Prayer a Stepping Stone to our Word of Faith

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All of us are affected by the needs around us: a child or a neighbor or fellow worker who needs to find the Savior, someone we have been
praying for for years perhaps, a fellow believer whose life is a mess, or the needs on a missionary’s heart. The point is to go on from merely
prayer—even intense, continued prayer— to specific believing for specific ends. Can I really say God will do this? Can I say by faith what will happen in the village in Africa? People see me by my word. This is how my
thinking and desiring come into public form.

You can’t throw out your word of faith like confetti, though. It takes time, having been pressed by a sense of need, to say what God will do. We
collect our praying together in ourselves. This may include others—a group. Then we put it on God: “You must do this.” Our word of faith,
spoken either individually or collectively, puts us into action as intercessors. I have said, “This will come to pass.” Now whenever that
need comes to my attention, I affirm my spoken word of faith: “It shall be done.”

Christ must many times have gone over the whole process of the Cross. And every choice we make, whether big like this or tiny by comparison, is a “death.” As we persist in believing, there will be a cost. But our frustrations are really our opportunities. We stick with Romans 8:28,
knowing that God means Satan to do what he does, and that God will work whatever evil comes to us, whatever seeming block to our word of
faith, to its more-than-perfect accomplishment. We “see” God only.

As king, we have the authority of one seated with Him on the throne, thus able to “command deliverances in Jacob1′ and bring things into being by achieving faith, as told us by Jesus in Mark 11:22-24 and exemplified in Hebrews 11:1-34. As priest, we are brought by the Spirit into the Lamb Life. We lay down our lives vicariously as intercessors, taking the places of those for whom we intercede. Death works in us, but life in them; and we gain the end of the intercession.