Just Imagine (part 2)

Last week, I wrote about sharing with Life Action’s ministry teams before going out for a long season of ministry. I shared with them things I had hoped and imagined God doing.That year, the team I was leading saw God do even more than I had imagined. Everything began to change after God burdened us to pray and fast and wait on Him.During the next couple of years, I recorded a whole list of things I had never seen during my previous fourteen years of Summit ministry. Here is part of that list:

• Men meeting every day to pray, some kneeling, some prostrate, some sitting, some standing, some walking, some reading Scripture, some singing, some crying out, all during the same prayer time
• My own heart so stirred that I couldn’t sleep, so I would get out of bed and go over to the church sanctuary after midnight to walk around and pray and cry out to God
• A pastor publicly wailing out loudly during a service because of his broken desperation—for nearly 45 minutes in front of his congregation, while I continued to preach
• A child crying out loudly at the altar over his parents who were having marriage problems; as a result, the parents were moved to brokenness and repentance and joined their son at the altar to pray and reconcile
• Children on their faces in tears and brokenness, crying out in prayer
• Children asking to give testimony to the adults about what the Lord had done in their midst
• Children burdened for the parents and adults so much that they spent 20–30 minutes marching and praying around the church building outside as the main Summit service was going on inside
• A group of singers, instead of leaving after singing at a pastors’ meeting, spending the next 45 minutes marching around the building praying and crying out to God for those pastors to be broken—and they were! (see the next comment)
• A pastors’ gathering where lunch was canceled due to the men being broken before God, on their knees and on their faces crying out to Him, weeping on their chairs or on the carpet
• A pastor interrupting me in the middle of my sermon and telling me to sit down so he could confess his pride and ask the church’s forgiveness; afterward, I was able to finish the message and see God break down many barriers
• A church choosing to meet late one night and voting unanimously to give their church emergency backup fund ($36,000) as a love gift to our ministry, because God had done so much for them as a church during the preceding days
• Five people converted (two of them deacons, one of them the Summit prayer coordinator) during the first week of meetings, even before I had given a salvation message
• All the teenage boys in a church standing up before the congregation and confessing multiple sins publicly and asking forgiveness from the adult members
• Staying in one place for four weeks (instead of the expected two), meeting every morning for prayer, and being a part of many services lasting three to four hours
• Hearing 126 testimonies in just one night of what God was doing in lives
• Having a church spontaneously initiate an all-night prayer meeting that lasted until daybreak
• Seeing over half the churches we visited having the men initiating daily prayer meetings, several of which continue even today
• Preaching in a church packed with people, including seventy teenagers sitting on the floor during the message because there wasn’t room in the pews
• Having a city call off the Saturday soccer league so it wouldn’t interfere with our marriage seminar at the church
• A whole service, including testimonies and even baptisms, lit only by candlelight when the electricity was out during killer storms
• A church sending out twenty teams to other local churches after our team left, to give testimony and reports of what God had done in their church
• Hearing a man testify about his alcohol problem, then go home to dump out all his booze, then go ask others to forgive him for his bad example, leading to at least two others going home the next night and doing the same thing!
• Hearing a lobbyist for the gambling establishment stand and ask the church’s forgiveness for being on the wrong side of the issue and say he was going home to get several hundred dollars he himself had saved up to gamble, and give it in the offering

Revival is real. Prayer and fasting “work.” God is on His throne.Just imagine what it would look like in your life, in your church, and in your community if God’s Spirit began to blow. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. TURN, PRAY, and UNITE!Again I’m reminded: “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think [or imagine], according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen” (Ephesians 3:20-21 NASB).