G.W. North emphasizes that intercession must align with the will of God and the mind of the Spirit, as human understanding is limited and often misguided. He explains that the Spirit intercedes for us based on God's purpose, which is to conform us to the image of His Son, and that true intercession involves a deep connection to God's eternal plan. North illustrates that just as Jesus submitted to the Father's will in the garden, intercessors must also surrender to God's desires, recognizing the cost and privilege of this ministry. He highlights that intercession is a cooperative effort with God to fulfill His purpose of bringing forth sons and achieving personal holiness. Ultimately, intercession is a reflection of God's love and a means to participate in His divine plan.

There is another factor which, if not quite so fundamental to this ministry, is also of great importance: all intercession must be made according to the will of God and the mind of the Spirit of God. The Spirit only makes intercession for man according to God, that is, He does not make intercession according to man's ideas or concepts of himself, even if these be in relation to himself and God; these may be far from correct, and totally unrelated to reality. Of himself, a man cannot know what to pray for; that he ought to pray he is fully aware, but for what? There are vast things outside a man's consciousness of which he has no knowledge; he does not even know that they exist, therefore he has no intellectual grasp of them at all. In his own universe man is a babe; he does not know from whence he came and whither he is going. The Spirit has come forth from God with the knowledge he ought to know, that, being taught of God, man should not spend his time, or waste his life, on eternally useless objects and vain and unattainable objectives. The Spirit knows that the important thing for every man is to be concerned with God's purpose to conform him to the image of His Son. We are to be saints according to God, not according to anything or anyone else, and it is to this objective that the Spirit has come to inspire and conform us. He knows the end in view; He also knows the beginning from which God commenced, from which beginning and end God has never moved. The intercessor must know this too, and move with the Spirit to this end. Man's regeneration is nothing other than the means whereby he is born into this; he must learn that he was predestinated to this by Father, who knew him before he had conscious being or power of choice. Before man knew himself, or what he wanted to be; before he knew God, or to what he was being called, and what God wanted him to be, God decided what he should be, conformed him to it and predestinated him to that end. This is why God created the earth and formed the universe around it. Whether or not the earth was placed central to it originally, and has been moved off centre now by the will of God because of sin, we do not know. What is certain is that it is at the centre of God's plan for a new creation; it is also the sphere of the Spirit's present operation and activities to bring forth sons of God in this age of its existence. With this purpose God has called men, both to justify them and glorify them, so that His Son should be the firstborn of many sons. When this has been finally accomplished to His satisfaction, His purposes with this earth will be finished. What God did by His own power and will before He called us He did according to His foreknowledge. When He began He already had the end before Him; He needed neither time nor events to instruct Him or force Him to make decisions, or to alter His plans. He was able to plan with full knowledge of everything that would happen, so that nothing should thwart His original purpose. That mysterious conforming power, so little understood by God's sons, became pre-destiny in them when it began to work in them by the Spirit making them first cry 'Abba, Father', and later groan and travail in intercession. The intercessor must be cast utterly upon the will of God the Father as was God the Son when here on earth. When facing arrest and the death He knew would so quickly follow, the Lord went to the garden with His remaining disciples to teach them the way of sonship. We do not know whether His prayer was heard by the select three who accompanied Him to the point where He left them and went furthest out to the place from which there was no return, but it is recorded for us by the Spirit, 'Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt'. In His heart Abba, Father, and Father's will were linked — He was a true son. 'Being in an agony He prayed the more earnestly'. The word agony used to describe the Lord's terrible pains, which caused His sweat to drop from Him like spots of blood, is better translated 'the agonies', which could hardly be better interpreted than as being pains, groans, travail, birth-pangs. So, by our great Examplar Himself, the pattern is set — the cry — the will — the groans. He who searched His Son's heart knew the mind of the Spirit, as well as His own will according to the eternal purpose set from the beginning. There can be no changing the pattern — it was not only fixed in eternity in God, it was also set in humanity when God became flesh. Intercession is costly. Sons of God cannot be brought forth without pain and groans of the same order, though not of the same intensity as those which the Lord bore and uttered. So great were the Lord's agonies that our spiritual exercises are not worthy, indeed cannot and ought not, to be compared with them; but God, having graciously allowed us, in measure, to partake of these things, draws us on to this most excellent ministry, the highest degree of fellowship of sonship. Intercession is a privilege, it is the handing over of self in co-operation with God for the achievement of His purpose in the begetting and perfecting of sons. This is the greatest confirmation and highest degree of God's love towards us and our love towards Him, the fulfilment of the marriage spoken of so wonderfully by Paul earlier. By the body of Christ the sons of God have been made dead to the 'body' of law and the body of sin and the body of the flesh and the body of death, so that we should be married to Him who was raised from the dead. The purpose of this marriage is for the fulfilment of love in bringing forth fruit unto God, in the realm of personal holiness, and personal reproduction. Every one thus joined to Him will bring forth after his own kind and in His own image by the same Spirit. This is consummation, personal consummation in this life, leading on and contributing to the consummation of God's purposes at the consummation of the age. Christ wants us to enter into and enjoy all God has to give us in Himself, mediating to us all He has Himself entered into and presently enjoys, that we may share in it with Him. That is the purpose of intercession.