May 24
Send A Great Revival! by Dr. D. James Kennedy
…O Lord, revive Your work in the midst of the years!…Habakkuk 3:2
Today we’ll look at revival. Particularly, we’ll look at some great revivals of the past.
Perhaps the most notable revival of the twentieth century happened in 1904 and 1905 in the tiny land of Wales. This revival started with a few people fervently praying. The prayers of these people had powerful results.
Churches that had been one-fourth full of apathetic Christians began to come alive. The Spirit of God fell on various towns, moving everywhere. Within five months, over a hundred thousand people in that small land converted to Christianity! The bars in many towns had to shut down completely, and the jails were emptied and closed!
Another powerful revival happened years ago on the battleship North Carolina. While this battleship anchored in New York harbor, four young men out of a thousand got together. They could find no other Christians, but they asked for a room where they could meet and pray. They were assigned a little room way below the waterline, and day after day they faithfully met together to pray. They prayed that God would pour His blessing upon that ship.
Finally one day the Spirit of God descended, the sailors’ hearts burned within them, and they knew that God was present. They began to sing praises to God, and their hymns of praise wafted up through the ship. Hearing the singing, rough sailors came down to mock the four men, but when these rough men entered the room, the power of God’s Spirit gripped them.
These men fell to their knees. Eventually, hundreds converted to Christianity, and a great revival swept the entire ship. In fact, the revival carried from that ship to others.
The same God who changed these men, the same God who changed Saul of Tarsus into Paul the Apostle, can change anyone. Today pray that God will bring revival to our nation, especially to the people whom you’d least expect would give their lives to Christ. He can work through you as you faithfully pray.
Revival is a sovereign act of God, whereby He intervenes to lift the situation completely out of human hands and works in extraordinary power. —Jeffrey King
We are celebrating Memorial Day this weekend. It is the holiday wherein we honor those who have sacrificed their lives for the nation in which we live. Consider for a moment the foundation upon which that nation is built: truth, honor, opportunity, equality, freedom of expression, freedom of religion.
The only religion in the United States at its inception was Christianity in its various forms, and yes, there were a smattering of Jews--all the faiths represented were oriented around the sacred texts of Christians and Jews.
Today, there is a turning aside from the faith on which this nation was established, and there has been an erosion of the principles in which that faith anchored us as a people.
Today, as we honor the memory of those whose lives were laid down that our nation and its governing principles might live, let us supplicate Heaven that He who governs the affairs of men might revive us again! Let us pray that His Holy Spirit will wash over us as a people!
Let us pray that old and young, weak and strong, poor and rich, black and white, religious and irreligious might be washed over and cleansed through by the coursing power of the Holy Spirit of the Living God!
Let us pray that we will fall on our knees before the One who died to set men free from the chains of sin--the sins of hatred, adultery, murder, theft, deception, prejudice, mallace of any sort--that we might be free to worship the Christ in the beauty of holiness and reestablish our country on Him and the principles our founding fathers cherished.
Let us pray that this Memorial Day will find us reflecting upon not only those who gave themselves for this nation but also upon the principles upon which these United States were founded--that were and still are worth dying for!
JESUS, HELP US REMEMBER, AND REVIVE US AGAIN!
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