Continuing my What I’m Praying series, I want to tell you about something I love praying for every single week. Every Saturday morning at 11am, I serve as the worship leader on an intercession set at The Prayer Room for various justice topics. My prayer leader and I have been doing this set for several months now, just the two of us, and it’s been powerful!

We’ve been praying for several topics, including adoption and the foster system, reentry into society after incarceration, and always for the church to have God’s heart for justice. It’s one of my favorite sets of the week because we really feel the partnership with God as we go after these things that He cares so much about. Jesus is the righteous Judge, and His heart burns to set all the wrong things right.

“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne…”
(Psalm 89:14)

As we’ve been praying, we’ve been trying to keep a few key principles in mind. In my experience, having a handful of goals for the way we pray strengthens the intercession and helps everyone in the room engage with the topics.
1. Be Praising

Before you go into intercession, get a high view of God in worship. Remember who you’re talking to. Agree with who He is and declare that He is holy, good, and powerful. From that perspective, you’ll have the faith to pray biblically and declare His heart over the brokenness in our world.

Psalm 2 shows this pattern of intercession:

“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? …He who sits in the heavens laughs… ‘As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.’ … The LORD said to me, ‘You are my Son…Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.'”
(Psalm 2:1-8)

The nations are raging, but God sits in heaven and isn’t worried at all. He has set Jesus as King. Then the next thing He does is invite Jesus (and I think we can hear this invitation for ourselves) to ask Him for the nations. From the perspective that God is confidently seated in heaven and He has firmly placed Jesus as King, we can have the joy and confidence to ask Him to move in the nations.

2. Be Biblical

Use verses! The prayers and promises in Scripture are like checks already signed by God – these are things we already know He wants to do, and this is language He actually gave us to ask Him to do them. Praying Scripture is the easiest way to come into agreement with the heart of God.

The prayers of the New Testament, which we call the apostolic prayers, are a great place to start (check out this list of apostolic prayers found in Scripture as well as this longer list of apostolic prayers) and you can also find a TON of verses to pray in the Psalms and prophets.

“The LORD is a stronghold for the oppressed…”
(Psalm 9:9)

“O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will… do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed…”
(Psalm 10:17-18)

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?”
(Isaiah 58:6)

“The LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives…”
(Isaiah 61:1)

“what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
(Micah 6:8)

BONUS verse: we’ve discovered that we love praying Ephesians 2 for unity and the ending of racism–

“For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility… that he might… reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.”
(Ephesians 2:14-16)

3. Be Positive

One of the core values of the harp and bowl model is positive prayers– praying FOR good things instead of AGAINST bad things. This is the model we see in the majority of the prayers in the Bible, and in my experience, it is super helpful to guard our hearts against offense and anger. We want to train ourselves to focus on the kingdom of light rather than the kingdom of darkness!

As another practical point, positive prayers help everyone in the room engage in unity. For example, you might want to pray “Remove the deception and racism in how this nation sees immigrants!” and not only are you working yourself up into more frustration, but someone in the room is now wondering what exactly you think about immigration policy and they’re probably arguing with you in their head. BUT if we pray, “Give us grace to see immigrants how You see them and love them well,” it’s much easier for someone to agree, because (hopefully) we can all agree that we all need more love!

4. Be Specific

When we started our set, we were praying really broadly, pretty much that God would reveal His love to every victim of injustice all over the world. That’s great, but it was a little too vague for us to focus effectively. As we grew, the topics became more specific, and that really helped us engage in a more targetted strike in intercession. In praying for the fatherless, our prayer leader got in touch with a local ministry that serves adoptive families, and we started praying specifically for their needs. Putting specific names, places, and scenarios to the topics we’re praying for really helps our hearts engage and helps focus our intercession so that we can actually, measurable see change happen.

5. Be Bold

I am so proud of my prayer leader– last week, he prayed boldly for a controversial topic related to systemic racism. He was biblical, positive, and specific, and prayed with a lot of grace and love. Plus, I know it was a topic that was very personal to him as a person of color. We prayed boldly and I could feel the Spirit of God interceding with us.

As easy as it may be to stick to the vague, safe topics, God’s heart is breaking for specific and often controversial injustices. He’s looking for a people unafraid to join Him in His burden for the things that are often difficult to talk about. Not only are we sowing into the spiritual breakthough that will one day come in these areas, but we’re practicing and modeling how believers should talk and pray about these topics from a biblical justice lens.

6. Be Persistent

We’re not going to see breakthough if we flit from one topic to another whenever we get bored. We need to take the example of the widow in Luke 18:1-8 who modeled persistent prayer for justice.

I saw this happen so powerfully when I was at IHOPKC – every month on the set for the ending of human trafficking, the prayer leader would focus on a different city somewhere in the world. All (or at least many, I can’t remember) of our prayers would be focussed on the ending of human trafficking IN THAT CITY, and then next month we’d switch to a different city. Every now and then the prayer leader would make an announcement on the mic that went something like, “Remember how we were praying for that specific city? Well, last night the police made a huge bust and freed 30 girls and made 14 arrests!” and we would all cheer and launch into our prayer for the next city with renewed vigor and faith.