The apostle Paul writes to his young protégé, Timothy, "Endure suffering along with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. Soldiers don't get tied up in the affairs of civilian life, for then they cannot please the officer who enlisted them"(2 Tim 2:3-4).

There is a particular lifestyle associated with being a soldier. It is essential to remember that as a soldier, you are no longer a civilian. You are called apart and live separately. Getting entangled in the mundane affairs of the civilian world is not allowed for a soldier on duty; you serve a higher cause. Off- duty soldiers who get caught up in naughty behaviour unbecoming of a man in uniform face more severe consequences than would some random person on the street. Living within the chain of command means that you are accountable to your commanding officers for your actions and attitudes, that you are accountable for those under your command, and that you are accountable to your comrades in arms. When the accountability built into the chain of command fails, the effectiveness of the armed forces declines. The discipline and accountability required of a soldier is there to save his life and the lives of those serving with him.

Moreover, the overarching reality of life as a soldier is not that you get to shoot big guns, travel the world, ride in helicopters and battleships and wear cool gear like night vision goggles. The overarching reality is that you no longer belong to yourself. You belong to a larger and greater cause. Your life is not your own. You don't get to just opt out when things get messy, your unit comes under fire and lives are at stake. Doing so is desertion, a crime punishable by death through much of military history.

As a Canadian, I was taught in high school of the history of Canada's participation in World War. Many regard Canada's participation on the Western Front as a defining coming of age as a nation. The campaign in which Canadian troops especially distinguished themselves was that of Vimy Ridge. That episode in Canadian history is superbly retold by the eminent Canadian storyteller and historian, Pierre Berton, in a book of the same name.

These young men in the Canadian Corps, from places like the Yukon and Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island, went to war in a far-off land, against enemies from foreign country (predominantly Germany), effectively on behalf of yet another country (Great Britain). They sailed to the other side of the world and lived in horrendous conditions. Trench warfare was noted not only for its grotesquely high casualty rates, but for the miseries endured by the living. Life in the trenches was a living hell, full of disease and rats, endless mud, inadequate food and drinking water, and either claustrophobia in airless tunnels or exposure from lack of shelter, not to mention the soul-crushing wait to pile into the meat grinder and die from machine gun fire, artillery explosions, snipers, grenades, bayonets, or most horribly, from poisonous gases now banned by the United Nations. These men from not just Canada, but from Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the far reaches of the British Empire lived and fought and killed and died for a cause that didn't even really belong to them. The majority of them were volunteers.

And yet we, as part of a cause that is infinitely more glorious and eternal, can't even rouse ourselves to a lifestyle of prayer. It's a sobering thought.

In the mission organization I serve with, small prayer groups are dotted around the world, interceding for workers serving on mission field. These prayer groups were called "prayer batteries". This is not because of the modern concept of a battery providing energy and power, although that, too, is a good metaphor for how intercession supports those serving in mission. This agency was founded in 1913. It grew out of an era when a battery was understood to be an organized group of artillery pieces. This is a superb analogy. Just as the artillery fire provided cover for advancing infantry, suppressing the enemy and softening the defences for the first wave of ground troops, so too our intercession not only covers the missionaries with spiritual protection, but opens up the ground for the greatest possible impact upon engagement.

Military language and metaphors are no longer en vogue in missiological vocabulary. We recognize that our mission is to demonstrate the love of Christ to all people and to serve others humbly. Adversarial, militaristic language can communicate the wrong idea that we are the good guys and everyone else the bad guys. It can encourage, or at least imply, imperialistic attitudes. Yet we also recognize that our battle is not with flesh and blood, but against spiritual powers that set themselves up against the authority of Christ. Such wicked powers long for the subjugation, degradation, and destruction of all people and societies. In the hyper-technological, modern world many of us live in, to think of a disembodied, Satanic foe seems the subject of a horror film or campfire story. Yet Christ himself as well as many of the writers of the Bible made no bones about the reality of our spiritual enemy. Go spend extended time in a context that is not prosperous, cozy, and insulated from the "real" world by chrome, digital displays, Vicodin, air conditioning, drive-throughs, and hand sanitizer, and you will quickly discover that very modern and educated people know very well the realities of spiritual evil and oppression.

C.S. Lewis sagely wrote that "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel and excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."[i] Yet I do not intend to write a treatise on spiritual warfare. There exist already many excellent resources on that subject, and should you become engaged in a lifestyle of intercession, then I suggest you avail yourself of them.

The truth is that we are in a war, although most of us don't live like it. There will be casualties in a cosmic struggle on such an epic scale. The devil is filled with great wrath, because he knows his time is short. (Rev 12:12) People who engage in shining light into the darkness and setting the captives free from oppression and bondage are going to face opposition. The world, the flesh and the devil do not willingly give ground when the gospel advances. There will be many kinds of suffering. Some of us will die for our faith. And that is to be expected. The devil was overcome by the blood of the Lamb (i.e. Jesus' suffering and death on the cross) and by the fact that the saints "loved not their lives even unto death." (Rev 12:11) There are always casualties in war, and this is the defining war of human existence! When we look at the big picture, whether we live or die is such a tiny issue compared to the grand campaign of bringing Jesus' life and freedom - now and for eternity - to those who suffer in chains.

You know what you never hear in church? "Want to live an adventure? Want to take risks? Want to live dangerously? Come to the prayer meeting!" This is not because such claims are untrue, but because most of us have lost the sense what is at stake in our intercession. We do not see prayer as a dangerous act. Yet true intercession puts us in the crosshairs.  Remember that the word itself means interposing ourselves. A life of intercession means that we make ourselves a conduit between humanity and God - on behalf of loved ones, on behalf of the Church, on behalf of our communities, city and nations, on behalf of the whole human race. It also means that we place ourselves between those whom we love and care for and our spiritual enemy, who seeks to kill, steal, and destroy. Standing in the gap in this way certainly can be dangerous. Yet the sense that our prayer lives should be dangerous and risky is missing for so many of us, especially among the younger generation.

There is one other dangerous element in global intercession - the likelihood that God changes you through the process of prayer. Richard Foster states, "To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us."[ii] God may seize your heart for those suffering or lost, leading you to changes in your lifestyle and faith. The Lord may even call you - gasp - to full time service, possibly even in missions! As Eugene Peterson rightly observes, "Be slow to pray. Praying puts us at risk of getting involved with God's conditions...Praying most often doesn't get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be our best interests. And when we realize what is going on, it is often too late to go back."[iii] [i] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Fount, 1986), p.9.

[ii] Ibid, p. 30
 
[iii] Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987), 30-31

Seventy years ago the Nazi regime was falling to the invading allied armies, and Nazi SS officers attempted to prevent foreign soldiers from seeing the horrifying conditions in concentration camps. They gave orders for the emaciated Jews, Russians, Poles, Gypsies and other slave workers to leave the camps on ‘Death Marches’ towards the areas where the German army still had control. Many died from the cold and exhaustion or were simply shot for not being able to walk or refusing to obey orders. In 2015, in many German cities, a ‘March of Life’ has been or is being organised by Christian groups, in cooperation with Jewish communities and survivors of the Holocaust, to ask for forgiveness, promote reconciliation and bring new life to their cities and communities that had experienced the curse of death. 

For about a year, Pope Francis has been meeting with scientists and policy experts to get their advice on addressing the environmental degradation caused by climate change. This process will culminate in June or July, when he will deliver a highly anticipated papal encyclical on the environment. An encyclical is the highest teaching issued by a pope. It is essentially a church policy paper, meant to offer guidance on specific issues for the bishops, priests and faithful who make up the family of about 1.2 billion Roman Catholics worldwide. The pope finished writing his ‘eco-encyclical’ in late April. It will be the first time a Catholic leader has dedicated an entire encyclical to environmental issues. The Vatican’s speaker on climate change said Pope Francis will frame the issue of climate change in moral terms regarding the accelerating burning of fossil fuels that power our economic engine and disrupt the earth’s delicate ecological balance on an almost unfathomable scale.  See also article 4 in Prayer-Alert British Isles section.

The current head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis S Collins, told a CNN news reporter that he came to faith after he set out to disprove God. ‘I had always assumed that faith was based on purely emotional and irrational arguments and was astounded to discover that one could build a very strong case for the plausibility of God. My earlier atheist’s assertion that "I know there is no God" emerged as the least defensible.’ Collins' work gave him a spectacular view into the magnificence, order and finely-tuned perfection of the DNA molecule, God’s software for every living thing. He also reported to the National Geographic, ‘At the most fundamental level, it’s a miracle that there’s a universe at all.’