Redigging The Wells Of Prayer Series

Supernatural Breakthrough #1:

Redigging the Wells of Prayer

TRANSCRIPT

REDIGGING THE WELLS

“And Isaac dug again the wells of water which they had dug in the days of Abraham his father, for the Philistines had stopped them up after the death of Abraham. He called them by the names which his father had called them.” (Genesis 26:18).

Over the last couple of weeks, this Scripture has been burning in my heart. Quite often, what was in the natural in the Old Testament, has a spiritual significance and implication to our lives today in the New Testament. This story shows us how in the natural there were wells that Abraham had dug - a source of refreshing water and life for the people. The people in that generation had enjoyed the refreshing of those wells. But their enemies had come along and stopped up those wells and filled them with dirt so that they couldn’t access the water any longer. But later, Abraham’s son Isaac began to redig those wells. He recognized that there was a place of refreshing there, and redug the wells from the days of his father. And what I believe God is calling us to do is redig some of the wells of the early church.

WE NEED THE POWER OF GOD TODAY

If you’ve ever read the Book of Acts in your Bible, you’ve probably noticed that there are a lot of differences between what they did back then and there, and what we’re seeing in the church today. If you go back to the book of Acts, you see a powerful and a glorious church. You see people getting saved, delivered and healed - lives being touched and set free by the power and person of Jesus Christ. And yet in so many churches today, the power is not there. The presence of God is not there. And the question we need to ask ourselves is: why? What’s different about the church today? And some people would say, "The gifts of the Spirit - the power of God - that’s been done away with. We don’t need that in the church anymore today." And I would like to propose to you that we do need the gifts of the Spirit, we do need the power of God in the church today. Because if anything, people are more broken - lives are more fractured, life doesn’t make sense for people in this 21st Century. How much more do we need the reality of the power of God that can change people’s lives today.

THE DAYS OF GREATER GLORY

A prophet in the Old Testament, Haggai, made this declaration: “The glory of this latter temple shall be greater than the former,’ says the Lord of hosts.” (Haggai 2:9). What is Haggai saying? In the last days, before Jesus comes back to the church to take us back to Heaven to live with Him forever, the glory of the latter house - the church - will be greater than the former. But we’ve bought into the idea that, although the book of Acts was a supernatural, glorious church, the church is getting weaker and smaller, and we’re just sitting around and letting the devil beat our brains out until one day Jesus is going to come back to the earth and rescue us. But the reality is, that Jesus has promised that the latter days church is going to be more glorious than it was in the book of Acts. And you say, "What will that look like?" I don’t know because we haven’t seen it yet. But I don’t believe for a minute that we just have to sit back and be content with being religious. No! Let’s go back to the Bible, and redig the wells in the book of Acts, and see what they did to get what they had. Let’s contend for that.

A YOUTH GROUP HUNGRY FOR REVIVAL

For ten years, I was a youth pastor at Bible Fellowship Foursquare Church in Surrey, BC, and one of the things that we did there was contend for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We wanted to see the reality of God touching and changing people’s lives. We were so hungry and desperate to see a move of God that every Wednesday night before our youth meetings we would pray and say, "God, we want you to move. If you don’t come tonight, if you don’t show up, then let’s just go home and shut the whole thing down." And an amazing thing happened as we got hungry and desperate for more of God. We knew that the Lord said, "And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart" (Jeremiah 29:13), and if we would draw near to God, He would draw near to us (James 4:8), so we started doing that. We said, "God, we want to know you in a very real and a personal way where our lives are changed." And one of the things that started happening, was the Holy Spirit started moving in our midst, in a group of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18 years old who said, "We want a real relationship with God. We don’t just want to be religious. We don’t want to just sit in a pew on Sunday morning and go through the motions.” They said, "If God is real, we want to know Him." So one of the things we saw happen, as the Holy Spirit was poured out in our midst, was times where literally every person was laid out, laid down on the floor in the presence of God, just because of the sense of the overwhelming reality that God is in our midst. We would see young people run up to the front altar - not in response to preaching or an altar call - but convicted by the Holy Spirit, they would cry out, "We need to get right with God!" We started just saying, "Lord, we want more!"