Mensa Otabil - God Fulfills Petitions
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Psalm 20, verse 5: We rejoice in your salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners. May the Lord fulfill all your petitions. As I’ve noted throughout this week, this Psalm is a Psalm of intercession, so it’s telling us how we intercede and pray for people. In Israel, at the time this Psalm was written, it was for the nation to pray for their King, but by application for us now, it opens up knowledge as to how to pray for people, intercede for your spouses, for your friends, and so on.
So in this verse, it is telling us what happens after we have prayed for people. After we have interceded, we have to anticipate God’s answer and God’s victory. There are three things that the verse highlights. The first: it says we will rejoice in your salvation. In other words, after we’ve prayed for you and God has answered you, we will be happy for you. You know, many times people pray for others, saying, «Oh, I’m praying for you,» and then when God answers the prayer, we are not too happy that good things have happened to someone else when it hasn’t happened to us.
But here, the intercessor says we will rejoice in your salvation. We’ll be glad to hear your testimony; we’ll be glad to hear that God has visited you, that God has blessed you. Anytime you pray for people, anticipate a miracle and be glad for them and for their salvation. The second thing it says is that we will set up our banners in the name of the Lord. In ancient times, people went to war under the banner of the king. So if they were going to fight a nation, they would lift up the symbol of the king, which would sometimes be an animal or something like that on a pole, and they would go to war under that banner.
Now in modern times, we do similar things; we war under the banner of our nation. We’ve seen it in the current World Cup; nations are fighting and contesting on the football field under the banner or the flag of their nation. So in Israel, they went to war under the banner of the Lord. God was their flag, so when they went to battle, they were fighting for the Lord and in the name of the Lord.
When we intercede for people, we are setting up our banners in the name of the Lord. In other words, all that we’re doing is for the glory of God, for His beauty, for His honor, and for His glory. So when we raise up our banner, we signify that God has given us victory in our battle. God has given us victory and is giving victory to the people we are interceding for, but it’s all being done in the name of the Lord. We lift up our banners in the name of the Lord. Although we are Ghanaian, our greatest joy is to see God at work and see Him at work in every nation, even if it goes against us. We lift up our banners in the name of the Lord.
The third thing that the passage says is, «May the Lord fulfill all your petitions.» So this is the cry of the people: we have prayed for you, we are ready to rejoice for you, we’ve lifted up our banners in the name of the Lord, and we are anticipating that God will do everything we have requested Him to do and that your petitions before the Lord will be answered. You know, this gives us a good attitude for praying for people, that we wish them well; we want to see them do well; we want to see them prosper, even if we may not be doing well ourselves. We are glad that God has answered the prayer of somebody we were praying for because the same God who answers other people will also answer us one day.
And that’s why we intercede for one another, pray for one another, and rejoice with them, setting up our banners in the name of the Lord and trusting God to answer all their petitions. Let’s pray. Say with me, «Heavenly Father, I rejoice in your salvation. You are my banner of victory in every battle. In Jesus' name, amen and amen.»