Today, we begin something new at Life Action. Every Monday, I plan to share a word from my heart about what I see God doing in our nation and beyond. I will update you on movements of God happening around the country.
Sometimes I will have a guest share. I hope you will be excited about this new opportunity to stay more current with what God is doing in our day.
And He is doing a lot!
Many of you have heard me say that we are living in days of great movements of revival and awakening, but we have to get on a plane to see it.
It continues to be true that God is working in the third world and in persecuted regions like we have never seen. But now we are beginning to see God’s Spirit moving in our own country in fresh ways.
What really excites me is that we are seeing Him weave together what He has done in the past with what He is doing in the present. And a Life Action thread runs through it!
On February 2 we began a four-day meeting at East Rogersville Baptist Church in Rogersville, Tennessee. It’s a relatively small church, and not the one most people would guess God would use to begin a mighty move of His Spirit.
But God loves to use the unlikely. In retrospect, we should not have been surprised, since we found out that one man in the church, Sheldon Livesay, has prayed for revival for thirty years. And the church itself, along with many other churches, have been fasting and praying for revival for forty days.
God began to powerfully move before I even opened my mouth to speak. And He never stopped for the next four days. After we left to go serve another church, they decided to keep going.
As of this writing four weeks later, they are still meeting! God has moved like a wave over that church and community. People are coming to Christ in large numbers as well.
Here’s a really interesting connection—the pastor planned this conference to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Asbury revival and the 25th anniversary of the Brownwood revival that I was privileged to be a part of.
On February 19 of this year, I preached at Howard Payne University in Brownwood, TX, for the 25th anniversary remembrance of the collegiate revival that broke out there and eventually spread to over 100 campuses. The day before that service, major news outlets begin to cover what was happening in Tennessee and the connection to a Christian university in Texas!
I read to the students from one of those articles, and we all stood in awe at how, 25 years after the revival that changed so many lives, God is still connecting the dots!
By the way, the new president of Howard Payne University, Dr. Cory Hines, was a student and a part of that revival 25 years ago. I’m not sure there’s another school in America that has a president who was part of a sweeping revival movement at the same school he now leads!
The revival in Brownwood happened when the Internet was still new, not utilized to check on everything like it is today. And that’s where Life Action came in.
Life Action vetted the movement and wrote about it, publicizing what God was doing. As a result, the fire spread, and credibility was established, which fanned the flame of revival. And here we are at Life Action 25 years later, being able to do it again.
On the eve of the 25th anniversary service at Howard Payne, a spontaneous prayer meeting developed with the worship leaders who were preparing to lead the service the next day. I had never met any of them, but we circled up around the very spot where the revival had been launched, and we prayed together.
What was so significant about that spot? A student I will call Jay lay on his face crying out to God on that very spot on the platform just after Henry Blackaby preached on February 14, 1995. God’s Spirit broke loose in power after that.
Today, that young man is a missionary who is part of a great revival in the Muslim world! I wish I could tell you more about him without endangering him and others. But the fact is, he really doesn’t want anyone to know more. He’s never been interested in his name being known. Revival created a passion in him for the for the Name above all names to be known.
This is what revival does. God is still weaving together the threads of past works of His Spirit. And He is not finished yet.
Ask Him to make your life one of those threads today! Hear His call and say yes.
Thank you for praying for us and helping us inspire millions more to say yes to God before He comes again.
John Avant
President, Life Action