Faithful in Prayer (1984)
by David Bryant
I've been to six Urbanas. That means hundreds of hours of stimulating challenges and spine-tingling information. It means thousands of words have gone in one ear and out the other one. I've forgotten most of them. But two sentences have stayed with me. And if you walk out of Urbana with one key idea that becomes a new lodestar for your life, then it will have been worth it all.
One of those key sentences for me came in 1976 when John Stott was expounding the life of Abraham. He challenged us with these words: "We need to become global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God."
And I thought, "That's exactly right!" And as I moved out of that convention, I was determined to learn what it would mean to become a world Christian.
The second sentence that the Lord lodged in my heart from all those Urbanas came in 1981. Again it came from the Bible expositor, Eric Alexander. He was expounding Acts 6 about the priorities and the ministries of the apostles, and this statement went through me like an arrow: "The frontline in world evangelization is the Word of God and prayer."
I put those two sentences together and determined to leave Urbana to do two things. One, to begin to work day by day to integrate into all that I am a vision of the advance of the gospel of Christ on my campus and to the ends of the earth. Second, to take all that the Lord has shown in his Word that he is willing to do through his people to the glory of his Son and to make that my agenda in prayer.
So what is the next step for us now? The answer is simple. The most strategic impact your life or mine will ever have on the global cause of Jesus Christ next week or fifty years from now is that we grow as men and women of prayer and that we be used by the Holy Spirit to mobilize God's people into a movement of prayer for the advancement of Christ's kingdom. The most strategic step any of us will ever take out of this Urbana is in our quiet times, beginning tomorrow, to grow as men and women of prayer, praying for the full counsel of God, and to allow him to use us to mobilize others on our campus into a movement of prayer for spiritual awakening and world evangelization. It is that frontline action that will change your life. It will change your chapter. It will change your campus. It will change your city. It will change your nation. It will change the nations and the peoples of the earth. It will change the course of history.
"If you ask anything in my name, I will do it," Jesus said. In Romans 12, Paul says to a group - he sounds like he's writing to someone who's just come from an Urbana conference - "Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, and faithful in prayer" (vv. 11-12), Paul says. Once you see where the Lord is headed, once you understand how glorious it will be as you serve him and give yourself fervently to do his will, be marked as men and women whose spiritual fervor takes shape in faithful prayer.
In 1 Timothy 2:1 Paul says, "I urge, then, first of all [that is, as a highest priority] that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgivings be made for everyone." Or as Paul puts it simply in Colossians 4:2, "Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful."
Many decisions have been made here this week. But we must never forget that preceding all of these commitments, undergirding them, sustaining them and bringing them to fulfillment, is the need for us to be faithful men and women of prayer. We need to be prepared to allow God to use us to serve the body of Christ on our campus and in our church, to mobilize others into a movement of prayer for the advancement of Christ's kingdom.
Isn't that where the book of Ephesians finally winds up? After Paul has painted for us the glories of the plan for the fullness of time, summing up all things in earth and all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth, after he has taken time to explain to us how we are to walk in a manner that is worthy of such a calling, he then calls us in Ephesians 6 to stand together, clothed in the armor of Christ himself, wrestling against the principalities and powers, and being active together in prayer. We are to pray at all times, in all seasons, for all the saints.
The stress is not just on prayer but on united prayer.
Let me tell you about a prayer meeting I attended in Madison, Wisconsin. It may be a little different from some prayer meetings you've been in. For example, as soon as you walk in the front door, you must take off your shoes and socks and roll up your pants legs and then roll up your shirtsleeves and walk into a little room that looks like a YMCA shower room. There are stalls around spigots, and you squat down in front of a spigot and begin washing around your ears and the back of your neck, your feet and hands, and you even snort some water up your nose. Then you're ready to pray.
Is anyone involved: in a daily prayer meeting like that on your campus? Does anybody know where this one is? This prayer meeting is in a mosque built by Muslim students at the University of Wisconsin. I go there because I have friends who are Muslims, and it is a great way to build relationships. It's a good way to get to understand where they're coming from, to let them know I care about who they are, to open the door for discussions about the things that mean the most to them. When I walk into this room, I find about a hundred men from about forty nations flat on their faces praying fervently in Arabic.
I don't join in the prayer. I sit there. I pray that God would move in the midst of the Muslim community in Madison and bring them to a knowledge of the One who is the only One who can bring them into the presence of the living God. But as I sit there, I have often thought that I was sitting in the middle of a united prayer movement that has international repercussions. It is welding together even more firmly an Islamic brotherhood among Muslim students at the University of Wisconsin. Sometimes I have walked out of that little mosque grieved to know that I have rarely seen such fervency and unity in prayer within the body of Christ.
That's what God is calling forth in this hour of history from his church. He is raising up a movement of prayer in the body of Christ unlike anything any of us have seen for a long time.
I have the privilege of being a part of another little movement of prayer in Madison. It only happens once a month, not once a week. There are only about twenty of us, not a hundred. We've been meeting for four years. We call ourselves the concert of prayer because concerted means united. Ours is a time of united prayer. Our focus of prayer is for spiritual awakening in the church beginning with ourselves and the churches in our city, and for the advancement of the gospel beginning in our city and on our campus and to the ends of the earth. We meet for about two and a half hours once a month. And I come out of that prayer meeting knowing that I've been involved in prayer that has international repercussions.
In our last concert of prayer we decided not to ask God for anything but to spend the entire time praising him for everything we could see that he has: done in answer to our prayers over the last four years. And it took us almost two hours to cover the list of things that came to our minds where we had seen God move internationally in answer to that little movement of prayer.
This prayer meeting is held in a central location in Madison: InterVarsity headquarters. It's not sponsored by InterVarsity, but the headquarters is centrally located. So they allow us to use it, and some InterVarsity staff come at times. There's a little living room area where we meet.
There's a fireplace in that living room, and above the fireplace is an etching, or rubbing. It comes from a monument, not a tombstone. The monument was built in 1806 on the campus of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The monument says, in essence, that it marks the place where five students prayed into being the North American Protestant missionary movement.
One day after about two years of meeting in that living room once a month, I happened to look up in the middle of prayer meeting and studied that rubbing for the first time. I realized that we were a part of the fabric of what God has been weaving for hundreds and thousands of years as he has moved from one new generation to another to bring forth men and women of prayer to seek his face with all of their hearts. He has answered them. And out of that has come a major new mission thrust that has international repercussions.
In fact, if you were to study the whole topic of student initiative in world missions over the last two hundred years, you might see that it was a student prayer initiative in world evangelization. Students have gathered just as the little group of five students did at Williams College in 1806. They were praying for revival and for world evangelization. And then God answered both agendas by reviving that campus as well as many other campuses throughout New England and by using those five students to break the logjam in missionary vision. As a result the North American Protestant missionary movement was born.
What God has done before, he is willing and ready to do again. God did it in bringing forth InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. In 1862 a daily prayer meeting was begun at Cambridge University in England that brought together two groups on that campus. One was the Missionary Union. They had been praying for missions. Another was a group that had been praying for personal revival. Those two groups were challenged to start meeting together every day. And that daily prayer meeting at Cambridge, except for a few interruptions, has gone on nonstop for over a hundred years. And out of it have come literally hundreds and thousands of men and women who have served the cause of Christ all over the world.
We are on the verge of another major movement of prayer. Let me give you some examples. There is a mighty movement of prayer which began as a meeting to support the evangelistic outreach at the Los Angeles Olympics. That movement has continued and is growing in southern California and has become the foundation on which the Billy Graham Association is building for its next major crusade in Los Angeles.
There's a movement of prayer in New Orleans. A hundred thousand Christians, most of whom are involved in inner-city churches, set aside 1984 as a year of prayer. They prayed around the clock from January 1, 1984, for spiritual awakening and world evangelization.
There's a movement of prayer that's being fostered among campuses in various parts of this country - in New England, in the southeastern part of the country, along the West Coast. In Kansas City last year there was a meeting almost this size sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. The challenge to commitment was this: How many students would be willing to commit themselves to a movement of prayer? Over ten thousand students committed themselves to it. Campus Crusade was taken aback with that kind of response. So they called it the National Collegiate Prayer Alliance. Across the world we see the same thing. Last June in Korea three thousand praying people from seventy different nations gathered for a week for the International Prayer Assembly for World Evangelization. They examined not only prayer and how to pray, but looked at a strategy for mobilizing the body of Christ worldwide into united prayer for spiritual awakening and world evangelization.
God may be calling you to become a man or woman of prayer, and to mobilize three or four others into a movement of prayer. There seems to be a sign on the horizon that the Spirit of God is graciously choosing to burst again upon his church around the world. So if you go back and gather three or four on your campuses to begin to seek the face of God: Remember, you are not alone. God is weaving you into the fabric of his work in history to penetrate the very ends of the earth with the gospel.
Suppose two or three of you formed a little prayer group on your campus as a result of this Urbana. Or perhaps some of you gathered together people from your church to meet once a month. You meet together for an evening, and you do: three things: (1) you talk about the vision that God is growing in your life; (2) you hold one another accountable for the commitments you've made; (3) you give yourselves to prayer. What kinds of miracles might God do with such a prayer meeting?
Three years ago at Princeton University there was a prayer movement that God brought into being. A few students came back from a missions conference similar to this convinced that the most strategic thing they could do was mobilize a movement of prayer. How did they go about doing that? Well, they fumbled for a little bit. But finally they set up a schedule that allowed everyone to get involved. They set up a daily prayer watch. People would sign up for a certain period of time, say fifteen minutes from 12:00-12:15 P.M. Wherever they were, studying in the library, eating lunch or whatever, they would slip out and spend that fifteen minutes in prayer, knowing that someone had prayed up till they began and someone was picking it up as soon as they were done. These students were able to get many on their campus involved in united prayer in that way.
But that wasn't enough. They also set up a daily prayer meeting and a weekly one. And then they set up a concert of prayer once a month where everybody who had been praying in all other ways could gather together for an evening of focused prayer on spiritual awakening and world evangelization.
God did amazing things out of that prayer movement. Some of you are here right now because of what God did in answer to that prayer. There are people serving in other parts of the world that were thrown out into the fields because of that movement of prayer. There were teams that went out and raised up other prayer movements on other campuses. And there's now a conference in New England that occurs every October called Vision. It took place at Yale University this past October. Five hundred people attended. That conference led solely by students grew out of that movement of prayer that began with: about four or five students who were ready.
As we come to the close of Urbana, what are you hungry for? What are you desperate for? What are you hopeful for? What do you believe God might be ready to do in your life and on your campus? This is the year of evangelism in InterVarsity. What if God banded together a movement of prayer on your campus that became the base of operations for the penetration of the gospel in a whole new way into every part of your campus? What if God took that same movement and turned it into a launching pad for new missionaries to be thrust out all over the world? What if God used that movement of prayer as a sustaining foundation for spiritual awakening in your chapter and in other chapters nearby and within InterVarsity itself and within the church worldwide? Those are the prospects that are before us if we truly serve the Lord. What are you desperate for? What are you longing for God to do? Eric Liddell from Chariots of Fire was a pacesetter.
Somebody has to set a pace. Who is going to set the pace for a movement of prayer?
I was in a meeting a couple of years ago. It was attended by President Ford, and there were about five or six secret agents who came with him. I'd never been in a situation like that. As I sat in that auditorium I tried to see if I could pick out the secret agents in the audience. I couldn't. They looked just like everybody else. I didn't know which ones were the secret agents, but they were there. It was quite a funny feeling.
I have the same feeling at this Urbana convention. I know this auditorium is filled with secret agents. You're no more spiritual than anybody else. In fact, you may be just a little more desperate. But God is asking that your first step out of this convention is not only to become a man or a woman of prayer but to go and be used of his Spirit to mobilize others to pray for spiritual, awakening and world evangelization.
Isaiah 62 says, "I have posted watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the LORD, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem." That means, do not rest till God establishes your chapter, establishes your church and makes it praise him in the earth. God has appointed watchers, and they're here in this auditorium. There may be only a hundred. There may be five thousand. Maybe all of us are being called into that role as watchers. We're God's agents. We are part of a total movement of his Spirit to mobilize his church to the frontline of world evangelization.
Do you remember the story of Jacob told in Genesis 32? He had been in exile for fourteen years and was coming back to the land of promise. Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men. They were enemies. Jacob had no idea what lay ahead, whether he would be totally wiped out along with his family and his possessions. So Jacob stayed behind on the other side of the river Jabbok and he wrestled with a man. He wrestled with him all night. And he kept saying to him, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." He wasn't saying, I will not let you go until you give me some neat, new spiritual experience. He was saying, 'I will not let you go until you have conferred the blessing of my father Abraham. I will not let you go until you fulfill in me what you have promised to me: not only to bless me but to bless the families of the earth through me. This was nothing less than his prayerful pursuit of the unfolding of the "Great Commission."
Entwined with the living God, Jacob called the place Peniel. He said "I saw God face to face." He was entwined with the living God like the vine and branches with our Savior. And God blessed him. While God blessed him he gave him a new name. What was the name he gave him? Israel. What does Israel mean? "He who struggles with God." For God said, "You have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."
God has selected a name that he wants to write across his people. That name is Israel. Those who struggle with, me (and overcome). We are to be submitted to the Lord Jesus Christ, but he has called us into intimacy with himself where we can wrestle hand to hand, foot to foot, body to body, life to life. That's grace. That's the cross.
God desires at this moment to write Israel across every InterVarsity chapter and student group in this hall. He wants to write that across the entire student movement. We are to be known above everything else as men and women who together have struggled with God. And by his grace and in his Son we have overcome.
[The following was written in 1984] David Bryant serves nationally as missions specialist with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship-USA. He has promoted biblical vision and practical strategies to thousands of students and lay people across the country through his World Christian conferences. He is the author of two books: In the Gap: What It Means to Be a World Christian and With Concerts of Prayer: Christians Join for Spiritual Awakening and World Evangelization.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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