Urgent Prayer For Revival
A courageous determination in the life of the men God uses in revival is seen in their boldness in prayer. They are never flippant and careless before God, nor are they over-familiar or presumptuous; but they are bold. One of the most powerful prayers recorded in the Bible comes from the lips of Daniel, who confessed his sin without reservation (Dan. 9:1-16) and then boldly urged God to respond: "Now, our God, hear the prayers and petitions of Your servant. For Your sake, O Lord, look with favor on Your desolate sanctuary. Give ear, O God, and hear; open Your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears Your name. We do not make requests of You because we are righteous, but because of Your great mercy. O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act! For Your sake, O my God, do not delay, because Your city and Your people bear Your Name" (Dan. 9: 17-19). All the ingredients of great and confident praying are found in that great cry of Daniel: an honest confession of sin and a total lack of confidence in himself are contrasted with Daniel's conviction that God must respond to defend His great name and honor.
The Priority of Prayer
You cannot read far into the story of a revival without discovering that not only is prayer part of the inevitable result of an outpouring of the Spirit, but, from a human standpoint, it is also the single most significant cause. "In the first month of the first year of his reign, [Hezekiah] opened the doors of the temple of the Lord and repaired them" ( 2 Chron. 29:3). The fact that this was the first recorded action of his reign shows that he made it a priority. Opening the doors of the temple was his way of re-establishing his relationship with God, and that of the people, because the Holy Place was in the temple, and it was there that the high priest brought the prayers of the nation before God.
Hezekiah started here because he was aware that this was the root of the people's trouble: "Our fathers were unfaithful; they did evil in the eyes of the Lord our God and forsook Him. They turned their faces away from the Lord's dwelling place and turned their backs on Him" (v.6). That was their sin--prayerlessness. And Hezekiah started at that point. We cannot overstress this. What Hezekiah did in that action of reopening the temple was to bring himself back into a true and prayerful relationship with God. Those whom God uses in revival are men and women of prayer. That is their great priority. And this is true of a community also. If we really want God in revival, we must ask for it. Our fundamental problem today may be a simple one: "You do not have, because you do not ask." And when we do ask it is half-hearted and insincere, "because you ask with wrong motives" Jas. 4: 2 &3). We want revival to improve our reputation, vindicate our theology, add to our denomination, or just to encourage or excite us. In other words we want revival for our sake, not God's.
Desperate Prayer
When the Holy Spirit saturated the 120 on the Day of Pentecost, they had been in desperate prayer. And I use that word "desperate" carefully. Our Lord left them alone for what must have seemed an eternity; they were terrified of the Jews and Romans, and on this particular occasion were locked in the upper room. That was the position God wanted them in. He wanted them at an end of their own devices and without any confidence in themselves. They must have been praying in desperation. This was the moment God came. Generally among the churches in our country today we have not reached that point. We have masked our failure by extravagant claims and glittering showmanship. Only when we realize and admit our true condition will we long for revival. Praying for revival is not enough: we must long for it, and long for it intensely. We have our revival prayer meetings, but we are neither confident in God's willingness to answer, nor desperate for the answer.
Prayerful Leaders
In describing how revival comes we can never overlook the part that urgent prayer and confident expectation play. There must be, especially among the leaders, the determination that God will come, that He must come. Jonathan Edwards argued that it is through intimacy with heaven that men are made great blessings in the world. And his carefully disciplined prayer life gave his congregation in Northampton, New England, an example of this. Nearly a century after Edwards first saw revival in New England, Daniel Baker was greatly used by God on the same continent. After his settlement as pastor of the Independent Church in Savannah in 1828 he spent a day "in fasting, humiliation, and prayer." The site he chose for this was a brick tomb in a cemetery, but it became a Bethel! His cold congregation was revived, his ministry was transformed and, until his death in 1857, Baker saw the continuous hand of God on his ministry with hundreds converted.
Almost every Christian leader today laments a lack of personal prayer, but very few are determined to do anything about it. We are not sufficiently concerned to make a radical alteration in our diaries and get down to the "unproductive" and unnoticed battle of assaulting heaven. We would all prefer to be compared with Hezekiah rather than his father Ahaz, but it was the latter who "shut the doors of the Lord's temple," and in our lack of prayer we have done just that. When Hezekiah received news of a national emergency, he went straight to God (2 Kgs. 19: 14-19), but, faced with an emergency among the churches, we prefer to tackle the problem ourselves.
Prayerful Churches
But prayer cannot be left only to the leaders. Churches must pray also. Joel 2: 15-17 is a vital passage for us to come to terms with: "Blow the trumpet in Zion, declare a holy fast, call a sacred assembly. Gather the people, consecrate the assembly; bring together the elders, gather the children, those nursing at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room and the bride her chamber. Let the priests, who minister before the Lord, weep between the temple porch and the altar. Let them say, 'Spare Your people, O Lord. Do not make Your inheritance an object of scorn, a byword among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, "Where is their God?"
Here is a community of the people of God called to pray for revival, and it clearly involved a radical alteration of their regular program. The first hint of revival is frequently a stirring in the life of prayer in the church. However, it is frequently the example of the leaders that brings about this burden for prayer in the church. Hezekiah set the example for the people by his own commitment to God in prayer. When Paul urged Timothy to prayer ( 1 Tim, 2:1), it was in the context of a letter to a Christian leader.
