August 28, 2006

"Servant"

We hear in scripture, "Speak, Lord!  Your servant is listening."  Servant. This is a very special service roll today in the church.  Listen to the words of Our Lady.  "Behold the handmaid!  Behold the servant of the Lord."  Now, we might think we are servants.  I will share with you this image, which I received from the Lord one time, in which He gave me a clearer understanding of my servant-hood. It had to do with someone for whom I had been praying for a long time.   Maybe you have had such an experience and when the grace was won, you knew it. God answered your prayer.  It was at Communion when this image came to me.  I saw a person for whom I had been praying and sacrificing.  This person had died and I knew it.  In the image I saw a beautiful, royal carriage, coming along a path.  All sorts of little children and people were out there giving acknowledgement to this person.  He was obviously on the way to heaven now.  It was a beautiful image.  He was accepting flowers, which were being thrown to him and I was standing there in the scene.  I was dressed in a dark brown, long dress with a little funny hat on.  I thought, "Where have I seen that kind of a hat before?"  Then I recalled that it was in a movie where you see servants wear these little, white caps.  I thought, "Well, I am here as a servant girl."   The carriage came and passed me.  The person never even acknowledged my presence.  He never said, "Thank you."  He said nothing to me in the midst of all this acclamation and celebration. Well!  I asked the Lord about that!  I said, "What about me?"  This whole procession is taking place because I did all this intercession!"   Of course all this intercession is what the Lord wanted. What a surprise it was when the Lord said to me, "You are my servant.  Your joy is in My joy.  This is My child who was lost, and now is found."  I realized then that even when we think we are serving the Lord, there can still be that little bit of self, which we are actually serving.  We have to get totally out of it.  Intercession is totally for others.  It is for God's greater honor and glory, not ours.

You never know when the Holy Spirit is going to prompt you to go into intercession.  You may be driving along when you see something. You are the intercessor.  You are there, right on the scene.  You see it and you realize that you are to pray.  You can go to the grocery and, realizing that there is something wrong with the relationship between a parent and child, you start praying.

We have a beautiful sister in our community now who is from Singapore.  Actually we have three Sisters from Singapore.  She was sharing a story the other night about a time when she had read a little article in Singapore about some young girls who were being picked up and taken away.  People actually go to the families of these impoverished girls, give their parents money and say, "We can get your child an education.  We can help your child to get work."  What they are really doing is taking them captive and using them for prostitution.  Our sister was horror-stricken when she read that!  She had no idea!  Now it was not by chance that God was giving her this information through this little article in the newspaper.  So she had, what we call, the burden. You will know when you have such a burden. You just know.  She started prayer, "Lord, these girls that are being held captive!  Some are being shipped out.  Some are being shipped in.  They have no way of communicating. No body knows where they are or how to help them!"  The whole operation was hidden, in the dark.  It had not been brought into the light.  She prayed every day, "God, help them!  Set them free wherever they are.  Let somebody know so that they can receive help!"

After a few weeks, she happened to pick up the paper again. There was a little, tiny article which, normally, she would not have even seen.  When God wants you to see something, you are just drawn there.  This article said that, in this particular house, there were quite a few young girls who were being held captive.  One of them somehow got a little note on a rock and she threw that rock with all her might through the window.  She broke the window.  It went out on a road and somebody came along, saw it, picked it up and turned it in.  These girls were all set free! Right then the burden lifted from Sister.  She knew then that she was not to be in intercession for them any longer.  Her intercession had been answered.  When your intercession is answered, the burden does lift.  Sometimes it will lift because God wants others in intercession - because you are not the only intercessor.  We are not usually the intercessor for the whole world. He has others as well.  We have to be careful that we do not take on things that have not really been directed by God.

In intercession, we are telling God, as Mary did, "They haven't any wine!"  They haven't any life!  They haven't any joy! They haven't any love!  They need You!  The bottom line in intercession is that Jesus always sends us forth in His grace.

What is needed for intercession? Union.  There is a beautiful scripture in the Song of Songs in which God is saying, "Oh, My dove!  Let Me hear your voice!"   He is speaking to His dove within each one of us.  He is speaking to His Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit, Paul tells us, who intercedes within when we do not know how to pray.  The Holy Spirit makes intercession for us.  He is the dove. God wants to hear the dove who needs our voice. Intercession can only be done in union.  It cannot happen without union.  Isn't that interesting?

Jesus won the graces.  He is  "The Intercessor."   He works through His disciples in the power of His Spirit.  God will only go through humanity.  He can move anywhere!  God is God!  He can do anything, but He chooses to move and act through humanity.  He does it through being asked.  We never realized that.  It is the way that He set up.  He sent Jesus as the intercessor and then Jesus comes again and again in the power of the Spirit through us.  So God does need us!  He has chosen not to do it without us.  I see now why Jesus is so insistent that we ask and ask and ask! When we ask, God definitely does act!

In John 15, Jesus said, "I am the vine."  You are not!  I am!  "You are the branches!"  We must really know this.   Branches cannot survive all by themselves.  Apart from the vine, they die.  Jesus said,  "You cannot bear fruit apart from Me."  In the ministry of intercession, we are in it together with the Lord.  "If you live in Me and My words stay part of you, you may ask what you will and it will be done!"  That means you can ask for miracles.  God loves to do miracles.  One time the Lord said to me, "There are just not enough people asking for miracles in the name of Jesus." We need to believe that God is God and wants to do the impossible - impossible to us!  But nothing is impossible to God!  Nothing!

Do not limit God. Let Him be God.  We are the limited ones.  I said to Him one time, "You deliberately made it this way, didn't You?"  "Yes," He said, "You are limited."  We are limited in love.  We are limited in patience. We are limited in virtue.  He is not.  I asked Him, "Did you set it up this way so that we would always come to You to fill up what we cannot do and to do what we cannot even think about doing!"  He said, "Yes."  He wants to be with us in all of this, in everything!  It pays to let Him be God and to remember that you are not.    Ask Him with boldness!  We can do that when we get to know Him and when we really know what He wants to do. There is a beautiful scripture in Amos 3:7.  It is one simple, little scripture that He gave me a long time ago.  It says, "God never does anything - anything - without first revealing it to His servants, the prophets."  Prophets are those who listen.  He does nothing without revealing it!  When we get that knowledge from God and can see what He wants to do, we can pray with boldness.  We have information!  We no longer pray, "If it be Your will."  We know His will and we can pray in a tremendous boldness.

Scripture also says, "Jesus was heard because of His reverence," and "I no longer call you servants.  Now, I call you friends."  When we start walking in a close relationship with the Lord, which is what God wants us to do, since His wisdom makes us friends of God, we must not get so casual that we fail to speak with reverence. We must always remember: He is God.  The Lord showed me this one time in my own relationship with my mother, who was my closest and dearest friend.   We had a wonderful relationship.  I used to share everything with her. The Lord said, "You always remembered, though, that even though she was your best friend, she was your mother. She was not your sister.  She was your mother." We must maintain that reverence, even in this deep friendship with God.  Jesus was always reverent. He said, "The Father is greater than I."  He always prayed with great reverence to the Father.  He was heard and answered.
Excerpt from Mother Nadine's, "Intercession," Waveland, MI, 2005