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
Read more at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MZ197B5
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