2024 09 18

HolyName - Fall On Your Knees (feat. Brian Head Welch & Brook Reeves) [Official Live Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3AOQQfMrQ

Van Cliburn - Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, B-flat minor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qROema2MDI&t=1373s

Psalm 122 New King James Version
1 I was glad when they said to me,
“Let us go into the house of the Lord.”
2 Our feet have been standing
Within your gates, O Jerusalem!

3 Jerusalem is built
As a city that is compact together,
4 Where the tribes go up,
The tribes of the Lord,
To the Testimony of Israel,
To give thanks to the name of the Lord.
5 For thrones are set there for judgment,
The thrones of the house of David.

6 Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
“May they prosper who love you.
7 Peace be within your walls,
Prosperity within your palaces.”
8 For the sake of my brethren and companions,
I will now say, “Peace be within you.”
9 Because of the house of the Lord our God
I will seek your good.

Praying for the Peace of Jerusalem

A formative experience in prayer for me began I think around 1973 while Jean and I were missionary teachers sent by the Episcopal Church to Liberia. One morning I was reading the Bible and in Psalm 122 I encountered the words, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem." Then there followed a prayer to pray. It stopped me in my tracks and I wondered how many other places in the Bible were we told to pray for something and then given a prayer to pray. I discovered that there are very few such places. I decided that those few must be fairly important then if that is all there were. I struggled with a couple different translations and finally came up with the following prayer:

"Father, I pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
May they prosper that love you.
Peace be inside your city walls and prosperity within your palaces.
And for the sake of my brethren and companions, I will say,
'Peace be with you.'
Because of the house of the LORD our God,
I will seek to do you good."

I stuck the prayer up by the mirror I used for shaving and it became a part of my everyday routine. I didn't think much about it, I just did it. At a certain point I woke up to the implications of the phrase, "for the sake of my brethren". My younger brother had been a fugitive from Federal justice at that time for about five or six years. He had been in the Weathermen in the 60's and had tried to fire-bomb an Air Force ROTC building at the University of Washington in Seattle. After he was caught and arrested and let out on bail to await trial he jumped bail. Ultimately, he remained at large for seventeen years before he was finally caught, but that's another story. Anyway, I realized that in praying for the peace of Jerusalem, I could also pray for my brother, and the prayer became:

"Father, I pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
May they prosper that love you.
Peace be inside your city walls and prosperity within your palaces.
And for the sake of my brothers and companions, I will say,
'Peace be with you.'
Because of the house of the LORD our God,
I will seek to do you good."

In this slightly modified form it continued to be a part of my daily prayers. As I said, I didn't think much about it, I just prayed it.

In June of 1976 we returned to the United States and I enrolled as a graduate student at SUNY-Albany. I continued to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. After about a year or so, I think in the Fall of 1977, I woke up in the middle of the night with a sense of compelling urgency to pray the prayer. I did and rolled over and went back to sleep. An hour later I was again wakened with that same sense of urgency to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Again I did and went back to sleep. Hour by hour, round the clock that compelling sense of urgency came to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. I had no idea why, only that I should and did. After three days of this, the announcement came: Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, was going to fly to Jerusalem to make peace with Israel. During the days that followed I lived and breathed that prayer. At various points during those days I was given various people in the Egyptian and Israeli governments to pray for.

Eight years later I met another guy who had the same experience, and he knew of one other . . . I realized that God had intercessors around the globe praying for the peace of Jerusalem.

Since those days, whenever a verse of the Bible takes on that "something extra," I pay attention to it and see it as an opportunity to pray in English under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Back in 1971 I had received the gift of tongues about a month after I was baptized in the Holy Spirit. It came out of a deep yearning to pray for my brother. I did not know where he was, I did not know if he was alive, and I did not know what he needed. The gift of tongues came as a wonderful blessing in that I could at last pray for him and his condition, even though I did not know what that condition was. The gift of praying Scripture has been an even greater blessing to me in that I can pray, not only with the guidance of the Holy Spirit in my prayers, but also in English so that I could understand (in part) as well.

Torre

A Word Received: Come into my peace, not by force, but by love.

Albany Intercessor