Should We Pray for Revival?

Last night messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Baltimore gathered to pray for revival. They prayed God would move in our churches and in our nation so that we might see Christians filled with God’s power and more people come to Christ. Influential Atlanta pastor Andy Stanley tweeted a string of observations that caused a stir. He argued that we shouldn’t pray for revival, instead working harder to do what we already know to do and praying for the boldness to do it.

This reinforces the prevalent idea among many churches that reaching people is simply of matter of doing the right things so we will produce the right results. While this does recognize that God has ordained means to accomplish His purposes, it ignores the truth that God supplies the power to do what He has called us to do. I am afraid we are advocating a view of church that could continue even if God did not exist.

Martyn-Lloyd Jones, the influential Pastor of Westminter Chapel in London from the 1940s to the 1960s, wrote and preached extensively about our need for revival. The following quotes about revival from Dr. Lloyd-Jones show the necessity of praying for revival and the foolishness of relying on our methods and ingenuity.

“If you and I are not praying for revival there is only one explanation. It is that we do not realise the nature of the problem confronting us. We think that we can still do it by means of organisations or other activities, but once we see what man really is in sin, we know that nothing short of the power of God can possibly deal with him.”

“We can produce a number of converts, thank God for that, and that goes on regularly in evangelical churches every Sunday. But the need today is much too great for that. The need today is for an authentication of God, of the supernatural, of the spiritual, of the eternal, and this can only be answered by God graciously hearing our cry and shedding forth again his Spirit upon us and filling us as he kept filling the early church.
What is needed is some mighty demonstration of the power of God, some enactment of the Almighty, that will compel people to pay attention, and to look, and to listen. And the history of all the revivals of the past indicates so clearly that that is invariably the effect of revival, without any exception at all. That is why I am calling attention to revival. That is why I am urging you to pray for this. When God acts, he can do more in a minute than man with his organizing can do in fifty years .”

“Pray for revival? Yes, go on, but do not try to create it, do not attempt to produce it; it is only given by Christ himself. The last church to be visited by a revival is the church trying to make it.”

For Further Reading:
Revival by Martyn Lloyd-Jones