Revive Us Again

We’ve got snow on the ground here in Cambridge, but I’m seeing signs of life and growth on campus.

This past week I met with several students who began praying together last November for greater spiritual healing in their lives and greater spiritual vitality on our campus and in our churches.

As we began this new semester, our student council leaders led three evenings of prayer and preaching on the theme of spiritual restoration. Each night we asked the Lord to work in us individually and collectively.

Our faculty and staff meet each Wednesday at lunchtime to pray for God’s ongoing work in and through the school. These prayer times are an expression of our sense of need and our confidence in God to do more than we can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:2o).

If you study the history of revivals, you’ll discover God’s gracious work of reviving His people has sometimes begun on a college campus. One powerful example of this happened in 1806 on the campus of Williams College (Massachusetts).

A small group of five students began meeting on the banks of the Hoosack River to pray for God’s work in their lives and on their campus. One Saturday, a thunderstorm forced them to seek shelter in a nearby barn.

Each of the young men had been deeply impacted by the writings of William Carey about the great need for global missions. On that Saturday afternoon, near a large haystack in the barn, they knelt and dedicated themselves to go wherever God would lead for the sake of reaching people with the gospel. Their motto became, “We can do this if we will.”

God answered their prayers by launching a spiritual revival that impacted the campus and spilled over to the churches in New England. These students began the first student missionary society in America. Historian Kenneth Scott Latourette summarized the global impact of the “haystack prayer meeting”: “It was from this haystack the foreign missionary movement of the churches of the United States had an initial main impulse” (https://urbana.org/blog/samuel-mills-0).

Would you join me in praying that God would hear the prayers of the students, faculty and staff at Heritage and grant us a spiritual revival that spills over to the churches and furthers the global witness for Christ? One way you can do this is to set a reminder (phone or computer) and pray for us every Wednesday at lunchtime (when our faculty and staff gather to pray). I’ll keep you posted on how the Lord answers our prayers.