Revival Praying - 2

Here are more spirit-stirring excerpts from Leonard Ravenhill's Revival Praying. May these words stir you to be on your knees...

Prayer is taxing. Prayer is exacting. Prayer means enduring. prayer means denying self, a daily dying by choice. But someone says, "There's nothing wrong in going fishing for a couple of hours." Maybe not if you are prayed up. Yet there is something wrong when we go fishing or do some other thing without the Spirit's leading. It is wrong when instead of praying we do things just to please others. There cannot be two operators of the Christian's life. We are either Spirit led in everything or self led.

We will have to sacrifice precious things in our lives if we are going learn the great art of intercession... Affection can play havoc with devotional life. I believe it is but simple logic to say that a Christian is backslidden if he spends more time with a member of the opposite sex than he does in prayer and in the Word.

No one is a firmer believer in the power of prayer than the devil; not that he practices it, but he suffers from it. (Guy H. King)

Once again I say that at God's judgment bar we believers are going to be embarrassed, for as Dr. A.W. Tozer mentioned recently, "We are not only going to be judged for what we have done; we are going to be judged for what we could have done." That hurts. Oh what we could have done! Oh the sacrifice we could have made, the prayers we could have offered, the tears for the lost we could have shed, the souls we could have won to Christ! There are resources in God that we believers have never touched; there is wealth, spiritual wealth in God that we have never discovered; there is power in God that we have left untapped - all because we have been faithless and unbelieving.