Since the outpouring of God’s presence that occurred at Asbury University in February of 2023, many people have been asking two important questions: Is there any way something like that could happen here where I live? And if or when it does, how could we be prepared to steward it?

Right from the start we should be quick to acknowledge a crucial subtlety in these questions and the title of this resource. Exploring how to prepare for outpouring does not assume that a movement of grace is the result of any kind of formula or recipe, as though our preparation can cause it to happen. Preparation for outpouring is not about merely meeting a set of conditions that then guarantee and require God’s response. Sowers of awakening have wrestled with this for centuries. In 1737, Jonathan Edwards published his account of the early days of the First Great Awakening under the title A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. And awakening is that: surprising on many levels, never manufactured or self-generated, always the action of God’s sovereignty. Yet by contrast, during the Second Great Awakening, Charles Finney catalogued in his Lectures on Revivals of Religion seven indicators for recognizing “when a revival of religion is needed” and several more signs of when a revival may be expected. And awakening is this, too: recognizable in discernible patterns over time. “The Word of God presents to us side by side these two foundation stones of every revival,” Arthur Wallis wrote, “the sovereignty of God and the preparedness of man.”1

We know who is actually pulling the weight in the yoke of Jesus he invites us to share. That’s why this yoke is easy, and his burden is light: Jesus himself is carrying the load. But in the economy of the kingdom, he has invited us to be “co-workers in God’s service” (1 Cor. 3:9)—the mystical union through which God accomplishes his purposes in the earth. Outpouring is not a kit we can buy or a program we can plug in and play. We will never restructure or whiteboard our way into awakening. But we can remove impediments to it. We can posture ourselves to receive it. We can cry out to God for it. And we take all of these up from a perspective of no time to waste—the essential preliminary move in knowing how to prepare for outpouring.

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