"The ELIJAHS" - by RAVENHILL
Posted by: prophetic <prophetic@...>
Great industrial concerns have in their employ men who are needed
only when there is a breakdown 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 on, 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, as 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.
To such men as this the Church owes a debt too heavy to pay.
The curious thing is that She seldom tries to pay him while he
lives, but the next generation builds his sepulcher and writes his
biography, as if instinctively and awkwardly to discharge an
obligation the previous generation to a large extent ignored.
Such a man as this is not an easy companion. The professional
evangelist who leaves the wrought-up meeting as soon as it ends
to hurry over to the most expensive restaurant to feast and crack
jokes with his sponsors will find this man something of an
embarrassment, for he cannot turn off the burden of the Holy
Ghost as one would turn off a faucet. He insists upon being a
Christian all the time, everywhere; and again, that marks him out
as different.
Toward him it is impossible to be neutral. His acquaintances are
divided pretty neatly into two classes, those who love him with all
admiration, and those who hate him with perfect hatred!
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SECTION 2 - "Where are the ELIJAHS OF GOD?"
-by Leonard Ravenhill.
To the question, "Where is the Lord God of Elijah?" we answer,
"Where He has always been - on the throne!" But where are the
Elijahs of God? We know Elijah was "a man of like passions as
we are," but alas! we are not men of like prayer as he was. One
praying man stands as a majority with God! Today God is
bypassing men - not because they are too ignorant, but because
they are too self-sufficient. Brethren, our abilities are our handicaps,
and our talents our stumbling blocks!
Out of obscurity, Elijah came on to the Old Testament stage, a
full-grown man. Queen Jezebel, that daughter of hell, had routed
the priests of God and replaced them with groves to false deities.
Darkness covered the land and gross darkness the people, and
they were drinking iniquity like water. Every day the land, fouled
with heathen temples and idolatrous rites, saw smoke curling
from a thousand cruel altars.
Elijah lived with God. He thought about the nation's sin like God;
he grieved over sin like God; he spoke against sin like God. He
was all passion in his prayers and passionate in his denunciation
of evil in the land. He had no smooth preaching. Passion fired his
preaching, and his words were on the hearts of men as molten
metal on their flesh.
Brethren, if we will do God's work in God's way, at God's time,
with God's power, we shall have God's blessing and the devil's
curses. When God opens the windows of heaven to bless us, the
devil will open the doors of hell to blast us. God's smile means
the devil's frown! Mere preachers may help anybody and hurt
nobody; but prophets will stir everybody and madden somebody.
The preacher may go with the crowd; the prophet goes against it.
A man freed, fired, and filled with God will be branded unpatriotic
because he speaks against his nation's sins; unkind because his
tongue is a two-edged sword; unbalanced because the weight of
preaching opinion is against him. Preachers make pulpits famous;
prophets make prisons famous. The preacher will be heralded;
the prophet hounded.
Ah! brother preachers, we love the old saints, missionaries,
martyrs, reformers: our Luthers, Bunyans, Wesleys, Asburys, etc.
We will write their biographies, reverence their memories, frame
their epitaphs, and build their monuments. We will do anything
except imitate them. We cherish the last drop of their blood, but
watch carefully the first drop of our own!
Oh, my ministering brethren! Much of our praying is but giving God
advice. Our praying is discolored with ambition, either for ourselves
or for our denomination. Perish the thought! Our goal must be God
alone. It is His honor that is defiled, His blessed Son who is ignored,
His laws broken, His name profaned, His book forgotten, His house
made a circus of social efforts.
Does God ever need more patience with His people than when they
are "praying"? We tell Him what to do and then how to do it. We
pass judgments and make appreciations in our prayers. In short,
we do everything except pray! No Bible school can teach us this
art. What Bible school has "prayer" on its curriculum? The most
important thing a man can study is the prayer part of the book.
But where is this taught? Let us strip off the last bandage and
declare that many of our presidents and teachers do not pray, shed
no tears, know no travail. Can they teach what they do not know?
The man who can get believers to praying would, under God, usher
in the greatest revival that the world has ever known. There is no
fault in God. He is able. God "is able to do according to the power
that worketh in us." God's problem today is not communism, nor
yet Romanism, nor liberalism, nor modernism. God's problem is -
dead fundamentalism!
"So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew
you out of my mouth." - Rev. 3:16
Sin today is both glamorized and popularized, thrown into the ear
by radio, thrown into the eye by television, and splashed on popular
magazine covers. Churchgoers, sermon-sick and teaching-tired,
leave the meeting as they entered it - visionless and passionless!
Oh God, give this perishing generation ten thousand John the Baptists!
Just as Moses could not mistake the sight of the burning bush, so
a nation could not mistake the sight of a burning man! God meets
fire with fire. John the Baptist was a new man with a new message.
As a man accused of murder hears the dread cry of the judge,
"Guilty!" and pales at it, so the crowd heard John's cry, "Repent!"
until it rang down the corridors of their minds, stirred memory, bowed
the conscience and brought them terror-stricken to repentance and
baptism! After Pentecost, the onslaught of Peter, fresh from his
fiery baptism of the Spirit, shook the crowd until as one man they
cried out: "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Imagine someone
telling these sin-stricken men, "Just sign a card! Attend church
regularly! Pay your tithes!" No! A thousand times no!
"Oh, my God! If in our cultivated unbelief and our theological twilight
and our spiritual powerlessness, we have grieved and are continuing
to grieve Thy Holy Spirit, then in mercy spew us out of Thy mouth!
If Thou cannot do something with us and through us, then please
God, do something without us! Bypass us, and take up a people
who have not yet known Thee!"
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[-Extracts from "Why Revival Tarries" by L. Ravenhill].