As we start a new year, most people make some sort of new start. This can be the best year you have ever had! This can be the year when your spiritual life explodes into deeper and better things than you have yet experienced, things that you have barely even dreamed of. This can be the year when revival starts in your own life and travels through you to effect the life of your family, your church, your city, and your nation.
Join me and start this next year with hungering and thirsting after God and the things of God to a greater degree than ever before. This hunger will drive you to deeper, more intense habits of prayer, and study, and walking with God. You won’t pray and read the Bible because you should but because you can’t stand not having more of God actively working in and through you.
How do you get hungry for God? You find yourself getting hungry for what you look at, what you think about. So start the year by putting God in first place. Fill your mind with His word and thoughts and stories of His moving. Go where the Lord is moving. The will spark your hunger. Begin to express your hunger to God in prayer and in worship. Follow your hunger into the reality and presence of God.
A major key to a move of God in your life, in your church and in the area you live is hunger.
Quote from Spiritual Hunger by John G Lake
“Brother Parham was preaching in Texas. A black man by the name of Tom Seymour came into his meeting. Parham related his experience to Brother Tom and myself. There was a deep hunger in that black man’s soul. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant to support himself while preaching to a church of his own people. He knew God as Savior and Sanctifier. He knew the power of God to heal. But as he listened to Parham, he became convinced of a bigger thing – the baptism of the Holy Ghost. He went on to Los Angeles without receiving it, but he said he was determined to preach all of God he knew to the people.
He said, before I met Parham, such a hunger to have more of God was in my heart that I prayed for five hours a day for two and a half years. I got to Los Angeles and there the hunger was not less but more. I prayed, God what can I do? The Spirit said, pray more. There are better things to be had in spiritual life, but they must be sought out with faith and prayer. I increased my hours of prayer to seven and prayed on for a year and a half more.
God had put such a hunger into that man’s heart that when the fire of God came it glorified Him. I do not believe any other man in modern times had a more wonderful deluge of God in his life than God gave to that dear fellow, and the glory and power of a real Pentecost swept the world.”
God started a world-wide revival through the hunger of this man. His hunger drove him to more and more prayer until God began to move in and through Him and around Him and the Spirit fell at Azusa Street, and the rest is history.
Quote from In the Day of thy Power by Arthur Wallis:
“It was springtime in the year 1938. A boy in middle teens stood in the little schoolroom adjoining Moriah Chapel, in the small Welsh mining town of Loughor, Glamorganshire. A strange feeling of awe and wonder filled his heart, for this was the very room that witnessed the beginnings of that great outpouring of the Spirit, the Welsh Revival of 1904. He listened to his host and guide, himself a convert of the revival, speak of those memorable days when the hardest hearts were melted by the presence of the Lord, and when the hills and valleys rang again with the songs of Zion. It was almost too wonderful to be true, but it created questions deep down in his heart for which he could find no answers.
If God can achieve such mighty things in time of revival, and if the spiritual labors of fifty years can be surpassed in so many days when the Spirit is poured out, why, he wondered, is the church today so satisfied with the results of normal evangelism? Why are we not more concerned that there should be another great revival? Why do we not pray for it day and night?”
Spiritual Hunger
Isaiah 44:3-4 – For I will pour water upon him who is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground. I will pour My Spirit upon your offspring, and My blessing upon your descendants. And they shall spring up among the grass like willows or poplars by the watercourses.
Psalms 63:1-2 (Amplified) – O GOD, You are my God, earnestly will I seek You; my inner self thirsts for You, my flesh longs and is faint for You, in a dry and weary land where no water is. So I have looked upon You in the sanctuary to see Your power and Your glory.
Psalms 42:1-3 (Amplified) – My inner self thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, Where is your God?
James 5:16 (Amplified) – …The earnest (heartfelt, continued) prayer of a righteous man makes tremendous power available [dynamic in its working].
The power in your prayers are connected to your heart. For prayers to be full of dynamic power, they must be fervent, earnest and heartfelt.
Jeremiah 29:13-14 (Amplified) – Then you will seek Me, inquire for, and require Me [as a vital necessity] and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will release you from captivity and gather you from all the nations and all the places to which I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I caused you to be carried away captive.
It is only when you seek Him with ALL of your heart that you will find Him. Another result of heartfelt prayer and seeking is release from the captivity and bondage in your life. The things that you have made resolution after resolution to overcome, you will find yourself free of!
Example in the Early Church
Acts 1:8 (Amplified) – But you shall receive power (ability, efficiency, and might) when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends (the very bounds) of the earth.
Acts 1:14 (Amplified) – All of these with their minds in full agreement devoted themselves steadfastly to prayer, [waiting together] with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.
Acts 2:1-4 (Amplified) – And when the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all assembled together in one place, When suddenly there came a sound from heaven like the rushing of a violent tempest blast, and it filled the whole house in which they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues resembling fire, which were separated and distributed and which settled on each one of them. And they were all filled (diffused throughout their souls) with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other (different, foreign) languages (tongues), as the Spirit kept giving them clear and loud expression [in each tongue in appropriate words].
The Holy Spirit fell on the Day of Pentecost. They couldn’t do what they needed to do to win with world without the power of the Holy Spirit. We may have received the Holy Spirit, but that doesn’t mean we have all we need. There is always more of God. We need new outpourings and new infillings to equip and empower us for what we need to do in this world. God will come again in response to His people drawing near to Him, waiting on Him, seeking Him with their entire hearts.
We will be having a monthly prayer and praise gathering for the month of January. The first week will be on spiritual hunger, seeking God, waiting on God, drawing near to God. The schedule for the rest of the weeks is below. Come and join us as we burst through old patterns, old ways, traditions and thoughts that have kept us back and into new and better things, into depths of God that we haven’t yet known.
