Revival And The Prayer Of Power Series

A woman told of their family moving into a new house in town after years of living on a farm. Early the next morning, their 3 year old boy ran into the bedroom to wake them. “I dressed him and told him to play in the yard and to quit bothering us.” About 20 minutes later, he came running back. “Mommy, Mommy! Everybody has doorbells and they all work!”

Starting April 1st (NO FOOLING) we’ll be having our 1st Revival Meeting in nearly 30 years. When the Elders started talking about this (several months ago) I decided to ask several Revival speakers what to do to make this Revival successful.

One of those Revivalists (named Harvey Hacker) said this: “What you need to do is… pray, pray, and pray some more.”

Now frankly, I was looking for something a little more nuts and bolts. I thought to myself – prayer’s good, but there’s got to be more to doing a good Revival than that. And then I got to thinking… wait a minute! There’s more we CAN do. But unless we START with prayer and bathe the Revival in prayer, we’re gonna just be spinning our wheels.

You see, if we’re going to have a great Revival/powerful Revival, we’ve got to invite God to take part we’ve got to ring HIS doorbell - and ring His doorbell – morning/noon and night. We need to… pray, pray and pray some more.

Psalm 127:1 says “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.”

Unless the Lord is in this revival, all our efforts will be in vain. So we need to pray, and we need to pray seriously for this! But… what is it exactly that we should be praying for?

I had a wise old preacher once tell me that when you pray, you need to be specific. You need to tell God exactly what you want His help with. If you are not specific in your prayers, how will you know if God has answered the prayer or not?

ILLUS: Our family minister, Scott, shared the story about Hannah’s birth with me this week. He said: “Terri realized she was pregnant about a week after we had heard from 2 other couples we had known in college that they had miscarried. This made Terri nervous, so she began to pray, "God, help us to know that our baby is going to be healthy and strong and go full term." The next week, her morning sickness became all day sickness and she had to go to the hospital for dehydration. The doctor came in, checked over her vitals, and said, "You know, women who struggle like this in pregnancy tend to have babies who are healthy and strong and go full term." The nurse came in to change the IV and said, "You know, women who go through this tend to have babies who are healthy and strong and go full term." Two or three others came in with the exact same message. At that point, we laughed because we recognized that God had answered our prayers. Since then, we've encouraged people to be specific about what they're praying because God just might give you exactly what you asked for.”

So we need to pray… and we need to pray specifically.

And that brings us back to the question – what should we be praying for? What do we want God to accomplish for us with this Revival?

Now churches have held Revivals for a number of reasons. Some churches have Revivals… because they’ve always had Revivals. They don’t have any specific goals, they just like the IDEA of revivals. And so even if they have a small crowd, they feel good about the fact that they’ve done a REVIVAL because they’ve done their duty for the year. BUT WE’RE NOT GOING TO DO THAT!

Other churches have Revivals because want other churches to come & visit. They’ll have a role-call of how many people came from what churches. The more churches that show up, the better they feel, because that’s what they were aiming for.

ILLUS: Now we’ll probably have several area churches show up for our Revival. Aaron Davis is a popular and powerful preacher… and I’m suspecting we may have as many as 50 to 100 people come - he’s that well liked. BUT THAT’S NOT THE REASON WE’RE HAVING THE REVIVAL.

A third reason churches have Revivals is because… they’re struggling. They’ve been damaged or hurt in some way and they need to heal and be rejuvenated in their faith. That kind of church needs to be revived, and so they need a preacher to come and encourage them.