Audio Sermon: Elijah, He Prayed — Leonard Ravenhill

Most preachers seem to have an incurable habit of buying books, and I have suffered from this habit a long while, I think. People come to my home and say sometimes, you have a lot of books. I have maybe two thousand, but I don't think I have many.

I know preachers who have five. I know a preacher who has twenty-five thousand. That means you invest a lot of money. There are many great lives of outstanding men that are written in two volumes. Begbie wrote the life of the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, in two very interesting volumes.

There are two very large volumes on the life of Mrs. Booth, the wife of the founder of the Salvation Army. There are two very fine volumes on the life of Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, and the first volume is called The Growth of a Soul.

It explains God's dealings with Hudson Taylor himself, and the second volume is The Growth of the Work, which shows the expansion of the work of the China Inland Mission in China. I don't think it's very difficult if you can manipulate words.

When I've been preaching the other week, a fine-looking man came to me. He said, you preachers have a way with words. Well, you need to have a way with words if you're going to write and get truth through.

I don't think it's difficult to write if you have enough information to put a life in two volumes. But I suggest to you that only God himself could put the life story of a man in two words, particularly a man who is identified with supernatural work, a man who can strangle the economy of a nation, a man who can change the atmosphere, a man that can subdue kingdoms and raise the dead.

Elijah’s Life Summed Up in “He Prayed”

And yet God has put his name, put his history in two simple words. He prayed. That's really the epitaph of this amazing man that we call a prophet, Elijah. Now, prophets come in all shapes and sizes, like most people.

We have major prophets in the Old Testament, minor prophets. And this man Elijah is one of the most outstanding men in history. And I'm quite sure in a day when we're very generous with adjectives and flamboyant and we like to pay tribute in lots of words, that we would never reduce the phenomenal life span and life work of a man of this character in two simple words he prayed.

And yet God does. He was a very normal man. The Bible says he was a man of like passions as we are. To prove how natural he was, he stood up to 800 men and ran away from one woman. That's some ratio, isn't it?

He could face 800 men but not one woman. That's pretty sensible. But this man Elijah came onto the stage of Israel. Do you remember when he came, how he came? Oh, you remember how he went? He went up in a whirlwind and then he went up in a chariot of fire.

Everybody that goes to Sunday school knows that. But where did he come from? Nobody knows. We don't know his father, his mother. We don't know his history. We don't know where he came from. It doesn't matter where we came from.

It doesn't matter where we're going. But it matters what we do while we're here. He was a man of like passions, the word of God says, as we are. And he prayed. I was arrested in reading the New Testament recently to discover what you may have discovered a long while ago, that the disciples never asked Jesus to teach them to preach.

They never said, Lord, we're fascinated. You stun us with your miracles. Show us how to manipulate and produce the miraculous. I think I was more stunned when I realized that there is no record in the New Testament that Jesus ever prayed with his disciples.

You ever realize that? In the last critical hours of his life, he said to the disciples, you stay here and I'll go pray yonder. I think the outstanding privilege I've had in my Christian life, apart from my relationship with the Lord, was the privilege of going into Dr. Tozer's study at any hour that I was passing through Chicago.

I took that opportunity many times. I wish I'd done it more often. He died fairly young. And I can remember time after time, as we met together, he talked about prayer and intercession and traveling. Talked about men that he knew and said that very scarcely do you find a man who really is an intercessor.

Elijah was an intercessor. He came onto the stage in the most critical hour of the history of this great nation of Israel. Without wearying you, I remind you that it was 58 years after the dividing of the kingdom.

Elijah and the Crisis of Israel

There had been a succession of seven kings. And the second king did more evil than the first. The third did more evil than the second. The fifth did more evil than the fourth. The sixth did more evil.

And finally, Ahab did not exceed the iniquity of the king before him. He exceeded the aggregate iniquity of all the kings before him. And in the language of the Bible, the enemy had come in like a flood.

You can find a summary of the events at the end, not now, but when you go home at the end of the 16th chapter in the first book of Kings. The whole nation was flooded with impurity and idolatry and iniquity and incest and evil.

And when the enemy had come in like a flood, the preachers ran helter-skelter there into the caves. They hid away. I was going to say, and I digress a little there concerning the prayer of Jesus. I'll go back to this other in a minute.

But when I went to Dr. Church the first time, I said to one of his deacons, an outstanding artist in America, one of the greatest commercial artists, Mr. Chase, I'm looking forward to prayer meetings to pray with Dr. Tozer.

He said, well, Tozer never comes to a prayer meeting. I said, why not? Well, he did come for a number of years. He would give a dissertation on prayer. And then he would say, now for the next 15 minutes you can pray.

Anybody pray. Nobody prayed. They all waited until Dr. Tozer prayed. Nobody dare pray until he prayed. And after he prayed, nobody dare pray because he prayed. He had a language, he had an intimacy, he had a relationship with God that made everybody else feel how withered and helpless they were.

Now I've listened to some pulpit auditors in my day, some of the greatest. I've been preaching myself more than 50 years. I'm getting old and wrinkled. And I've heard in a forum in England, some of the greatest preachers that have preached in the last half century.

And some of them are very dazzling, very fascinating. They were masters. They had elastic vocabularies. They could stretch their words. They could paint pictures. They could make something round up and down your spine.

They could chill you. They could give you a fever because they knew how to put words together. But I've met very few men that disturbed me when they prayed. Nobody wanted to pray after Dr. Tozer. He had a language, he had a, he had, shall we say, a disposition in prayer.

This in my judgment is why Jesus says, you stay here while I go pray on. They would never have understood his grief, his anxiety, his sweat. He sweat as it were great drops of blood. They didn't understand this.

They were used to saying their little paternosters, their little prayers. Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. But beyond this, they didn't know much about intercession at all. All right, let's go back to Elijah.

Elijah has come on the stage. The enemy has come in like a flood. He could have said, then I, even I only am left. Instead of that, we discover that he faces up to the issue. He was a very lonely man.

I get a bit nervous when I hear somebody's a popular preacher. There's something wrong with him. Jesus never was, Paul wasn't. The man who's a popular preacher is missing the beat somewhere. Well, you can have it your way and say there are popular preachers, all right.

But I'll tell you one thing, you never find a popular prophet. And I believe the hour is so late in America and England right now. In fact, on God's clock, I think it's a few seconds to midnight. And not because of them, but in spite of them.

In spite of million dollar, multi-million dollar crusades for a month or so now that we have. I can remember when certain men were terrified that they spent a quarter million on a crusade. They can spend a million and a quarter now and it doesn't faze them that much.

Now, not because of these men, but in spite of these men. America is worse off tonight than it was 25 years ago. Morally, economically, spiritually, I don't care which way you take its temperature. Prophets are men that God produces.

They don't roll off the assembly lines of Bible schools. They're made in God's university and that's the university of silence. Elijah can do like everybody else. He can quit, he can run away. But reformers, prophets, a Savnerola, a Wesley, faces up to the awesomeness of the day in which he lives.

And he says either my nation goes to hell or that God there is asleep or somehow he can't get through to this generation. I'll find the reason why. I can hear Dr. Tozer saying again one day, he said, Lane, I'll tell you one thing, I can't visualize a prophet in a gray flannel suit and a college tie.

They were pretty rugged men and pretty ragged men. Prophets are God's emergency men for crisis hours. And I think it's reasonable to suggest tonight that you as a fine group of people to come out Monday night or summer night, you could be swimming or boating or something, must have a little concern at least and realize it's a grave hour in which we're living.

What's this man going to do? Join the gang? Get a job? Settle down? Or is he going to lift up his voice like a trumpet? Is he going to face hell or high water as the poet says? Is he going to take everything that comes?

What's he going to do about it? Well again you see, Elijah is not a college boy. He's not a seminarian. Elijah is a God-made man. Elijah is so big and I remind you again, he raised the dead, he strangled the economy of a nation, he changed the weather, he did a thousand things.

And yet despite his majestic faith, Elijah is not found in Hebrews 11. If I'd written Hebrews 11, I'd hardly put anybody in it. They're a dirty bunch anyhow. I used to stand back and say, Abraham, Moses, these majestic characters.

Then one day I sat down and just thought it out a bit. Abraham, oh he was the father of the faithful. He stepped out in faith. He stepped out in disobedience. Read the second verse of Isaiah 50. I called Abraham alone.

Did he go alone? No. He leaned on the young man and he leaned on the old man. And he got stuck with the old man for 15 years and then after he died, he got stuck with the young man a bit later on. What about David?

He's in the chapter. David was an adulterer. What about Noah? He got drunk. What about Jephthah? He made foolish vows. What about Samson? We'll talk about him tomorrow night. He had his problems. Do you think if I wanted to illustrate faith, I'd take a harlot, write Rahab.

I'd put some people in that chapter of faith that aren't there. I would put a man that commanded the sun to stand still on Gibeon and the moon in the valley of Adullam because he hadn't got enough time to finish a job he was doing.

And so he changed the day, stretched it a few hours. But he isn't mentioned in Hebrews 11. And Elijah isn't mentioned in Hebrews 11. Here is a man who is a giant amongst giants. And again when the enemy had come in like a flood, he doesn't back off nervously.

He had discovered what we need to rediscover, that one man with God is a majority. Now if you don't have God on your side, get some millionaires, get a committee, get everything you can get. You'll need them.

But if you're linked up to an omnipotent God which the prophets were, you don't necessarily need these others. Elijah is a phenomenal man. Oh somebody usually comes up and says, well I enjoyed your little talk.

Boy that's bad when you sweat over a sermon and they call it the little talk. But somebody says I enjoyed your little talk on Elijah but you failed to mention Elisha. Well I don't have to talk about Elisha.

I don't remember that God, the mighty God, the everlasting father, the God who sustains all things by the word of his power and hangs the world on nothing. And remember he's still saying to us, thy throne oh God is forever and ever.

Maybe I mentioned yesterday, if I didn't let me mention tonight that in reading Hebrews I'm staggered to find that God has not a single word to say to lost men and women in Hebrews. You can preach on Hebrews 2 chapter 3 which preachers evangelists often do, how shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation.

But that is addressed to believers and not to sinners. There is not a word in Hebrews addressed to sinners. And there isn't an epistle in the New Testament addressed to sinners. God's problem in the Old Testament was not the Amalekites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites and any otherites you have.

God's problem in the Old Testament was Israel. God's problem tonight is not communism or Romanism and the otherism. God's problem has been, it is and it always will be, his church. As the hymn writer says, with his own blood he bought her and for her life he died.

And Elijah, this fantastic man. When John the Baptist came, you remember that they said, well this, this, this, this must be Elijah. When Jesus died on the cross they said he calls for Elijah. On the Mount of Transfiguration there was two people with Jesus, one was Moses and the other was, and in the end of the book of the Revelation there are two final men going to testify to this world and one of them is the same man, Elijah.

Prophetic Calling and the Cost of Ministry

If you were to go into a Jewish home at a festival season you would find, if they had six people around the table you would find seven chairs. You'd find the door open. If you went to shut the door they'd say leave it open and you say well, well, there are six of us eating the meal, why do you have an extra chair?

Because Elijah is going to come back. He's one of the most phenomenal men in history. He had to be. You don't have scales digging up a theological knowledge great enough for anything else that you can measure a man of the caliber of this amazing man Elijah.

He's got nobody to lean on. Prophets never have, they're lonely men. If you aspire to be a prophet you better get ready brother to sell out to everything else because it's going to be a lonely path. You can be a jolly good boy, a jolly good pastor, a nice guy and all the rest of it.

A young man told me last night after the meeting he disobeyed God a few years ago. He wouldn't answer the call to preach but he's answering it now and he told me his age. Well, I said you're all right.

After all, is it Deuteronomy 4 that says you can't be a preacher until a priest until you're 30 years of age? You could be a Levite. You could be a soldier when you're 25. You don't need brains to kill anybody.

I mean you could be a soldier when you're 20. A soldier when you're 20. A Levite who served in the outer court, ran around after everybody. But the man who was going to minister with God could not minister till he was 30 years of age.

How old was Jesus when he began to minister? 30. How old was John the Baptist when he began to preach? 30. How old was Joseph when he began to minister? 30. How old was Joshua? 30. Doesn't mean you have all the brains in the world when you're 30 but this was a restriction that God put down.

Now I do not care. I have never found, you can disagree and I don't care if the pulpit committee is here or not. If you are, bless you. And if you aren't, same thing. But I'm going to tell you this, that you very seldom find a good pastor who is a good preacher.

And a good preacher is usually not a good pastor. Nobody drew the people in Chicago like Dr. Tozer. But I stayed in a home of a lady who taught in his church for 25 years and she said in 25 years he was only in my home about five times in 25 years.

I used to tell my people that when they were healthy they should be in church and if they were sick, it isn't my job to visit you. That's the job of the elders, read the sixth chapter of Acts. Their job to minister to the sick.

It's their job to care for the dying. It's their job to dispense the money that the church gives to the poor, not the pastors. One of the greatest preachers of all time in England, the king of the pulpit in the north of England, was Dr. Alexander McCarran.

I've been in his great, fantastic church. He packed it to the rafters every Sunday morning and evening. And after they had said they would give him a lovely manse, and in those days a carriage and a horse or horses, give him one of the outstanding salaries in the country.

And they thought they'd just got him tied down. He looked at the elders, in those days they were all rather gray bearded men, round the table and he said, gentlemen, I want to ask you just one thing. I believe I'll take this pastor.

Do you want my head or my feet? You can have one or the other, but not both. Well, they had an idea he didn't have any brains in his feet, I suppose. So they said, well, we'd rather have your head. He said, all right, you can have my head, but I won't run around after the church.

We don't build churches usually on great preaching anymore. Some, not many, but I'm quite sure of this, wherever you spread the table, people are so hungry in these days, they come a hundred miles to a Sunday morning service.

We were in a meeting, my dear wife and I, not very long ago, and a man came up after the meeting and he said, well, thank you, I have to get off, I can't stay as these other people, I must go. I said, all right, have a good trip.

He said, yes, he said, I drove 300 miles to hear you tonight, and it's 10 o 'clock, I have 300 miles to drive back, but I'll be back tomorrow. I'll be back the next night. I'm not saying you have to drive 300 miles to hear me, but you see, if people are hungry, and God is there, and the food is there, they'll come.

And I pray, I've been praying. I've prayed many weeks about this church. In fact, I think I've prayed months for it. I've preached with a number of times with Adrian Rogers, and heard the church was vacant.

Decided I didn't want it, but I prayed for the church, and I'm praying God will send you the right man, an ambassador, preacher of the word. Elijah comes on the stage when everybody else has quit. The enemy has come in like a flood.

Elijah Confronts Baal and Calls for Judgment

I don't know how it happened, but I like to think that maybe they were in the garden cutting flowers, and suddenly this little rugged, ragged man comes up, and he says to this wicked Jezebel, who just got the nation in her fingers.

She chased the preachers, and then like putting the lights out one by one, she got the nation into darkness, and under cover of darkness, there was an invasion of priests, and they built groves to ashtaroth and to Baal, and every day the stinking incense went up to God.

Well, that troubled Elijah. It doesn't trouble us. You can go down the street and see a Jehovah Witness church, or in these days of sick ecumenism, and some rather sick charismatic stuff too. You sit down with priests and others who rebel against God, and I expect you to kiss them one night when you go to a meeting, and tomorrow night they'll be contradicting all the Bible says.

Elijah didn't do this. Elijah stood up against the enemy. Paul went down the main road in Athens, the intellectual capital of the world, in his den, as he looked at this temple and that, he says he, the sleepy Elizabethan English says he was stirred that the Greek actually says, and here for once I agree with the Amplified, he was angry.

That doesn't make us angry. You go to Washington, most likely you'll go see a 30 million dollar church the Catholics have raised, and say, isn't it beautiful? Oh, isn't it lovely? As far as I'm concerned, it stinks like a manure heaping God's nostril.

It's an abomination. Our trouble is, we get angry about things. Your little child upsets you, you get angry and shout your head off, and things that ought to disturb us do not disturb us anymore. They were offering us sacrifices to Baal and Ashtoreth, and every day God was smelling this incense and nonsense, and he was angry, and so was the man of God.

And he went up to this man, to the king, and he says, listen I want to tell you something. I'm going to tell you this, that God is angry with this nation. He's going to send judgment to this nation. Well, I don't know what the man thought, but, pardon me, I don't know what the woman thought, but I know what the king thought, because he knew that what power these prophets had.

And Elijah said, I'll tell you how angry God is, and he reached, as it were, in his pocket, and he said, look, I'll shut up, I'll shut up heaven. There's going to be no rain according to my word, not God's word, my word.

And he shut up heaven like that. That's why it says in the next verse, after it says he prayed, it says he prayed again, otherwise we might not have had rain till now. There shall be no rain according to my word.

If I were to say to you tonight, do you really seriously think that number one need, number one priority here in America tonight is real Holy Ghost revival, not this false stuff that's going around now, not this which is the imitation of that which is really to come.

Because when God comes, he isn't going to just touch a few charismatic people, when God comes, he'll shake this nation from centre to conference like a terrier shakes a rat. And he'll shake England too, because we're the modern Sodom and Gomorrahs.

As I reminded you last night, I intend to put my books out there. I never want to commercialise, anyhow, the money goes to missions. I don't even, I haven't made enough money in the last few years even to publish them, never mind make a profit.

What we have had has gone to our boys or others on the field. But in my new book that Sodom had no Bible, as I reminded you last night, that Sodom had no Bible, it had no church, it had no prophet, it had no priest, it had no prime minister, but it perished.

How long do you think God's going to put up with our iniquity, our sin in England and America? We've had the greatest revivals in history. We produced the greatest teachers of the word of God in history.

We've launched the greatest revivals in history. There's never been a revival that superseded the Methodist revival. John Wesley's heart was strangely warmed at a quarter to nine on the 24th of May, 1738.

And immediately God brought to life calling the heart of that man, he changed the character of the world. I reminded you last night that Wesley preached 600 sermons in a row, and only six of them inside of churches.

We raise our hat to him now, they raise their boot to him in the day he lived. He finds a place in history as one of the greatest of theologians and hymn writers. He established schools and colleges. Through the Methodist revival there was a purging, cleansing flame went throughout the world.

You could say the same about Phinney in your revivals here in America. I don't think America ever has had a preacher like Phinney. I sometimes said to preachers, they don't like me for it, but I never set out to be liked.

The Lord never told me I had to be liked. But I told the preachers sometimes that I think evangelists are about the most stupid people in the world. They want to break up the fallow ground and sow the seed and water it and reap a harvest in 20 minutes.

Nobody else expects to do that but a preacher. Do you know that Mr. Phinney preached 28 nights in a row and never made an altar call? He didn't preach God's love, he preached the wrath of God. He didn't say you're a nice little person, God loves you, but he hates your sin.

He says God is angry with the wicked every day. He didn't preach love, he preached judgment. He didn't preach mercy, he preached judgment. He didn't preach God's love, he preached God's wrath. He didn't preach heaven, he preached hell.

He didn't preach grace, he preached law. Night after night he pummeled those people and they listened until they were in a state of almost mental exhaustion and finally the fire of God would break out.

Remember he went to a city like Rochester, New York and had a crusade there for about two months and left a hundred thousand people genuinely born again of the Spirit of God that changed the character of that city.

And as I reminded you yesterday, a true revival, I don't care how many people come to the altar, how much you give the evangelist, if it doesn't change the moral atmosphere of the community it's not revival, it may be evangelism.

Revival is the work of the Spirit of God in the church, evangelism is the work of the church in the world. Elijah said there's going to be no rain according to my word. I've said this many times, my dear wife will tell you that if God laid all the gifts of the Spirit out, and there are about seventeen not nine, all the gifts including ministry gifts of the apostle and the teacher and the evangelist and the prophet, if God said Ravenel you can have any one of these but only one, and he said you can have that ministry of prayer, there'll be nothing public about it, I'd choose that ministry.

Revival, Intercession, and the Power of Prayer

You see when we talk about prayer, we talk about a young man who really killed himself praying. David Brainerd died at the age of 28, prayed sometimes in kneeling in the snow, when the snow was up to his chin he said, and he could only reach it with the tips of his finger at the end of the day when he'd wrestled for 10 hours in prayer, and he had a tubercular disease, and when he sneezed he sprayed the snow with the blood that came off his lungs, and if you thought that was a petal from a rose and you took it and stretched it, it would stretch like that a piece of his lungs.

He literally prayed himself to death. Payson of Portland, the man who didn't have wall-to-wall carpeting in his bedroom, he had a hardwood floor like this, and after he died they found that floor had grooves in it, two grooves at the side of his bed, long grooves, and as they washed his body to bury him they discovered he'd big hooves on his knees, and somebody put one and one together and said this is where he used to pray, and he used to pray interceding this way until he wore the very grooves in the floor of his bedroom.

Oh I could give you a list of a lot of men in history, I have a lot of books on my shelves of men that that soaked themselves in prayer, men that used to spend days and nights and wrestling in prayer and tying up principalities and powers.

About four years ago my dear wife and I were in a place not too far from Chicago, and I hoped to escape, which I don't go to churches to where they ask me to preach, I hope to be quiet, sometimes it's difficult, and they said brother Rayden will give us a talk before he leaves this morning, so I shared something that the Lord had given me.

As I left the man said to me would you like to see brother so-and-so, and I said I sure would, I'll see if he's available. He said yes you can see him, and I said come on Martha, let's go. Oh I'd heard about this man, this is three years now, three years since we were there, five, four, five, a Scotsman, 83 years of age.

Well I've seen many a Scotsman 83 years of age, just about as wrinkled as a prune, and looking as though he was ready to go to the next world. I went into the room of this man, and he had a complexion most of you girls, even 16 year olds would envy.

He had a flawless skin, he had beautiful pink cheeks, bright blue eyes, smile, radiant. Oh come in, I've read some of your books, my they've been a blessing, I'm honoured to have you in my room. I said sir, you're not honoured to have me, I'm nobody, I'm honoured to come in your room.

What's unusual? He's living tonight, he's 88, he looks about 48. What's unusual about the little Scotsman? Well I think it's unusual, when we went into his room, my dear wife and I, and tonight of course it's five years after, so now that man hasn't been to bed one night in the last 28 years.

Isn't that amazing, you've got a man like that in America? They won't build an epitaph, they won't put an image to him at the side of George Washington, or Booker Washington, or anybody else. 88 years of age, and for the last 28 years, that man every night at 10 o 'clock goes into his room, and he gets alone with God, and he prays till five or six in the morning, whenever the burden lifts.

I'd like to write this story, he won't let me, I'd like to take his picture and publish it, but he doesn't want it, he says this is a business deal between God and myself, I'm not after rewards or honors.

That man knows God's voice, do you know why? He went to the mission field, when he went to the mission field, God said go back, go back where? Go back to America, I want you to intercede for America. Oh yes, he'd raise money to support him on the mission field, and people would say he didn't know his own mind, he didn't have to, he knew God's mind.

The news in Northern Ireland isn't very good, but if you went to Northern Ireland tomorrow morning in a town called Portadown, I preached in it many times, by five o 'clock as the grey skies are beginning to roll the clouds back, you'd see people lined up at the door of a little Irish woman, she's little thin fingers, and she isn't educated, and she doesn't know anything about theology, or philosophy, or psychology, or anything else.

She's just a little country woman. Every morning at five o 'clock she has a line, as we say in England, a queue, a line of people at her door, with their problems, and heartaches, and diseases, and sicknesses.

They don't go after the preachers round about, some very brilliant preachers in Northern Ireland, some of the finest preachers in the world. There's a Baptist preacher there that has a midweek Bible class of 400 people, and has had it, I guess, for 15 years.

There are great towering Gothic churches there, run by the Presbyterians, but people don't line up there, they go to a little woman, that knows how to pray. Elijah knew how to pray. If I were to say to you tonight, do you think that number one problem in America is that we should have revival?

I guess you would say yes. Do you mean you want revival at the price of standing in bread lines at four o 'clock in the morning? I've done that in Europe. Would you like revival at the price of gas not just going up to a dollar, but going till there is none, and you can't afford it anyhow, and the machines of industry stop, and the TV programs are just about vapor?

Would you like revival like that? Would I? Elijah prayed, and everybody knew when he prayed. He shut up heaven, and there was no rain. And if you shut up heaven, it means you've no crops, and you've no cattle.

Everything was done. You remember later, when he was going down the road, he said to a woman, make me a cake, and she said, why should I make a cake? Well, what are you going to do? I'm going to take a little handful of meal, and a little drop of oil, and put them together, and make a cake, and eat it, and die.

Like everybody else, he said, if I could get my hands on that money, Elijah, I'd strangle him. She didn't say that, but I guess she thought it. Shut up heaven, that there be no rain. Oh, Jezebel must have gone home blazing mad.

Why don't he do something about it? Isn't it really a marvelous credit to this man Elijah that had no money, and had no governments behind him, and had no banks behind him, and had no armies behind him, that they turned an army out to find a man who hadn't got a weapon on him?

I say, reverend, say, my God, I'd like to see God give you somebody in this church, whether he be the pastor, or deacon, or somebody else who could pray like that, until hell is afraid of him. Elijah prayed.

Jezebel got mad. The armies were searching for the man of God. His life is very simple. Read the story. What does it say in the next chapter? God said to him, go hide thyself. In the next chapter he says, go show thyself.

It's wrong to hide yourself when you should show yourself. It's wrong to show yourself when you should hide yourself. Come on Elijah, he says, you and I are in business together. You go down to a certain place.