Reviving Prayer

really convinced that prayer changes the way God acts, and that God does bring about remarkable changes in the world in response to prayer, as Scripture repeatedly teaches that he does, then we would pray much more than we do. If we pray little, it is probably because we do not really believe that prayer accomplishes much at all. (Wayne A. Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, p377.)
I wish I was more of an expert at prayer. I am not; but I am learning. I wish I knew more about reviving prayer. If there was ever a man that the bible holds up as an example of fervent reviving prayer, it was Elijah. I would like to introduce us today to a man who certainly knew how to pray. I want to look at the prayer life of Elijah, since the dramatic events of his life are often seen as representing revival - we pray "send the fire" or "send the rain" - he saw both literally. Intriguingly, Solomon whom God is speaking to in the above promise had also seen literal fire, as did of course the early church in the book of Acts. Fire is very instructive to us about how God the Holy Spirit works.


The New Testament honors Elijah in the book of James
James 5: 16-18 The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
So what IS effective prayer? We will look at every recorded prayer of Elijah. We will begin in 1 Kings 17 where we find the first recorded prayer of Elijah. But before we launch into it, I want you to know that there is no doubt this was not the first prayer of Elijah. We know this for certain because the verse in James we just read tells us that Elijah prayed for the rain to stop. That prayer is not recorded in the scripture, which I think tells us that we must learn to pray in the secret place - I am very sure that Elijah will have prayed for all kinds of small things before he began to pray his "big prayers".
B. WHAT IS REVIVING PRAYER LIKE?
If there is one prayer in the whole bible that is an example of reviving prayer it is the first recorded prayer of Elijah which is found in 1 Kings 17. The widow who has been looking after the prophet Elijah during the great drought probably expected some kind of reward from God for doing so. What happens instead? Her son dies. This prayer is a prayer that quite literally brought a corpse back to life- it revived the boy. This should be enough to make us sit up and take notice and say "so what can we learn about prayer from this? Sometimes we have to be brought into a desperate situation that we have no "clever" answer to in order for us to be driven to prayer
"He gave no answer to her expostulation, but brought it to God, and laid the case before him, not knowing what to say to it himself." (Matthew Henry)
A REVIVING PRAYER - 1 Kings 17:20-21
And he cried to the Lord, "0 Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by killing her son?" Then he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried to the Lord, "0 Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again. "
1. Recognises the situation - doesn’t deny it. Eg Abraham (in Romans 4: 19) "He did not weaken in faith when he considered