Every situation always starts with a resistant human self. It must do, because that provides the necessary foundation of an involved self. Now the first step forward in being God’s intercessor is being taken. It is a step down, not up. It is a death experience. The hurt self has to be recognized for what it is, not wrong, but the first evidence that God is looking for His intercessor in a situation, and that we are that man, for we are involved in it.

But when frankly recognized, we accept our privilege as a privilege, not as an imposition on us, and we see glory in the cross. For this is what Paul called it in that great explanatory paragraph on intercession in 2 Cor. 4:7-13, "Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus" and "we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus sake." This is not to be confused, as many do confuse it, with the once-for-all identification we have had with Christ crucified and risen, and we with Him, where it is said, we died, we were buried, we rose with Him. That is past and never repeated. That was His cross and resurrection we participated in for our own redemption.

What we are now talking about is not the cross for our redemption, but for the redemption of others. This is adulthood, not adolescence. This kind of cross is constantly repeated in our daily lives whenever we are in situations which our human selves would be rid of; but instead of remaining in hurt self, we recognize them to be part of some redemptive purpose of God through us in others. So, Paul says, we accept them as something we have been "delivered unto," and our "dying" which is said to be the dying of the Lord Jesus in us is our heart acceptance of them, though that may not be lightly, 

or easily, any more than the Savior could accept His cross without a Gethsemane.

Here is a principle of constant "dyings," daily maybe, affecting every kind of normal situation in life, not by any means in what we might call our religious activity. Anything which hurts, disturbs our status quo, or challenges, be it what we may call small in our personal lives, or big in some public affair, is a place of dying when we change from self’s resistance to acceptance as a step in God’s saving plans.

Without such dyings, Moses could never have seen that he was not to be a possible, ephemeral Pharaoh, but a savior of God’s chosen people: Gideon could never have changed from challenging God’s apparent indifference to accepting the challenge to be himself the deliverer. Abraham could never have exchanged his laughter at the idea of a couple of their age having a son for a productive faith. David could never have resisted the chance of killing Saul to wait in patience for God’s day of his coronation. So through every aspect of achieving or enduring faith in all history. Everyone had to start by a disturbed, resisting self which saw God in the tough situation and then died to his self-resistance.

Then comes the resurrection–which is the Spirit in us causing us to see things from His point of view. We can begin to be intercessors. We can see what God is after, and the first effect is a joy, release, sense of adventure, praise where there seems nothing to praise for, for we now see the redemptive purposes, something by us for others. Its immediate effect, as Paul says, is a quickening in our own selves: "the life of Jesus manifest in our mortal flesh": burdens, fears, the sense of a hurtful, not joyful cross, is gone, and others watching can see a release and ease which is not what the world experiences in its tough spots. Resurrection life is manifested in our mortal bodies, and that by itself is God coming through us to others.

The real purpose can now be discerned. An intercessor is God’s strategist. He sees what God is after and goes along with Him. The men of the Bible always understood their specific commission. So must we. Any of us in any kind of circumstances can draw aside with God and examine before Him the whys and wherefores of what is happening. It will not take long before we begin to see clearly: it is for this to happen to these folks in my home, or for this in my Sunday School class or church, or to some areas of need in my city, or right out on some distant mission field. But it is specific. It is God saying to me (or to a group of us in something together), "You have been put by Me to stand in that gap. See that you carry it out."

I well remember how clearly, soon after my conversion, just before World War I when I had received my commission to join the regiment as a 2nd Lieutenant, the Spirit of God was wrestling with me about my affection for an unsaved girl and telling me I could not have Christ and Antichrist in my heart at the same time. There was self blocking the vision all right! The battle was won the day I took the train to our training center, and clear as daylight in that railway compartment an inner word was spoken to me, though I was the youngest of untaught Christians in those days. It said, "You are joining your regiment. You will train for a year and then get out in the trenches. Many of you will be dead in a year. You make sure that some of those other fellows receive the gift of eternal life you now have." I couldn’t "see" that great commission, until the self-block was out and I had died; but then I knew with no uncertainty my real commission within my King’s commission for the next five years of war, and it became my absorbing objective to carry it out.

Later, at Cambridge University for a post-war period, once again the commission came clear (we ex-soldiers were given very easy and short ways of getting the degrees we were going out for before the war): "Whatever degree you get or don’t get, you will fail at the University if you don’t get souls." And once again, by God’s enabling and not without often reluctant obedience, it was carried out.

These are only illustrations of the certain fact that just as every redeemed person is by that same token a priest and intercessor, so everyone who sees the meaning of self-dying to our normal self reactions in our daily lives, can hear, find, and move in on God’s specific commission to them. And, of course, with mainline commissions there are always many and variable, even daily, local commissions.

With the commission comes action. An intercessor accepts the full meaning of a commission–that it is God’s declared intention to fulfill some saving purpose by him, and that everything he has and is, is going into it. No one is more active than he–call him God’s soldier, God’s servant, God’s husbandman, God’s athlete. Let us make no mistake–activity, not passivity, marks him for what he is. "A body hast thou prepared me," he says with Jesus.

My own life has been spent in a missionary crusade, so I can draw my illustrations most easily from it; but that must not give any misleading idea that a foreign missionary is some very holy or very special kind of servant of Jesus Christ. You don’t think that for long if you are one, or live among them! They are the most ordinary humans, just seeking to answer what they understand to be the call of God to them, not any different from any housewife or businessman who equally seeks to answer what he understands to be his call. But I have seen by them for over forty years what dedicated action means. There is a goal to be reached: it is going to be reached.

C.T. Studd, my father-in-law, went to the Congo. As a young man, when England’s greatest cricketer, he had heard God’s call to take Christ to inland China. He went, exchanging cricket field for mission field. In China, inheriting from his father what might be a quarter of a million dollars in today’s values, he heard God’s call to sell all that he had for the spread of the Gospel. He did it.

Back in England twenty-five years later, with broken health and his wife an invalid, he heard God’s call to go to the heart of Africa. Against the advice of doctors, with empty pockets, called a fanatic by his friends, he went. He said, "If the young men won’t go, perhaps if an old one goes and dies, they may make his grave a stepping stone and go." He lived in the Congo forests for sixteen years, while his wife by faith got off her sick bed to call recruits to join him. When he saw the crowds that poured out of the villages to greet him, he said, "Here is my black gold. They shall hear and hear to purpose that Christ died to save them." They heard, and a short while after his death, twelve thousand Africans from fifteen tribes gathered at the spot where they buried him to thank God that he had brought Christ to them.

He founded the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade with the call to young men and women to follow Christ on the same principles of sacrifice and faith, so that all nations should hear. Over a thousand have followed in forty countries, and, as I have lived with them and been one of them myself for forty-five years, I know that commissioned men and women are men and women of action. By their bodies Christ takes His gospel to every creature: some at home in the kitchen and office: some wrestling with languages and translation: some at the printing presses: many tramping the villages in remote places or visiting the longhouses up jungle rivers: others teaching school and tending the sick, and all without salary or human security, fed by the Lord through His people.

What does it all mean? Merely this–that an intercessor is a man of action. What God commissions him to do, he does with body, mind and soul, and does not stop doing. He is a man with a purpose, a man with a goal to be reached, and the word from heaven has come to him, as to Moses, Joshua, the prophets, and to Jesus Himself. "This I am going to do, and I’m going to do it by you."

Once again we say: Let no man think this refers to special activities by special people in special places. No, this word from heaven is being heard and heeded by thousands and tens of thousands of God’s intercessors in all nations all the time, and being acted upon in thousands of different ways–and among them you and me. The Church of Christ is this day "terrible as an army with banners." Let us never think that, when in former days we were active for God and exhausted ourselves in good works before we knew the secret of our inner resources in Christ, therefore, there should be less activity now. No, the opposite. More activity than ever, more straight aiming than ever, because now our resources are endless. Then we only knew how to rest from our work: now we know how to rest in our work. No one can out-work, out-think, out-pray a man in whom the Spirit of God is.

It leaves a wholly wrong impression if we should think that outward activity has any meaning unless it is the product of inward activity. The whole point is that an intercessor is not "working for God"; he is the human means by which God is doing His own work–and that’s all. The fundamental difference is between the way we "tried" to be God’s servants, when we were still under the delusion that the redeemed man does God’s work for Him and with His help, and the revelation now given us that we are not really we at all, but He in us that He may be He by us. We, indeed, need to have this clear deep down to the centre of our consciousness, so that our basic outlook on what we commonly call Christian service has been revolutionized; and we cannot, simply cannot, be caught up again in that frustrating, ulcer-causing, nervous-breakdown-producing rat race of "doing our best for Him."

Our calling is to activity, non-stop activity, probably more ceaseless and intense activity than in that former way; to a sacrifice that, as with C.T. Studd and so many thousands of others, may bring us the honour of empty pockets, worn-out bodies, lives laid down (and we reckon it the highest honour God could ever give a man when it was said of Jesus, "It pleased the Lord to bruise him"). All this is now God in saving action by us, God reaching man through man. Therefore, our first form of action is always that our inner man is rightly geared in with the Inner Man. The intercessor is commissioned (Is. 59:16). The intercessor is involved (Is. 53:12). But all this is meaningless unless the intercessor is also authoritative (Heb. 7:25). This means faith in action.

It is plain enough through all the Bible that faith is the power line. Hebrews 11 settles that–using only that one word to account for all the achievements in the lives of the men of God. Faith is the whole man in action, but primarily the inner man. We must know, therefore, how to win our battles within before waging them without. Indeed, every battle is in fact won from within, and the spoils of victory gathered outside.

—The Spontaneous You