Miracle Ministries & the School of Miracles

Christians all over the world are praying for revival in their churches and communities. They have a heart for God and want to see the lost saved but do they know what revival actually is? Would they recognize revival if it happened?

Christians all over the world are praying for revival in their churches and communities. They have a heart for God and want to see the lost saved but do they know what revival actually is? Would they recognize revival if it happened?

The answer to the question "What is Revival?" is enclosed in the meaning of the word. To be revived, you must have been alive at some point in the past. Therefore how can revival be a term that is used when people are receiving Salvation for the first time? Revival is when Christians are revived, when the Church functions just like it did in the book of Acts. Have you read this book lately? If not, you should because it describes in vivid detail what the Body of Christ in Revival is like.

Quite often we see people use the term revival to refer to any meeting outside the regular church schedule. How many times have you heard of a church holding a revival meeting? Revival isn't meetings. It isn't alter calls either. In Acts we read that thousands were coming into the Church at a time. Why were so many people coming in? Because of power, they could see the power of God manifesting in the lives of the Apostles. Signs, wonders, the impossible happening daily.

Even in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, people are bogged down in religion. They see evangelistic rallies as revival because many people are coming to the Lord. This is all they know because it was all those who taught them knew. It's great when people come to the Lord at these types of rallies but that isn't what revival is about. Revival is the Church being revived, moving in signs and wonders and with that power and reality of God being shown to people they will be compelled to come in. If you saw someone raised from the dead tomorrow, that would get your attention, wouldn't it. Well it's the same thing for unbelievers. When they see the Church moving as it ought to, in power and might, then they will want to know more. They will come in rather than being brought in. They will be compelled to come because what they see and hear, ie our witness, will be compelling.

So how do we get from here to there? How do we revive the Church?

When you want to learn something it helps if you ask someone who's done it before. You can't learn to play the piano from someone who has never played it themselves. This is where it is important to know how to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and do what He says. That's how Pastor Vaughan was used of God to lead REAL revival in Fiji in the mid 1980's. Listen - Do.

During that revival people came to the Lord because they saw that God was real, not some religious tradition. In fact during that revival Mr. Pelvis was healed.It started in a small sugar town called Raki Raki in the north east of Fiji's largest island.

Fiji is a nation of over 300 islands, most of them uninhabited due to them being so small there is no fresh water. It is also a racially divided nation. The native Fijian population own the land but can't work it. At the turn of last century the British Government brought thousands of Indian workers into Fiji to temporarily work the sugar fields. 99 year leases had been signed for the land and so the Fijian people were left out. The Indians were to be taken back to India but the British Government that took them there, refused to take them home, so they have been there ever since. The Indians, while not having the right to own land, have worked it and become far more wealthy than the Fijians. You don't have to be very smart to see that this history makes for a powder keg type situation. It wasn't helped by the Indians, during World War II, refusing to help defend the country.

When it comes to spirituality, Fiji is just as divided. Much of the Indian population is Hindu. The Fijians are predominantly Christian but divided between the Assemblies of God and Methodist denominations. Within these two denominations it is very rare to find a racially mixed congregation. Even at the same church there will usually be an Indian service and a Fijian service. As you can see, God had a lot to overcome here.

Pst Vaughan was also very inexperienced. When he and the team he was with went to Raki Raki, they were expecting a regular type series of services. They were expecting God to move but had no idea of what God had in mind. They also didn't know the preparation that had gone on before hand, and this next paragraph is the key to revival in the Church anywhere in the world.

The pastors of the area took themselves out to a small island, where there was no food and water, to pray for revival one day a week. They had been doing this for months. There was unity across racial and denominational barriers among the leaders of the church. That is the key, unity and prayer. Righteousness and Holiness are prerequisites to this of course (how can you have a heart for revival without living in Holiness).

A church may well be in revival. They may be moving in the gifts of the Spirit. Healings and miracles may be taking place but Church revival (the body of Christ) is where this is happening all over the place. In the case of Raki Raki, it started in a community hall. It could seat only 200. Only God knows how many people were there because there were crowds outside the building as far as the eye could see. Traffic backed up because of the crowds. There was no one to clear the way for the traffic because the entire area police force was already in the meeting. When God moves, He MOVES!

Because the Church was revived, the unsaved came to see what was going on and subsequently stopped being unsaved. Revival swept throughout the entire nation and lasted for several years. There were occasions where entire hospitals were cleared out as ALL their patients were healed. People were raised from the dead, cancers disappeared by the thousands. One drunk man was translated out of the doorway of a pub into the middle of a well lit international football stadium that had just been used for a rally. He was delivered of alcoholism and, together with his family later that night, received the Lord as his Saviour. The Church returned to being like the book of Acts. As a small child, I remember sitting in the Deputy Prime Minister's boardroom in Suva, the capital city, while miracle meetings were taking place.

Some churches use the term revival as a marketing tool, to have larger meetings so as to make more money. Many really do have a heart after God and just don't know what revival is, believing it to be an evangelistic rally of some sort. But Revival is so much more than meetings, it changes a nation to it's very core. Little did we know it then, but God was preparing people, through that revival, to lead the nation of Fiji through an impending crisis.

In 1987, a movement among some native Fijians that was anti-Indian was gaining momentum. When an election took place that many believe was rigged that year, tensions between these two races reached boiling point. Col. Setiveni Rambuka had been at some of the meetings taking place during the revival. He was, and is today, a Spirit-filled Christian. He was also the head of the Fijian Army.

The anti-Indian movement was about to round up the Indians and drive them into the sea when evidence of corruption in the new government was exposed. Col. Rambuka saw that he would have to order his men to fire on other Fijians in order to save the lives of thousands of Indians if he did nothing. Following the leading of God, he lead a bloodless coup. Not a single person was hurt and the corrupt government was eventually replaced when elections could be held.

Thousands of people were saved because one man allowed God to lead him. And that was a result of the thousands of Christians in the revived Church praying for the leaders of their nation during that time of crisis. God doesn't just do things. He does things for a reason. He heals people because He loves them but also because it brings Him glory and is a testimony to His love so that those who don't know Him will see that He is love. He brought about that revival because He knew what would happen a few short years later and that the Church needed to be equipped to fight a real spiritual battle.

Here in Richmond, people have been praying for revival since 1865, the end of the Civil War. Richmond is a city still divided. It is more focused on it's past than any city I know of. A statue of Abraham Lincoln was unveiled recently in a park here and many people turned up to protest. They protested that a statue of a man they see as a traitor would be erected in the former capital of the Confederacy. I have heard the Civil War referred to as the War of Northern Aggression. The wounds of that war, in the minds of many, are still fresh. It is a city stooped in religion. There are over one thousand churches here in a city of less than one million people. Each one is concerned about their little territory. There is almost a feeling of competition between churches here rather than unity.

It is very sad to see this because it has been prophesied several times that Richmond will birth a revival that will change the US because it is referred to as "the womb of the nation". Virginia was where America was born. Jamestown, just down river from Richmond, was the first English settlement in Northern America. Charlottesville, about an hour west of Richmond, is where Thomas Jefferson lived and where the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written. George Washington called Northern Virginia home. Yorktown, near Jamestown, was where the British suffered their first real defeat of the Revolutionary War. It was such a stunning and massive loss that it forced the end of the war. And of course most of the Civil War took place within 100 miles of Richmond. When will revival come to Richmond?

It will come when the pastors come together to pray in unity. It will come when they want their churches to function just like the Church did in the book of Acts. God has sent us here, I believe, to play a part in revival. How He will bring that about, I don't know. What our part will be, I don't know. I do know that we have seen revival first hand and know what is required to see it and what it will do to a city or nation.

Richmond is 100 miles from Washington DC. When revival hits Richmond, it won't stop here. It will spread to other cities including Washington, unarguably the most powerful city in the world. Through Washington, revival will change the entire nation and with this, the most powerful and visible nation on Earth turned to God, the rest of the planet will be changed also.

When you pray for revival, pray that the pastors in your area will have an understanding of what revival actually is. Pray that they will come together in unity and pray and seek God. Pray that they will hear from God and simply do as He says. Revival will only come when there has been a firm foundation of prayer, and it starts with you.

"How little chance the Holy Ghost has nowadays. The churches have so bound Him in red tape that they practically ask Him to sit in a corner while they do the work themselves." - C.T. Studd

"If revival is being withheld from us, it is because some worldly idol remains still enthroned; because we still insist on placing our reliance in human schemes; because we still refuse to face the unchangeable truth that it is not by might, but by God's Spirit." - Jonathan Goforth

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