Abraham is the first person the Bible identifies as a “prophet” (Gen 20:7), and in the same context, he becomes the first person in the Bible whose prayer is narrated (20:17).

It’s not often easy for us to understand where the label “prophet” comes from in that story. How is Abraham a prophet? When has he foretold any future events, or spoken on God’s behalf to anybody at all? Evidently, there’s something more fundamental to the identity of a prophet even than the speaking role he carries out: the prophet has God’s ear.

Abraham hears from God all the way back in chapter 12, the beginning of his story, and God speaks to him in the intervening chapters, but it’s only in chapter 15 that he starts talking back – immediately after the famous assertion that he was justified by faith. As a believer and party to a solemn covenant with God, Abraham is now also a dialogue partner, a privilege he exercises at the end of chapter 18 when the Lord has revealed His plan to redress the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It’s because a prophet is part of God’s council, privy to the Lord’s deliberations about how to respond to human evil, that he has the right to speak the Lord’s words to His people.

There’s much more to say about what the Bible means by “prophet,” but it’s important to keep that central idea in view when we talk about Jesus as the great Prophet, and when we think about ourselves as Christians as participants in his prophetic ministry. He – and we through him – belong in God’s presence, have a right to stand there and speak for ourselves and others. It’s because we do this that we in turn have something to say to the world around us, or that we have any power to do good works for our neighbors.

That’s why we hammer the idea that prayer is ministry, and why I’m so grateful that our agency is working to begin a series of short-term trips focused on prayer. That’s a hard sell – Anna and I hear that the usual comment is, “I’d just rather go on a trip where I felt like I’d really done something afterward.” If you can’t relate to that, you’re a far more saintly soul than I; but it’s a painfully wrong way to understand prayer.

Intercessory prayer is, simply put, exercising the prophetic office, which is to say wielding God-given authority toward God-given ends. It’s a crucial way not just to be personally intimate with God, but to carry out His mission by speaking on behalf of the world to Him and in turn being commissioned to speak for Him, to carry His word in our mouths and hearts in the places He sends us. We tend to think of the speaking and acting we do as the work we’re called to, but in our more pious moments, we would always admit that the real work, the kind that yields real, lasting fruit, is done by God Himself, independently of our control or orchestration.

I say the work is independent of our control, but it is most emphatically not independent of our involvement – if we are taking our proper place in the divine war room by prayer.

If it’s at all possible for you, I strongly urge you to consider joining MTW’s upcoming trip to Berlin this October (you can email the two-week department for more info), or to keep an eye out for future opportunities like it. You will “do something” – something perhaps invisible, to be sure, but something that you were made to do, something you are called to do where you live, something that is the very heart and soul of every effort to do the Lord’s work.

-Ben