Ravenhill - Why Revival Tarries

Leonard Ravenhill
Why Revival Tarries

BY LEONARD RAVENHILL

Revival Gods Way
Revival Praying
Why Revival Tarries

Leonard Ravenhill
Why Revival Tarries

Why Revival Tarries
Copyright 1959, 1987
Leonard Ravenhill

Cover design by Eric Walljasper

There are more than 500,000 copies of Why Revival Tarries in print, including editions in Arabic, British, Chinese, Finnish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Malayan, Nigerian English, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Telgu, and Urdu.

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Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-7642-2905-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ravenhill, Leonard.
Why revival tarries / by Leonard Ravenhill.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7642-2905-2 (pbk.)
1. Revivals. I. Title.

BV3790.R295 2004
269'.2dc22 2004006164

To Martha, my gracious wife

LEONARD RAVENHILL was born in 1907 in the city of Leeds, in Yorkshire, England. After his conversion to Christ, he was trained for the ministry at Cliff College. It soon became evident that evangelism was his forte, and he engaged in it with both vigor and power. Eventually he became one of Englands foremost outdoor evangelists. His meetings in the war years drew traffic-jamming crowds in Britain, and great numbers of his converts not only followed the Savior into the kingdom but also into the Christian ministry and the worlds mission fields. He emigrated to the United States in midlife, where he continued his ministry. He and his wife, Martha, raised three sons. Ravenhill went home to be with the Lord in November 1994.

LEONARD RAVENHILL ,
MY FATHER

My mother was a singing mother. Every day as shecarried me in her womb she sang and prayed for me. Sheand Granny, who lived next door to us, prayed togetherabout the child that was to be born. An amazing thinghappened two hoursnot two months, not two weeks, nottwo daysafter I was born. I was in a prayer meeting.My mother told me twenty years after, When the midwifewent out, I reached over the bed and laid my hands onyou and just prayed, Lord, make this boy a preacher ordont let him live.

The above is a transcript of a forgotten tape that I was given only a matter of days ago in which my father recalls some of his early years. He was raised in a God-fearing home that believed in the power of prayer. His earliest recollection of school was that of being taught the Ten Commandments as a five-year-old as well as having to memorize and recite many of the Psalms. At the age of fourteen he was attending all-night prayer meetingsa passion he carried throughout his life.

He recalled: They prayed with tears, they prayed with brokenness. They prayed for a lost world, then they began to pray for nations I knew little about. They had signs of Niagara Falls, but instead of water falling over, it was people dropping down.

My fathers ministry started in England at the age of sixteen. His burden for the lost took him into the streets, where he began to preach to the local gypsy communityseventyone years later he was on the streets of Glory.

My father was a powerfully anointed preacher who could bring down the convicting presence of God in a way that very few can. People would begin making their way to the altar even before any type of invitation was given, their hearts pierced by the Word of God. His preaching was superceded only by his passion for prayer. Like the apostle Paul, he carried the daily pressure of concern for the church. Prayer was his life. Prior to his death in 1994 he told me he had received a number of requests from seminary students who wanted to come and see him for the sole purpose of having him lay his hands upon them in order to receive his mantle. With his typical dry British humor, but at the same time deadly serious, he said, Everyone wants to have my mantle but nobody wants my sackcloth and ashes. Sitting at his bedside only days after the stroke that was to take his life, I wrote these words:

Tribute to a Godly Man

I knew a man who gave his life
To see revival fire
He prayed by day, he prayed by night
to birth this one desire.

He had but one obsession
To see a glorious bride
Arrayed in spotless purity
Brought to her bridegrooms side.

His power while in the pulpit
Was matched by very few
And yet he loved the closet
There with the God he knew.

While others strove for mans applause
For fortune and for fame
He had but one ambition
To exalt his Masters name.

For eighty-seven years
He lived just for eternity
A man of faith and wisdom
And true humility.

He knew one day hed have to stand
Before Gods judgment seat
And so he ran to win the prize
His mission to complete.

The fortune that he left behind
Was not in stocks or gold
But lives transformed and challenged
Their stories yet untold.

There is no greater privilege
Than this that I have had
Of knowing this great man of God
And having him as Dad.

DAVID RAVENHILL,
AUTHOR AND ITINERANT TEACHER
LINDALE, TEXAS

CONTENTS

3. A Call for Unction in the Pulpit
Action in the Pew!

Great industrial concerns have in their employ men who are needed only when there is a break-down somewhere. When something goes wrong with the machinery, these men spring into action to locate and remove the trouble and get the machinery rolling again.

For these men a smoothly operating system has no interest. They are specialists concerned with trouble and how to find and correct it.

In the kingdom of God things are not too different. God has always had His specialists whose chief concern has been the moral breakdown, the decline in the spiritual health of the nation or the church. Such men were Elijah, Jeremiah, Malachi, and others of their kind who appeared at critical moments in history to reprove, rebuke, and exhort in the name of God and righteousness.

A thousand or ten thousand ordinary priests or pastors or teachers could labor quietly almost unnoticed while the spiritual life of Israel or the church was normal. But let the people of God go astray from the paths of truth, and immediately the specialist appeared almost out of nowhere. His instinct for trouble brought him to the help of the Lord and of Israel.

Such a man was likely to be drastic, radical, possibly at times violent, and the curious crowd that gathered to watch him work soon branded him as extreme, fanatical, negative. And in a sense they were right. He was single-minded, severe, fearless, and these were the qualities the circumstances demanded. He shocked some, frightened others, and alienated not a few, but he knew who had called him and what he was sent to do. His ministry was geared to the emergency, and that fact marked him out as different, a man apart.