Faith and Intercession

There's something remarkable hidden in the genealogy of Genesis 5. Most of us glaze over when we hit those long lists of names in Scripture, but someone took the time to decode the Hebrew meanings behind Adam's descendants. What they discovered was breathtaking.

Adam means "man." Seth means "appointed." Enosh means "mortal" or "frail." Kenan means "sorrow." Mahalalel means "the blessed God." Jared means "shall come down." Enoch means "teaching." Methuselah means "his death shall bring." Lamech means "the despairing." Noah means "rest."

Read together, this genealogy proclaims: "Man is appointed mortal sorrow, but the blessed God shall come down teaching that his death shall bring the despairing comfort and rest."
The gospel message, encoded in names, written before the flood. God's intentionality is stunning when we take time to look.

The Cloud of Witnesses
Hebrews 11 gives us a hall of fame of faith—Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and countless others who "conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised." But the chapter doesn't end with triumph. It includes those who "faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment... who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection."

These witnesses weren't superhuman. They were ordinary people who encountered an extraordinary God and refused to let go.
Their stories continue through church history, though many names have been forgotten by the world.

David Brainerd: The Man Who Died at 29
David Brainerd was an orphan at 14, expelled from Yale at 23, coughing blood in the American wilderness at 25, and dead by 29. Yet his prayer life sparked revivals, and his diary became one of the bestselling books of the 18th and 19th centuries, inspiring missionaries for generations.

Brainerd struggled with depression and melancholy his entire life. At 21, alone in the woods, he encountered God's grace: "I saw that it was not my work, but His righteousness alone that could make me acceptable to God."

His ministry began with crushing disappointment. Expelled from Yale for calling a professor spiritually dead, he lost his chance to become a pastor. Connecticut law required graduation from Yale, Harvard, or a European university for ordination. His dreams were crushed.

But this prepared him for a ministry he would never have chosen.
Licensed to minister to Native Americans, Brainerd spent a year with the Mohican Indians, alone, unable to speak the language, seeing almost no fruit. His journal from that period is filled with anguish: "Was ever a soul so burdened? My heart aches. I eat little. I sleep less. My soul cries out for these people, but I am a stranger to all comfort."

Tuberculosis ravaged his body. He wrote of spreading his soul before God in the woods, weeping bitterly with no light coming. But he didn't leave.

Then, among the Delaware Indians in 1745, the Holy Spirit fell. An entire community of 130 Native Americans came to Christ. They memorized Scripture, renounced sin, shared their food, and wept in intercessory prayer together. Many confessed sins Brainerd had never mentioned because the Holy Spirit was preaching directly to their hearts.

Brainerd's prayer as death approached: "Oh God, that I might not outlive my usefulness."
He died at 29. The young woman who cared for him contracted tuberculosis and died four months later at 17.

Why did his story matter? Because Brainerd's life became a vivid testimony that God works through sick, discouraged, lonely, struggling saints who cry to Him day and night. A life completely laid down can accomplish far more than we dare hope or expect.

Lucy Farrow: The Mother of Pentecost
Her name is largely forgotten, but Lucy Farrow was the catalyst for the Azusa Street Revival that birthed a movement now encompassing 600 million Pentecostal believers worldwide.
Born into slavery in 1852, Lucy was the niece of Frederick Douglass. As a child sold away from family, she whispered Scripture by candlelight and prayed to a God who saw her when the world did not.

By age 39, she had buried her husband and five of her seven children. But suffering didn't make her bitter—it made her hungry for God.

In 1905, Lucy was pastoring a small holiness church in Houston, Texas. A black woman leading a church in the Jim Crow South, where laws meant that if a white man sat anywhere, every black person had to leave. Where being outside after 6 PM could land you in jail for 21 days. Where 27 suffrage laws kept women silent.

Doubly disqualified by race and gender, Lucy kept pastoring, praying, and fasting.
When Charles Parham came to Houston preaching about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Lucy was hired as a cook for the crusades. A pastor reduced to washing dishes while white Bible students debated theology. But Lucy was listening.
She heard Joel 2:28 preached: "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh... Your women shall prophesy."
Lucy prayed: "Father, does all flesh include black flesh? Does your maidservants include people like me?"
In radical obedience, she left her church to become a nanny in Kansas. By day, she cooked and cleaned. By night, she was alone with God, fasting and interceding.
In 1905, God filled her with the Holy Spirit. She became the first recorded African American to speak in tongues.

When she returned to Houston, she encouraged William Seymour to pursue what God was doing. Seymour went to Los Angeles to pastor, but was locked out of the church after his first sermon.

The meetings moved to a home on Bonnie Bray Street. For weeks, seekers prayed and fasted, begging heaven to open. Nothing.

Then Lucy arrived. The moment she entered and began to pray, the atmosphere shifted. She touched the first seeker's shoulder—instantly they fell and began speaking in unknown languages. One after another, the entire room erupted. Black, white, Latino—barriers crumbled as the fire spread.

This became Azusa Street Revival, the epicenter of global Pentecostalism.
Lucy never sought the spotlight. She ministered, laid hands on seekers, prayed for the sick. Blind eyes opened. Deaf ears unstopped. Paralyzed people walked. She was content to serve in the background.

In 1906, she went to Liberia for nine months, preaching to the Kru people in their own complex language—a language she'd never learned.

Lucy died of tuberculosis at age 60. Even while dying, visitors were healed as she prayed for them.

The Pattern of Power
Throughout history, the pattern repeats: 100-year prayer vigil of the Moravians. Evan Roberts spending three months waking at 1 AM to pray before the Welsh Revival transformed a nation. John Hyde praying with such intensity his heart shifted position in his chest before revival swept Punjab, India.

These movements weren't about manifestations or theological arguments. They were rooted in the practice of waiting on God to accomplish what only God can do.

The Invitation
Jesus told a parable about a persistent widow who kept coming to an unjust judge until he granted her justice. Then He said: "Will not God bring about justice to His chosen ones who cry out to Him day and night? I tell you, He will see that they get justice and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"

The invitation stands: to love God's presence more than anything else. To cry out day and night for hearts to be transformed. To be poured out like a drink offering.

Revival doesn't start with programs or strategies. It starts with surrendered hearts in hidden prayer closets, with people willing to pay the price no one sees.

God is looking for ordinary people willing to become conduits of extraordinary power. People the world overlooks. People who will decrease so He can increase.
Will He find that kind of faith when He returns?

To Watch Full Sermon "Faith and Intercession" Click Here