Our view of intercessory prayer

Remember when Jesus was praying and making sure that God was being glorified through His life and that He was being glorified because of His obedience to God?  Right after that, Jesus continues to pray as He looks to the time when He would be taken from the disciples and they would be left in the world.  They would find themselves in a new situation and He saw that only as they became one with Him and each other could the experience the fullness of the revelation of the glory of Himself. 

Jesus knew that the world and the evil one would like to thwart those plans, so Jesus now turns to pray for His disciples in the situation they are about to face.  Jesus prays first for God to protect the disciples by His name, which He has given to Jesus.  In that pray Jesus addresses God as, Holy Father. God is commonly known as the Holy One, the expression Holy Father is not found anywhere else in the Bible. Holiness refers to divine otherness, the realm of the divine in contrast to the mundane. Thus, this phrase captures beautifully God's "purity and tenderness, the "transcendence and intimacy characteristic of Jesus' personal attitude to God and of his teaching about God."

There's this amazing prayer by a Jesuit father that says 'Fall in love with God, stay in love with God, and it will change everything.'

You pray, then, in this manner: Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be your name...

This is followed by the very essence of intercessory prayer.  When we pray, "Thy kingdom come,' are we praying for heaven to come to earth? In a sense we are praying for this; but heaven is an object of desire only because the reign of God is to be more perfectly realized then it is now. Apart from the reign of God, heaven is meaningless. Therefore, what we pray for is, "Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This prayer is a petition for God to reign, to manifest His kingly sovereignty and power, to put to fight every enemy of righteousness and of His divine rule, that God alone may be King over all the world.

The prayer Celine Dion& A Bocelli 
Our Father Prayer in a Catholic Church setting

Cleveland Baptist Church Choir- Hear Our Prayer

Related articles

• Lord, Teach Us to Pray - Week 11
• A reflection of prayer