Collegiate Day of Prayer Global: 40-Day Prayer GuideSample

Day 15: The Way to Awakening

By David Thomas (Daivd helps lead New Room, a division of Seedbed. David and his wife Karen live in Lexington, Kentucky, and are the parents of three young adults.)

There is a wide-open door for a great work here…

—1 Corinthians 16:9 (NLT)

On the approach to the Collegiate Day of Prayer, it’s good to be reminded of how much of God’s renewing work has been birthed out of the university campus. Most of the colonial colleges, what we know today as the Ivy League, were started in the overflow of the First Great Awakening. You may know the stories of the Haystack Revival, the Student Volunteer Movement, the passionate praying of David Brainerd begun in his days at Yale, and more. The Wesleyan movement began among a few college men meeting in the 1730s at Oxford University, willing to endure the derision of being called “Methodists” for their commitment to real Christianity.

We live and pray in a cultural moment where we see early signs of this same zeal and boldness among university students today. And we have every reason to follow their lead. These are young men and women who have come of age on the smart phones they are carrying around—a little 24/7 porn store in their pockets, hooked up to an around-the-clock shame factory that reminds them of all they are not and what they are missing. They are emerging adults who have survived COVID in their high school and early college years, who have come through political turmoil and all the rest that has shaped their adolescence. Any Gen Zer I meet who has braved their growing up and are still chasing Jesus, do so with a courage and clarity that I did not have when I was 20 years old. They know how desperately their generation needs Jesus. They pray with a fervor that matches the urgency of the need. And Jesus is hearing them. We are wise to listen to them.

If organizational corrections were enough to stem the tide of societal decay and renew the church, it would have happened by now. What we need is something only God can do. We need a spiritual awakening. We will have to dig deeper, beneath the surface, down to the sacred root system from which our churches once came and where there is awakening life still nascent.

What we find there is not complicated. Thirst, heart cry, and holy love. Safe and honest soul-friendship among the faithful. Passionate concern for the unbelieving. Endurance married to urgency. Overflow into culture change. As we take up a Malachi 4 posture of hearts of elders turned to the young and the young toward the old, we can care for the souls of university students and be shade over their boldness in trusting God for a new day in their generation.

Awakening is not something we can manufacture. But we can remove impediments to it. We can position ourselves to receive it. And we can join hands and hearts across the generations to cry out to God for His new work of grace until He sends it. More than at any other moment in our lives, this could be the way to awakening—with students leading the way.

PRAYER POINTS:

• Pray for personal awakening and humility. Pray for a fresh encounter with Jesus that leads to repentance, opening all channels to His work in our lives. Pray for a deep embrace of a chosen desperation that defies any self-sufficiency and unmasks our true need for God (Psalm 66:18, Psalm 79:8).
• Pray for a vision of what the Christian movement could be. Ask God to reveal the potential of the Church, making the gap between our current experience and that vision intolerable to our spirits. Pray for a willingness to enter into travailing prayer, sharing God’s burden for the world (Colossians 3:2, Luke 22:44.)
• Pray for fervent unity and boldness. Pray for an outpouring of the spirit of prayer, marked by fervor and unity. Pray for a renewal of evangelistic passion, leading to boldness in advancing the gospel, especially among emerging adults. Pray for a deep awakening—the healing and authenticity made possible in relationships formed from bonds of safety and courage (Zechariah 12:10, Acts 4:29).