In this sermon transcript, the speaker, Brother Ravenhill, engages in a conversation with a man named Brother Singh about the procedure in his church service. Brother Singh describes a unique and intense worship experience where the first three hours are dedicated to praise, worship, and adoration, followed by three hours of prayer and intercession, and then three hours of breaking bread and sharing testimonies. He mentions that sometimes the meetings can last for 11 to 14 hours, as they allow the Holy Spirit to move and direct the gathering. Brother Ravenhill expresses his longing for a sovereign move of the Holy Spirit in the church today and highlights the importance of spending more time in prayer.

What happens? All the meetings over. Off they go. They hardly get through the door. They're smoking or they rush out 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 tracks we give out, our records or something. Who says he has? We sanctify the flesh to a great degree. We put personalities up just like the world does. I just 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 eleven and come out at twelve 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 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 said to me, no, 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 had, I could leave Friday afternoon and that 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. How people walk out. But then he stood up for 15 minutes. He said, have you ever 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 though he jumped in the audience. And that happened more than once. And he said at the end of the meeting, he said, of course, you end the meeting with 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, it was ready. I was ready to preach. And suddenly I was overcome with grief. And I just walked forward and sat on the floor, 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 about 3,000. He said, there's a girl in here who has been molested by a man, sexually molested. And the man is going to go to jail. And as he said, the girl about 16 ran 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, broke up in weeping and broke in the seeking. Same thing happened without ever, ever having to open his mouth preaching. 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 till 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 a holy place saying, God is the here and that 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 are one you ordered 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 prosperous 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. So I'm 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, she needs, the church needs God. If the church gets God, America will soon feel it. She'll be staggering. But I've been in a little church, and it's a tiny gospel church on the hills of Wales. Service starts half past ten on Sunday morning. No, and he said, I haven't been in a church in England where they know how to worship. Well, I said, this is very interesting, Brother Singh, would you... 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 he'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. 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 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 of you that are hungry and thirsty, 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. Like Jonah, they didn't want to go there. I don't agree. And God will send revival. Don't you make a mistake. If he can't get a way to send it in America, to Hollywood or somewhere else, then he will set out setting fire to every single life. Amen.