By Randy C. Davis
President & Executive Director, TBMB
Randy C. Davis
Pray for wisdom.
Pray for strength.
Pray for forgiveness.
Pray for others.
Pray for those in authority.
Pray for healing.
Pray for protection.
Pray without ceasing.
Pray, pray, pray.
And that’s why I want to extend a personal invitation — a plea — to join me and others to pray. Together.
“An Urgent Cry to God for Spiritual Awakening” is the theme for an upcoming pastors’ prayer gathering. I’ve never had a greater desire to gather with believers to get before God for an extended time of prayer; confessing our brokenness, repenting of our sin, and seeking His face.
The Bible directs us to pray more than 850 times. We talk about it. We preach about it. We have conferences that teach how to do it and countless books that dissect it, but unfortunately when it comes to it, Christians statistically spend less than 30 minutes a day in prayer.
By comparison, according to a February 2021 survey conducted by Statista, nearly 60 percent of respondents stated that on average they daily spent five to seven hours on their phones NOT including work-related use.
We need to turn off the phone and turn to God.
That’s why I want to invite you to join me and many others to pray. We need this. We need to humbly get before God, together and in unity, for an extended time of confession, repentance, intercession, petition, worship, and with sincere hearts, ask our great God to awaken His church, send revival, and light anew a Great Commission passion so that all may know Jesus.
To create this prayer forum, “An Urgent Cry to God for Spiritual Awakening,” begins Wednesday, Sept. 27, at 6 pm and will continue Thursday from 8 am until noon. The event will be at Thompson Station Church.
The event is actually for more than pastors. It is for pastors, men sensing God’s call to pastoral ministry, other pastoral staff, evangelists, associational mission strategists, church prayer ministry leaders, and deacon leaders.
There will be no string of speakers, preachers or singers. We will have moments of guided prayer by friends like Claude King and Bill Elliff.
You probably noticed this begins on Wednesday night when many of you have prayer meetings. That’s the point. The objective is for churches to pray for pastors who are gathered to pray for spiritual awakening. We have all the information including a downloadable Wednesday night prayer guide the church can use while pastors attend the prayer gathering. All that can be found at: https://www.tnbaptist.org/event/pastors-prayer-gathering-training/
Friends we say things like, “every great movement of God began with prayer,” yet we don’t get down to business and put in the sweat equity to make it happen. We need to be counted as Epaphras, who Paul said in Colossians 4:12 was “always struggling/laboring” in prayer on behalf of the people. Would it be to God that we would be known as people laboring in prayer. How different would our churches look? Our families? Our communities? Our nation? Our world?
I would love to find out. The past few years have been tumultuous on many fronts, and at times contentious among believers. But I know spiritual awakening can truly happen in our lifetime. We saw it earlier this year in various pockets — on college campuses and in churches — and there is no reason that can’t explode. Those moments were like scraping steel across a flint and seeing sparks.
However, we need to scrape and scrape in prayer until those sparks ignite a movement of God that can only be attributed to God.
So, won’t you answer this call to urgent prayer and join us? Registration is not required, but helpful and you can find that form and more information at the link above. There is no force in this world that can stand against God’s people when they seek their Heavenly Father in prayer.
“Oh Lord, let the raging fire of your Holy Spirit ignite a group of people gathered in a local church who are humbly asking for awakening to begin with them, and may they spread the good news of Jesus Christ to millions across Tennessee and around the world.”
