Revivals & Prayer

From p58 of "Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire":

“The history of past revivals portray this truth in full color… you always find men and women who first inwardly groan, longing to see the status quo changed – in themselves and in their churches. They begin to call on God with insistence; prayer begets revival, which begets more prayer. It’s like Psalm 80, where Asaph bemoans the sad state of his time, the broken walls, the rampaging animals, the burnt vineyards. Then in v18 he pleads, “Revive us, and we will call on your name.”

One of the questions that have made its way to me on a regular basis over the last couple of months goes something like this (with my own interpretive tone to it): “Is this prayer kick the latest River City fad? Is it possible that this is another product of our ADD culture that temporarily focuses on one thing until the next big thing comes along?”

I don’t actually fault anyone who wonders this. We probably have been guilty at times of failing to see something through that had begun with much excitement. It’s probably a question anyone serious about this topic would and should ask.

The best way I know how to answer it is to take a line from this quote at the top:

“The history of past revivals portray this truth in full color… you always find men and women who first inwardly groan, longing to see the status quo changed – in themselves and in their churches.”

This picture describes what has happened to me over the past 6 months. There is an inward sensation that I continuously sense, and a ‘groan’ is probably as close as I can come to putting a word on it. It is a groan to see the status quo changed – in our global world, in our city of Chicago, in our neighborhood of Humboldt Park, in our faith community River City. But as much as I groan to see the status quo changed in all of those, I might sense it deepest in the desire for the status quo to change in myself.

I don’t want to just do ‘church.’ I don’t want to fall into the many traps that lie before people in my space that range from moral shortcomings to apathy and powerlessness. I don’t want to fall into despair, losing hope that anything can ever change. I don’t want day after day to go by with no sense that God is mightily at work in my life and in our neighborhood.

So I groan inwardly. Not because I even want to groan, but because I don’t know what else to do. So I have began to call on God in a way that I never have before. I pray for the status quo to change. I pray for revival, repentance, and reconciliation. I pray that I will learn to pray better. I pray that we will learn to pray better. I pray that we will become people of prayer.

As I have studied revivals over the last couple centuries, I see more and more that it not something we can generate as much as it is something we respond to. God begins to stir our spirits, and we feel that sense of an inward groan. The inward groan leads to prayer and an increasing hunger for the manifestation of God in our lives. And that in turns produces a hunger for even more prayer…