Revival Hope

Again I'm hoping maybe it really isn't too late to save America, to have revival that resuscitates an entire nation and pulls it back from the brink of death.

Here's where Leonard Ravenhill would have us start:

...[I]f I could, I would like to call together thousands of preachers in different countries of the world to spend a week in prayer for renewal. I would like to see them given instruction in prayer; not seminars on prayer, mind you, but exhortation to pray. We would spend the whole week praying, with periodic breaks. I believe this could be a detergent in the life of the Church. It would be a cleansing process. We could go back to our churches and perhaps stave off judgment, and God would usher in the revival that must* come. [p. 95, America Is Too Young To Die. Christian Life Books paperback]

This ought to be a prayer in itself, but I've found that I can't pray that big. I can barely pray for thousands of preachers in America myself, let alone the whole world. Which I guess means I don't have the faith for a movement that large. But wouldn't it be great if thousands of us all over the nation prayed for this to happen?

It seems right that it should start with the preachers, the pastors of churches, and the elders and deacons. That's where the revival in the Hebrides under Duncan Campbell started, with the church leaders saddened by the falling away of the young people in the community and desiring to revive them, so getting together two or three nights a week to pray, while a couple of the elder women in the congregation prayed together at home at the same time.

We need a HUGE revival in America, a nation-wide revival, and of course a world-wide revival would be even better, but Ravenhill's book is about America under God's judgment and what it would take to save the nation, and the theme of my recent posts has been the same. America is going to go under completely if the churches don't rise to the occasion and pray out their hearts for revival. The same is true of all the nations of Europe and all I can do is hope the fire would spread there too.

And please, not the kind of revival they had in Brownsville with people passing out and jerking and flailing around as if that's the whole point of revival while the word of God hardly got heard, but a revival that majors in conviction of sin and repentance first of all, at all levels of the Church from the pastors on down. That's where REAL revival always starts and that's what the nation needs, after all, if judgment is to be averted.

There always seems to be less preaching during revivals from what I've read, God Himself doing the major work of it, but there must be some preaching of the truth if there isn't going to be a flood of false doctrine taking over. People can get saved but have some very strange ideas about Christian theology and someone has to teach them.

The very best book I've found on revival is Brian H. Edwards' Revival!

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