What is your burning desire? How bad do you want it? What are you willing to do to get it? Are you willing to invest time and prayer and sacrifice to it? How about focused consistent action? Here is what happened when ONE man decided to do the only thing he knew how to do. Start praying! RSB pg 610 Prayer was such a key in the 1857 Third Great Awakening that it had been called the "Prayer-Meeting Revival." God laid a call on Jeremiah Lamphier, a forty-eight-year-old New York City-born businessman who was converted in 1842 during a meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle built by Charles Finney. Lamphier saw the terrible need in the city for God and gave up his business in order to be a city-street missionary. With social collapse staring the city in the face, Lamphier walked the streets, passing out ads for a noonday prayer meeting to be held on Wednesdays at the Dutch church at the corner of Fulton Street in downtown New York. On the first day, he prayed alone for the first half hour, and then at 12:30 six men came in, one after another. The following week there were twenty; by the first week in October 1857, just before the stock market crashed, they had decided to meet daily instead of weekly. Within six months over ten thousand businessmen were meeting every day in similar meetings, confessing sin, getting saved, praying for revival. Most of the organizers of the prayer meetings were businessmen; people had meetings in stores, company buildings and churches. With hardly an exception, churches worked together as one, with no time for jealousy. By common consent, doctrinal controversies were left alone. On the eve of the Civil War, America began to live again; in just two years, over a millions converts were added to churches of all denominations. From February to June in 1858, some fifty thousand persons a week were making commitments. The social and ethical effects continued for almost half a century. Human service agencies like the United Way, American Red Cross, and the YWCA began, staffed with community volunteers. YMCA converts ministered to both the Northern and Southern Armies during the Civil War; there were over one hundred and fifty thousand converts among the Confederates alone. Geographically the blessing spread to Great Britain, covering every county, which had over twenty-seven million people, of whom a third attended state and free church services. It first touched Ireland, then Scotland, Wales and finally England. There were one hundred thousand converts in Ulster, one hundred thousand additions in Wales, three hundred thousand in Scotland, and more than five hundred thousand in Great Britain by 1865. Three hundred thousand joined Methodist, Baptist, and Congregational churches. Over a million converts were ultimately added to the churches in England. (Winkie Pratney)
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 19:10:49 +0000
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