02/04/2026
Take Abraham the father of the faithful. How earnestly did he plead for his son Ishmael! “O that Ishmael might live before thee!” With what importunity did he approach the Lord on the plains of Mamre, when he wrestled with him again and again for S***m; how frequently did he reduce the number, as though, to use the expression of the old Puritan, “He were bidding and beating down the price at the market.” “Peradventure there be fifty; peradventure there lack five of the fifty; peradventure there be twenty found there; peradventure there be ten righteous found there: wilt thou not spare the city for the sake of ten?” Well did he wrestle, and if we may sometimes be tempted to wish he had not paused when he did, yet we must commend him for continuing so long to plead for that doomed and depraved city. Remember Moses, the most royal of men, whether crowned or uncrowned; how often did he intercede! How frequently do you meet with such a record as this— “Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before God!” Remember that cry of his on the top of the mount, when it was to his own personal disadvantage to intercede, and yet when God had said, “Let me alone, I will make of thee a great nation,” yet how he continued, how he thrust himself in the way of the axe of justice, and cried, “Spare them, Lord, and if not,” (and here he reached the very climax of agonizing earnestness) “blot my name out of the Book of Life.” Never was there a mightier prophet than Moses, and never one more intensely earnest in intercessory prayer. Or pass on, if you will, to the days of Samuel. Remember his words, “God forbid that I should sin against the Lord, in ceasing to pray for you.” Or bethink you of Solomon, and of his earnest intercession at the opening of the temple, when, with outstretched hands he prayed for the assembled people; or if you want another royal example, turn to Hezekiah with Sennacherib’s letter spread out before the Lord, when he prayed not only for himself, but for God’s people of Israel in those times of straits. Think ye, too, of Elias, who for Israel’s sake would bringdown the rain that the land perish not; as for himself, miracles gave him his bread and his water, it was for others that he prayed, and said to his servant, “Go again seven times.” Forget not Jeremy, whose tears were prayers— prayers coming too intensely from his heart to find expression in any utterance of the lip. He wept himself away, his life was one long shower, each drop a prayer, and the whole deluge a flood of intercession. And if you would have an example taken from the times of Christ and his apostles, remember how Peter prays on the top of the house, and Stephen amidst the falling stones. Or think you, if you will, of Paul, of whom even more than of others it could be said, that he never ceased to remember the saints in his prayers, “making mention of you daily in my prayers,” stopping in the very midst of the epistle and saying, “For which cause I bow my knee unto the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” As for the cloud of holy witnesses in our own time, I will hazard the assertion that there is not a single child of God who does not plead with God for his children, for his family, for the church at large, and for the poor ungodly perishing world. I deny his saintship if he does not pray for others.
Charles Spurgeon
