Petitionary and Intercessory Prayer

Good morning, while I was preparing for today’s sermon, I came across this short story.  This lady called in to a radio pastor, and she was crying as she said : “Pastor, I was born blind, and I've been blind all my life. I don’t mind so much being blind but I have some well meaning friends who tell me that if I had more faith I could be healed.” The pastor asked her, “Tell me, do you carry one of those white canes?” “Yes I do,” she replied. “Then the next time someone says that hit them over the head with the cane,” he said. “Then tell them ‘If you had more faith that wouldn’t hurt’”! So can you hazard a guess as to what is the prayer topic for today’s sermon? Yes, it is the petitionary and intercessory prayer, aka the give me give me prayer and the help them help them prayer.

All of us have in one way or another, prayed these prayers, today let’s take a more detailed look into them.  Whenever we pray to receive something (be it is mercy, guidance, forgiveness, peace, personal growth, or a new partner, job, car or home), we are using petitionary prayer.  Intercessory prayer is petitionary prayer for another person.

In petitionary prayer, our needs and wants are the focus of the prayer. Petition is asking God for something for ourselves.  It usually begins with us telling God, what we think we need, with the added provision that it must be in accordance with God’s will. God’s answer to our prayers may be yes, no or now is not the right time. Does praying the petitionary prayer means that we are being selfish and greedy, and we try to manipulate God into granting our wishes.  Is it bad to pray to pray this kind of prayer? Doesn’t it try to turn God into a Santa Claus, or should we not ask god for anything for ourselves?
If God is Love, bringing before him desires and needs is not in itself wrong. God wants his children to tell Him honestly what we think and feel, without hypocrisy. God loves us enough to want us to tell him these things. Although he also loves us enough to not grant us many of the things that we pray for, because they are not really good for us.
We all have needs and desires, some of them good, others, not so good. Our needs and desires can, in fact, rule our lives without us knowing it. But if we bring them to God in prayer, and let Him sort them out, we gain some freedom from these desires. God gives us a handle to make choices as to what we really want. Maybe we think a partner will make us happier, but, if we ask God for a partner in prayer, we may find ourselves asking: Will he or she solve all our problems in life? So, we find ourselves becoming aware of deeper needs to share with God as well. We can ask God to make our family or our colleagues easier to live with, and we may end up praying for more patience with them.

Avoiding petitionary prayer for fear of being greedy may prove a greater danger than asking for the wrong things. It could mean we give less importance to ourselves than God does. If we think we are beyond caring about what we get in life, it is all the more important to search our hearts. Chances are we desire for many things, but we are denying these very desires and then we are giving ourselves a pat on our backs on our detachment. More seriously, we may be depending on ourselves for getting things in life, and not depending on God.

Petitionary prayers are important. "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened." (Luke 11:9-10). If we talk with God in prayer, petition comes naturally. In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector who go to the temple to pray, the tax-collector, whose life is a mess, makes a very simple petition, "Lord, have mercy on me a sinner": and Jesus says that it was the tax-collector who went out from the temple in a right relationship with God. (Luke 18:10-14)

Petitionary prayer is probably the most basic form of prayer any of us ever pray, sometimes the only kind of prayer we are capable of offering in times of great distress and difficulty.  Petitionary prayer is in fact surrendering and trusting, especially when we pray to be healed of difficulties that we are unable or unwilling to give up on our own.

Petitionary prayer is particularly deepening because it points us to our dependence on God, and it is particularly honest because we bring our whole selves to it, selfish motives and all. God doesn't need to be told this stuff about us in order to know it, but that we ourselves learn what we want and need in the process of praying.

At first our prayer of petition will tend to be self-centred, but if we can be still before God, the nature of our petitionary prayer will change. As we grow in awareness of our own limitations and narrowness, our petitionary prayer will become less particular and prescriptive – telling God what must be done – and become more a prayer that he may be the God of mercy and compassion to us and through us, leaving him free to work out the details.

Our desires and wishes will gradually be purged of selfish elements; we come to see that we should pray, for "an increase of faith, hope, and charity" and in consequence come to conform our desires and wishes to the ongoing purposes of God. Whatever else we may think we require or want is secondary.

This leads us to intercessory prayer, which is asking God to meet someone else’s needs. Intercessory prayer implies a sincere and grateful acknowledgment of God’s presence already in the life of the person being prayed for, and affirms the continuing power of God’s grace. There are as many ways to intercede in prayer for another. Perhaps all that is truly required is a genuine desire for God’s will to be manifest for that person or in that situation. A sincere heart, “directed toward God”, in an effort to obtain good for another, is the heart of intercessory prayer.

Intercessory prayer can still be selfish if we are to confuse another's needs with our own, we need God's guidance in moving beyond our own conceptions of others to a glimpse of how God sees them. The point of intercessory prayer is to hold up another person before God. When we do this, we often gain insight as to what we can do for the one we pray for. More important, we find that both of us are in God's hands.

Praying for the well-being of others, or indeed of the world, can lead us to experiences of quiet, deep surrender.  Some people wonder why anyone would practice intercessory prayer, and assume it can't do any good, and some argue that in fact it distracts those involved from doing "real" work to change the world.  Whether or not intercessory prayer actually, technically helps sick people and people in pain (some scientists proved that it works, some prove that it does not), it has a profound effect upon those of us who use it.  Intercessory prayer can open our hearts and change us so that we can go out and change the world.  Praying for our "enemies" (people who have wronged us, people we need to forgive) can have a liberating effect.  We become less able to hate people for whose well-being we are genuinely praying for over time.  When we pray for an "enemy," their grip on us loosens, and when we pray for a friend, that friend is with us in the prayer and some part of each of us touches the other.  When we pray for "strangers," in some way they become less strange to us.

All petition and intercession ought to arise from actual concrete situations in which people find themselves. It is only when we are wrestling with problems that desperately bother us, only when we are involved with others in such a way that their troubles become our own, that our petitions for ourselves and our intercessions for others can have much reality. Thus, these prayers must spring from our deep involvement in life, its sorrows, its difficulties, its demand for significant decision. When we meet somebody; our petition is that we shall understand his situation so that we shall be able to serve as a channel of compassion. When we face some overwhelmingly hard decision; our petition is that we shall be enabled so to choose that the divine love may be more effectively released through us. When a friend is seriously ill; our intercession is that, in part through our concern for him but more especially through God’s faithful love for him, he may both know and reflect the goodness that through his life can be shown and expressed.

God’s answers to our prayers may or may not be to our liking. We pray for wealth, health, success, popularity and may find ourselves poor, sick, a failure and a reject. We pray for healing for our loved ones, and we may still see them degenerate day by day. When we pray, does God listen? Can our prayers change God’s mind?  Why pray if it does not…because God knows how useful it is for us to pray. When we find ourselves in situations where we are helpless, and unable to overcome by our own strength, by prayer we obtain His strength and mercy. When faced with temptations, by prayer we obtain His grace to overcome our weakness.

Jesus himself prayed that, if it be God’s will, the cup might pass. It did not, but his strength was made equal to the burden. In confessing his private longings and his communion with the Father, Jesus found the grace to endure the cross. If God loves us as an all-loving parent loves a child, then we, like children, can communicate with God without ceasing. We can share even the little concerns of daily existence—anything that is worth worrying about—much as a child does with its parents. We can surrender every corner of our lives in prayer, not with the intent of manipulating magical solutions to life’s problems, but in the confidence that prayer is a means of grace whereby we grow and are sensitized to God’s presence.

Prayer pleases God, it overcomes enemies, it changes men. It appeases the wrath of God, who pardons all who pray with humility. It obtains every grace that is asked for; it vanquishes all the strength of the tempter, and it changes men from blind into seeing, from weak into strong, from sinners into saints.

Prayer is not magic, but it is mystical. In quiet meditation and prayer, we experience the reality of the living God. As God speaks to us and us to God, we are changed. Sinking to our knees or bowing our heads reminds us of our humble dependence. Prayers for others make us more aware of their needs. As the writer William Law once observed, “there is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.

When we pray, we are submitting ourselves to God.  Though we do not know why God choose to answer some prayers and not others, we have to rest in assurance that God cares for us and want us to continue talking to Him in prayers.  

So how do we bring our petitions and intercessions to God?

First, pray responsibly. God won't do for us what we need to do for ourselves. If we do not study hard, praying furiously for God's help at examination time will not guarantee a pass! We may pray for God to send a smart and cute partner along our way, but we must not forget to ask God to help us be the happy and mature individual that will attract such a partner to ourselves. 

Secondly, prayer is about attentiveness, attentiveness to the Spirit dwelling within and around us. The attentiveness becomes a gradual assimilation into the mind and heart of God. And we learn to pray in harmony with God's will. 1 John 5:14,15 "This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him."

Thirdly, pray persistently. God stands at our doors and knock, sometimes we need to be the one that’s knocking. Not all prayers are answered quickly. Some things need to be prayed for years before getting an answer. If our prayer is legitimate, we may need to be as persistent as Jacob, who once said to God, "I will not let you go until you have blessed me." The principle is to keep on asking and seeking until we receive God's answers.

Finally, come to God on His terms. Effective prayer is dependent on our having a right relationship with God. When we are living in a right relationship with God and learn to pray according to His will we can be certain that God will answer. As Jesus put it, "If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you." John 15:7

There is no right or wrong way when it comes to prayer, we can pray when we feel that we are at the top of the world, or we can pray when we are down in the deepest abyss.  We can pray when we feel God’s prompting, or we can pray when we don’t even feel like praying.  We can pray standing up with our eyes opened, or we can pray lying on our bed with our eyes closed.  No matter how we pray, we know God accepts our prayers, just as he accepts us, with loving hands and a smile because we are his children and he delights in our love.