Travailing in Prayer
Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall the earth be made to give birth in one day? Or shall a nation be born at once? For as soon as Zion was in labor, She gave birth to her children. Shall I bring to the time of birth, and not cause delivery? says the Lord. Shall I who cause delivery shut up the womb? says your God.
Isaiah 66:8–9 (NKJV)
I kept calling out this scripture in my sleep, so I felt that today's reading should be about it. This kind of intercession is unknown to a large part of God's people. To travail implies a painful, laborious effort; it is the final phase of a woman's pregnancy, just before the baby comes. In Galatians 4:19 Paul speaks of travailing in prayer for the church, so there is such an activity as travail in the Spirit, and it is carried out through prayer. And if this spiritual travail exists, there must also be a womb of the Spirit through which God can give birth. This is biblical language.
The Lord asks a very challenging question, one that runs against the laws of nature, but that is how God is: He specialises in the impossible. This prophecy was fulfilled in 1948, when almost overnight the nation of Israel was dramatically reborn and declared a sovereign nation, just after the Second World War. The whole world was astonished. Take time to study how this humanly impossible work was accomplished. The Jewish people had been scattered throughout the world without a home for generations, battered, killed and persecuted wherever they went, the Holocaust being the most grotesque and horrific experience of the Jews in modern history. They were a people without a home, because the land known as Israel was inhabited by Palestinians who claimed Jerusalem as their homeland. But the Lord heard their cries and their travail, in which they had probably engaged for centuries, to give birth to God's supernatural work: an entire nation in travail.
Here is something I want to point out. There are things God will not do until we pray, and there are things in God's will that will not be born in the earth unless we travail, because He has given the earth to man and has chosen to work in the earth through the prayers of men. The moving of the hand of God is a function not only of God's sovereignty but of praying and travailing men and women.
What the Lord did for Israel He will do for us. Yes, I am speaking of giving birth in a day: of birthing the promises of God, your desires and your prayers. This is a dimension of prayer that manifests the realities we have prayed for, and all this and more is possible through travail in prayer. Labour has always preceded birth, and it is a work the Holy Spirit wants to bring us into, because the desires of God must be birthed in the earth. The earth is a womb through which the Spirit manifests His desires, and in that sense every Spirit-filled believer can become a vessel for the desires of God. You qualify yourself for this through the law of travail in prayer.
Everything noteworthy that God has ever birthed through men on earth became a reality because someone engaged in travail. Travail is the vehicle through which God fulfils His Word and His purposes. The Apostle Paul called it striving in prayer: a strenuous, agonising process that one undergoes in prayer to see a matter through, and without which many of the plans of God cannot come to fruition. Elijah engaged in this dimension of travail when he sought the rain he had prophesied. Jesus travailed in the garden of Gethsemane. Moses agonised in prayer when Israel had sinned. The children of Israel were themselves in travail for decades, and it birthed their deliverance, and Daniel interceded when he discovered a delay in the deliverance of his people. This is the process of birthing spiritual realities in the earth. Christ cannot even be formed in the life of a believer without travail (Galatians 4:19).
This dimension of prayer cannot be entered without the help of the Spirit, as Romans 8:26 states. To enter it, there must first be a burden, a desire. This is so important: in the Bible a burden refers to a vision, or a word of the Lord. The promise of God in your life is your burden; it is your unborn child, and the day of labour comes when travail in prayer has been done. Pray in the Spirit, depend on Him, and He will bring you to the place of birth, where great joy awaits you. The time of birth has come. Shall He bring you to it, and not cause delivery?