Revival Praying - 3

More amazing truths...

In heaven there will be no praying. All the faith we exercise must be exercised here. All the praying must be done here, for heaven will not be a place to make up a pitiable backlog of unfinished praying.

"Rend your hearts" (Joel 2:13). We rend our hearts by godly consideration and self-examination; by the conviction of the Holy Spirit; by recognition of our failure to pray; by confessing that we have more appetite for material food than for spiritual; by acknowledging that we like the company of men more than the company of God; by abhorring ourselves because we love to play more than pray.

Men who prayed most accomplished the most. Lasting prayers bring lasting revivals. Prayer does not condition God; prayer conditions us. Prayer does not win God to our view; it reveals God's view to us. Prayer is not merit, so that by withdrawing from the world we of necessity gain special favors of God. Prayer is not purchasing things from God.

Prayer is another way to telling God that we have all confidence in Him but no confidence in our own native powers.

No man is greater than his prayer life.

~ Excerpted from Leonard Ravenhill's Revival Praying

If you have read all 3 posts of excerpts from Ravehill's book, I would strongly suggest re-reading them. It sounds beautiful at first (if you understood anything at all), and then you will wonder what was so wonderful and forget it all. READ IT AGAIN! And most importantly, PRAY!

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.

Revival Praying

I am currently reading an amazing book entitled Revival Praying, by Leonard Ravenhill, and I want to share with you some of what I've read with prayerful desire that these blazing truths will set your own hearts on fire to seek God in prayer:

The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the Church has lost her power to weep over it... Every church without a prayer meeting condemns us; every Bible daily unopened condemns us; every promise of God unused condemns us; every lost neighbor condemns us; every lost heathen condemns us; every dry eye among us condemns us; every unclaimed opportunity for God condemns us. Next year is not ours. Tomorrow may be too late. Unless we repent now, unless we return and fire the prayer altars now,unless we fast and weep now, woe unto us at the judgment!

Often we hear the prayer, "Lord, Thou art able to do this." That prayer is very good and may build up confidence in the pray-er [that is to say, the one who is offering up the prayer]. But - and this is important - to say "God is able" is not faith... But - and here is where I fail - I do not have the faith to believe that God will [do what I believe He is able to do]. My theology says that God can do it, but on the faith end I fail. I have said before that one of these days someone will read the Bible for the first time, believe it, and act on it with a daring, simple faith. Then we long-time believers will bow in shame, crying, "Lord, help our unbelief."

Here is a great illustration from Ravenhill's father's own personal experience:

One day in the course of his [Ravenhill's father] hospital visitation, a sick man listened to my father's testimony, then jabbed back at him feelingly with, "I have prayed to God and He did not hear me. Why?"

Dad answered the man this way: "Suppose the king of our country [Great Britain] came into this room right now, and I asked him for five pounds (equal to twenty dollars then), would the king give it to me? After all, I am a loyal subject to the crown."

The man thought for a moment and then replied, "I don't suppose that he would give it."

"Well then," Father said, "suppose that after I had asked the king and had been refused, the Prince of Wales had come into the room. Would he [the Prince] get the money he asked for?"

"Oh yes," answered the man, "but then, he's the king's son."

"Exactly right!" Father said. "Relationship makes all the difference."

Here is another spirit-provoking words:

...There is an article by Bakht Singh. This dear Christian leader in India says, "The indigenous churches in India have a great burden for American just now... and are praying that God will visit your country with revival... You feel sorry for us in India because of our poverty in material things. We who know the Lord in India feel sorry for you in America because of your spiritual poverty. We pray that God may give you gold tried in the fire which He had promised to those who know the power of His resurrection... In our churches we spend four or five or six hours in prayer and worship, and frequently our people wait on the Lord in prayer all night; but in America after you have been in church for one hour, you begin to look at your watches. We pray that god may open your eyes to the true meaning of worship... To attract people to meetings, you have a great dependence on posters, on advertising, on promotion, and on the build-up of a human being; in India we have nothing more than the Lord Himself and we find that He is sufficient. Before a Christian meeting in India we never announce who the speaker will be. When the people come, they come to seek the Lord and not a human being or to hear some special favorite speaking to them. We have had as many as 12,000 people come together just to worship the Lord and to have fellowship together. We are praying that the people in America might also come to church with a hunger for God and not merely a hunger to see some form of amusement or hear choirs or the voice of any man."

Convicting, isn't it?

FOCUS

This is actually the introductory letter from Pastor Carter on his newsletter. God's been giving us this message for a while now.

Dear Friend,

Are you one of the many people today who harbor grave concerns about the future? Whether it’s on a global, national or personal level, the storms of our time seem to be taking on an intensity we have not known before.

In these times, the lessons of Scripture can become our greatest comfort. I am reminded of another day and another storm which believers in Jesus Christ had to face (Mark 4:35–41). Self-concern so gripped these early believers that they lost focus—and then they lost faith. Two things are worth noting in the Scripture. Firstly, we see that they were indeed going to the other side and that Jesus was with them in the journey. Secondly, there were “other little ships” alongside them (v. 36), trying to make the same journey without the relationship with the Savior which they enjoyed. I believe the disciples lost faith in the midst of the storm because they lost focus. When they feared for themselves, they lost sight of God and those around them.

God wants to give you His heart for other people. Ask Him for the capacity to care, as He does, about where those in our generation will spend eternity. I have personally found that fear gives way to faith as I allow God to perfect His love for others within me.

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Carter Conlon
Senior Pastor

I encourage you all to read the full Newsletter.

the Cost

This is an excerpt from A.W Tozer's Success and the Christian: The Cost of Spiritual Maturity. I encourage you all to meditate on these truths:

I want to tell you that it costs to know Jesus Christ... It costs, and most people won't pay the price for it at all. That's why most Christians are common. They won't go on because for Christ's sake, they have surrendered evil things - that is, things that are injurious and things that are unclean and grossly sinful; but they are unwilling to surrender "good things."

There are certain things we won't do and for Christ's sake we have surrendered those evil things. But this is the mark of a common Christian and the man who's never gone beyond that is a mediocre Christian...

As a little child will take his teddy bear to bed with him, so we grownups have our "teddy bears" too. We have what to God must look like teddy bears and dolls. We hang on to them. A baby, of course, has a right to that... But the point I'm making is that we oldsters, we mature people, people even in their teens, when we still insist upon hanging on to things, we will worship them. Whatever you hang on to, you worship because it gets between you and God, whether it be property or family or reputation or security or your life itself. Jesus taught that we couldn't even hang on to our life itself...

Any external treasure that touches your heart is a curse. [Apostle] Paul said, "I give that up so I might go on to deeply enriched and increasing intimacy and vast expanses of knowledge of the One who is intimate and illimitable in His beauty and I go on to know Him. And that I might know Him, I give all this up." He never allowed anything to touch his heart. (pp.19-21, emphasis mine)