History reveals a very important connection between repentance praying and revivals. Through the centuries, a powerful evangelism prayer method has profoundly influenced the coming to Jesus of non-believers. Repentance praying prior to and during revivals has been one of God’s most powerful means of reaching unbelievers.
One of the marvelous examples of this happened in 1947 in the New Hebrides Islands when a handful of ordinary men were brokenhearted about the spiritual condition in their country. Feeling that the only hope was seeking God’s help through prayer, they worked all day, spent the evening with their families, and then gathered in a barn – to pray. For two years they kept up this incredible schedule, begging God to rescue their islands.
They always based their praying on a Scripture, and one night they chose Psalm 24, including the following from verses 3 and 4:
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who has not lifted up his soul to vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
Devastated, they suddenly realized the truth. “Is it possible,” they asked, “that for two, long years we’ve been praying night after night, sacrificially, for the Lord to move on our islands – and yet our hands are not clean? Is it possible our hearts are not pure? Is it possible that our souls have been lifted up to vanity and that we have sworn deceitfully?”
Immediately the Lord convinced them that all these things they feared were true. That night, they prayed the words from James 5:16:
Therefore, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
As they left the barn that night, they saw two town drunks on their knees – not drunk but praying, asking God to forgive them. They also saw the lights on in the homes in the valley below them at 1:30am. Realizing their separation from God, dozens of families had gotten up in consternation to try to find someone awake with whom they could talk.
They then invited the great English evangelist Duncan Campbell to come preach to them, and their great revival broke out – born in a barn when men, already praying sacrificially, confessed their own sins.
In his book The Coming World Revival, Dr Robert Coleman, director of the Institute of Evangelism at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton and for years a leader in the study of evangelism, writes about this great New Hebrides revival of 1949. He concludes his account of those few pray-ers confessing their own sins this way: “That night revival came to the town. The whole community was shaken by the power of God and within a few weeks the revival had moved across the island sweeping thousands of people into the kingdom … So every revival begins. God can use a small vessel, but He will not use a dirty one”.
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Historically all revivals have come because of prayer – groaning, agonizing, persistent, prevailing prayer – by just one person or just a few or at times widespread by many Christians. In the past, every major revival has been characterized by this all-consuming prayer. Without such phenomenal praying there never has been a real revival.
(From the book A Time to Pray by Evelyn Christenson, pg 103-105,107)