Many of the most insightful and enduring lessons we learn concerning prayer come from Andrew Murray. I love this excerpt from his work With Christ in the School of Prayer, the Twenty Sixth Lesson: I have prayed for you. It has been lightly edited here:
But I have prayed for you, that your faith fail not. --Luke 22:32
I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you. --John 16:26
He ever lives to make intercession.--Hebrews 7:25
All growth in the spiritual life is connected with the clearer insight into what Jesus is to us. The more we realize that Christ must be all to me and in me, that all in Christ is indeed for us, the more we learn to live the real life of faith, which, dying to self, lives wholly in Christ.
We learn first from Murray that the Christian life is not a feeble or failing struggle to live right, but the resting in Christ and finding strength in Him as our life, to fight the fight and gain the victory of faith.
This is specially true of the life of prayer!
How clearly this comes out in the last night of His life. In His high-priestly prayer (John 17), He shows us how and what He has to pray to the Father, and will pray when once ascended to heaven. And yet He had in His parting address so repeatedly also connected His going to the Father with their new life of prayer.
The two would be ultimately connected: His entrance on the work of His eternal intercession would be the commencement and the power of their new prayer-life in His Name.
Praying In His Name and Power
Praying In Union and In Unison
I Have Prayed For You
It is to the fruit-bearing branches of the Vine; it is to disciples sent into the world as the Father sent Him, to live for perishing men; it is to His faithful servants and intimate friends who take up the work He leaves behind, who have like their Lord become as the seed-corn, losing its life to multiply it manifold;--it is to such that the promises are given.
Brothers and sisters! Let us each find out what the work is, and who the souls are entrusted to our special prayers; let us make our intercession for them our life of fellowship with God, and we shall not only find the promises of power in prayer made true to us, but we shall then first begin to realize how our abiding in Christ and His abiding in us makes us share in His own joy of blessing and saving men.
O most wonderful intercession of our Blessed Lord Jesus, to which we not only owe everything, but in which we are taken up as active partners and fellow-workers! Now we understand what it is to pray in the Name of Jesus, and why it has such power. In His Name, in His Spirit, in Himself, in perfect union with Him. O wondrous, ever active, and most efficacious intercession of the man Christ Jesus! When shall we be wholly taken up into it and always pray in it? Amen
