21 Days of Fasting and Prayer: Let It RainParaugs

Ready for Awakening

One of the greatest revivals we see in the early church is in the city of Ephesus. Ephesus was a pagan city full of evil, including rampant sorcery and witchcraft, sexual immorality, and the worship of false gods. Ephesus was ripe for a Great Awakening! Acts 19 describes the events that led the city of Ephesus to experience such a powerful move of God that it transformed the entire city.

When the Apostle Paul first arrives in Ephesus, he immediately finds some fellow believers, and his first question to them is if they’ve received the Holy Spirit. They responded that they’d not even heard of the Holy Spirit, so verse 6 tells us, “When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.” Paul understood that if the city of Ephesus were going to experience the spiritual awakening God desired, His people would need to be full of the Holy Spirit.

Paul then spends two years preaching powerfully in the synagogues and throughout the city. Verses 11-12 tell us that “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured, and the evil spirits left them.”

Miracles are taking place, evil spirits are leaving, and then we see a radical event demonstrating just how powerfully God was working in people’s lives. Verse 19 tells us, “A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas.” A drachma was equivalent to a person’s daily wage, so based on the average salary in America today, fifty thousand drachmas would be between four and five million dollars!

People are being saved, baptized, healed, and filled with the Holy Spirit. They are parting ways with evil and turning to Jesus by the thousands. The city of Ephesus was experiencing a Great Awakening! This is what we are praying for our cities, our state, and our nation. We desperately need God to sweep across our land so that we might see millions turn to Jesus as their Savior!

Acts 19 provides great insights into what must happen if we are going to experience such a Great Awakening in our nation today. Believers must be full of the Holy Spirit, praying for people to be healed and sharing the message of Jesus with those who don’t know Him. These 21 days of prayer and fasting are preparing us for a season of increase in what we’ve seen God do over the past several years. God wants to do more through each and every one of us, but for that to happen, we must continue to get ready for awakening!