Laboring Fervently in Prayers

She has a picture of what intercession is and she has never come anywhere near it.

The picture involves an older woman, usually, and hours, and a wrestling that goes somewhere and comes out the other side. She has heard three or four people describe something like it and she has believed every word.

What she does is different. Somebody asks for prayer and she says yes and means it, and then she prays for perhaps forty seconds, at the traffic lights, and it is thin, and she is aware while doing it that it is thin, and then it is gone.

She is twenty nine and she has been in church her whole life and she has never once told anybody this.

Because there is a particular shame in it. Not the shame of not praying, which she could confess and get on with. The shame of doing it badly, which feels like something a person cannot admit at twenty nine after that many years.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She thinks she does not have whatever it is that other people have, and that intercession is a room she has never been in and probably cannot get into.

Read the word Paul uses

There is a description in Colossians of a man called Epaphras, and the word chosen for what he does is a working word.

Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, saluteth you, always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.Colossians 4:12

Laboring fervently for you in prayers.

Labor. Not glowing. Not soaring. The word is the one used for the effort of an athlete or a workman, and it carries strain in it, and Paul reaches for it as the natural description of what intercession actually is.

Which means the thing you've been waiting to feel before you can start is not the entrance requirement. Labor is what a person does before they are good at something and while it is still hard, and nobody expects labor to feel effortless, because if it felt effortless it would not be labor.

And notice the content of his laboring. It is specific: that they stand perfect and complete in all the will of God. He is working at something definite rather than generating an atmosphere.

Your intercession is labor rather than a feeling you have been missing, and Colossians 4:12 chooses a working word for it. That is what the word actually calls it, not lowering I am doing to make you comfortable, and the Holy Spirit is the One who works alongside a beginner at twenty nine.

Nobody photographs the bad hours

Now the plain thing, and it is about where your picture came from.

The three or four accounts you've heard were true, and they were also edited. People describe the hour that went somewhere. Nobody stands up and describes the two hundred hours that were dry, distracted, interrupted and apparently pointless, because that does not make a testimony, and so the whole visible record of intercession in your life has been highlights.

You have compared your ordinary practice to other people's best moments and concluded you lack something. That is not a spiritual diagnosis. It is a sampling problem, and it has convinced a young woman who prays for people at traffic lights that she has never prayed at all.

And nothing about forty thin seconds has ever made your prayer worthless. Scripture names it labor and never once requires the laborer to enjoy it, and the Holy Spirit is not comparing a twenty nine year old to somebody's account of one good night.

Fifteen minutes, one person, badly

Here is the practical piece, and the last word matters most.

Fifteen minutes. One person. Badly.

Set a timer, because without one you will stop at four minutes and conclude something has been proved about you. Pick one person, not a list, because a list is how you avoid the discomfort of staying with somebody.

And then be bad at it. You will run out of words in ninety seconds. Stay anyway. Say their name again. Say what you actually want for them, in plain language, more than once. Be distracted, notice, come back, and do not treat coming back as a failure, because coming back is the labor.

Fifteen minutes of that will feel like nothing happened. That is what labor feels like from inside on the first day of anything.

You are able to do this badly and be doing it properly, and the badness was never a disqualification. Colossians 4:12 calls it laboring fervently and picks a workman's word for it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who is present in a fifteen minute stretch that feels like nothing.