Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Please Pray for Me

I have an opportunity through the seminary that is exciting and terrifying! March 16-19 I will be preaching during revival meetings in a church outside of Spokane, Washington.

Please pray that God will send revival in my life, among the people of that church, and their community.

However, you may be asking, "What is revival?" Good question, I'm glad you asked. Here's two quotes that help describe it:
"[Revival is] the strange and sovereign work of God in which He visits His own people, restoring, reanimating, and releasing them into the fullness of His blessings." --Stephen Olford

"The renewal of the first love of Christians, resulting in the awakening and conversion of sinners... It reclaims the backslidden church and awakens all classes." --Charles Finney

In others words, it is when God visits in a powerful way that results in the salvation of sinners and the renewal (revival) of the saved.**

Since it is a move of God we, as Christians, cannot generate revival by having special meetings, music, or guest preachers. All we can do is pray and ask the Lord to revive us and leave it in His hands to do so. However, we may not be able to control or predict the wind, but we can set our sails so that it catches the wind if it does blow. For this reason, we have revival meetings.

So what are revival meetings? In my case it will be four days of special meetings at the church, sharing the Gospel in the community and doing other visitations. I will be preaching evangelistic messages for the congregation and any guests they bring as well as sermons geared toward following Christ.

Again, please pray for me. I took this assignment on faith. I have preached about 5 times in my life and now I will be preaching 5 times in 4 days.

I have to admit that I am extremely weak and to accomplish something like this is beyond me. But I want you to know that God is God and He can do awesome things through weak people. I hope to report to you in a month or so all the awesome things He did during that week.

Please pray for me. Did I mention I would like you to pray? On your mark, get set, pray!


**To see if revival is biblical, check out the following places:
  • Gen. 35:1-15 - Jacob's household
  • 2 Chron. 15:1-15 - Asa
  • 2 Kings 11-12; 2 Chron. 23-24 - Joash
  • 2 Kings 18:4-7 - Hezekiah
  • Nehemiah 9-12 - Nehemiah
Also, "the Lord calls the church to repent and return to an intimate love relationship (Rev. 2:2-4, 14-16; 3:1, 3, 15-16, 19)"

A lot of the ideas above were taken from the book Revival 101 by Dale Schlafer.

2 comments:

kman said...

Brother, I am praying for you. God will use your humility and genuineness to break through and reconcile men to Himself. I am praying for lives to be turned inside out and for Jesus to be made known. As Dr. Smith says about preaching: Good expository preaching is when the preacher disappears and Jesus is shown brightly through the text.

Keith

Gator said...

Preach On! Brother Bishop, Preach On!