Prayer Is The Living Springs From Which Revival Blessings Issue!
By Hubert C. Mitchell
The Lord’s disciples did not plead, “Lord, teach us to preach or to sing.” They cried, “Lord, teach us to pray!” (Luke 11:1).
God help us to make the same request from our blessed Lord. May He have mercy on our carelessness and our prayerlessness! How can we go on as we are with the world falling apart all around us?
Pastors! Preachers! Evangelists! Missionaries! Keep the challenge of prayer before your people continually! One night of prayer a week in your church would bring revival to your community. Do not worry about crowds. Start with a faithful few. Persevere! Keep doggedly at it! Jesus said that “where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst” (Matt. 18:20). That is all you need to begin with!
Night praying is not easy. Here is where you will have to plead the same request as the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray.” The stomach has to be disciplined and the natural mind crucified. Every member of our body has to be brought under the yoke.
Come, all ye faithful shepherds! Come, all ye laborers in the harvest, and ye soldiers of the Cross of Christ! Come! Put some fire and blood, some steel and fight into your Christianity! Our cry is for a militant church! A church that will attack, and Christians who will take the initiative against the foe. This takes courage! It takes boldness! It takes wrestling in prayer!
Prayer, and more prayer, and prayer with fasting – is the only answer to today’s spiritual and moral needs in the church and the nation. Let us open our churches then for prayer. Let us call the Lord’s people to nights of prayer or half-nights, once a week or even once a month.
Pay the Price
The church has a problem today, and a big one. We don’t want to pay the price of waiting on God for the power of the Holy Spirit! Real intercessory and prevailing prayer is sacrifice. Why don’t we sacrifice and suffer for our faith and our living Lord? Our forefathers did. The apostles did, and so did the early church.
Pagans keep their temples open night and day. They burn their incense and light their unholy fires day and night. The unbelievers of this world take fables and traditions to be facts. They will sacrifice and suffer for some god or goddess and do it with supreme devotion. They will give their last ounce of strength and their last coin for some worthless cause or belief.
We Christians have and hold the most cherished fact of all the ages, and yet we treat it like a fable. Many a time, in India, I have been kept awake at night by non-Christians who prayed and cried all night long to their gods. Someway, somehow the simple, primitive and sincere drive exemplified by the early church is not in the warp and woof of our 20th century Christian structure.
Are you a driver or a drifter? The drifter spends minutes with his Bible…the driver spends hours in the “Book.” The drifter spends moments in prayer…the driver prays for hours. The drifter stays up late at night, puttering around, and gets up in the morning just before the call for breakfast. The driver redeems the time and is up at the crack of dawn, seeking the face of God. The driver is memorizing verses every day, and storing away great portions in his heart. The drifter never wins. The driver is more than conqueror through Jesus Christ our Lord. If we do not drive we will drift. Remember – “and so much the more as ye see the day approaching” (Heb. 10:25). Let’s drive!
I challenge every reader of this article to spend a full or a half-night of prayer once a week in your home or in your church and cry out to the Lord for revival in our land…for sense enough to obey God and do what He told us to do…for a Spirit of repentance to come upon all of us and especially upon you and me!
It is God’s hour for revival! Every revival has had its roots in a prayer meeting. Therefore, pray ye!
“O Lord, revive Thy work” (Hab. 3:2).