There are two factors or conditions involved in every answered prayer – righteousness and faith. The imputed righteousness of Christ, which comes through His shed blood, is what gives us boldness to approach His throne of grace. It is absolutely indispensable for effective prayer. But personal righteousness is also crucial, for Psalm 66:18 says, "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." Perhaps Jesus summed it up best when He said, "If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you" (John 15:7). In other words, obedient Christians get their prayers answered!!

The other necessary factor in all answered prayer is faith. This is an unbreakable law in the spiritual realm. It is always "according to your faith be it unto you" (Matthew 9:29). Unbelief is continually our besetting sin and it is more often than not the cause of unanswered prayer.

So when we pray for the lost, we need righteousness (imputed and personal) and faith. But there are eight other factors that are particularly important for this task. The first of these is brokenness. "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy" is the law of spiritual harvest. However, we want the harvest without the heartbreak. Leonard Ravenhill once said, "God does not answer many prayers – they are too locked-up in self-pity or aimed at personal benefit. He does answer desperate prayer" (Ravenhill 110). And until we get desperate for souls, our prayers for them may remain unanswered. For just as Jesus wept over Jerusalem, so must we weep over our lost loved ones if we really want to see them saved.

On one occasion some Salvation Army workers wrote to General Booth decrying their ineffectiveness in winning souls and asking what they should do. He sent back a two-word message, "Try tears." Tears are so potent that when coupled with sharing the gospel, God guarantees a fruitful harvest (Psalm 126:5-6).

Another important factor is travail. This pictures the excruciating agony and pain of childbirth as seen in Isaiah 66:8, "…as soon as Zion travailed she brought forth her children." Strong’s dictionary defines travail "to writhe in pain; to fall grievously with pain." Luke 22 speaks of Jesus being in an agony and His sweat as great drops of blood. Most of us have never been here in our prayer life, which is why we don’t see phenomenal results in winning the lost to Christ.

Jesus described the experience of salvation as being "born again." Just as a mother experiences labor pains in giving her baby physical birth, the same is true in the spiritual realm. Paul speaks of "travailing in birth again" for the spiritually immature Galatians he had won to Christ. But even as a man cannot fully appreciate the severity of the labor pains his wife experiences because he does not give birth, neither do most Christians understand the necessity of travailing for souls since some ninety-five percent of professing Christians never win a single soul to Christ!!

One of my heroes is John "Praying" Hyde, a missionary to India who literally gave his life praying for souls to be saved. In 1908 he prayed for God to give him a soul every day. That year he won over four hundred to Christ. The next year he prayed for two souls a day (not just to pray a prayer, but to be baptized and consecrated to Christ) and won over eight hundred to Christ. Then in 1910, he prayed for four souls a day and God granted his request. But during this year as his health was failing, a friend persuaded him to visit a doctor. For us to understand the tremendous toll of travail for souls let’s listen to what the doctor tells him: "The heart is in an awful condition. I have never come across such a bad case as this. It has been shifted out of its natural position on the left side to a place over on the right side. Through stress and strain it is in such a bad condition that it will require months and months of strictly quiet life to bring it back again to anything like it’s normal state. What have you been doing with yourself? Unless you change your whole life and give up the strain, you will have to pay the supreme penalty within six months" (Carre 44).

There is a price to pay if we would join our precious Lord in agonizing for the deliverance of souls from the kingdom of darkness, but it will be worth it all! Therefore, let us join that noble band that "loves not their lives unto the death" (Revelation 12:11) and victory will be ours.

Through the many vivid word pictures in the Bible concerning the plight of the lost, we can easily see why persistence in prayer becomes a necessary factor. Isaiah 14:17 describes the lost as being prisoners whom Satan refuses to release. Acts 26:18 tells us that they are under the authority or jurisdiction of Satan. Perhaps the most frightening description of all is that given by Jesus in Mark 3:27 as a strong man’s house. He even tells us that "no man" can help those individuals until the strong man is bound.

Some controlling demons are so strong that prayer and fasting is required to gain the victory (Mark 9:29). Persistent prayer is necessary because of Satan’s reluctance to give them up, not because God is unwilling to save them!!

Satan is even able to control entire countries and cultures. This is why it is often so difficult for missionaries to be effective in reaching some people groups. "It was seven years before Carey baptized his first convert in India; it was seven years before Judson won his first disciple in Burmah; Morrison toiled seven years before the first Chinaman was brought to Christ; Moffat declares that he waited seven years to see the first evident moving of the Holy Spirit upon his Bechuanas of Africa; Henry Richards wrought seven years in the Congo before the first convert was gained at Benza Mantaka" (Gordon 139-40).

One of Satan’s favorite tactics is to make the situation look so impossible that we get discouraged and quit praying. The reason he does this is that he has absolutely no defense against prayer. The old saying is true that Satan trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon his knees. All prayer is warfare and, when you pray, Satan is being defeated even though you see no change in the circumstances.

However, if we could see what is happening in the spiritual realm when we pray, we would be greatly encouraged. Remember how God opened the eyes of Elisha’s servant so he could see the horses and chariots of fire protecting them from the enemy (II Kings 6:17)? So, keep on praying for the lost whether you see results or not because your prayers are being answered!!

The most incredible case of this kind of persistence is found in the life of George Muller. Because he had much success early in his ministry in seeing the immediate conversion of many for whom he had just prayed, he got the impression that it would always be that way. But listen to his testimony concerning this, "If I say that during the fifty-four years and nine months that I have been a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ I have had thirty thousand answers to prayer, either in the same hour or the same day that the requests were made, I should not go a particle too far…But one or the other might suppose all my prayers have been thus promptly answered. No, not all of them. Sometimes I have had to wait weeks, months, or years; sometimes many years…In November 1844, I began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. I prayed every day without one single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land or on the sea, and whatever the pressure of my engagements might be. Eighteen months elapsed before the first of the five was converted. I thanked God, and prayed on for the others. Five years elapsed, and then the second was converted. I thanked God for the second, and prayed on for the other three. Day by day I continued to pray for them, and six years more passed before the third was converted. I thanked God for the three, and went on praying for the other two. These two remain unconverted. The man to whom God in the riches of His grace has been given tens of thousands of answers to prayer, in the self-same hour or day on which they were offered, has been praying day by day for nearly thirty-six years for the conversion of these two individuals, and yet they remain unconverted" (Steer 246-47).

But this is not the end of the story. He kept on praying day after day, year after year and then he said, "The great point is never to give up until the answer comes. I have been praying for sixty-three years and eight months for one man’s conversion. He is not saved yet but he will be. How can it be otherwise…I am praying." The day came when Muller’s friend received Christ. It did not come until Muller’s casket was lowered in the ground. There, near on open grave, this friend gave his heart to God. Prayers of perseverance had won another battle. Muller’s success may be summarized in four powerful words: "He did not quit" (Eastman 99-100).

Because prayer is warfare, I want to suggest that aggression is important in intercession. God has given us incredible authority (Matthew 16:19), and it is imperative that we exercise it, especially in world evangelization (Matthew 28:18-20).

We are over-comers (Revelation 12:11) and "more than conquerors" (Romans 8:37), and God expects us to "come upon" the strong man who is fully armed and overcome him in order to "spoil his goods" (Luke 11:21-22). As we have already seen, Satan holds souls captive and he will not give them up without a fight! But we must ever be aware that the "weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God" (II Corinthians 10:4). When we are battle-ready in God’s armor and with God’s weapons, we fight by praying (Ephesians 6:10-18).

God has mightily empowered His church to aggressively assault and conquer the "gates of hell." Yet, we sit passively by, allowing hell to "enlarge herself, and open her mouth without measure" (Isaiah 5:14). I was stirred by Ravenhill’s graphic way of stating this tragedy – "There is a suffocating indifference in the church to the peril of judgment" (Ravenhill 80).

Just as a small wooden stake is able to hold a huge elephant because he has been trained to believe he can’t get loose, so the church of the living God has been so deceived by Satan concerning our mighty power (Ephesians 1:17-23) and authority that we no longer try. And he continues to imprison our loved ones while we languish in lethargy and unbelief.

Satan refuses to acknowledge his ultimate defeat; he refuses to surrender any of his dominion until he must; he fiercely and bitterly contests every action against himself, yielding only what is forcibly wrested from him (Newell 27). Therefore, it is time for us to get aggressive in the war for souls, for the kingdom of heaven "suffereth violence and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11:12).

When it comes to praying for others, pleading is very effective. Many are the Biblical examples: Abraham for Sodom (Genesis 18), Moses for Israel (Exodus 32), Hezekiah for Judah (II Kings 19) and the list goes on and on. Pleading basically means that you present to God a Biblical reason why He should answer your prayer. The Lord even instructs us to "bring forth our strong reasons" (Isaiah 41:21).

A.T. Pierson says, "We are to argue our case with God, not indeed to convince Him, but to convince ourselves. In proving to Him that, by His own word and oath and character, He has bound Himself to interpose, we demonstrate to our own faith that He has given us the right to ask and claim, and that He will answer our plea because He cannot deny Himself" (Pierson 150).

Spurgeon felt strongly about the power of pleading. He said, "It is the habit of faith, when she is praying, to use pleas. Mere prayer sayers, who do not pray at all, forget to argue with God; but those who would prevail bring forth their reasons and their strong arguments and they debate the question with the Lord…Oh, brethren, let us learn thus to plead the precepts, the promises, and whatever else may serve our turn; but let us always have something to plead. Do not reckon you have prayed unless you have pleaded, for pleading is the very marrow of prayer" (Spurgeon 49-50).

George Muller took the first five words of Psalm 68:5, "A father to the fatherless," and repeatedly used the phrase to plead for his orphans. These are his own words: "By the help of God, this shall be my argument before Him, respecting the orphans, in the hour of need. He is their Father, and therefore has pledged Himself, as it were, to provide for them; and I have only to remind Him of the need of these poor children in order to have it supplied" (Pierson 143).

I am quite sure that there are hundreds of Scripture verses we can use in pleading for the salvation of souls, but for the sake of time and space allow me to mention just a few. We can plead the purposes of God for man (Jeremiah 1:5), (Luke 19:10), (II Peter 3:9), (Acts 26:18) and (Ephesians 2:5-7). We can plead the promises of God concerning salvation (John 3:16), (John 1:12), (Romans 10:13) and (John 6:37). We can plead the power of God to save (Hebrews 7:25), (Romans 1:16), (I Corinthians 2:4-5) and (I Peter 1:3-5). We can plead the personage of God in His relationship to man as Creator, Redeemer, Father and Lord. We can plead the attributes and attitude of God toward man such as His love, His mercy, His grace, His gentleness and His longsuffering. My favorite plea involves His past performances in saving others: Ninevah (a city so wicked that God had already earmarked it for destruction), the Gadarene demoniac (who wore no clothes, lived among the tombs, was so fierce no man could approach him, an outcast of society, filled with a legion of demons, worse than anyone we will ever know), Saul of Tarsus (wreaking havoc of the church) and the entire towns of Lydda and Sharon (Acts 9:35).

Another crucial factor which can be so subtle as to make literally years of praying totally ineffective is our motive! Our primary motive in praying for the lost must be for God’s glory (John 15:8). But many times our motives are poisoned with pride and selfishness. Parents may be praying for their "black sheep" out of pride for the family name without even realizing their motive is impure.

I prayed for years for my brother-in-law without seeing any results whatsoever. But when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and my prayers became more fervent, God revealed to me that all those wasted prayers were tainted with selfishness. You see, the real reason I wanted him to get saved was so that my sister would have a better husband and my nephews and niece would have a better daddy. Therefore, God could not answer my prayers for him. However, when my motive became pure, God saved him!!

The Bible is crystal clear at this point: "Ye ask, and receive not because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts" (James 4:3). If you have been praying for a long time for a particular person (especially a family member or close friend) without seeing results, you may want to check your motive to see if it is pure (primarily for God’s glory).

In a court of law the opposing attorney can "object" to a line of questioning, a particular argument or the presenting of certain evidence that he believes to be outside the bounds of legality. If the judge agrees he will "sustain" the objection which renders the non-legal tactics null and void. The same is true in the spiritual realm. We may very eloquently plead the case of our lost loved one, using dozens of strong Biblical reasons, but if our motive is wrong, Satan "objects" and God must agree with him, rendering all our prayers and pleadings null and void!! And the one for whom we are praying will die and go to hell if we do not get our motives right.

Another integral element of intercession is a sacrificial spirit. We find this demonstrated in the apostle Paul who was willing to be "accursed from Christ" for the salvation of his Jewish people (Romans 9:3); in Moses who fasted and prayed another forty days and nights because of the sins of his people (Deuteronomy 9:18-19); in Esther who declared, "If I perish, I perish" (Esther 4:16).

When I was teaching a seminary extension class on Personal Evangelism, I printed up some prayer list cards with the inscription "I’ll Go To Hell For You." The idea was to list the names of people for whom we would be willing to go to hell in their stead and pray accordingly. At the next class meeting, after having distributed the cards to my students, one of them, a pastor, said, "I don’t think that I am willing to go to hell for anyone." He pretty much spoke for all of us. Although God would not allow for us to take another’s place in hell, it sure would increase the effectiveness of our prayers for them if we were so willing!!

All other things being equal, unity is the most powerful factor in praying for the lost. It usually yields immediate results!! Just as a magnifying glass can ignite a fire by capturing the diffused rays of sunlight and concentrating them on one specific spot, so can Christians unitedly praying for a particular person rout the strong man and focus the power of the Son on his life.

This is what happened in the conversion of William Carey’s son Jabez. It was during the annual meeting of the Baptist Missionary Society being held in London that Dr. Ryland, being heavily burdened for Jabez said: "Brethren, let us send up a united, universal, and fervent prayer to God in solemn silence for the conversion of Jabez Carey." As though the Holy Ghost had suddenly fallen upon the assembly, the whole congregation, of at least two thousand persons, betook themselves to silent intercession. Carey soon received a letter from Jabez telling of his conversion, "and the time of the awakening was found to accord almost exactly with the hour of this memorable intercession" (Gordon 87-88).

Jim Cymbala tells how he agonized in prayer for his daughter Chrissy for two-and-a-half years with no visible results. Then during a Tuesday night prayer meeting at Brooklyn Tabernacle, a young lady felt impressed that they should pray for Chrissy. That night "the church turned into a labor room. There arose a groaning, a sense of desperate determination, as if to say, ‘Satan, you will not have this girl. Take your hands off her – she’s coming back!’" And thirty-two hours later she did (Cymbala 63-65)!

When the pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Jones, Louisiana, challenged his congregation to write on a slip of paper the name of someone they wanted to see converted and were willing to commit themselves to pray for that person, eighteen people wrote "Mike Doles." In two weeks time he was gloriously converted.

After eighteen fruitless years of praying for her husband to be saved, Helen Gresham asked her pastor, Mickey Hudnall to help her pray. With the two of them praying together for Ricky, he was wonderfully converted in less than two months! And you will be delightfully amused at all the things God engineered in his life during that two-month period as you read his testimony. By the way, he did not know that his wife and her pastor were praying for him.

Let’s recount the awesome power of unified praying for the lost: two thousand prayed for Jabez Carey and he was converted that very hour, several hundred prayed for Chrissy Cymbala and she was repenting within thirty-two hours, eighteen prayed for Mike Doles and he was saved within two weeks, two prayed for Ricky Gresham and he was totally transformed in less than two months!!

Hey, if you can get somebody to help you pray for your loved one, you will see dramatic results!! For two can chase ten thousand in the spiritual realm (Deuteronomy 32:30) and two "agreeing together" in prayer will always receive their request according to the Lord Himself (Matthew 18:19).

Let me tell you why unified praying for the lost is so powerful. First and foremost is the incredible value God places on unity among His people. This is the Lord’s desire evidenced in His prayer for us (John 17) where five times He prays that we "may be one." Also the number one thing on God’s list for us to do is to "pray for all men…that they may be saved (I Timothy 2:1-4). Now, since unity is fairly rare and intercessors are extremely rare (God could not find even one in Israel – Isaiah 59:16), when you bring these two together – unity in intercession – you have something that is doubly rare. And God finds it so precious that He richly blesses it beyond our wildest imagination!!!

The second reason is really simple – there is only one strong man controlling a person’s life. When several of God’s people come against one strong man, he is easily defeated because "greater is he that is in us than he that is in the world" (I John 4:3-4). And then the "spoiling of his goods" is a relatively easy matter. Many times the lost person will even come to you looking for help. This was the case with Jimbo Barrentine. I covenanted with his wife Rachele in January to pray for him. Two months later he was under such crushing conviction that he came to my office looking for me. But I was in Arkansas teaching this material in a prayer conference, so he went to the home of another preacher in our church to find the way of salvation. He couldn’t wait for me to get back; he had to get saved right then and there!