Prayer Circle

I'm not saying 
I will beg the Father 
on your behalf. 
He already loves you. 
When I intercede 
I will be lifting you 
into his lap for blessing, 
or, hearing from the Spirit, 
we will be conversing 
about how much you've grown 
and how to grow you next, 
or I will be offering, as always,
my purity as covering  
for your shame. 

When you have needs 
and come to him 
for answers in my name, 
I will corroborate 
your right to ask 
because you're mine, 
because you love me. 
And our one heart 
will hold you close 
within the circle 
of these prayers. 


This is amazing truth: Jesus prays for me!  Jesus prays for you, too! He intercedes for us, his followers! I am grateful, aware of my minute standing in this huge world. There are so many of us! Add to this the truth I contemplated last week, that the Spirit intercedes for us, and then think of God  himself, Yahweh, responding according to his purpose! I imagine it as a prayer circle as I work at unpacking the united conversation of the Trinity.

When I was a little girl growing up in the mountains of eastern Congo, breakfast with my missionary parents was a treasured moment. After breakfast they would be at work; we kids could run and play with friends, watched over by our Congolese nanny. It was at breakfast that we were together before the day began. They had a little box of Bible verses they wanted me and my younger brother Dwight to memorize. Reviewing them always highlighted one for me:

 Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.  (Jas. 4:8 RSV)

I clung to that as I grew up, wanting to know him the way my parents did. I was trying to “draw near,” often wondering if I was making progress. A.W. Tozer wrote about this in The Pursuit of God, a library book I read as a young teen at boarding school. It stirred me deeply. And then as an adult, this truth hit me:

Consequently he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. (Heb. 7:25 RSV)

My Lord Jesus is interceding for me! Because of my trust in Jesus, and his intercession showing his awareness of my struggles, I had been drawing near to God, learning increasingly how precious it is to know him better and better. And I knew that there are three persons in the Godhead. This revelation that Jesus would talk to the Father about me, standing up for me and explaining my needs, was a hard one to wrap my mind around. They talk to each other? How about the fact that our Advocate, the Spirit, is interceding for me too?

I began to relish this picture of the Trinity’s ongoing conversation about the believer who is attached to them. It is clear that the Spirit lives in that person to teach them how to live, to comfort them with his presence now that they are joined to God:

¹⁶ And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever– ¹⁷ the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. ¹⁸ I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. ¹⁹ Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. ²⁰ On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you . . .²⁵ “All this I have spoken while still with you. ²⁶ But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.  (Jn. 14:16-10, 25-26 NIV)

Jesus was painting a spiritual picture for his disciples: he is in the Father; the disciple is in Jesus (so he’s in the Father too), and Jesus is in the disciple through his Spirit living them. The Spirit helps them and intercedes for them:

 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. ²⁷ And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. (Rom. 8:26,27 NIV)

I was contemplating that precious work of the Spirit in me, in us, last week in this blog. And I thought: yes, I will go on working through the inter-communication within the Trinity that is revealed to us, with Jesus interceding for us too. What a delight it was to go to church on Sunday and hear my pastor—my brother Brent Slater—circle through his explanation of Hebrews 13:8 to include this very truth that Jesus is, forever, our intercessor! He always intercedes, and never changes:

Consequently he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. (Heb. 7:25 RSV)

⁸ Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Heb. 13:8 NIV)

He made it clear that we future believers were also the focus of his prayer:

²⁰ “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, (Jn. 17:20 NIV)

He specified that the Holy Spirit is our Advocate, (John 14:26), and his disciple John underlined that Jesus is our advocate too:

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father– Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. (1 Jn. 2:1 NIV)

This should not stun us—it just fleshes out the meaning of the unity of the three Persons who are one God. Jesus wanted his disciples to understand this, and I am deeply grateful that he used his disciple John to share with future believers those truths about their unity and its deep importance for us.  His own words, handed down to us by John in John 14-17, explain that Jesus and his Father are “one,” living in each other. Jesus’ words came with authority from the Father, and the Father was doing his work through Jesus:

Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. ¹¹ Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. (Jn. 14:10 ,11 NIV)

A bit later he made it clear that he would be sending the Spirit to live in them, and all that he would communicate to them internally would also be coming through the Trinitarian line, from the Father and Jesus to the Spirit:

“I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. ¹³ But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. ¹⁵ All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.” (Jn. 16:12-15 NIV)

Jesus’ words of comfort and revelation to his loved ones were sealed for us in his prayer to his father, which closes that passage. A key theme is, again, this “oneness,” a unity of persons. He prayed:

 I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. (Jn. 17:11 NIV)

What a model of unity we are called to live up to: that constant unity that circles communication through the Spirit and Jesus and the Father! It is true that we can only do this through the power of God. His name represents the truth about him:  Yahweh means “the one who is.” He always has been and always will be. The way Pastor Brent put it in English, he is the “is-ing one”. And Jesus (whose name means “Yahweh saves”) is one with him, and the Spirit is their envoy to us, living in us.

Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. (Jn. 14:23 NIV)

He said that he and the Father would come to his follower and make their home in that person. And how do they do that? They send their Spirit, the Spirit of truth:

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever– ¹⁷ the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. (Jn. 14:16 NIV)

What a wonder this is! When we turn to God and come to him through Jesus, cleansed from our wrong-doing, he wants us to develop right understanding of his truth, but also to grow in our fellowship with him. When you live with someone all the time, especially in a place as intimate as inside us (where nothing is hidden, and all our thoughts and emotions are communicated), you get to know each other and a deep friendship grows. Trust and companionship lead to living out what has been agreed on. The fellowship of the Trinity is like that, as in the prayer circle (described in the opening poem).

He gave us family as an image of what this could be like: a husband and wife who become one, unified, and children who grow up loved by their parents. Our problem is that we are broken and the image we pass on can send the wrong message. When it is union with God—with the Father, Son, and Spirit—we can grow constantly in our experience of this fellowship. And as we come closer and closer to him, he will keep on coming closer and closer to us. He longs for us to know him and be part of that wonder, that unity. In order for that to happen we need to dedicate ourselves to it:

And I set myself apart on their behalf, so that they too may be truly set apart. ²⁰ “I am not praying only on their behalf, but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their testimony, ²¹ that they will all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. I pray that they will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me. (Jn. 17:19-21 NET)

Most English translations of what Jesus said here say “I sanctify myself . . .so that they may sanctify themselves,” or else they use the word consecrate. All these words mean that God’s people must be “set apart” for God’s purpose, just as the priests were in order to serve and worship in the temple, where their furniture and tools were also “set apart” for that purpose. When we dedicate ourselves to follow Jesus, to draw near to the Father and to communicate with him through the Spirit by praying in Jesus’ name (John 14:13,14) and obeying his commands (John 14:23), then we can be “one” with God.

This then makes it possible for all those who are deeply attached to him this way to be one with each other, as well. May it be so!

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one– (Jn. 17:22 NIV)