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Ye Must Be Born Again - Part 2
Leonard Ravenhill

Leonard Ravenhill (1907 - 1994). British-American evangelist, author, and revivalist born in Leeds, England. Converted at 14 in a Methodist revival, he trained at Cliff College, a Methodist Bible school, and was mentored by Samuel Chadwick. Ordained in the 1930s, he preached across England with the Faith Mission and held tent crusades, influenced by the Welsh Revival’s fervor. In 1950, he moved to the United States, later settling in Texas, where he ministered independently, focusing on prayer and repentance. Ravenhill authored books like Why Revival Tarries (1959) and Sodom Had No Bible, urging the church toward holiness. He spoke at major conferences, including with Youth for Christ, and mentored figures like David Wilkerson and Keith Green. Married to Martha Beaton in 1939, they had three sons, all in ministry. Known for his fiery sermons and late-night prayer meetings, he corresponded with A.W. Tozer and admired Charles Spurgeon. His writings and recordings, widely available online, emphasize spiritual awakening over institutional religion. Ravenhill’s call for revival continues to inspire evangelical movements globally.
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In this video, the speaker repeatedly emphasizes that they will be showing the viewers something important. They mention this multiple times throughout the video. However, the specific content of what they will be showing is not mentioned. The speaker also mentions that they will be showing a little bit of what they will be showing, but again, the actual content is not revealed. The video seems to be focused on building anticipation for what will be shown, without actually providing any concrete information.
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Why was Satan dethroned in heaven? Did they find him stealing a slab of gold off Main Street? I don't think so. You'll find some Christians up there doing it, the way they go after gold down here, there'll be gold diggers up there. But, no, I don't know that Satan was found stealing a slab of gold. And he wasn't beating Michael up. And he wasn't creating a disturbance. He decided he was going to run his life the way he wanted to run it and not the way God wanted to run it. And therefore, because of that, he got pitched out. And by the same token, the boy, the fellow, got thrown out of the Garden of Eden because he wouldn't run his life God's way. And when the prodigal got to the end of the journey, he came back and he said, Father, I have sinned against heaven in thy sight. Make me as thy hired servant. Why? Why didn't he come swaggering in and say, I'm a son and I'll always be a son and I'm coming back and I'm going to live here anyhow and I don't care what you say. In other words, he said this, Father, I've tried living my life my own way. It won't work. Make me as a servant. I want to be in bondage to the will of my Father. I want you to govern my life. I can't manage my life. That's why so many Christians have lives that are so full of failure because they're trying to run them. And they haven't subjected themselves in complete sovereignty to the sovereignty of the personality of the Lord Jesus Christ. And listen, if Jesus isn't Lord of all, he isn't Lord at all. The Holy Ghost is the coronation gift of Jesus. He says, I can't send the Spirit. I'm a satan. And he must be enthroned. And then when he ascends, then the Spirit descends. And you can speak with tears and you can speak with grief and you can complain about your spiritual bankruptcy and you have no consistency in prayer and you have no power to witness and you have no passion for the Lord. You can do that over and over again in a few tears here, until you come to the place of complete total subjection to the Lord Jesus Christ, to the Lordship of Christ, and then you're a candidate for the fullness of the blessing in my judgment. Again, I tried living my life my own way. It won't work. Make me as a servant. I want to be in bondage to the will of my Father. I want you to govern my life. I can't manage my life. That's why so many Christians have lives that are so full of failure because they're trying to run them. And they haven't subjected themselves in complete sovereignty to the sovereignty of the personality of the Lord Jesus Christ. And listen, if Jesus isn't Lord of all, he isn't Lord at all. The Holy Ghost is the coronation gift of Jesus. He says, I can't send the Spirit. I'm a satan. And he must be enthroned. And then when he ascends, then the Spirit descends. And you can speak with tears, and you can speak with grief, and you can complain about your spiritual bankruptcy, and you have no consistency in prayer, and you have no power to witness, and you have no passion for the Lord. You can do that over and over again in a few tears here, until you come to the place of complete total subjection to the Lord Jesus Christ, to the Lordship of Christ, and then you're a candidate for the fullness of the blessing in my judgment. Again, I say Christianity is not a sinning religion. It's a victorious religion. What did Jesus say to the woman who came in sin to him? Go unsinless. Right. Oh now, now, you're preaching sinless to her. I know nothing of the kind. I'm not saying it's impossible for a man to sin. I'm saying it's possible for him not to sin. I crossed the Atlantic, I don't know, about 20 times by boat, as well as flying, and had to go through the usual drill, and put my life jacket on, and stand on the deck, and you get loaded with this immense thing, it can hardly see over, and some little lady says, what's this for? I've always thought if I were the officer, I'd say, well, you're going to play tennis, my dear, what do you think? You've got a life jacket around your neck, and they show you how to tie it, and then he says, now, ladies and gentlemen, this is for when the ship goes down. For what? Oh, this is for when the ship goes down. It's been tested, and that little thing there, you just flick it like that, and it will blink a light when you're in, you know, two miles of water beneath you, two thousand miles to England, a thousand miles back to America, but take comfort, you've got a little light there, about as big as a cigarette, and somebody will be up in a plane, and he couldn't see it if he tried. But there you are, you've got something that will keep you buoyant, and instead of the shark eating you all at once, they'll just nibble you bit by bit, you see, because the other end will be floating up. You'll be all right, just take it comfortably. Look, if he said to me, this is for when the boat goes down, I'd say, hold it a minute, do you mind backing it up and let me get off? I don't want to be on a luxury liner when it goes down. But he doesn't say that. He doesn't say, this is for when the ship goes down, he says, this is for if the ship goes down. But those ships crossed the Atlantic, one of them crossed the Atlantic five hundred times, it never sank. I remember R. R. Brown telling me about the time two ladies were arguing near his home, and one of them said, well, what are they doing around the corner? They're going to put a new Baptist, we don't want a new Baptist church. We've just got a church to our lady around the corner. Oh, the lady said, now look, let's not quarrel about religion. The great enemy of America is communism, not religion. Now, now, now, the Baptists are very nice people, and I don't want Baptists around here. They'll have a daily vacation, Bible school, they'll give my children facts, and the kids will come in singing like they did in the last town, we don't want a Baptist church here. So the lady persisted, she said, now look, there's no difference between Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and Pentecostals and Catholics, we're all the same, just one God, one heaven, one hell, one Bible, and there's no difference. Well, the lady said, that's news, I always thought there was a difference. Not a bit of difference, she said. Oh, that's interesting. Now, how do you figure that out? Well, as you said, now I'm a Catholic, and every six days, I go to confession. I kneel down in a little box, and I tell the man all the bad things I've done, and he says, all right. And I go, and I go to communion. The priest stands up, makes a sign of the cross, says, absolvo deus, and I'm all right. It's a Monday morning, and I start all over again, and then at the end of the week, I take in the next lot of sins. Well, the Baptists don't do that, they don't have a priest and an altar and a mass, do they, and a Presbyterian. No. Not much difference. A lot of difference. No, no, no. She said, you see my dear, what you do, you go every six days to confession, don't you? Yeah. Did you ever see a big sign outside of a church that says R-E-V-I-V-A-L-M-N? Sure, they got one down the street right now at the Methodist church, a revival. Right. She said, you see, the difference is this. You Catholics go every six days in confession sins, but Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists, they save them all up for six months, and then they have a revival in church, and they get rid of the whole lot at the end of six months, and then they start again, and they save them up for another six months. It's only a case of whether you go every six days or every six months. Now, that's funny and yet serious. It is not impossible for a believer to commit sin. No, it is not impossible, but it's possible for him not to commit sin. And it says not only that he that is born of God doth not commit sin, but it says that he that is born of God loveth the brethren, and that's Harry. He that is born of God loveth the brethren. Now, you can soon discover your spiritual health because, you see, there are some things a must do. You can't carry the analogy out perfectly because no analogies are perfect. A babe has no choice in its own birth, and you and I do have a will. And God won't smash your will. He reasons, he argues, he presents truth. But you see, that little baby has been born of its parents, right? Now, if it's going to stay alive, there are some things it's got to do. It's got to breathe, it's got to be fed, it's got to have some kind of utterance. They say when a child is born, if it doesn't make a noise, they hold it up and spank the little thing till it does yell, and then it fills its lungs with air and it's going. You know, if you're really born again of the Spirit of God, we've got something to talk about. No, not just something, someone, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And if you're going to live, you've got to breathe, and prayer is the Christian's vital breath and the Christian's native air. English good or bad, prayer is something you do or you don't. It's something you feel conscripted to do or under the hand you say, my, here it is, the greatest minister I can have in the world, a relationship with the living God. And I can say to that God, not only is he the God, the maker of heaven and earth, but he's my Father. I can breathe his name in prayer. And then, of course, you've got to eat. And if you're going to eat, you're going to eat the Word of God. Wasn't it Job who said, I esteem thy word above my necessary food? Oh, what a marvelous thing when the Word of God becomes as juicy and as tasty and as lovely as anything that could ever pass your lips. In fact, your spiritual palate becomes so sensitive and God begins to give you, if you like, the honey and the wine and the sweet things of Canaanland, and you, you rejoice in all the profound and wonderful things and mysteries that God has for those that love him. We have, and I finished again with this because I'm sure that lots of people don't have this but should have this again, and that is the spirit of adoption. The spirit of assurance. We know, we know, we know. I say again, if you lost your burden, you're going to know about it. If you get out of a dark prison into the sunshine, you're going to know about it. If there's been an error of death and that has been cleansed and life has come in, in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ and he lives in me, I'm surely going to know about it. And then there's this delightful and wonderful thing. With all its privileges, the fact that we are children of God and we have come into a living relationship with him, that we have found the one and only answer to the sin problem. That we are the only ones who are in drought, thou get this. We have a solemn obligation to tell this message to men and women. I think of a little boy in England, and we have some schools there that are called public schools, but they're private. You have to pay, send your children there. And you pay a heavy fee, particularly if you go to a school like Eton or Harrow where Mr. Churchill went. This little fellow was taken to school one day, driven there in his daddy's Rolls Royce. He had the inevitable tuck boxes, suits of clothes. His daddy was a millionaire. And the little guy always had money and he always had food and oranges and apples and candy when nobody else had it. And he was very generous. He used to give it out lavishly. There was another little guy that wished he could do it and he couldn't and he was very envious of this boy's popularity. One day when the boy had been giving out very generously his dimes or quarters or we say shillings and sixpences and packing out candy and giving out oranges and other things from this supply that never ended because there was always new stuff coming. The other little guy confronted him and he put his finger, he said, I want to tell you something. He said, what do you want to tell me? I want to tell you that that fellow that you call your daddy, that millionaire guy that lives in that big castle that has that big yacht and Rolls Royces, he isn't your daddy. And the little fellow pulled his fist back and his eyes filled with tears. He said, you say that again, I'll give you a, I'll burst your nose. He said, burst my nose, it's still true. You ask him when you go home. When the little fellow went home, after some weeks, because they only go home and have a recess at Christmas and Easter. When he got home, he ran through the castle, knocked at the door of his daddy's office and his daddy said, hi John, come in. The little fellow stiffened up, he said, I want to ask you a question. Are you my daddy? I'm like, what? Are you my daddy? He said, John, you wanted a white pony for Christmas and I didn't ask you about a pony. Are you my daddy? He said, say tomorrow we're going to Switzerland, we're going skiing. I didn't ask you that, are you my daddy? He said, come here John. He took John on his knee, sat by the window, showed him a beautiful park in which they lived and a distant town that the man owned and the mills there and the chimney stacks, smoke stacks and everything. When the little boy got back to school one day, he said, he was confronted by this boy again, he says, did you ask your daddy? He said, yes I did. Well, is he your daddy? No. No, he's not, he said, he's not my daddy. Oh, he said, you're, oh, I told you that, you started crying, you're mad. Well, what did you do? Oh, he said, he's not my daddy, that's all. And you're quite happy about it? Sure, I'm happy about it. How come? Well, he said, he took me on his knee and he said, John, I want to tell you something, we had a little boy like you in this house and he took sick and died and the doctor told us we could never have any more little boys. A lady's friend in a distant city and if you take this note from me, she is the matron of a large orphanage for boys, they have 500. And if you take this note, you can go down there and select one of those boys and we'll process this legally and you can adopt a boy. And he said they went down and they selected 25 out of the 500 and then they got from 25 to 5 and daddy said, why don't we, suppose we start with one? And he said they started with 500, got down to 25, got down to 5 and finally after a lot of deliberation, they said, we'll take him. And he said, my daddy said, I have to tell you this, that when they wanted a little boy, they had 500 to choose from, but when you came to your house, they got to have you whether they wanted you or not. He said, you see, he selected me, he adopted me and say, you know, I'm happy because he showed me the town down there and he said, son, your daddy and mommy were killed in a fight in Liverpool in one of the dirtiest quarters, they were drunk, your father was a criminal, but we've forgotten all about it. I've not only adopted you, I've changed your name, I've put it down in my will, you're going to inherit all that property down there, you inherit my yacht, you inherit the other home, we have that as he said. And you think the lousy world outside there is going to bow, beat me when I say that I was a child of the devil, but God adopted me and he gave me his name and he gave me his name on my forehead. Well brother, you couldn't get more than that as a child, could you? There's one simple thing, after John Wesley was born of the spirit, he went on and he declares openly that there came a day when he was consciously filled with the spirit. He's had many biographies, I read one by Villeneuve, a Belgian priest, and he said the only thing that really happened to John Wesley was in Aldersgate Street that night at a quarter to nine he said he had a fever. Oh may the Lord send us a plague of fever tonight. I'd like you boys all to go out spiritually. I'd like you to realize that because you're a child, when hours of God's joys they don't enter the gifts of the spirit, they're the gifts of Jesus, because he led captivity captive and gave gifts sent to men and we're living in this state of impoverishment because we don't possess our possessions. I pity our generation of kids, do you know why? Because they're very much like a boy I taught to in Zemeck's village one day in a coffee house and I got the coffee and doughnuts and came along and sat down and I kind of jotted a bit you know or fenced a little to get to him and then he said now you're going to talk to me about the Lord, took the wind out of my sails. I suppose you're going to sit here and say and he recited it right after, there was a certain man named Nicodemus, the ruler of the Jews, the same tempted Jesus by night and Jesus said unto him, you must be born again, he says brother I've heard that priest said a different term for intended. Oh when the preacher stands up Sunday night he's going to come out with old Mick again. Dear old Nicodemus, he says, he gives me the run over, he said I should tell you more about Nicodemus later than you know and you know one thing that used to get to me and break my heart down when I worked for two years with Dave Wilkerson down there in Zemeck's village, you know it used to get to me how many of those kids that were prostituting those girls, how many of those boys who were up to their ears in crime and LSD and prostitution and every unclean thing, stealing and everything else, some of them have been dried out at Lexington and come back to their drugs, some of them have been in prison time after time, some of them have been rejected even by the courts in New York and the thing that used to sting me to the heart was this, that so many of those kids were children of ministers and you know not, I would say at least 25 or 30 percent of them were children of Pentecostal ministers, you see our kids have never seen revival, you've got to face it, all our kids are in lectures about the risen son of God or something else but a manifest power of God all right along, along, along with all my sisters, I've never said anything, but God will answer that, you're going to have to use you, but as I see the church tonight, Jesus is coming here reminded tonight, I must put it in the bride's face, He's coming for a bride, but the church is old and helpless, she's not a bride, she's not vivacious, she's not full of life and expectation, she has no sense of resource. Just this one thing, when you and I get spiritually healthy, when preacher you're prepared to burn some of your sermons or bury your nose in the ground and say, God almighty I don't have a broken heart over my generation and the lostness of men. You know there was a period, I think it was the same time, the time 1837, Mr. Spurgeon came to America, it was a time of the Fulton Street prayer meetings and Lancia was getting 2,000 men to eat the lunch before 12 o'clock and come and pray for the whole hour together and 2,000 men were praying in New York and 3,000 men were praying in Philadelphia and 2,000 other men were praying in Cincinnati, that was some praying wasn't it, 7,000 men a day on their faces. You wonder there was an outbreak of revival, Spurgeon headed back to England and he said, get to praying, get to praying, the Americans are. That was in 1738, uh 58, 1800 rather and 58. In 1859 we had the great Irish revival, we had the great revival in Scotland which really was a result of the great outpouring of the Spirit of God in America indirectly. But you know they said that a hundred miles out at sea, yes sir you can say all you like about Mr. Finney and I'm not going to downgrade his preaching, I wish to God I could preach like him. Finney could send a congregation, he could get them so mad that while he was preaching they'd stamp their feet and go out and say, we'll never come and listen to you again. Well I can preach like that but he could pray them back and I can't. I can get them mad and they say I never do a lot of great news in town, that's all right I don't care either in that sense. But remember this will you that just as Moses had Aram and Hur holding up his arms, that Finney had old Father Terry on one side and Father Nash on the other side. And when they came to the city where of course 50 years before I was in that city of Bolton in England I met an old lady who remembered when they came to town. She said they came down a poor street and they saw a little window below the house window and they knocked and asked the lady could they rent a room and she said I don't have a room. Do you have a basement? I have a cellar. They rented the cellar for 25 cents a week and each of those men prayed 12 hours a day, 12 hours a day. When one wasn't praying the other was. They filled the 24 hours up with mighty intercession. Do you remember that when he was having revival in Utica and Boston and other areas? And listen don't let anybody tell you that we're drawing the greatest crowds in history to our evangelism, that's a lie. Now dear friend before there were any blacktop roads and cafes and motels and the like, I have a record that 30 years before John Wesley preached, no a number of years before John Wesley preached there were two Frenchmen drawing a crowd of 30,000 people a night. Do you know when George Whitfield came to Boston the population of the city was only 12,000 and he drew 14,000 people a night. There were no blacktop roads and no automobiles and no press announcements and no radio. The Holy Ghost was there and people all threw snow up to their knees. The man said I robbed the old mayor but she got too tired telling my wife and I so he said I got down and just let the wife ride and when I got too wet and cold in my legs I got on the old man and George Whitfield was about 23 years of age then. And when he preached and he had no financial back, no modern gimmicks, no advertising, you don't need to advertise a fire. When he descends everybody knows when God descends. And they said when the Spirit of God descended over Utica and a hundred miles out at sea when boats got, it was just as though they passed through a cloud or a curtain and after that men didn't smoke and nobody served liquor and people were afraid to be perfect. The influence of the Spirit of God was reaching a hundred miles out into the Atlantic and prevenient ways began to work in the hearts of men and they were glad to get to the place of safety and glad to get converted by the time they got back to this, into this coming place. And God's just the same. Oh brother, one great thing that I have proved and everybody else has is God the Holy Ghost has filled you. There's one thing will be revolutionizing your life amongst others and that surely is your prayer life. So there's only one way to pray and that's there in the epistles of the uh little epistle of Jude where it says praying in the Holy Ghost. And you know I'm afraid we don't tie the devil up anymore. We don't embarrass the devil, he embarrasses us. We don't go along and say you're not going to pass or we should do because amongst the other things that God has done, Jesus delegated his power. We scream and we shout and say Lord you're over a good far more exceeding abundance of all that we can either ask or think and then everybody says amen. But that's not the the scripture says that God is over a good far more exceeding abundance of all that we can either ask or think according to the power of the earth within us. And the hold up is not in God, the hold up is in us. We don't love enough and weep enough and pray enough. There isn't a living man, there isn't a demon can make God alive. When men meet meet conditions, God meets them. But it all begins here because if you don't get the foundation right, you can't get anything else can you? And if you don't have biblical regeneration, we can have a lot of exciting gifts that are not necessarily gifts of the spirit. We can have a lot of supernatural evidence and all supernatural evidence is not born of the Holy Ghost. I believe God is these days one reason why I came here. Amongst other things I believe that God is doing what he said he would do. He's setting the solitary in families. He's bringing people of like faith and like ideas maybe with aspects of theology, pre-trib and post. That doesn't make too much difference as far as I'm concerned here. What he is concerned is he's after people who are pure in heart, who are passionate in spirit, who long to spread great outpouring of the spirit so we can present to Jesus. And to me it's still consistent with a world at rest. You may say, well I've got my defenses up by the way here because I know what the Bible says and I know where you're going to come. You're going to say at the end time there's going to be a great falling away. You can't fall out of a basket if you're not in it, can you? People can't fall away from truth in our senses because most of them have never heard it. But I believe there's going to be a great confrontation of holy truth. There's going to be a great visitation of God who's going to raise up prophets, who's going to raise up these great and wonderful men for this end time. And if we have 500 million people converted in the next three years and that will be the greatest revival in history, do you know Satan would still have three billion people left in the earth? 500 million isn't many out of the world population today. I look for a harvest. I look for the greatest visitation of God in the history of mankind. I believe God's going to topple our systems. I believe he's going to bring us naked. We won't come full. We're too fat and flourishing. We've had our seven years of plenty and all we've done is give God as little time, as little money as necessary. You say we give more commissions than any other country. True enough, but we don't give as much commissions as we spend on dog meat. All right, come on, come on, come on. Not only true of our nation, it's true of the Gentiles, it's true of the British, it's true of the Church of Jesus Christ almost universally. And while I spoil the prospect of Jesus coming, I still say, Lord, I hope you don't come just, please, just once more. Before you cut the tree down, give us a year to dig round it and fertilize it and let's bring many sons to glory. Let's see the greatest outpouring of the Spirit. Let's see you blast a hole into communism. Let's see you destroy part of Romanism, twin eagles as far as I'm concerned. Both don't understand Protestantism. I believe God's going to do it. He did it through Wesley. He had set the balance of power in Wesley's day. And the things that started then, part of it, of course, was the destruction of slavery because it started there, at least in the British Empire, and so many other reforms and so many other miracles there were. It started because God got a man who not merely wanted his rotten sins forgiven because Wesley didn't have too many. He wanted his personality to be filled with God. He wanted a God-directed intellect. He wanted God-directed emotions. He wanted God-controlled spirit, passions. He wanted everything in subjection to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And when God got that man, in total, he wrote another page in history. And I'm convinced of this, that when we get to a place of owning our bankruptcy, and seeing us preachers getting down in the dust and acknowledging that we go through our sermons and we go through our, and we go through a performance Sunday by Sunday and our bottom houses don't break our hearts anymore. Well, we're not going to have heartbroken congregations till we have heartbroken preachers. But when we get them, God will pour out his Spirit on all things. We will see the greatest revival that this world has ever known.
Ye Must Be Born Again - Part 2
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Leonard Ravenhill (1907 - 1994). British-American evangelist, author, and revivalist born in Leeds, England. Converted at 14 in a Methodist revival, he trained at Cliff College, a Methodist Bible school, and was mentored by Samuel Chadwick. Ordained in the 1930s, he preached across England with the Faith Mission and held tent crusades, influenced by the Welsh Revival’s fervor. In 1950, he moved to the United States, later settling in Texas, where he ministered independently, focusing on prayer and repentance. Ravenhill authored books like Why Revival Tarries (1959) and Sodom Had No Bible, urging the church toward holiness. He spoke at major conferences, including with Youth for Christ, and mentored figures like David Wilkerson and Keith Green. Married to Martha Beaton in 1939, they had three sons, all in ministry. Known for his fiery sermons and late-night prayer meetings, he corresponded with A.W. Tozer and admired Charles Spurgeon. His writings and recordings, widely available online, emphasize spiritual awakening over institutional religion. Ravenhill’s call for revival continues to inspire evangelical movements globally.