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IT ALL STARTED BY ONE MAN WANTING TO PRAY
In 1857 there was a 46 year old man named Jeremiah Lamphere who lived in New York City. Jeremiah loved the Lord tremendously, but he didn’t feel that he could do much for the Lord until he began to feel a burden for the lost and accepted an invitation from his church to be an inner city missionary.
So in July of 1857 he started walking up and down the streets of New York passing out tracts and talking to people about Jesus, but he wasn’t having any success. Then God put it on his heart to try prayer. So he printed up a bunch of tracts, and he passed them out to anyone and everyone met. He invited anyone who wanted to come to the 3rd floor of the Old North Dutch Reform Church on Fulton St. in New York City from 12 to 1 on Wednesday to pray. He passed out hundreds and hundreds of fliers and put up posters everywhere he could.
Wednesday came and at noon nobody showed up. So Jeremiah got on his knees and started praying. For 30 minutes he prayed by himself when finally five other people walked in. The next week 20 people came. The next week between 30 and 40 people came. They then decided to meet every day from 12:00 to 1:00 to pray for the city.
Before long a few ministers started coming and they said, "We need to start this at our churches." Within six months there were over 5000 prayer groups meeting everyday in N.Y. Soon the word spread all over the country. Prayer meetings were started in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Washington D.C. In fact President Franklin Pierce started going almost every day to a noonday prayer meeting. By 1859 some 15,000 cities in America were having downtown prayer meetings everyday at noon, and thousands were brought to Christ.
The great thing about this revival is that there is not a famous preacher associated with it. It was all started by one man wanting to pray. People have been seeking God, and seeking a relationship with God through Jesus Christ for centuries.
(From a sermon by Rich Anderson, Seeking The Face Of Jesus Christ 2/18/2011)
What is Revival?
1. Revival is not a week worth of meetings.
2. Revival is not started in one day.
3. Revival is not controlled by man.
4. Revival is a heart thing.
5. Revival is always brought on by REPENTANCE.
6. Revival is renewed zeal to obey God
"HE LEAKS!"
A country church was having their annual revival meeting. On the first night the preacher preached a message about repentance and the need to return to the Lord. At the altar call, a man came down the aisle saying "Fill me Lord, fill me".
The next night the preacher challenged the congregation with the need to totally surrender their lives to Christ in complete obedience. Again the altar call was extended; like the night before the same man came down the aisle saying "Fill me Lord, fill me".
The third night of the revival preacher warned his congregation of the evils of sin and urged the congregation to live lives of holiness. Again at the invitation was made to give one's life to Christ, the same man came up the aisle saying "Fill me Lord, fill me".
To which someone in the back of the church yelled; "Don't do it Lord, He leaks!"
The truth of the matter is we all leak from time to time. We all lose our way, we tend to lose our first love or we wade in the pool of the lukewarm.
(From a sermon by Alan Tison, Remember What We Are To Do, 8/7/2010)
J. Edwin Orr, a professor of Church history has described the great outpouring of the Holy Spirit during the Welsh Revivals of the nineteenth century. As people sought to be filled with the Spirit, they did all they could to confess their wrong doing and to make restitution. But it unexpectedly created serious problems for the shipyards along the coast of Wales. Over the years workers had stolen all kinds of things, from wheelbarrows to hammers. However, as people sought to be right with God they started to return what they had taken, with the result that soon the shipyards of Wales were overwhelmed with returned property. There were such huge piles...
WHAT WILL YOUR HERITAGE BE?
An investigation into the famed 18th
century revival preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) showed that, of the 1,394
known descendants of Jonathan Edwards, 100 became preachers and missionaries,
100 lawyers, 80 public officials, 75 army and navy officers, 65 college
professors, 60 physicians, 60 prominent authors, 30 judges, 13 college
presidents, 3 United States senators, and one a vice-president of the United
States.
Another man of that era, Max Jukes, had 310 descendants who died as paupers,
150 criminals, 100 were drunkards, 7 were murderers, and more than half of
the women were prostitutes.
James Wilson
Jim Cymbala began at the Brooklyn Tabernacle as an ill-equipped, under-educated, time-strapped preacher who led a second congregation in New Jersey. The Brooklyn church had no money to pay him, a ramshackle building, and barely enough attendance to bother with weekly meetings.
Today, the Tabernacle hosts around 6,000 spirit-filled worshipers. The difference came when Jim, in a moment of desperation, set aside his planned message and called the church to pray. The weekly prayer meeting, not the Sunday worship, became the focal point of the Brooklyn Tabernacle.
Jim’s belief that "God can’t resist those who humbly and honestly admit how desperately they need him" (p. 19) guides his work. It is Prayer, not preaching that brings Revival.
Back in the 1880’s Nietzsche declared that "God is dead," and before the turn of the Twentieth Century, Shaw and Wells chimed in saying the 20th Century would mark the end of the world’s "religious phase."
Yet, today a church now meets in Russia’s Museum of Religion and Atheism-the former center of atheism. Nearly half of the United States’ population attend Worship on a regular basis while revival is sweeping through Latin America and Christianity grows behind China’s iron curtain.
Once a man asked an evangelist “how can we have revival?” The evangelist answered by asking “Do you have a place where you can pray?” Yes the man replied. Tell you what to do, go to that place and take a piece of chalk along. Kneel down there, and with the chalk draw a complete circle around you and pray for God to ...
DL Moody was a great evangelist from Chicago. He went to England once and met a young man there that wanted to preach in his church. Moody agreed thinking that he would never see him again. To his dismay he recieved a letter that said the young man would be in his town shorlty and wanted to take him up on the offer. Moody was going out of town that week and agreed to let the man preach, but he warned the deacons to be ready in case it was a real flop. When Moody returned from his business his wife informed him that revival had broken out in his church and that "he needed to be converted". The young man preached every night on the same text, John 3:16, speaking of the love of God, from his heart. Moody went and he said he was indeed converted. He said I used to preach the judgment side of the cross, now I focus on the grace side of the cross, I used to preach mainly on the wrath of God, now I preach he said on the love of God. His life and ministry were forever changed. We need to experience a renewal of the Love of Christ in our Lives.
Carlyle Fielding Ste, How Long Will You Limp?: "Too many churches today are devoid of the Spirit of Pentecost because they are dry and stale, where people are in a stupor; where worship services are wooden and so scripted that they are hollow; where the preaching is dull and flat; where the singing is Geritol-tired and without the vim and vigor which speaks of a crucified, died and risen Lord; where if anyone taps his foot and says, "Amen", he is stared into silence, and if anyone shouts, "Thank you, Jesus" the people call the EMS or 911! Too many churches have become mausoleums for the dead rather than coliseums of praise for a living God. They have lost the spirit of Pentecost! They have lost their enthusiasm. They have lost their joy for Jesus and find themselves suffering from what William Willimon calls "Institutional and Spiritual Dry Rot." If the Church is to survive the next millennium it must recapture some of the praise and enthusiasm it had two millennia ago."
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