What if while driving down the road you say a prayer for every person that you see along the way. Surely they all need your prayers. Would you intercede for others more often and more readily if you saw your prayers get answered? In this episode, Terry Modica reveals that the real stumbling block is not a lack of fruits but a lack of understanding how intercessory prayer works. By clearing up misconceptions, you can discover greater faith to become a more effective intercessor.
Podcast Excerpt:
We all have people in our lives who need our prayers. And the strangers that you see only once: Some of those people don’t have anyone praying for them. Your prayers are important!
We could all do a better job of being prayer intercessors for others. But what I think holds us back is the lack of seeing enough encouraging fruits of our prayer efforts to motivate us to keep doing it and even to do more.
The real stumbling block is not a lack of fruits but a lack of understanding how intercessory prayer works.
A good example of how we misunderstand intercessory prayer is in the way we so often hear official prayers in church. For example, the common prescribed response to the Prayers of the Faithful during Mass is, ‘Lord hear our prayer.” The implication that unconsciously undermines our thought processes and our understanding of God’s role in answering our prayers is that the Lord won’t hear our prayer unless we ask him to.
So, to cure that, we could change it to, “Lord, thank You for hearing our prayers.” Even if we do this silently in our hearts while everyone else is saying the prescribed formula, this can build our faith.
But we can go even deeper than that to uncover greater faith. Think about the word “our” in “Lord, hear our prayer”. How much weight do you give to the fact that it is your prayer? What if you turned that upside down and thought about it as God’s prayer being spoken through you? Suddenly the effectiveness of the prayer seems so much greater.
You see, prayer, real prayer, is communion with God. It’s a form of union with God, or it should be. It’s communication. Notice how these words all tie together: communion and communication. Prayer should be a form of experiencing the communion of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is Christ’s real presence in the form of bread and wine. Prayer is Christ’s real presence in your communication with God.
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