It’s Time to Fast and Pray

(courtesy: Charisma magazine,Charisma@strang.com)

Our prophetic word for this week is from Lou Engle, co-founder of TheCall solemn assemblies, which draw youth together to fast and pray for revival in our nation. TheCall was dormant for a few years but is being revived on July 7 in Nashville, Tennessee. (For more information, go to www.thecall.com.) Engle believes that if we seek God through fasting and prayer at this crucial hour in world history God will respond by sending a great spiritual awakening.

“I believe that if we respond in repentance in this moment of time, we could release a great revival of confession of sin and a cleansing by the blood of Jesus that could draw us back into marital faithfulness with our Bridegroom. I believe a great spiritual awakening could be at hand that would affect the elections of 2008 and overthrow Jezebel's death march in this nation.

“What must we do? God's holy prescription for our diseased state in times of national crisis and moral collapse is in Joel 2, verses 12-13, 15-16, 18 and 28, which describe a solemn assembly of united fasting and prayer:

‘Now, therefore,’ says the Lord, ‘Turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning. So rend your heart, and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm.

‘Blow the trumpet in Zion, consecrate a fast, call a sacred assembly; gather the people, sanctify the congregation. Assemble the elders, gather the children and nursing babes; let the bridegroom go out from his chamber, and the bride from her dressing room.’

Then the Lord will be zealous for His land, and pity His people.
‘And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions’” (NKJV).