How to Pray for the People You Love

Scriptures: Romans 15:30, Ephesians 6:18, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

In my early 20s, I experienced God move through my prayers in a new way for me. A close friend was going through a nasty breakup from a toxic relationship. 

She was putting boundaries up to keep this person out of her life, but she was struggling with repeatedly letting him back in, so she asked if I would pray for her. We went to this little chapel on our school campus and prayed for 15 minutes. 

She left to meet with him, and I volunteered to stay and pray for her for a little while. Truthfully, 15 minutes of prayer was already long for me, so I didn’t plan to be there much longer! 

After another five to ten minutes on my knees in prayer, I felt I had met my obligation. When I got ready to get back up, something incredible happened. It felt like an invisible hand gently pushed me back down to my knees. 

After another five to ten minutes in prayer, I got ready to stand up, and the same thing happened again. I prayed more and got up a third time, only to feel like God was literally keeping me on my knees. I spent two hours on my knees that night in that prayer chapel. To this day, it’s the most extended prayer session of my life. 

I contacted my friend the next day to see how the conversation went. I learned that she ended up having her life-changing conversation right outside the building where I was praying. 

She said, “Scott, I’m so glad you didn’t leave because if you had, you would have walked in and disrupted that conversation. I might’ve lost the will to build a strong boundary. I’m so grateful you were praying for me, and you stayed in there because I was able to do what I needed to do.” 

God moves in response to our prayers. When we love people enough to pray for them, who knows how God will work in power?!

I believe that you started this plan because you are concerned about someone (or perhaps several people). You love and care for them deeply. You want God to move in a specific way in your life! These feelings are leading you to intercede for them. 

Intercessory prayers are the prayers we pray for someone else. They differ from prayers of petition, which we pray for ourselves. The English word intercession comes from the Latin intercedo, which means “to come between.” 

When we intercede for someone in prayer, we come to God and plead on their behalf, as if we are standing between them and God. Often, those intercessions result from us realizing we cannot do what we want to do for them. We know that only God can work in a specific way or area, so we come to God on their behalf. 

I love what Richard Foster says about intercession. “If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, which will lead us to prayer. Intercession is a way of loving others.”

Over the next few days, I’m excited to share several Biblical principles about prayer, especially intercession. Here’s the first one: Intercession is the overflow of our love for people and our limits as people.

There are limits to what you can do for the people you love. You are not God. Therefore, you go to God on their behalf. We pray for the people we love first and foremost by letting God know that we love them and that we’ve reached our limit of what we can do for them. 

When we confess our limits as people and our trust that God is more than able to move in the lives of those we love, we put ourselves in a position to see God move powerfully. 

Tomorrow, we’re going to look at how intercession works. If you’ve ever felt like you’re alone in prayer, keep reading because what I share is going to encourage you!

Scriptures: James 5:16, Romans 8:34, Romans 8:26-27, Hebrews 4:14-16

Have you ever been tempted to give up when praying?

If so, you aren’t the only one! It can feel lonely when you’re seemingly the only one praying about a situation. It can also feel frustrating when God isn’t moving in the way you want. It can even feel discouraging when it becomes clear that God’s timing isn’t yours. 

For the last several years, I have been praying for a friend. I want this friend to put his faith in Christ and make profound changes. But neither of those things is my choice. He has to be open to God’s work in his heart, make different choices, and want different things. So far, none of those things are happening. 

Part of me feels alone in this prayer, as others have given up on him. Part of me is frustrated because I know how Jesus could improve his life. Another part of me is discouraged because I feel weary in this prayer. 

These feelings surfaced when I was writing a sermon on prayer recently. During that preparation, I realized something that I had never considered before. This realization is an important principle that will encourage you if you feel lonely, frustrated, or discouraged in your prayers for others. 

This is the second key principle in this plan – when you are interceding, you are never praying alone!

James 5 discusses intercession in the context of community. Many people have heard the words of James 5, in which the half-brother of Jesus encourages us to confess our sins and intercede for each other. He states, “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” We often think about intercession based on the idea that our prayers are powerful. 

But, according to James, we aren’t just praying for other people; we are praying with other people. The context for these powerful and effective prayers is confession. This kind of confession and intercession creates a path to healing. So, if you’ve been interceding alone like I was in that prayer chapel, please know that you can intercede in community, too. You can pray for people, and you can pray with people, too! 

Intercession isn’t only a human activity. Consider what Paul describes in Romans 8:34 about Jesus interceding for us. “Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” As you intercede for the people you love, Jesus is interceding for you. 

Not only that but according to Hebrews 4, Jesus is interceding for us in light of His human experience on earth. Therefore, His intercession included empathy and compassion for our temptations. I can’t tell you how much it encourages me to know that Jesus is praying for me right now. I hope it inspires you to know that Jesus is praying for you right now, too.

But the encouragement doesn’t stop there. You may have experienced exhaustion or weariness in prayer. Maybe you’ve prayed for so long that you don’t have any more words. If you’ve been in that space emotionally or are there right now, hear this good news from Romans 8. Paul writes, “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” 

Did you catch that? The Holy Spirit prays for us when we have nothing left. In our weakness, the prayers of the Spirit are strong!

When you don’t know what to pray for or how to pray, you don’t have to give up. You can invite someone to pray with you. You can remember that Jesus is praying for you. You can surrender to the Holy Spirit, who will pray for you. 

When you are interceding, remember – you are never praying alone.

Interceding isn’t easy, so tomorrow, we’ll explore one of the difficult questions this kind of prayer raises. If prayer has ever challenged your faith, you’ll want to keep reading.

Scriptures: Psalms 22:1-8, Psalms 23:1-6

I love how honest the Bible is. I’m often surprised as I’m reading to find such raw, authentic human moments in the pages of God’s word. 

One of those moments takes place in Psalm 22. In this passage, David tells God that he feels abandoned by Him as if God is not answering him and will not deliver him from his current struggle. 

Have you had a moment like that as you prayed? If you have, I encourage you to read Psalm 22 and know you aren’t weird. 

What’s truly mind-blowing to me, though, is that if I turn my Bible one page from those words, I find David singing a very different tune. In Psalm 23, he wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd. I have all that I need…Only goodness and love will pursue me all the days of my life. ” 

How can one person express these two very different feelings?! Well, David is wrestling with God’s goodness and sovereignty in the midst of real life. When you pray honestly, you pray like Psalm 22 and Psalm 23. 

Do you want a specific outcome for someone you love, but you can’t make it happen? Then, you’re experiencing the overflow of your love for them and your limits. You’ve come to the end of what you can control and recognize that you are not God. 

Eventually, we all have to wrestle with God’s character. Is He really sovereign? Is He really powerful? Is He really in control? Is He really good? 

As a pastor, I often meet people who have prayed for something, and it didn’t work out the way that they prayed for. They asked God for something, but He didn’t give them what they wanted when they wanted it. 

Is that why you don’t pray much anymore? Because if God were really good, He wouldn’t allow that to happen. If God were really sovereign, He wouldn’t allow that, right? If God really cared, how could things end up like they did?! 

In the aftermath of the miraculous moment I had with God in that prayer chapel I told you about on Day 1, I was in a Psalm 23 state. “God, thank you so much. You’re good, you’re faithful. I felt you, you’re real.” But several years before that, I was praying Psalm 22. 

One day, near the end of high school, the phone rang at my house at five o’clock in the morning. 

My dad answered the phone. A few moments later, I heard the garage door open, and his Buick peeled out. It’s hard to make a Buick peel out! I got out of bed, went into my parents’ room, and found my mom crying. 

I knew that something had happened. What I didn’t realize was that my best friend, at 17 years old, had died.

While lying face down, he’d had a seizure, literally suffocating in his pillow. That news wrecked me. He was my first close friend to die. I wasn’t praying Psalm 23 that day. I was praying Psalm 22. “God, Jamin had so much potential! As a junior, he had a full-ride college scholarship for playing saxophone. His humor was healing in every room he stepped in. He was the life of every party. At 17 years old, his whole life was ahead of him. God, this makes no sense!” 

Since then, I’ve wrestled with God, grieved, and healed a lot. Here’s what I want to share with you as a result of that work. If we’re praying to God as David did in Psalm 22, then we’re going to need to embrace mystery. It’s been over twenty years since Jamin died, and I still don’t understand. 

Eventually, intercession will lead you to a moment when you wrestle with God and struggle to understand Him. So, I refuse to disrespect you with a trite answer to your big questions. I don’t know why, and I don’t understand how God works. 

I am not God. When I pray, I am reminded of that fact again and again. Prayer reminds me of how small I am, how big He is, how little I know, and how much He does. 

Psalm 22 tells me there’s a place to pray like that. Psalm 23 tells me I won’t always pray like that. 

We love people, and we have limits. In that space, we see the third key principle in this plan: Prayer becomes the way we wrestle in faith with God.

Tomorrow, we’re going to wrap up this plan by considering what must be present in our hearts to sustain our intercession for others. The secret to more intercessory prayer in your life might surprise you!

Scriptures: Nehemiah 1:3-4, Ephesians 3:14-21

I don’t know you, but I can guess a few things about you. 

Chances are you’re not famous with a massive horde of adoring fans. You’re an average person living your life today. You might not think that you’re the kind of person whose actions or prayers can change the world. 

But I want you to know something. It doesn’t take a particular person to pray for people in ways that change the world. It just takes a person who is listening to God and loving people.

That’s the story of Nehemiah. He wasn’t a mighty figure. He didn’t wear a crown, enjoy massive wealth, or employ many servants. Nehemiah was himself a servant of the king. 

Living in a foreign land and serving a pagan king, Nehemiah was responsible for ensuring the king was not poisoned. This was a massive responsibility, and he developed great trust with his king. But as conscientious as he was in his job, Nehemiah was equally compassionate in his faith. 

When Nehemiah heard a report that the walls of Jerusalem were broken down and his people vulnerable to attack, his heart broke, and he entered into a season of deep prayer. 

The final thing I want to share with you is this – intercession emerges from a heart that has been broken before God. Nehemiah loved his people, but his heart was broken when he heard of their plight. His love and compassion for his people drove him to fasting and praying on their behalf. I love how Pete Grieg, the founder of the 24-7 prayer movement, describes this kind of prayer. “Intercession is impossible until we allow the things that break God’s heart to break our hearts as well.” 

Nehemiah went on to risk courageously and sacrifice significantly for his people. These acts of love and service began in his brokenness before the Lord and his intercession for his people. 

Put another way, intercession is a way of loving people. If going through this plan is the first time you’ve heard the term “intercession” or truly understood it, I want to challenge you to ask an uncomfortable question. Is it possible you’ve lacked intercession for someone because you lacked love for them?

Perhaps your next step at the end of this series isn’t “I just need to pray more.” Maybe the solution is that you need to love more. If you loved differently, could you pray differently? If you just willed yourself to pray more, that wouldn’t require a change of heart. 

However, if intercession is the overflow of our love for people, then maybe the solution isn’t, “God, help me to pray more.” The solution to praying for the people we love is “God, help me love the people in my life the way You love them.” When you love people like that and realize your limits to do for them what you want, you’ll pray for them in ways you haven’t ever prayed. 

In Ephesians 3, Paul writes that our minds cannot conceive, and our hearts cannot comprehend what God has in store for those who love Him. If God can do exceedingly and abundantly beyond what we can ask or imagine for the people He loves, then the best thing we can do for them may be to enter into God’s presence, interceding on their behalf. 

I’m praying for you today. May you love the people in your life like God loves them. When you realize your limits as a human who loves them, may your love for them overflow into how you pray for them.