The Ministry of Intercession and the Architecture of Spiritual Foundations. Part 1

Every initiative that lasts begins with a foundation that exists before the work becomes visible. This is true in business, in career, in ministry, and in the establishing of any structure meant to serve a purpose beyond the person who starts it. A believer who wants to build something enduring must first ask what has already been built in the environment he wants to enter, because no structure rises from nothing, whether that structure is natural or spiritual. The spirit does not work by wishful desire. What a person wants to see manifests in the natural world requires a corresponding foundation in the spirit, and that foundation has to be built or discovered before the building itself can begin.Paul establishes this principle when he writes to the Corinthian church about foundation. He tells them that no one can lay a foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:11). The principle he states about the person of Christ applies more broadly to the pattern of how God works. There is an order to building, and that order begins underground, in a place hidden from public view, long before anything above ground can be recognized.Foundation as the Precondition for BuildingA person who senses a call to build a ministry, launch a business, or shift the direction of a nation must resist the urge to construct without first locating the foundation that permits that construction. If no foundation exists in that environment, the work has not yet begun, even if visible activity has already started. The first labor required is not building upward but building downward, and this downward labor often goes unseen, unappreciated, and even misunderstood by the very people the initiative is meant to serve.This is where the place of prayer carries weight that exceeds emotional comfort or personal devotion. Prayer and intercession function as the excavation and pouring of a spiritual foundation. Before a ministry, a business, or a societal reform can stand, someone must have already labored in the spirit to establish the structure that will bear its weight. The kind of future a person wants to build, and the kind of transformation a person believes God has called him to bring to a nation, a sector, or an institution, has to be constructed first in the unseen realm through intercession, because the visible follows the invisible and not the reverse.