Skip to main content

How to Pray for Revival: Part II, by Ray Ortlund

By Anonymous


How to Pray for Revival: Part II
By Ray Ortlund

Last week, I (Pastor Charlie) shared with you that Pastor Kevin, Karen, and I traveled to California to meet with the pastors and leaders of the Treasuring Christ Together Network (TCTN). The TCTN is our family of churches, and the Lord truly blessed our time together. As I was praying for our gathering a couple of weeks ago, my heart was filled with desire to pray for revival for our country and thus last week I shared Part I of a very good article by Ray Ortlund on how to pray for revival. Here’s Part II. Please read it carefully and more importantly, join with me in praying that God will pour out his grace and power upon our land. Ortlund writes…
“When Jonathan Edwards described the awakening in his church, he had to use words like ‘surprising,’ ‘extraordinary’ and ‘astonishing.’ The Bible says of the early church that ‘awe came upon every soul’ (Acts 2:43).  We can’t program that into our worship: 10:45 am – Awe comes upon every soul. Since revival is of God, we should pray for it. But how? The Bible teaches us how to pray; Isaiah 63:15-64:12 is a biblical prayer for revival…
“LAMENTING OUR OWN SINFULNESS: ‘In our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?’ (64:5). Isaiah is not blaming God for our sins, but he is saying God can hand us over to the power of our sins. It’s easy to think, ‘We’ll never change. Nothing will ever change.’ After all, it’s not as though we fell just yesterday. We have long histories running contrary to God. Let’s admit it to him. Let’s admit how helpless we are. Let’s hurl ourselves at Christ, the mighty friend of sinners.
“LONGING FOR THE TOUCH OF GOD: ‘We are the clay, and you are our potter’ (64:8). If we are the clay and God is the potter – if God is sovereign over us – why pray? Because we are the clay and he is the potter! We lie in his power. He can touch us again and reshape us in new ways. Nothing in us limits God.
“FINAL APPEAL: ‘Will you restrain yourself at these things, O Lord? Will you keep silent, and afflict us so terribly?’ (64:12). Oh, that God would visit us with unrestrained power! Nothing in us can hold him back. Only God controls God. We therefore cry out to him, to vindicate the holy name of Jesus Christ in our time.
“Will you join me in praying for revival, as the Bible instructs us to?”

Ortlund, Ray. “Revivals and Church History.” SermonIndex.net. http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=38693&forum=40 (accessed October 21, 2016).





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To Have My Soul Happy in the Lord, by George Muller

By Anonymous
To Have My Soul Happy in the Lord By George Muller “It has pleased the Lord to teach me a truth, the benefit of which I have not lost for more than fourteen years. The point is this: I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord, or how I might glorify the Lord, but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. “I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God—not prayer, but the Word of God. And here again, not the simple reading of the Word of God so that it only passes through my mind just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what I read, pondering over it, and applying it to my heart. To meditate on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed. And that thus,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reflective Glory: How the Moon Displays the Mercy of God

By
Our sun is a fitting metaphor for the glory of God. In the context of our solar system, it is massive, bright, beautiful, powerful, self-sufficient, heat-producing, life-giving, and dangerous. It is, by far, the dominant feature of our solar system and without it the system would fling apart and all living things therein would die.  On the other hand, our moon is a fitting metaphor for human beings, especially for those who believe in Jesus Christ. First, compared to the sun, the moon is tiny and dim. The sun is 400 times larger than the moon, its mass is 27 million times greater than the mass of the moon, and from our perspective its light shines 450,000 times brighter than that of the moon. The sun is so much greater than the moon that it’s difficult to quantify and express the difference. Likewise, the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is so much great than each and all of us that it’s impossible to quantify or express the difference. Indeed, the Lord is very great and greatly...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Children Say "I'm Bored" By Julie Lowe

By
This Article is written by Julie Lowe and was originally posted on the CCEF blog.  I highlighted the areas of particular interest. I had already prepared a blogpost on dealing with boredom from a Christian worldview and then came across this. There is much overlap between the two, perhaps this one is more concise while my work attempts to explain the connection between the ability to think and the ability to be happy. You can visit the original blogpost in the link provided below.  https://www.ccef.org/resources/blog/children-say-im-bored   We have a common crisis in our home; it is the calamity of boredom. Our children might even consider it a catastrophe. “I’m bored” is repeated so often it would not be an overstatement to say that these words echo continuously throughout our home especially during any break from school. These are children with limited media time but still children with a Wii and Xbox system, a pool outside our door, multiple games, toy...
Post a Comment
Read more