The Holy Spirit is continuing to move and this time it involved a revival that broke out at the University of Kentucky in mid-February.. With the main campus located in Lexington, Kentucky, the university has 35,952 students registered for the 2024-2025 school year.

On Wednesday, February 12, 2025, over 8,000 students gathered at the Rupp Arena and when a call was given to those who wanted to be saved over 2,000 students came forward, CBN reports.

“I’ve never seen anything like what happened last night. Kids lining up to get baptized in 30-degree weather –  it’s truly amazing what’s happening,” said CBN’s Abigail Robertson who was at the event.

The meeting was sponsored by Unite US that has been organizing revival meetings at universities across the US since 2023.

The Importance of Prayer

Similar to past events, an important key to what happened at the University of Kentucky was prayer. According to a social media post, Christian students had been praying for months in the lead up to this event.

This even included prayer marches. These are also referred to as Jericho marches. They are patterned on what happened in the lead up the battle for the city of Jericho in Joshua 6. The Israelites were commanded to walk around the city of Jericho, once a day for six days. On the seventh day, they marched around the city seven times and when the seven priests blasted their trumpets in unison on the seventh walk around, the people shouted and Jericho’s walls collapsed.

Similarly to this students at the University of Kentucky gathered to walk around their campus and pray.

“Our local student team organized weekly prayer gatherings and walked up to 42 miles one Saturday as they prayed over their campus,” said Unite US, Tonya Prewett in an interview with CBN News. 

“‘Jericho Marches,’ they called these Saturday prayer walks and we saw walls come down last night,” Prewett added.

A year earlier, a revival broke out during a chapel meeting at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia because of prayer. The spiritual development office was hosting a chapel on Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024. Typically, about 10 people show up at chapel services, however, on that day hundreds showed up.

“There were so many people that were there…that couldn’t even fit inside the chapel to where they started worshipping and praying outside on the lawn, in front of the chapel…it was like 30 degrees outside but they were undeterred,” said Liberty student Daniel Spinney in an interview with CBN.

“There were so many people in there to where when we were singing, we were singing so loud that we couldn’t even hear the microphones and the worship collective singing through the speakers,” Spinney added.

The key again was prayer. For the 2023-24, school year, Liberty’s spiritual development department had decided to focus on prayer. This included encouraging prayer in the dorms, which led to groups of students initiating all night prayer meetings.

As one man said, ‘True revival is not preached up, it is prayed down.”

We need to start meeting for prayer, like they did in the early church.

When the believers were being threatened with arrest in Acts 4, they met for payer. As they prayed for boldness and signs and wonders, we are told that “the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 4:31).

We need the shaking of God, spiritually and physically.