This sermon by Derek Prince Ministries focuses on effective prayer for Israel, emphasizing the importance of aligning prayers with God's Word and prophetic purposes. It highlights the need for thanksgiving and praise as gateways to God's presence, confession of sins as a vital aspect of intercession, and identification with God's ultimate purpose of forming a people for Himself. The sermon underscores the power of praying in line with Scripture and the significance of humility and reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles in prayer for Israel.

Derek Prince Ministries Proclaiming the inspired word of God around the world. Derek Prince is an internationally recognized Bible teacher and author. Through books, audios, videos, and radio broadcasts, Derek seeks to reach the unreached and teach the untaught. In over 50 years of ministry, Derek has reached over 100 nations in more than 50 languages. And now, Derek Prince. I'm trusting that you and others who eventually receive this message will be prompted by the Holy Spirit to pray for Israel. So I'm going to give you 11 suggestions to make prayer for Israel effective in your life and ministry. I'm not suggesting that you could go through all of these in one prayer session. There are different aspects of approaching prayer for Israel. And they are all based on personal experience and observation. So here we are. Suggestion number one, stay within the parameter of God's word. That's one reason why I took so much time to go through what I believe is revealed in Scripture concerning God's purposes for Israel. Because to pray outside the purposes of God, or contrary to the purposes of God, is to waste your time. I gave some examples of that, I won't go back. But let me give you just one pattern prayer. In Matthew 24 and verse 20, Jesus speaking about a crisis that has not yet developed, but will develop. In Israel He says to those who are followers of His, Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on the Sabbath. Now that sets very clear parameters to how they are to pray. He doesn't say pray that you won't have to flee, because you will have to flee. That is fixed in the purposes of God. The only limitations you have, that you can pray that you may not have to flee in the winter, because it would be a great hardship, especially for pregnant women. And pray that you may not have to flee on the Sabbath, because in the present state of Israel, fleeing on the Sabbath would be very difficult and would make you very conspicuous. So I'm suggesting that's a pattern of how to pray within the parameters of the Word of God. Don't ask God to do something He said He will not do, because you won't change God. You need to have an understanding of God's prophetic purposes for Israel in order to pray effectively for them. There is a good deal of praying for the Jews which is sentimental. It's soulish. And I don't think it accomplishes much. I have learned by painful experience that the Holy Spirit is ruthless. He will bring us into line with God's purposes, whether they suit us or not. Whether we think they're right or not, they are right. One of the features of American culture today is the slogan the customer is always right. And a lot of people approach God as customers. They have their wants and their requests. They want a certain style and a certain color and a certain price. But it's not true that the customer is always right. That's a psychological gimmick of people who want to sell things. The truth of the matter is only one person is always right, and that's God. And if you want to pray intelligently and effectively, you've got to start from the fact that God is right. And what He says is what's going to happen. But, He gives us the privilege of praying into being His Word. That is, the most powerful prayer that you can ever pray is in line with the Word of God. In 1 Chronicles 17, David had a plan to build a temple for the Lord. And the prophet Nathan said to him, go ahead, that's a wonderful idea. But God dealt with Nathan in the night and said that's not my idea. David is not the one to build a temple for me. So go and tell David, you wanted to build a house for me, but the Lord says I'm going to build a house for you. That's God's level was as high above David's level as heaven is above earth. David said, I'll build a house for the Lord. The Lord said, no David, I'll build a house for you. So David came before the Lord the next day, and in his prayer he said these words. Do as you have said. You cannot pray a more powerful prayer than that. Praying God's Word into being makes you, in a sense, irresistible. Now in the New Testament, the Virgin Mary received the astonishing news that she was to be the mother of the Messiah. And when the angel gave her that message, she didn't understand it. She didn't know how it could happen, but she said, Be it unto me according to thy name. And I believe the greatest miracle ever experienced by a human being, other than Jesus, was the birth of the Messiah through a virgin. And it came to pass when she said, Be it unto me according to thy word. You cannot pray anything higher than the revealed Word of God. And one of the great functions of intercessors is to pray into being what God has already said will happen. That's why God has set intercessors on the walls of Jerusalem. I said, I think in my first meeting at NRAC 1, the Hebrew word for an intercessor in Isaiah 62 is mazkir, which means someone who reminds someone else. So according to the Hebrew understanding, the function of a secretary is to remind her boss of what's on his calendar. And as an intercessor, a mazkir, masculine, mazkira, feminine, your job is to remind God of what's on his prophetic calendar and say to him, Do as you have said. There's more to intercession than that, but that is the base of intercession. Therefore, an intercessor has to be familiar with the Word of God, has to be clear about God's purposes and their outworking. So that's the first principle I want to lay down. When you pray for Israel, stay within the parameters of the Word of God. Second is based on Psalm 100, verse 4, which says, Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise. This is a great fundamental principle, which unfortunately many Christians are not familiar with. The only way of direct access into God is through the gates of thanksgiving and the courts of praise. And if you do not come with thanksgiving and praise, you can lift up your voice like the ten lepers who cried to Jesus from a distance, and he will hear you. But you don't have direct access to God. There is no way into his presence except through the gates of thanksgiving and the courts of praise. And this applies to praying for Israel. The most effective way to pray for Israel is to begin by thanksgiving. God has given us a pattern. In the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 31, verse 7, God says this, Sing with gladness for Jacob, and shout among the chief of the nations. How many times have you read the word shout in the Psalms? Have you ever shouted? That's right. That wasn't much of a shout, but at least it was a good shout. Now, I'll show you how it should be done. Hallelujah! Will you join me? Shout, hallelujah. Hallelujah! That's more like it. I tell people I'm not a singer, I can't keep a tune, but I can shout. All right, here we are. Going back to Jeremiah 31, verse 7. Sing with gladness for Jacob, and shout among the chief of the nations. Would you count the United States among the chief of the nations? All right, then you have an obligation to shout. You've got to choose the right time and place. But don't mutter. Be clear, be bold, be articulate if you can. All right, sing with gladness for Jacob. Shout among the chief of the nations. Proclaim. You know this little book of ours? Prayers and Proclamations. That's a way you can proclaim. Sometime in this message Ruth and I will give you some pattern proclamations for Israel. Proclaiming is releasing the word of God into a situation. I've told people, and it's in this little book, when Moses stood before the Lord and the Lord said, I want you to go back and redeem my people from Egypt. Moses said, I've got nothing to go with. What can I take? The Lord said to Moses, What have you got in your hand? Moses said, this is a little paraphrase, Just a staff like every shepherd carries. He didn't think there was much to his staff. The Lord taught him a lesson. He said, throw it down on the ground. And it turned into a snake. And Moses ran from his own staff. He had no concept of the power that he held in his hand. Well then the Lord said, pick it up by the tail. And I'm sure in Arizona you have some experience of snakes. Everybody knows you don't pick a snake up by the tail. But Moses did it, I'm sure with trembling, and it became a staff in his hand again. And the Lord said to Moses, Take your staff and go. This is a little paraphrase. That's all you need. And if you follow the story of the Exodus, Moses never needed any other instrument or weapon but his staff. Every miracle was released through the staff of Moses, including the opening of the Red Sea, and the closing of it on the Egyptians. Now I want to suggest to you, you may be like Moses. You have a staff in your hand and you don't know how powerful it is. And the staff in your hand is your Bible. And you release its power by proclamation. Boldly and in faith you proclaim the Word of God into any given situation. And you release God's supernatural power into that situation. And so the Lord says in this verse, Proclaim. Release my promises into the destiny of Israel. And then He says give praise. So there's a time for giving praise. I believe probably at the end of this message we will take some time to praise the Lord. I hope so. And say, O Lord, save your people, the remnant of Israel. Notice there are five things the Lord said to do. Sing, shout, proclaim, praise, and pray. Because to say, O Lord, save your people, is prayer. So those are five responses we can make to the promises of God. Sing, shout, proclaim, praise, and pray. But notice pray comes at the end. What makes prayer effective is going through the previous stages. So, enter into God's gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. And specifically, give Him thanks and praise for what He is doing and for what He's going to do for Israel. Now the third suggestion I have applies both to Jews and to Gentiles. And it is, confess your sins against one another through the Lord. You see, the true intercessor is one who has come to confess sin before the Lord. The perfect pattern of this is Daniel. Daniel was one of the most righteous men recorded in the New Testament. In fact, there are two major characters in the New Testament of whom no sin is recorded. One is Joseph, the other is Daniel. But when Daniel saw that the time had come to pray for the restoration of his people to Jerusalem, he came before the Lord in prayer. And though he was an outstandingly righteous man, he identified himself with the sins of his people. You see, if you're going to be an intercessor, you can't stand there and say, they have done wrong. That doesn't get you anywhere with God. You have to say, we have done wrong. You have to identify yourself with the sins of your family, your inheritance, your culture, your nation, whatever it is you're praying for. And let me say to you, dear Americans, there are plenty of sins in the history of America with which to identify. When you've dealt with the sins against the blacks, then move on to the sins against the Indians, which have hardly been touched on by most Christians. But now let's look at the pattern of Daniel in regard to Israel. He says, I'm just reading in Daniel 9, a few verses from verse 5. We have sinned, not they have sinned, we have sinned, and committed iniquity, and we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from your precepts and your judgments. Is that true of Israel? It certainly is. Neither have we heeded your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings and our princes, to our fathers and all the people of the land. O Lord, righteousness belongs to you, but to us shame of face as it is this day. To the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those near and those far off, in all the countries to which you have driven them, because of the unfaithfulness which they have committed against you. O Lord, to us belongs shame of face, to our kings, our princes and our fathers, because we have sinned against you. To the Lord our God belongs mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him. We have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God to walk in his laws which he set before us by his servants the prophets. Yes, all Israel has transgressed your law and has departed, so as not to obey your voice. Therefore the curse and the oath written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out upon us, because we have sinned against him. But you see the pattern? Don't be self-righteous, don't stand at a distance. Like the Pharisee in the temple who said, I am not as this publican. I fast twice in the week. I give tithes of all I possess. And the publican, the tax collector said, Lord, be merciful to me a sinner. And Jesus said, the publican went to his house, justified. The Pharisee didn't. Pharisaical prayers are abomination to the Lord. All right, now let me just relate something that happened this past June. I was a speaker at a conference in Jerusalem of the ICCC. Do you know what the ICCC is? It's hard to get all the C's right. It's the International Christian Chamber of Commerce. It's a group of international businessmen who have decided to commit their businesses and their expertise to promoting the kingdom of God. They're not living for profit, they're living for benefit. And it's international. It's headed by a Swede, and there are Germans, and there are British, and there are French, and there are others. And a branch has just recently opened here in the United States. And they decided this past June to hold their international conference in Jerusalem. And one of the things that they did was to contact a number of Jewish businessmen in Israel and say, listen, is there any way that we can get together and by working together promote the products of Israel overseas. And believe me, that excited the Jewish people. They don't have many people that approach them like that. Anyhow, it so happens I was the speaker on the final evening. And my theme was the life of Jacob as a pattern for what's going to happen to Israel. And I explained how when God told Jacob after about fourteen or fifteen years time had come to go back to his land and his inheritance. He set out with his wives and his eleven children and all his possessions. And he'd gone as far as the stream that is the border of Israel on the east. And he received news that his brother Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred armed men. And the last time they'd been together Esau had been trying to murder Jacob. So he became a little anxious. And that night a mysterious stranger met him. A man wrestled with him all night. The next day he said, I have seen God face to face. And at the end of his life when he was blessing the two sons of Joseph he said, God, the angel who redeemed me from all evil. So that one person was a man, God, and an angel. A messenger from God to man. And this is very vivid to me because I encountered the same person the night I got saved. And so this has always been clear to me. There's only one person in the universe that answers to that description. A man and God and a messenger from God to man. The one who was manifested in human history as Jesus of Nazareth. And my theme was that Jewish people will never gain real possession of their land and be secure there until they've met that person. He's there waiting to meet them. Well, Jacob resolved his problem with the angel but he had to meet one other person. His brother Esau. Now, I personally believe if Jacob hadn't met the angel he would never have acted the way he did. But when he saw his brother Esau coming he bowed to the ground seven times before him. He humbled himself before his brother. And I suggested to those people Jacob could be viewed as a pattern of the Jews Esau as a pattern of the Gentiles. And I said at some time there has to be a reconciliation and a self-humbling by both Jews and Gentiles. And at the end I did something unrehearsed. I said perhaps the Lord wants to see a little of that here tonight. So I said if there are two Jewish believers and two Gentile Christians who would like to confess their sins one to another. Well, before I finished speaking two young Jewish believers, both of whom were friends of mine stood up and began to come. And then the two men who were directing the conference Gentiles, came up. And I stood back. And they stood facing one another just in front of the podium. And this must have lasted half an hour. They really confessed their sins against the others, to the others. The Britisher confessed how Britain had mishandled the mandate for Israel, being unfaithful to their commitment. And what was interesting, because I had happened to say by way of ingest in passing that contempt is one of the greatest wounds you can give a person. And the two young Jewish men, I hadn't planned it, both confessed the Jewish contempt for Gentiles. And then they did everything. They bowed down, knelt down before one another and actually kissed one another's shoes. That was totally unplanned by me. That's right, Ruth is correcting me. They had taken their shoes off. Well, there was something of a breakthrough in the congregation at that point. People started to weep. A lot of people took their shoes off. And something went through the congregation. And I think this is a pattern. The Jews have got to confess their sins against the Gentiles. They're not sins of persecution. But they are sins of contempt. And the Gentiles have plenty of sins to confess against the Jews. And I doubt whether intercession will be fully effective until the problem of unconfessed sin has been dealt with. And we have learned a principle which has been learned by many intercessors, that you need to confess the sins of this group you represent. You've got to stand in proxy, just as Daniel did, because he was a righteous man. But he didn't say of his fellow Jews, they have sinned. He said, we have sinned. And it seems to me that Daniel's prayer was what opened the way for the return of the Jews from Babylon to Israel. So, confession is an essential part of effective intercession. Now my next suggestion, number four, is identify with God's ultimate purpose. Which is what? Why has God tolerated the appalling wickedness of humanity for hundreds and hundreds of years? What is He waiting for? Come up, sweetheart. My answer is, He's waiting for a people for Himself. That's what God is going to get out of history. Not an institution, not a lot of buildings, not a lot of government schemes, but a people for Himself. And Ruth and I have had impressed upon us Titus 2, 11 through 14, which we will now say. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works. That's what God intends to get out of history. His own special people, zealous for good works. That's why He waits with endless patience while wickedness runs its course. Because God has a chosen remnant, both Jew and Gentile. And He's not going to let history close till every one of them has come to Him through Jesus. So when you pray for Israel, don't start by praying for political issues. You can do that, but that's not primary. What's primary is that Israel will become the special people that God is after. And He's going to go on until He gets it. 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