The Burdens of Ravenhill - Part 3 (Compilation) — Leonard Ravenhill

What happens? All the meetings over. Off they go. They hardly ever get through the door. They're smoking or they rush off to do something. In the Bible, people do not leave the sanctuary for hours. This precious 26 year old young man finished preaching.

Walked out of the building at 10 o 'clock, got down on his face and prayed all night and all the next day for the next meeting the next night. Our guys are guzzling some junk or running home for TV. There's no brooding of the Holy Ghost.

Longing for a Sovereign Move of the Holy Spirit

But when the Holy Ghost takes in an area, they watch it. You can't explain it. You can't predict it. You can't direct it. God becomes sovereign. And I'm aching, aching, aching in my spirit to see a sovereign move of God, the Holy Ghost.

Lord, do you think God may be as grieved with the church today that we spend so little time in prayer? I'm convinced we've come into a form today of Christian humanism. That's all it is. We'll do it. You bless it, Lord.

You've got to bless our TV program. You've got to bless our tracts we give out or our records or something. We want to do it in the energy of the flesh. We sanctify the flesh to a great degree. We put personalities up just like the world does.

A preacher said something the other day that's very disturbing. I said, Doctor, what was it? He said, this good Baptist preacher said this. The audience that he was addressing, he said, I want to tell you that if God withdrew the Holy Spirit from my church today, it would function tomorrow the same way we wouldn't even know he'd gone.

The Mechanical Church and the Holy Spirit

And he thinks that might be written of many churches in that we become so mechanical. We go in at 11 and come out at 12, and the Holy Ghost must come when we open the door of the church, and he must leave when we lock it.

And we try and lay down the track and say, come, Holy Ghost, for thee we call, spirit of burning, come, but come our way. We've laid down the conditions. Holy Ghost, come, but please don't violate our theology.

Don't upset our status quo. Don't break our hearts over the lost world. I said, what about the Welsh revival? He said, I'll tell you what happened in the Welsh revival. He said, I was with William Booth in his office.

We were having meetings in London, and somebody said to me, no, my wife, revival has broken out. There's a young man in his 20s, Evan Roberts, and he's packing everywhere he goes. He won't even let them publicize him.

He won't let them put his picture in the paper. They'll just announce he's coming to Swansea, and every church in town is filled because they don't know where he's going. So he said, well, I knew Friday afternoon, I could leave Friday afternoon, and that Saturday free, and I could come back Sunday and get to the office on Monday morning.

So I said, I went there. Meeting was crowded. In one meeting, Evan Roberts comes in. There's 800 people, which isn't big for America, but there it's the largest hall in town. And Evan walks down to the front seat, sits down, bows his head, and prayed for three hours.

Hard people to walk out. But then he stood up for 15 minutes. He said, have you ever heard like it in your life? The Holy Ghost came upon him. He was a big man. When he prayed, God just came down as though he jumped in the audience.

And that happened more than once. And he said at the end of the meeting, he said, of course the end of the meeting was no, no, no, no, no, no. He just, after he'd prayed for three hours and spoke for 15 minutes, he went out.

At 10 o 'clock at night, he prayed the whole night for the anointing for the next day. Our guys don't do that. They go sit and talk and say silly jokes. We want to be spiritual and carmel, spiritual carmel, hot and cold, all out for God, all out for the cowboys.

God says no. And you've done it for 25 years. Why not quit and start something different? Last Sunday night, he preached in one of maybe the largest church in Denver, Colorado. He said, Len, as we sat there, I was ready to preach.

And suddenly I was overcome with grief. And I just walked forward and sat on the floor, didn't go to the pulpit. And I began to weep. God just gave me such a burden. And he said, look, there's a congregation about 3000.

He said, there's a girl in here who has been molested by a man, sexually molested. And the man is going to go to jail. And as he said, the girl about 16 ran down the aisle and she said, Mr. Wilkerson, I'm the girl that has been molested.

My daddy did it. And he has to go to jail. David just groaned. He said, there must have been 15 or 16 other young women who came there and said, my father or brother or somebody is assaulting me sexually every week.

He said, my spirit just groaned. And he stayed there 15 minutes weeping. I said, Dave, bless you. The average preacher would have said, I just had a kind of a little upset in my spirit. I feel there's somebody in trouble.

I'd like a few of you to pray. Raise your hands. We're going to pray for this girl. She's in trouble. I know she is. Instead of that, he swept all this theology sermon on one side and obeyed the Holy Ghost.

The whole church broke up in weeping and brokenness seeking God. Same thing happened without ever having to open his mouth preaching. I'm sure that's the kind of spirit that the apostle had because the spirit of Christ is dwelling in him.

It's the spirit of God dwelling in him. They experimented at Cornell University some years ago by putting a frog in a dishpan of boiling water and he jumped out. And then they put a frog in a dishpan of cold water and they turned the jet at the bottom and then they turned it up one degree, two degrees.

And you know what that frog did? He stayed in there till they cooked him to death. When they put him in the boiling water, he got out because he said, I can't live here. But when they, by degrees, they changed the thing and he adjusted and he adjusted and he adjusted and they still killed him anyhow.

Gradual Carnality and the Loss of God's Glory

And you know, we've got some things in our churches, if not in our lives, that a few years ago we would never would have had. And old Satan didn't pour the boiling water on, he put this little thing and then that little thing and that little thing.

And before very long, the churches become so carnal. The glory of the Lord doesn't fill the temple. When did you last tiptoe out of your particular tabernacle saying, surely God is in this place? I say again, with all the power of my being, I do not believe that modern Christians go to church to meet God.

They go to church to hear a sermon about God. They don't expect deity to invade the place. They don't expect to tiptoe out of the holy place saying, God bless us. The spirit moved over my heart. Tell some people that God almighty may send communism to America to purge it of its uncleanness and its sin and its lethargy and its unbelief and the selfishness amongst believers.

They are what you ordered shipped out of the country. But I want to tell you, God loved Israel, but he let her go into bondage for 400 years. And then when she came out, he let her go into bondage another 400 years.

And now they're in bondage, not to the Philistines. And after all, dear friend, when you read the Old Testament, almighty God's problem in the Old Testament was not the Amalekites or the Hittites or the Perizzites or the Jebusites.

God only had one problem in the Old Testament, and that was Israel. And I believe almighty God only has one problem in the world tonight. And it's not communism or Romanism. It's the church of the living God.

And he is concerned about her. With his own blood he bought her, and for her life he died. And if Jesus weeps, he weeps tonight because of the paralysis of the church. The glory has departed. We go through the mechanics.

Pastoral Prayer, Revival, and Total Surrender

I'd like to see 300 pastors come together for a whole week and stay prostrate before God. Wouldn't you like to see that, Brother Ray? No fancy lecturing, just getting there in prostration, heart searching and saying, God, if we can do it, if we can birth revival, if we can give our bodies, our spirits, our minds to total control by you, if we stay here, it doesn't matter whether we die here.

See, this class of prayer is hardly known. And saying, God, God, you don't manifest yourself anymore. We don't challenge you to divide the Red Sea. We don't dare to call fire down from heaven. We can sow and plow and do everything.

We don't ask you to feed us with heavenly manner. Our people don't feed on God, they feed on meetings. They go from one seminar to another seminar. So I'm praying this morning that suddenly God will come.

You'll jump up from your seat with an arrow of God in your heart and flee here for refuge. The Lord whom ye seek, and I'm seeking God. I'm not seeking miracles as good as they are or prophecy. I'm seeking God.

You say America needs God. No, she doesn't. The church needs God. If the church gets God, then America will soon feel it. She'll be staggering. I just finished a two-week meeting in Dr. Fuller's church in Grand Rapids, and I preached radical holiness in that big Baptist church with 1 ,200 people in.

Reverence in the House of God

The thing I liked, when we came into the sanctuary, a lovely auditorium, Dr. Fuller walked us to the front and raised his hand. The whole audience was quiet. Fuller said, each meeting, God is in his holy temple.

Let all the earth be silent before him. You see, I can go to the sanctuary of God, but I don't have to wait for God to come, really. It doesn't mean that I go in and say, God's never late. The son never gets out of bed, as Dr. Anderson said this morning, one second late.

He never goes to bed one second late. It works perfectly. When I come to the house of God, the presence of God should already be there. We've lost much. Yes, we may nod our heads and nudge each other and disagree and pass it, but if I were talking to you individually, you'd say with me, you know, we're not producing a very deep form of piety in the day.

We're at St. Nicholson Church on the hills of Wales. Service starts half past ten on Sunday morning. I get there a quarter past ten. A little old man comes in, but he sits down, bends his head reverently, and begins to sing quietly, O come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord, and sings it maybe twenty times.

And then somebody else comes up, and they join in it, and maybe they sing it another twenty times. And somebody else comes up, and they sing with him. Before long, without much fear, he's got filled with worshipping men and women.

They never start worshipping with a hymn at this time. The whole service moves in the spirit of worship and reverence and adoration, and I've been in churches in many parts of the world, and some of the biggest churches, but I tell you this, that I have never yet, and I'm not Pentecostal, and I don't speak with tongues, I've stood for and suffered in some way for old fashioned holiness and old manhood.

But my dear friend, I want to tell you that when I want to know how they worship God, I slip in that little church of minors, and unlike men and women, my soul goes wide up to heaven. I don't know if the churches, and Paul just said at the end, you know, I don't know.

You see, Junior gets up and runs to the bathroom, but he wouldn't get up and run to the bathroom if Mr. Eisenhower was giving a speech. Somebody comes in and gives a bit of gossip, and yam, yam, yam, yams away in somebody's ear while the teller preaches.

Would he do that if Eisenhower was here? Come on, be honest! No, and he said, I haven't been in a church in England where they know how to worship God. Well, I said, this is very interesting, but the thing would.

Brother Singh's Pattern of Worship and Intercession

Well, I said, tell me this, if I came to your church Sunday morning, what's the procedure in the service? And without batting an eye, he just looked up very pleasantly, and he said, Brother Abner, the first three hours of our service Sunday, do you get that?

The first three hours is given to praise, worship, adoration, thanksgiving, ecstasy, and then what? Or the second three hours we give to prayer, intercession, supplication, and then what? The third three hours we have breaking of bread.

One man has a hymn, another has a song. A woman gets up and says she's just finished twenty days of fasting. A man here says God dealt with him here. A man says the Spirit awakened him and told him to go put something right, something he'd stolen.

We give the whole meeting over to the saints for each of them to make their contribution. Well, I said, Brother Singh, that's nine hours. Do you have a service nine hours every Lord's Day? He said, no.

Oh, well, I said, I wasn't thinking about conventions or cat meetings, I was thinking of the normal Sunday. Well, he said, I'm talking about the normal Sunday, except that the meeting doesn't last nine hours always.

Sometimes the glory comes down whether they're eleven hours, twelve hours, thirteen hours, fourteen hours. The thing about that, do we? I can remember Dr. Tozer, I can hear him now saying, Len, I think I'll have gone from this scene, but maybe before you die you'll see people coming from foreign countries to show us what New Testament Christianity is all about.

The Need for Revival in a Dry and Thirsty Land

And as I said last night, the great need of this hour is that Brother Singh this morning, all of you that are hungry and thirsty, the need of the hour is water. We're in a dry and thirsty land. There's not a spot of revival in America today.

There's not a spot of revival in England today. The only countries in the world that have any semblance of revival are non-civilized countries. They're uncivilized countries. God is by-passing us, pervading us.

Like Jordan, I didn't want to go there. I don't want to go there. To be revived, I worked. God said, go. I stirred up this nation of mine. I did revival there, and I by-passed Israel. And God will send revival.

Don't you make any mistake about that. He can't get away to send it in America. He is flying away. But God loves my generation as much as He loves any generation. Grace is still flowing, my brother, but a million there have been surprised.

He's a tempest-rider here, and the water lies before He runs dry. It's not the quality for it. On the other hand, go away to the different shows. From Hollywood or somewhere else, they're seeking life.

And He will set out setting fire down out of His belly. It's there to be praised. You remember that part where He said, some of you, your God is your belly. And we live in a generation of belly-worshippers.

We never had more food, and we never had more hunger. I don't want to be surprised by Him. I don't want to be surprised by Him. I'll be a well in Him that goes out. To the utmost parts of the earth is He.

I am. Anyway, He's as emphatic as He was like. That's why my dear friends, you need to ask the church. It's as silly as I said last night. It's brooding over your assembly. If He is, then He will be in sync with life.

God is life. Life forgets life. And life is power. And life is reproduction. And the church of holiness, the church of holiness today will have no life. We've got the letter, but no life. We've got the word, but no spirit.

We've got the terms, but no production.