The short reason is: I don’t need to be one.

The longer reason is: I’m not called to be a mediator and, indeed, for me to mediate, would be to usurp the position of someone far more able than me.

Fact is today Christendom abounds with so called mediators. In almost every church, fellowship or Bible study group there’s someone itching to pray for you, if not lay hands on you, allegedly to impart a blessing.

Now, while intercession, pleading for God’s intervention to save or heal and deliver is fine and certainly biblical; that of being a mediator, of “standing in the gap” to effectively take the place of Jesus is not. It has been overtaken by events. The reason is four-fold:

1. Such mediation rarely works.
2. Those claiming to be mediators are almost invariably self-appointed.
3. God Himself says He is the mediator between Himself and man.
4. The Lord has stated that He is now the only mediator (1 Timothy 2:5)

Truth be told, it’s taken me much of my life to learn God doesn’t want me to be a mediator. You see, like many called of God and saved by grace through Jesus’ blood shed on the cross, I longed to pray for, lay hands on, and “be Jesus” to as many people as possible. It was something I felt I must do. Why? Because when you’ve got saved you’re just bursting to do something, anything, to share salvation, blessing, healing and deliverance with those yet to come to the party.

But is that really what Jesus wants us to do? Not if what He actually says is anything to go by. In the days of his flesh upon earth the Lord told thousands of Jews who followed Him (after the feeding of the five thousand) and came seeking a second free meal, not to labour “for the meat (food) which perisheth but for that food which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of Man shall give you” (John 6:26-27)

Stunningly, instead of asking Him there and then for this “bread from heaven”, they said: “What shall we do that we might work the works of God?” Importantly, Jesus’s answer is one that stands for all time. He said:

                This is the work of God that ye believe on Him (Jesus), whom God hath sent (John 6:29).

So, some 2,000 years later is believing on the Lord Jesus Christ still the only real “work” God requires us to do? Yes, but, of course, doing so takes faith. And where does faith come from? Answer:

                Faith coming by hearing and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17).

And, to put it frankly, “hearing” takes work. It takes living, not just by bread alone ‘but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). It means taking God at his word and trusting his truth while living in a world and way of life that doesn’t believe He exists.

Let’s face it, few are seriously willing to do so. To have faith God will see you through when the chips are down, when you’ve lost your job, face financial loss, been betrayed in marriage, had your children turn against you, suffered a maiming accident or been stricken by disease is the test of a true believer.

Perhaps your standing for the truth has seen you kicked out of church and so called Christian friends have deserted you because you uphold what God says rather than compromise and settle for the “gimme gospel” so popular in Christendom today.

Fact is, serious Bible study, which is how you “hear” the word as the Spirit reveals it to you, is no longer a priority for church-going Christians. Indeed, scarcely any churches I know of in my locality now run a Bible school. But 30 years ago it was deemed a necessity for any church of size. True, today, some fellowships have mid-week Bible study groups but often they are sparsely attended.

What is popular though is praying for and laying hands on people along with intercession asking God to make a person’s life, the family’s life, the community’s life and that of the world better. In other words rather than studying the Bible to learn God’s plans and purposes for our time and then fitting into them, many church goers make themselves mediators. They dump their needs and those of others in God’s lap and, if that doesn’t work, well, that would be his problem not theirs. The sad truth is such mediatory prayers rarely work. What’s more, they lack a firm biblical foundation. But they do provide an easy way out if you’re troubled by another’s need.

But surely, people got prayed for by other people in the Bible, you say? Well, check it out. Certainly, Jesus prayed for Peter’s faith to survive and for all his disciples and those who would receive Him as a result of their witness (John 17:9, 11, 15). And Paul prayed God would give faithful believers “the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him [Christ] (Ephesians 1: 17).

But where do we find the apostles and other disciples praying for people in the Book of Acts. Fact is, they didn’t pray but simply laid hands on the sick and they recovered. They didn’t pray for people to get salvation; they simply gave witness, God opened the hearts of their hearers and thus they were saved. Acts 16:25-34, the story of a prison keeper, is a classic example.

Real prayer is prayer to God for oneself. Jesus did this and so did Paul and Barnabas. But where in Acts do we find apostles praying for people to get healed, saved or delivered? We don’t because they didn’t.

But praying for others, thus “standing in the gap” as a mediator is how organised Christianity does it today. People put their trust in the church, the denomination, the healing crusade, the evangelist, the pastor, bishop, the pope as their chosen mediator, not in God’s unshakeable, inerrant word.

What’s more, they get busy. If nobody is getting saved these days that’s because they haven’t worked hard enough. So run more sport for the kids, more dinners for the needy, more entertainment to bring unbelievers to church. And maybe, just maybe, someone somehow will get saved.

Decades ago the cry was very different. Back then the worry was to find a building big enough to house the crowds seeking “a touch from the Lord”, to learn about Jesus, and, yes, find out what the Bible really says. Fact is tens of thousands of New Zealanders came to know the Lord in the Charismatic Movement of the 1970s-1980s.

Why is it that Christian leaders today don’t tell us why all that stopped, still less what it would take to get it going again? Over a century ago that doughty preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon warned the heyday of revival in his time would end and explained why:

“O churches! take heed lest ye trust in yourselves; take heed lest ye say, ‘We are a respectable body,’ ‘We are a mighty number,’ ‘We are a potent people;’ take heed lest ye begin to glory in your own strength; for when that is done, ‘Ichabod’ shall be written on your walls and your glory shall depart from you. Remember, that He who was with us when we were but few, must be with us now we are many, or else we must fail; and He who strengthened us when we were but as ‘little in Israel,’ must be with us, now that we are like ‘the thousands of Manasseh,’ or else it is all over with us and our day is past.”

Notably, Spurgeon refused to have “mediators” praying for people to receive Christ in his meetings. Crowds were flocking, many wanting to be saved but Spurgeon spurned the popular “enquiry room” for would-be converts.

Iain Murray in his book “The Forgotten Spurgeon” quotes Spurgeon as saying, “You say, I should like to go to the inquiry room. I dare say you would, but we are not willing to pander to popular superstition. We fear that in those rooms men are warmed into a fictitious confidence. Very few of the supposed converts of inquiry rooms turn out well. Go to your God at once, even where you are now. Cast yourself on Christ, at once, ere you stir an inch!”

Can the same be said of the Charismatic Movement and what’s happened since? Those saved in this move of God’s grace, and still going on for Jesus today, say they and others were saved by the sovereign saving act of Jesus through the power of his Word and Spirit, not necessarily by their response to an altar call, nor by the prayers of intermediaries.

So what’s wrong with an altar call? Only the fact that those who respond to it find themselves faced with a “mediator” between them and Jesus, not meeting with the Lord Himself. The question is: Can  Jesus Himself save without human intervention, or must faith be put in a humanly contrived substitute. The sad legacy of crusades and altar calls is that they are followed by a huge falling away.

Once, for three years I sat on a committee that brought the then top evangelists to Wellington. They included Derek Prince who drove out devils and Melvyn Banks, who claimed cripples threw their crutches away when he prayed for them. Thousands filled the Wellington Town Hall for these meetings. When they ended a reckoning was called for.

Sadly a survey showed that out of the hundreds that responded to altar calls none had had a medically verifiable healing and none had lasting deliverance from demons thrown out of them. What’s more three years on none of the “saved” could be found attending any of the city’s churches.

So what’s the truth? In the Book of Acts there was a God-given “foretaste” of the powers of the kingdom of God (Hebrews 6:4). God-appointed mediators laid hands on the sick and they were healed without being prayed for. That ended when the Apostle Paul pronounced judicial blindness on Israel and the Lord set the nation aside. Paul declared the message of salvation was now “sent to the Gentiles” (Acts 28:28).

In the ensuing “dispensation of the grace of God“ (Ephesians 3:2), in which we are now, there is no need for mediators since believers now have direct access to the greatest power of all, that of the risen, glorified Lord Jesus Christ, and already have been made “accepted in the Beloved” [Christ] (Ephesians 1:6 and 19).

Let the last word go to the Apostle Paul. In 1 Timothy 2:5 he declares the inerrant word of God:

                For there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

No one else need apply.

John Dudley Aldworth

Email: john.aldworth@hotmail.com.