======================================================================== (COMPILATION) THE ARENA OF GOD'S IMMEDIATE SOVEREIGNTY by Leonard Ravenhill ======================================================================== Summary: This sermon emphasizes the need for a sovereign move of God's Holy Spirit in the church, contrasting the lack of deep prayer and spiritual hunger seen today with the fervent seeking of God in the past. It calls for a return to genuine, Spirit-led worship, intercession, and brokenness before God, highlighting the danger of becoming mechanical and carnal in our faith. The speaker shares powerful examples of individuals who dedicated extended hours to prayer and seeking God's presence, leading to profound encounters and revival. Duration: 20:15 Topics: "Revival", "Spiritual Hunger" Scripture References: Psalm 63:1, James 4:8, Acts 1:14, 2 Chronicles 7:14, Matthew 6:6, Luke 18:1, Ephesians 6:18, Romans 12:12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DESCRIPTION ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This sermon emphasizes the need for a sovereign move of God's Holy Spirit in the church, contrasting the lack of deep prayer and spiritual hunger seen today with the fervent seeking of God in the past. It calls for a return to genuine, Spirit-led worship, intercession, and brokenness before God, highlighting the danger of becoming mechanical and carnal in our faith. The speaker shares powerful examples of individuals who dedicated extended hours to prayer and seeking God's presence, leading to profound encounters and revival. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What happens? All the meetings are over. Off they go. They haven't got to get through the door. They're smoking or they're rushing off to do something. In the Bible, people do not leave the sanctuary for hours. This precious 26-year-old young man finished preaching, walked out of the building at 10 o'clock, got down on his face, and prayed all night and all the next day for the next meeting the next night. Our guys are guzzling some junk or running home for TV. There's no brooding of the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost takes in an area, watch it. You can't explain it. You can't predict it. You can't direct it. God becomes sovereign. And I'm aching, aching, aching in my spirit to see a sovereign move of God, the Holy Ghost. Lord, do you think God may be aggrieved with the church today that we spend so little time in prayer? I'm convinced we've come into a form today of Christian humanism. That's all it is. We'll do it. You bless it, Lord. You've got to bless our TV program. You've got to bless our tracts we give out, our records or something. Who says we haven't? Sanctify the flesh to a great degree. We put personalities up just like the world does. A preacher said something the other day that's very disturbing. I said, Doctor, what was it? He said this good Baptist preacher said this to an audience that he was addressing. He said, I want to tell you that if God withdrew the Holy Spirit from my church today, it would function tomorrow the same way we wouldn't even know he'd gone. And he thinks that might be written of many churches in that we become so mechanical. We go in at 11 and come out at 12 and the Holy Ghost must come when we open the door of the church and he must leave when we lock it. And we try and lay down the track and say, come Holy Ghost, for thee we call, spirit of burning, come, but come our way. We lay down the conditions. Holy Ghost, come, but please don't violate our theology. Don't upset our status quo. Don't break our hearts over the lost world. I said, what about the works revival? He said, I'll tell you what happened in the works revival. He said, I was with William Booth in his office. We were having meetings in London and somebody said to me, no, my wife, revival is broken out. There's a young man in his 20s, he's having robbers and he's packing everywhere he goes. He won't even let them publicize him. He won't let them put his picture in the paper. They'll just announce he's coming to Swanson. Every church in town is filled because they don't know where he's going. So he said, well, I knew Friday afternoon I could leave. Friday afternoon. And that's Saturday free. And I can come back Sunday and get to the office on Monday morning. So I said, I went there. Meeting was crowded. In one meeting, Evan Roberts comes in. There's 800 people, which isn't big for America. But there it's the largest hall in town. And Evan walks down to the front seat, sits down, bows his head and prayed for three hours. Hard people to walk out. But then he stood up for 15 minutes. He said, yeah, I've never heard like it in your life. The Holy Ghost came upon him. He was a big man. When he prayed, God just came down as he jumped in the audience. And that happened more than once. And he said at the end of the meeting, he said, no, no, no, no, no, no. He just, after he prayed for three hours and spoke for 15 minutes, he went out. At 10 o'clock at night, he prayed the whole night for the anointing for the next day. Our guys don't do that. They go sit and talk and say silly jokes. We want to be spiritual and carnal, spiritual, carnal, hot and cold, all out for God, all out for the cowboys. God says no. And you've done it for 25 years. Why not quit and start something different? Last Sunday night, he preached to maybe the largest church in Denver, Colorado. He said, Len, as we sat there, I was ready to preach. And suddenly I was overcome with grief. And I just walked forward and sat on the floor. I didn't go to the pulpit. And I began to weep. God just gave me such a burden. And he said, look, there's a congregation of about 3,000. He said there's a girl in here who's been molested by a man, sexually molested. And the man is going to go to jail. And as he said, there's a girl about 16 running down the aisle. And she said, Mr. Wilkerson, I'm the girl that has been molested. My daddy did it. And he has to go to jail. David just groaned. He said there must have been 15 or 16 other young women who came there and said, he said my spirit just bloody swept all this theology sermon on one side and obeyed the Holy Ghost. The whole church broke up in weeping and brokenness, seeking God. Same thing happened without ever having to open his mouth. I'm sure that's the kind of spirit that the apostle had. Because the spirit of Christ is dwelling in him. It's the spirit of God dwelling in him. They experimented at Cornell University some years ago by putting a frog in a dishpan of boiling water. And he jumped out. And then they put a frog in a dishpan of cold water. And they turned the jet at the bottom. And then they turned it up one degree, two degrees. And you know what that frog did? He stayed in there until they cooked him to death. When they put him in the boiling water, he got out because he said, I can't live here. But when they, by degrees, they changed the thing. And he adjusted and he adjusted and he adjusted. And they still killed him anyhow. And you know, we've got some things in our churches, if not in our lives, that a few years ago we never would have had. And old Satan didn't pour the boiling water on. He put this little thing and then that little thing and that little thing. And before very long the churches become so carnal. The glory of the Lord doesn't fill the temple. When did you last tiptoe out of your particular tabernacle saying, surely God is in this place? I say again, with all the power of my being, I do not believe that modern Christians go to church to meet God. They go to church to hear a sermon about God. They don't expect deity to invade the place. They don't expect to tiptoe out of the holy place saying, God is here about to bless us. The spirit moved over my heart. If you tell some people that God Almighty may send communism to America to purge it of its uncleanness and its sin and its lethargy and its unbelief and the selfishness amongst believers, they want you all to be shipped out of the country. But I want to tell you God loved Israel but he let her go into bondage for 400 years. And then when she came out he let her go into bondage another 400 years. And now they're in bondage, not to the Philistines. And after all, dear friend, when you read the Old Testament, Almighty God's problem in the Old Testament was not the Amalekites or the Hittites or the Perizzites or the Jebusites. God only had one problem in the Old Testament and that was Israel. And I believe Almighty God only has one problem in the world tonight. And it's not communism or Romanism, it's the church of the living God. And he is concerned about her with his own blood he bought her and for her life he died. And if Jesus weeps, he weeps tonight because of the paralysis of the church. The glory has departed. We go through the mechanics. I'd like to see 300 pastors come together for a whole week and stay prostrate before God. Wouldn't you like to see that for the rain? No fancy lecturing, just getting there in prostration, heart-searching and saying, God, if we can do it, if we can birth revival, if we can give our bodies, our spirits, our minds to total control by you, if we stay here, it doesn't matter whether we die here. See, this class of prayer is hardly known. And saying, God, God, you don't manifest yourself anymore. We don't challenge you to divide the Red Sea. We don't dare to call fire down from heaven. We can sow and plow and do everything. We don't ask you to feed us with heavenly manner. Our people don't feed on God. They feed on meetings. They go from one seminar to another seminar. I've been praying this morning that suddenly God will come. You'll jump up from your seat with an arrow of God in your heart and flee here for refuge. The Lord whom ye seek, and I'm seeking God. I'm not seeking miracles as good as they are or prophecy. I'm seeking God. You say America needs God. No, she doesn't. The church needs God. If the church gets God, America will soon feel it. She'll be staggering. I just finished a two-week meeting in Dr. Fuller's church in Grand Rapids. And I've been trying to go home, and I said, nothing Baptist church with 1,200 people in. It didn't hold its hand very long. But I've been in a little church, and it's a Pentecostal church on the hills of Wales. So we start half past ten in Sunday morning. Before long, the atmosphere is up filled with worship. No, and he said, I haven't been in a church in England where they're not. But the same with it. Well, I said, tell me this. If I came to your church Sunday morning, what's the procedure in the service? And without batting an eye, he just looked up very pleasantly, and he said, Brother Abel, the first three hours of our service Sunday. Did you get that? The first three hours is given to praise, worship, adoration, thanksgiving, ecstasy. And then what? Oh, the second three hours we give to prayer, intercession, supplication. And then what? The third three hours we have breaking of bread. One man has a hymn, another has a song. A woman gets up and says she's just finished twenty days of fasting. A man here says God dealt with him here. A man says the Spirit awakened him and told him to go put something right, something it's stolen. We give the whole meeting over to the saints for each of them to make their contribution. Well, I said, Brother Singh, that's nine hours. Do you have a service nine hours every Lord's Day? He said, no. Oh, well, I said, I wasn't thinking about conventions or Catholic meetings. I was thinking of the normal Sunday. Well, he said, I'm talking about the normal Sunday, except that the meeting doesn't last nine hours. Always it lasts, sometimes the glory comes down, whether they're eleven hours, twelve hours, thirteen hours, fourteen hours. You don't want to think about that, do you? I can remember Dr. Tozer, I can hear him now saying, Len, I think I'll have gone from this scene, but maybe before you die, you'll see people coming from foreign countries to show us what New Testament Christianity is all about. As I said last night, the great need of this hour, that I've got to send this morning, all the need that I've hungrily purchased, the need of the hour is water. We're in a dry and thirsty land. There's not a spot of revival in America today. There's not a spot of revival in England today. The only countries in the world that have any semblance of revival are non-civilized countries, they're uncivilized countries. God is bypassing us, revolting us. Like Jonah, he didn't want to go there either. If he can't get away to send him to the military, he's flying away. But God loves life. So Hollywood or somewhere else, that's equal. We need to ask the question, that is as simple as I said last night, recruiting all the other families. If he is, then it will really sink in life. I'm right to get blind. And they're telling us they're holding us to that. ======================================================================== Video: https://sermonindex2.b-cdn.net/teYoR_NSQYE.mp4 Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/leonard-ravenhill/compilation-the-arena-of-gods-immediate-sovereignty/ ========================================================================