In this sermon, Leonard Ravenhill shares his personal experience of coming to Jesus at a young age. He attributes his conversion not to a deep understanding of sin or a conviction of wrongdoing, but rather to the example set by his father's zealous pursuit of God. Ravenhill emphasizes the importance of having a fervent zeal for God, as demonstrated by his father's love for reading the Word, attending prayer meetings, and preaching on street corners. He encourages listeners to seek the same kind of passion and devotion in their own lives, drawing inspiration from the hymn "My Faith Looks Up to Thee."

Welcome to from the pulpit and classic sermons. Each week we bring you a different message from some of history's greatest speakers in the Christian faith and powerful sermons from modern preachers too. This week we have Leonard Ravenhill with his message, A man of God, part one. I've often said that I didn't come to Jesus as an old English hymn like we used to sing so often. I came to Jesus as I was weary and worn and sad. I didn't because I was fourteen and I didn't understand my father's zeal for God. I didn't come because I was convicted of sin. I came because of the blanks in my life, like he relished reading the word of God and he relished going to prayer meetings, even half nights of prayer. And also, more than ever, he relished being a street corner preacher. And that, do you remember the hymn My Faith Looks Up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary? Well, the last stanza says, May thy rich grace impart strength to my fainting heart, my zeal inspire. And my daddy had inspired zeal. God lifted the beggar from the dunghill. He completely changed my daddy. He'd been to a certain system of religion which made him fearful and terrified of priestcraft and all that. And he got marvelously born again as a result of hearing David Matthews, who went through the Welsh Revival. Then he wrote the classic, it's still a classic, on I Saw the Welsh Revival. And my daddy had never been in meetings like that. And the fervor and the joy, particularly I remember seeing David Matthews when I was five years of age. I'd never seen anybody preach like, he sang like, his mouth like an oval. And he had a shock of black wavy hair. And he had a zeal and he had a joy in the Lord that stirred and my daddy got saved. Well, as a result of that, as I say, he became fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. I never saw him downcast. I never saw him suggesting about giving up. But I mean, when he got saved, he tossed away his interest in professional football and everything else, which of course became a style in England. After you're saved, you never go to a movie, you never go to a professional match. There's so much profanity and so forth. And when I saw that, and I saw the joy and we lived in comparative poverty, we had much money, my daddy was a laborer. And as a result of that, as I say, at 14 he took me to a half night of prayer. There were three other men there and they prayed. And my daddy's a big husky man, taking his coat off at one o'clock in the morning in a room that had no heat and praying with tears and further. From that very day, I recognized there's something far beyond what the average Christian had. And then after that, of course, I went to the Methodist class meeting till I was 14 and that was full of the joy of the Lord. I mean, people spoke as though God lived with them all the time and he did. And there was that same kind of zeal there. I mean, even in those days back in the 19-odd, well, that'd be around 1912, just before World War I even, there was a half hour song singing before the Sunday night service, but they didn't sing choruses except choruses from hymns. Or they sang great hymns like, And Can It Be and so forth. And you had men who would explode in a meeting when he was singing, And Can It Be. My chains fell off. One old boy would jump at the tears all down his face. He'd strike it up at the end. There's a woman to the left of us. I used to watch her because her neck would go red and then she'd suddenly burst with a hallelujah, you know. We talk about the joy of the Lord. I'd never seen anything like it. Well, at that time, Samuel Chadwick was preaching in the, he had revival on the local level in Leeds. And of course, the conversation in our house, we hardly ever had a newspaper. There's no talk about films, of course. We were just coming out then. It was all about God and mysteries and so forth. Daddy took me to see Padgig Wilkes, who founded the Japan Rescue Mission. I was about 12, I think. I heard C.T. stood to give a lecture one morning and later saw Miss Cable and Miss Francesca, friends that walked through China and the Gobi Desert and all that kind of, my daddy, wherever there was anything foreign. I'll tell you, at that time, Doncaster was 25 miles away from us. Well, there was a Pentecostal fellowship there. And I forget the name of the Bible teacher, but my daddy might get on a bus to town, another bus from town to Doncaster, and then walk the rest of the way to the fellowship and stay there a weekend and come back radiant as though he'd been in the upper room, which he just about had, because Smith Wigglesworth was one of the teachers there and all those guys. And nobody in those days scornfully said that faith healing is fake healing. I mean, there were living evidences of people spontaneously getting out of wheelchairs and so forth, but it wasn't that. Really, it was a transformation in personality. I mean, they went back to the churches and had prayer meetings. And in our town, we had a little man, he's only, I don't think he weighed about 110 pounds. And for years, he fasted and prayed. He was a Pentecostal, which was despised. In fact, his wife said to hear him pray, he'd be praying in another room. It was like, you know, a man having a personal encounter with God, he'd wrestle with God. Well, then George Jeffress came along in 1927. The whole city was swept in three weeks with the Holy Ghost. And the church is there today. It's called Bridge Street in Leeds, England. That church is still, it's in its third enlargement. When other churches are going down, they still have that same. They were born in the fire, they maintain the fire, but they maintain prayer all the time. Well, then from there, I was in a factory, working in a factory one day, and I heard a voice say, follow me. And I turned, it was so real, I took my tape off my neck, I was a tailor's cutter, put my shoes down and prayed. I remember saying clearly to the Lord, Lord, not only will I not go back, I won't even look back. And that day I applied to go to Cliff College. And then when Chadwick was the principal there, well, Chadwick, the birds both had a flock together. So the great character in America at that time was A. B. Simpson, founder of Christian Mission Alliance. And also in Scotland, there was a man by the name of MacIntyre, I don't know, have you read his little book, Hidden Life of Prayer? It's one of the classics. It's still published, better than it just re-published. Well, those three men, of course, across the Atlantic there was no telephone in those days, and mail was slow, but they corresponded all the time because they were all on one level. Well, Chadwick went out, and right opposite his church in the middle of Leeds, there's an obituary statue of Queen Victoria with a big spread in front of it, and men used to stand there and preach. Well, an atheist stood there, and he laughed at people coming after church and scorned them, and told you, a man standing in a coward's castle, a pulpit, he talks one way, you can't answer, listen to me, and they listened. Well, Chadwick went out and listened to this man scorning the Bible and everything, and one day he said, listen, I've listened to you three weeks, you didn't come and listen to me. You come and listen to me, he said, I'll come next. So he came, and there's a big horseshoe gallery, and right opposite the preacher was a clock, and this man, the leader, sat behind the clock, and the other ten men sat with him, and they came to the altar the first night they were there, and it wiped out the whole testimony of the atheists. Then it wiped out all the devilry in the community on a local level, and it was all prayer. I mean, he wrote the book The Way to Pentecost, and after that he wrote the book The Path of Prayer, and that's where he lived, and that's where it rubbed off on so many of us, that we saw a living example of a man who walked in the power of the Spirit. Well, then I could go on for long enough, but I won't. All the time I've tried to feed myself, and I've gathered books out of a rack of books on prayer, and a whole stack of books on historic revival, which we don't have anymore. America hasn't had a revival in the last 70 years that I know of. I mean, revival that closes their shops, and as soon as people get home, they want to get to the sanctuary, and they don't stay till seven o'clock till eight. They stay till eight till midnight and after, when the Holy Ghost really comes. I think very often we're praying in ignorance. We want the Holy Spirit to come, but what do we want him to come for? Just to increase our numbers? Just so our kids won't go to the devil? I mean, are we jealous for God's glory? And to me, that's what revival is all about. Revival is an invasion of God by the Spirit, and if America doesn't have one within the next 10 years, it's going to be horrible living in this country. Crime is out of hand now. Immorality abounds. Herpes, AIDS, every devilish thing is prospering. Plus all the power of the cults save multi-million dollars. So it's inevitable that we have revival. Paul said, would the God you could bear with me in my following. Yeah. Indeed bear with me, for I'm jealous over you with godly jealousy. For I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ, but I fear less by any means as the serpent beguiled thee through his subtlety. So your mind should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For he that cometh preaches another Jesus, whom we have not preached. Or if he receive another spirit, which he have not received, or another gospel, which he have not accepted, you might well bear with him. Is there another gospel that we're listening to? It's not the gospel. What is that gospel? Well, in England we used to call it modernism, or you call it liberalism here. That, I mean, the Baptists now, for a long time they've had contention about the Bible is the very word of God. I mean, can't we alter it? And as I say very often, we've revised it, but God never has. And I still think the King James Version is nearest to the best. And those old-fashioned guys preached it. I think, brother, there's, we've almost no preachers in America. Everybody's teaching, teaching, teaching. I think I have 500 tapes in there that people, I think I got 40 tapes in the first month of this year. You must read my interpretation of Revelation. You must read my story. There is, there's at least 50 John the Baptists in the country. So they think they are. If a guy tells me I'm a John the Baptist, I say, have you increased your insurance? They say, why? I say, you've only got to live six months. He goes, oh no, no, no. But we're not preaching the gospel. What are we preaching? Well, there's one, there was two groups. There's one group now that's preaching signs and wonders all the time. There's another one that says it's love and signs. If it's signs and wonders in God's name, what did he do for Judas? He saw everything Jesus did, then look what he did. And what if some of the guys have been preaching about the Holy Ghost and miracles? Where are they now? One's in jail, the other's in the gutter comparatively. We've got to get back to the cross. If I've been lifted up, I will draw all men. You get the Emmaus road, going down the Emmaus road, it says that Jesus opened unto them the scriptures, then he opened their eyes, then he opened their understanding. But then you think after they, and read the last chapter in Luke, and it says the most awesome thing there that they sat and talked with Jesus and had breakfast with him. One of them broke bread and he gave him bread. The other one broke a honeycomb. Well, can you imagine you giving Jesus personally honeycomb, and he puts his hand out, there's a nail hole through it. And they saw the most astounding miracle in history, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And wait a minute, he says, come with me. And they went to order for the next most astounding miracle, the ascension of Jesus into heaven. Couldn't they live on that? Couldn't they live? There isn't a devil in hell who will ever move us. We had breakfast with Jesus, we talked with Jesus, we shared a meal with Jesus. Couldn't you live on that forever? Jesus says, no, you can't. Well, we saw him ascended into heaven, not many of us, but we saw him. The two most outstanding things, and yet Jesus says, tarry till you be endued. You can't live on the emotion of it. That's the trouble with the most horrible thing I know that happens in evangelism today. We don't value the human soul. When are we going to get serious about being serious about the most serious thing in the world, the birth of people at the altar. I watched the close of a service in Dallas a few weeks ago. At the end, about 15 people came in four minutes. They said a prayer and gone away. Well, my reaction to that brother was this, I can't get my car through a car wash in four minutes. Can they pass from death unto life? Can they put off the old man and put on the new man, as you Jews have figured? Can they get married to Christ in four minutes? Of course not. In fact, when you read Seven Pentecostal Pioneers, which everybody should read because it's still printed, it tells you there that they had one place where they had meetings for three weeks, and I forget the number, something like 964 people came and everyone was dealt with personally. We used to go to a city without money and pitch a tent and stay there 12 weeks. The churches are still there 60 years after. But everybody came to the altar. If you came, I'd come with a bible at the side of you and ask you what your problem was. You wanted to be saved, we took you through the scriptures. If we spend an hour, so what? I don't often watch TV. I watched a special, there was a special about three years ago, of all the things they were going to show on one of the, what is it called now? Well, it was a special on animals, the birth of a giraffe. Now I said to Martha, well darling, I want to see this. So anyhow, the guy said, now listen, I've already gone through this once, but let me show you. And he brought in this female, he said, look her head is 14 feet from the ground, which I thought was a long way. Now here's the male, his head is 19 feet from the ground, now watch. And he said, I've been through this, so watch. And he said, well bring the camera right in front of the giraffe. He said, now look, she's spreading her legs at the back. You see that black thing hanging? That's a little baby and it's going to fall five to six feet, according to the height of the animal, onto a bed of straw. So what's that got to do with the gospel? It broke my heart. Why? Because I watched that thing. And he said, now watch the next, now you see the thing's coming now. Now watch, watch, he said. There. And the thing dropped onto the big bed of straw. And he said, now this takes between three and four hours. And he said, now watch. And the little thing tried to get up and it rolled over. It tried again, it rolled over. It tried up again, it rolled the other way. Now watch carefully, he said. And the next time it tried, the mother put a hoof behind its backside and lifted it up and it stood up. And she turned around and nodded. And the little thing nodded. And he said, that's almost four hours. So I went to the room to pray and mother said, what's wrong? I said, darling, I said, it takes four hours to get a baby giraffe born. It doesn't take four minutes for somebody to get born at our altars today. Oh, well, Graham said it more than once, just stay a few minutes, stay a few minutes in God's name. What do you mean stay a few minutes? Was Gethsemane a few minutes? Was a temptation in the wilderness a few minutes? We're trying to get people in. I guarantee that not five percent of people in America or England are genuinely born again of the Spirit. They're born again of a decision. They give up a few lousy habits, some of them. And some of them don't. They go right back. And then you tell you there's nothing in it. Dear brother, I was at a certain place. I preached on the new birth. I thought there was pretty much liberty. And I said, if any of you want this experience of birth in Christ, come forward. The men come down the aisle and go to the room on the right. Women go down on the left. So there were half a dozen in each group. Well, that was that was nine o'clock. And we stayed in that room till ten, helping men. And they were really broken before God. Then at ten o'clock, there's a knock on the door. And I said, come in. And it was the pastor. He said, can I bring this lady in? Will you pray with her? I said, well, if you stay, she's a big, gorgeous looking blonde. She knows when I hit the ground and she bursted. And she said, I want to tell you something, Mr. Ramey. I said, well, tell me, I'll listen. She said, this is the 14th time I've come out for this. I went to a certain Bible school for three years. We had three revivals a year. And each time I went, that was nine times. And he said, since then, I've been to other meetings. Somebody slips their arm around me and says, don't worry, dear. Jesus paid it all. He knows when you said you're sorry that that's all that matters. And I said, that's not true. And I said that we'll stay with you while you really get a real relationship with God. So we stayed. And she passed from death to life. How do I know? Because two years after I was passing the church, she was coming out with the Bible. And I said to her, he said, that's a good woman you prayed for the last time you were here. She's the best Bible teacher we have. But the thing was, before she got saved and back to Bible school day, she got married. She got divorced. She had a child. She had a broken heart, a broken life. It would have been avoided if she got saved the first time. But she didn't get saved. She made a mental decision. She wanted to be better. She wanted to go to heaven. But how many people really want to know? I mean, isn't the essence of Christianity Christ in you, the hope of glory? There's no other religion in the world where a man's God comes and lives inside of him. And we've made it appear as though if you get saved, of course, you're going to give up all your joys. You give up these crazy habits. You don't go to movies. You don't go to ball games. You're Christ is all you want. But what on the other hand, what about peace that passes all understanding? What about a home eternal in the heavens? What about the eternal aspect? We don't present that. I got two fellows in here the other week, and they came from a certain, I'd like to say, came from Criswell Seminary. And one of them said immediately, I know how to put a sermon together. I know how to get words together, but I have no power. The other man burst into it. I said, I just opened a paper and your picture's in there. He said, well, I didn't put it somewhere. I said, but you're a preacher. He said, I've had 300 people saved in the last three months. How do you know? And he hadn't an answer. Well, he said, I don't know. I've often wondered. They'll come out and say a prayer and go out and live the same. I said, they don't. If they're born again, you become a new creature. If any man anywhere at any time being Christ, and there's no better example of that than Dave Wilkerson with all the people he covers, unless I don't know if you know Jackie Pullinger. You know Jackie? Well, she was here to see me. And I mean, she goes, she doesn't go out till 10 o'clock at night. She goes to the gutters. She goes to the outcasts. She goes to the prostitutes. She goes to men that have smoked opium for 50 years. She goes to women that have prostituted for 40 years. You've got to have a gospel. You can't give a mental flip to those people. And she stays with them until they're born again in the Spirit of God, as one of the most amazing works in the world, as far as I'm concerned. But where are the people? I mean, you add up all the people who made a profession of Christ in the last few years of our crusades, or let me put it here and then quit. I had a veteran missionary from South America, and he said, before I came up with the Raymond, I was talking to a veteran missionary, and he said, brother, if you add up all the crusades in South America, and all the people, everybody in South America has been saved five times in the last 15 years. Well, is it the same in this country? Are we talking about how many people came to the meeting? How many people came forward? Why aren't the churches increasing? I had a lawyer call me from one of the greatest churches in the country. So Mr. Raymond, at least a thousand people walk down the aisle in our church every year. And after three years of doing that, he said the church is still the same size. We still have the same seating capacity. The prayer meetings haven't grown. There's no evidence except that these people come forward every Sunday. Why haven't they? As I said to you earlier today, brother, the darkness of this day is the gift of the church to the world. The street meetings have gone. Dear God, with all kinds of ministries around here, but Tyler goes to hell. How many churches do you have, the mega churches in Dallas? I guess you can't find one street. I spent 50 years of my life in street meetings. Every Saturday night, I went out at 9 30 till midnight. And after every night, whether it was snowing or raining or what, we went out to the same place. And people came out of taverns and out of movie houses at 10 o'clock and stayed an hour and two hours in the cold. No air-conditioned buildings. No nice, no attractive singers. Just testament to that. One man said this man was in jail. This man used to run around with women. This man has a prison record. This man over there used to beat his wife in the transfer. This girl was a prostitute. And put them out living flesh and blood. Nobody could argue. People would stand and say, why are you the only preacher in the town does this? I don't know except God told me to do it and I do it. Well, that's where the lost people are. A man would be an idiot to buy a hundred dollar fishing gear and fish in his bathtub. And that's all we do in church. We're fishing with the same people every week. And people are dying without God. I'm glad, dear brother, I was raised in a church where we had another preachers off and boarding. I devoured the Methodist in book 80 years ago and I can recite still dozens and dozens of hymns. And one was a hymn by Andrew Bonner, Go labor on, spend and be spent. Thy joys do the master's will. It is the way the master went, should not the servant tread it still. Men die in darkness at your side without a hope to cheer the tomb. Take up the torch and wave it wide. The torch that lights time's thickest gloom. I go to the prayer meeting. Somebody will pray that. After that, somebody will pray the prayer of one of the modern women there from India. What was her name? Amy Carmichael. Yeah, thank you, Amy Carmichael. You know, give me a love that leads the way, a faith which nothing can dismay, a hope, no disappointments, tired of passion that will burn like. Let me not sink to be a cloth. The woman in way over a hundred pounds. Make me thy fuel flame of God. She never married. She took a one-way ticket to the mission field. People go now, there's plenty of money in our church. Oh, we'd love you to come back for Christmas or Thanksgiving. Do come back. So they break off and come back. They go back. They run to and fro. They have to go with a camera. They have to go with a load of stuff. You don't find the old-fashioned missionaries going like they used to do. Jackie went on a single ticket to Hong Kong when she was 19. She's 44 now. She's still there. She's shed a million tears, but she's had some of the greatest characters, infamous characters saved there. How many people come forward in your church, and you can go back afterwards and say, well, you came to the altar. Well, what happened in your life? I think that everybody that comes to the altar, we should visit them during the week and be sure that they did pass from death unto life, because what happens? They say, well, I've been out twice and never got anything. Well, they can't, because so to do so mentally. I don't see any brokenness. I see kids come forward in a crusade. They're laughing and joining hands. They go out, and the first thing they do is stop at a hot dog place or something. They don't go home to grieve and read the Word and find out if it's true. They go back full of jollity, and they sing on the bus. We had a wonderful time, but what are we doing? The summer's gone. The harvest has passed, and we're not saved. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, well, I'm saying, dear brother, I don't believe that we reach the conscience like some people, like one of the classic things Dr. Tozzi used to quote to me often. He used to say, well, Len, remember when our famous American preacher, D.L. Moody, went to London, the first day he preached, he'd laugh at his Yankee clothes. The second day, they laughed at his style. The third day, Cambridge University men were there laughing, and he stopped them. He said, gentlemen, laugh at my style. Laugh at my Americanism. But he said, in God's name, don't laugh at the Word of God. He says, the Word of God, I would just as soon handle fault-lightning. But what happened? He's an illiterate man, comparative with no education. He goes to London. He goes from London to Scotland, where Alexander White was the king of the pulpit at that time, and Alexander White sits on the edge of his chair with his mouth open. Well, what has this man got? He doesn't know history too well, doesn't quote scripture very correctly, but there's something about him. So much so that across town, there's a man, I don't know if you know a book, written by Henry Drummond, the greatest thing in the world, it was one of the greatest classics ever. And Alexander White says to Drummond, hey, come over and hear this fellow. We haven't had an evangelist like this. And they were spellbound. What would have happened if he'd gone to London for three days? He didn't. He went for eight months. He went to Scotland, and the tent hall is still there. I think they called it a tent hall, because people came out of the tent that Moody had and went in that hall. Also, one of the greatest Bible schools ever, Glasgow Bible Institute, was founded because of that. And the money was given to him. Well, I'll tell you, you talk about a background. One of the most wonderful men I ever saw was C.T. Studd. Well, C.T. Studd's daddy used to buddy with the King of England. When I used to do, in World War II, I went to one of the largest air force camps in the nation, and I had to go up a hill and to the right, in the moonlight, I could see this estate where C.T. used to live with a private racecourse. Well, C.T.'s daddy went to London, mixed up with all the society, and he had about this Yankee preacher, well, let's go. Well, when he got there, somebody asked a man to pray while, what do you call him now? Well, Moody was on the platform going to preach. They sang to him and said, pray. This guy went on and on, and Moody jumped up and said, let's sing a song while this fellow finishes. So immediately, they were happy. You know, the guy wasn't tied up to formality. Well, they listened, and C.T., and I think his father got saved there, as a result, he took the three most famous cricketers in England. C.T. was the Babe Ruth English critic, cricket. Well, they went, and the whole society like that went. Well, C.T. joined up with the other six, and they formed the Cambridge Seven, and went to China. I mean, there's all kinds of things happened out of that. One revival of an illiterate man that didn't care if they laughed at his clothes and everything, and he received opposition. Well, nothing happened like that till the 1920s, or 26 or something like that, when George Jeffreys went to Holcruise Edge in England, and Stephen Jeffreys had greater work than that, and they got to a time without a penny, and believe got to fill an auditorium with 3,000 people in a week, and they did it. And they weren't great expositors. Brother Reagan Hill, in Jeremiah, the prophet says, Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths. Where is the good way? Walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, we will not walk therein. Well, going back, Brother Larry, I said, we've turned the light out in the street. We've no more street meetings. We've turned the light out Sunday night. Many churches turn up at Sunday night meeting, Wednesday night. That's about the biggest tragedy. People say, don't you think we should get the Bible back in school? I said, that's not the first problem. Get it back in the home. Why don't, how many people meet, ask the deacons in your church, ask the pastor, how many of you have family worship? They don't have it. As soon as supper's over, they have to go and get on TV and leave it till the kid has got to bed. They don't know the Word of God. I had a man here, and his daughter came to bring me some mail, and she's 14. I said, well, dearie, how much scripture have you memorized? Oh, I haven't memorized any. I said, can you memorize the Ten Commandments? He couldn't say the Ten Commandments. Two days after, a young guy came, he lives across town. He has seven children. The eldest boy is 13. He's memorized every word of chapter in Proverbs. And the other boy is 10, and he's memorized 12 chapters of Proverbs, every word. The man gets up with his wife at 4 to 4.30 in the morning. They have an hour together with the Word of God. They get the children up just after 5, and then teach them the Word of God and prayer. And then the children have a rest, and the mother teaches them the rest of the day. She's homeschooling them how they do it. But those little kids are walking Bibles. We don't know the Word of God. Two things we don't know. In fact, I said to the seminary men, do you know God? Well, I didn't know, no. I answered, yes, I know. Oh, I learned Hebrew. I didn't ask if you know Hebrew. Do you know God? You ask 10 young people in your church to answer in less than 50 words, why did Jesus come into the world? To save us from hell, to save us from sin. And so they go on. But what does Jesus say in John 17 too, that they may know thee, the only true God. And that's the answer. We don't know God. If we knew God, we'd set the world on fire. If we knew God, we wouldn't beg for money. We know things about God, but we don't know God. We don't know God. But I want to tell you then, in 1932, I preached in Swansea, South Wales, in a little upper room, and there's a lady there with white hair. And she said, do you know my husband? I said, I didn't know you had one. She said, well, my husband is Major Russell. I said, well, who's Major Russell? In the British Army? No salvation on me. She said, would you come up and have a meal with us? I said, well, this is a crusade. And she said, I only have Friday off. I said, I'll take the bus and come up to places called Rovina. I'll come up Friday afternoon. She said, well, come and have some tea and we'll talk. So, here's a grey-haired fellow sitting. I said to him, well, it's a privilege to come and talk with you. How old are you? He said, well, I'm 82. And he said, I'll tell you some things that when you're my age, I said, I never lived to be 82, and I'm 84 now, nearly 85. But he shared the office with William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. I said, what were the days like? Days like heaven on earth. He said, God, the Holy Ghost came. They mentioned a certain place which is on the Strand in London. He said, now it's a theatre. In those days, it's a hall you're hired. And movies weren't houses and theatres weren't open on Sundays. So, you could rent them on Sundays. So, you used to rent them Saturday and Sunday. And he said, I've been in that meeting. He said, people won't believe you when you tell them. And that was 1932, so it's almost 60 years back. And he said, when you tell them, they won't believe you. I said, well, they'll believe me, not tell me. I said, I want to know. I don't care if it puts my nose in the ground. I don't care what you say. As long as you realize that just as you're a link with the past, at my age of 82, I'll be a link with another generation that doesn't know God. So, I said, well, I'll tell you what happened. He said, William Booth could preach like nobody else from Jeremiah. The harvest is past, as somebody said it. Oh, his favorite was, and he had a gruff voice, if those run with a footman and they have worried thee, I will now do in the swelling of the Jordan, fire of Ollie, which meant say hallelujah. So, they all wrote hallelujah, you know. And he said that what William Booth could do, he could get men trembling, he said. He said, as a matter of fact, you'll give them a hymn book of maybe 25 pages and they'd sit with it on their lap and shred it while they were, they were so disturbed. He said, you could see where these men have been, all the back pews were full of shredded hymn books. The same thing happened in 1926. I talked with the greatest revivalist Ireland's ever had, W.P. Nicholson. He said, by the way, he said, people used to shred the hymn books when we listened. They were under conviction. They were so nervous and sweat would run off their noses, not that it doesn't happen anymore. Anyhow, going back to this, he said, the old William Wood Peach hellfire boy, he said, he could make you shake. And he said, but he couldn't make an altar call. So, he would say, now come to the mercy seat, come to the mercy seat, come, run for your life, you're going to hell. And he couldn't get anywhere. He'd shout out, where is Lawley? Where is Lawley? Well, Commissioner Lawley was one of the stalwarts of the Salvation Army, like Bringle. And he said, he was under the platform and it would come out. And they used to hand clothes to each other, you know, like somebody gave me your suit, it would be hanging down on me. And Commissioner Lawley's coat was down to his ankles. But he said, it'd come out on all fours and do this, there'd be a cloud of dust. And then Lawley would begin to make an appeal, you know, come to the mercy seat. And he said, the altar would be lined, but sometimes they wouldn't come. He said, the general would turn around and roar at us, you know, pray. Everybody looked down and prayed. And usually there's a break, but he said, this day they prayed and nothing happened. So he said again, pray. He said, everybody's nervous. Hey, what's happening to the old boy? He's angry, he's angry. Well, let's pray. And he said, Lord, Lord, move right now, move right now. And he said, nobody came. So a third time he'd roar, you know, get hold of God. He said, this meeting is going to go to hell. These people are perishing. Some of them are wealthy, some are poor, some are ignorant, some are backslidden. Pray. And he said, the Holy Ghost would take all the men on the backseat and lift them bodily over the congregation and drop them on the altar. I've said to Pentecostals, you saw that, you'd run for the door, you'd say spiritism or something. I said, but there was an unwritten law in the Salvation Army. They called their churches a core, you know, like the army does, C-O-R-P-S, core. And it was an unwritten law in the Salvation Army that when you finished your street meeting at nine o'clock Saturday night, you go to pray till midnight. And he said to me, we had men that would pray. And one old man particularly would say, he'd jump up, maybe 12 or one, and raise his hand and shout, victory, victory. There'll be 10 tomorrow. And he said, there'll be 9 or 10 saved. Or he'd say, there'll be 15, there'll be 13 or 14. He said, it was only one or 12 every time. But he said, remember, we had street meetings, we got baptized with rotten eggs. In those days, there were no houses with bathrooms. They kept a, what they call a pot under the bed, and they'd know it was empty. And people would run out and throw it from a window and throw urine on them. And he said, we kept two coats. He kept an old one with eggs. And you went home and scraped them off, and then you put your Sunday best on. And he said, Bert, he said, who cares when there's revival? As I said to you, you don't have to advertise a fire. Colonel Bringle was the biggest orator in America. And I don't know who it was, or the multimillionaires offered to build him the biggest church in America, give him the biggest salary if he would stay. He said, I'm going to London. Why? Because there's a fire. There's a man called William Booth, he was a Methodist, they got rid of him. And he's having revival, and he went and had revival. And he gathered all kinds of people to him. But the secret again, that they had a burning. You went in a prayer meeting, you know, you felt the glory, the majesty of God. And now you don't do that. Like I was with a team not long ago, well, before the meeting at night, we went in a side room and they'd hot tea and cold tea and drinks and fruit and everything, and trivia talking and straight off there to the platform. How do you suddenly turn off and suddenly become spiritual? We traveled the country, but I walked the length of England, walked the breadth of England with five college fellows. We slept in fields at night, we slept in churches. We didn't get a penny wage in six months, and nobody ever said a word. Because at night, we'd kneel in the street at ten and eleven o'clock at night, and people get saved in the street. You don't care who where you sleep. We slept in sleeping bags for three years, slept on the floor of churches. Anyway, they'd take us in, but we had revival. The churches are still standing today. But now I go to a meeting and everybody says, oh, nice to see you. And they want to talk. I say, leave me alone. Well, we went, brother, we had a solid hour of prayer together, eleven o'clock to twelve in the morning. Then we had a bit of a rest in the afternoon and mostly went to prayer. Then we had a prayer meeting one hour before the night service, went on the platform, charged with the power of God and full of expectation and faith. And night by night, the elders were lined with people. We don't do that today. We've got Miss so-and-so, she's number one on the charts. We've got so-and-so. And it's humanism, we're depending on something we have. I mean, you clap, you go to one charismatic meeting, you've been to them all. You stand and sing for thirty, forty minutes. We're trying to work something up when God has to send something down. I can remember, dear brother, when you went to a holiness meeting in England or a Pentecostal, there were more people at the altar before the service than after. I used to fear going when I was fourteen. I used to go, my daddy used to take me to a Pentecostal meeting and the whole row, the throng before, and they'd be praying with energy and crying to God. One old man particularly would say, come Lord and walk in our midst. And I used to think, I hope he doesn't because I'm scared to death he would. But God used to come in the meeting. And then at the end he didn't have to beg and sing emotional songs, there's room at the cross. Forget it, there's room on the cross. Forget there's room at the cross. Get on the cross. And as Joseph said, a man going down the road with a cross, you know, one thing about him, he wasn't coming back. Our people don't want to die. There's only two kinds of people in the world, those who are dead to sin and those who are dead in sin. And we're in one of the two. In fact, you talked about victory, they laugh at you. Oh, you can't live in victory? Well then, why don't you be a Buddhist to somebody? What do you do with somebody that says, look, I don't just want to get sick, I want to be pure in heart. You can't be pure in heart. Who says so? One of the latest books off the press says you can't. Who cares a hillaby? What does the Word of God say? What did Jesus say to the bad woman that came to him? Go and sin less. He says that to a woman who's been spending in immorality before the cross. What does Paul say? Let him that stole steal less. No study, it's cut off. What we need in America, dear brothers, is more than ever, we need people to go forth with a new birth message. Forget all about tongues, forget all about miracles and signs and wonders, in case they're not happening anyhow. Let's get back to real genuine conversion. Why? Most of our kids, our teenagers, they go to a Christian camp. Well, Christian camps are not much better than others. I mean, Adam Israel here, one of the few men I really respect in the world, he came from India and he came through Hawaii, so he went to a very famous Bible school there. What do you think of it? He said, well, he said the girl's shorts were so bad when they came toward me, I was disgusted. When they went the other way, it was worse. So he said to the world famous leader, you've no dress code here. He said, what do you mean? He said, well, the girls come towards me. He said, you can't tell their shorts on the social. When they go the other way, they're terrible. And the reply he got from the famous leader was, as long as their cheeks are not showing, they're all right. So as a girl's backside to be showing, you can't even not preach holiness, you can't preach modesty these days. Because kids are used to getting saved and going straight back to the old way. They go mixed bathing in some of the meetings around here. They'll have two missionary groups go to wet and wild. But what do guys want to stand with half naked women, women in bikinis or as near as they can to there. I had a man came to see me a few weeks ago and he said, he'd been to a ministry near here. And he said, I went to the meeting last night. It was very good. I enjoyed it. But then he said this morning, they said we were meeting at the swimming pool. He said, there was my wife. For the first time in her life, my five children saw the mother almost naked, standing in a pool. And I realized this is not for me. And he left it. And another man left not after. And he said, if you can't have modesty, where can you have it? And they don't want to pray. They have no appetite for prayer. But the old salvation army thrived on prayer. The greatest revivals in history, the Shang Tung revival. When Munson was there. And the woman that died last year of a hundred years old, Bertha Smith with the Southern Baptist. She was born again. She was filled with the Holy Ghost in that revival. And they expected God to move in phenomenal ways. They didn't advertise it. We don't have to advertise it. What we need is God in the midst. If God is in the midst, a lot of our stuff would never take place. Just let God come. His very presence. That happened in the Welsh revival. You know, when you go to a revival now, the big guy gets up, they sing, then Bev Shea, somebody's going to sing, then something else and it's all programmed beforehand. How can God come in? I went with that Welshman who went through the revival with William Booth. But then I said, what about the Welsh revival? He said, I'll tell you what happened in the Welsh revival. He said, I was with William Booth in his office. We were having meetings in London and somebody sent me a note. My wife. Revival has broken out. There's a young man in his twenties, Evan Roberts, 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 Swansea and 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 for 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. Our people walk out. But then he stood up for 15 minutes. He said, yeah, I don't like it in your life. The Holy Ghost came upon him. He was a big man. When he prayed, God just came down as though he'd jumped in the audience. And that happened more than once. But he said, once I had that young man. And of course, the Welsh can sing like nobody on earth. God me, O thou great Jehovah, these are the great hymns. And he said, at the end of the meeting, he said, no, no, no, no, no, no. He just, after he'd prayed for three hours and spoke for 15 minutes, he went out. At 10 o'clock at night, he'd 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 calm, a 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? OK. So then he said, I stayed the first day. Boy, he said, I was hooked. Here's this young man preaching like nobody had ever preached in my life. Praying as nobody had prayed. Tears. And he said, I listened the first day. I thought, well, I can still get the train overnight and get back to my office Monday morning. But boy, he said, Sunday night was better, so I stayed the next day. And then I thought, well, I'm in trouble. Any other general will be after me. Oh, no, no, because I can use this other day as my day off for this week. And he kept bargaining with himself like that. And he goes home on Saturday, Friday night. He goes in the office. He said, William Booth just turned around and said, Russell, where have you been? You know, barked at me. And he said to himself quietly, General, I've been to heaven. You've been where? I've been to heaven. What do you mean you've been to heaven? He said, sir, the Spirit of God is on a man in Wales, a young man, almost without tutoring. He hadn't been to a Salvation Army college, but God is upon him. He's been in hiding for 13 years. Dear God, he's only 26 years old and he prayed for 13 years. I said to preachers, when I get the chance, I said, listen, you say I need a vacation and you need a cave. I said, can you go for three? Surely you can't go for three hours without turning TV on. You don't need grace to pull down strongholds. You need grace to stop TV. That's the devilish thing. It's not the devil, it's your choices. Anyhow, he said, the General said, well, tell me about it. Tell me about this. He said, the General just relaxed. And I told him how God had worked. And he said, there's no begging people. They come and rush to the scene and cry. And he said, the police are not arresting anybody. The judges are not, the courts are closed. The taverns are closed. They have prayer meetings in the coal mine. They used to take a little tin, you know, with the, what do you call it, a food tin you take. And they call it, I mean, they're snapped. You've only a little time. And they'd eat the snap before they start working. And then they'd spend the rest of the time praying in the dinner hour or singing in the coal mines. And he said, I went on to tell him what miracles were being done. He said, the General put his finger up. He said, remember Russell, he said, in the very early days, the very first days of the salvation, I mean, it was just like that. The glory of the Lord came down. We're getting too commercial. We're getting too mechanical. We'll have to go back to the glory of the Lord in the same way. And all the Bible says is pray without ceasing. It doesn't say preach without ceasing. It doesn't say do miracles. It says pray. And somebody may ask me, if I know you fellows, well, I'd say, well, I've met them, but I don't know anybody. He said, I've prayed with him. I don't care who he is. And I know some of the outstanding personalities in the world today, but I haven't prayed with them, so I don't know them. But once a man opens his heart, and it's one thing for us to stand between, uh, stand before God on behalf of people. It's a great thing to stand before God on behalf of people, and stand before God, and stand before people on behalf of God. As I quoted the other day to some people, uh, what, in about the 34th chapter of, of Exodus, where Moses had been on the mountain, and God says, let me alone. I said, that's God saying to a man, leave me alone. I said, did God ever say that to you? I said, it's wonderful when a man lays hold of God. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing, in one sense, when a man lays hold of God, but when God lays hold of a man, and God says, let me alone, and I'll absolutely destroy these people. But I was not there. John Wesley preached on Romans 8, 16, more than anything else, the witness of the Spirit. Oh, well, I want the Spirit to bear witness. I'm walking in holiness. I want you to bear witness. I'm speaking truth. I want you to, I said, do you want to, do you want to borrow his language in Romans 9, where Paul said, I call the Holy Ghost to bear witness that I lie not. Can the Holy Ghost bear witness? I said, in essence, what Paul says, then I'll be damned, if need be, if only you'll just render heavens and come down. And I said, you get, you keep praying again. I said, well, 64, for all that thou would render heavens and God shoots back, render your hearts and not your garments. Don't put a one-hour prayer meeting on, make it a lifestyle. I used to, I told the deacons, the last church I had in England, I said, listen, I'll take the church on this condition. Number one, that you meet with me at least a half hour to 40 minutes before every service. Number two, you abolish offerings, so we don't have to beg from the poor people, and that you meet with me Friday night, nine o'clock till midnight. We did and God turned that church around. And I don't know any ministry that's had the same time in prayer. Have you read, have you read George Burns at all? Well, you read Robert Merrimack? No, George Burns. Have you read Robert Merrimack Shane? Yes. Well, Merrimack Shane, I stood outside of his church in, in, anyhow, it's on the coast of Scotland, Aberdeen, Scotland. Well, he was a man that prayed and wept and prayed and wept and prayed and wept until his health went, so he went to be a missionary. He's a brilliant man in Hebrew, and he went and had a rest in what was Israel then, or Palestine. And while he was there, W.C. Burns came in the church and the Holy Ghost was upon him. Of course, it spent days and weeks in prayer, and the whole town was rocked with the revival. The whole city was moved. There'd never been revival before or since. That's how they killed Scythe's revival. So, anyhow, W.C. Burns has this tremendous move of God, and we would book him up for London and book him up for Manchester. Oh, the anointing is on him. Open the way, let the guy go. Out of that, God picked that man up, dear brother, and took him to China and dropped him in China, and he died unknown from a modern Pentecost. Go and pray. And he went and prayed and fasted and wept in that area. So, what happened? After him, Jonathan Goforth went. Mrs. Goforth says, they will go to a meeting in the morning at nine and stand and sing and praise God, and they'll still be praising him at five o'clock. Nobody sat down, even though they were tired. You go the next day, there'll be no singing. It will be prayer the whole day. You go the next day, there's neither singing nor prayer the whole day in the quietness, she said, and in the quietness was more productive than the other meetings. I told the people this week, we've forgotten how to be quiet. Be still and know that I'm God. He's as real as be filled with the Spirit. Anyhow, Jonathan Goforth went. The whole ground was broken up and teared, tear-stained by W.C. Burns. Jonathan Goforth went. After him came Watchman Lee, and I don't know if you read the life of John Sung. Have you read his life? That's the most fabulous thing I've read outside the New Testament, I think. Well, I quoted him as being the most distinguished scholar, foreign scholar ever came to America. He learned English. He learned German and did his PhD in German. He took his BA degree, his MA degree, learned a new language, took his doctorate in three and a half years. And finally, he went to Union Theological Seminary in New York. And when he was there, a young man said to him, you look more like a preacher than like a scientist. Well, five different nations begged him to come on their payroll and be their leader in nuclear fission, even those years ago, and he refused them. Well, to cut a long story short, one night he knelt down. He said, well, Lord, my dad is a Methodist preacher, and I'm not born again. I don't know God. And right there, God came upon him. He jumped up, opened the door, ran down the corridor in Union Theological Seminary, like the one in Acts 3, leaping and praising God. The next day, they certified him insane and put him in the white, in a institution. And there the Lord said to him, I can get you out of here, but stay here, I'll forget the number, like 195 days, I'll teach you my way. And he learned, dear brother, how to analyze a chapter eight different ways. And then he went back to China. He threw all his diplomas overboard in the China Sea, and he began his ministry, married the girl that the neighbor had said they'd marry when they were kids. To cut a long story short, I was preaching in a meeting, and I quoted the story. And a big oversized woman at the organ, and she'd been playing, and tears rolling down her face. So afterwards, she said, well, that was a lovely meeting. I said, I noticed you were weeping. I said, that story of John Sung, did you hear it before? She said, no, Mr. Ray, I used to play in his meetings in revival in China. I said, well, did I exaggerate? She said, you couldn't exaggerate that man, doesn't know what you're saying. But she said, I'll tell you one thing, that I went after he died, and he died as a young man. He died of tuberculosis. She said, he would come from a meeting at night, and he never did like the others. He didn't get western clothes, and he wanted an American jacket and a white shirt. He just had a fitted tie on his shoulder, and a lock of hair that fell down. And she said, he stayed in the home of a friend of mine, and he would leave a half door open, you know, to get the air. And she said, he would come in after the meeting, and his shirt sticking to his back, and he would be heeding like a dog. And this lady said to her after, you know, of all the preachers I've ever had in this country, I've never seen a man like John Sung. He lives and moves as his being in God. And she said, he comes home every night sobbing and weeping, and his shirt stuck to his back. And she said, one scripture only leaps to my mind when I see him. She said, what's that? This is my body, which is broken for you. And she said, that was where he lived. He didn't tell other people who lived there, but he lived economically, and he lived all the time. Well, his book is written, Tan Inman Mission published it, and if you see it, buy it. It's worth a thousand dollars. I mean, I've tried to contact men that like that have lived moving out there, being in God. They have theories. There's all kinds of theory. In fact, right now, I should be in Australia with a team that will go on to Hong Kong and China and everywhere. But the thing is, there's a hunger now. Young men in this country have never seen revival. They never see meetings that go until two or three in the morning. People that won't go home, or if they do go home, say, I can't eat. I can't turn on my TV. I'm so hungry for God. I'm so tired of my neighbor's going to hell. You've been listening to the From the Pulpit in Classic Sermon series. This week, you heard Leonard Ravenhill with his message, A Man of God, Part One. Tune in next week to hear Part Two of A Man of God with Leonard Ravenhill on the From the Pulpit in Classic Sermon series.