This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program originally aired on Feb. 8, 2024. To listen to the program, please click HERE.
Jamie Mitchell: Well, good day friends. Welcome to another Stand in the Gap Today. I’m Jamie Mitchell, director of Church Culture at the American Pastors Network, with me, my good friend and our co-host today, Dave Kistler.
One of the tasks that I have at the American Pastors Network is to write in an annual evaluation on the state of the church. That paper is available to anyone for free. You can go on our website, especially for pastors, get it into their hands. But as I look across the landscape of the Evangelical Church, I find many troubling signs, decline in attendance, sloppy preaching, a misguided idea on what a disciple actually is, but most importantly, influences fading quickly in the world. And all of this speaks to a deeper spiritual problem in the stalls of believers in our leaders and in the general body of Christ. I know that Jesus declared that he would build his church and the gates of hell would not prevail. Yet, are we allowing him to build his church? And what we are building and what we are participating in, does it really reflect the person, the power, and the purpose of Jesus Christ?
Sadly, I see the body of Christ metaphorically laying on an emergency table in a hospital gasping for air and facing death if we don’t do something or specifically if we don’t open up ourselves to God to do something. The church needs renewal, revival, or better, resuscitation. And that’s our focus for today, our desperate need for spiritual resuscitation. And to help us is someone who, for more than four decades, has preached, studied, written, and appealed to the church to understand its need for prayer, intimacy with Christ, and the need for revival.
David Bryant, a number of years ago, founded Concerts of Prayer International. That’s how we met and how I became acquainted with him when I was serving in New York City years ago. There was a great prayer movement among pastors. And believe it or not, that was three or four lifetimes ago. He today, heads up, ChristNOW, a different name, but the same emphasis. He’s been the catalyst for many a ministry to take a hard look at our ministries and really point people to Christ and the fulfilling of our call, of connecting God’s people and the world to the hope only found in the gospel.
David Bryant, I am so glad to have reconnected with you and thrilled to introduce you to the Stand in the Gap People. Welcome today.
David Bryant: Well, thank you Jamie. It’s great to be back in touch with you again after so long and you’re welcome to come visit us in New York. There’s a lot of spiritual dynamism going on in this city right now. Those people would not believe that, but God is doing some powerful work among us. So anyway, it’s great to be with you.
Jamie Mitchell: Well, David, it is great to talk with you. And a few weeks ago, we had some discussions about doing this program and you said something in that conversation, you used the word resuscitation. Could you just clarify why we’re using that word today? But I think more importantly also, give some people some background about your ministry history and even why this issue of renewal and revival and seeing the church resuscitated has been an important element of your ministry.
David Bryant: Oh, wow. Okay. Well, in the few minutes we have, let me see how I can put this together simply. For a number of years, I worked with what was called the National Revival Network. Of course we were dealing with the whole issue of revival and how you define it. We had leaders from many different organizations and many different revival ministries trying to work together to get at it. And one day I came across this quote from George Barna and he was sort of summarizing all the research he had just recently done on the church in America. And this is the quote I shared with you when we talked to a few days ago. He uses the word resuscitation and I said to the National Revival Network people, I said, “I think this is the best definition for revival or what I always call a Christ awakening.” That’s my favorite term.
But let me just read you the quote I shared with you the other day when Barna wrote these words, he said, “Overall…” Now, George Barna is sort of like the George Gallup of the Evangelical church, so this is all based on a lot of research. He said, “Overall, Christian ministry is stuck in a deep rut. Too many Christians and churches in America have traded in spiritual passion for empty rituals, clever methods, mindless practices.” It goes on. The challenge to today’s church is not methodological. In other words, there isn’t something we need to do to sort of fix the program. Instead, he concludes, it is a challenge to resuscitate the spiritual passion and fervor of the nation’s Christians.
When you think about if somebody needs resuscitation, I mean we compressed on the chest and so on, but sometimes it requires mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when one person puts their face into the face of the other person and you take the air in your lungs and you breathe it through their mouth into their lungs as a way to sort of bring them back to life. And to me, that is what our churches need desperately right now, to have a fresh encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s almost like meeting him face-to-face in a way that allows him then to do a work among us, he’s longing to do and that is to breathe new life into us, out of his lungs into our lungs.
And when that happens… And if there was time, I could tell a hundred stories of where I’ve seen that happening, including in my own life personally and in the ways I’ve worked with other Christian groups, when that happens, then so many of the other issues we’re facing, we can take on those challenges because now we have a new vitality in our life in Jesus that is equal to the task.
Dave Kistler: David, this is Dave Kistler. I just want to say what a delight it is to have you on the program today. And one of the greatest definitions of revival I’ve ever heard is God’s infusion of his life into a body that is threatening to become a corpse. I think that’s exactly just fits the word that we’re talking about today, resuscitation. Very quickly before we have to go into the break, I want to ask you this question. Do you sense that the evangelical community knows and understands that we are in deep spiritual trouble? The church is in a situation that we’re describing here in this first segment. Or do you think they’re oblivious to that?
David Bryant: I believe we’re asleep on it. The phrase I use is a Christ awakening. And right now the church is sort of like someone asleep. Paul said, “The night has passed, the day is at hand. Awake.” And then he goes on and says, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” That’s really where we are right now. Most of us don’t realize in the last 20 years, 40 million church attenders in this nation have walked away from the church. There’s a book that just came out and I would recommend it highly written by people who have studied this research in depth and written this book together. It’s called The Great Dechurching, not the great Awakening, the great Dechurching. And what’s happening is we are losing our young people and it’s because the church has gone to sleep on Jesus. And that’s what we really need, is to be resuscitated in a whole new experience of the power and presence of Jesus Christ. I’ll end by just saying the church has had a great phrase for this. They called revival the manifest presence of Christ.
Jamie Mitchell: Amen. Amen. Hey, when we come back, we’re going to discuss more. Why do we struggle spiritually? Join with us here on Stand in the Gap Today.
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Jamie Mitchell: Well, welcome back. Our topic today is our desperate need for spiritual resuscitation with David Bryant from ChristNOW. You can check out his website ChristNOW, all one word, .com. Plenty of resources, a great reading on there.
David, we are discussing the spiritual temperature or lack thereof in the church, in believers lives today. I want to get a handle on why we lack spiritual power. What are the roadblocks or why do we struggle? And what have you seen over the decades of ministry of really drilling down on this subject in the evangelical world?
David Bryant: Yeah, well, that’s a great question. Before yesterday, I would’ve had one answer, but then yesterday we mentioned Barna earlier, he came out with some new research just published yesterday about why Christians are not more passionate for the things of God. And what he discovered was that only 7% of those interviews said it was because their lives were too busy. Now, that’s what I would’ve said in answer to your question this morning, but now I guess that’s not actually the main reason.
Barna also came out with a research not long ago where he concluded that 4%, only 4% of evangelicals are biblically literate. That means that a good percentage of our people really don’t know much of what the Bible says. And unfortunately what I’ve discovered traveling every stream of the church, not just the evangelical world, but every part of the body of Christ, both in this nation worldwide over these many decades, is that we’re not only just ignorant of scripture in general, we’re really ignorant of what scripture says about the person of Christ himself.
Paul says in Romans 10 that faith comes by hearing when what is heard is the word about the Christ. In other words, the more we hear of who Jesus is, not only about what he’s done for us, but who he is right now today and what his reign, what his supremacy, what his kingdom is all about, the more we get to know Him, who He is to us and for us and who He is over us and be for us, who He is within us and through us and upon us, all of those dimensions that Scripture gives us. Then the more our faith comes alive, the more we have a desire then to go in a spiritual direction.
And when we live the way we’re living right now, we run the real risk of what Paul talks about. He talks about grieving the spirit. He talks about quenching the spirit. There’s so much being reported today, Jamie, as you well know about just how much the politicization of the church is taking place so that in our congregations, pastors, almost 50% of pastors in the last two years have seriously considered resigning because of the acrimoniousness of their congregations over political issues. And Paul says that kind of way of living is what he calls the works to the flesh. And the works of the flesh are going to grieve and quench the spirit of God every time.
So there’s a sense in which we have got to move back into greater intimacy with Christ. Paul says, and with this I’ll conclude my thoughts here, Paul says in Colossians chapter 1 verse 27, he says, “The richness of the gospel is this.” In other words, the richest thing the gospel brings to us is this. And he says, “It is this, Christ is in you, the hope of glory.”
Now, let me say three things. Number one, Christ is not his last name, it’s his title, title who he is right now, Lord of heaven, earth, and the fullness of his supremacy. “In you” is plural, means in the midst of you. Not just in us individually, but in the midst of His people. Hope of glory means the assurance of all the promises of God that they’re going to be fulfilled.
So I say the Christian life thing could be defined as intimacy with Christ and his supremacy that leads to great expectancy. And if we get our people back to living that way, that expectancy that rises out of our intimacy with the fullness of Jesus is what will drive our spiritual ambition and our spiritual hunger and God’s people will become the witness for him that I know He longs for us to be.
Dave Kistler: David, my mind’s running a lot of different directions right now, but a pastor one time said this that the last three things that he would see change in a believer’s life were these. Number one, prayer. Number two, giving. And number three, evangelism.
Now, to be quite honest with you, I’m a little surprised that he would say that one sense but not surprised in another sense because those three things seem to be very basic building blocks of discipleship, that we ought to be praying, we ought to be giving, and we certainly ought to be sharing the faith that God has given us in our salvation experience and how Jesus has changed our life with others. I’m just curious, are you seeing those three things as the last three things that are kind of the spiritual holdouts among believers as far as their discipleship is concerned? And are there any other kind of roadblocks that you see that need to be overcome?
David Bryant: Wow. Well, yeah, again, great questions. I would say those three are among three. I would give greater priority to the prayer only because the prayer life of a church is really the pulse that tells me how much vitality in life there is for anything else, including evangelism.
Let me tell you about an experiment that was done a few years ago by Ray Bakke who was at that time the foremost evangelical urbanologist. He was a social scientist, studied the church at work in the urban parts of our world. And for five years, he traveled to 300 of the major cities of the world, Jamie, and he held two-day consultations with Christian leaders in each of those 300 cities over five years. And then he wrote up his findings. He came up with 10 major barriers that were keeping the churches from doing evangelism and reaching out and making a difference in their cities. And of the 10, the number one reason which he concluded out of all of those surveys of 300 cities was hopelessness in the hearts of the pastors and also in the hearts of the believers, the sense that the challenge of the urban setting was so great that it was too much, that the best they could do is hold on and survive until Jesus comes again.
I have come to conclusion that the reason the prayer life of the church is so anemic… And it is all through our churches, there’s very little corporate praying going on, I can’t speak for what happens individuals. But the reason I’ve concluded is we do not have a sense of where God wants to take us because we do not see the wonder of who Christ is and what he’s up to. Who He is and where He’s headed and what He’s doing and how He gets exalted, that we don’t see that clearly enough that to birth in us a sense of expectation and hope that drives us to prayer.
You see, prayer basically comes about both by holy desperation and holy anticipation. And yes, a lot of times we’re driven to prayer by desperation, but the best way to be driven to prayer is because God has something we know he wants to do and we’ve decided we don’t want to live without it, but we know we cannot produce it. So the only thing left to do is to seek it.
I’ve been working for years. As you know, we’ve had mass prayer rallies at stadiums all over the world and throughout this country. I’ve seen God’s people want to move in this direction if we give them a big enough vision so that they can’t live without it. And that’s the great need of the church right now.
Jamie Mitchell: David, I say amen and amen for a number of reasons. To go back to your issue about our intimacy with Christ, and I know this might seem trivial, but my wife is away taking care of her parents. And so I was free the other night and I noticed that the movie The Chosen was in the theater. And I haven’t been a big Chosen fan or follower, but I said, “You know what? I’m going to go.” And I went and for three hours it depicted that the life and the person of Jesus Christ in a dramatic form. As I was saying there, I realized I had not, in a long time, drilled down on his words and it really affected me in a deep, meaningful way. Is that what you’re talking about, especially with pastors and peoples in the church, that again, this falling in love with Jesus and hearing his stories and hearing what he did and how he moved, is that what we desperately need to overcome our spiritual malaise?
David Bryant: Yes. Well, again, the Holy Spirit can use anything. That’s a beautiful story, how he could use a movie to get us moving again in the direction that we need to move. But the fact of the matter is, faith comes by hearing.
You see, what I’ve learned as I’ve traveled is that many Christians think about who Jesus was and all he did and the work of redemption and so on. And then they think about prophecy and Jesus is coming again and what it will be like to be in glory and so on. But very few Christians I have found really think much about who Jesus is today. I was teaching on the resurrection at one point and a fellow said to me afterwards, he said, “Up until now, I was thinking Jesus right now is just sort of floating around up there.” And he said, “I hadn’t really thought that he’s got a body, that there’s a man in glory sitting on the throne of heaven, that he’s bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.” And that’s just the beginning.
I wrote a whole book, it’s 500, almost 600 pages called Christ is Now. I look at seven dimensions of who Jesus is today. And if we could begin to help people see who he is at this very moment, which that movie begins to sort of suggest we should, then that’s what’s going to really quicken people and give them a whole new desire to know Jesus because he’s right there. I could have intimacy with Him at this very moment. That’s why the spirit of God was given to us. That’s His main job, that’s His mission, that’s what He longs to do for all of us if we just let him.
Jamie Mitchell: Amen. Identifying the problem is the beginning. We’re going to start talking about solutions. When we return, our pastors and shepherds, the key, how do we help them? How do we maybe breathe some life into our leaders to resuscitate them so they then can start giving CPR to our congregations? Come back and join us on Stand in the Gap Today.
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Jamie Mitchell: Well, thanks for coming back and joining with us. I mentioned before that if you want information about David Bryant and ChristNOW, you go to christnow.com. But also David, you have a ministry I think called Proclaim HOPE! Give our people just a moment to share about your ministry and how you’re assisting believers and pastors in the church experience, what we’re talking about today, spiritual resuscitation.
David Bryant: Okay, well, and let me just say that it all began back in 1988, Jamie, when we founded what was called what we called Concerts of Prayer International. That term Concerts of Prayer actually comes from the first Great Awakening, which is what they described the prayer meetings that took place prior to that here in the United States and other parts of the world. It means concerted, united together in prayer.
And so for many years I was helping to mobilize prayer in the body of Christ in many parts of the world. I gave leadership to America’s National Prayer Committee for many years in this country. And then the more I traveled the church, the more I realized that the great need wasn’t first of all to get people into the activity of prayer, but to get them aware of what we’re praying toward the hope that we have in the reign of Christ at this very hour so that they would want to pray. I call it the crisis of Christology, a crisis of our vision of the greatness and wonder and supremacy of Jesus Christ. So we reshaped Concerts of Prayer International and called it Proclaim HOPE! And that’s what we were doing. And so for many years, we were addressing this crisis of Christology.
And then one of our major projects, which began about almost nine years ago, was to begin to use the internet and begin to work in the digital world. We put together a project of Proclaim HOPE! called christnow.com, and that’s where I’m giving most of my emphasis now. If people go to christnow.com, there are literally thousands of free resources of all kinds available to help you go deeper with who Jesus is today and both individually and a lot is there to help local churches.
Finally, I would just say that right now this year, Jamie, we’re strongly at work on what we’re calling the 2024 Nationwide campaign for an American Christ Awakening, which we believe is the greatest need of the hour in this. Not our campaign, but an American Christ awakening, greatest need of the hour at this moment for the survival of our nation and for the survival of the witness of the cause of Christ in our nation. So you’ll learn all about that as well when you go to christnow.com.
Dave Kistler: David, let me ask you a question here. You mentioned two things in the last segment, that we sometimes are driven to earnest prayer by desperation, but you said the greatest motivation ought to be anticipation or expectation. And I want to ask you this question because I’m encountering this a lot. As an evangelist who travels across the country and preaches on the topic of revival, I’m hearing whether it be individually or sometimes even on religious broadcasting, you’ll hear people discussing what’s going on in our country, what’s going on in our world, and they talk about it from a standpoint of defeat as if we’re going to dissect the darkness. And they spend a lot of time doing that, but there’s no real hope offered with respect to what God can do.
And if you were to ask some of these folks the question, “Do you believe God can or do you believe God will allow the possibility of revival to occur in America again, is that even a possibility”? Again, I think sometimes you would hear, “Well, no. We are in the last days. We’re in times of great departure from the faith, times of great apostasy.” And the insinuation is, or maybe the direct statement would be they don’t believe revival is possible.
What I love about what you’re saying is exactly what I believe that this hope of Christ and him doing a work again in America, in the world in these strategic days is that which ought to motivate us to prayer. If people are communicating that that’s not possible, then why pray? Are you seeing that across the length and breadth of the country?
David Bryant: Yes, I would say not only are we feeling defeated as we look at what’s going on in our nation, our culture, but we are not actually starting where we should start, and I don’t mean to be introverted, but looking inward and ask, “Is the church changing the culture or has the culture changed the church?” Has enough of all that darkness out there gotten into our lives insidiously, invaded the life of the church so that we really need to start again?
I often hear in revival preaching and revival praying, I’ve noticed over the years how much time will be spent on repentance as if unless we get all of everything out on the table and look at all the darkness and deal with it and weep over it and so on, God’s never going to do anything. And yet when you look at the major promises for awakening anywhere in both the Old and New Testament, you find that hope precedes repentance because repentance means you turning from and turning to. And if we haven’t clarified for people what they’re turning to and we only tell them what they need to turn from, we’ve left them in worse condition than if we had not even started at all.
I’ve often said that the greatest repentance that will deliver the church and finally set us on the road to our real revival is when we repent in the words of Revelation 1 when it says they will look on Him whom they have pierced and they will weep for Him as one weeps for their only son. That when the day comes, when God’s people begin to see what we have done to God’s son, how we’ve used Him, how we’ve misrepresented Him, how we’ve blasphemed His name among the Gentiles, as Paul puts it, when we realize what we have done to the person of Christ before the eyes of the world. And it breaks our hearts and we come back to Jesus and start all over again with who He really is, not who we wanted Him to be or who we thought he would be, then that’s when…
And listen, if the church is revived, that just means we’re full of Christ and there cannot be a single challenge we’re facing in this nation that’s bigger than He is. So we’re the body of Christ. We’re to be filled with his life. And that’s why I think, again, back to the word resuscitation, our lungs full of his breath. We’re going to be alive, we’re going to be strong, we’re going to be vital, and we’re going to be able to bring forth the fruit of the spirit. And the darkness will have to flee because the light overwhelms the darkness.
Jamie Mitchell: David, one of the heartbeats of this ministry is pastors. We recognize that if this resuscitation, this revival were to take place, pastors will have to play a key role in it. I’ve always believed speed of the leader, speed of the team and affecting pastors are important. Two questions I want you to weigh in on. One is, is the reason why we’re not seeing this kind of revival renewal in the church because pastors are in a spiritual malaise themselves? And a part of that, even if they were to get spiritually revitalized themselves, getting pastors to come together, work together, link arms together, they can’t start revival alone. You need to do it together. Why are we not seeing that within the church ranks from your perspective?
David Bryant: Wow. Hey Jamie, I love your question. Unfortunately, we have such a short time to address such an important question. My major focus for almost 30 some years now has been, above all other audiences, has been working with pastors. I developed a whole teaching called the Christ Institute. So I did live for many, many years. It’s now on video and it’s available free to everybody at christnow.com. But it was designed particularly to take pastors right where you’re talking about it and to walk them into a whole new perspective of what their ministry is all about.
And I often would say to pastors, “How would you like to lay your head on the pillow every night and be able to say with a clear conscience and a settled heart that you know this day your life has counted strategically for the advance of God’s kingdom?” And I said, “If you want to be able to do that every night, just commit yourself to one thing. That every time you have a chance to share God’s word with God’s people, that you will give them two things before you’re done, no matter whatever else you talk about. You will end up giving them a little bit larger vision of Christ and greater reasons for them to put their hope in him.” I said it could be counseling, it could be how you lead a marriage ceremony. It could be a hospital call, it could be a small group.
It could be particularly your sermon on Sunday morning. The people would walk out of the sanctuary, whatever the topic, they would have a little bit larger vision of Christ and greater reasons to put their hope in Him. Because you see, then the Holy Spirit has something to work with. There is no limit to where God can take us. If our vision for Christ is growing and our hope in Him is being enlarged, there’s no limit. So if I’m doing that daily in all my ministry activities, even with an email or a letter or whatever it may be, I keep looking for a way just a little bit larger, then when I go to bed at night, I know my life has really made a difference for God’s kingdom to long-term.
I think if pastors could see that and believe that about who they are, that this was the reason they came into the ministry to begin with. Paul says, Colossians 1, “Him we proclaim, teaching everyone and exhorting everyone that we may present everyone complete in Christ.” Paul said, “That’s my whole life.” Everybody in the ministry, we ought to be able to say, “That’s my whole life.” Now, maybe we should take this up after the break, but we could talk about the flip side of that, why so many pastors are not coming together I believe is related to two things, a raft of disappointments with God they have already and a sense of competitiveness with their fellow pastors.
Jamie Mitchell: Okay, you’ve set the table. We’re going to come back because I want to get to that answer. We’re not going to rush ahead because that is so important, David Bryant. So come back for our last segment. We’re going to answer that question, why aren’t pastors gathering together, uniting together to both proclaim Christ and to motivate the church to cry out to God and call for revival?
Jamie Mitchell: Well, what a great honor and privilege it’s been to have David Bryant as our guest today as we’ve been dissecting the problem of spiritual fervency and the need for resuscitation in the body of Christ. David, we ended last segment and we just started to get into this. I want to get as much out of this segment as we can. We were talking about the church’s struggle, but also pastoral struggles of why pastors struggle spiritually. And you said a couple of things there at the end. I want you to follow up on that about why pastors struggle, but also how can we get pastors together to start praying for their city, for their region and working together. I’ve seen that as a great mark of when revival has come. So weigh in on the pastoral side of this.
David Bryant: Yes, right. I was a pastor for a number of years before getting into all that I’m doing now. Maybe I should tell a quick story here, and that is that back during those years, I was pastoring a church in a city that came under revolution. We had armed troops in the streets, people were being shot and killed. About eight or nine men in the church joined me and we moved into six weeks of prayer, four nights a week, two hours a night. We prayed through the book of Ephesians, one chapter for each of the six weeks. We basically used that as our prayer agenda and asked God to do in our midst what He did for the church in Ephesus and what was outlined in that book.
We were up against something where we were praying out of desperation, as we said before, not so much anticipation. We just knew that we were in a situation where we were in over our heads and where we needed to see a new work of God. But as we prayed through the book of Ephesians, what happened was that we unpacked this glorious vision of who Jesus is without knowing that’s what we were doing because the Book of Ephesians is essentially a beautiful portrait of who Jesus is right now, what He’s up to, what He’s doing, what He offers, what we can find in Him, where He wants to take us, and so on.
So we came out of that resuscitated. Our church came out of that resuscitated. The next four years as I was there, the stories I could tell you of what God did both in that city, on the university campus that we were next to, it was really quite an amazing thing. I came out of that convinced that this is a kind of thing I believe God wants to do everywhere.
So to come back to your question now, number one, the reason pastors are not meeting together is, number one, because they’re exhausted. Os Guinness came out with a book on pastoral ministry a few years ago in which he identified 27 separate roles that most churches expect their pastors to play, and it is just too much. When you’re that exhausted, taking on another meeting, whatever it’s about, is the last thing you feel like doing. That’s number one.
Number two, we live in a very competitive environment generally in our culture, and we put high value on those that succeed. And we usually measure that by numbers. And so when pastors get together to pray, you end up, if you do this very much, you end up finding out about each other’s ministries. And I’m not sure I want you to know exactly where I’m struggling in my ministry or how our ministry doesn’t quite stack up to somebody else’s, number wise, for example. So you don’t want to get into that competitive experience. So it’s better to just stay back and draw back than to do that.
Third reason is, and I do believe it’s really at the core, it comes back to a seminal book that Philip Yancey wrote a few years ago called Disappointment with God. Now, it was a study of the Book of Joel, but it was basically a study of where the church was at that very moment. That was about maybe 15 years ago. It hasn’t changed at all. His conclusion, Philip Yancey, one of the great Christian writers of our generation, his conclusion was, and I believe he’s exactly right, that our churches are filled with people who have a backlog of many disappointments with God, where they prayed, where they sought, where they hoped, and it seemed as if God didn’t come through for them. And what do you do with that when you have that kind of an experience? You can’t talk about it out loud because you’re afraid you’re going to maybe bring discredit to the Lord so you keep it to yourself. And then you stuff it down inside. And enough of those build up to the place that it cuts the nerve of faith.
He said, “The greatest need in our churches today is to liberate God’s people from this backlog of disappointments.” Well, pastors have probably more than their people and they have so many unanswered prayers in their life of ministry that they wouldn’t even be able to have the courage to unpack it all at once if they had to or wanted to. And so it’s cut the nerve of faith.
I’m not really convinced, Jamie, that if we get together with fellow pastors and pray for our city, it’s going to make any difference at all. So here’s what I say. If you want to start a pastor’s group, and this is my fourth point, if you want to start a pastor’s group, don’t come together to pray. Don’t come together to share with each other what’s going on in your ministries and what your problems are so you can pray for each other’s problems, which is usually about as far as it ever gets.
Instead, come together for the following reasons. Number one, to share with each other something new that you’ve uncovered about the glory of Christ this past week that you now want to share with the other brothers and sisters in ministry in order to build them up in their walk with Jesus and in order to help all of us fill up our tanks so we have something to draw on as we try to proclaim more of Jesus to our people. And then spend time in prayer that is built on…
I have six Rs. I hope this doesn’t overwhelm the listener, but here we go. It’s built on rejoicing and in everything we see of Christ, repenting of things in our lives that is grieving Him in light of who he is, resisting the enemy wherever we think He’s coming against the purposes of Christ, making a request for him to reveal more of his glory, which is what an awakening is, receiving which means a little bit of time of just being silent and listening to how God wants to speak back to us out of those prayers. And finally, a prayer of recommitment where we say, “We’re ready for you to take us to be a part of the answer to the prayers that we pray in this place today.”
If pastors come together Christ-focused rather than self-focused or even church-focused or city-focused, if they begin by being Christ-focused and fill each other up with more of Jesus to take back into their ministries each week, then you’re going to see them gradually gravitate toward where they start praying kingdom prayers not just for their churches, but also for the city and beyond. I believe that would strike the fire we’re looking for. That’s the resuscitation there. It’s just so easy. It’s so easy, so easy, and yet in most situations being missed completely.
Jamie Mitchell: Wow. David Bryant, this has been such a great joy today. I can’t wait once this is on our website, on our app. I’m going to be sending this program to a hundred different pastors I know because we need it.
Dave Kistler, I can’t see you, but I bet you, you’re doing a dance or a jig in your office there. This has been a great joy today. Would you end our time? We got about 30 seconds. Will you pray for this program and thank the Lord for David Bryant? And let’s pray for revival in this country, Dave Kistler.
Dave Kistler: Thank you, Jamie, for the privilege and thank you David for being on. Heavenly Father, thank you for who you are. And Lord, I cannot help but be reminded of the servant who came to Elisha and said, “We’re in trouble.” And Elisha just said, “Lord, open his eyes and let him see that those that be with us are more than those that be with them.” And Lord, what I’m asking today is you would open our eyes, the eyes of every pastor that’s biblically committed across this country and your believers to see the greatness of your glory. And Father, bring that revival that we need. Bless brother David Bryant. Give him energy for the task ahead, and us the same, in the mighty and matchless name of Jesus, I do pray. Amen.
Jamie Mitchell: Hey, to ask for revival takes courage. So today, live and lead with courage. We will see you back here 23 hours from now on the next Stand in the Gap Today.
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