Abiding in Christ — Leonard Ravenhill

Prayer and Abiding in Christ

The following message was delivered by Rev. Leonard Ravenhill during a regular session at the Christ for the Nations Institute. He was speaking on the subject of prayer and abiding in Christ. Somebody once asked D .L. Moody how he knew, could he prove the Bible was inspired, and he said yes.

I know it's inspired because it inspires me every time I open it. I think that's a pretty small answer and yet a very great answer too. I've never been you, and I'm awfully glad about that. So I don't know how you react to the scriptures, I don't know how you react to the word when you read it, I don't know if you ever find that the Bible kind of explodes in your hand when you are reading it.

There are times when I find this to be very real, as though the Bible suddenly explodes, gets hold of me. And as I said before, I want to try at least to talk about prayer tonight. And I think it's significant that the disciples never asked Jesus to teach them to preach.

He was the greatest preacher the world ever had, and he preached the greatest sermon that the world has ever heard. And when some very modern boys asked me in New York why we had lived 2000 years and nobody had an answer to the problems of the world, I reminded them, partly in the language of G .K. Chesterton, that Christianity had not been weighed in the balances and found wanting, it had been tried, found difficult, and rejected.

And we're not waiting for somebody to discover an answer, even to human problems, because it's all there in what we call the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest sermon that the world ever heard from the greatest person that ever lived.

But they never said, Lord, teach us to preach, and they never said, Lord, teach us to do miracles. But at least on one occasion they did say, Lord, teach us to pray. Now here's an interesting thing. Have you ever thought of this?

In all the books you've read about prayer and everything else, and even reading the Word of God, there is no record in the Bible that Jesus ever prayed with his disciples. Ever thought about that, is there?

He prayed for them. Again, in the prayer that we call the Lord's Prayer, which is the disciples' prayer, the Lord's Prayer, of course, is John 17, which is divided into three sections, verses 1 to 5 he prayed for himself, and verses 6 to 19 he prayed for the church, and verses 20 to the end he prayed for the world, which I think maybe is a divine order.

Why didn't Jesus pray with his disciples? Well, I can only give you again what I think, because they'd be too embarrassed. And I don't think they'd ever try and pray again after they'd heard him pray.

The Anointing, the Wilderness, and the Discipline of Prayer

I once did a two-week meeting for Dr. Tozer in what I used to call the highest pulpit in America. If you preach in his pulpit, everything else is easy. He was such a profound theologian. He was such an amazing man of God.

And we had a series of two-week meetings there. Now, I said in passing this morning that when the Lord Jesus received the anointing, I prefer that, if you want to call it the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the disciples were to be baptized with the Holy Ghost and fire.

I don't like the term baptism. It's too slang. If you're going to quote it, quote the Scripture. He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Right. With a lot of baptism, I'm afraid it hasn't got much fire in it anymore.

But Jesus was not baptized with fire for the simple reason there was nothing impure in him to be consumed. It was the anointing, a signal anointing by the Spirit of God. And again, we remember that when he came up out of the baptism, out of the water, he was led into the wilderness by the Spirit.

Not led of the devil, as some people say. He was led of the Spirit. And he returned in the power of the Spirit. Not exhausted, not on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Fighting every round with Satan and winning every time on every round and every level with him.

I don't know whether it was there or in the experience that we call the Garden of Gethsemane that the apostle is referring to in Hebrews when he speaks about the Lord Jesus who prayed with strong crying and with tears.

Now, the disciples didn't say, teach us how to pray. I don't think there is a formula in prayer. There's a science in it, but not a formula. You may not agree with a lot I say. You don't have to. You might be stupid if you did.

But that goes for every preacher, of course, because they're all stupid. But always take whatever a preacher says and measure it by the Word of God. Now, this is a strange country, isn't it? It's a young country compared with the ancient dynasties of, say, the Empire of China or even the British Empire, America is just a newborn babe in a crib playing with its toes.

After all, you're only 200 years old. So you're looking that the nation's only 200 years old. So compared with ancient dynasties, America was born yesterday. She's dying today. She'll be dead tomorrow unless we have revival.

It's as easy as that. Now, America has produced some of the greatest, rottenest things in modern history. I don't think anybody could stand erect and feel proud about Vietnam. I'm not taking issue with beatniks and others who yell about it, but all war to me is immoral.

And there are lots of other things. You can go to India and pick up a beautifully bound copy of Shakespeare in leather and look inside and it will say printed in Russia, printed in English in Russia. You can pick up a nudie magazine at the other end and look and it'll say printed in Chicago.

And the film industry has certainly cursed the world. America has enough to make her crawl on her knees from here to eternity. But to balance the scales, you know, you may not like that. I spoke like this at a meeting and a lady came up to me and she was pretty angry.

You know, ladies can get mad. I mean, they practice too often. And this lady came up to me and she was really mad and she said, What are you talking about like that? You're an Englishman. What are you talking like that in America for?

What are you doing in America anyhow? And I said, Because Billy Graham's in my country. And sometimes it's a bit difficult to take from an Englishman. But let's face fact, this is a debit side. All the lousy, filthy, rotten things that are cursing the world.

Not all of them, but many of them came out of America. Now, what about the credit side? Well, to just take one little section, America has had some of the greatest praying men in history. I have in my office, I have some pictures, Billy Graham's amongst them and Dave Wilkerson and Norman Grubb and a few others, C .P. Studd.

Then I have a picture of a man with a very benign kind of face. He's totally bald, just what he lost at the top he let go at the side. So he has two great big puffs of white hair on either side, or one on either side, pardon me.

And a beard right down here, snow white beard. And people will look at that kind of little gallery and say, well, who's that, who's that? Who's the old fellow at the bottom, your grandfather? I say, well, guess how old he is.

I don't know, maybe he's older than he looks, 80, 90, 100, 101. Who is he anyhow? Oh, he's an American, a very remarkable American. And that bald-headed old man with his long beard and white hair is just at the remarkable age of 45.

Crazy. Well, his daughter sent me the picture, his name was E .M. Bounds. I have a book amongst the few that I've not written, anything like Brother Gordon Lindsay, but one book that I didn't write it, I edit it, so I'm not afraid to push that book.

I never push my own books, it's thought own about and that's fine. But I never carry them, I never sell them, it's for other people to do if they want. Because I don't want anybody to think I'm trying to commercialize from the pulpit, I don't do this.

But this one book is, E .M. Bounds wrote 11 books. Out of the 11 he wrote 7 books on prayer alone. Now, you've got to know a bit about praying if you're going to write 11 books on it. And I just took the overlapping sections and I got these books which, 6 of them are out of print, and I put them together in one volume which is called A Treasury of Prayer.

Now, E .M. Bounds had a habit, as Wesley had, the same habit that Robert Murray McShane had. He died at the ripe old age of 28. The same habit that one of your famous Americans had, but he lived longer, he lived to be 29.

That was the boy that went after the Indians, David Bainard. I don't know the answer, so don't ask me the question, but a whole bunch of these men had a habit of rising at 4 in the morning, not once a week, every morning of their lives.

Now, E .M. Bounds' daughter told me this, she said, My daddy used to rise at 4 until he got older and the burden got heavier and time was getting shorter and then he got up at 3. Now, they have a list, you've got E .M. Bounds, you've got, oh and then up in, we went through Portland some weeks ago, a man called Payson, and preachers always illiterate, you know, praying Payson of Portland.

He was the man who, after he died, they found at the side of his bed, it wasn't one of those lovely rooms like yours with wall-to-wall carpeting, he had no carpeting. And at the side of his bed they found two grooves in the floor just hollow, scooped out, 3 or 4 inches long, scooped out, and when they washed him for burial they saw on his knees two big hoofs, two great big things like corns there.

Somebody put the two things together, this is where his knees used to rub on the floor when he was making intercession. In the days when Lafayette was in this country, this famous man Payson was a very brilliant preacher.

I do have an old letter-bound volume I picked up in Boston, nobody wants that kind of thing, I got it for 30 cents, I wouldn't sell you it for 3 dollars. But, not 30, but he was a wonderful preacher.

But a very titled lady came into here in one morning and all he did was pray at the beginning of the service and she couldn't remember another thing. She got lost in that prayer. And going out she said to one of the church officers, I would like a copy of the prayer of the preacher.

Well, he doesn't have any copy. What, you mean that he hadn't recited that thing, he hadn't memorized it? It was so comprehensive. All the height, the depth, the length and breadth, he carried us out of time into eternity.

You know, I think this is one of the great, forgive me, and if you don't, I'll love you, but I think that one of the great impoverishments in the American pulpit is that preachers don't know how to pray.

My good friend Martin Lloyd-Jones has just finished 30 years of preaching in London and he said, I didn't finish because my Bible was running out. He said, I hardly got into it. He finished because time was running out.

He's over 70 and had serious surgery last year. But this is another amazing man of God. And Martin Lloyd-Jones has sparked off a chain reaction that our brother was speaking about today in the realm of prayer too.

He has been able to ignite ministers and gather them together for Bible study and serious contemplation again on the life of prayer. But when people are going to London, they say, well I'm going to London, who should I hear preach?

And I say, go and hear Martin Lloyd-Jones. And without exception, every preacher that went, when I said, now just tell me this, first of all, what impressed you most? Two things, I know them both. Number one, the adage, you always stand up to sing in England, you know, in honor of people, you always stand up before the king, so we stand up always to sing every hymn.

And remember that Wesley's hymns, he wrote 30 ,000 roughly, and do you know that most of those hymns had up to 30 stanzas? Oh, we've mutilated hymnology. There's hardly anything left. The fellows that wrote the hymns wouldn't know them if they came back.

You can find the hymn book in America today, I don't think, except one night when it failed to compile and I pushed it in, where you've got five verses in the hymn, like when I surveyed the wondrous cross.

The last verse is, his dying crimson like a robe, spread o 'er his body on the tree. Then am I dead to all the globe, and all the globe is dead to me. Well, we'd better not sing lies, so we drop it off anyhow.

But an awful lot of hymns have been amputated, amputated, amputated, amputated. But people said when they went to hear Martin Lloyd-Jones, well, these things amazed me. Number one, they sang a hymn, a brief prayer, they sang a hymn, and then they had the church announcements.

He has no choir, no specials, no trumpets, no soloists, doesn't go in for anything of this, he's a real old Puritan preacher. And then he would say, let us pray, and he would pray for 15 to 20 minutes.

Most people would say, no, that's as long as my preacher preaches. He'd pray for 15 to 20 minutes. You know, sometimes when those fellows have prayed, I didn't care whether they preached or not, I got so much out of the prayer, I was ready to go home, I was just about full up to my gills anyhow.

And then he preached for an hour and ten, an hour and 15 minutes to the largest audiences in Britain, right until a few months ago. Our church population is down, he got a couple of thousand people Sunday morning, a couple of thousand Sunday night, and a good cross-section of them, teenagers, 20-year-olds, students, varsity students, men from the law schools, girls in training for nursing, scientists, tremendous audience of people.

But the two prevailing things were not a jazzy choir and some other wonderful contortions, but two things again, prayer and the word of God. Sometimes when I talk to preachers, I get into trouble too.

Prayer and the Word of God as the Preacher's Calling

You know, a preacher only has two things to do. Oh, I'm so tired. Are you tired, are you, preacher? I've been to six hospitals today and so forth. Well, you're stupid. Why don't you become a Bible preacher?

The formula for a Bible preacher is we will give ourselves continually to prayer and the word of God. Those are the only two things a preacher has to do. The elders of the church should look after the sick, not the preacher.

You see, when we do God's work in God's way, with God's power, we'll get God's blessing. Now, you can run an automobile, an eight-cylinder automobile, you can run it on four. You may have a struggle getting over the Rockies, but if you really want the car to go, you should get all the eight cylinders working.

But, you know, we've run so long in our churches on four cylinders that we are not much interested whether the other four work or not. We're getting along, so what? We just put a new building up and we've got a new few other things.

You could build a building from here to Timbuktu and the devil wouldn't get any nerves anyhow. And I say to the preacher, you can put all your diplomas on the wall. Do you think that scares the devil?

You can read as well as you can. All he'll do is smile and say, get that guy to get a bit more interested in this and that. As long as he doesn't pray, as long as he doesn't prevail with God, that's the only thing that matters.

Isn't it? Some of you preachers are sweating on ten committees. Maybe the Lord didn't want you on one, but it's prestige. Oh, did you hear about my husband, wife says? You know, he's been appointed to the board of so-and-so.

Reminds me of the preacher who asked on Tuesday night, he'd like all the board members of the church to come, and 700 turned up. They were all bored. But it's prestigious now, isn't it? They put on this board, they put on that, they put on something else.

Oh, my husband. Well, I'm sorry, he won't be home for two days. He's gone to headquarters at so-and-so, and he comes back. I'm sorry, he has to leave tomorrow morning. He's at so-and-so. I'm sorry, he won't be back for so-and-so.

I just say, you know, somehow the Lord isn't kind of quickening me and getting... Sure, sure. What does the Lord say? What did you sing the other day? Burdens are lifted at Calvary. Sure. But burdens are given at Calvary.

All God is looking for now is people to carry burdens. We all want to be blessed, blessed to death. But you see, my yoke is easy and my burden. Now, if you're carrying a burden the church made for you, it may kill you.

If you're carrying a burden you made for yourself, you're stupid. You might be carrying a burden that your organization made for you. Oh, there's 50 burdens, and God won't give you a bit of strength for any one of them, so he may as well quit praying.

The man that wrote some of our greatest hymns, who lived a long while before the Westerlies, was Isaac Watts, and Isaac Watts said on one occasion, I would be quite content to be the governor of six worlds as big as this, or six universes like this.

I would, if this were the burden of God for me, I would be content to carry the burden and govern six universes. If that was God's burden. But if it wasn't God's burden, he said, I wouldn't even dare to attempt to look after six sheep.

You see, the compensation is my yoke is easy and my burden. God isn't obligated to give you anything except what he's put upon you. He isn't obligated to give you money, strength, wisdom, or anything else, if it isn't his burden.

You'll kill yourself, or you'll say some nice things, only the trouble is you won't hear them. And you'll be down there in your box. You see, we've got to go God's way about things. My yoke is easy, my burden.

Give yourself continually to prayer. This is the only thing we're told to do, the preachers, give yourself continually to prayer. And the people, we're told to pray without ceasing. Now, I think maybe tomorrow morning they're going to finish up John 15, and we were trying to talk today about becoming mature in God.

That none of us have arrived, however long you've been around. I heard of a lady in the church testifying, some people saying, I've been in the way. Oh, I've been in the way 20 years. This lady says, I've been in the way for 30 years.

And some member of the press said, you've been in everybody's way. And there are some people like that, they've been stuck around too long, I think, they've been in everybody's way. But you know, none of us have arrived yet.

There's still a lot of land ahead to be possessed for any of us. And the only way that I know to possess it again is obedience and in the place of prayer. Now, there's one of the great men in the Bible.

Maybe we will start on, what, tomorrow Wednesday, Thursday morning, maybe in Hebrews. But there's a great man in the Bible, and he was a great man. He was a great man from God's standpoint. He was such a great man that he could stop the course of nature.

He could strangle the economy of a nation. He could raise the dead and do a whole string of miracles. And yet God's epitaph of that man is just two words. He prayed. Now, there are many biographies of famous men written in two volumes.

Begbie wrote two marvelous volumes on the life of William Booth. And there are two larger volumes on one of the greatest women that ever lived, Mrs. Booth, the wife of the general, one of the greatest women that this world has known.

If you'd looked on the Booth Street one day there in London, you'd have seen somebody stop at a door and a royal carriage drive up and somebody hand a letter in and the letter would be taken to Mrs. Booth and she'd read it and it would be from the Queen of England saying, Pray for me, we have vital problems in the British Empire today.

And when that carriage had gone, another one would come bearing a letter from the Prime Minister of England and the same thing, something of the same thing. The cipher on the corner from Downing Street.

Please pray, we have a very decisive thing to settle in the British Empire, will you pray? Now, they didn't go to William Booth. They didn't go to the other cabinet members. They came to this woman that all her life had a curvature of the spine and had a somewhat moderate degree of ill health, but she knew one thing, she knew how to pray.

Well, there's the very remarkable life of the founder of the China Inland Mission written in two volumes. Volume number one, The Growth of a Soul, and volume number two, The Growth of a Work, the establishing of the China Inland Mission in China through Hudson Taylor.

And I could recite a whole string of biographies and autobiographies, live stories written in two volumes. Here is a life story, a vast life story written in two words. He prayed. Now, if you want the second volume, I can give you it.

He prayed again. That's the only difference. If he hadn't have prayed again, we might be without rain until now. And you don't need to look up the story, but you can read it when you go home. Well, I guess if I was to say to you, when did Elijah come on the stage?

Well, you remember maybe when he came on. Or do you? Oh, you remember he went off the stage in a whirlwind and in a chariot of fire. How did he come on the stage? When did he come on the stage? Well, if you forget the long period before this, when, what, 58 years before, there had been a dividing of the kingdom, and immediately before Elijah came on the stage, there had been seven kings.

And the second king did more evil than the first. The third did more evil than the second. You go right down the list. And then when the seventh man, Ahab, comes along, he did not do more evil than the king before him.

He did more evil than all the kings that were before him. Then, as though he would defy God to the nth degree, he rebuilt the city of Jericho, which God had said should never be rebuilt. And then, to make matters worse, as the Irish would say, he not only rebuilt the city, but he married outside.

He married a Sidonian. And the summary of this whole thing is that, well, there are seven things, indictments against him. He did the sins of Jeroboam before him. Then he took the wife of Jezebel, daughter of Abel, and then he served Abel, and then he worshipped him, then he read an altar to him, and he built a grove, and he did more to provoke the God of Israel and anger him than all the kings of Israel before him.

And then, just like turning these lights out one by one and plunging the building into darkness, this is what this wicked woman did when she got into the place of authority. She said, I've got it just where I wanted it now.

And they built groves to Ashtaroth and to Baal. Would you ever try to imagine you'd like to see the world as God sees it? When God looks on this pile of dung that we call a world, what do you think he thinks of it?

How do you think he reacts to it? Every time God looked from heaven, he saw groves to Ashtaroth and Baal. He saw incense offered, and they were all stinking in the nostrils of God. And God was angry. As I said this morning, we get angry about things that shouldn't faze us, and we don't get angry about things that should make us blazing mad.

It says in the 17th of the Acts of the Apostles that when Paul went down that main street in Athens, the intellectual capital of the world at that time, and when he saw the cathedrals and the buildings and the temples to strange gods, in this sleepy, stately, Elizabethan English, it says his spirit was stirred.

But it says there in the version I don't like too much, except when it agrees with me, and that is the amplified version, it says he was angry when he saw it. You get angry when you see temples to strange gods.

Now you may disagree with me and fire me, and if you do, I'd just be as happy to go tomorrow and love you all. It would make a hell of a difference to me. You know, I can't get excited about what these people call Pentecostal Catholics, because I don't believe there are any.

The Roman Church is the dirtiest thing on God's earth. It's worse than communism. Now I'm not saying a Catholic can't be saved and filled with the Spirit, but I am saying they can't be saved, filled with the Spirit, and stay in that system.

You can't offer the sacrifice of the mass, it's blasphemy. You can't make the Virgin Mary co-redemptrix with Jesus Christ, it's anti-biblical. You see, Protestantism is the meat in the sandwich. We've got Catholicism here, and we've got Romanism there, and boy, they're going to put pressure on.

Because they both hate us like the devil anyhow, if they're true to their vows. We're heading for trouble. Whistle as you like. You can say, well, I know lovely people. Well, you may do, but I'm talking about a system, and I'm saying they won't stay in that thing, because the Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth, and he'll fight heresy and error.

You see. And we're going to have the biggest showdown in America before very long. You mark my words. That system robs the living and it robs the dead. But we don't get angry about it. We're trying to balance the thing.

We'll be anything to anybody. You know, if you start an anti-communist society in America, like a good preacher who had a tremendous ministry, and suddenly he dropped it all to fight communism. Well, if you're going to fight communism just on a human level, you may as well try and beat an elephant to death with a balloon.

You've got as much chance. God will destroy it. Men will destroy it. And Rome, too, because the branch that beareth not fruit, men take it. Not devils, not God. Men take it away and burn it. And Rome has killed more Protestants and more believers than all the wars in history.

Yes, sir, when God looks down on these abominations, God hates them. They're vile. And when Elijah saw these altars to Ostrath and Baal, he was angry about it. You know, these days people back off and say, you know, I don't think we can do much these days.

We've just got to kind of sit and let things get worse and worse and just hope the Lord's going to get us out of this trouble. Did you ever hear of a man by the name of Ralph Nader? What did he do? Well, about five years ago he decided single-handedly to take on Ford Motor Company and all the multi-billion dollar motor industry and take them to the cleaners, and he did it.

And in case you don't know, he did it without the Holy Ghost. Well, boy, he's a headache to them. He's starting on the airlines now. Brother, he's a boy. He's determined to get justice. Did you ever hear of a woman called Madeline Mary?

They call her Mad for short, and that's real good. Now, if you'd said to that woman a few years... Oh, look, woman, now just think. You think you're going to get the Constitution of America altered. Well, don't you?

Just one stupid woman that's blazing mad and gets a few atheists and others and Jews around her, and they're going to get the Constitution of America altered? Oh, forget it. You can't alter it. It's like the laws of the Medes and Persians.

It alters nothing. But you get it altered. Well, if Nader can do that on one level, on the financial level, against the multi-billion dollar motor industry, and this woman can do it on this level, don't you think there's a chance that some man, really, full of the Holy Ghost and in total submission, might write a few new pages in the history of the world?

After all, God isn't looking for movement. He's looking for men. God didn't ever raise up a movement yet, in my judgment. He raised up men. Maybe movements come out of men, but God never starts with a committee.

Elijah, the God of One Man, and the University of Silence

Something would have happened if Moses had sat on the mountain and said, I've got a suggestion to make. I want you to sit down and vote on whether we accept these Ten Commandments or not. You think it would have gone over big?

I don't. You see, there's an old, old saying in history that one man with God is a majority. Now, if you don't have God, you need everything else. And everybody else. But if you really have God, you just don't need anything else and everybody else at all.

Just him. Now, I can't tell you where this man Elijah came from. I just don't know. Oh, he came from Thizb or Tizb. Where's that? Well, nobody knows very much. But you see, this man again is the personification of some of the promises of God.

Proverbs 28, isn't it? Verse 1 says that the wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as a lion. What they say about this man, the effectual servant prayer of a righteous man. He's as bold as a lion.

Or as the psalmist says there in Psalm 3, that he'll not be afraid even though 10 ,000 people press on him. All right, Elijah comes on the stage and everybody else has run away. Sometimes people have said to me, hey, just wait a minute.

You forgot to mention one thing, that after Elijah, Elisha came. Elisha prayed, let a double portion of thy spirit come on me and he did twice as many miracles as Elijah. Right. Sure enough, the Bible's always true.

But you know, God is never called the God of Elisha, is he? When John Baptist came in the desert place, what did he say? Who was come? Oh, Elijah, not Elisha, huh? He went to the home of a devout Jew on some of the festive days, what we call again the feast.

He would find the door open five or six inches. You'd find a table set for six people but an extra chair. And you might come in, sit down and say, oh, you're expecting someone else to say, yeah, yeah, excuse me, the door's open.

Oh, yes, it's got to stay open. The extra chair, somebody flying in. Oh, no, no, Elijah may come. They were promised that Elijah would come. Jesus was transfigured on the mount, wasn't he? And there appeared with him Moses and who?

Oh, not Elisha, huh? And in the book of the Revelation, there are going to be two final witnesses and they're going to be who? Moses and Elijah. And Jesus was dying on the cross and they said he'd call us for Elijah.

God is called the God of Elijah, not the God of Elisha. Now, this man comes on the scene when the whole nation is just drowning like we are today in iniquity and impurity and impiety and indecency. Every devilish thing was prospering.

The enemy had come in like a flood. The man could have legitimately run away and said, well, every other preacher's gone. Everybody else is forsaken. What am I going to do? Well, I don't quite know altogether.

Yes, in some ways I do. I do know where God trained this man and he can train you and me there, though it's a pretty expensive Bible school because it's in the University of Siloam. And when God had got this man ready, he says to him, come on now, come on.

And one day, I don't know quite what they were doing. I like to think that maybe this very strong personality, this woman was very authoritative. Maybe it was in the garden plucking some flowers with Elijah, a family they had.

And suddenly this little man comes up and she looks breathlessly at him, this ragged, rugged little man, and he just says, just before you take the flowers in the royal palace, I want to tell you something.

Wait till I get my key. Where's my key? Here's my key. There's going to be no rain around here all for a few years, according to my word, not God's word, my word. And here's the key. Look, I'll shut up heaven and you know what?

There won't be another drop of rain until I turn the key and lose heaven. It's rather amazing, but we'll commence on it the day after tomorrow, that amongst the men of faith, in Hebrews 11, Elijah isn't found in this chapter.

And it takes some faith to do that, doesn't it? I should have heaven, but there'd be no rain. And he should have heaven. And the rain, the heavens became like brass and nothing happened. Now, I think he must have felt real good when he told the king and queen off, don't you?

I'd have felt real good if I'd rebuked that pair of rascals. And immediately he'd done that when he was the most powerful preacher in the world. You know what God said? I'm going to increase your salary.

Send you to a bigger church. You can build a house, buy the sea of Galilee and fish and just write books at the weekend. He didn't say that. Poison man, and everybody in the nation is going to talk about him and feel the power of his life.

And you know what he said? God said, go hide thyself. Oh Lord, this is bad psychology. I mean, I'm right in the zenith of my power. I mean, couldn't you promote me right now? I mean, I've just shut up heaven.

I've just exercised more power than any man on earth. I mean, Lord, did I hear you right? You see, in the next chapter, God says, go hide thyself. In the next chapter, he says, go show thyself. And it's wrong to show yourself when you should hide yourself and it's wrong to hide yourself when you should show yourself.

He says, in this chapter, I've commanded the ravens to feed thee there. And in the next chapter, I've commanded the widow woman, later in the chapter, I've commanded the widow woman to feed thee there.