Small beginnings

It's amazing what God can do when a few men and women pray for the Holy Spirit to move in them and the world around them.

There is, of course, the example of the first Pentecost.

In Acts 1, we read that after Christ ascended to heaven, a few followers of Jesus - men and women - "joined together constantly in prayer".

Then, at Pentecost, the Spirit descended like tongues of fire on each one and they began speaking in different languages, astonishing the people there from many nations.  When Peter spoke, he preached a sermon that struck many to the heart and 3,000 became believers that day.

It's a story that has been repeated many times since that time.

One of the revival stories that I return to often is the account of the outbreak of revival in the late 1850s in the United States.

Elana Lynse tells the story in her book Flames of Revival: Igniting the Hearts of a Nation Through Prayer.

In 1857, the Old Dutch Church in Manhattan, New York hired Jeremiah Lanphier to be a "lay visitor" to reach out to the unchurched people of New York.

Among the things he did was launch a weekly noon-hour prayer meeting in his church.  He printed a little pamphlet explaining what the prayer meeting was about and distributed it.

He said it was open to everyone and people could drop in whenever they wished during that hour and stay for as long as they wished.  They were to pray for whatever was on their minds.

The first day, no one showed up except Lanphier as the prayer meeting began.  Then, five others wandered in half way through the prayer gathering.

With this small beginning, great things happened.

Word spread and Lanphier's prayer meeting grew.  Soon people were meeting daily with up to 100 attending.

News filtered out across the United States where people started meeting in churches, stores, and public halls following Lanphier's pattern.

In early 1858, there were more than 20 prayer gatherings in New York alone.  At one point, someone estimated that more than 6,000 people were praying at meetings in the New York financial district in a one-hour time slot.  Fire and police departments and theatres opened their doors for prayer meetings.

In Chicago, 2,000 people crowded into the Metropolitan Theatre for prayer daily.

The impact on the nation was enormous.  Many became believers in Jesus Christ.

Lynse tells this delightful story: "At one large, crowded prayer meeting, a man was praying when his neighbour gave him a sharp shove with his elbow, grabbed his arm, and said, "Stop praying and tell me how I can become a Christian."

The revival even caught the attention of newspapers across the nation.

All it took was a small spark to set the United States alight.

I sense a growing movement of prayer in the United States and Canada - prayer for our nations, prayer for revival.

I want to be part of it.

Chrissy's story

Jim Cymbala says that "trouble is one of God's great servants because it reminds us how much we continually need the Lord."

Cymbala, pastor of Brooklyn Tabernacle Church in New York, tells of one of his greatest trials in his inspiring book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire and how persistent, united prayer pulled his oldest daughter Chrissy from the clutches of Satan.

By the time Chrissy rebelled, Cymbala had already been through some tough times which turned him, his family and his church to prayer.

Years before, he had been on the verge of burnout with a tiny congregation of less than 25 and no money when his in-laws invited him to Florida to recover.  While there, he was tearfully pouring out his desperation to God one day when he sensed the Lord telling him to pray and seek him and he would show him what to preach and provide him with all that he, his family and his church needed.

When he returned to Brooklyn, he told the congregation that the Tuesday night prayer meeting would be the "barometer of our church".  As people sought God in prayer, the Lord would move.

"No matter what I preach or what we claim to believe in our heads, the future will depend on our times of prayer," he said to his few listeners.

The results were indeed amazing.  People flocked to his church, becoming believers.  Many broken people were healed - some from severe drug problems.

But these blessings drove Satan to attack Cymbala's family through his daughter Chrissy.

When she turned 16, her rebellion began.  She eventually left home and her family often had no idea where she was.  She turned to drugs and lived with a boyfriend.  This went on for well over two years.

Cymbala admits he tried everything - begging, pleading, cajoling and even trying to control her with money.  He recognizes now that he was foolish in doing this.

The toll on Cymbala and his wife Carol was tremendous.

He wept as he drove to church on Sundays, wondering how he could minister to others when his whole heart was preoccupied with Chrissy.

After surgery for a hysterectomy, Carol Cymbala was particularly depressed and told her husband that they would have to leave New York to protect their other two children.  But she agreed to stay.

Even a good friend told Cymbala he should give up on Chrissy.

At this point, Cymbala felt God was telling him to do nothing further except to converse with God - in other words, he was to live what he was preaching on the power of prayer.  So he began to pray with growing faith that God would act.

Finally, at a Tuesday evening prayer gathering at Brooklyn Tabernacle, a woman in the auditorium sent Cymbala a note saying she sensed God wanted them to pray for Chrissy.

He stepped forward to the microphone and asked the congregation to pray for his daughter. People responded by praying all together - fervently - for Chrissy.  Cymbala said "there arose a groaning, a sense of desperate determination" as the people prayed to rescue the young girl from Satan.

That Thursday morning, Cymbala was shaving in the bathroom when his wife rushed in to say that Chrissy had returned home.

He hurried down to the kitchen, finding his daughter on her knees.  She begged his forgiveness and her mother's and God's.  Cymbala pulled her to her feet and they hugged and wept together.

Then, she asked her father: "On Tuesday night, Daddy - who was praying for me?"

She said that on that night God had woken her and showed her she was heading toward an abyss and there was no bottom.  She was frightened.  But "at the same time it was like God wrapped his arms around me and held me tight" and assured her he still loved her.

Chrissy went on to Bible college, married a young pastor and became very active in her own church.

Jesus promised his followers that they would face trouble.  But he also promised them he would be with them always.

Like Cymbala, we can expect trouble.

May we respond the way he ultimately did - by turning to God for help.

Renewed

A great principle of the Christian life - and prayer - is losing yourself before gaining everything in God.

If you are like me, surrendering yourself is hard.

I think of the bitter weeping of Peter after he denied Christ and the sobering conversation he had with his Lord by the Sea of Tiberias after the resurrection.

Peter loved Jesus but when the crunch came, he was afraid for his life.

Yet some weeks later, Peter stood bravely before thousands of Jewish listeners and proclaimed the good news, prepared to give his life for the Lord.

He was a witness of the power of the resurrection, the triumph of the cross.  And he was willing to give everything to tell others about this great truth.

In a sense, Peter was renewed.  He surrendered himself to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Ruth Haley Barton, author of Invitation to Solitude and Silence, says that we need to come to the end of ourselves, sacrificing our self-centredness, in order to be rejuvenated by the presence of God.

So, I ask myself am I willing to give up the praise of others, the pats on the back I get for what I do?  Am I willing to come before God and honestly admit my failures and weaknesses?  Am I prepared to confess that I am helpless - unable to walk in his footsteps - without his power?

John the Baptist said it best when his followers complained that people were following Jesus rather than him after Jesus had been baptized by John in the Jordan river.

John said in John 3:30: "He must become greater; I must become less."

The process of stripping can be hard, Barton writes.  We may become aware that our spiritual problems are not only caused by outside evil, "but also also a result of patterns of sin and brokenness that have hardened in and around our own heart".

Barton says that if we persist in turning to God during this time of stripping away our pride and self-sufficiency, "all of a sudden it becomes very quiet".

"The silence that comes after the chaos is pregnant with the presence of God."

In this silence, she says, "God grants a most powerful experience of his loving presence".

Barton, who went through this experience herself, writes that this becomes "one of the fullest experiences of the spiritual life".

"Finally, I am knowing in the depth of my experience that God is God for me and with me and in me."

For those who have taken this step, the renewal is worth the inner pain.

Parables and prayer

Pondering Jesus' parables can lead to a deeper experience of God than reading a theology textbook.

That's the suggestion in Joyce Huggett's book Praying the Parables.

Huggett discovered the power of stories when she and her husband spent time in Pakistan visiting villages and sharing the gospel.

On one occasion, she and village wives squatted on a mud floor while the men sat on chairs around them as Huggett's husband talked about Ephesians 5:25: "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her."

Rather than give a detailed academic explanation of the verse, Joyce's husband "told story after story of men who had cherished their wives and poured on them the kind of tender, liberating, unconditional, forgiving love with which Jesus loves his church".

Gradually, the women understood, smiling, nodding and giggling, as Huggett's husband said their husbands should love them as Jesus loved the church.

While these women would not have understood a Western-style sermon, "they were delightfully capable of entering theology Jesus-style," Huggett says.

She writes that we can plumb the depths of Jesus' parables in the same way, using them as a springboard for profound experiences of prayer.

Her little book explores several of Jesus' parables and various ways of praying them back to God.

For example, the parable of the sower in Matthew 13:1-9 can tell us a good deal about God and ourselves.  It speaks of a farmer sowing seed on different kinds of ground - a path, stony soil, thorny and weedy ground, and soft, nourishing earth.

What does it say about God?  Well, one way of looking at it is that God is offering the good news to everyone, no matter what is the condition of their hearts.  He is a great and loving Father who wants everyone to enter his family.

How about us?  The condition of our hearts and our readiness to open ourselves to God is vital.

That's just an off-the-top-of-the-head interpretation.  But Huggett goes well beyond that as she describes her own meditations on that one parable.

For example, she has imagined herself into the shoes of those who listened to Jesus in Palestine many centuries ago.  How would farmers and priests have responded to what he said?

What about the visual picture of tender seedlings being choked by weeds?  What does that prompt you to think and pray?

She recommends that we read the parables with a pen and notebook to record our thoughts as we meditate.  We should choose a comfortable and quiet place, recognizing that Jesus is with us.

Huggett has felt deep emotions on occasion as she reflects on the parables.  She finds they often touch her heart and lead her to pray for herself and her relations with God and other people.

Stories are about people and relationships.  God is about people and his relationship with us.

We can understand him better as we ruminate on the parables.

And the parables will drive us to prayer.