Repentance paves the way for revival, and one can prepare for it - but only God can make it happen, 5,000 delegates heard at the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Incheon, Korea on Sept. 23.
Sarah Breuel, director of Revive Europe, chair of the 2016 Lausanne Younger Leaders Gathering, and co-leader with her husband René of a church plant in Rome, Italy, recalled marvelous revivals over the years, from Korea, to Wales, to the recent Asbury Revival. However, Breuel made it clear that God alone “can send revival.”
“There's no question about that,” said Breuel. “We cannot make revival happen, but we can posture ourselves for it. We can pray for it and we can remove impediments with personal and corporate repentance.
“God comes where He's wanted. There is no formula. God comes to hearts and communities who are hungry, who are desperate for him.”
Breuel asked the delegates if they were willing to ask God to increase the “hunger” where He had placed them. She suggested praying for it and outlined how revivals are preceded by “travailing prayers”, such as Paul writes about in Galatians, comparing this type of prayer to a woman in childbirth.
“This is the kind of intercession, the Spirit interceding on our behalf with wordless grounds,” she added. Breuel also referred to the enslaved Hebrews groaning in their hardship, as narrated in Exodus. “They groaned in their slavery and God heard their groaning.”
Breuel also compared travailing prayer to Hannah weeping in the Bible, or the prayer of Jesus himself in the garden of Gethsemane, before his arrest and crucifixion.
“We can ask God to pour out this gift of travailing prayer in our lives, in our communities, and we can remove impediments with repentance.
“This is not a time for business as usual, the call from John Baptist to get right with God is for you and me.”
Breuel herself confessed to personally asking Jesus for wisdom on sins she needed to repent from, and He “has been putting his finger” on unresolved relationships, pride and unforgiveness. “I wonder what Jesus might be bringing up in your heart,” she asked in turn of the Lausanne delegates.
Corporate repentance was just as important, on behalf of the sins of nations. She suggested that finding wisdom in repentance stemmed from honest discussions with one another: “We will see what the Holy Spirit will bring up as we hear from one another.”
Breuel, a Brazilian national, recalled how her own grandmother became a Christian after North American missionaries shared the gospel with her. She slammed the notion that the mission movement “just aided colonialism,” and said this secular view had crippled the boldness and zeal of Western missionaries.
“Can I say, as a leader from the Global South, we need you fully at the table. Do not retreat,” she implored.
Breuel expressed delight at seeing the mixture of evangelicals visible at Lausanne 4, such as the Chinese, “Teach us your heart for lessons learned in persecution,” and the “roar” felt in the African church, which needed to also “roar” from Africa to Asia, and the Koreans - “Teach us how to pray.”
She recalled how Brazilians meeting at the Lausanne Congress in Cape Town 2010 invited Africans along and then prayerfully confessed “centuries of kidnapping, slavery, cruelty and racism.”
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the room,” she remembered. This gesture of repentance in turn led to the Africans then asking for forgiveness from each other for what different ethnicities on the continent had done.
“Friends,” Breuel implored the 2024 delegates, “I wonder if one of the most fruitful things that we can do these days is just ask forgiveness of each other, both personally and on behalf of our nations.”
“Jesus is building his Church and it is one global Church,” said Breuel, adding that Europe also had a key part to play. “It is the north and south and east and west honoring one another, laboring together and Europe… God is not done with Europe yet. God is not done with Europe!”
In Breuel’s view, Europe is not post-Christian but pre-revival and she wanted friends in the European Church to be aware of the lies of secularism.
“God is moving in fresh ways in Europe and even if some may think that there might be areas in Europe where Christianity seems to be dead. Well, we serve a God who happens to be in the resurrection business. He has the power to revive Europe.”
Breuel told the story of a meeting between Korean church leaders and then-King Sunjong. The monarch confessed publicly that he had used money intended for his deceased friend’s family on his own needs, and this in turn led to the church leaders confessing their own moral failures.
These actions led to a powerful move of God in Korea in 1907, according to Breuel, adding that repentance “paves the way for revival.” She referenced the apostle Peter in Acts: 3, who told people to repent and turn to God, so that times of refreshing could come from the Lord. Even Jesus’ own ministry was preceded by a call of repentance, she pointed out.
“You see in Scripture, repentance and times of refreshing, they’re deeply intertwined.”
In recalling evangelical history, Breuel pointed out that revival times happened after genuine repentance. Prayer was essential in this – the Moravian revival of 1727, for example, happened after 300 refugees spent a whole summer being reconciled to each other with repentance, “then the Spirit of God falls on them” and this led to a 100-year-long prayer meeting and an effective missionary movement.
She lauded recent historic moments such as the 24-7 Prayer movement celebrating 25 years of nonstop prayers with 25,000 prayer rooms in 78 nations or God moving through universities in the U.S. with 200 baptisms in one night at Auburn University, similarly 300 baptisms in an evening at Florida University and 60 baptisms at Ohio University.
Breuel said such true awakenings also affected societies. The abolition of the slave trade, for example, came as a fruit of western revival. Educational establishments such as Ivy League universities were “all fruit of awakening.”
In Breuel’s view, this is the greatest need of our time. The western Church was richly resourced with excellent missional strategies, however “we need something from the hand of God.”
