Fully Equipped Laborers for the Harvest

At the beginning of the IHOPU Student Awakening in 2009, the Lord put a prayer in my heart that would grow into a significant mandate for me. 

In the first days of that move of the Holy Spirit, when I was a third year student, there was a “Student upper room,” where we kept an intercession set going while ministry was going on in the main auditorium.  As I thought of the large numbers who were experiencing the joy of the Lord, being set free from self-hatred and besetting sins, and getting healed downstairs, the following verses captured my heart:

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Matthew 9:35–38)

I prayed this prayer earnestly in the days and months that followed. In my campus ministry years, I had been taught that the word “laborer” in this verse meant an ordinary, untrained field-hand.  The implication was that anyone could be a laborer if they would merely do something for Jesus.  But as I began to pray this verse, I realized that this interpretation did not hold up to scrutiny.  If “laborers” were untrained and common, why did Jesus say there were “few” of them?  And why was the primary command not simply to “go,” but to “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out” laborers?  In fact, the word translated “send out” is a very forceful word – it is usually used in the New Testament for casting out demons!

Furthermore, the fact that Jesus saw the crowd as “sheep without a shepherd” strongly suggests that the laborers must be well-equipped for their task.  The language of “shepherding” in the Hebrew Scriptures refers to leaders of the people – the prophets, priests, and kings of Israel. (e.g. 2 Sam 5:2, Ps 78:71-72, Jer 23:2, Jer 50:6, and esp. Zech 10:2).  Laborers who would solve the problem of sheep without a shepherd suggest the promise in Jeremiah 3:15 of “shepherds after My own heart” (cf. Acts 13:22).

I have come to believe that this prayer for laborers represents the Lord’s desire to send out ambassadors who know Him so well that they accurately represent Him to people around them.  They will be “after His own heart,” because by knowing Him, they will feed others with the knowledge of God.  I see three dimensions of a fully-formed laborer after God’s heart:

• His word is in their mouths.
• His compassion is in their hearts.
• His power is in their hands.

Two and a half years later, that prayer continues to burn on my heart.  I believe that God desires to finish the task of evangelizing the nations in partnership with people who are “after His heart,” who, like Paul, have counted every lesser thing as rubbish in comparison to the excellence of the knowledge of God, and have become ambassadors trained and equipped to cry out to all nations, “Behold your God!” (Isaiah 40:9)

The answer to this prayer is not simply more missionaries graduating from Bible college and seminary.  Deep Bible study is necessary, but contemporary theological training is not, by and large, producing men and women who know their God and do great exploits (Dan 11:32, NKJV).  Fully-equipped laborers will be formed as the first apostles were – sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to His word.  Prayer, not education, will be the first priority of these laborers.

Finney: Why the Church needs revival

After hearing Lou Engle speak at IHOPU chapel last night I started reading Charles Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion.  There is a lot of wisdom rooted in experience in Finney’s talks.  I was particularly struck by two points in the first talk:

1. Many Christians – and I think Christian leaders in particular – would rather see the Church make progress steadily and grow over time instead of going through all the confusion and disruption – and excess and error – that comes with revival.  Finney answers the argument squarely.  If the Church were who she is supposed to be most of the time, revival would not be necessary.  But in this age, with the deceitfulness of sin and the influence of the world which is “under the sway of the wicked one,” (1 Jn 5:19), we need revival.  The Church continually backslides without regular injections of God’s power in revival.
2. Revival, when it is the real thing, is so clearly the work of God and beyond what human beings could work up, that people often conclude that it is entirely a work of God’s sovereignty and human beings have nothing to do with it.  In fact, the history of revival shows the opposite.  It is the praying Church, consecrated and committed to seeing God’s will done on earth as in heaven, that opens the door for God’s power to be manifested.

Lectures on Revivals of Religion by Charles Finney
There is so little principle in the church, so little firmness and stability of purpose, that unless the religious feelings are awakened and kept excited, counter worldly feeling and excitement will prevail, and men will not obey God. They have so little knowledge, and their principles are so weak, that unless they are excited, they will go back from the path of duty, and do nothing to promote the glory of God. The state of the world is still such, and probably will be till the millennium is fully come, that religion must be mainly promoted by means of revivals. How long and how often has the experiment been tried, to bring the church to act steadily for God, without these periodical excitements. Many good men have supposed, and still suppose, that the best way to promote religion, is to go along uniformly, and gather in the ungodly gradually, and without excitement. But however sound such reasoning 11may appear in the abstract, facts demonstrate its futility. If the church were far enough advanced in knowledge, and had stability of principle enough to keep awake, such a course would do; but the church is so little enlightened, and there are so many counteracting causes, that she will not go steadily to work without a special interest being awakened.
....
I wish this idea to be impressed on all your minds, for there has long been an idea prevalent that promoting religion has something very peculiar in it, not to be judged of by the ordinary rules of cause and effect; in short, that there is no connection of the means with the result, and no tendency in the means to produce the effect. No doctrine is more dangerous than this to the prosperity of the church, and nothing more absurd.

Suppose a man were to go and preach this doctrine among farmers, about their sowing grain. Let him tell them that God is a sovereign, and will give them a crop only when it pleases him, and that for them to plow and plant and labor as if they expected to raise a crop is very wrong, and taking the work out of the hands of God, that it interferes with his sovereignty, and is going on in their own strength: and that 14there is no connection between the means and the result on which they can depend. And now, suppose the farmers should believe such doctrine. Why, they would starve the world to death.

Just such results will follow from the church’s being persuaded that promoting religion is somehow so mysteriously a subject of Divine sovereignty, that there is no natural connection between the means and the end. What are the results? Why, generation after generation has gone down to hell. No doubt more than five thousand millions have gone down to hell, while the church has been dreaming, and waiting for God to save them without the use of means. It has been the devil’s most successful means of destroying souls. The connection is as clear in religion as it is when the farmer sows his grain. (pp 12-14)

Murray: Prayer is Meant to be Answered!

I have been making an effort to read a chapter of With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray each day, and am being provoked all over again to seek God for what the Bible actually says is possible in prayer.  Even at IHOP-KC, it is all too easy to come up with a theology to explain away my barrenness and lack of power in prayer.

Oh Lord, may I not settle for less than what You have actually promised to Your Church!

With Christ in the School of Prayer, note after ch 21, "The All-Inclusive Condition"

On a thoughtful comparison of what we mostly find in books or sermons on prayer, and the teaching of the Master, we shall find one great difference:  the importance assigned to the answer to prayer is by no means the same.  In the former we find a great deal on the blessing of prayer as a spiritual exercise even if there be no answer, and on the reasons why we should be content without it.  God’s fellowship ought to be more to us than the gift we ask; God’s wisdom only knows what is best; God may bestow something better than what He withholds.  Though this teaching looks very high and spiritual, it is remarkable that we find nothing of it with our Lord.  The more carefully we gather together all He spoke on prayer, the clearer it becomes that He wished us to think of prayer simply as the means to an end, and that the answer was to be the proof that we and our prayer are acceptable to the Father in heaven. It is not that Christ would have us count the gifts of higher value than the fellowship and favour of the Father.  By no means.  But the Father means the answer to be the token of His favour and of the reality of our fellowship with Him.  ‘To-day thy servant knoweth that I have found grace in thy sight, my lord, O king, in that the king hath fulfilled the request of his servant.’

A life marked by daily answer to prayer is the proof of our spiritual maturity; that we have indeed attained to the true abiding in Christ; that our will is truly at one with God’s will; that our faith has grown strong to see and take what God has prepared for us; that the Name of Christ and His nature have taken full possession of us; and that we have been found fit to take a place among those whom God admits to His counsels, and according to whose prayer He rules the world.  These are they in whom something of man’s original dignity hath been restored, in whom, as they abide in Christ, His power as the all-prevailing Intercessor can manifest itself, in whom the glory of His Name is shown forth.   Prayer is very blessed; the answer is more blessed still, as the response from the Father that our prayer, our faith, our will are indeed as He would wish them to be.

I make these remarks with the one desire of leading my readers themselves to put together all that Christ has said on prayer, and to yield themselves to the full impression of the truth that when prayer is what it should be, or rather when we are what we should be, abiding in Christ, the answer must be expected.  It will bring us out from those refuges where we have comforted ourselves with unanswered prayer.  It will discover to us the place of power to which Christ has appointed His Church, and which it so little occupies.  It will reveal the terrible feebleness of our spiritual life as the cause of our not knowing to pray boldly in Christ’s Name.  It will urge us mightily to rise to a life in the full union with Christ, and in the fulness of the Spirit, as the secret of effectual prayer.  And it will so lead us on to realize our destiny:  ‘At that day:  Verily, verily, I say unto you, If ye shall ask anything of the Father, He will give it you in my Name:  ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be fulfilled.’  Prayer that is really, spiritually, in union with Jesus, is always answered.