JENA, La. (BP)–On a recent Wednesday evening, as my colleague placed his 15th baptismal candidate under the water, I received an e-mail from a national convention executive asking how the experience of the Jena revival could be replicated in his part of the country. I replied with my Blackberry, “Much prayer.” My personal thoughts were centered on Jesus’ response to the disciples’ inquiry as to why they couldn’t cast the demon out of the young man in Mark 9. “This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer” (Mark 9:29).
Humble, fervent prayer lies at the base of every great move of God. If we are to experience the hand of God moving in our Southern Baptist churches, we must be compelled to go to our knees in prayer.
This doesn’t mean we hold a prayer meeting on Wednesday night or schedule the latest prayer guru to lead an organized study on prayer. Nor does it mean we meet and articulate our wish list as if God was some sort omnipotent pizza delivery guy (You call in what you want and He will deliver). How presumptuous our American thinking can be.
The kind of praying that released the power of God in a broken community like Jena, La., is the kind that begins in the heart of a desperate individual. With no place to turn but to the Lord Himself, one falls to his/her knees and bows in surrender to the Lord, our King. Desperate, not manipulative prayer, moves the heart of God.
Pride resists such a display of humility. But obviously, at the point of individual and community brokenness, God desires to orchestrate something extraordinary. In Jena, I observed how at invitation time the men broke from their seats, briskly walked down the aisles and fell on their faces before God. These were the leaders of the church and the leaders of the families. Men from different races. Young men, median adult men, seniors. They humbled themselves and sovereignly, God moved toward His humbled people.
Two rows in front of me, a woman turned to a friend. You could read her lips, “Watch my baby, I’m going to the altar.” And she went to the altar and knelt. You could see her shoulders heaving with repentance.
The church’s interim pastor continues to say that the key to this movement is humbling ourselves before our Holy God, obedience to God’s Word and faith to trust God. Simple, yet profound. When these concepts are translated out of the worship center and into the community the next day, there seems to be a holy boldness that abounds. The homes, the community, the workplaces, the educational institutions and even the Wal-mart buzzes with the news about God working in response to humility, submission and faith.
A trucker stood before the congregation and testified that his wife who attended the meetings came home and looked him in the eyes and asked, “If you died tonight …?” He had heard the question before but this time it kept him up all night long and on Wednesday evening, he surrendered his life to Christ and became a candidate for baptism.
While lining up the candidates for baptism, a mom grabbed the sleeve of the interim pastor and said, “I’m lost and I want Jesus.” As the congregation waited a little longer for the Wednesday night baptismal service, she surrendered her life to Christ.
No pastor, no committee, no convention initiative can orchestrate this kind of response. There is no slick program or personality who can make this happen. No one can package a movement of God and put it in a box to be sold at LifeWay stores. Genuine revival is God’s people responding to the Spirit of God, the Spirit at work in the lives of people.
When He is moving, people humbly and fervently pray. This kind of praying is not what is experienced in most churches today. It’s not the kind of praying that some people in our churches have ever experienced. Some fear that honest, humble prayer will lead them to do something weird or to cause the body to utter something unintelligible. That is just the spirit of fear talking in someone’s head. When God moves, He moves in concert with His Word. Besides, how weird is confession of sin, restored relationships, or reconciled marriages and families? How weird is justice and racial equity? How weird is it for someone to surrender to the call of God?
When the heart is humbled the only opinion that matters is God’s. The expression of God moving in response to a broken and contrite heart delivers people from their cultural demons and restores His supremacy in the life of his child and his church.
The greatest challenge of the church today is our desperate need for a move of God. To discover what a move looks like, we must humbly pray and desperately seek Him.
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John L. Yeats is the recording secretary of the Southern Baptist Convention, director of communications for the Louisiana Baptist Convention and editor of LBCLive, the state convention’s missions magazine.
