Jesus Now! God Is Up To Something BigSample

The Master

Revival is happening this very moment in the coal-mining country of West Virginia. Prayer and desperation for God led to a great movement of God. As of May 2016, over 3,000 people in Mingo County have given their lives to Jesus Christ and been baptized. The Holy Spirit has fallen in great power over this area of our country—a dream for many who’ve been praying. Revival is happening, it’s happening now, and it even has a name: “The Coalfield Revival” or the “Appalachian Awakening”!

Today, when I look at the national landscape called the American Church, I sense the anticipation of the harvest building in me once again. Although I feel the anticipation, already I know the answer. It was the same one I heard as a farm child looking for an earlier harvest. Wait. While I look forward to the day of revival in the United States, while I chuckle at my own insatiable desire to “know when,” I wait. And I pray.

My greatest prayer is that God would engulf our nation and all who claim to follow Christ in a sweeping movement of His Spirit. My prayer is that He would revive Christians, starting with me, and that this new breath of His Spirit would awaken new and old believers to a fresh, deepening love for Christ. As Uncle Millard said, “When the time comes, you and I will know it.”

What are we to do in the meantime? You and I can pray that we’ll be open to receive all that He has to give the church and our nation when He breathes life back into our hearts, our minds, our very being. As we wait, we can be inspired by the growing evidence of God’s unfolding work in our nation. We can revel in stories of Jesus now. We can look at these glimpses of what He’s doing as snapshots—small, focused, yet important glimpses of the “big picture” of a Jesus-Now Awakening.

Let me be clear: What we’re going to look at is not a window on the future. The purpose is not to assume that you or I can know what revival will look like. The goal is not to think we can sneak a peek at the Master’s painting while His work is still in progress. The goal is to know the Master Himself!