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Psalm Praise

• Lets Pray with our Hands
  
  

This is a Beginners Biblical Guide to praying for those you love and interceding for people and situations. 

Please get your Bible and look up the texts. If you havn't got a Bible go to TMD's Weblinks and get one online.

Pray about it

Luke 9:55 -Yes, get your Bible and read it!

The disciples are on the way to Jerusalem. They don’t get the welcome they expect from a Samaritan village. James and John say to the Lord, “Lord, shall we call down fire from heaven to burn them up?” Did our Lord fold his arms and rest his back against the nearest olive tree and say, “Sure. Go for it.”

Good or bad, we don’t have it in us to work a miracle by ourselves. We cannot call down fire or blessings. But James and John do get something right. They ask ‘shall we?’ And back in Luke’s Gospel, the Lord says: No.

Ask the Lord if he wants you to pray about it.
 

Praying for Sodom

Genesis 18:16-33 - Yes, get your Bible and read it!
In the Old Testament, the prayer of intercession comes off to a slow start. The first strike is Abraham’s.
 

Plus score (to God): God is patient! And he is fond of children (even 99 year olds!).

And that is what this whole approach is; it’s childish! It is as children that we try this. We try to buy God and bargain with him. The kid from the Catholic side of things will say, “Look God, I’ve binned the chocolate, now heal Aunt Mary! The kid from the Presbyterian tradition says, “Look, God, if you heal Aunt Mary, I won’t eat chocolate till Christmas.” There is a place for fasting in prayer, but this isn’t it.

Working with God

Exodus 3:1; 11:9  Yes, get your Bible and read it!
This is a real catechesis in prayer:

And, in a progressive revelation from Exodus Chapter 3 to Chapter 7:20, God tells Moses what he requires of him, what the result will be and the whole schema, all before he has a single interview with Pharaoh. God’s method becomes perfectly clear with the mob of frogs. (Exodus 8:1-13)

• God tells Moses where to go and what to do.

• Moses and Aaron do it.

• Pharaoh gets the point: he says,“Pray to the Lord (on my behalf) to take them away.”

• Moses’ motives are without personal vanity. He wants Pharaoh to know one thing: that there is no one like the Lord our God.
  
• Then Moses and Aaron prayed to the Lord concerning the frogs.

• AND THE LORD DID AS MOSES REQUESTED.
   

God is guiding Moses’ prayer. Moses prayer involvement is not actually essential; God does not actually ‘need’ it. But he wants it.

There is a difference between me and Moses. It is the same difference as between the old and the new covenant. Moses does not have the Holy Spirit inside him to offer direction. The Spirit has not yet been given. That doesn’t mean the Spirit is not there.

Moses sees the Spirit’s action: in the pillar of cloud and fire and on Mount Sinai. But he does not have the Spirit in his heart.
The Spirit is given to the Church at Pentecost. The Spirit comes to us and dwells in us when we’re baptized. The Spirit intercedes for us (with cries too deep for words) and teaches us to discern how to pray for others.
 

In His Name

Matthew 18:19-20  You have your Bible by this time........!
If two or three of us get together in Jesus name, he is personally present. And if even only two of us agree about what we’re asking - in his name - it will be done for us.

Mark 2:3-12
There’s a story that illustrates how this friendship of intercession works:

A man is brought to Jesus by four friends. He is paralyzed, but it is clearly his own choices that have induced Locked-In-Syndrome. The story would make no sense if he had merely been run over by a chariot! He has spent so long trying to find a way to turn that he can’t move.

But this man is still loved by four of his friends. They fight their way through an immense crowd. They drag the stretcher up on the roof, start taking the tiles off and lower the man down in front of Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t look at the man, he looks at the man’s four friends and he sees their faith. Because of the faith the four share in agreeing about their friend’s need of healing, Jesus does not need to consult the faith of the paralyzed man. “Your sins are forgiven. Get up, pick up your bed and go home!’ Jesus says. And he does.

We run on the idea that God has called us friends.

I have a praying community at home. You could say we’re professionals - and we are all professed, except the novitiate sisters! But you don’t need a vow card to do this!
 

And it works just as well with email.
 

This is a true story

Please pray for ‘Kim’, who is into drugs.

Kim’s addiction paralyses him. He steals from his father and, in a frenzy, he beat his younger sister for the cash in her purse. He doesn’t know what happens to his body when he’s out of his mind. When he’s fully conscious he hates himself. He has no hope. He definitely has no faith.
 
But we have faith. We know that Jesus can heal him. The Spirit prompts our hearts to pray. We pray:

Jesus, we place Kim before you.
He is paralyzed by his sins.
Please forgive him and heal him.

Amen.

We leave it there. In the Gospel the paralyzed man got up and carried his bed home himself. His friends were left repairing the roof.

Another story - also true

‘Teresa’ is 19. Malcolm, who is nearly forty, thinks he’s in love with her. He wants her badly and Teresa is flattered. She is sorry for him; she thinks she loves him and can save him from his loneliness. She thinks the fact of their ‘love’ for each other will atone for their living together. Malcolm has no religious background and says he sees nothing wrong in what he’s doing. He doesn’t understand what is troubling Teresa.

There’s a lot to trouble Teresa. Malcolm is married. And, however unhappy his relations with his wife might be, he has two children. The little boy is too young to understand. The girl is twelve. She is a paraplegic in a wheelchair with a degenerative disease Her father was the centre of her life. She keeps writing to him asking why he won’t come home to see her. Her condition gets worse. But she isn’t half so paralyzed as Teresa who does not know how to move in any direction.

Lord, you are God.
We lay Teresa before you.
Give life to her paralyzed conscience.
We believe and we know
that you are the Son of God.
Please forgive our friend
and let her stand on he own feet
and take her bed home.

Amen.
 

Can I pray?

The fact that a friend asks one to pray and that one feels one can, is usually a sign of the Spirit working, teaching, asking us to pray.
We respond in faith and we leave it before the Lord, remembering that we haven't, in ourselves, the power to call down fire or blessing.

Our prayer is in the heart of God. He has invited us to be part of it. We don’t own our prayer, and we don’t keep taking the temperature of the person for whom we are praying. This is not something to be tested by measurable results. You will find out, one day, what your prayer was part of. That’s enough.

• We know that God does not listen to the prayer of sinners?

• Do we?

• God did not come to call the righteous but sinners, like me - and you.

• If I am going to wait until I am canonizable before I pray for someone - I’ll be dead.
   

Praying for others is part of my conversion. God gives me a tiny share in his great work.
If I become a praying person, part of my prayer for Kim and Teresa will be that I do not reduplicate the pattern of their destructive choices.

I can’t pray for a drug addict and then have an evening out on Speed.

I can’t pray for an adulteress and finish the party in someone else’s bed.

That is obvious.

My life - as it happens - may not offer me the chance to get myself in either of these calamities.
But behind big sins are little ingrained attitudes. I am praying for Kim. At the root of his agony he simply cares more for himself than for anyone else. Loving Kim gives me the incentive to stop hoarding my time, for example, when someone needs my friendship. It is an incentive to let others help me, because Kim won’t let anyone help him.

I have to work at my courage because I am fairly cowardly. When some visitor to our monastery makes a superior, ‘you-know’ sort of remark, I could easily give a weak and equally knowing reply.
 

Or
 

I could hold Teresa before the Lord and remember that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong. And the comment I was just about to let pass was wrong; I can have the courage, because I love Teresa, to say so.  Love is the one thing that gives us the grace to grow.

How to pray for others

The bottom line  This is the important bit!

Amen!