REVIVAL AND PRAYER
by Louis Bartet
Because I haven’t found a better definition, I’m still holding on to the one given by Vance Havner: ” Revival is the saints getting back to normal.” Jim Cymbala, pastor of Brooklyn Tabernacle, Brooklyn, New York, had the following to say about revival: ”Revival is where you see multitudes getting saved, not coming over from another church because there’s a better program…a church loving each other and coming together to pray and call out to the Lord…a return to the book of Acts.
All of us are in agreement that the time for revival is now, but do we realize that the way to revival is prayer. English preacher Sidlow Baxter, when he was eighty-five years of age, said: ”I have pastored only three churches in my more than sixty years of ministry. We had revival in every one. And not one of them came as a result of my preaching. They came as a result of the membership entering into a covenant to pray until revival come. And it did come, every time.”
Prayer is the fountain from which revival springs. The key to revival in every age is prayer. In 1904, Frank Beardsley wrote: ”It is possible to have revivals without preaching, without churches, and without ministers, but without prayer a genuine revival is impossible.”
Concerning what has come to be known as the Brownsville Revival, John Kilpatrick wrote:
“There is no question in my mind that prayer was as central to the revival itself as it was to the preparation of it.”
Dr A. T. Pierson once said, ‘There has never been a spiritual awakening in any country or locality that did not begin in united prayer.”
Revival won’t come by teaching, great worship music or beautiful buildings. It is scripturally and experientially linked to prayer.
Isaiah 64:1 (NKJV) Oh, that You would rend the heavens! That You would come down!That the mountains might shake at Your presence– 2 As fire burns brushwood, As fire causes water to boil–To make Your name known to Your adversaries, [That] the nations may tremble at Your presence!
2Chr 7:14 (NKJV) “if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves,and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
