There are no accidents in the economy of God.
So, I decided, maybe God wasn’t leading me in the direction of preaching regularly at a church. I could imagine a search committee interviewing me and wondering about my past, and whether it would stay in the past. I was a risk.
What made more sense was that I become a revival-type preacher. I had a powerful story to share, I connected well with lost people, and nobody had to worry about me in the long term. I’d be more like Billy Graham, traveling and maybe building an organization. I loved the message from 2 Chronicles, my first real sermon. The message of spiritual awakening was close to my heart.
I devoured sermons from preachers like Leonard Ravenhill, Paul Washer, and Paris Reidhead. Most of my time was spent studying the Great Awakenings in our country. Whether it was the First Great Awakening with Edwards, Whitefield, and Wesley, the Second Great Awakening with Finney, Asbury, and Campbell, or the prayer revival that started in New York led by Jeremiah Lanphier, I yearned to see God do that again in America.
Traveling and speaking seemed like the avenue to bring about revival, and it best fit my gifts.
I told Kandi how and why I felt this way about my future, but she didn’t really endorse that evaluation. Kandi has incredible discernment, and she’s unlikely to make impulsive decisions the way I always have.
One of my best experiences was working with MissionLab, a seminary initiative built around the needs of New Orleans. Given the uniqueness of the city, MissionLab was a program for bringing in college students to do mission work, using our campus as the base. There were custom mission trips to the downtown area for groups of all sizes. While it functioned all year, summertime was, of course, the main hub of activity.
I was the camp pastor that summer—a natural fit because I knew the city and loved speaking to students. Whenever the seminary students caused me to doubt myself, it seemed as if God used the high school students to build me back up again.
As that summer began, I got involved in another prayer group. But this one was more ambitious. This one swung for the fences. Have you ever prayed for something so big that, if it happened, it could only be explained as divine intervention? Most of the time, if we’re honest, we’ll admit we lack the boldness. Maybe we’re afraid God will ignore us, and our faith will be damaged. Yet great movements in Christian history have always begun when someone stepped up and dared to pray for the impossible.
For example, as recently as two centuries ago, world missions was all but nonexistent. This I knew from the story of William Carey, who gave his name to my college. Basically, churches worried about their own people and ignored Jesus’ Great Commission, even though it was his final and greatest command.
Our marching orders are to make disciples of all nations. It’s remarkable that 1,800 years after the Resurrection, there were almost no mission projects for doing that.
But in 1806, five students gathered in a grove of trees in Massachusetts to talk about that very idea. Why wasn’t anyone trying to take the gospel to Asia or Africa? What could be done about that?
As they talked, the skies opened up and the rain began to pound on them. They took refuge under a haystack, strangely enough, and something about the whole experience, huddled together in prayer during the storm, got them fired up. Over time, those five students were all parts of pushing forward the world mission movement in fantastic ways.
One of them helped form the American Bible Society, translating the Bible into hundreds of other languages. Several of them formed a missions group that sent out 1,250 missionaries in its first fifty years. All of them had a vast impact on the world, and today a number of missions initiatives trace their beginnings back to those five students.
David Platt, Rob Wilton, and I wanted to reach New Orleans for Christ. Our prayer was to do something “out of the range” of our own capacity. We called our group “Out of Range for God,” and the idea was to pray for God to do a mighty work that was out of our range, but not his. We asked eighteen others, mostly students, to be part of disciplined daily prayer time. On a given day, eighteen of those would pray for three people who would pray and fast—the “tip of the spear” for our prayer pursuit. All twenty-one prayed, but three of us at a time would be on our faces, praying and fasting with all our heart and soul.
Thursday was my day, for example. I remember I was going to be preaching on Thursdays to close out the MissionLab camp week. At the culmination of a week in a city where dependence upon God was a necessity, I would extend an invitation for people to come forward and make professions of faith, or commitments to missions and ministry. I prepared eagerly, knowing that eighteen guys were interceding before God on my behalf. They cried out for the power of God to fall on that meeting.
I felt God’s presence that summer like never before, and I wasn’t the only one. My study and prep time was phenomenal; my energy and faith levels were off the charts. The invitation we offered was like a dam breaking, with students pouring down to the front of the room before I even invited them. It was a bit like the West Virginia ski retreat, but even more powerful, because this time it was the result of earnest, dedicated prayer, and many of these students were committing themselves to missions and ministry.
It was the most anointed time of my life, and I remember feeling overwhelmed with
