It’s Time To Pray

Over the past several weeks, God has been dropping various memories into my mind until I realized that He was calling me back for a purpose. First, He brought back to mind a painting that I had done in 1976 in remembrance of my only brother and my neighbor who died in that year. It escaped my mind until last week I saw it hanging in the hallway at the church! I have no idea who put it there after almost 50 years! The painting is a candlestick, an open Bible to 2 Chronicles 7:14 with a bookmark commemorating our bi-centennial 1776-1976. The message on the plaque was a plea for us to pray, return to God and be light to the world as that verse commands: “If My people who are called by My Name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” Then, God started replaying in my mind a song from many years ago called “It’s Time to Pray.” The verse and the words of that song are a clarion appeal from God to us as we celebrate July 4th this year ushering in our nation’s 250th year! May we take that verse and the words of this song to heart as we enter this week. “It’s time to pray to the God who watches o’er us; It’s time to seek His help without delay; The world is dark for the clouds of war still threaten; It’s time for all America to pray. If we would keep the flag of freedom flying, Secure the peace for which we all are crying. It’s time to pray—our sin and wrong confessing, It’s time for all America to pray!” It’s up to us the people of God!

So many changes have occurred in these last 50 years just to name a few: In 1976 the first commercially developed supercomputer—Cray-1 was released; the first Internet message was sent—two letters then system crashed; the first presidential debate was held. Just think about how technology has exploded during this time, but one thing has not changed—wars and rumors of wars continue; there has been a great departure from God and faith; and social unrest and moral decline, and technology has come out of the marketplace and invaded our homes and lives with cellphones, Internet, personal wearing devices, and now AI!

I believe God is calling us back to remember our heritage and our need to humble ourselves and pray and seek God’s face so that He will heal our land! Let us consider the words of our 16th President Abraham Lincoln as there is a parallel between his assassination and the attempted assassination of our President. His words echo down through the years and ring true today: “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”

Last week God brought another event from the past that has a right now connection to our nation. In 1949 there was a powerful movement of God on an island in Scotland known as the Hebrides Revival. Two sisters, Peggy and Christine Smith, 84 and 82 years old—Peggy completely blind, and Christine bent over with arthritis—were burdened due to the depressed spiritual state in their village church. They sensed the Lord speaking to them: “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground.” (Isaiah 44:43) This led them to pray in their small cottage two to three nights per week, from 10 p.m. till 3 a.m. After several weeks of praying like this, Peggy had a vision of her church being crowded with young people, and an unknown minister preaching from the pulpit. Peggy then sent for their minister, Rev. James Murray MacKay. She told him they sensed the Lord was going to send a revival and that he must get his church leaders and spend every Tuesday and Friday night in prayer, and that they would pray simultaneously in their cottage. MacKay respected the sister’s spiritual judgment and the call to pray was made. There was also a group of pastors in the region that met to discuss the spiritual declension on the island. Together they composed a resolution to be read on a certain Sunday in all the Free Churches of Scotland. It was an appeal for all believers to “view with concern the barrenness of the parishes” so they would “turn again unto the Lord whom we have so grieved with our waywardness and iniquities.” It also involved asking the people to pray that the villages would be “visited with a spirit of repentance.” Many of the believers in the Hebrides immediately went to their knees, petitioning God to visit the islands.

Following that proclamation, two times per week, Peggy and Christine Smith prayed in their cottage from 10 p.m. till 3 a.m., while the ministers and others prayed in a barn-like structure and in other locations mostly in unheated buildings—in the middle of the winter. People all over the islands had the sense that God was telling them to “ask Me for revival.” This was a divinely orchestrated movement to petition God for revival. Revival began one night in a barn, after a young deacon read from Psalm 24: 3-5 “Who may go up on the mountain of the LORD? Who may stand in His holy place? One with clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted his soul in vain, nor sworn deceitfully. He will receive a blessing from the LORD, righteousness from God his salvation.” Then the young man said: “It seems to me to be so much humbug to be praying as we are praying, to be waiting as we are waiting, if we ourselves are not rightly related to God.” He then prayed, “God, are my hands clean? Is my heart pure?” Immediately, at around 3 a.m., the presence of God gripped every person present. It wasn’t only them that sensed this, for the entire village and larger surrounding area sensed that same awareness of God. That group of intercessors left the barn at that early hour and found men and women kneeling along the roads, crying out to God for mercy. Every home had lights on in it, as no one could sleep with the awareness of God being so overwhelming.

God through His Divine intervention brought the man in Peggy’s vision to the island—Duncan Campbell. He arrived at the pier and was greeted by the minister and two church leaders, and they went straight to the church and addressed the congregation at 9 p.m. Three hundred people were gathered at the church when Campbell arrived. After preaching a sermon, nothing significant happened. There was an awareness of God’s presence, more powerful than what Campbell had experienced, and the service was closed at approximately 10:45 p.m. With everyone having departed from the church except the young deacon and Campbell, the young man, knowing God was going to do something much more that night, said: “Nothing has broken out tonight, but God is hovering over us and He will break through any moment.” He lifted up his hands and started to pray: “God, you made a promise to pour water on the thirsty and floods upon the dry ground and you are not doing it.” At around 11 p.m. the back door of the church opened and a man entered saying, “Mr. Campbell, something wonderful has happened. We were praying that God would pour water on the thirsty and floods upon the dry ground and listen, He’s done it! Will you come to the door and see the crowd that is here?” Hundreds entered the church with no invitation, but they had been drawn sovereignly by God, at that late hour of the evening. By 12 midnight the church was crowded out. One hundred young people at a dance hall, stopped the music, were overcome by conviction of sin, and made their way to the church. In addition to these 100 young people, there were hundreds more who had already been in bed but simultaneously, without any explanation, got out of bed, dressed themselves, and went running to the church.

A hunger and thirst for God overwhelmed the people in the area. In the church the gathered crowd began singing Psalms. The church that would seat over 800 was packed and people were in the aisles and in the pews on their knees, crying out for God to have mercy. The meeting continued till 4 a.m. As they left the church, there were people all along the road, kneeling and crying out to God in repentance, pleading for mercy. People came in buses from locations up to twelve miles away. When asked why they had come there, they didn’t have an answer. They just said they had a hunger in their heart to go to the village where the church was located. This move of God lasted until 1952 just because two elderly sisters had a burden and prayed! But this revival in the Hebrides also has a connection to us today. Those two sisters were the aunts of a woman named Mary Anne (incidentally my full name) who was President Donald Trump’s mother. Those sisters mailed their Bible used in the Hebrides Revival to her and it was the Bible that her son Donald would take the oath of office in 2017! Do it again Lord, send revival!

The question is: Will we be intercessors as God has commanded? An intercessor is the one who comes in between. The intercessor comes in between God and the objects of God’s just wrath and impending judgment. In doing so, that person says, in effect, “God You have every right to strike these people. Your justice demands that You do so. But I’m standing between You and them. Lord, in all reverence, but with great boldness, I want to say that if You strike them, You’re going to have to strike me first.” But as we have just read about, the first requirement of an intercessor is to be humble before the Lord and have clean hands and a pure heart. Psalm 66:18 says that if we regard iniquity in our heart, the Lord will not hear us. Unconfessed sin or a heart set on evil can hinder our relationship with God and prevent Him from hearing our prayers. Therefore, we must ask God to reveal anything in us that is not attuned to His will. In Psalm 139: 23 the psalmist prays, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends You, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.” God is looking for intercessors who will stand in the gap for a land, for a city, and nation. As long as there is an intercessor there is hope! Will we offer ourselves to God for this ministry?

Dr. A.W. Tozer gives us five vows for spiritual power: 1. Deal thoroughly with sin in our life. Every known sin is to be named, identified, and repudiated, and that we must trust God for deliverance from it, so that there is no conscious, deliberate sin anywhere in our lives. 2. Never own anything. Everything we have belongs to God and all we are doing is just working for Him. If it is God’s, we no longer need to worry about it. 3. Never defend yourself. If we insist upon defending our self, God will let us do it. But if we will turn our self wholly over to the Lord, He will defend us completely and see to it that no one will harm us. (Isa. 54: 17) 4. Never pass anything on about anybody else that will slander him. “Love will cover the multitude of sins.” (1 Peter 4:8) The talebearer has no place in God’s favor. 5. Never accept any glory. Seeking to have a reputation among the saints is very dangerous ground. We must determine that we will never take any glory but see that God gets it all. Let us draw near to God that He will heal our land! We must go beyond knowledge to experience Spirit-Filled Living that glories God!