I love these seasons when the Lord is really trying to drive a point home in me. I love it because there’s no room for questioning in my soul that He’s speaking.

This season started months ago as I was studying intercession. There was a day when I really got that intercession isn’t about me or the people I’m representing; it’s about God and His glory in the earth.

The Father loves me and wants good things for me. He loves the people I represent in intercession, and wants good things for them too. Above and beyond our temporal comforts, though, He wants His Son glorified in the earth because that’s what this whole thing is all about. It’s about Him. We get offended at the idea and blame God for being egotistical or selfish, but it’s not ego if it’s true.

And it is true.

Creation is about Him making Himself known. It’s about Him wanting a family who will choose to love Him back. And, really, if we step back from all our relatively petty and temporal problems and desires, the best thing we could pray for each other is that He be glorified through the ends of the earth.

It changed the way I pray, which in turn started to change my worldview.

A day later I was praying for a loved one in a difficult situation. The over-arcing theme of my intercession was that God would – somehow – swoop into the circumstance and make it better. He, in turn, made an object lesson out of what I’d just learned,

“Where is My glory in that?”

He could do it, but the situation would simply … change. We would be thankful, but the other people involved wouldn’t see His hand in it at all.

“Rather,” He suggested, “you should pray that your loved one changes his response to the situation to one that lifts up the name of Jesus.”

So I changed my prayer. And it’s hard to change a prayer like that for someone else, and not change the way you pray for everyone. Including yourself. And sometimes it’s not so much a matter of prayer as of simple action. Is what I’m doing aligning with what I would be praying?

It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s about Him.

You know that. But that’s where it starts. Tomorrow we’ll get into it.