Towards Prayer for Revival – the NEED
You can now watch TOWARDS Prayer for Revival, the video version expanded from last month’s blog post.
Awareness of the need for the church to be revived and the hearts of people to be awakened to the Lord isn’t the only trigger for revival prayer, but it is an essential fuel for sustaining this kind of praying. In last month’s post, it was one of the five stones (stone #2:We NEED a fresh move of God) in the pathway that leads towards prayer for revival. I want to add a few more thoughts on it.
We can grow accustomed to the way things are. The shift is gradual. We might barely notice that we’ve become people who accept spiritual mediocrity as the norm, adjust to a life (and ministry) void of God’s supernatural presence, and become anaesthetised to the world’s pain.
Awareness incites action, and can stop us drifting into complacency. But we can lose that awareness in the busy pace of life if we don’t nurture it.
We feed our awareness by being informed – watching and listening, forming a need-picture of the target community we carry in our hearts. But it’s what we do with that information that’s important. We use it to shape prayers of lament that connect us emotionally to the need and to God’s heart concerning it. And our awareness of the need will take us to relevant truths in scripture that can anchor our praying in line with God’s will.
Our praying isn’t a list of requests for God to fix the need. It’s an opportunity to know his heart; to be stirred by his view of the need and what he wants to do as Rescuer. And then, we shape our lament and our asking to agree with him.
As our awareness of, and prayer-engagement with the need grows – with its size and urgency – so does our conviction that only a powerful move of God will significantly change the need-picture. We NEED a fresh move of God.
Those are some added thoughts on stone #2. I’m sure much more will open up to you on each of the stones as you re-walk the pathway towards prayer for revival. I encourage you to watch the 15-minute video, and re-watch it before each fresh walk along the pathway.
I’d love to hear your response to the question at the end of the video.
Watch Towards Prayer for Revival, on the YouTube channel, Prayer Life Wingspan: https://youtu.be/qnBNi9gjYks
Praying ahead
The best time to pray about a crisis or problem might be before it happens; praying ahead of it. By anticipating a situation, prayer can block its arrival or influence its outcome. Our prayer licence includes an authority to preempt – prayer that anticipates...
Informed or Transformed?
The value question Cyber-traffic never sleeps. News, gossip and content on any topic are just a click away. The information flow is strong, and it’s easy to be swept along by the current. That’s why it’s good to use the value question: what is really important to me –...
Filtering prayer requests
There’s never been a shortage of prayer needs, but in our digital age we're more exposed to them. It's impossible to respond to all. This is where filtering is so helpful. But it's not just about dealing with the volume; it includes how we handle a prayer request....
Power in praying for Glory
We arrived in SE Asia, excited gospel messengers, ready for anything…or so we thought. My book, Shaped for Prayer Enjoyment opens with: If I had to put a label on the year 1980, it would be ‘Almost a failure’. And the language struggles, cultural challenges and...
Praying about Glory
Missions isn’t life’s number one goal. That might sound strange coming from me after four decades in mission work. But the great adventure and most urgent need is knowing Christ’s Glory. He is the point of missions, and the heart and will to declare him is shaped by...
Conversation about Glory
The Father, Son and Spirit aren’t living in separate rooms, absorbed in their own agendas. They are perfectly one, and their conversation about Glory is pure joy beyond anything we can imagine. That’s the joy we’ve been brought into! And prayer is the Lord's gift to...
Prayer Conversation Piece
The advantage of a familiar Bible verse is that we can repeat it easily, without much thought. The downside is that we can repeat it easily, without much thought! By using it as the nucleus of a prayer conversation piece we avoid mechanical repetition, and can enjoy...
Pray continually
Pray continually – given to train us, or tease us? Is 1Thes 5:17 a great idea, but not doable; an unreachable standard? This short phrase is sidelined by some, but is a life passion for others. Some handle it by pasting regularly over the continually. Many simply drop...
Close-up conversation
God is always close-up, but it can sometimes feel like we’re praying from a distance. True, it’s not about how we feel; it’s about faith. But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for prayer as a remote faith routine. Prayer is close-up conversation, enjoyable for us...
Close-up enjoyment of God
Forgiveness did more than free us from the old; it freed us for the new: close-up enjoyment of God. He didn’t wave his scepter over us like a magical wand to change our status from sinner to forgiven. The high cost plan was Christ! We were “overwhelmed” by sin, but...
