Will you please listen to my heart? God has called us to be ministers of reconciliation in intercession, we stand in the gap as watchmen intercessors. With that call we are never given permission to take sides, except the side of the Great Intercessor Himself. He, the One so superior to us, makes entreaty on our behalf, positioning Himself to bring Father’s will to pass.
Please let’s set a guard on your heart as a great citadel, for out of it are the source and outgoings of life. Please let’s tune our ears. With all the voices, there is only one voice we must listen to – the voice of the Shepherd. If we are not careful to curate our heart and ears, we so easily will pick up Satan’s bait by becoming offended and joining the voice of the Accuser. Let’s stop, shut up and listen. We need Holy Breath to be still so we can know that He is God.
In this time of lament, we must be particularly careful to entrust our own deceitful heart to the One who tests it. As I walk through this path of grief, I have to ask Father to test my own heart all the time to see if there be any wicked way in me. Grief has to be fully walked through, it cannot be truncated, or it becomes morbid and unhealthy. But grief is an extremely selfish emotion that we give ourselves permission to feel. But as intercessors, we carefully steward this emotion inside the grief of He who bore our own punishment and by Whose wounds our grief is healed. There is a time to mourn, we just can’t stay there, we’ve got to get to the time of dancing.
For me it was in the garden, Yeshua prayed: “not My will but Thine”, He had no tears for His own grief, but sweat drops of blood for mine. He took my sins and my sorrows, He made them His very own. He bore the burden to Calvary and suffered and died alone. How marvelous, how wonderful, is my Savior’s love for me.
Early this year, by Spirit’s guidance, I took up a new daily posture before beloved Jehovah. My ‘new year’s resolution’ was to ask God to remove my stony heart to make it a heart of flesh. I want Him to transform my mind by His Word. I need Him to do what only He could do, change my very DNA. I want Him to do heart surgery, choosing to trust myself to His loving scalpel allowing Him to test my motives right down to where my soul and spirit separate, and being willing to feel the pain of it, if need be. I am so blind to my own prejudices, my own judgmentalism, my own self-sufficiency. His unexpected response was to invite me to ‘do the one thing necessary’, sit at His feet like Mary did. And what He did was to ‘wash my feet’, saying that if I didn’t let Him do so, I could have no part of Him. What God does that?! I am undone. My only response is to offer myself as a living sacrifice poured out in worship on His feet. And this has, by Spirit’s lead, become a daily practice. I am humbled. The one thing I need, humility, is becoming a reality.
“The weight or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it.” (C.S. Lewis)
Jesus says: ‘the feet of good news-bringers, are beautiful’, every day we get to put on shoes of the preparation of the gospel of peace. And, dearest ones, that is the core issue – the foundational problem. Yeshua came to seek and save that which was lost at the Fall. Anything that prevents that good news from getting out, has become the target of my lament, my intercession, my spiritual warfare.
As a child, I remember hearing my dad agonize in prayer, asking God to give him a supernatural love for the Germans. I heard him repeatedly ask God to forgive him for his hatred because of what he suffered at the hands of the Germans during the war. And I watched how God answered dad’s prayer. My dad’s favorite hymn became: “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus”.
Jesus took into Himself the demonically inspired sin of man’s inhumanity to man – the knowledge of evil – on the Cross. He atoned for it. His blood cleanses from all sin. He became sin, so we can be righteous. He is the Peace. In His flesh, He made opposing groups into one by breaking down the dividing wall of hostility between them. He is the Prince of Peace. Only through Spirit, I can become an instrument of God’s peace, where there is hatred let me sow love – a minister of reconciliation in intercession: in my prayer closet, in unity with others, in community with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Thank you so much for reading this. May this be so for you as well, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in accordance with His Word, and in the name of Jesus the Messiah. And together with Jehovah Elohim, let’s contend for the advance of the gospel, reaching up to God in faith and reaching out to others in love.
