Day Twenty-One: Could there be another great awakening in America?
Scripture: Mark 9:14-29
Principle: Revival will only come through prayer.
I pray that over the course of these 21 days that prayer has become as essential as breathing to you. I also want to give you one more challenge. If you are reading this, then I probably don’t have to convince you of our world’s need for a revival. When I talk of revival I mean:
“the Holy Ghost descending upon a church or a community or a country in power and in might, in an unmistakable manner, breaking men down and perhaps even casting them physically to the ground. It leads to agonies of repentance and longings for peace and salvation.”37
In Martyn Lloyd Jones’ book “Revival” he makes the case that in today’s reading of Mark 9:14-29 the church is represented by the disciples and the demon possessed man is the world. The reason the church has failed to cast out the demon is because we are using the wrong methods. The disciples had cast out demons before and most certainly approached this one with the same way they used in many other cases, which had been successful. But this was a different kind of demon which required a different technique. The times in which we live are different times and require a different method. Not that the other methods are wrong or don’t work, it’s just that they don’t work in all circumstances. Today requires the church to recognize that it does not have the power to bring revival. It doesn’t have the strength to restrain the tide of evil. It must feel its need for God who is the only one with the power to turn the tide and the church must confess this and appeal to God for His strength and power.
This does not have to start with church leaders. It can start as a grassroots movement of individuals. It starts with you. When you recognize your own desperate situation and that everything you’ve tried has failed. Then know that this revival it is of a different kind and will require you to do something different.
“We must become utterly and absolutely convinced of our need. We must cease to have so much confidence in ourselves, … We have got to realize that we must be filled with God’s Spirit. And we must be equally certain that God can fill us with his Spirit.”38
What is needed is prayer.
Application: Pray:
“Jesus, Master, have mercy upon me! I wake this morning poor, wretched, empty, and needy—as though I never before had heard of your dear name, or had never been living upon your fullness.”39
Ask Him to fill you with His Spirit. Pray for revival.
37Tony Sargent, Gems from Martyn Lloyd-Jones: An Anthology of Quotations from “the Doctor” (Milton Keynes, England; Colorado Springs, CO; Hyderabad, AP: Paternoster., 2007), 257
38David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1987), 19.
39Robert Hawker, “Seeking Jesus for Yet More Grace,” in Piercing Heaven: Prayers of the Puritans, ed. Robert Elmer (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), 45.