0. 0. INTERCESSION IN ACTION

1. Interceding to Save a Life

Dr Raymond Edmond, a medical missionary to Uruguay, had become so ill that his wife and friends gathered around his bed to say their goodbyes, having already dug his grave outside. But suddenly, much to everyone’s surprise, Dr Raymond sat bolt upright, requested his clothes and sprung out of bed completely healed.

Many years later Dr Edmond was preaching in Boston and he recounted this story of the day he was miraculously rescued from death’s door. At the end of the meeting an elderly lady approached him clutching a dog-eared old notebook. ‘What day did you say you were dying in Uruguay?’ she asked. Dr Raymond told her. She leafed through her notebook and eventually located the day, whereupon her wrinkled face suddenly lit up. ‘There it is!’ she exclaimed, pointing at a scribbled note. ‘At 2am God said to me, “Get up and pray – the devil’s trying to kill Raymond Edmond in Uruguay!”’4

2. Interceding to Rescue an Orphaned Child

‘My parents longed to adopt a baby called George from Mexico, but after four years of trying, the Mexican government introduced new legislation and rejected our application completely. We had sent George teddy bears, we had photos and videos of him, and my five-year-old brother often prayed for his new brother. We were all devastated. I’m sure my parents must have felt bad for raising our hopes, but as they prayed and fasted they continued to sense that it was still God’s will for George to join our family, even though we’d been told that this was now utterly impossible.

Around that time someone gave us a prophetic word, saying that God would use kings and queens to move mountains for us. Several months later, a Mexican friend who had been acting on our behalf in the adoption process, happened to meet the wife of the Mexican President. He gathered the courage to tell her about George and she was so moved by the story that she agreed to use her influence to ‘move mountains’.

George is now my brother. He even has a teddy bear signed by the wife of the former president. Looking back, I don’t think it was a matter of begging. I think we received a miracle because, having seen what the Lord wanted to do, we simply kept believing and praying, against all the odds.’5

3. Interceding for a Nation

By May 1940, Hitler’s forces had cornered 380,000 Allied soldiers in north west France, trapped with their backs to the sea. No more than 30,000 were expected to be evacuated to safety. Facing calamity, King George VI called his British subjects to
a national day of prayer.

On 26 May 1940 the beleaguered people of Britain filled churches up and down the land, interceding for the lives of those 380,000 soldiers, crying out to God for the kind of national deliverance described in the Bible. Winston Churchill described the results of that prayer meeting as ‘a miracle of deliverance’.

The first answer to prayer was the weather: the sea was the calmest it had been
for 30 years, enabling an armada of private vessels to cross the English Channel to rescue troops from Dunkirk. Meanwhile a storm blew up in France to ground sections of the Luftwaffe. What’s more, Adolf Hitler inexplicably made one of the worst decisions of the war; holding back his forces to enable one of the greatest escapes in history which enabled more than a third of a million men to fight another day and thereby undoubtedly determining the outcome of World War Two.

That ‘miracle of deliverance’ is well known. Fewer people realise that it was an answer to the intercessory prayers that spanned the British Isles on 26 May 1940.