Let Your Kingdom Come

The Power of Prayer: "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'"

I wrote this on my Facebook page and decided to take my own advice to create a blog. Therefore, this is my first post!--

I know, I should probably just start a blog so I have some kind of outlet to write about the things I find fascinating so you don't have to read them here. Nevertheless, I had to share this.

Some of you know, that I really enjoy learning about history. I've been fascinated, as of late, learning about history that hasn't been recorded for mainstream use. In particular, the movement of the Holy Spirit and the Church after, or during, times of devastation. For instance, the period after the Civil War, when God poured out his Spirit to heal a nation divided and suffering from PTSD. This period in history is referred to as "The Holy River", in which, there was a great awakening. All of this, due to prayer.

Today I read in the book Red Moon Rising by Pete Greig how prayer toppled the Berlin Wall. He writes,(and this is paraphrased) "...in the city of Leipzig in communist East Germany, a 13-year-old was looking around in amazement at all the candles and people crammed into St Nicholas Church to pray for peace. There were barricades in the streets outside, beatings and death threats from the authorities, and hundreds of armed police expecting a riot.... the pastor of Leipzig's most dignified church, a man named Christian Fuhrer, called people to pray for peace every Monday night [for seven years].

At the start there were often fewer than a dozen people huddled together in this cavernous Gothic barn where Johann Sebastian Bach had premiered some of his finest choral pieces. But they had persevered and now, seven years later, Markus looked around in amazement at eight thousand people crammed into the church. Outside in the streets and in other churches there were as many as seventy thousand people--the largest impromptu demonstration ever witnessed in East Germany since it had been formed after the Second World War.

With so many people expressing their protest in prayer, The State prepared for anarchy. In fact, they had threatened to shut the prayer rally down that very night, Monday, 9 October, adding ominously 'with whatever means necessary'...Surely this was crazy; attempting to fight military hardware with prayers?...

After about an hour the pastor led the congregation out onto the Augustusplatz. Still clutching their candles, they marched past the headquarters of the dreaded secret police, chanting "no violence' and praying that it might be so.

Surprisingly the police never opened fire. There would be rumors later of deals done in high places. Whatever the reason, within a week the prayer rally for peace had grown to 120,000 , and the East German leader had been forced to resign. Within the fortnight the prayer rally attracted three hundred thousand protestors, and within a month--four weeks later to the day--the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Some journalists and historians have identified the Leipzig prayer rallies as the tipping point in the fall of East German communism--a remarkable acknowledgement for the movement that had begun so quietly seven years earlier, with a handful of people at a prayer meeting...

The Leipzig prayer rallies embodied the defiance of praying for the kingdom of God to come on earth and the power of crying out to the Lord of lords for regime change. It's tragic that the most revolutionary cry in world history, 'Let your kingdom come', is so often reduced to a religious catchphrase, mere shorthand for a few less people leaving our churches and a few more homeless people receiving a tuna sandwich on Friday nights...'There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'".

Does that not change your perspective on prayer? It's power and importance? History books that you read in school may not record these moments in our human existence but, nevertheless, they are there. And they are just at the end of our fingertips and on the tip of our tongues. So many things, in our modern world, need prayer. It may take seven, or even 45, years but the cry of "Let your kingdom come" should never dull until it has come to pass.