Intercessory Prayer

And then the final aspect of prayer is that God cares. And this may sound like a strange thing to put in a list of things about prayer, but I remember when I was a little kid and some nights I would get up because I would hear a noise downstairs and I'd wander downstairs and I would find my mom kneeling by the couch or by the chair or a table praying. And I would say, "Mom, what are you doing?" She said, "I'm just praying." I said, Why? You know, you can pray during the daytime. Why are you up in the middle of the night? Oh, I couldn't sleep and just felt like praying. I said, well, what are you praying about? And she would say this line, and I understood it as a kid. She would say, I'm giving permission slips to angels. And I knew what she meant, because a permission slip was what I had to take to school when my dad was coming to take me out to lunch. It meant I was going to get to do something that the other kids couldn't do because they didn't have a permission slip. A permission slip was what I had to take with me if I was going to go on an excursion with my class, because it meant I had permission to go somewhere that I didn't have permission to go to without that permission slip. And so she was saying, "What I'm doing is..." and she would explain it to me. "This is the devil's playground. This is the devil's world, and he's got control here. And so God sees everyone down here and he loves everyone so much, but if somebody said, 'No, I don't want God in my life,' God will not push, and his angels can come so close, but then they'll stop." because that person has said no or they haven't said yes, and the devil or one of his angels will say, 'Hey, hey, hey, you can't come into this territory. This person doesn't know God, doesn't want God.' But she said, when I pray and when we pray, when any of us pray and say, 'Dear God, you know so-and-so, and you know that they're struggling, they're away from you. Could you please touch their heart?' She said then the Holy Spirit, an angel, Somebody gets to go right down there. And when the devil says, "Hey, stop, stop, they don't want you." "No, but I have a permission slip." Intercessory prayer. That's what intercessory prayer is. It's giving permission slips to angels. And the reason why God wants us to pray intercessory like that, to pray for other people, is because he truly does care very deeply. Listen to this verse from Isaiah 40. He tends his flock like a shepherd. He gathers the lambs in his arms, carries them close to his heart. He gently leads those that have young. Or in Psalms 147:3, it says, he heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. God wants more than anything to be able to act in the lives of everyone on this earth. And as Christians, we know that God listens We know that God speaks, and we do know that God cares. We've seen it in our own life. But as we pray for other people, as we give permission slips to angels, God can impact the world around us.