With Christ in the School of Prayer (26) ... Christ the Intercessor

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 26, Christ the Intercessor:

"The whole of salvation is Christ Himself:  He has given HIMSELF to us; He Himself lives in us.  Because He prays, we pray too.  Now we see Him as intercessor on the throne, know that He makes us participate with Himself in the life of prayer.

It is the sight of Jesus in His intercession that gives us power to pray in His Name:  all right and power of prayer is Christ’s; He makes us share in His intercession. To understand this, think first of His intercession:  He ever lives to make intercession.

‘It is Christ that died:  yea more, who is even at the right hand of God, who makes intercession for us.’  That intercession is an intense reality, a work that is absolutely necessary, and without which the continued application of redemption cannot take place.

And this exercise of His power only takes place through His prayer:  He asks of the Father, and receives from the Father.  ‘He is able to save to the uttermost, because He ever lives to make intercession.’  There is not a need of His people but He receives in intercession what the Godhead has to give. Nothing takes place without His intercession:  it engages all His time and powers, is His unceasing occupation at the right hand of the Father.

We are partakers of His life, His righteousness, His work:  we share with Him in His intercession too; it is not a work He does without us.

Life-union is also prayer-union:  what He prays passes through us, what we pray passes through Him.  We live, we abide in Him, the Interceding One.

Our faith in the intercession of Jesus must not only be that He prays in our stead, when we do not or cannot pray, but that, as the Author of our life and our faith, He draws us on to pray in unison with Himself.  He alone breathes into us our praying.

He provides in everything for the life of His redeemed ones by giving His own life in them:  He cares for their life of prayer, by taking them up into His heavenly prayer-life, by giving and maintaining His prayer-life within them.   It is, ‘if ye abide in me,’ the ever-living Intercessor, and pray with me and in me:  ‘ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’

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.

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?

More on Christ the Intercessor:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XXVI.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.