Before anything else: if you own Kneeling on the Promises, you already own this book. The Prophetic Intercessor is a revised and updated edition of that earlier title by James W. Goll, published by Chosen Books. The old page never mentioned it, and a reader with the first edition on his shelf would have bought it twice.
What the book is about
Goll’s subject is intercessory prayer, specifically praying what you believe God has shown you rather than working through a list of requests. His two anchor figures are Elijah praying through a drought and Anna, the widowed prophetess in Luke’s Gospel who spent decades in the temple and was there when the Messiah arrived.
The Anna material is the most affecting part. Goll uses her to make a point about obscurity: decades of prayer nobody watched, ending in a moment she would have missed if she had not been there every day.
He also writes about his and his wife’s years of infertility and the four children that eventually came, and uses that as the pattern for praying over things that look finished. Whether that lands as faith or as a stretch will depend on the reader, and it is the emotional centre of the book either way.
Where it sits theologically
Goll writes from inside the charismatic prophetic movement, and the book assumes throughout that God speaks to people now and that the gifts described in the New Testament are still in operation.
Called to Better holds that view too, so we are not going to treat it as a warning label. But it is a live disagreement among faithful Christians, and a cessationist reader will find the book’s basic premises unargued rather than defended. Goll is writing for people who already agree with him on this.
What we would flag for any reader, in this stream or not, is the ordinary discipline of testing what you think you have heard against Scripture and against people who know you. Goll would say the same. Books in this genre can leave a reader confident about impressions that deserve more scrutiny, and that is a failure mode worth naming.
What we removed
A quotation attributed to Goll about shaping the atmosphere, and a reader review. Neither could be verified.
The meta description was also broken, running the title and publication details together into a fragment that would have shown up in Google as the page’s summary. That has been rewritten.
Format note
The book includes a 21-day devotional section, which is a genuine feature and one of the more useful parts. Cindy Jacobs contributed a foreword.
Who it is for
Someone already praying regularly who wants to go further into intercession, and who is comfortable in a charismatic frame. It is a teaching book, not an introduction, and a man new to prayer altogether should start somewhere simpler.
It also suits a prayer team rather than a general men’s group, and the old page’s suggestion of a father reading it with his son overstates how accessible it is.
The Prophetic Intercessor on Amazon