Signs of the Coming Revival

From Gospel Translations

Before last Friday night’s “Missions at the Manse” Paul Lindberg had drafted a detailed proposal for a Bethlehem Men’s Prayer Breakfast. Like the great “Laymen’s Missionary Movement” founded in 1906, the purpose is investigation, agitation and organization, immersed in prayer, for the cause of Christ. 

A week and a half before “Missions at the Manse” the Council of Deacons approved Paul’s proposal. Then came “Missions at the Manse.” At 7:30 last Friday ninety young people packed the living room and dining room of our home. (Another dozen or more wanted to be here.) Over a hundred people seeking God’s guidance toward ministry mainly overseas! This was a phenomenal response to God’s work among us. This was an epoch-making event. This is the outpouring of the Spirit.

It is no fluke that the Bethlehem Men’s Prayer Breakfast was conceived and approved just prior to “Missions at the Manse.” The inspiration, preservation and preparation of one hundred young people for missionary service (not to mention dozens more in coming years!) is going to take a great movement of prayer in our church. The women have been organized for a long time. Now there is a new day for old men to dream dreams and young men to see visions. The timing is perfect for a great movement of prayer among the men of Bethlehem.

Out of this Prayer Breakfast will emerge the unimagined strategies to get one hundred young people to the mission field in the next seven years. The bigness of our plan will be proportionate to the bigness of our God. And he is getting bigger and bigger at Bethlehem!

Phillips Brooks said, “Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for power equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work will be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle.”

First Strategic Bethlehem Men’s Prayer Breakfast
Saturday, March 31, 8:00 am
at the church

Men of Bethlehem! Begin to pray for something extraordinary. Put this date on your calendar. Each of you will be needed for the cause. God is drafting forces at Bethlehem in unprecedented numbers. The challenge to us all is unparalleled. It will demand a tireless labor of love.

But recall the words of David Livingston to the students at Cambridge in 1857, “Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.”

On the crest of the wave,

Pastor John