It was my first day at my new church, Friday morning, June 1st. I was the new pastor of small groups at a church in Southern California. It was my practice to pray two hours in the worship center of my previous church on Saturday morning for the Sunday morning worship service. This church had five worship services, two on Friday night and three on Sunday morning. So I entered the worship center and knelt down to pray for the Friday night services. Our worship pastor saw me and knelt down beside me to join me in prayer. In the course of our prayer time, we called forth a harvest of the lost from the east, west, north and south. The next morning we prayed for the Sunday morning services. We faithfully prayed this way throughout the summer and fall. Six weeks after that first morning in prayer our church attendance grew one hundred people in one weekend. This amazed all of us.
This church had been planted ten years earlier. Through the first eight years, the church grew to 1250 people in attendance. Then the church attendance plateaued for two years. The church planter and then senior pastor tried everything he knew to spur the church onto new growth. The Lord used that season to call him into a new global ministry of training church planters. One of his associate pastors became the second senior pastor and I was the first new pastoral staff member he hired. Our church had a very gifted pastoral staff and team of lay leaders led by it's new senior pastor. We were poised for growth. All we needed was an on-site prayer effort along with calling forth a harvest to see a harvest of souls. By Labor Day Weekend, three months later, 250 new people were attending our church. That summer catapulted our church to be one of the twenty fastest growing churches in America in the next two years.
One year prior to that summer, I read Larry Lea's book, Could You Not Tarry For One Hour. In it I was introduced to praying for the harvest. The notion of praying for the harvest comes from Isaiah 43:5-7. Within the context of the passage, the prophet is calling forth the dispersed children of Israel. There is a principle here of calling forth those individuals that God is drawing to Himself. In our implementation of this principle, we call forth two kinds of people:
- Laborers, asking the Lord of the Harvest to bring laborers into His harvest field, and
- Lost, asking the Spirit to bring all those who are lost so they can hear the gospel and become followers of Jesus. He is saying to the Lord of the Harvest, "Bring them to us, gather them to this ministry."
This is spiritual warfare! Whether the Christian leader is asking the Father to bring them or addressing the demonic and saying, "Let them go!" The powers of darkness that are blinding the eyes of the unbelieving and holding them in prison (the gates of Hades) within the kingdom of darkness don't want to let them go. We sometimes passively assume that our churches and ministries will grow. Sometimes, in the grace of God, they do. However, I want to suggest that in most places throughout the world where there is a harvest there is aggressive spiritual warfare prayer. The powers of darkness do not want to give up those whom they hold in bondage and desire their destruction. So we call them forth, in the authority of the name of Jesus and in obedience to God's calling in our lives. This kind of warfare prayer can bring great results for the advancement of God's Kingdom on earth.
Years later my family was attending a church in Arlington, Texas. The pastors of the church asked me to lead their pastoral staff in a Jericho Prayer Effort for an evangelistic outreach. A gifted team of evangelists who tear a part telephone books, blow up water bottles and judo chop concrete blocks, giving them an audience to present the gospel led the evangelistic event. We began praying on a Monday at the noon hour. Everyday through the week we called forth a harvest of lost students and their families from 28 elementary, Jr High and High School campuses that were targeted with special assemblies led by the evangelistic team. The evangelistic event began on Wednesday night. Fifteen hundred plus students and their families attended that first night. One hundred students and adults responded to the invitation at the end of the evening. Day by day we prayed, calling forth a harvest. Each night of the five night evangelistic event was more of the same as 500 plus students and adults trusted in Jesus. God did an awesome work among us! Those in spiritual authority of that church, the pastoral staff, prayed daily for the harvest and God responded by bringing them to Himself.
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