Weeping Between Porch and the Altar — Leonard Ravenhill

Father we thank you this morning for this privilege of fellowship. We will be still and know that thou art God. Lord we care not whether you come in the earthquake or in the wind or in the fire or in the still small voice, but we see a world outside of us so reckless, so hell-bound, so sin-bound, so blind, so deaf, so smart scientifically and so dumb in the areas of spirituality.

And you've called us to be shepherds, to be leaders. You've called us to be joshuas, to lead the church on to victory. And we recognize Lord the staleness that there is around. We do not see the pillar of fire hanging over the sanctuary.

We do not hear the rushing mighty wind. Will you speak to our hearts today? Grant Lord we shall be edified after we have been here and have new incentives and new vision and new purpose to do the will of God.

We remember the suffering church throughout the world, the millions of precious Christians who today have to bow their necks and bow their backs to the smiters who know no relief from their misery. We thank you for the testimony that still flourishes amidst all that wickedness and violence.

Lord God we thank you for every good and every perfect gift that you bestow upon us. Thank you for our freedom. Thank you for your word which you've preserved right through the centuries. And I ask again Lord that we may be a vital link between your eternal song and this troubled world outside, this lost world.

And I give you praise in Jesus name. Amen. Thank you. I'm not really going to preach a sermon this morning, but I want to have a launching pad, and the launching pad is in the little book of Joel in the second chapter.

Weeping Between the Porch and the Altar

Joel chapter 2 and verse 17. I'll go back, pardon me, to chapter 1 and verse 13. God yourselves and lament ye priests how you ministers of the altar come lie all night in sackcloth you ministers of my God for the meat offering and the drink offering is withholden from the house of your God.

Sanctify a fast and call a solemn assembly. And then to verse 17 of the next chapter, let the priests the ministers of the Lord weep between the altar the porch and the altar and let them say spare thy people O Lord and give not thine heritage to reproach but the heathen should rule over them.

Wherefore should they say among the people where is your God? Most of the prophetic books have a kind of historical framework or a setting in which it's comparatively easy to discover that which provides a key to the interpretation of the book.

This book of Joel, to me, it's timeless. I know the word of God is timeless, and it differs from other books because there are no kings of Israel or Judah mentioned in the book, no great empires like Assyria or Babylonians and Egyptians and so forth, and scholars dispute whether it's earlier than Amos or later than Micah, and I don't think that matters too much either.

I get literature from all over the world because my books are in a number of languages, and then everyone that writes to me quotes 2 Chronicles 7 14, which I'm sure you know. I'll remind you of it. If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and so forth.

Now I do not believe that that is the key verse for our day. It's a valid scripture, but you see it's comparatively easy to use it because it throws the responsibility on the pew. If my people are called by my name, I don't believe the key to revival is in the pew, I believe the key to revival is in the pulpit.

There's an old saying that a river will never rise higher than its source. A few years ago before he became the... a few years ago before he retired, Dr. Carl F. Henry, the founder and editor of Christianity Today, sent out a questionnaire to what he called 20 of the leading intellectual preachers in the country.

There must be more than 20 because I didn't get them anyhow, and the question that he sent out was this. What do you see for the church of Jesus Christ by the year 2000? I remember only one of the replies.

It was given by Elton Trueblood, the Quaker philosopher, and Elton Trueblood said this amazing thing. By the year 2000, the church will be a conscious minority surrounded by an arrogant militant paganism.

I followed that hook line and thinker and woke up with mental and I think spiritual indigestion about two o 'clock in the morning. The world, by the year 2000, the church will be kind of crunched in which will be a conscious minority surrounded by an arrogant militant paganism.

And then I began to realize, well you better back up a bit. I think we need to remind ourselves that Christianity was not served up to the world on a silver platter. Christianity was born in a sophisticated totalitarian society.

We used to live in the city of Bath in England. It was founded in 55 BC, 55 years before Christ, and when Christianity was born, it was born in a slave system that dominated almost the whole world. I use the figure sometimes again of when we stood on the southern lip of the Grand Canyon, and there read the legend, which I'm sure you've read.

It's fixed on one of the rocks that this is Grand Canyon, and it gives some statistics about it. The yellow ribbon in the distance is the Colorado River. It's seven miles away, it's about 350 feet wide, it's about 45 feet deep, and so forth.

And if you look down and you see the ground level of the canyon, the walls on either side are a mile high. I don't know why, except it seemed the Lord said to me, well how would a child get out of that situation?

A little child couldn't surely swim the Colorado River, a man couldn't do that either. How could it scale the walls on either side? They're almost perpendicular, and immediately they came to my mind. It was a picture of the early church.

The early church was walled in on one side with the mightiest military machine in history, the Roman power. It was walled in on this side with Greek intellectualism. It was blocked ahead by the Jewish monopoly, as they thought, of the gospel.

And you know, one of the things that really hurts today is the snobbishness even in Christianity. If you don't have a degree, I don't have any degrees. After all, you can have 32 and still be frozen. But those men who turned the world upside down had no colossal intellectual capacity, they had no great financial backing, they had no social standing.

They were about the most despised men in and around Jerusalem, and yet they broke out somehow. And later it was said that they turned the world upside down. I think at least once a week, sometimes I think of it once a day, where Dr. J .B. Phillips, that gave us the Phillips New Testament, one day turned around rather wearily in his office, and he picked up a book which happened to be the Acts of the Apostles, which happened to be in Greek, which he happens to understand very well.

And he read through to about the fifth chapter, and then he summarized it this way, this is the church of Jesus Christ before it became fat and out of breath by prosperity. This is the church of Jesus Christ before it became muscle-bound by over-organization.

This is the church of Jesus Christ where they didn't gather together a group of intellectuals to study psychosomatic medicine, they just healed the sick. This is the church of Jesus Christ where they did not say prayers, but they prayed in the Holy Ghost.

There's a vast difference. The tragedy in our colleges and seminaries right now, we turn men out because they know the Word of God. That's never going to move the world. The question is not whether they know the Word of God, the question is whether they know the God of the Word.

The Church Before Prosperity and Organization

And just to give a man a license to preach because he has some academic ability, and then he can say the little thing on the wall, you know, to say he got his degree because his grandmother put him through college, you know, and he likes to show this thing off.

To do that is like giving a blind man a driving license. If he doesn't know God, why is he in this business? I come to this conclusion recently about two things. We've got to make up our minds that this book is absolute or absolute salute.

If I ever got the answer for our generation, I'll forget it. And the other thing is that preaching is not a profession, it's a purpose. I remember going down the street, the High Holborn in London a few years ago, well it is a few, 25 I guess, and a little lady was going to the mailbox there of people like Charlie Chaplins, and she was very, very stooped, and she shakily put her letter into the mailbox, and then she turned to go into a building, and somebody said, you know who that is?

I said, not the slightest idea. That's the widow of Hugh Price Hughes, at one time the king of the, at least of the Methodist pulpit in England. His daughter gave us a huge biography of her father, and she said when he came back on a Sunday night from the service, preached morning and night, when he came back at night, if nobody had been saved, he was inconsolable.

You couldn't comfort him, he wouldn't eat, he wouldn't drink, he wouldn't even take his long coat off. He threw himself over his bed, and he sobbed, and he sobbed, and he sobbed, and said, why, why, why?

Isn't it staggering when you think that one sermon on the day of Pentecost produced three thousand people, and we had some cities yesterday where three thousand sermons were preached, and nobody was saved?

And it doesn't even faze us. The church used to be a lifeboat, now it's a cruise ship. We're not marching to Zion, we're sailing there with ease. In the apostolic church it says they were all amazed, and now in our churches everybody wants to be amused.

The church began in the upper room, despised, in the upper room with a bunch of men agonizing, and it's ending in the supper room with a bunch of women organizing. We mistake rattle for revival, and commotion for creation, and action for unction.

Humanism, War, and the Need for Divine Intervention

Look, I think in this critical hour in history, and it is the most critical hour in history, the Middle East is ready to blow up. The prestige of the nation has gone down, as we know in this nation we love.

From Watergate it's gone down, down, down, and we've never been as humiliated. And if you want to see the bankruptcy of humanism, all you have to do is ask why we poured billions of dollars into the United Nations, and what did they do?

We saw Cambodia raped, the most hideous example of genocide in the history of the world. And Nixon and Kissinger knew about it, they inaugurated the bombing, or they connived to it anyhow. You know, as many as three million people had to march out of one city.

They actually went in when surgeons were doing surgery, and they pulled the surgeons away, and they took the people off that were open, and they flushed them on the floor, and they marched people down the road till they were treading on each other's heels and taking their skin off.

There are not a million people left, we're told. If you get last year's issue, I think it was March issue of Reader's Digest, it has the most horrible article on the rape of a quiet country, I think it called it, the rape of a gentle country.

You talk about hideous things, you talk about unlimited wickedness, you talk about the brutality of man. Shakespeare said in those dreamy days when he lived that man's inhumanity to man makes countless millions more.

I jotted some notes the other day, I haven't memorized them yet, about the condition of the world, and this is given by men outside of the Church of Jesus Christ. Carl Jung says, and he's quoted by Paul Coffman, it is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, or microbes, or cancer, but man himself who is the threat, who is the greatest danger to mankind.

Anthony Storr says we are the cruelest, most ruthless species that have ever walked over the face of the earth. Paul Tonio says the dance of death and violence goes on round about us daily. Another man whose name I do not know says we live in a theater of the absurd.

I'm old enough to remember years prior to 1914. I remember the war broke out on August the 4th, 1914. My cousin had been to our house about a month before that, as straight as a ramrod, he had his red jacket with his lovely gold buttons, and I looked at him and I thought, my what a marvelous thing to be a soldier.

On the 4th of August, he went with millions of other men to fight. He came back a total physical wreck, but you see the slogan to World War I was this, this is the war to end wars. War is not only unchristian, it's uncivilized, and then after that we had from 1919 to 1939, we had 20 golden years of peace when the church had the greatest opportunity since Pentecost in my judgment, and all we did was try and get a kind of a peace situation between the liberals and what they used to call German rationalism, and find out how much of the bible we could concede.

Then came the second world war. Prior to World War I, we had a group of intellectuals in England called Fabian Socialists. The red-bearded man who gave us plays like Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, George Bernard Shaw was one of the super intellectuals.

The, I forget the names of all the others, but Bernard Shaw was one, one of the helpers was in the in the same group, but really the leader was a self-anointed and self-appointed prophet of a new world order.

His name was H .G. Wells, a cocky little man. Those men did not talk about redemption, they did not talk about sin, they were just rationalists, they were just humanists, pardon me. But way back in 1912, H .G. Wells said two years, two years before the 1914 war, H .G. Wells said it is possible for us to have a new race of people by intellectual and biological processes.

We don't need the bible, we don't need the church, we can pull down the hills of wealth, we can fill in the valleys of poverty. He didn't talk about sin and redemption and wickedness, he talked about the adequacy of materialism, he talked about the inevitability of progress, he talked about the sufficiency of man, and they were going to bring in a new millennium by their own genius.

And then a shadow came over the sky, we had the 1914 -18 war, and at the end of it H .G. Wells and the gang weren't so sure about things. 1939 came the second world war. Well H .G. Wells had written his crux ansata that got him into trouble with the Roman church, and then he had written his outline of history, but the last book he wrote in the middle of world war ii was not this rosy optimism that man has innate power to cleanse the human system and bring peace and civilization and order.

His last book was mined at the end of its tether, and he said there is no hope for humanity. But he did say one sensible thing, he said there's a little cavity somewhere in the human breast which can be filled by God and only by God.

We feel a little nervous these days of talking about human depravity. Well heaven knows there's never been as much depravity around as we have today. The things that were done in a corner 25 years ago now are big business.

People are not ashamed to be naked, you can go on the beach there on Fire Island New York, you can go to a beach in Southern California and see a thousand people on Sunday without a stitch on them. From little things like this to tottering old men.

They play volleyball, they play their games and start making this, and make good targets of course for the hundreds of cameras that are there. We live in a day again which parallels the iniquity that was on the earth when the prophet Elijah came on the scene.

The nation was in bondage to idolatry and impurity and infidelity and indifference. There was a Jewish scholar years ago by the name of Bucks Basin, you may remember him, he gave us a fine book on the prophet of Isaiah.

Prophetic Brokenness and True Revival

And it's my contention this morning brethren that this pulpit is no place for puppets in this day in which we live, it's prophets that we need. And Bucks Basin says that the prophet, by the very nature of his calling, is a tragic figure.

He has a fierce loyalty for God and he has a broken heart over a lost nation. Read about the prophet Isaiah that he stays, as we would say, in a shopping center. He lies naked there, he's an aristocrat, and yet he's consumed with love for God, but he isn't afraid to be fought a fool.

You read in Ezekiel's prophecy where, for what is it, 349 days he had to lay on his left side, he wasn't even about to turn on to his right side, because of the iniquity of the nation. We're going to have no broken-hearted people till we have broken-hearted preachers.

Let the priest weep between the altar and the doorposts. It's amazing when you think of it, you know, there's no way that you can organize revival. It doesn't need to be advertised, it can't be subsidized, it can't be nationalized, it can't be denominationalized, and it sure can't be rationalized.

Right now there's a breath of revival in one country, only one I know of, it could be other places, and that is over there in Nagaland in northeast India. It broke out in 1977. True revival changes the moral climate of the community.

Most of our revivals don't get under the door of the sanctuary. When a lady was arguing with a protestant lady arguing with a catholic lady about a piece of land that was being excavated, the lady said, well our denomination is building a new church there.

The catholic lady says, we don't want one. Why not? Because we just built a church up the road, and I don't want my children going to a church, a daily vacation, bible school, and getting tracts, and getting other stuff.

Oh no, the protestant lady said, now let's not argue about this, you know, we'd better join together and fight the communists. You know, that was the thing that the old square-headed Georgian, what was the dictator in Russia?

Stalin, Stalin, thank you, Stalin, sitting there at, was it Yalta? I think it was Yalta, and Stalin was there, and Mr. Roosevelt was sitting in the middle, and Winston Churchill was over there, and Stalin said, look you've got an enemy called Germany, and I've got an enemy called Germany, and America has an enemy called Germany, so we are friends fighting one enemy.

It was very clever, and it worked, though it was wrong. We have a problem, we've got to fight communism, so let's link up. There's no difference between your religion and mine, and the other lady said, I thought there was a big difference.

Why? She said, I go to church, and I confess my sins about every six days, and you don't do that in the protestant church, do you? And the lady said, no, no we don't. Have you ever seen a sign outside of one of our churches?

Revival. Yes, I've often wondered, what do you do? Well, she said, you see, you go and confess your sins every six days, and in our church, we save our sins up till we have a revival, and then we all go up to the front, and cry, and confess our sins, and we have a great time, and everybody's happy, and then we go back and start our sinning all over.

Isn't it about time we told the world that while there's a study of comparative religion, Christianity is not a comparative religion, it's a superlative religion? And we mix them up, and we try and tell people who are morally good, and very excellent, many of them, that Jesus Christ came into the world to make bad men good.

He did not. That's a fringe benefit. The first argument God has with a man is not that he's bad, it's that he's dead in trespasses and in sin. And Christianity is the only gospel in the world, only message in the world, where a man's God comes and lives inside of him.

The Mormons claim that last year they had more converts from evangelical churches than the evangelical churches had from Mormonism. They're something to make you think. Again, somebody said that Mormonism last year was the most rapidly growing religion in America.

Somebody said, forget it, that's not true. Mormonism is the rapidly growing thing. And oh, how the preachers are concerned about the White House. I wish that God were half as much concerned about God's house as we are about the White House.

The White House is never going to govern the country. The White House is... supposing we have a moral majority. Why, bless your life, Jesus could have had a great time with a moral majority who were more moral than the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

You see, we're always trying to help our poor, bankrupt Christianity out one way or another. So it doesn't work that way, let's work it this way. We've glamorized it. Sunday morning, you turn your TV on, you see people in gorgeous dresses.

You watch people going to church, and you've got to say, there's more passion than passion. Come on, where's the brooding of the Holy Ghost these days? When revival comes, you don't daringly say, Joe Smith is coming to preach Sunday night, and he finishes next Sunday night.

Where in the world did we get the idea the Holy Ghost only comes at 11 o 'clock Sunday morning, and you send him home at 12, and you want him back at 7 at night till 8, and we don't need him till Wednesday night?

That's not prestigious, that's truth. When revival comes, the lights don't go out in the sanctuary for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. I spent an afternoon in Wales in 1931 -32 with an old man who had been one of the right-hand men in the Salvation Army revival back in the 1880s.

The man was 80 years of age. He told me about the amazing things that happened in their revivals. The men that would sit on the back seats, the scum almost of the earth, and they'd come in just to get warm, and they'd have a hymn book in their hands, and they'd get so worried when the old preacher of William Booth, particularly, was preaching his Hellfire Messages, that they'd shred their hymn books, leave a hymn book shredded, and Begbie, in his, I think, definitive work of William Booth in the first volume, I think it is in the first volume about the first chapter, talks about the holiness meeting, and he said when the Holy Ghost came down and men resisted the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God would lift people from the back of the sanctuary and carry them over the ordinance and drop them at the altar.

And we think we've seen everything because two or three people get healed. Again, you cannot standardize revival. I'm not thinking of a church revival, I'm thinking of a national revival. There's only one hope for America, not one or two, there's one hope for America, and that is that we have a divine intervention in the nation.

Forget your denomination, forget your empty seat. Let's see, first of all, how much God grieves over the sin of the people. After all, when you look in the Old Testament, God's argument was not with the Amalekites and Hittites and all the other acts.

God's problem in the Old Testament was Israel. God's problem in the world today is not Communism, Mormonism, Moonism, or any other ism. God's problem is his church in the today. Less so worldly. I live in an area which is quite unusual.

I suppose if you if you leap straight behind me across the fence there, David Wilkerson lives about a mile away, and up to our left, the Agape Force, and down to the right, David Keith Green. And now the second chapter of Acts have bought 100 acres there, and now Jimmy Owen has bought 10 acres just up the road, and we have the Agape Force there, and we have Youth with a Mission here, and just a bit further over the road there, we have Calvary Commission, and Barry McGuire lives there, and Dallas Holm lives there, and Keith Green, one of the top musicians.

Boy, we've got such a proliferation. They're calling it the New Jerusalem, which I'm sure it isn't. You know, I tease those fellows some days. I say, you know, you guys, I have to sweat, and fast, and pray, and weep before I go to a so-called revival, and you guys can walk out with a smile, and say a few things, and whang your guitar, and in two nights you can get more money than I get in a year.

Now, that doesn't make me envious, but you know, I see the 4 ,000 people on a Saturday night to pay five dollars, plus all the expense of traveling, plus the fact they have to eat before they go home, and eat before they come, and you can get thousands of people, and clap, and applaud, and have a great time.

The Cost of Prayer and the Example of Nagaland

When I read of a young man that could walk out in the snow, and the snow up to his chin sometimes, wrestling in prayer from sunrise till sunset with a tubercular body, that when he sneezed he sprayed the snow with blood, that when he coughed he spit up what looked like the leaf, a peckle from a rose, and if you've got it you could stretch it like that, it was a piece of his lungs, that a young man could die at 28 years of age, like Robert Murray McShane died in Scotland at 29 years of age.

When I heard about a man who wrestled in prayer like that, I was dumbfounded, and since the church I went to was pretty sleepy, and I was only about 17, I went out into Sherwood Forest. I lived on the edge of it, and I started praying by myself at night.

We have some bracken there, it doesn't go out this way like a fountain, it starts and it comes out like a bowl, and it grows seven or eight feet high, and I used to creep in it, and weep, and groan, and pray for revival.

I used to stand on the hill outside the city as Jesus did over Jerusalem, and three years after I started praying, revival came to that city, because I was just one of a number. But a man called George Jeffreys came.

George Jeffreys came, there's a book about him called the Ministry of the Miraculous. He was very humble. No, no, no, he never stopped to make, you never heard money mentioned. He just came there, they sang about one chorus, he'd minister, and the authority of God was on him, and again the acts of the apostles were repeated.

I don't think that's the only answer, in fact I think we could bypass that. In the last 30 years, America has had more great healing crusades than all the nations of the world put together, and look where we are.

What we need now is a revival of holiness, a revival of character, a revival of people who are utterly selfless, and prepared to lay their lives on the altar for God. Again going back to that thing up there which Keith Green said to me the other day, why don't you go, I'll pay you fair, let's go see what's happening in Nagaland.

Well one thing, we have a language barrier, but Paul Kaufman, who I consider one of the leading missionary statesmen in the world, he lives in Hong Kong, went to see what happened, and expected something like Phinney, and when he got there, there were signs and wonders and miracles.

Cripples were healed, blind people were seen, every distorted perverted thing was put right. So what? Hey, did you ever hear of a revival like this? The government has made an inquiry. Why has the drink traffic gone down?

Why is it the kids are behaving in the streets? Why are we not having a problem with drugs? There's a pretty hefty problem around here with it, I guess. Do you know a city in the nation that hasn't? Miami now, England, the other day said Miami is the murder capital of the world, and some people say no, no, no, no, that's up there in Atlanta.

Well how does this eruption suddenly come? Why is the nation convulsed? Why is the government asking? We were the most rebellious, lawless state in India, and now we're the calmest. The crime has gone.

People are civilized, and gentle, and loving. Well it's the same old story. They discovered a group of people, underground people, who've been praying 20 years for revival. I live 50 miles from a young man, 32 years of age, who prays 10 hours a day in busy America.

A man outside of Waco is 60 years of age, he prays five hours a day. No man, I don't care how colossal your intellect, no man is greater than his prayer life. To stand before men on behalf of God is one thing.

To stand before God on behalf of men is something entirely different. We've urged people to to tie, haven't we? But we only mean their money. You see, we want a revival, a painless Pentecost. We want something that won't disturb our status quo.

It's easy street everywhere else, so why not here? There never has been a revival at Eichentrace that hasn't been bedded back there with true, true, true intercession in the city of Leeds, where I lived in England.

I say the revival came through George Jefferson, it did. But it came because there was a little man there, he was unlettered. You know that shouldn't worry us too much, that the world, what does the world know about spiritual values anyhow?

That's how there's lots of denominations have fallen for it. You can't have a minister unless he has so many degrees. This little man had no degrees, but boy did he have a burning heart, and he labored, and he had three breakdowns, not mentally, physically.

Do you know why? Because he fasted so much, but he had authority. Paul says in Ephesians 6 19, pray for me that utterance may be given me. In other words, he means let the word be threaded with that mysterious thing that you can't define, and nobody can give.

The thing that we call the anointing of God. If money could buy it, my some of you would sell your house to get it, but you can't get it with money, and you can't get it by, you know, extracurricular stuff at the university.

No sirree, I've been praying for a long while in my secret heart that in this last day, when wickedness is so arrogant, the church is going to end up as a conscious minority surrounded by an arrogant militant paganism.

That's how it was born. That's how it is today. That's how it will be until God pours out his spirit with one final movement of compassion. Until again, you don't have to show Christian films. Oh boy, we've tried to make the gospel roll along, haven't we?

Christian films give our children hayrides and sleigh rides. We have some girls and folk not far from us with Keith Green's group who used to be in the Mooneyites. Man alive, you'd think West Point's tough.

West Point's a nursery compared to the way those guys had to live. The food they got, the discipline in their lives, the hours they have to ponder over the wood, the time they have to be up in the morning.

That's about the last aspect that we present to people, isn't it? We're so keen to get them all saved, and you're going to heaven, and we forget to tell them you're a soldier of Jesus Christ if you're really born again, and you have no rights.

Now we're trying to marry Christianity to prosperity and popularity and personalities, and it isn't working. Oh, you can preach the prosperity doctrine because that feeds our carnality. Everybody wants, look, why don't those men who preach that go to the third world and preach it where they need it?

I know wealthy people, I know many millionaires, I know lovely people, and I believe God lets them have a ministry in supplying needs. But the church of Christ, when the church is prosperous, she never has revival.

It's when she's poor. Prayer is the language of the poor. Bow down thine ear and hear me, for I am poor and needy. The self-satisfied don't need to pray. The self-sufficient don't want to pray. The self-righteous cannot pray.

But the man who realizes, I need something outside of anything that's human at all, he wants to bathe his soul in prayer. I went to a little Bible school in England, there were only 35 students, but my, I'm glad that the man who was the principal was a man of prayer.

He wrote a book, Samuel Chadwick's book, The Path of Prayer. It's reissued right now. And then after that, he wrote a book that seemed logically to follow, The Way to Pentecost. The weakest, weakest meeting in almost any church without exception is the prayer meeting.

And when we're not strong in prayer, we're saying to God, we can manage. Of course, we shall pray if we have an invasion. We shall pray if we have a famine. We have a great utility, God. Very often we say to young people, now look, very often we say to young people, now look, now you've got saved.

Read your Bible and maintain your prayer. You need to maintain your prayer life to pray. No, not so, not so. You need to maintain your Christian life in order to pray. The greatest expositor in the world living today told me personally, he said, I don't have any trouble.

I delight to expound the word. My books, he's written many, many books, but he said, I've always found prayer so tough. I, I just, just found, find prayer the most difficult thing in the world. Read the Acts of the Apostles, and all you read about is prayer, prayer, prayer, prayer, prayer.

When they had prayed, the place was shaken. If you want to read the prayer life of Jesus, you would read the gospel according to Luke, because in every instance he gives Jesus as a praying man. While the other evangelists say that Jesus was baptized in Jordan, Luke says it was as he was praying he was baptized, whereas he was baptized, he was praying.

And the others say, of course, Jesus was crucified, but Luke says it was, it was while he was, while he was crucified, even he was praying. The evangelists say he was on the Mount of Transfiguration. Yes, but Luke said it was while he was praying he was transfigured.

Prayer, Holiness, and the Presence of God

I guess there's not a preacher here that doesn't get discouraged sometimes. If not, you must be a very wonderful guy. You think, well, are they listening? Do they hear? You know, I'm convinced of this, that 95 percent, at least, of the people that came to this sanctuary, any other sanctuary in America yesterday, did not come here to meet God.

They came to hear a sermon about him. When did you last picture out of the sanctuary, and you dared not say a word? I remember a series of meetings we had in Wales in 1949, and after three days a lady, Mrs. Lewis, said, Brother Ray, no, this is the nearest thing to the Welsh revival that we've had.