Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!
In 1991, after a season of intense prayer and fasting, a prophetic vision began to unfold before my eyes. God began to speak to me about a sweeping revival that would finally come to the United States, a nation that seemed to have been bypassed as God's Spirit flowed throughout other parts of the world.
At the Holy Spirit's prompting, I pulled out a map of America and allowed the Spirit to guide my hand to the area where this revival would break out. My finger rested on Pensacola, a Florida panhandle city hardly associated with spiritual fervor. In fact, the city was known to the homosexual community as the "gay Riviera." A seven- mile stretch of beach on the Gulf of Mexico just east of the city attracted thousands of homosexuals and lesbians over the Memorial Day weekend every year, and the homosexual population reached as high as fifty thousand. Pensacola was definitely one place to be if you were gay.
It was also the place to be if you wanted an abortion. At one time, the city was home to three abortion clinics. Three clinic bombings on Christmas Eve of 1984 had put Pensacola on the map; within three years of my vision, the murders of three clinic workers had drawn worldwide attention to the city of fifty-eight thousand people.
On that night in 1991, I believed I had heard the voice of the Lord loud and clear: "I am going to send revival to the seaside city of Pensacola, and it will spread like a fire until all of America has been consumed by it." Word spread across the country about the coming revival. In no time, it reached the ears of John Kilpatrick, pastor of Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola. Here is the account of what happened next.
Years earlier, Pastor Kilpatrick had spent an extended time in prayer about the direction the church's Sunday night services should take. During that time, the Lord prompted him to turn to Matthew 21:13, which reads, "My house shall be called a house of prayer" (NKJV).
In 1988 Pastor Kilpatrick shifted the focus of his life to prayer. That began a special and intimate journey with God, as the Lord taught John Kilpatrick deeper and deeper lessons about the nature of prayer. He began to incorporate fasting into his prayer routine as well, further deepening the well of wisdom God was forming in his spirit.
All through the early nineties, Kilpatrick led his church in a growing awakening into the power of prayer. By 1993 regular, systematic prayer was firmly entrenched in the congregation's worship routine.
Once word of my prophecy reached Kilpatrick, he and the leadership of Brownsville Assembly set aside Sunday nights exclusively for prayer for revival. For nearly three years they prayed. They prayed for the lost, for political leaders, church leaders, denominational leaders, and school officials. Brownsville's road to revival was under construction.
Also "under construction" were the church's prayer banners—another evidence of this congregation's knack for bringing abstract concepts to life. As a continual reminder of the prayer needs of the church and the community, church members created a dozen different banners to help people focus on those areas they needed to bring before the Lord: warfare, family, lost souls, governmental leaders, healing, pastors, revival, schools, ministries, the peace of Jerusalem, children, and catastrophic events.
Leaders assigned to each banner would gather specific prayer requests related to the theme and lead prayer around the banner. After each banner focus was prayed about, the congregation would join in corporate prayer. And much to the surprise—and delight—of many, the attendance at the Sunday evening prayer services began to increase.
"Prayer absolutely conditioned our church for revival," says Kilpatrick. For a reason they would not discover until two years later, a growing number of people found themselves particularly drawn to the revival banner, united in deep intercession. In May of 1995, as Christians gathered downtown to pray at a rally held in connection with the annual March for Jesus event, the crowd heard my prophetic words again: "I am going to send revival to the seaside town of Pensacola..."
No one saw it coming. No one predicted the day and the hour. No one even suspected that the Father would come on the most obvious day of all—Father's Day. But nothing laid the foundation for revival as prayer did.
In one sense, the day Pastor John Kilpatrick's mother died signaled the very beginning of revival—though few people would have thought it at the time. A month after her death, Kilpatrick found that he was far less able to handle his mother's passing than he had thought. She had died of cancer on May 7, 1995, and her illness and death had taken a tremendous toll on the then forty-five-year-old Kilpatrick. Before she died, Kilpatrick knew that revival was on its way. It was in the air, and its unmistakable scent was strong. Now, revival seemed far away.
Physically and emotionally drained, he called on Stephen Hill, a colleague in the Assemblies of God and a longtime friend, to preach at the evening service on Father's Day, June 18. The night before, Kilpatrick met with Steve and told him how grieved he was that so many people had left the church because of all his preaching on revival.
Kilpatrick was clearly still grieving over his mother's death as well. A gentle-natured man with a Georgia drawl, Kilpatrick admitted that he felt emotionless and even lacked the inspiration to prepare a sermon. He asked Hill to also preach at the morning service.
At first, nothing spectacular happened that Sunday morning. It was something of a typical worship service,except that maybe some minds were wandering a bit more than usual, planning meals and surprises and special presents for Dad.
As the clock struck noon, Hill gave an altar call. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, God came—and all heaven broke loose. A thousand people—half the people in the congregation—streamed forward to the altar for prayer.
At the same moment, Kilpatrick felt the sensation of wind blowing in the sanctuary. One person after another fell to the floor as Hill prayed for them. Others wept; some shook violently.
Hill prayed a simple prayer for Kilpatrick as he stood on the stage. "More, Lord," he said—and the pastor fell to the floor, where he lay for almost four hours. For the next forty-eight hours, Kilpatrick would be virtually useless to anyone but God Himself.
As the pastor lay on the floor, he felt a heavenly glory resting on him like a heavy blanket. God's presence was tangible at last. "When I hit the floor, it felt as if I weighed ten thousand pounds," Kilpatrick told Charisma magazine. "I knew something supernatural was happening. God was visiting us."
That day, the morning service did not end until 4:00 P.M. And that night, the evening service didn't end until well after midnight. Revival had come. In no time, word of the revival spread. People began lining up at 3:00 P.M. just to get a seat in the sanctuary, which at that time seated twenty-three hundred people. They'd stand in line, eating hamburgers from the local Burger King or slices of pizza from Pizza Hut, which one night reportedly was forced to close early because the kitchen ran out of dough.
Inside the church, it became a common sight to see bodies strewn all over the plum-colored carpeting, on the stage, at the altar area, and in the aisles. People would moan and weep as they lay trembling throughout the sanctuary.
Nightly, buses and vans from as far away as Minnesota and Quebec would pull up to the front of the church to drop off their load of passengers. Other visitors came from overseas—believers from Australia, Korea, Brazil, Uganda, Great Britain, continental Europe— people desperate to experience a touch from God.
Services began to attract five thousand people each night, double the number the sanctuary could hold. Work crews quickly installed closed-circuit television monitors in the chapel, the cafeteria, and the choir room to provide space for those who arrived too late to find a seat in the main sanctuary. A fourth room eventually had to be prepared for the overflow crowds. If you weren't at the church by mid-afternoon, you had little chance of watching the service "live" that night.
The sanctuary was bursting at the seams. Not even four years old, it was already too small.
Kilpatrick and Hill began a routine of working fourteen- to sixteen-hour days. Ushers, altar workers, and maintenance workers had to be enlisted in record time. Security guards patrolled areas where worshipers parked their cars, often a half-mile or more from the church. Some services lasted until sunrise.
Since June of 1995 some 1.5 million people have visited the unassuming church on Desoto Street in Pensacola. More than one hundred thousand people have been saved, and the tally is likely to go higher. Countless backslidden Christians have found their first love again. Hundreds of others have been healed and delivered.
During the first year after revival broke out, the church was forced to buy adjoining property to accommodate the growth. Construction of a five- thousand-seat multipurpose building to be known as the Family Life Center began in the spring of 1997.
"The sanctuary would fill up in sixty seconds [for revival services]," Steve Hill said. "But we didn't want to move the revival to the civic center." The only alternative was to build.
The revival has attracted so many pastors and leaders from the United States and around the world that the church now hosts semiannual pastors' conferences. When the first conference drew nearly seven hundred pastors only five months after the revival started, Kilpatrick was amazed. Now, the pastors' conference draws more than two thousand leaders.
Through it all, prayer continues to be the primary focus of the church. The Tuesday night prayer meeting is open to everyone, though participants from other denominations are encouraged to get permission from their pastors. Attendance can run as high as one thousand at the prayer meeting; some people drive a hundred miles or more just to attend.
And every night, a team of intercessors meets for prayer, joined by pastors and lay people from other churches. Kilpatrick has no intention of eliminating the focus on prayer. "If we stopped the prayer meetings, I know this move of God would grind to a halt," he said.
If you will allow the principles of prayer to revolutionize your life as it has my own and the lives of thousands of people whose lives have been transformed by the fires of revival in Pensacola, Florida, I sincerely believe that you will never be the same. Your prayers will have more power! There will be a marked change in your life! Your ministry will be more effective!
I am working on one simple premise. That premise is this: God has no favorite children. What has worked for me will also work for you. What brought power to the lives of men like Luther, Wesley, Finney, and Moody can also bring you power. It does not matter if you are an ordained minister or a housewife. Your level of education or your station in life is of no consequence when it comes to prayer. If God has worked through men and women in the past, He can work through you.
One of the greatest lies of Satan is that we just don't have enough time to pray. However, all of us have enough time to sleep, eat, and breathe. As soon as we realize that prayer is as important as sleeping, eating, and breathing, we will be amazed at how much more time will be available to us for prayer.
As you read this book, please take time to pray about each chapter. What is contained in the following pages is more than mere formulas. What I have tried to share is based on nearly forty years of experience in successful praying as I have seen prayer bring definite and precise results.
- Dr. David Yonggi Cho (PRAYER THAT BRINGS REVIVAL )
William James Roop
