The War Manual: A Guide to Intercessory Prayer

By C. B. Grace

As Christians we have been fighting in a war that we have not trained for and we are not prepared for. It is time for us to train for the battles ahead. This manual is designed to help churches and ministries ramp up their prayer coverage. It applies a military model and the principle of agreement to corporate prayer. The ideas and principles can be applied in any type of group setting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 14, 2008
• ISBN: 9781477162354

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Copyright © 2008 by C. B. Grace.

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4363-1402-2

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4363-1401-5

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4771-6235-4

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CONTENTS

How it Started

Call to Attention

Cleaning up

Banding Together

Comrades in Arms

Taking Aim

The Squad

The Battle Plan

Weapons of Warfare

Armor of God

Praise and Worship²

Chasing the Spirit

Traps of the enemy

Building

Mobilize

Officer Training

Commission

Prayers

Special Thanks

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Contact Information

Endnotes

This book is dedicated to my family who believed I could do this and encouraged me to go forward. Thank you, Mom and Dad, Dennis, Jenny, John, Judy, Mark and of course,

Evan and Sam.

How it Started

It all started many years ago at a church in Austin, Texas, now named The Promiseland. I grew up attending there, when it was called The World of Pentecost. Every new year, the Bishop, Kenneth Phillips taught about prayer and distributed to the congregation a flowchart aptly named, The Mechanics of One Hour Prayer. The Bishop would encourage us to pray at least one hour every day; in fact, the church building was open at 6 a.m. for early morning prayer and usually stayed open until 9 or 10 p.m. for those who wished to stop by and pray. In addition to the teaching I received at church, my own dad, Laddie Bordovsky, encouraged and demonstrated the importance of prayer in our home. My dad still prays and reads his Bible every morning. On many occasions throughout my life, his prayers have carried me through difficult times. There is nothing like knowing you have someone praying for you. So prayer was planted deeply within me at a young age.

As life goes, any very strong-willed person has to figure some things for his or herself. At least that has been my experience. Maybe I am strong-willed or as some other folks my think, hard-headed. What every the case, in my early 20s, I stopped attending church almost all together. It is difficult to pinpoint the time frame of this. As with any attack from the enemy, it was subtle. It didn’t happen suddenly, it happened a little at a time until I found I was not attending church much any more. I was in college and having fun with my friends. My family was pretty despairing about this situation. They were certain that if Jesus returned, I was going to burn in hell. My lifestyle was very self-serving and not at all what anyone would consider Christ-like. I no longer prayed. Looking back on it, I am not sure what I had as a youth was all that real. I know I had to go through that so I would know that I choose for myself not because of my parents or friends but because I loved God and wanted to have a relationship with Him.

My family continued to pray for me and they employed some interesting tactics to re-interest me in attending church. It must have seemed as if nothing was working. God heard their prayers and sent a prophet to call me home.

I love telling this story. It’s my love story. There are some things in our lives that we should never ever forget. I was attending college and living my life, basically for myself. I was not attending church. I was many things then but I was not a hypocrite. My mom had somehow talked me into going to church one Sunday. I stopped by to see a sweet friend who worked in the bookstore; she was busy so I waited outside and spoke with her husband, Don Peshcka. Don looked at me and spoke directly into my heart, the most simple message, the message that every human being on the planet needs to hear, Jesus loves you. My mind denied it. How could He love me? I am so undeserving. I do not spend time with Him. I do not serve Him. Why would He love me? I started crying right there but I wasn’t quiet ready to make the changes in my life that I needed to make in order to set things right with God. A few months later, at school I went to the library to study and saw this guy I had grown up with, Charlie Lujan. The moment I saw him I remembered my sister telling me, that guy Charlie is going to church and he is ‘really on fire’. Charlie came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. He said he needed to talk to me outside. In my experience running from God, going outside to talk to someone who was on fire was not a good plan. On fire seems to spread. But I found myself following Charlie outside. Outside of the library, he told me God has sent him to talk to me. Charlie said, God says it is time to come home. I cried then too. Then I avoided Charlie like the plague. He would see me in the student lounge, come over, sit down and be friendly. If he happened to be there first and I saw him on my way in, I would turn and around and go find a different student lounge to hang out in. This went on for a couple of months. It was March, when I decided I am definitely going to church. I started attending on Sundays and some Wednesdays. Gradually, I started attending some single events.

What really had changed was not so much my belief in Jesus. I never stopped believing in Jesus. But the relationship changed. As every relationship should, a transformation took place. Most days, I would go to the church on my lunch break and pray until I needed go back to work. God had worked it out so my new job was on the same street as the church. My prayers were for my own healing, for salvation for friends who needed it, and for my church. Before long, people started asking me to pray for their request. Soon, I was carrying a prayer journal with me everywhere I went so I could write those request down. That was an exciting time in my life. I saw many answered prayers.

I also became friends with Charlie. He shared with me his perspective of the events that took place. He said the day he spoke to me in the library, God had sent him there on a mission. He didn’t know who he was going to speak to but that the person would be in the library. So he waited and waited and finally left. He went all the way down to where he had parked his truck got in and started to drive away. This campus was a former office building and there were never enough parking spaces to accommodate the number of students. Giving up a parking spot was a big deal. As he pulled away, God told him, She is there. So he re-parked the truck and went all the way back up to the library and waited. He said he knew when I walked in that I was the mission. Did I mention that Charlie is a former Marine (there are no ex-marines)? He serves God like a soldier. He said after that day, every time he would see me, God would direct him to come over and sit with me. He would tell God, She hates me but he would obey anyway. For the most part Charlie did not talk to me about God, he just worked on being my friend. This is a testimony to anyone who knows someone who needs God, invest in their life, then you have earned the right then speak into their life.

Charlie and I spoke often about prayer and even about getting people together to pray. One day Charlie showed up with a book, no one had ever heard of it or the author. He found in a bin of on sale books at a secular bookstore. This was in the late 1990s when many churches only had loosely organized prayer groups. The book was called Possessing the Gates of the Enemy by Cindy Jacobs, a first addition. We were so stirred up about the ideas she presented. She described prophetic prayer, praying what God gives us to pray rather than what we think of on our own. Charlie worked on a protocol plan and drew out a diagrams. He prepared so much information. Then he went to the Bishop and asked permission to start a prayer team. Charlie’s idea, which was God directed and has been very effective, was to set up prayer teams like platoons in the military. Teams consisted of a squad leader and twelve members, three of whom were team leaders. The squad would get together once a week and pray for the church. Part of the plan was the squad would receive prayer request from the leadership that would direct our prayer focus. Occasionally, the Bishop would direct us in what our prayer focus would be. But primarily, the meetings were God directed. In the beginning the squad only had five members. We had some severe growing pains. Even though I was helping Charlie, I had my own ideas about how things should run. So Charlie and I did not see eye to eye on things related to the group. Did I mention that I am strong-willed? Did I mention that Charlie is hard-headed? There is a reason why the Word says if any two agree on earth… Because God knows getting people into agreement is a challenge. In the beginning we had some very long prayer meetings. The Bishop asked us to limit our prayer time to around an hour so people would not get worn out. The Bishop helped us to find balance in that area. Everyone on that original team brought something different to the table. One young lady was the most compassionate person; she was so full of mercy, a true handmaiden. There was Charlie who understands authority and who always knew who he was in Christ and the authority that gave him. So many spiritual gifts were present in that group as well. We were babies then. God loves to answer the prayers of babies; we had expectation; we believed that He would hear and answer. After a few months the team came under attack; even then we learned about warfare and tenacity and that God can use hard-headed, strong-willed people.

At one point, the prayer team dwindled down to just Charlie and me. The lessons we learned in those first few months would be very important over the next few years. Charlie and I were truly brother and sister and we fought like it at times. We learned to put aside our emotions and work together. We began praying more for the prayer team; establishing prayer coverage. Once Charlie and I learned to work together despite our differences, the prayer team began to grow. In fact, it seems as if only a month or two later, we had twelve people committed to the team. At that time we had our first multiplication. Daphne Jordan began leading the squad praying for the youth, which included students from the youth group. Didi McClain began leading the squad praying for the singles department. The prayer ministry also began taking on other projects such as prayer walks and participating with citywide prayer.

As things progressed, I eventually led the main squad. Charlie named us the Circle of Servitude. Every quarter, we would have a recruiting meeting. With all the new people attending the group I found myself conducting short training sessions at each meeting. Often I would provide an outline. The training I conducted gave birth to this manual.

There are many testimonies and answered prayers