From the Desk of James W. Goll

As you receive this weekly communication, I am back in Germany for “Round Two” at His Place Wellness Center for additional tests and immune therapy treatments. I return on October 26th. I have great news to share with you!  Tests show I am already 80% healed of the Epstein-Barr virus! I am so excited. The culture that created the lymphatic cancer and chronic fatigue is leaving my body! Praise the Lord with me that I get a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) opportunity at life!

This, of course, has basically required me to take the month of October off.  As you know, this affects the income streams of Encounters Network • Prayer Storm • Compassion Acts so we are continuing the Health Recovery Fund for the rest of the month of October. We need 175 people to donate a one-time gift of $100 to help us meet our monthly budget. Thank you to everyone who has helped this Summer and Fall.

The FIRE ON THE ALTAR - International Prayer Storm Convocation is approaching ever so soon! Come join co-founder of Generals International, Cindy Jacobs; apostolic voice of the Caleb Company, Don Finto; International House of Prayer – Kansas City worship leader, Julie Meyer; founder of BURN 24/7, Sean Feucht; Director of The Cry Canada, Faytene Grasseschi; leaders of the band August York, McKendree and Rachel Tucker; myself and others this November 3–5, 2011 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

We will have an all night BURN Friday at 10PM until Saturday at 10AM that is open to the public.  Evening sessions are also open to the public.  Every daytime registrant to the conference receives my Prayer Storm book FREE. Tell others. This is for you!

Remember, our new EN Resource Special for the month of October - purchase my book The Coming Israel Awakening and get a FREE copy of Praying for Israel’s Destiny. If you already have a copy, this is a great opportunity to sow into the lives of others. Don’t stop praying for Israel!

Remember, in Jesus, We Make a Great Team!

James W. Goll
and the Encounters Network•Prayer Storm•Compassion Acts Team

If the ministry of James W. Goll and the combined ministries of Encounters Network • Prayer Storm • Compassion Acts have blessed you, please consider giving a financial contribution so that we may continue to serve you and others. Checks can be made out to Encounters Network and sent to our office address, P.O. Box 1653, Franklin, TN 37065, or contributions may be made online by clicking here or call 1-877-200-1604. Gifts are tax-deductible as allowed by law and a receipt for your donation will be mailed to you.

Thank You for Your Consideration.

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The Role of Prayer in Spiritual Awakening

Without prayer, revival will not come. But, what does this kind of prayer look like? In 1976, an Oxford-educated church historian named J. Edwin Orr gave a talk entitled “The Role of Prayer in Spiritual Awakening” at the National Prayer Congress in Dallas. A videotape of his presentation was made and it is still available today. Here are some excerpts from it:

Dr. A. T. Pierson once said, “There has never been a spiritual awakening in any country or locality that did not begin in united prayer.” Let me recount what God has done through concerted, united, sustained prayer.

Not many people realize that in the wake of the American Revolution there was a moral slump.... Crime, drunkenness, profanity rose to alarming levels. Churches stopped growing and began to shrink. Christians were so few on the campuses of Ivy League colleges in the 1790s that they met in secret, like a communist cell, and kept their minutes in code so that no one would know....The Chief of Justice of the United States, John Marshall, wrote to the Bishop of Virginia, James Madison, that the Church “was too far gone ever to be redeemed.” Voltaire averred, and Tom Paine echoed, “Christianity will be forgotten in thirty years.” How did the situation change? It came through a concert of prayer....

In New England, there was a man of prayer named Isaac Backus, a Baptist pastor who in 1794, when conditions were at their worst, addressed an urgent plea for prayer for revival to pastors of every Christian denomination in the United States.

Churches knew that their backs were to the wall, so the Presbyterians of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania adopted it for all their churches. Bishop Francis Asbury adopted it for all the Methodists. The Congregational and Baptist Associations, the Reformed and the Moravians all adopted the plan, until America...was interlaced with a network of prayer meetings, which set aside the first Monday of each month to pray.

It was not too long before the revival came. It broke out first of all in Connecticut, and then spread to Massachusetts and all the seaboard states - in every case entirely without extravagance or outcry. In the summer of 1800, when it reached Kentucky, which was a lawless territory at the time, it burst into wildfire. Great camp meetings were held, and pastors of every denominational affiliation assisted when as many as 11,000 people came to one communion service.

Out of that second great awakening ... came the whole modern missionary movement and its societies. Out of it came the abolition of slavery, popular education, Bible societies, Sunday schools and many social benefits....

However, by the mid-1800s, conditions had deteriorated again. In September 1857, a man of prayer, Jeremiah Lanphier, started a prayer meeting in the upper room of the Dutch Reformed Church consistory building in Manhattan. In response to his advertisement, only six people out of the population of a million showed up. But, the following week, there were fourteen, and then twenty-three, when it was decided to meet every day for prayer. By late winter, they were filling the Dutch Reformed Church, then the Methodist Church on John Street, then Trinity Episcopal Church on Broadway at Wall Street. In February and March of 1858, every church and public hall in downtown New York was filled. Horace Greeley, the famous editor, sent a reporter with horse and buggy racing around the prayer meetings to see how many men were praying: in one hour, he could get to only twelve meetings, but he counted 6100 men attending.

Then a landslide of prayer began, which overflowed to the churches in the evenings. People began to be converted, ten thousand a week in New York City alone. The movement spread throughout New England, the church bells bringing people to prayer at eight in the morning, twelve noon, and six in the evening. The revival raced up the Hudson and down the Mohawk, where the Baptists, for example, had so many people to baptize that they went down to the river, cut a big hole in the ice, and baptized them in the cold water: when Baptists do that they really are on fire... Out of this revival came a young shoe salesman whose name became a household word, D.L. Moody.  More than a million people were converted to God in one year out of a population of thirty million.

Then that same revival jumped the Atlantic and appeared in Ulster, Scotland, Wales, and then on to England, parts of Europe, South Africa and South India - anywhere there was an evangelical cause. It sent mission pioneers to many countries. Effects were felt for forty years. Having begun in a movement of prayer, it was sustained by a movement of prayer.

That movement lasted for a generation, but at the turn of the twentieth century, there was need of awakening again. A general movement of prayer began, with special prayer meetings at Moody Bible Institute; at the Kenswick Convention in England; and places as far apart as Melbourne, Australia; Wonsan in Korea; and in the Nilgiri Hills of India. All around the world believers were praying that there might be another great awakening in the twentieth century....

Among the most notable results of this prayer is the well-known Welsh Revival of 1904... The movement went like a tidal wave over Wales. In five months there were a hundred thousand people converted throughout the country....It was the social impact that was astounding. For example, judges were presented with white gloves, not a case to try: no robberies, no burglaries, no rapes, no murders and no embezzlements, nothing... As the revival swept Wales, drunkenness was cut in half. There was a wave of bankruptcies, but they were nearly all for taverns. There was even a slowdown in the mines. You say, “How could a religious revival cause a strike?” It did not cause a strike, just a slowdown, for so many Welsh coal miners were converted and stopped using bad language that the horses that dragged the trucks in the mines could not understand what was being said to them, hence transportation slowed down for a while until they learned the language of Canaan. (When I first heard that story, I thought that it was a tall tale, but I can document it.)

That revival also affected sexual moral standards, I had discovered through the figures given by British government experts that, in Radnorshire and Merionethshire, the actual illegitimate birth rate had dropped 44% within a year of the beginning of the revival. That revival swept Britain. It so moved all of Norway that the Norwegian Parliament passed special legislation to permit laymen to conduct Communion because the clergy could not keep up with the number of the converts desiring to partake. It swept Sweden, Finland and Denmark, Germany, Canada from coast to coast, all of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, West Africa, touching also Brazil, Mexico, and Chile....

As always, it began through a movement of prayer, with prayer meetings all over the United States as well as the other countries; and soon there came the great time of the harvest. So, what is the lesson we can learn? It is a very simple one, as direct as the promises of God in Scripture:

If my people, who are called by My name, shall humble themselves and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (2 Chron. 7:14 [rsv])

What is involved in this? As God requires us to pray, we must not forget what was said by Jonathan Edwards: “...to promote explicit agreement and visible union of God’s people in extraordinary prayer.” What do we mean by extraordinary prayer? We share in ordinary prayer in regular worship services, before eating and the like. But, when people are found getting up at six in the morning to pray, or having a half night of prayer until midnight, or giving up their lunchtime to pray at a noonday prayer meeting, that is extraordinary prayer. But, it must be united and concerted.

[Excerpted from a transcription of “The Role of Prayer in Spiritual Awakening,” a talk given at the National Prayer Congress in Dallas, Texas in October of 1976 by J. Edwin Orr. Used by permission of Campus Crusade for Christ/Randolf Productions, Inc. and the J. Edwin Orr Foundation.]

Dr. Orr just touched on a few highlights from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Again and again we see the powerful effect of prayer in bringing about true revival. It takes a lot of prayer to bring true revival. It takes an army of intercessors praying over time. Those who pray for revival do not need to be in the same room at the same time, although sometimes they are. They don’t even need to speak the same language, because they might come from different countries. But they do need to be united in purpose: “Lord, send your Spirit.... Revive us again!... Rend the heavens and come down!”

Expectantly!

James W. Goll

This week in our Global Prayer Storm, we are going to do two things. We are going to pray over our own lives and families and ask the Lord for the FIRE OF HIS LOVE to burn on the altars of our hearts. Make this personal. Make it for your family. This is how true revival will come – it comes as each individual believer has his or her heart set on fire with the love and power of God.

The second thing we are going to do this week is to join in by praying for our soon approaching FIRE ON THE ALTAR – International Prayer Storm Convocation in at Life Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania coming up November 3-5, 2011. Pray that the ceiling over this event “opens up”, hundreds of people come, all are inspired in their faith and prayer lives, and that all the financial needs for this event be met with excess.

There is still time for you to come. This is for you! It is Encounters Networks first conference in over three years. We need your support. Ask the Lord if you are to come and do what He shows you. This week, we pray for individual revival in our hearts and for the blessing of the Lord upon this soon approaching convocation.

Blessings to You as You Stand on the Walls!

James W. Goll