Awaken the DawnSample

When Jesus Stops By

My heart, O God, is steadfast; I will sing and make music with all my soul. Awake, harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn. —PSALM 108:1–2

I remember the day vividly. It was 2003, and one of the leaders in the church where I served as a worship leader and youth pastor had just read a book called Red Moon Rising. In it, Pete Greig writes about a 24-7 prayer movement that broke out in England and spread all over the world. Stirred by what she’d read, the leader suggested we consider praying 24-7 for a week in our church.

For me, prayer was like going to the dentist. You only did it because you didn’t want your teeth to fall out. You didn’t spend extended hours in prayer out of any remote sense of enjoyment. Yes, good definitely would come of it. But to me, praying 24-7 for a full week sounded harder than manual labor. But who can argue against prayer, right? So we agreed to pray 24-7 for three days because a week just seemed too long—and those three days changed my life forever.

The prayer meetings were like nothing I had ever experienced or even imagined. I knew what it was like for God to show up in a ministry gathering, but this was entirely different. We felt God’s presence in a profound way, but it was not like a visitation in which God’s presence marks a particular service. It was like God came to stay—day in and day out.

Then something happened that really blew my mind. A young girl heard the sounds of our worship in the middle of the night and out of sheer curiosity wandered into the room off the street. She met Jesus that night. This was not what we had planned. Three days of 24-7 prayer wasn’t designed to be an outreach. In my mind at the time, it was just a prayer gathering meant to prepare us for the real ministry that would come later. But people were coming to Jesus. And that young girl who committed her life to Jesus eventually ended up on the mission field.

I felt like I was stumbling into my calling, and I began to wonder if my idea of ministry was all wrong. What if instead of building our ministries and church communities only around meeting human needs, we built our communities around Jesus’ presence and person? What if we made worship and prayer central to our churches and by extension made God’s presence central? What if that is actually the best way to meet human needs because God is the ultimate answer to every problem we will ever face?

A new life is found in supplication to Christ.