Ian Milmine, Revival's General Secretary

Revival Prayers by Ian Milmine

As we continue to consider the subject of revival prayer, we must be clear that we cannot create or work up a revival. We can remove hindrances to revival, which is what we have looking at in the past weeks, but we cannot restore life. We can humble ourselves before God, but only He can exalt us. We can lay the sacrifice ready, but only God can bring down the fire from heaven. We can turn to God in new consecration and faithfulness, but we have to acknowledge our own helplessness and cry to God.

How, then, should we think of revival in relation to ourselves? Is there any action, or strategy, or method we can employ that will aid the arrival of a mighty move from God?  Throughout its pages the Bible is clear that it is not by power or by might, but by God’s Spirit alone that we can expect revival. The bottom line is that God revives at His sovereign discretion. Should this thought discourage us? Just the opposite! For as we cannot ensure revival by our own preparations, so we cannot preclude it by our lack of preparation. As God can break in on the careless individual to convert him, so God can break in on the careless church to revive it. Therein surely lies our hope today.  Thus, the only thing we can truly do as a prelude to revival is to be praying for revival. [As we seek through our witness to lead churches back to a living biblical faith, we should cry to God to do what we ourselves cannot do-- to send the Spirit of life in new power. "O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years....; in wrath remember mercy" (Hab. 3:2).]

But, as I emphasised last week, we must come to God in prayer realising that we are in a solemn situation before Him. Our churches in the West are largely dormant, we could even say they are moribund.  For a church that isn’t growing is a church that is dead! And, as the letters to the 7 churches of Asia in Revelation chapters 2-3 show, stagnant churches stand under God’s judgement. There is no neutral state. If churches are not alive and faithful, a chastening visitation from the Lord is certain. And we must solemnly admit that the reason why our churches are stagnant is because its members are stagnant in their faith. A church that is conceited and complacent in its outlook can only expect to be brought lower and lower. The alarming thing is the apparent absence of alarm in our churches. We are sinners with no terror of sin or judgement. Oh, that God would laden our hearts with a heightened sense of failure and sin, and lead us in repentance to His throne of grace!

Why will not the preachers, churches and assemblies of our land unite in waiting on God in united prayer and intercession. Let there by fasting and confession of our need before the Lord, until He sends us a mighty baptism of Pentecostal revival fire, with a burning passion for lost souls, [so that thousands will be born again and their names written in heaven? ] Oh, for such a revival, world-wide, to the glory of God alone! As the famous American revival evangelist, Jonathan Edwards wrote, “When God has something very great to accomplish for His church, it is His will that there should precede it the extraordinary prayers of His people… and He will begin by remarkably pouring out the sprit of grace and supplications”.

Yes, we can do nothing to bring upon us such a sovereign act of God as a mighty revival, save humbling ourselves before Him and begging His mercy.  The first casualty of a Holy Spirit revival will be our pride and our disunity. We must decide what we prefer:  a rushing mighty wind of Holy Ghost power, or the storms of God’s judgements upon a dormant church!

Listener, I invite you to humble yourself before God and cry out for revival.

Ian Milmine, Revival's General Secretary

Revival Prayers by Ian Milmine

David Brainard ministered among Indian tribes in the North-eastern part of the United States during the 1700s. It was said of him that the snow would melt underneath him because he prayed so long for the Indians. He was God’s instrument to bring many to the knowledge of the Saviour. Why? Because his heart beat in harmony with the heart of God When our hearts beat in harmony with His, God will do incredible things to bring to pass those things for which we have interceded. The heart of God breaks for a lost and dying world. When our hearts feel the same burden, we will cry unto Him and He will hear and answer us. When a mother weeps for a wayward son, it touches the heart of God. When a father cries to God for His fallen children, it moves heaven to earth. When young people are broken over their schoolmates’ salvation, the Spirit of God is released from heaven to capture that school for Christ.

The shortest and yet one of the most powerful Scripture in the Bible is the one that simply says, “Jesus wept.” If God in human flesh wept, then we’ll also weep when we understand His heart. One of the trademarks of every time of true revival ever recorded is the gathering of people to weep in brokenness and repentance over their sins. Why? Because sin hurts the heart of God.  A second trademark of times of revival is God’s people weeping for those who are without Christ. God holds dear to His heart the tears of His children. He understands the hurts of humanity because He gave His own Son for those injured by their sins. As we pray with tears of sorrow for our sins, and tears of sadness for those who are lost, we are praying in harmony with God’s heart.  When we do this we can be sure that we are praying according to God’s will . One day, in His time, He will open the heavens and pour out a blessing upon us that’s beyond imagination.

It is prayer in harmony with God’s heart that can expect Him to reveal His glory. It is this kind of prayer that sets off the spark of revival. Do not expect God to revive us without first cleansing us. This is what His heart desires, although we may not be too keen. Remember the wonderful words of David in Psalm 51: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”. So you cannot expect God to send revival to others without first touching you. It is in my heart and yours where revival must begin.
Revival cannot come to us without any cost to us.  Until we have tuned our hearts to God’s heart, our wills to His will, it will not come.  Unless we are prepared to indefinitely set aside those things which hinder our coming to God on His terms, there can be no revival. Likewise, do not expect God to work revival without involving you in the work. We cannot pray for revival unless we are prepared to face up to the consequences and allow God to do what He has to do in us, and then through us.  We cannot expect God to send revival if we are hoping to return to our former way of living as soon as it is over.

Revival doesn’t happen as a result of a week of revival prayer meetings. It doesn’t happen because you have a good preacher in your church – God may choose to use you to be the one through whom He sparks revival! There is but one condition for revival that God has established, according to His heart – we find it in 2 Chronicles 7:14 “If my people, …shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and heal their land.”

This is where prayer for revival begins. O that we should stop paying lip service to revival, and humble ourselves before God, until our spirit is broken and contrite, that we may begin to want what God wants, and pray with His tears, and see His salvation. May God lead us to this kind of prayer!

Ian Milmine, Revival's General Secretary

Revival Prayers by Ian Milmine

Continuing this series on Revival Prayer, it seems to me that if there is one prayer that can bring a Christian into the frame of mind he needs to be in to begin to experience revival in his life, it is this: “Lord, give me a hungry heart.” Jesus said, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled” (Matthew 6:6). It is those who seek Him wholeheartedly who find God, says Jeremiah 29:13. And this is one prayer you can be absolutely sure God wants to answer: the prayer for a hungry heart that seeks wholeheartedly after Him.

However, this prayer implies that the pray-er is willing to accept any means God chooses to use to bring about revival in his or her life. We cannot dictate terms to God! We cannot put limitations on Him.  Now it’s entirely possible, in fact most probable, that the means God will use to produce in us a heart that hungers after Himself will not appeal at all to our natural sensibilities. First, God will have to forcibly separate us from our deep-rooted affection for the things of this life. How else will we be able to spend time with Him? Secondly, He will have to work on our self-love; that ingrained putting of oneself first that does not allow us to love God for whom we were created. This prayer will also require a great deal more patience and perseverance than we are accustomed to exercising; for it will require time for God to rid us of those things that our hearts have falsely learned to treasure.

In fact, before this process can truly begin, we first need to have a clear understanding and acknowledgement of the sin and sinfulness that lurks deep in our human heart. Unless we first come to God in recognition of our sinful state, and are willing to openly acknowledge and confess this to Him, we will never recognise the fact that it is impossible for us to do a single thing to transform our own lives. We will keep expecting to be able to achieve in ourselves the work which only God can do. It’s only when we recognise that our heart is sinful and rebellious, that we can begin to have an awareness that it is only God, by His grace and mercy, who can do the necessary work to change us on the inside, re-conforming our hearts after His own. [In fact it is only then that we will be conscious of the treachery of which our hearts are capable, so that we seek safeguards set up by the Holy Spirit Himself, against our heart betraying us into even the grossest sin. Yes, my brothers and sisters, this can happen even while we claim to be seeking wholeheartedly after God.]

So, if we are to see a personal spiritual revival in our own lives – something I’m sure all true Christians long for – we must understand that the way is not upwards, as one might think, but downwards.  The first step in spiritual revival is to humble ourselves before God, to acknowledge our unworthiness and inability to achieve anything of ourselves, and to seek God and His righteousness with real hunger and thirst. Everyone who ever experienced a revival of this kind had first to allow God to reveal the true condition of their life, to bring to their souls such a hunger and thirst that only humble confession and imploration to God would bring satisfaction, so that all the power, the honour and the glory may be God’s, not our own.

Are you prepared to make this your prayer? “Lord, give me a heart that is hungry for you”. Until next Monday, may God bless you.

Ian Milmine, Revival's General Secretary

Revival Prayers by Ian Milmine

O how we need God to change the spiritual condition of our nations.  What can we do?  The answer is: we can pray.   In the words of P.V. Jenness, “Revivals are supernatural demonstrations of God’s power. When will we learn to let God work in His own way? When will we spend more time in seeking to know what His way is than we do in devising human plans and methods which only bring us a sense of failure and loss? We need a revival. The church needs a revival. The world-hungry, restless, sin-cursed, dying needs a revival. God wants us to have it. Let us make every effort to meet the divine conditions and let us expect Him to answer by fire.”
He was small with sandy-coloured hair, straight nose and thick lips. At fifteen he began work at a local bank, where, being a merry lad, he was popular. He scoffed and swore and his father beat him for blasphemy. A year later his mother was away. He looked idly over his father’s books and found a tract. He picked it up, intending to read the story and skip the moral. He went into the barn behind the house and shop, curled up comfortably and began, convinced that he would put it down if the reading became heavy. As he read, one sentence gripped him. Suddenly he realised that he had approached religion from the wrong angle. He believed Christianity to be a dreary struggle to pay off bad deeds by good. He had long abandoned this struggle. He knew he owed too much – his sinful lifestyle had led him into spiritual bankruptcy, merely paying a small dividend to his Divine Creditor in the shape of chapel attendance and prayers rattled off at night, but with no hope of a full discharge of his debt.

One sentence in the tract broke open his mind to a sudden certainty that Christ by His death upon the cross had already discharged this debt of sins. As light was flashed into his soul by the Holy Spirit, the joyful conviction dawned on him that there was nothing in the world to be done but to fall down on his knees accepting this Saviour and His Salvation, and to live to praise Him for evermore. He had just gone seventeen. At the return of his mother, ten days afterwards, he ran to the door to tell her that he had such glad news to give. She replied as she hugged him, “I know, my boy. I have been rejoicing for a fortnight in the glad tidings you have to tell me.”  She said that 80 miles away, at the very same time as the incident in the barn, she had felt such overwhelming desire to pray for him that she spent hours on her knees and had arisen with the unshakeable conviction that her prayers were answered. The young man was Hudson Taylor, later the founder of the China Inland Mission.

Such is the power of a mother’s revival prayer. As you search the annals of church history, you’ll find that the people who have been greatly used of God have been men and women of prayer. They’ve learned to wait in the secret place of prayer and allow God to impart His heart to them. They’ve been people whose hearts have been passionate for the things for which God is passionate. George Mueller began orphanages for children in Bristol during the 1890s. He trusted God to meet their every need. He never asked for money, but he clothed, housed and fed many thousands of children. Near the end of his life he said that every person for whom he had prayed to come to Christ (with the exception of two), had come to know Christ as his Saviour. After Mueller died, those two people also came to a personal knowledge of Christ.

Why not make this your prayer?: “Lord God, make me a person of prayer, give me a heart for intercession until you take over in my life, in my family, and in my community. Amen”.

Ian Milmine, Revival's General Secretary

Former Spice Girls’ pop singer, “Mel-B”, tells how she recently spent a week on a run-down Council Estate for an ITV programme. She had to live with a family of five headed by a single mum, on £264 weekly Benefits. The house and area were vermin-infested, but what most struck her was the lack of any hope that she observed among these people. The 18-year-old son was so uninterested that he didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning even to sign on at the Jobcentre. She called the place, Apathy city, and recalls the time when she grew up in an area close by:

“My younger sister Danielle and I were given chores, such as setting the table at meal-times, and we did them. There was also a real sense of community where we lived – we all looked out for each other… My father Martin went to work every day and, at one stage, my mother held down three jobs. Danielle and I learned from watching them that we could have better lives by earning our own money… When I was younger I was a Girl Guide and attended Sunday school. I looked forward to going every week…”

A strong work ethic, Guides, Scouts and Sunday School used to be a key component of growing-up in Britain. Today these are replaced, among vast swathes of our population, by the kind of apathy and indifference described by Mel-B. The tragic spiral of family break-down has added further fuel to this apathy, especially among young boys. As Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, put it: “Family breakdown and the devaluation of marriage produce a generation of children with no concept of right and wrong.”

What should we, as Christ’s Church, do about this tragic and shameful situation in our nation? Jesus commanded us to be “salt” and “light.” In the past our forbears created the Sunday School movement precisely to reach out to generations of children who had no hope in life – it became a part of the 19th-century transformation of our nation! How can we, the Ambassadors of Christ today, respond to the need of our generation?

With loving greetings from all the Revival team,

Ian Milmine

“There is surely a future hope for you, and your
hope will not be cut off. Listen, my son, and be wise, and keep your heart on the right path.”

(Proverbs 23:18-19)

“Let your light shine before men, that the may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven”

(Matthew 5:16)