'Return to me,' declares the Lord Almighty,
'and I will return to you,' says the Lord Almighty.
Zechariah 1:3
Praying for revival...it sounds like a good thing. Many of us have been in churches where the pastor prayed for revival. We might have asked for it ourselves. But do we really know what it is we are asking for? It's not something that just happens magically, all of a sudden. It won't be ushered in by the great words of some preacher or the passionate words of a song. Instead, it will come when we get rid of all the extra things within the Christian religion and desire God alone.
Revival is basically, a "return to God." People begin to desire God alone. A vital and fervent relationship with God is restored or ignited in the hearts of many. Suddenly, the cares of yesterday are not as important because people have, in mass, turned their attention to God.
One can identify six major "Awakenings" or revivals in the church worldwide — from 1727, 1792, 1830, 1857, 1882 and 1904. More recently there were the revivals of 1906 Azusa Street, 1930s Balokole, and the 1970s Jesus movement, which spread in the Americas, Africa, and Asia among Protestants and Catholics.
I'd like to highlight one of these revivals which Jim Cymbala talks about in his book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. Try to imagine what it must have been like to be a part of this.
"Revivals have never been dominated by eloquent or clever preaching. If you had timed the meetings with a stopwatch, you would have found far more minutes give to prayer, weeping, and repentance than to sermons. In the 'Prayer Meeting Revival' of 1857-59 there was virtually no preaching at all. Yet it apparently produced the greatest harvest of any spiritual awakening in American history: estimates run to 1,000,000 converts across the United States, out of a national population at that time of only 30,000,000. That would be proportionate to 9,000,000 Americans today falling on their knees in repentance!
How did this happen? A quiet businessman named Jeremiah Lanphier started a Wednesday noon
prayer meeting in a Dutch Reformed church here in New York City, no more than a quarter mile from Wall Street. The first week, six people showed up. The next week, twenty came. The next week, forty...and they decided to have daily meetings instead.
'There was no fanaticism, no hysteria, just an incredible movement of people to pray,' reports J. Edwin Orr. 'The services were not given over to preaching. Instead, anyone was free to pray.'
During the fourth week, the financial Panic of 1857 hit; the bond market crashed, and the first banks failed. (Within a month more than 1,400 banks had collapsed.) People began calling out to God more seriously than ever. Lanphier's church started having three noontime prayer meetings in different rooms.
John Street Methodist Church, a few doors east of Broadway, was packed out as well. Soon Burton's Theater on Chambers Street was jammed with 3,000 people each noon.
The scene was soon replicated in Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington and the South. By the next spring 2,000 Chicagoans were gathering each day in the Metropolitan Theater to pray. A young 21-year-old in those meetings, newly arrived in the city, felt his first call to do Christian work...Dwight L. Moody.
Does anyone really think that America today is lacking preachers, books, Bible translations, and neat doctrinal statements? What we really lack is the passion to call upon the Lord until He opens the heavens and shows Himself powerful."
It began with and will begin with prayer.
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