Instead of having our annual church-wide fall retreat we will be having a revival meeting at church this year. The dates will be from Thursday, November 10 through Sunday, November 13. The speaker for the revival will be Pastor Jonathan Park who was the speaker for last year’s retreat at Camp Allen.
The purpose of having a church-wide retreat once a year is for the whole church to take some time out to get away from the routines of life so that we can relax and rest together as we listen to God’s messages in an extensive way. And we have certainly experienced this in the previous years through our retreats. Our physical bodies have been rested and our souls have been fed, challenged and equipped through the retreats in the past.
As the church grows, however, it becomes very difficult to find a retreat site not too far from Houston that can comfortably accommodate all of us. We are running about 450 people on Sunday including children and youth. We couldn’t secure Camp Allen for this year but we did manage to reserve it for the next two years. But if the church grows in number, having retreats may not even be possible. Therefore, this year’s revival meeting at church is a good opportunity for us to experience what it will be like if we can no longer have retreats elsewhere.
Whether we have retreats or revival meetings, we will need to prepare ourselves to meet God in a very special way because “without God, we cannot and without us, God will not.”
As a way of preparing ourselves for this year’s revival, I would like for us to do seven day early morning prayer and evening fast starting from Wednesday, November 2. Early morning prayer will start at 5AM in the worship center. Everyone will pray on their own for 45 minutes and at 5:45AM we will all gather together in the front of the worship center and pray for the revival meeting for 15 minutes joining our hands with each other. This will give you plenty of time to get to work or go back home to prepare and send your kids to school.
The evening fast will begin from 5PM starting from Wednesday. The whole purpose of this is to have our evenings free from cooking, eating and doing dishes so that we will have more time to read God’s word, pray and meditate in the quiet of the night. But if you have little children, by all means, feed them. We will break our evening fast by having breakfast the following morning.
Please remember the following:
- Since we would like for everyone to get involved in and experience this to some degree, we will fast dinner even on Friday, November 4 during our house church.
- We will meet at 6:30AM on Saturday for early morning prayer.
- We will not meet for prayer on Sunday morning on November 6.
- We will not fast on Saturday evening on November 5.
This sounds very intense and it will be. That’s why we don’t do this every day. However, there are times in life when we have to get serious with certain discipline and training and just go through it because the end results will be glorious. And if you take up this challenge and go through it with me, you will realize that you have gained spiritual strength and muscles afterwards.
When we gather together for early morning prayer, we will pray for the things that are related to the revival meeting: our speaker, his family and ministry, our hearts to be wide open to the work of the Holy Spirit, our children to have a great time as they go through their own program, everyone who will be serving during the revival meeting and New Life to be upgraded in its commitment and devotion to Christ. But I would like for you to bring one prayer request to the Lord that you urgently need Him to answer. And let’s pour our hearts before our Heavenly Father who loves to hear our prayers.
I expect some tremendously amazing things to happen during our seven day preparation for the revival.
Your pastor,
Eric
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