DARE TO TRAVAIL! By 'DON OKPOMBOR

 

WHEN WE TRAVAIL WE SHALL PREVAIL!

Quite often, I hear someone say, “The Church is not what I came to meet some years ago.” Well, whatever the Church was, men made it, and whatever the Church is today, men make it. Men? Yes, men! The fire you saw the years past was brought about by some praying men. If the fire must fall again, there must be such praying men again.

In Colossians 4:12 we read, “Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, saluteth you, always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.” If the Church must 'stand perfect' in orderliness, holiness, power, and prosperity, there must also be some fervent-prayer-laboring Epaphrases.

A story is related by T. Dewitt Talmage, of an outbreak of revival in a church because some men dared to travail in the secret place:

 

“In the winter of 1875 we were worshipping in the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We had great audiences but I was oppressed by the fact that conversions were not numerous.

On that Tuesday, I invited to my house five elderly consecrated Christian men. I took them to the top of the house and said, 'I have called you here for special prayer. I am in agony for a great turning of the people to God. We have vast multitudes in the attendance, and they are attentive and respectful, but I cannot see that they are saved. Let us kneel down and each one pray and not leave this room until we are all assured that the blessing will come and has come.’

“It was an intense crying to God. I said, ‘Brethren, let this meeting be secret,’ and they said, ‘It shall be so.’

“The next Friday night came the usual prayer meeting. No one else knew what had occurred on Tuesday night, but the meeting was unusually thronged. Men accustomed to praying with great composure broke down under emotion. The people were in tears. There were sobs and silences and solemnity of such unusual power that the worshippers looked into each other's faces as much as to say, ‘What does this mean?’”

When men dare to pray, God dares to answer. When men dare to request, God dares to give. One of our major problems is that we are extremely good at expecting more than we can pray. How many torrents of revival have we often expected when we never could pray a little?

How many times have we expected a mighty spiritual downpour when we never have been able to pray even for the clouds to gather? How much of the move of God have we comfortably sat to witness, many times, when we could not even pray for just a touch of His? Who then should we blame for the spiritual declension of the church? No one else, but the one we see when we each look into the mirror!

It is said that Zinzendorf, the leader of the Moravian church, was disappointed and frustrated at the lifeless and fruitless state of the Moravian church. So, he went to God in prayer for a mighty awakening among the Moravians.

As a result of his passionate pleadings with God, a mighty revival came at about eleven o'clock on Wednesday morning of August 13, 1729. That was the beginning of the great Moravian revival in which a prayer meeting was born, which we are told, lasted one hundred years.

Dare to travail!

An excerpt from DARE TO STAND OUT RATHER THAN BLEND IN by 'DON OKPOMBOR

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