In some sense, it’s hard to write about prayer and revival. My preference would be to encourage you to simply pray — right now — for revival. Why spend this time just reading about revival when you could be praying for it? That would be a phenomenal stewardship of our time, but it would be equally beneficial to first spend some time searching for specific direction about how to pray for revival.

That’s the purpose of this work: to teach us how to pray for revival. My hope is that this will help you see how God has responded to the prayers of his people in the past to bring revival, and to ignite our hearts to persevere in prayer for God to bring revival again today.

But this is more challenging than it appears. Some Christians pray for revival. Some Christians not only pray for revival; they pray fervently. But how many Christians are ready and willing to pay the personal cost for revival to come? If we are serious about revival in our land, we must first be serious about revival in our life. We need to see that revival is not about delighting in our self; it’s about denying our self. Revival is not about taking up our commitments; it’s about taking up our crosses. Revival is not about fulfilling ourselves; it’s about following Jesus Christ (cf., Luke 9:23).

If we desire for the Lord to bring revival to our souls, it will mean realizing that so much of this partly-pasteurized, vaguely-spiritualized version of Christianity that we often see today is not the norm. The life of discipleship described in God’s word is the norm. Things start to happen when we abandon ourselves to obeying God’s word and find our full sufficiency in Jesus Christ. That’s when people are “cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37). That’s when lives are radically and forever changed for the glory of God.

Revival does not begin with lost people getting saved. It begins with saved people realizing how lost we are apart from Jesus Christ.

Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Until we realize this — dare I say, until we are broken by this — we will not know revival. But the good news Jesus brings to those who love him is that it is possible to bear much fruit, and that only as we are desperately dependent on him.

So begins our pursuit of revival. More important, so begins our pursuit of the God who brings revival. This is the first post in a series that will help us understand how to pray for revival.

You might have prayer without revival, but you will never have revival without prayer. And the thread that runs throughout the Bible and much of church history is that revival could be only a prayer away.