It Was a Night of Watching by the Lord: On Creating New Space for Prayer

Four hundred thirty years. Get your mind around that. For those of us who live in the United States, we have only been a country for 248 years. I don’t have a calculation for how many of those 430 years the Israelites spent enslaved, but it was likely most of them. In other words, no one’s great-great-great-grandfather, who was already long dead, likely remembered a time when slavery was not the norm. Just as freedom rings in the deepest sense of our identity as Americans, slavery rang in the deepest sense of the Israelites’ core identity.

Other than some prevenient whisper of freedom resident in their deepest DNA as human beings, they had utterly no concept of anything else but slavery. There were no Ten Commandments yet, no tabernacle, no sacrificial system to speak of, no priests, Levites, or anything of the sort. There was the aging memory of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They did have one thing going for them: I Am was with them. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was for them.

Six hundred thousand men plus women and children and livestock—conservatively, two million people. Get your mind around that. As a point of reference, that is roughly the population of Houston, Texas. They have just been through ten successive plagues of absolute cataclysmic proportion. They are on foot, walking out of the country en route to the promised land. It would take forty years to get there. They would get out of Egypt overnight. It would take another forty years to get Egypt out of them.

Here’s a marvel. Despite centuries of captivity, from generation to generation to generation, the Israelites never stopped crying out to God. They kept their watch. They never gave up: “The Lord said, ‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.'” (Ex. 3:7).

While I don’t believe God is waiting for a threshold count of numbers of people or years of duration praying before he responds, there is something about a slow-growing wave of prayer over a long period of time that, historically speaking, precedes awakenings. There is no formula, just deep, sustained yearning that can only come from a real, deep place of travail.

Here’s what most amazes me about today’s text. I love how the ESV has it. Referencing the night of the exodus from Egypt, we read:

It was a night of watching by the Lord, to bring them out of the land of Egypt . . .

A night of watching by the Lord.

Get your mind around that. It is one thing to have our eyes on the Lord, but quite another for his eyes to be on us. What if that’s at least a part of the holy secret of deliverance—that the Lord’s watchfulness patiently waits for the watchfulness of his people? When the watchfulness of the people meets up with the watchfulness of the Lord, the miracle begins to happen.

Then comes this final word from the text:

. . . so this same night is a night of watching kept to the Lord by all the people of Israel throughout their generations.

There are so many stories I want to share at this moment. Only one seems necessary. Twenty-five years ago, I received a calling within my calling. It is one I have both succeeded and failed to fulfill. This calling came to me one morning with the clarity of a winter sunrise. It emerged from a word of Scripture: “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful” (Col. 4:2).

The Lord impressed upon me these words: “Create space for prayer.” From that day forward, I have stumbled and fallen and stumbled again, and yet I keep getting back up.

I believe I am hearing from the Lord that the day of march has come yet again. “Create space for prayer.” I sense the Lord is creating a new house of prayer in my midst again. As I see the words unfold on my screen, it feels both overwhelming and right.

Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. 

Might the watch for awakening be ready to ride again?