Encourage Your Intercessors - 90 Days of Prayer & Fasting

 

Hello everybody, my name is Dean Davis and this is “Multiply,” the podcast that provides a word of encouragement for Village Church Planters.

We all need intercessors.  We all need people who will stand between us and God and pray for us. To intercede is to intervene on behalf of another. Intercessory prayer is prayer that calls out to God for the benefit of other people. As a church planter, you need prayer during these 90 Days perhaps more than any time since you began planting churches.  You need prayer for power and wisdom. You need prayer for open heavens. You need intercessors to ask for God to pour out his Spirit to draw men and women to himself as you and your disciples share the Good News. You need prayers for open doors as you look for men and women of peace in villages that currently do not have churches. And you need prayer for both physical and spiritual protection as you and your disciples reach out with the Good News.

As you know from m your own prayer and fasting, intercession is hard work. First of all, it takes time. And of course it takes faith. Intercessors must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him (Hebrews 11:6). But there is another aspect of intercession that makes us tired. Intercession is hard work because we wrestle in prayer. We struggle against the Enemy who seems to be winning the battle in so many places. And we wrestle with our own doubts. This is tiresome. So, even experienced intercessors are tempted to pray less.  All intercessors need encouragement.

So how do we encourage intercessors? First of all, we remind them of the goodness of God. We share testimonies of answered prayer. Hearing how our good and loving God has answered their prayers and ours stirs up faith for more intercession.

Secondly we remind them of the promises of God to hear and answer our prayers.  There are dozens of promises in the Old and New Testaments. But one that inspire me as I pray is found in 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.”

  As we pray for the lost and as we pray for new churches we know we are asking according to the will of God.  What an encouragement!

The third way to encourage intercessors is to share specific new prayer requests with them. And the fourth way is to simply thank them for the hard work of prayer they are engaged in.

My fellow church planters, you need intercessors and your intercessors need encouragement, especially during these 90 days of prayer, fasting, and church planting.  Will you build up their faith with a word of encouragement today?

This has been “Multiply,” and I’m Dean Davis thanking you for your faithful intercession for me and for more than 13,000 Village Church Planters across Africa.

 

#EncouragementForVillageChurchPlanters #FastAndPray #Intercede