Why Revival Tarries

It is not a personal opinion, but it is a documented fact-the Church in America is in trouble. Why? What's the problem? What's the solution?

In December 1959, God used a man by the name of Leonard Ravenhill to pen these words which gives a precise diagnosis of the church in America today. I pray that as you read them, and reread them, you will be as convicted and repentant as I have been:

No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. The pulpit can be a shop-window to display one's talents; the prayer closet allows no show offs.

Poverty stricken as the church is today in many things, she is most stricken here, in the place of prayer. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere.

The secret of praying is praying in secret. A sinning man will stop praying, and a praying man will stop sinning. Spiritual adolescents say, "I'll not go tonight, it's only the prayer meeting." We are beggared and bankrupt, but not broken, not even bent.

Are we so substandard to New Testament Christianity that we know not the historical faith of our fathers, but only the hysterical faith of our fellows? Prayer is to the believer what capital is to the business man. Can we deny that in the modern church setup the main cause of anxiety is money? Yet that which tries the modern churches the most, troubled the New Testament church the least. Our accent is on paying; theirs was on praying. When we have payed, the place is taken. When they had prayed, the place was shaken!

In the matter of New Testament, Spirit-inspired, hell-shaking, world-breaking prayer, never has so much been left by so many to so few. For this kind of prayer there is no substitute. We do it-or die!


Taken from Why Revival Tarries, by Leonard Ravenhill, Fires of Revival Publishers, 1959.