A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
“He made known to us the mystery of His will….the summing up of all things in Christ.”- Ephesians 1:9
For almost two decades I have traversed this nation and the world, encouraging students and campus ministry leaders to seek God for revival and awakening. I am passionate about seeing transformation in the Church and in culture at large. Too often, however, I see well-meaning leaders, when considering revival and awakening, skip past the “who” and move on to the “what.” Here is the “what.” Revival is the large-scale bringing of life back into the Church. Awakening is the large-scale effect of revival in the Church upon those who aren’t presently following Jesus. The important questions are these: “To whom are we being revived?” and “To whom is the culture awakened?” We are the best agents for transformation when we carefully consider these two questions.
For almost two decades I have traversed this nation and the world, encouraging students and campus ministry leaders to seek God for revival and awakening. I am passionate about seeing transformation in the Church and in culture at large. Too often, however, I see well-meaning leaders, when considering revival and awakening, skip past the “who” and move on to the “what.” Here is the “what.” Revival is the large-scale bringing of life back into the Church. Awakening is the large-scale effect of revival in the Church upon those who aren’t presently following Jesus. The important questions are these: “To whom are we being revived?” and “To whom is the culture awakened?” We are the best agents for transformation when we carefully consider these two questions.
We must remember revival and awakening are the fruit of the end goal; they are not themselves the end goals. The end goal isn’t a better state; it actually isn’t an “it” at all…it’s a Him. The end goal is everyone in submission fully to Jesus and thereby fully glorifying Him and fully experiencing His goodness. To do otherwise is to admire the apples without giving thought to the tree, which provides nourishment to the object of our admiration. Absent the tree even the best apples don’t last long.
Included in our prayers for the nation and world today, let’s pray specifically for more students, faculty, and staff on the nation’s campuses to fully experience Jesus. Let’s pray for incoming freshmen to have an encounter with the manifest presence of God. Pray for encounters where Jesus isn’t solely a truthful idea, or only the means to a good outcome in an individual’s life, or simply a cure for the cancers that rage in our culture. These things are all true, but they aren’t the full picture. The full picture includes a direct, ongoing relationship with the person of Jesus. As large numbers of men and women have a Holy Spirit empowered, full revelation of Jesus, revival and awakening are sure to follow.
Jeremy Story
President, Campus Renewal Ministries
