UNBLOCKING THE WELL OF THE LIVING WORD

We arrived by ferry at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, yesterday evening. I told my wife on the ferry, “Be careful as you wake up on the isle of Lewis  tomorrow morning…. There will be a well beneath your feet!” .I had  just been reading Lou Engle’s book “Digging the Wells of revival.” He says to the reader  “do you know that just beneath your feet are deep wells of revival? Are you aware that you are standing on bottomless geysers and founts of the anointing and mandates of our spiritual fathers and mothers that are just waiting to be released afresh to you? God is calling us, as instruments today, to unstop the wells and to reclaim the spiritual inheritance of our nation.

We attended the very church today, Sunday morning August 6th,  where revival broke out in December 1949. To our surprise, the preacher was the Deputy International Director of WEC, World Evangelisation Crusade, that was founded by CT Studd over 100 years ago.. My wife talked to the preacher’s wife after the service. She and her husband had returned today to this church where she had grown up.They are about  to head off very shortly to a new assignment with WEC in Thailand. She told the story of how her father had been saved during the  revival here in Barvas in 1949. He played an accordion and they were doing a Ceilidh  in another village. He was on a bus driving down this road, right in front of the church and it was as if he felt  ‘hands actually pulling him’, he  was so apprehended by the spirit of God. He got off the bus into the church and the church was absolutely packed . There were people even sitting around the altar. It was totally full and he came in and on that night he was saved.    

Lou Engle’s  chapter title “There’s a well beneath your feet. Dig it”  has been impacting me today. He says“I believe God is saying we can go to the wells of our spiritual forefathers and dig again to find new streams of revival bubbling forth. I’m not speaking of redigging a well to return to the traditions of the past, or to rediscover old methods of cherished doctrine. Rather I’m talking of coming alive again with the waters of the Holy Spirit that were found in the wells of our spiritual ancestors.” He says” There is such incredible spiritual and natural significance in the understanding of wells and water in the bible . Jesus himself used the analogy of living water to describe the inestimable value of His life inside us when we tap our own “well” of the Holy Spirit . But perhaps in stories like Isaac’s in the Old Testament we find the clearest definition of the value of a well.In Genesis 26:8 Isaac found that the wells of his father Abraham had been rendered useless because the Philistines had filled them in with dirt and stones . So he chose to redig the wells of his father.”

Psalm 50 says “Gather to me my consecrated ones, who have made a covenant with me by sacrifice.” As we have been reading over the past few weeks, a few intercessors, including Christine and Peggy Smith and Kenneth McDonald, over 70 years ago on the Isle of Lewis in Barvas, laid hold of a promise of God in Isaiah 44:3 “ I will pour water on the thirsty ground,”and responded with sacrificial prayer.

Duncan Campbell recorded in his diary entry for 14 December 1949 that as he finished his first sermon on the Isle of Lewis and revival had NOT broken out, one young man interceded. As Duncan Campbell was moving down the aisle, at this very church here in Barvas, and the congregation was moving out, Kenneth Macdonald started to pray “God you made a promise to pour water on the thirsty and floods on the dry ground and you’re not doing it and he prayed and prayed and prayed again… after 5 minutes the door of the church opened and the session clerk came in and said Mr Campbell something wonderful has happened.. revival has broken out.. Will you come and see the crowd.” And I went to the door and there must’ve been a congregation of between 600 and 700 hundred people gathered around the church.”

Lou Engle says, “May we be the generation who appeals to the covenants of our forefathers who call on God to revisit the places he’s visited in the past and who lay extravagant sacrifices of love on altars of trust and obedience. Then perchance God’s heart will be moved, He will remember His covenant, and He will send fire and glory , the full blessings of His covenant. May we be people who not only take the Lord’s covenant on our lips but also live it.” There is a well beneath your feet .. it is time to dig!