intercessory prayer

February 8, 2025

“Ask what I should give you”

What would you ask for if the Lord told you to come to Him with a wishlist of all that you wanted? What would top your requests? I sensed God putting this before me recently. It was a staggering thought. Was it simply hopeful thinking on my own part?
January 31, 2025

Targeted Prayer: tips from a 93 year-old warrior saint

You're ready to see the citadels crumble around unbelieving loved ones, and the furnace fired up in the lukewarm. You're longing to see the supernatural override natural law "far as the curse is found." You hunger and thirst for righteousness and are no longer content to live in the deficit. This is the year the tide turns.
October 29, 2024

Five ways the church gets God’s judgments wrong

  Napoleon stands out as perhaps the ultimate example of a tyrant who, when brought to justice, has the opportunity to reflect on life and eternity. Napoleon in exile on St. Helena observed of Christ, “What a conqueror! A conqueror who…wins to Himself not only one nation, but the whole human race. What a marvel! He attaches to Himself the human soul with all its energies. And how? By a miracle which surpasses all others. He claims the love of men – that is to say, the most difficult thing in the world to obtain…..He claims it; He requires it absolutely and undividedly….Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Lous X!V strove in vain to secure this…He kindles the flame of a love which causes a man’s self love to die.”
September 25, 2024

Praying for God’s judgments?

Many Christians and secularists alike tend to think of God’s judgments as undesirable or even cruel. Some suppose that judgment is synonymous with hail, lightening, earthquakes, and floods. The scriptural pattern of God’s judgments often involved His people being invaded by foreigners who did not share their customs, took over their resources, and oppressed them. We cannot ignore that Peter told the church that “Judgment begins with the household of faith” (1 Peter 4:17).
July 15, 2024

God establishes nations and their borders

Western nations are hardly the only ones under assault. “The UN has much power on the African continent because of pulling the purse strings. With shekels come shackles.” So stated Voddie Baucham, Dean of Theology at African University in Zambia, in an interview with Beckett Cook. “And so the UN is doing everything it can to leverage its influence on the African continent.”
March 28, 2024

How praying in the Spirit changed a tense situation

Please pray!" came the quick whisper through the phone. "Pray in the Spirit, would you? And I'll be praying here." A friend of mine is staff for a political representative. I was just wrapping up morning devotions with my children when she called to tell me that the meet-and-greet the rep was hosting had been overwhelmed by constituents from the opposing party, and that they'd come loaded for bear.
February 10, 2024

The frightening truth about failing to pray

"Inattention to prayer actually gives place to the devil to advance his cause and evil." -Todd Smith, Unless We Pray An incident happened a couple years ago of which I only grasped its implications this week. It was July 2021. I had gone to a Wednesday night prayer meeting. There were only a few of us gathered, although our pastor was often reminding us as a congregation not to fall into "vacation mode" and lose spiritual focus, just because it was summer.
November 1, 2017

Contending for Climate Change: “Let justice roll down like waters”

I live in a region nicknamed the Garden Spot, and while one sees plenty of corn, wheat, and other crops flourishing in abundance, one rarely sees orange trees. Why? To […]
October 22, 2017

“Lift up your heads, O gates, that the King of glory may come in!”

For the last twelve months the Lord has highlighted, impressed upon me, and essentially flooded my consciousness with the word “gates.” Everywhere in scripture I keep seeing it pop up. […]