Tonight at our prayer meeting, we were praying for spiritual breakthrough in our communities. Recently, a church member felt that the Lord reminded her of the ‘dambusters’ in the Second World War. The Dambusters (made famous in the 1955 film of the same name, whose theme tune is very famous) was the nickname of the RAF’s 617 Squadron which led ‘Operation Chastise’ in 1943, an attack on the Möhne, Eder, and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr Valley industrial area of Germany. The idea was to destroy the dams so that the source of power for generating electricity was destroyed and massive disruption to German war production would be the result. The raid happened only when Barnes-Wallis created, in effect, a ‘bouncing bomb’, which was capable of destroying the dams at the bottom.
Prayer is a little like those bouncing bombs which destroyed the dams. Prayer is a spiritual weapon. Paul says, ‘For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.’ (2 Cor 10:3-4) Just as those bouncing bombs destroyed the seemingly impregnable dams, so I believe our prayers have the power to destroy the enemy’s strongholds in our area.
We need an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on our churches and on the whole area. One way we think about this is the idea of flooding, water pouring forth, gushing forth, an unstoppable stream of God. Is 59:19 says, ‘From the west, people will fear the name of the Lord,and from the rising of the sun, they will revere his glory. For he will come like a pent-up flood that the breath of the Lord drives along.’ We need an outpouring of God’s Spirit so that we see the strongholds breached and the flood of God’s life bringing regeneration, new birth, new life to our own lives, to our churches, to our area.
