Leonard Ravenhill, Revival Praying

I love Leonard Ravenhill as much as any of the many great Christian teachers I'm collecting on this blog and want to post some from his book, Revival Praying. I wish I could be as obedient to his advice as he teaches we should be and I know I should be. It's miserable to know what you should do and find yourself failing to do it at every turn. However, what he teaches is so absolutely necessary if there is any hope of the Church becoming what we are meant to be I can only post such exhortations as his and hope they set a fire under me as well as anyone else who happens to read them. And they DO inspire me. My prayer life is much the better for such readings even if I fail most of the time to get anywhere near the vision of what the true Christian ought to be.

He quotes his mentor, Samuel Chadwick (The Path of Prayer) in his Preface:

"Brethren, the crying sin of the Church is her laziness after God."

And goes on to say in his own words:

Prayer demands will power. Prayer recognizes unfinished business with and for God. Prayer is a battle for full-grown men, fully armed and fully awake to the possibilities of grace. I write here by constraint, for my spirit is sore, my heart sick at the slothfulness with which we tarry in prayer. My head hangs low that Communists will give more for their dying cause than we will give for the living Christ. [This book was published in 1962

He spends the first few pages chronicling the sin and corruption of America in those days and the apostasy and weakness of the Church in its response.

The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the Church has lost her power to weep over it. [p. 22]

And he ends his Preface with:

Hear me! Every church without a prayer meeting condemns us; every Bible daily unopened condemns us; every promise of God unusued condemns us; every lost neighbor condemns us; every lost heathn condemns us; every dry eye among us condemns us; every wasted minute of our time condemns us; every unclaimed oppoertunity for God condemns us.

In 1962 he is seeing the barbarians at the gate, in the form of Khrushchev and the threat of Communism, and the daily dying of millions into a Christless eternity. How much farther the barbarians have come in our own time and the millions go on dying and the Church goes on in the same weakness and irrelevance.

Never was there a need for the trumpeters on Zion's walls to sound a louder blast to sleeping believers than at this moment. [p.27]

If that was true in 1962 so much the truer now.

Where is our faith? Where is our sense of mission to this world? It's not that we have none, it's that we have nothing near what we could and should have.

I have said before that one of these days someone will read the Bible for the first time, believe it, and act on it with a daring, simple faith

Many of us when we first believe have something of that fire of faith, but it is quickly quenched among the multitudes of older believers who regard it as fanaticism. But I do think of Bakht Singh who had such a response to his first encounter with the Bible and maintained his simple powerful faith for the rest of his life, which included such exploits as expecting his ticket to be paid for when he got to the airport or the train station for a trip on business for the Lord, and according to the resports it always was paid for through nothing but faith. The power we should have as believers in the God of the Bible is just about never seen among us, so such incidents stand out as unusual when they should be common.

Faith honors God. God honors faith and goes wherever faith puts Him. Faith, Biblical faith, can do all that God can do. (Because its sole desire is God's glory, it would not ask anything amiss -- 1 John 5:14.) Faith's supreme longing is for the return of the glory that has departed from the sanctuary. Its ambition is not colored by the clay vessel. Faith is wedded to the love which "seeketh not her own." Faith longs for an overthrow of the powers of darkness. Faith yearns that the world might know the message of redeeming love, and aches for enslaved millions to be unfettered from the chains of sin.

...What are we Christians doing? To use a very tattered phrase, are we just "playing church"? With all our revival campaigns, are we getting folk into Biblical regeneration? Is it really a comfort to knw that the recent converts will become just like us? What if they are as lazy and self-excusing in the matter of personal devotion to Jesus and active engagement in soul-winning as the rest of our listed church members? ...Surely we need some injection into the Church of the living God immediately.

Then he gets into the conditions for prayer:

The path to the new individual and collective power [the Church needs] would be as follows: First, renunciation of all known sin; Secondly, sorrowful confession that we have failed so much and have been satisfied so long with the status quo; Thirdly, a seeking of God's face in earnest prayer; And finally, Bible study, in order to uncover the promises of God directed to this desperate age and our needy churches.

In making a request of God, the first thing we have to be sure of is this: Is our relationship right? Once we are convinced by the witness of the Spirit that we are blood-related to the Father and not at variance with others, we can come with boldness to the throne of grace. Soiled hearts that operate soiled hands can not plunder the resources of God, for God's command is "Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord." Assured that we are joint-heirs with Christ of the fabulous riches of God, what manner of persons we ought to be! Is there any excuse at all for our present poverty? When He longs to give full vision, is there any reason why we should still be seeing men as trees walking? With the promise of the mighty Holy Ghost to empower us, is there any self-defense when we stagger under the load and fail to "put to flight the armies of the aliens"? Has God failed? Is God unwilling to bless? No! Ten thousand times no! [p.32]

...Men of faith see -- they see the unseeable. Men of faith know a dimension that is unknown to those who pray only routine prayers.

[to be continued]

Pondering the practicalities of improving the practice of prayer

William Law's advice for daily prayer (as spelled out in his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life)is probably only really doable by someone in his position, independently wealthy with no need to work, and unmarried with no family responsibilities. He dedicated his life to serving the Lord with prayer and the use of his wealth for the poor, and he had the time for it.

He recommends praying six times a day, at 6 and 9AM, at noon, and at 3, 6 and 9PM, and he suggests topics he considers appropriate for those times. He doesn't prescribe how LONG each session should be, but the way he words it here and there hints that maybe he actually has in mind a whole hour at each session. Six hours a day! I'll be doing VERY well if I can arrange for two sessions of an hour each, or more sessions at fifteen minutes or so.

Many have written that the more you do the more you CAN do so it's mostly a matter of getting started.

He suggests Praise and Thanksgiving for the 6AM prayer, with the reading or chanting of certain psalms; Humility (the cultivation of humility and confession of lack of humility) for 9AM; prayer for universal love, and intercession for the people in your life for noon. Then Resignation is the subject of the 3PM prayer, "resignation" being the old-fashioned word for acceptance of everything the Lord brings into your life, contentment with thanks and praise, and "rejoicing in all circumstances," or willing what God wills, the ultimate expression of trust in God. Confession of sin is for 6PM and meditating on Death for 9PM.

I think I'd combine his prayers for the virtues of humility and universal love and resignation in one session, and combine thanksgiving and confession with other topics of my own, but otherwise I have other things I want to concentrate on. The state of the church is a big one, which includes prayer for revival, and "understanding the times" is another big one. If I ever could give specific times to my prayers I'd give each of these topics their own "hour" (even if that hour is only fifteen minutes). Right now I just pray my whole prayer list in one session whenever I sit down for that purpose. I haven't been able to come up with a way to apportion the topics on my list over the day as he suggests, but maybe a natural apportioning would come with time. Of course his method doesn't have to be followed at all, it's just that it appeals to me as a way to pray at length for important things.

If I'm honest I have to admit that I have plenty of time, no family responsibilities and only 20 to 30 working hours a week, at home too, so that I can apportion the time as I please. I have no excuse not to devote the remaining time to prayer. If I worked at it diligently eventually I might even be able to organize my day to provide for regular hours of prayer as Law advises. It's quite clear, however, that my prayerlessness has nothing to do with practicalities. I suspect that even for the busiest of people the problem is always motivation or commitment. Once the commitment is made the time takes care of itself, some forms of busyness get dropped because you come to see that they are not serving any good purpose anyway, and others get taken care of in less time at better times.

The biographies of some of the most dedicated saints often show a prodigious dedication of time to the Lord even in the busiest life. That's how the spiritual power they are known for was won. I forget who it was who worked a twelve-hour day then came home and studied the Bible and prayed for something like another six to eight hours and slept for only the few hours left. He was young. Could I get my sleep needs down at all? Maybe I could, maybe a lot of it is simply habit, and time with the Lord invigorates too. Do I have the excuse of not being young? It's probably best not to explain away anything but put it in the Lord's hands.

At the moment making a regular schedule does seem to be beyond me, I must admit. I haven't been able to sleep at regular times for years now. Just when I think I may be getting onto a reasonable sleep schedule I find myself lying awake for hours, and back I go to sleeping during the day, which I'd rather not do. I end up working during the night, and I pray only when I'm awake and not having to work and there's nothing else I really have to do. In other words, not nearly enough.

Prayer is crucial, the more the better, and fasting with prayer some of those times just as crucial. I know this, I know it I know it I know it, but doing it is SO hard. Sometimes I'm just sitting and thinking Why can't I be praying right now? Getting started seems impossible sometimes.

But at least I'm getting a prayer list worked out. Just to give the barest outline:

For myself: The virtues Law recommends, and healing for arthritis pain and other physical problems.

For friends and family and neighbors: Salvation and God's blessings.

For the church: An increase in the spirit of prayer above all. Just what I'm writing about here and want for myself. Honestly facing disobedience in the church and purging it.

Understanding the times: Right now I really want to understand the Rapture claims, meaning the expectation of the removal of the church from earth as a separate event at some time before the Second Coming. There is a lot that supports it but still enough to keep me from completely accepting it. I'm definitely a Futurist as far as prophecy goes. About all I know for sure is that I can't accept Amillennialism or Preterism. I wrote some about this on the End Times Monitor blog a while back.