Revival Begins with You

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"Before the Highway Is Built"

"Prayer Is Action!"

"Mercy Drops Falling around Us"

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Dannah Gresh:  Could it be that revival is on its way?

I know there’s skepticism about Christianity in the culture. You read or hear about all the TikTok critique of our faith. The word “deconstruction” may even strike fear in your heart.

But, I just saw some stats from last year’s state of the church report by the Barna Group. 

The decline has stopped! Since 2021, the Christian faith has been on the rise again. Thirty million more claim to follow Jesus now, than then! Though we have not quite closed the gap of decline that started almost a decade ago, the news is good. And get this: among the biggest drivers of this softening toward Jesus are younger generations, particularly Gen Z and Millennials. 

It confirms something I’ve had a front row seat to witness. You see, for the past few months I’ve been on tour with my True Girl team making stops to share the gospel of Jesus with moms and girls aged seven to twelve. Since the first weekend in February, I could see it.

There’s a sincerity in worship like I have not witnessed in a long time, and an openness to follow Christ boldly. Moms are reporting that their daughters are making professions of faith in a manner we haven't witnessed before. All of the seasoned members of my team have noticed it. There’s an anointing in the air. I like to say, “Aslan is on the move!”

The rumblings of revival are here. It’s undeniable! 

I’m your host, Dannah Gresh. You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Today’s program is all about becoming women who are desperate for revival. Now is not the time to be apathetic or nonchalant about this. It’s the time to seek the Lord with all our hearts. 

My dear friend Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth founded Revive Our Hearts with a deep desire to see revival in our day. We’re in our 25th year of ministry now, and this desperation for God to revive us is still the heartbeat of our mission.

I’m reminded of a message Nancy gave not too long ago called "A Highway for Our God." That title comes from Isaiah 40, where God’s people are told to build a highway in their barren hearts—an invitation for God to visit them. 

Because the truth is, revival doesn’t begin somewhere “out there.” It begins in our own hearts. So how do we practically prepare for the Lord to come and move? Let’s hear from Nancy. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: There are these crooked places, the hypocrisy in our hearts. Everybody thinks we’re great Christians. Listen, the world knows we’re not, and that’s why they’re not really impressed with the brand of Christianity we’re putting out there.

The world's not really impressed with the brand of Christianity we’re putting out there.

When I hear that seventy to eighty percent of the kids growing up in our evangelical churches, by the age of twenty-nine will be out of there—does that not say we have some crooked places that need to be leveled out, that there has been hypocrisy?

It can be mixed-up priorities. We claim to belong to God’s kingdom, but what we really love is our kingdom, this world, our stuff, our pleasure, more than we love God. 

I look at Facebook posts or Tweets. I see believers getting a lot of sound and good things through the social media like that (we use it and try to use it well). But sometimes as I read these posts from people I know and love and respect . . . Sometimes it seems to me that a lot of believers—if you look at what they post—are more passionate about their favorite sports team or Duck Dynasty or American Idol or . . . you fill in the blank if I didn’t get yours. That’s not a comment on those things. It’s to say, “Why does it sometimes seem that we’re more passionate about those things than we are about Jesus, about His Word, His people, His kingdom?”

Is it any wonder that the world is not motivated to know and love and follow Jesus when they see so few of us really delighting in Him?

Is it any wonder that the world is not motivated to know and love and follow Jesus when they see so few of us really delighting in Him?

There’s a fourth thing we need to do, if this highway is to be built, and that’s that the rough or rugged places need to become a plain. Those rough places could be rocks or boulders or shrubs—things that can trip you up. They’re not mountains; they’re not hills, but they’re little things we may have allowed in our lives that keep this highway of holiness from running through our lives.

They might be rough relationships that need to be smoothed out, a lack of love, disregarding the needs of others, treating others (maybe because they’re different than us in some way) with contempt.

I think these rough and rugged places, for a lot of us, could be just distractions. We are hooked on games and entertainment and amusing ourselves to death. I’ll just tell you, this is an area where the Lord really speaks to me—this whole area of distraction. These are things that are not sinful or bad, but they can steal hours of time that might have been spent loving Jesus, loving others, building my spirit.

We’re so distracted by iPhones (and whatever yours is called). I thought I left mine in the hotel room tonight, and it was like I couldn’t come to church without it. Some of you can’t be separated from yours. Some of you have carried on a lot of business since we got here tonight.

Here’s one of the problems with this constant stimulus going on in our minds—we don’t have time to think, time to process, time to hear from God. Enough about that one.

Roots of bitterness could be a rough place. Questionable, doubtful areas are rough things that aren’t inherently sinful, but they don’t edify or build up. Maybe God will show you what that may be in your own life.

We’re seeking to help build a highway for our God. What’s the outcome, what’s the goal? Why should we be doing this? Isaiah 40, verse 5 tells us that when every obstacle has been removed, when the highway has been built, when the way has been prepared for King Jesus, then—and not until then—“The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Why build this highway? So your town can see the glory of the Lord. So this country, so the whole earth, would be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. That is what we desperately need in our world! God has done it before. I think sometimes we think things have never been this bad. Yes, they have.

You read about it in the history of the Great Awakenings. In the Second Great Awakening, the crime rate was such that women were afraid to leave their houses at night for fear of being mugged in the streets. Does that sound a little like the twenty-first century?

It was social reform, moral reform, that decreased the crime rate in the Second Great Awakening. During the height of the Third Great Awakening in 1858, the Prayer Revival as it is often called, a reporter traveled from Los Angeles to Boston. He said it was like one continuous prayer meeting, “Wherever I stopped, the masses were gathered in public buildings, crying out to God.”

We read that something like a million people were converted in the wake of that revival, over several months. Fifty thousand a week, at the peak, were coming to know Jesus. And these weren’t people that just raised their hand or signed on some line. These were people who can be verified as having gotten connected to the church and gave incredible evidence of conversion.

Do you think God could do it again? I believe He could. I know He could, and I believe He wants to do it again. You see, the revival that we’re believing Him to send in our day is a glimpse of that ultimate day when King Jesus will return to this earth—the Man on the white horse—in all of His splendor and glory.

Dannah: I get so excited when I hear Nancy speaking about the coming of Jesus! Every time she does it, I get so excited. That was Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth asking the question, “Do you think God could revive us again?” I love that her answer is a resounding yes! Mine is, too, friend. I hope you’ll believe with us. I hope you’ll cultivate desperation with us. The younger generations are hungry. They’re open and eager to engage with the truth. Now is the time to prepare the highway for our God. 

One of the ways we do this is through prayer, and I can’t think of a better friend to tell you about this than Karen Ellis. Karen is the Director of the Edmiston Center at Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta, where she teaches on Christian endurance in the face of cultural hostility. Since 2003, she’s been an advocate for the global persecuted Church. And this work has taught her the incredible power of prayer. Let’s listen to part of a conversation Nancy and I had with Karen Ellis about that.

Karen Ellis: My husband and I really started challenging ourselves to pray those uncomfortable prayers, very Christ-centered. Jesus is the foundation for kingdom prayer. Through His prayers He calls down heaven’s infinite grace and power to inaugurate and advance the kingdom!

So we started studying Jesus’ life—His life of prayer, His teachings on prayer. We started asking Him to give us a spirit of prayer and to use us to birth a praying people and to join with other folks who were like our friends overseas and like our friends here on the margins domestically—to join with those folks and find each other so that we could pray together.

We started thinking about the concept of, “prayer is action.” We heard a lot of people praying for revival. We started to realize that prayer is actually revival itself; prayer is the beginning of revival. And just kind of refocusing ourselves has changed how we pray, how we approach prayer, and how we’re encouraging others to pray.

Nancy: Karen, you took a little bit of a hiatus from social media, and it seems to me when you came back you started talking a lot about prayer, and it seemed that you got some pushback, even from well-meaning Christians. People saying, “Okay, prayer of course is important, but we need to do something; we need to do more.”

And you kept coming back saying, “No, prayer is action! It’s not something we add to action; prayer is action.” And that is something that has really captured my thinking, as I’ve been watching and listening to what you’re saying.

Karen: Every single advance of the kingdom in the New Testament is preceded by prayer! I’m opening up the Scripture now, and I’m seeing prayer, prayer, prayer—kingdom prayer. One of the things I’m working on . . . I’m doing a research project on the Moravians and their hundred years of prayer and how the Lord unfolded an enormous movement out of that, that spread the gospel around the Caribbean through the first African-led congregation in the Americas. They were a product of that. 

I guess it’s just causing me to have a sort of different take and to see things through a different lens, that it’s hard for me to go back to that argument that prayer is not action. 

I would challenge anybody who would say that prayer is not action or prayer is passive, or prayer is the wimp’s way out. I would challenge them to go through Scripture and look at all the places where people called out to God and find one place where He didn’t move!

Nancy: Wow. So, what does it look like for you to be praying with some of these friends, these people with whom God has connected your heart? What do you see God doing? I know you’ve had kind of a front row seat to some of what God is doing in stirring up His people to cry out to Him. Give us a glimpse of some of what you’ve seen in that.

Karen: It sounds kind of redundant, but we’ve been praying for prayer. We’ve been praying for prayer and praying for God to help us find the people of prayer and peace. And in the middle of all of that, we’ve found ourselves in some really interesting situations. 

We stumbled on an ongoing prayer gathering that’s been happening in Fairfield, Alabama, that I wrote about in United We Pray, at their website. In the middle of all of the global confusion, all of the domestic confusion, a friend of ours who is the pastor of a church that has declared bankruptcy and has all sorts of problems that you would associate with a city in bankruptcy, on top of that, they’ve got civil unrest now. 

He called a prayer meeting and just sent out a basic email. I don’t know how many people he sent it out to, but about three-hundred people showed up. It was such an incredible experience, because the building was an old Dollar store. They didn’t wait for the big renovation to have the big church.

It felt so much like the condition of my heart at the time. The store was stripped, just rubble pretty much. Spread to the side so they could put up some chairs. There was no electricity in the building so they had some generators outside providing a sound system. It just felt very bare-bones, very much gutted.

I think a lot of us showed up with our hearts feeling gutted at the time. It wasn’t dramatic. The prayer that went on there; it was just three-hundred people. We heard a message where the pastor called out to God and reminded us that we are one, and then we just set about praying. 

It wasn’t something you would associate with, “Oh! Something significant happened!” or “We came out with a game plan of how we’re going to move and fix all of these things that are wrong with the city!” It wasn’t that, but I think everybody who was there just knew something significant happened, even if it was just the miracle of three-hundred people. 

Some of us had driven two-and-a-half hours to get there. Three-hundred people just coming together to pray in a hundred degree heat in a gutted building together as one. We see things like this popping up all over the place! They’re happening virtually: people starting these little prayer pods (I don’t know what else to call them) of people studying prayer, turning to prayer.

Actually, a big part of it seems to be laying down our idols, laying down the things that we have allowed to replace the Lord within our heart. There is probably much, much more going on that I have no idea, but it just seems that something is happening, something is stirring the Church to pray. 

We have been praying in a global online prayer group, like I’m sure some of you are affiliated with and participating in. We’ve been praying in one for God to stir His people to kingdom prayer. So pray for prayer! Praying for prayer is probably the most important thing we could do right now.

Dannah: You know, my heart is about to burst, because what I’m sensing . . . it’s almost like a eureka moment for me. I think that you’ve described this: how can you walk with the Lord for twenty-five years and suddenly be awakened to prayer?

I feel like, at this moment, I’m hearing, “The point of it is the prayer!” Hello-o-o?! The point of it is the prayer; the point of it is not, “What are we going to get out of the prayer?” So many times we come to God . . . My question I want to ask you right now (and I’m not going to), but the one I want to ask you is, “Well, what happened after you gathered in that dilapidated building? How did God move? What came next?” 

But I’m sensing this satisfaction that you just came and you were with God, and that was the point! And maybe that’s why the Lord is letting things fall apart, do you think?

Karen: Sure! I think the most significant change was in us . . . or at least in me; I can speak for myself. That was where the most significant change was. You know, the children of Israel cried out, “Lord, we don’t want to go if You don’t go with us!” 

I think the folks that we’re meeting, from whom we’re learning, are sensing that there’s always a cultural moment coming after the moment that you’re in. Cultural moments are like Pez candy dispensers: there’s always another one. You flip the head back, there’s another one, there’s another one. And we don’t know what that next cultural moment is going to be.

But if we become a people of kingdom prayer—not prayer centered on politics or culture, but on kingdom—if we become a kingdom of prayer, we may be a little bit better prepared for whatever is coming, even as our hearts are being stirred to the most basic confessing our idols and laying them down.

So, I’m content to sit in that space. Now, that doesn’t mean that I don’t go and respond to my community’s needs and continue doing the work of the kingdom and the mercy ministry and all of those things. That doesn’t mean that I stop all of that and just commit everything to prayer. We’re not talking about a kind of monastic existence here.

I think what we’re talking about is making that central, asking God, “Where are we going as a people? What are we doing as a people? How are we responding as a people in a way that comports with the kingdom that You’re building . . . not the kingdoms we want to see?”

Dannah: I remember that interview with Karen. It stuck with me. I saw prayer differently . . . almost more simply! The point of prayer is prayer. It’s just talking with Jesus. Revival happens when we’re with Him.

Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pray for revival. We should! We should cry out desperately for it. But we should also recognize that revival begins with us. Before prayer changes the world, we need it to change our hearts. 

As we close, let’s take some time to pray together. Barbara Blanchard is a sweet friend of Revive Our Hearts, and she is deeply passionate about revival. She’s gonna pray us out.

Barbara Blanchard: Oh our blessed Lord—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—we love you! We want to know You. We want to know You much more deeply than we know You now, and we want our lives to count for You! But we're impotent. In ourselves all we can do is come and say, "Here I am, Lord, use me."

And, Father, we thank You that You were willing to send Your Son. And oh, Jesus, how we praise You that You were willing not only to die on the cross, but to live through the years when people did not know Who You were and mistreated You, our Creator. You came unto Your own, and they knew You not.

And Holy Spirit, how we praise You that You speak to us; You instruct us; You direct us; You just teach us all the time and give us more understanding and fellowship. Oh Lord, I hardly know how to pray, except to say that You are so wonderful. You are so mighty. You are beyond our imagination, but You have called us to Yourself. You've allowed us to believe You. You have given us the things for desiring You, of thirsting and hungering after You, and You really have shown us our need and our dependence.

We want more of You, Lord. We want more for ourselves, and we want more for the world around us. Mostly, we want this for You, that you might be exalted and lifted up in the earth. We, being mere mortals, don't know how to well enough make You known. We can speak to others, but it is Your work of bringing them to Yourself.

We just ask You once again that You might be made known in our country and around the world. We ask You to come among us in a manifestation that is powerful, that cannot be mistaken. We ask you to come even as You came among the 120 who waited [at Pentecost] and the place was shaken and filled with Your glory!

The power came upon those who were waiting, and they could speak for You in ways that were so convincing, and multitudes came to You. We've seen the effect of the church increasing, from the band of just twelve disciples—simple, simple men. We long now for Your kingdom to come, for You to be made known in every people group of the world.

And we believe this will happen before You, Lord Jesus, come again the second time. You say Your sign will be seen in the sky and every, every tribe will grieve, and every eye will know You are Lord. And every knee will bow to the King of kings and Lord of lords.

And so, while we have breath, while we can think, we ask you to make us servants. Take us as servants, and make us part of whatever You want to do. Show each woman who's listening, what is our part, Lord? We would be like Mary, who said, "Behold, I am your handmaiden, be it unto me according to Your Word." 

And so, Lord, we do pray that you'll do exceedingly abundantly above all that we can ask or think, for Yourself, because You're worthy; You deserve it. I believe this is what You want, to be made known in all the earth. Glory be to You, our blessed Lord. In Jesus' Name we pray, amen. 

Dannah: Amen. I hope today’s episode has cultivated a deeper desperation for revival in your heart. Change is stirring in younger generations. Let's not miss out on that. Let’s seek the Lord for more. He is able!

And reminder! Revival begins with you. The Refresh Journaling Set is designed to help you pursue personal revival with the Lord. It includes a set of Scripture cards and a journal with space to meditate on those. We’ll send this resource your way when you make a donation of any amount to Revive Our Hearts. To give and request yours, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

Next weekend, we’re heading into the Revive Our Hearts kitchen to talk three ingredients of personal revival. It’s gonna be a fun time! I hope you’ll grab your apron and join me.

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan. Calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.