Intercede or intervene?

People can cause distress to us in  many ways. As we go through life we find that some people can really push  our buttons, cause us frustration, or elicit anger, disappointment, and sorrow in us. Others are the source of much joy and gratitude. If we are in an administrative capacity and find ourselves having to deal with folk on a daily basis, implement rules and administer correction, we may tend to accumulate the negative feelings more than we have occasion to consciously celebrate the positive ones.

Our decisions in such circumstances may often be a knee jerk reaction expressing those negative feelings welling up within us, or we may intervene to implement our convictions, convinced that it is for the common good.

That often backfires as it stokes the fires of dissension. We must remember that God’s kingdom and His righteousness does not need a trellis to support it. Truth stands by itself without being buttressed by our efforts to reinforce it.

God is still in control, and it is His world.

Rather than intervene, our response can be directed to intercede. Oswald Chambers defines vicarious intercession as "deliberately substituting God's interest in others for our natural sympathy with them.  This practice changes our perspective entirely, and removes our paltry frustrations, as we together come to the throne room, pleading for mercy on us all.  How many of our frustrations reach the presence of the throne room? How many of those people placed in our lives for a reason that is beyond our comprehension actually are upheld by us in prayer?

“For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer	60
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.” From “The Passing of Arthur”  by Alfred Lord Tennyson