iShare 2011

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Pacific Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Prayer and Revival

Melody Mason

Revival

I want to welcome you this morning to this seminar, The Secret to Continuous Revival and Answered Prayer.

And before we begin, let's just bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for bringing us here together.

Thank you for the amazing things that you are doing on behalf of your people as they're seeking after you and also as they're seeking to spread the words of life, Father, around the world.

Right now we just ask that your spirit would be with us as we study your word and examples from scripture.

You know it is our desire to walk with you in a continuous relationship of abiding and trust and to experience revival on a greater and greater level, Father.

So we just ask that you would be with us.

I ask that you would give me your words, that these would not be my own, but that you would speak through me right now.

And I thank you and praise you for what you're going to do in your precious name, Amen.

I have a lot that I want to share with you this morning so I'm gonna probably move pretty quickly and try not to go over time here.

I don't know about you but probably many of us can relate to the fact we have our mountaintop experiences.

We go to this conference or that conference and it's like we experience revival.

Or maybe we spend a summer doing literature evangelism and we experience God working and it's so amazing.

But then we go back to our school or back to our studies or back to life, regular life, and it's like you kind of begin to lose that walk or that relationship where you feel like I'm not experiencing the revival like I was.

He wants us to have this revival continually and to continue to grow.

So this morning I'm actually going to be talking 2 themes.

They work together but it's revival and answered prayer and I'm going to start with revival first.

We're going to run through this really quickly.

First off, when we talk about secrets to continuous revival, this is ABCs.

This is we must be people of the Word and of prayer And this is so obvious and yet we miss it time and time again.

In 2 Timothy 2.15 it says, study to show thyself approved unto God.

So we must be continually studying to show ourselves approved unto God.

Acts 17.11 says, and these were more noble in Thessalonica, and that they searched the scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.

They didn't take the things that they were hearing or others were speaking, but they were searching themselves continually, daily, to see whether those things are so.

And as we know, as we get closer and closer to the end, we're going to have a lot of different counterfeits, a lot of different confusion over what God is doing in his church.

And we have to be continually grounded in the word.

And that's why I bring people back to Isaiah 820 that says, to the law and to the testimony.

If they speak not according to this word, it's because there is no light in them.

I love these quotes from Great Controversy, page 595 and 601.

And you can just follow along with me as I read it.

It says, God will have a people upon the earth to maintain the Bible and the Bible only as the standard of all doctrines and the basis of all reforms.

We are living in the most solemn period of this world's history.

The destiny of Earth's teeming multitudes is about to be decided.

Our own future well-being and also the salvation of other souls depend upon the course which we now pursue.

We need to be guided by the spirit of truth.

Every follower of Christ should earnestly inquire, Lord, what wilt thou have me do?

We need to humble ourselves before the Lord with fasting and prayer and meditate much upon his word, especially upon the scenes of the judgment.

We should now seek a deep and living experience in the things of God, we have not a moment to lose.

So when I say the first secret in experiencing continuous revival in our hearts is we have to continue to be in the Word and in prayer or we are not going to have that experience.

Number 2, we need to realize that it's a daily walk.

You know, I don't know about you, but when I was younger, when I was a child, I would always like live in the future.

It's like, next month is my birthday, I can't wait till this happens, or next year I'm going to be old enough I can go away to camp or to do this or that.

And you often, even in our lives now, we can be looking forward and experiencing the future and not realizing that we are today to walk with Jesus, today to abide with him.

We went to this powerful GYC event, or we went to this powerful iShare event, and that was a great experience, and we continue to live on that experience.

We must breathe today, like Doug was saying, with the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is a daily walk and there's a number of scriptures, I didn't put all the references here.

But just the emphasis on scripture is not living on the past or living on the future.

It is to look forward with hope to the future.

Walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.

Walk in the spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called.

Walk in love, walk as children of light, walk after the Lord your God.

As you've received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him." So again, This is so basic, so simple, and yet, you know, for years in my own life, I didn't catch the significance of this daily walk.

I was always living on something that had happened before, or living on something that I was looking forward to in the future, when I didn't realize today, today, what does God have for me in his word today?

What does he want to show me through prayer today?

What does he want me to reach out or help someone today?

So, the first 1 is being in the word and in prayer and then realizing number 2 that it is a daily walk.

And here we have a couple verses talking about today.

Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts as in the provocation from Hebrews 3.15, but exhort 1 another daily while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sins.

First Corinthians 15.31, nevertheless I must walk today, tomorrow, and the day following.

We have to realize that the past is under his blood.

Whatever has happened to us in the past, however he's forgiven us, how he's worked, it's under his blood.

There's a powerful quote from that I may know him, page 63.

God will not occupy a divided heart or reign from a divided throne.

Every rival that holds the affections and diverts them from the God of love must be dethroned.

The Lord demands all that there is of us that there must be no reserve.

We are his heritage and we are to be honored by being co-labors with Jesus Christ.

Wear the yoke with Christ and daily walk with God.

By laying hold upon the help which God has provided.

The Lord has said, ask and it shall be given you.

Knock and the door shall be opened unto you." Okay, the third secret to continuous revival is the humility of brokenness.

And here I've listed several different verses that talk about the sacrifices of God are broken spirit, are broken in a contrite heart.

It talks about how he's close to those that are of a broken and humble heart.

For thus saith the high and lofty 1 that inhabits eternity whose name is holy, I will dwell in the high and holy place with him also that is of a contrite heart and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones from Isaiah 57, 15.

Let me talk a little bit more about what I mean when I talk about brokenness.

In a book called Secrets to Victorious Living by Norman Grubb, he actually makes a really interesting statement.

I just put it here so you can read along with me.

He says, We're not isolated units living in a vertical relationship with God.

We are members of a human family also with whom we live in a horizontal relationship and our obligations are two-way.

Biblical Support for United Prayer

I'm going to just talk with you, share some testimonies actually about the power of United Prayer, which is specifically what we're going to focus on today, and then going to talk about how we could make United Prayer a more practical part of our lives.

So hopefully that's what you're excited about because that's why you're here or because that's where you are here in the in the conference.

So let's just bow our head again for a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this time that we can be together and meet together And I thank you for your word and how you encourage us to take time apart to pray and to pray unitedly.

I think of the promise in Matthew 18, 19 that says, if 2 of you shall agree as touching anything that you ask, it shall be done for you of our Father which is in heaven.

And Father, we want to claim that promise and we want to praise you for how you have answered in response to that promise in our own lives, Father.

So just be with me as I share and thank you for this opportunity.

First off, when we talk about United Prayer, I want to make a disclaimer.

There's a lot of different things that are happening in the church, you know, both in the secular world and even in our own church, that are not biblical methods of prayer, that have their roots in mysticism and the occult.

You have different terms going around like spiritual formation, contemplative prayer, prayer centering, many different things.

And some of us probably have never even heard of these things.

And I don't encourage you to study very far into them but I think it is good that we know and realize what is going on and what we need to avoid.

Most appropriately is by knowing what the truth is, right?

Like as in the counterfeit, people that are trained to study the dollar bill or to know counterfeit money, they don't spend all their life studying the counterfeit, they spend their life studying the true and the genuine, so then when the counterfeit comes, they know what it is.

So I just want to share that at the beginning, that we do not support any of those methods.

And we'll be sharing more about practically why or what we believe that United Prayer should be and what we're doing.

But first off I want to share just a few testimonies.

You know we're told in Spirit of Prophecy that in the last days the rain is going to begin to fall, but yet there are going to be many around us that do not even experience it, do not even know that it's falling.

And How can we avoid being among those that don't know?

And we talked about that during the last couple sessions in regards to prayer.

So this morning, or actually this afternoon now, I just want to share a brief testimony of Army.

With our first Army Bible Camp, started back in 2009, God impressed 1 of our leaders, our prayer leaders actually.

They were actually just praying with the speakers before they got on the stage and kind of operating from that standpoint.

But God had laid it on their heart to do a morning prayer time before our first meetings.

And they asked us, can we have like a 615 prayer time?

And I'm ashamed to say that as leaders we're kind of like, well that's kind of early to ask people to come to pray.

Not sure how many people are gonna, you know, want to come and be part of that, but we'll offer it as an optional prayer time, okay?

So we were a little worried that we could just get people there for the 7 o'clock devotional, forget the 6.15 time.

But you know, about 20 people came the first morning and God worked in such a dramatic way.

The next morning we had 40 and the next morning 80 and the crowd began to grow and as we prayed together unitedly, and I'll talk about how that was done, you could just tell the Holy Spirit was there.

Families that had not been praying together began to pray together.

A couple that was actually on the brink of divorce actually were reunited and their marriage restored because of that united prayer, that united prayer alone.

And so in a result or as a result of that, we just began to realize God needs us.

He can do everything without us, so don't mistake what I'm saying there.

But we as a people need to be praying more, and if we pray more, what more blessings might he give us?

So after that we began to make the United Prayer a routine part of every Army Bible camp that we had and we we did see the Holy Spirit being poured out.

You know it's very easy for us as Christians, at least it's easy for me, to fall into the Martha mentality.

You know, I know that God wants me to do this, I know that He wants this done, I know He's called us, but you know, like it says in Mark 3, 14, before we are to go and be disciples.

And so often we work, but we're working in our own strength and we're not working through the power of prayer.

And this statement in Christian Service page 263 really caught my attention and our attention a little while back and it says, could we see all the activity of human instrumentality as it appears before God?

We would see that only the work accomplished by much prayer which is sanctified by the merit of Christ will stand the test of the judgment.

Now how much prayer, I mean how much work are we doing without prayer?

It's scary if we really realized, if we really you know, if we really searched our hearts as a people of God.

How much are we doing just in our own strength?

So as the camps have gone on, we have seen God continue to work in dramatic ways.

The second camp, God inspired our prayer leaders.

Why don't we start an all-day prayer room?

In other words, the whole concept started with the fact we're gonna have a room where we're gonna be praying all day long for the speakers because they need the Holy Spirit's power to speak the message that they need to speak and to train people.

The whole purpose of ARMI, I might share for those of you that aren't familiar, is revival.

ARMI stands for Adventist Revival Movement for the End Time.

But how we accomplish that revival is by arming people with the word and with prayer.

And so it's 2 words put together, arm me.

So that's what Army Ministries is about, is arming people with the word and power of prayer so that they can be more effective in evangelism and in their witness and testimony.

So as we went into our second camp, you know, our prayer leaders were really inspired.

We need to set aside a room where we can just really be praying.

As our attendees are diving into the word and learning how to study the word, that the Holy Spirit would be present and give power to the study.

But then we realized, you know, we as staff shouldn't be the only ones here in this prayer room praying.

We need to invite our attendees to be part of this and to be praying with us.

And so we asked people if you could come for just 1 hour during the conference and dedicate your time in the prayer room to pray for this conference, what might God do?

And as we prayed that, more amazing things began to happen.

And when I say this, I'm talking about, we had a 14 year old girl, we share her testimony, her name was Allison.

She came into the prayer room and she didn't think she could pray for more than 5 minutes a day.

She was basically used to praying 5 minutes a day and you know just very superficial, whatever, you know, God help me with this, God help me with that, help me to pass this test, whatever, you know, just the very basic superficial prayer.

But she came into the prayer room, she didn't think she could pray for more than 5 minutes a day, and she stayed for the whole hour, and she just fell in love with prayer.

She came back the next day and she stayed for 8 hours.

And she went home, 14-year-old girl, to her church and started 2 prayer groups.

And that church has been totally revitalized.

Her family is all on board and they're participating in United Prayer.

Her sister actually went with me when we went to the general conference to have a prayer room in United Prayer.

So we are seeing, as people are coming together in unity, praying for the spirit to be poured out in the meetings or whatever, their lives themselves are being revitalized.

And how can we as a people call others to revival or to this experience if we don't experience it ourselves.

So that's, you know, a big part of coming together in unity and prayers is that we will have that in our own lives.

So here you see pictures of the prayer room, how God has continued to grow and by our second and third camp we had people basically flocking to the prayer room and we emphasize it very much at camp.

You need to come and be part of uniting together in prayer.

In Mark 11 17 it says it's written, my house shall be called of all Nations the house of prayer.

It doesn't say it shall be a house of sermons, it doesn't say it shall be a house of singing.

We all know that those are part of the worship service, but God's house is to be a house of prayer.

And yet how often is prayer like just a little itty-bit.

We have 3 minutes of prayer and then all the rest of the time in our church and in our activities is spent speaking, preaching, singing, performing, evangelizing.

When we need to be in prayer There needs to be prayer coverage over everything that's going on.

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Series

Prayer and Revival

Revival

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Recorded

Parts

Revival

49m

Biblical Support for United Prayer

50m

Sound Doctrine