Monday, January 5, 2015

Where Are The Elijah's Of God?

Following in the vein of yesterdays's post, this one from another great Man of GodLeonard Ravenhill.

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. 

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. (Sound familiar? Pilgrim)

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.


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. 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!

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

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

“O Lord, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.”~Habakkuk 3:2

Wake-up, Pastors! Wake-up, Christians!

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