For as long as I can remember, believers have prayed for revival. I have done so myself many times. We long for God to move powerfully among us, to awaken His Church and to bring people to Christ. There is something right about that longing.
I have wondered whether being revival ready means something more than waiting for God to do something dramatic.
Perhaps it begins by becoming involved in what God is already doing.
There is a striking little phrase in Zechariah: “For whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice” (Zechariah 4:10).
God’s work often seems to begin with small things.
Nehemiah asked how things were in Jerusalem. What he heard pierced him. He sat down and wept. Then he fasted and prayed (Nehemiah 1:2-4). Eventually, he rebuilt the walls.
Daniel discovered from Scripture what God had said concerning Jerusalem. Knowing what God intended to do did not make him passive. He turned to God “by prayer and pleas for mercy, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes” (Daniel 9:3).
Isaiah heard God ask, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” His response was simply, “Here I am! Send me” (Isaiah 6:8).
Jesus saw the crowds and had compassion on them because they were “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). He told His disciples to pray for labourers. Then, almost immediately, those same disciples were sent out into the harvest (Matthew 9:37-10:1).
There seems to be a pattern here.
We sometimes imagine that God first gives someone a great burden, and that burden causes them to become involved. Scripture shows the process working the other way round. People obey what God has already shown them, and involvement creates burden. Perhaps there are things we only see when we get close enough to see them.
Someone begins praying for a few people. Someone starts helping in a struggling church. Someone opens the Scriptures with another believer. Someone becomes concerned about a neighbourhood. Someone speaks to a person who does not know Christ. Someone says, “Lord, here I am.”
Something happens within them. What began as obedience becomes concern. The concern becomes a burden. The burden begins to affect their prayers.
Involvement Produces Burden, and Burden Changes Prayer
That may help explain why it is possible to pray for revival for years while remaining detached from the very people among whom we want revival to come. Revival can remain an idea or something wonderful that we hope God will one day do.
Nehemiah could no longer think about Jerusalem abstractly. He knew its brokenness. Daniel carried the condition of his people before God. Jesus looked at actual faces in an actual crowd and was moved with compassion.
When we become involved in what God is doing, His concerns become our concerns.
There is another side to this. The burden God allows us to carry may eventually become too large for us.
Moses reached that point. He told God plainly, “I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too heavy for me” (Numbers 11:14).
Paul knew the same sense of inadequacy. Faced with the enormous responsibility of ministry, he asked, “Who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Corinthians 2:16). A little later he gives the answer: “our sufficiency is from God” (2 Corinthians 3:5).
Perhaps that is part of God’s purpose in the burden.
We become involved. We begin to care. We start praying differently. Then we discover that what needs to be done is far beyond us. That brings us to dependence upon God.
This may be one of the places where revival begins. Not with people who believe they know how to produce it, but with people who have become sufficiently involved to know that they cannot.
Haggai describes a moment when the people heard God’s word and obeyed it. Then we read, “And the LORD stirred up the spirit” of the leaders and the people (Haggai 1:14). They obeyed, and God stirred.
Perhaps being revival ready is less about waiting for God to give us something dramatic to do and more about responding to what He has already placed before us.
The prayer may begin simply: “Lord, show me where You are already at work, and help me to become involved.”
We may discover that the burden comes afterwards.