Articles
Where are The Elijas of God?
by Leonard Ravenhill on October 20, 2012
"...and he prayed again, and
the sky poured rain, and the earth produced its fruit." - James
5:18
To the question, "Where is the Lord
God of Elijah?" we answer, "Where He has always been-on the throne!" But where
are the Elijahs of God? We know Elijah was "a man of like passions as we are,"
but alas! we are not men of like prayer as he was. One praying man stands as a
majority with God! Today God is bypassing men - not because they are too
ignorant, but because they are too self-sufficient. Brethren, our abilities are
our handicaps, and our talents our stumbling blocks!
Out of obscurity,
Elijah came on to the Old Testament stage, a full-grown man. Queen Jezebel, that
daughter of hell, had routed the priests of God and replaced them with groves to
false deities. Darkness covered the land and gross darkness the people, and they
were drinking iniquity like water. Every day the land, fouled with heathen
temples and idolatrous rites, saw smoke curling from a thousand cruel
altars.
Elijah lived with God. He thought about the nation's sin like
God; he grieved over sin like God; he spoke against sin like God. He was all
passion in his prayers and passionate in his denunciation of evil in the land.
He had no smooth preaching. Passion fired his preaching, and his words were on
the hearts of men as molten metal on their flesh.
Brethren, if we will do
God's work in God's way, at God's time, with God's power, we shall have God's
blessing and the devil's curses. When God opens the windows of heaven to bless
us, the devil will open the doors of hell to blast us. God's smile means the
devil's frown! Mere preachers may help anybody and hurt nobody; but prophets
will stir everybody and madden somebody. The preacher may go with the crowd; the
prophet goes against it. A man freed, fired, and filled with God will be branded
unpatriotic because he speaks against his nation's sins; unkind because his
tongue is a two-edged sword; unbalanced because the weight of preaching opinion
is against him. Preachers make pulpits famous; prophets make prisons famous. The
preacher will be heralded; the prophet hounded.
Ah! brother preachers, we
love the old saints, missionaries, martyrs, reformers: our Luthers, Bunyans,
Wesleys, Asburys, etc. We will write their biographies, reverence their
memories, frame their epitaphs, and build their monuments. We will do
anything except imitate them. We cherish the last drop of their blood,
but watch carefully the first drop of our own!
We try to help God out of
difficulties. Remember how Abraham tried to do this, and to this day the earth
is cursed with his folly because of Ishmael. On the other hand, Elijah made it
as difficult as he could for the Lord. He wanted fire, but yet he soaked the
sacrifice with water! God loves such holy boldness in our prayers. "Ask of
Me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost
parts of the earth for thy possession." (Psalm 2:8)
Oh, my
ministering brethren! Much of our praying is but giving God advice. Our praying
is discolored with ambition, either for ourselves or for our denomination.
Perish the thought! Our goal must be God alone. It is His honor that is defiled,
His blessed Son who is ignored, His laws broken, His name profaned, His book
forgotten, His house made a circus of social efforts.
Does God ever need
more patience with His people than when they are "praying"? We tell Him what to
do and then how to do it. We pass judgments and make appreciations in our
prayers. In short, we do everything except pray! No Bible
school can teach us this art. What Bible school has "prayer" on its curriculum?
The most important thing a man can study is the prayer part of the book. But
where is this taught? Let us strip off the last bandage and declare that many of
our presidents and teachers do not pray, shed no tears, know no travail.
Can they teach what they do not know?
The man who can get
believers to praying would, under God, usher in the greatest revival that the
world has ever known. There is no fault in God. He is able. God "is able to
do according to the power that worketh in us." God's problem today
is not communism, nor yet Romanism, nor liberalism, nor modernism. God's problem
is - dead fundamentalism!
"So because you are
lukewarm,and neither hot nor cold, I will spew
you out of my mouth." - Rev. 3:16
This
generation of preachers is responsible for this generation of sinners. At the
very doors of our churches are the masses - unwon because they are unreached,
unreached because they are unloved. Thank God for all that is being done for
missions overseas. Yet it is strangely true that we can get more "apparent"
concern for people across the world than for our perishing neighbors across the
street! With all our mass-evangelism, souls are won only in hundreds. Let an
atom bomb come and they will fall by the millions into hell.
Sin today is
both glamorized and popularized, thrown into the ear by radio, thrown into the
eye by television, and splashed on popular magazine covers. Churchgoers,
sermon-sick and teaching-tired, leave the meeting as they entered it -
visionless and passionless! Oh God, give this perishing generation ten thousand
John the Baptists!
Just as Moses could not mistake the sight of the
burning bush, so a nation could not mistake the sight of a burning man! God
meets fire with fire. John the Baptist was a new man with a new message. As a
man accused of murder hears the dread cry of the judge, "Guilty!" and pales at
it, so the crowd heard John's cry, "Repent!" until it rang down the corridors of
their minds, stirred memory, bowed the conscience and brought them
terror-stricken to repentance and baptism! After Pentecost, the onslaught of
Peter, fresh from his fiery baptism of the Spirit, shook the crowd until as one
man they cried out: "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Imagine someone
telling these sin-stricken men, "Just sign a card! Attend church regularly! Pay
your tithes!" No! A thousand times no!
"Oh, my God! If in our cultivated
unbelief and our theological twilight and our spiritual powerlessness, we have
grieved and are continuing to grieve Thy Holy Spirit, then in mercy spew us out
of Thy mouth! If Thou cannot do something with us and through us, then please
God, do something without us! Bypass us, and take up a people who have not yet
known Thee!"
Leonard Ravenhill was a powerful preacher and author of many stirring
books, including the classic, "Why Revival Tarries." Formerly one of England's
outstanding evangelists, he went to be with the Lord on Thanksgiving Day weekend
1994.