What is prophetic intercession? In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Diana Dietz. Diana is a full-time volunteer intercessor for the Worship Department at Gateway Church in Dallas Texas.
Yes! Her full-time job is to pray for the pastors, leaders and teams who lead worship at Gateway! Listen in and be encouraged to step in faith, hear his voice and see the beauty of redemption.
Click below to listen starting at 29:45 to follow along.
The Spiritual Gift of Prophecy as Intercession
Gina:
There’s a season of a foundation being built with the prayer team at Gateway. That sets the table for prophetic intercession to take place. What does that look like? I think there’s a lot of people in the church, in the U.S. and abroad, that don’t have a grid for understanding the prophetic, or they feel like that it is for the Old Testament prophets to use as a warning. How does the prophetic play out in the context of that?
Diana:
The Bible is clear and says that we should all earnestly desire to prophesy. There’s a lot of other Scriptures for prophetic ministry, saying that it should be encouraging, comforting, and exhorting. I think we complicate it a lot. When I lead a prophetic team, we’ll be going to minister to one of our campus staff next week, and what I’ll say to my team is this:
“You’re ministering in one on one ministry. However the Lord leads. It could be reading a scripture over them as prophetic, prophetic prayer, prophetic blessing, a song. The Lord might give you a song to sing over them.”
One of our people is a sketch artist and she’ll write what the Lord shows her in a picture for that person and give it to them. I almost sometimes hate to use the word prophecy or prophetic, even though it’s all throughout scripture, to me, it’s more about like, “What is God saying?” Is He speaking anything to you?
Our pastor at the end of every service will say, “What is the Holy Spirit saying to you? That’s prophetic, but I love how simply he puts it, “What is Holy Spirit saying to you?” Yes, there can be a lot of theological issues that people have with what they would consider Old Testament Prophets and with what New Testament prophecy is.
I agree with you, but to me, it’s as simple as a conversation. What is God speaking? And as long as it’s lining up with the Scripture, you can go ahead and share that.
Gina:
Absolutely. It doesn’t contradict what God says about Himself and what He says about you, right?
The Power of Persistent Prayer
Gina:
I would love it if you have any testimonies or some stories of things that you’ve seen unfold that were a direct result of intercession?
Diana:
I do have some, but it’s about a grand romance, that we have this ongoing wooing from the Lord to our hearts, and our hearts to His. I call them “romance gestures” when God answers, or when He does sweet things. For six years, we prayed for my husband, because we knew that God was calling him to do something different in his career.
It was very much a six year process, and getting a lot of people to join in and pray for what was next. Just last August he started a new company, and God put it all together, brought financing, brought people, brought systems and processes. That was a huge thing that God has answered. That was about six years of praying and waiting.
Gina:
I love that, because that speaks to persistence. There’s something about continuing to carry that torch, continuing to intercede in the waiting with great expectation; but also surrendering control of how that’s going to unfold.
Diana:
Absolutely. I really believe that if God speaks something to your heart, until you see it manifested in the natural realm, you are supposed to pray into that until you see it in tangible form. Some people would say to pray about something until they have a release in their heart about it, but I actually continue to pray until I see it actually happen in the natural realm.
God Redeems Everything
Diana:
One thing I want to make sure to say, that my first years with the Lord were delightful and wonderful, and then there were years in the middle that some awful things happened. Once we got to Gateway a restoration happened in a deeper way because of the trauma, or the different places in life that we’d walk through that were difficult.
I always like to make sure I’m saying that it wasn’t all rosy and it wasn’t all delightful, it wasn’t all beautiful. But because of those years of things not being good, I can sit in places with people that I would never have been able to, if I only had this delightful front end part of my life. Not that God caused any of that, but like Romans 8:28 says, “He works all things together for good.”
Gina:
That’s redemption. There’s the theologian who categorizes the Psalms as, orientation, disorientation and reorientation. Orientation is “The trees clap their hands…praise Your holy name!” They’re the happy, joyful, all glory to God Psalms.
The Disorientation is “My flesh is rotting on my bones. Why have you abandoned me? How could you let this happen? My enemies are surrounding me.” That kind of theme.
And the Reorientation, is once you’ve gone to the disorientation and you back out and you can say “Yet, You are on the throne” and “Yet, I will praise you.” Then that praise “You are the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords” is completely different, because It’s got a different weight. It’s got a different authority because you’ve been through that place of disorientation.
You’ve been through the valley of the shadow of death. You’ve been in the desert where it looked like there was no hope and God met you in that place. Now you can stand there and praise and worship and declare with a completely different perspective, and nothing is wasted.
Diana:
Nothing is wasted. In fact, I love that scripture, Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good, for those that love God and are called according to His purpose.” I hated that scripture for a really long time, because I thought God was lying about it. I’ll be honest.
I was making a cake one day as the Lord started unpacking that Scripture. You put in things that don’t taste good on their own, and then you put things in that taste really good on their own. Then what do you do next? You beat it with a beater, then you bake it in the oven, and then you cut it up, and then it tastes great.
I had to exchange some wrong for some correct theology, and all of those places, because I was like, “No, everything’s not good.” But then I didn’t understand what good and God meant. That was a turning point for my life, when I realized that God would use all of it, all the good stuff, all the bad stuff, all the beating, all the baking, all the cutting, all the heat, everything for good.
Gina:
In Jeremiah 17 and in Psalm 1, God talks about the tree that’s planted by the river and whose roots go deep so that when the heat comes, and the drought comes, its leaves won’t weather and it won’t stop producing fruit. That’s intimacy with God.
It’s learning to depend on Him, and cultivating that relationship with Him; hearing His voice so that your roots go deeper and deeper and deeper, because the heat is going to come, and the drought is going to come, and pests are going to come.
Part of being able to stand, and part of cultivating those healthy root systems is prayer and intercession. Prayer is a vehicle of relationship. Then it’s a vehicle of relationship that we can take advantage of and utilize to cover one another, which is really powerful.
Closing Thoughts and Blessing
Gina:
Before we go, I want to just take a moment and sit with a couple of things. I really love Diana’s childlike faith, her desire to just be in God’s presence, to have that ongoing conversation, and then out of obedience, to serve in this way with so much trust and faith, but also so much simplicity.
It’s so incredible what God can do in and through us when we just trust Him that we’re enough and He’s going to equip us for the things that He’s called us to do. What is it that you sense that you are called to do? What has the Holy Spirit been nudging, tapping you on the shoulder? What are the gifts that He’s giving you? What is that risk He’s asking you to take that maybe you’ve resisted or been hesitant to step in?
I want to encourage every person that’s reading. Who are your intercessors? Who are your personal champions that are covering you in prayer? You don’t need to be the pastor of a huge church to have people that are surrounding you, covering you with prayer, intercession, blessing, encouragement, who are worrying for you and with you.
I want to challenge everyone who’s reading. First of all, lean in, ask The Holy Spirit, “What is it that You’re calling me to do?” Maybe you know what it is. Maybe you’re already doing it. But what is that next step that He’s asking you to take? I want you to go to Him. I want you to ask Him to show you and to just give you that extra little push to say yes. And as you step in, say “Yes.”
Who are the people that God’s brought in your life that you can go to and ask for prayer, ask for covering, ask for intercession, who are those who could be Watchmen for your life or in your ministry?
Father in Jesus name, I just pray for clarity of vision. I pray for boldness and strength to step in obedience to You. And I pray for boldness and confidence to surround ourselves with people who will cover us in prayer. Father, as your sons and daughters, fill them, strengthen them, pour out Your presence upon them and use them in mighty powerful ways for our good and for Your glory. We ask all of this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Check out Gateway Church
Check the rest of this conversation Calling, Covering & Contending, When The Church Prays
Check out the Dwell Meditations
