Language of the Poor — Leonard Ravenhill

Prayer as the Simplest and Profoundest Speech

The motion of a hidden fire that trembles in the breast. Prayer is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try. Prayer a sublimest strain that reach the majesty on high. Prayer is so simple that a child can do it, and so profound that nobody can explain it.

And if you speak in the languages of tongues and of men, angels and men, and tongues and everything else, you still can't exhaust this tremendous theme of prayer. In the 18th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, 18 .1, you may remember it says there, that men ought always to pray.

Those were the words of Jesus. In 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, there are 17 exhortations, and one of them is that we ought to pray without ceasing. I'm sure you think sometimes we got that mixed up and thought it was we should preach without ceasing, but actually pray without ceasing.

There's a note saying that man proposes and God disposes. And I had figured that today we'd continue the theme we had yesterday, the Sermon on the Mount. And yesterday morning the Lord made it very clear to me that we should stay with this theme of prayer.

Prayer as the Language of Spiritual Poverty

Prayer is the language of the poor. People who are spiritually rich don't pray. I reminded you yesterday that the Sermon on the Mount begins with blessed of the poor. If it began with blessed of the pure, the challenge would be too great for us.

But it begins with blessed are the poor in spirit. And again, the poor pray. Prayer is a confession of poverty. If you don't pray, then all you're telling God, you can manage it without him. You're self-sufficient.

Well actually, the self-sufficient don't pray. The self-satisfied don't want to pray, and the self-righteous can't pray. Prayer is a confession of bankruptcy. Again and again and again, the psalmist says, Bow down thine ear and hear me, for I am poor and needy.

And of course the supreme example is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Because he was always praying. It says of the disciples that they went, as was their custom, they went to sleep at night. Jesus went into a mountain to pray.

I imagine that the major part of the life of the Lord Jesus was the, was the life of prayer. I don't know if there is a pattern in prayer. People often ask, how do you pray? I read a lot of books on prayer, they say.

You could read a lot of books on swimming, but never swim. You've got to get in the water and do it. You could read a book on physical culture. As I tell young people sometimes, my muscles are hard to find.

Because I've never done any work. Preachers don't work, we're the retired class. I mean we don't work with our arms, we don't chop trees down, we don't do manual labor. And therefore very often we are, we're not too well developed.

Unless you've been an athlete. And our spiritual muscles don't develop by sitting in a chair and reading books on prayer. You can have all the knowledge in the world if you want it. The science of prayer, psychology of prayer, and still not know how to pray.

There is a sense in which it's a trial and error method. Madame Guion, if you can find the book, Madame Guion the French mystic had a lovely book on the, on the, on prayer. I mentioned last night, P .T. Forsythe, who is really a preacher's preacher.

He has a very beautiful profound book on the soul of prayer. You won't read it a chapter at a time, you might read a line at a time, you might read nearly a sentence at a time. We had the other night, three nights ago I think, a book publisher was here for the night meeting.

Didn't ask if he could publish any of mine, but anyhow. He was here and he said, well we're getting a new series of books out. That's just for Christians you know. Not more than 60 pages. I said what you mean is we're done.

All the bestsellers in the last few years have had a thousand to two, to 120, pardon me, to 1 ,200 up to 1 ,500 pages. If you didn't read Leon, Exodus by Leon Neurath, you missed a very fine book I think, you should read it.

Read his Miller or Miler, 18. Show you what people do when they, you know, when they set their minds to do it. A couple of kids in the fall of Warsaw, I think it was, that crawled under a city, right through a city, in the sewers, up to their necks in filth.

And when they got out, the oldest boy was about 15 I think, the younger boy about 12. And the youngster said, where do we go? And he said, we're going to our own country. Where's that? Palestine. Where's that?

Oh it's a long way off, but we'll get there. And they made it. Because they made up their minds they get there. I'm not, I don't think, I don't think you'd crawl through a sewer to a prayer meeting. You can get people to prayer meetings with wall-to-wall carpeting, and plush seats so you'll go to sleep quicker, and all the other things.

The softer we make the church, the softer we make the Christians. And now you don't have to preach too long. A law that I do not obey as you know. Now we want sermonettes for Christianettes. But boys would walk through a sewer up to their necks in excretion, and stink, and almost dying.

Because they wanted to be free. And usually, you discover in this country that very, very often the most outstanding students are kids that come from a foreign country with a shirt and a pair of shorts, and hardly enough money to chew gum, well they haven't learned to do that marvellous thing when they get here usually, they learn it while they're here.

And hardly enough money to ride home, but they make the best grade. You see there's no side diversion. They come to do this one thing, that's the whole secret of Paul's life, it will be the secret of yours.

Paul said this one thing I do, he had no side issues. And the Christian life is just as demanding as that. Now some of you look young, I don't know if you are, it could be the Avon lady helped you, I don't know.

Teaching Children to Pray

But you look young, and maybe you've got some children parked down the street. Don't you wish you could park them every day. But anyhow, are you teaching the children to pray? You know in the Christian life, you put this in your mind if you don't write it in the back of your Bible.

In the Christian life, the good is the enemy of the best. Books are good, but they're bad if they keep you from the Bible. The fellowship of saints is good, it's bad if it keeps you from fellowship with the Father.

John says our fellowship is with the Father and is with the Son Jesus Christ. And we have fellowship one with another, but we prefer fellowship one with another, to make up the other gap. You see why prayer is so demanding is, you don't have to pray with anybody else.

Prayer is a lonely business. I was born into a very wealthy family. My mother was a saint and my father was a praying man, but with no money. Later my father went into service with people like the Duke of Argyll and Lord Tolmache, and the upper crust, upper echelon of British society.

And afterwards he said he always thanked God he was born poor. Because when he got up there, he saw how they wasted their lives. As I said the other day, God will forgive you, this thing won't. Some stupid person will tell you faith can do anything, it just can't.

If it could, I'd suggest we all stay here a week and fast and pray and raise up John Wesley from the dead. We could do with him. And then pray and get Luther raised from the dead. And then why not shoot for the stars, let's pray and get the devil saved.

It cleared the whole mess up. Faith can do anything, no it can't do anything. It can do anything God wants, not anything I want. God has set boundaries. But I thank God sincerely I was born in a poor home.

I thank God for a godly mother. I thank God for a praying father. Not until I was a teenager did I discover why my father wept every time he prayed. Even at family devotions he wept. The greatest favor he ever did was take me to a whole night of prayer when I was 14 years of age.

I never forgot it. And when I heard a few weeks after there was another night of prayer, I begged, I entreated him. Please let me go. Mother said, well you know we didn't get home last time until between 2 and 3 in the morning.

So what? I heard father say, go. And I went week after week after week. 10 o 'clock at night we prayed until 2 or 3 in the morning. What do you do? Take the kids in the backyard and teach them to catch with a mitt?

Play baseball? Sure they need a little fresh air, encouragement and so forth. But what spiritual influence are you having on your children right now? Martha and I used to go to a home of a doctor, a very brilliant doctor.

Specializes in open heart surgery, as I do. And his wife is a brilliant surgeon too and they have a clinic. They're very wealthy. And ever since we went the first time to that home I was impressed by the fact.

First the simplicity of the home, secondly the dining room table. He made it himself, it's about 6 feet long and about 4 and a half feet wide. And it's plywood and it's very poor looking. But right behind the table, right on the wall, he doesn't have a lovely mural.

He has just a sheet of plywood which he's dyed black and he has a blackboard. And the children had to learn a scripture every day. Imagine how many scriptures they knew at the end of the year. In case you can't count, 365.

The first thing at breakfast was, you know, if it was John 3 .16, John 3 .16. But mostly proverbs. And at breakfast they had a proverb. Children came home from school, what was the proverb this morning?

When they had supper at night, before you eat, what was the proverb today? After they finished, what was the proverb today? And then almost from being the height of a duck, as soon as almost they could talk.

He wrote up, began to write out the grammar, the alphabet of Greek. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, you know, he got it all going. And then he got words. And he began to teach them some Hebrew. Children's minds are amazingly plastic.

You can teach them so much. In this country, I think children don't go to school till they're what, six is it? My kids went to school when they were three and a half. That's why they're smart. Because naturally they inherited a lot of that.

But apart from that, they did go to school when they were three and a half. I understand in Tokyo they have a class every Saturday morning of 2 ,000 children, between two and three years of age, learning the violin.

Can you imagine that? It must be agony. Going into a room with 2 ,000 kids, pulling horses' tails over cats' guts. They said Fritz Kreisler could make an audience weep by doing that. They'd weep if I did it too, I'm sure of that.

But the fact is, you see, that children so young, their minds can absorb so much. Isn't it really an indictment on us that an American child at the age of 18 has watched 20 ,000 hours of TV? And a psychologist says it does not damage the eyesight.

All it does is damage the brain, you see. 20 ,000 hours. Now supposing you taught them 20 ,000 hours of meditation in God, the Word of God and prayer. Man, we'd be raising giants. You know what you say, oh get in your room, you've got your own TV for Christmas.

Get in there, shut up, see Channel 7. Become an idiot like the other idiots. Do you really discipline your children? Do you, you see again, that word disciple, we talk about being disciples. Well disciple comes from the word discipline.

Are you a disciple or just a follower? I can't help again, but think of Mark Spitz, when he went to the Olympics there in Mexico, six, seven years ago. Arrogant, cocky, you watch me get all the prizes.

Didn't get one. Came home bitter, disillusioned, mad. Not with anybody else except Mark Spitz. When somebody said so-and-so beat you in the best stroke, I beat myself. So-and-so beat you in the backstroke, I beat myself.

But you wait till I go to Munich. You said that Munich, you said that going to Mexico. You remember when he went to Munich, he gathered one gold medal, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Everybody's gasping.

The only reason he didn't get eight was there wasn't one. And he admitted that when he came back crushed, feeling such a colossal failure. He'd been written up in all the sports magazines. Watch this fine young man.

He's got such a marvelous body, maybe the most coordinated body in the sports world, except for old Muhammad Ali. And he went to Munich and he captured all the prizes. Made records that will never be beaten because he changed the laws after.

When they said, how did you do it? He said, from the day I failed, I was in the water eight hours a day, every day for four years. Never missed a day. Eight hours when I wasn't in the water, I was doing something else.

Coordinating, psyching myself. I understand the man that trains him can't swim a yard. Well, he must be pretty humble to take advice from a man that can't swim. Imagine a man walking on the bank saying, hey, you're not going far.

Shut up, you don't know a thing, you can't even swim. When a man said, you turn your hands at the wrong moment, you're not turning your head the right way, you're not getting all the power you can. He listened, he was corrective.

He disciplined himself. And Paul says that men do this in the arena, they do it. Paul liked the kind of gymnastics. You know, he says the Christian life is what? He says, I fought a good fight, finished my course, kept the faith.

It's a fight. Not with the deacons, the devil. You may have to fight the deacons too. But, I fought a good fight, he said. I finished my course, it's a race. I've kept the faith. It's a stewardship. And if you're going to embrace all that, the only way to do it is, as I would say, wrap it all up in prayer.

Prayer, Revival, and Spiritual Discipline

Now, why don't you go home and start all over again? You've been saying, Lord make me humble. Well, one way to start is go apologize to your children. That's pretty grim, isn't it? Take a five-year-old and sit him or her on a chair and say, you know, Daddy, Mummy hasn't been what we should have been.

We've been going the wrong way about it. Keep you quiet, we gave you a lollipop. Interest you, we told you to watch Captain Kangaroo. And start all over. Make up your mind that your children are going to be this, that and the other.

You talk about psychology. Some people put a thing under the pillow, don't they, and learn while they're asleep. I guess Christians must use a lot of those things. Very happy. 1865, there was a woman in this, not in this country, but anyhow.

One of the greatest women, I think, that has ever lived since apostolic days. She was Mrs. Booth, the wife of the founder of the Salvation Army. And she was a great woman of prayer. If you've been going down the street where she lived, you would have seen the royal coach go up.

And the footman would get up and hand a note, please give this to Mrs. Booth. It was from the Queen of England. The letter would say something like this, we have a government situation which is serious, will you kindly pray about it today?

And the carriage had hardly gone away when the Prime Minister's carriage went up. And a note was delivered from Gladstone of Israeli, please pray, there's a situation affecting the British Empire. They don't do that anymore, of course.

But not only did she have a worldwide prayer ministry, even though she had a bunch of youngsters round her skirt. But every night when the children were asleep, she'd go to the side of the bed and lay her hands on them and pray.

And when she finished praying, she would say, sleep on darling, the world is waiting for you. And every one of them grew up to be distinctive. Hymn writers, poets, painters, not one of them in any way was commonplace.

Now it wasn't the only time she prayed for them, for sure. She continually bore them up before God in prayer. The pattern, as I said the other day, prayer really is preoccupation with our needs. Praise is preoccupation with our blessings.

Worship is preoccupation with God. I can't tell you how to pray. I can give you a suggestion or two. And I think that the first part of praying should be praise. Get a good hymn book, memorize some hymns.

There's a good, good old Methodist book. If you can't find it, get a bad Baptist book. But if you could get the old, old Baptist book, which I'm sure you can't get a hundred years old, it was a fantastic book of praise.

Praise should precede all our petitions. And from praise, we move on to worship. Many of you were not here the other day when I mentioned the fact that Dr. Tozer, in all the things he taught me, and I taught with him for hours, I prayed with him many times, just the two of us.

But the most startling thing he ever said, I think, was one day when he showed me a piece of dog-ear drug that was, he said he costs 69 cents at Kresge. And he said, Len, some mornings I come in and I take the phone off the hook and I call my secretary and say, Margaret, I can't interview anybody today.

No interviews, no dictation, go home, come back tomorrow. And he pointed, he said, I get down on that drug on my belly at eight o 'clock in the morning. I'm still there at 12 or maybe one o 'clock. And I haven't said one word of prayer.

I haven't said one word of praise. All I've done is worship God. Does that sound strange to you? If I said he lived in 1864, you'd say, there used to be saints around in those days. Well, he died fairly recently.

Never went to school, never went to seminary. Just lived on a little farm on the hills of Pennsylvania, and after he got saved, began to dig deep into the word of God. As I said the other day, you can say all you like about the modern interpretation of the spirit-filled life.

It may be right, it may not be right. But I challenge you to find me an example anywhere like Spurgeon. Spurgeon was saved when he was 15. They built him a church when he was 19, which in case you don't know, happens to be four years afterwards.

And without Bible school or seminary and with not many books, in four years they built him an auditorium seating 5 ,000 people, and he packed it twice every Sunday for the rest of his life. I've heard people say, almost patronizingly, Isn't it a pity he didn't know about the gifts of the spirit?

He never spoke in time. He never had healing meetings. And yet there's a record that more people were healed through his praying than all the hospitals ever did in London. And I'm saying that to say this again, you see, he made use of all the available resources that he could find in God.

One thing that I find is really disturbing amongst other things these days is the poverty of prayer in the pulpit. It seems to me, now in England of course, European style is entirely different. You never have a song leader for instance in Europe.

You sing, you lead the songs yourself. You don't say, we're going to sing number 25, blessed assurance then, Jack you pray for us. The last thing Jack was, was bite his wife's head off when they got out of the car.

Oh well I'll see you after the meeting anyhow. Come in like saint and smile, hello, hello. Hi, how are you, how are you? His lips were slimy with anger or bitterness or something and you want him to become a saint instantly and, you know.

And he stands up with piety and comes out with the old, old stuff he's prayed so long drowsed us. Somebody asked Paul Rees once, Paul is a great preacher. Somebody said you prayed a marvelous prayer. Do you, how long does it take you to prepare a sermon?

He said 15 hours, 15 hours, five hours a day for three days. Some of you guys get one in 15 minutes. You know when the lady said the other week, you know, you know preacher, now it was fantastic. Spurgeon couldn't have done better than that.

Sure he couldn't, that's where you borrowed it from. Everybody's reading Spurgeon, they're reissuing Spurgeon's sermon. In a preacher's office the other day there were about 20 volumes, beautifully bound volumes.

Spurgeon, Spurgeon's tabernacle pulpit, Spurgeon's sword and trowel, Spurgeon's this, Spurgeon that. What's wrong with reading Spurgeon? Nothing, nothing, nothing. They see very often the, as a hymn writer says, so that earth's bliss may be our guide and not our chains.

Books are all right when they're helps, they're bad when they become crutches. Books are helpful to provoke us maybe, they're wrong when all you do is take them and you rehash it up and just serve it up again.

In fact I was in a place not too long ago, a man came to me, he said, I've got to make a confession brother Raymond. I said confess, go on, get ahead, what do you want to say? Oh I want to tell you, he said that, I have a broadcast in the town where I live, and he said for the past months I've read a, well you know we have a song and a few announcements and then he said I've been reading over the radio, I've been reading Y Revival Taris, just a small section of it.

You don't mind do you? I said no, no, you lay up treasure in heaven for me. He said what do you mean? I said you think God's going to reward you for preaching my sermons? You'll reward me. That's why if you see a supersized mansion in heaven that's where Spurgeon lives.

Everybody's been preaching his sermons. So God's going to reward him, he did all the work, all the sweat, all the labor. My mother used to send me shopping sometimes. When I came back she'd count the change very carefully.

I didn't say thank you dear. But one night I heard my mother saying to my father, Walter you know the Lord's been so good to you. You haven't been sick, we don't owe any money. There's this, there's that, the other, and she was really thanking him.

Now she didn't thank me like that. All I did was take the money he earned and go shopping and that was my little part of it, but she thanked him for it. Well I'll tell you this, that one of my favorite verses is the river of God is full of water.

It doesn't matter how much we've taken out of it, it's still boundless, it's inexhaustible. And this was one of the secrets again of Dr. Tolter that he just plunged there deeply again into the word of God.

One encouraging feature to me in these distressing days is that there are bunches of people getting together to pray. Before we left Baton Rouge a lady called me and she said Brother Ravenhill I remember you spoke at so and so and God got hold of my life and changed it around particularly in the area of prayer.

And she said now here in Baton Rouge we have a bunch of women that meet five mornings every week. There's only five or six of us. And we meet every morning and pray for revival in this city. And she said the results of our praying have been so amazing that we're almost getting nervous about praying.

God is answering so quickly. Well amongst other things we're going to be amazed when we get to heaven of how little we have appropriated of the resources that there are in God. Again I do trust that in your home particularly if you're a pastor that you'll be a model father and that you'll teach your children to pray.

Revival, Holiness, and Spiritual Influence

People are always deploring the days in which we live and say you know times have changed. No they haven't. Times don't change people. People change time. You know how to prove it? Go up to Pennsylvania to the Amish country and see if the Amish people have changed in 200 years.

They haven't changed the bit. They have no TVs. They have no automobiles. They have no electricity. They've almost no crime. Their girls don't get into trouble. Why? Because they live as they were trained to live 200 years ago.

For the first time in history in the last 10 years people have been going out of America the land of the free because they were persecuted. A whole bunch of Amish people went down to South America. Why?

Because they were going to make the children go to the day schools, the state schools. They said what? To pick up dirty language and dirty literature and drugs and all the other things? Well either you conform to the state or you go.

So they, I forget, I think it was 70 families pulled up. The word of God says be not conformed to this world. Now are you shaping the lives of those children? You know one of the great things about revival is that when revival comes it doesn't distinguish between the rich and the poor, the black and the white or the old and the young.

I was thinking this morning of a morning when in it was Wednesday morning if I remember right on the 13th of August 1727. A bunch of people were praying in a place called Hernhut in Germany. And just as the clock moved up to 11 o 'clock as soon as it moved like that just as the o 'clock was going to strike the Holy Ghost came down on the community.

Do you know what the result was? That that one room in which they prayed and this is a record as far as I know that one room in which they prayed at 11 o 'clock that morning was never empty for a hundred years.

Go two o 'clock in the morning they were praying go two o 'clock in the afternoon sometimes do it two or three. Sometimes you'll find eight or nine or ten little boys and girls praying with tears, travailing.

And for a hundred years that prayer meeting went on it never stopped, the lights never went out. The result was that fine athletic young men that God came upon kissed the girlfriends goodbye or kissed the wives goodbye.

And they came down to the place where they had a plane crash the other day, St. Thomas. And some of those areas in the Virgin Islands and you'd see the colored fellows were put on the block, slaves were sold.

When they finished selling the slaves a white boy would stand up, lovely blond boy from Germany, nice golden curls and he'd stand on the slave block and say, sell me for what? I want to be a slave. We all want to be free.

Why be a slave? It's the only way you can get on a plantation. When they got on a plantation they plowed with five men instead of oxen. And the white man always got in the middle so he could witness to the slaves on either side.

They put him a gold, they put him a, I was going to say gold, they put him an iron collar around his neck. Stripped him to his waist, except for a little pair of shorts and put a belt around him and fastened him to a plow.

And that boy would witness until that collar would cut in his neck. They got all kinds of poison and troubles. And then immediately he got his money for being auctioned as a slave. He gave it to the pastor and said, send that back to Germany to pay the fare for another boy.

And they kept that up. That's the way they entered those fields. They literally sold themselves into slavery in order to get the message there. I've said very often, an experience of God that costs nothing is worth nothing and it does nothing.

There's a price to pay. You say it's all grace, it's free, everything. No it's not, read your Bible. What does it say in the book of the Revelation? I counsel thee to what? Well to buy of me. Buy what?

White raiment? Buy gold. Grace is free, rewards are not free. If there are any rags in heaven a lot of us will be wearing them. Because you see, everybody won't be the same in heaven. Won't get the same reward.

We won't be the same in appearance. We won't have the same offices. As I said last night, we're not eternally conscious people. We live on this dirty old mud board. We're so concerned to be promoted this way and promoted that way.

And even if we get asked to a state convention to sing, we feel, oh boy, of course my halo will be coming soon. When you think of the eternal aspect, my time, time, what is time? Oh well, my concept of time is it's an island surrounded by an ocean of eternity.

You can't get off it without getting into eternity. There was a young man in this country years ago, you may remember reading Stephen Grellick's life. Do you remember reading Stephen Grellick's life? No?

Anyhow, he's listed in one of the books of Borom, his five books on great texts. Stephen Grellick came to this country. He was a brilliant Quaker, a Huguenot. And he got in with society, away there in that lovely city of Philadelphia.

Right at the beginning, just about, you know, not too long after the, I guess, Declaration of Independence. He was quite a man. He was a real ladies' man. Wore his nice velvet jackets and, you know. But one day he went to a church and heard the gospel.

He didn't want to go. Then one night he went to a type of a camp meeting and he walked out of the camp meeting and he went down a corridor. They cut a rough road through the trees. And he said, the wind moved through the trees and every tree, every leaf on the tree became a tongue and every tongue began to say, eternity, eternity, eternity, eternity.

He said, it went down every corridor of my mind, every part of eternity, eternity. And he said, I fell there in the dust. Just like Saul of Tarsus. When he got up, he was completely transformed. When he got up, he didn't own a thing.

His body, his soul, his money, his time, anything. He swore his allegiance to Jesus and he said, Lord, I'll go wherever. Some people go to the down and outs, I'll go to the up and outs. He went to every king in Europe.

He even went to the Pope. He walked over the Alps in the snows. He went down into the hell hole of Calcutta and he sat there in the dirt and he picked up vocabularies from children, learned languages.

He learned about as many languages as I have fingers and toes. He was zealous for God, so zealous that when he preached in Paris, they got hold of him and put a rope around his neck and strung him up to a lamppost.

Somebody cut him down. Next day they got more mad, they threw him in the sign, the river sign there and he swam out, got delivered. But it didn't make any difference where he went. He went to kings, I say again, he went to the Pope, he went to the poor, he went to the rich, he went to slave camps, he embraced death.

He shook hands with misery. He went into leper colonies. This one thing I do. And the only way he could do it, obviously again, was that he girded himself with prayer. Men ought always to pray. Well, the life of one man in the Bible is covered by two words.

One of the greatest men that ever lived, he strangled the economy, he shut up heaven, he raised the dead, you mentioned it, he did it. Why did he do it? Because he prayed. How do you know? Because God said so.

Left a little tombstone like that, on the tombstone it just says two words, he prayed. What will it say on yours? He golfed or he goofed. He was the champion fisherman of all the pastors in the Southern Baptist Church.

Boy, what an honor that is. Elias, in case you think his daddy was a god and his mother a seraphim or something, it's very clear that he was a man of like passions. That doesn't mean he was a passionate man in the sense of anything sexual.

It means he was made up like you and I. He had emotions, he had nerves, and he had sinews and everything else. He was a man of like passions even as we are. He was a very normal man. He proved that very easily.

He ran away from one woman and stuck up to 800 men. So he must have been pretty normal anyhow. But this is what he did. He what? Well again, he came on the stage of Israel. You know how Elijah left the stage.

He went up in a whirlwind, then in a chariot. Fine, tell me how he came. Tell me where he came from. Tell me who his mother and father were, with all your knowledge. We'll tell you that at seminary. Where did he come from?

Who were his parents? What school did he go to? I told you the other day, he went to the same school that all good men go. He went to the University of Siloam. See this is the hard thing. You can put a show on in the pulpit.

You can't put a show on in the closet. You can pray very impressively maybe, when you're in your church prayer meeting. That's no good if you're dumb when you're home. Your longest prayer should be in the secret place.

Because if you're having a night of prayer, that's all right. You can maybe pray. I used to take teams of college men around England. I enjoyed that. I confess I enjoyed it very much. Every year I took a new set of men, about half a dozen men.

And they had to mean business. Do you know why? Because we had no money. We slept on floors like this. You used your boots for your pillow, your shirt of course to soften your boots. And we walked. John Wesley rode a triangle from the north of England, Newcastle, down to London, across to Bristol.