To the effect that hardened criminals, some of
them who have fought until their bodies were
bruised and bloody, some of them who have
been pistol-whipped, some of them who have
broken almost every law of God and man,
and feared neither God nor man, have feared
one thing.
And that one thing was when the judge
said that they were to be sentenced to
jail, but in solitary confinement.
And one very famous or really notorious criminal
sank on his knees and raised his hands
and begged the judge to lengthen his period
behind the bars, but let him be in
company with other men.
Because he said if I'm alone year after
year after year, I'm afraid that I can't
stand the loneliness.
Let him be in company with other men.
Because he said if I'm alone year after
year after year, I'm afraid that I can't
stand the loneliness.
Prophets are a strange breed of men.
They're God's emergency men for crisis hours.
And the price of being a prophet is
that a man has to live alone.
All God's great men have been very, very
lonely men.
A lady once asked me what university I
went to, and I said I went to
Bush University.
She said well I never heard of anybody
from Bush University.
Who was the student there?
And he spent 40 years on the backside
of the wall.
And not only does he send a man
like that, but the other prophets in the
word of God were very strange men.
Isaiah was prepared to walk around the streets
of Jerusalem barefooted for three years.
Well that doesn't sound strange except you remember
perhaps that when the prodigal came home, his
father said put shoes on his feet because
no slaves ever wore shoes.
That's why the colored people used to sing
so joyously, all God's children got shoes.
I got shoes, you got shoes.
Gonna walk all over God's heaven in shoes
because they never had shoes.
And Isaiah was prepared to be identified as
a slave.
Another man was prepared to lay on his
right side for a period of time.
Another man like Jeremiah walked down the street
with a yoke around his neck and said
the nation was in bondage to sin as
he was in bondage to that yoke.
And tonight I want to think about a
man that lived a very very lonely life.
I said very often that when I turn
over the pages of the Bible that one
of the most challenging pages is the white
page that divides the testaments.
It doesn't say anything, it says one of
the most eloquent things that it's possible to
say.
It's a white page but it covers a
period of 400 years of total darkness.
400 years of darkness without any light, 400
years of silence without any prophetic voice.
If I were to say to you tonight
I'll give you paper and pencil and you
can write and give me from your knowledge
of the word of God who was the
greatest man that ever lived outside of Jesus
Christ, I guess you might come up with
Moses or you might come up with Paul
and you'll be wrong because the greatest character
reader of all time was Jesus himself and
he said that the greatest man that was
ever born of woman was John Baptist.
A man who spent some 20 years there
in the fastness of the desert.
A lonely man, a strange man.
His father was a priest of the Cross
of Adia.
There were 20,000 priests at that time
and his father was a member I think
of the 12th caste or the 8th caste
and it's an amazing thing when you think
of it, at least to me it is.
You know just like the tide has to
go the farthest out before it can return,
we as individuals, we as churches, we as
nations, as I see the picture, have to
come to a place of recognizing our total
barrenness before ever we bring forth life.
And you can tell me of a little
spark of revival in your church, thank God
for it, but you'll never convince me there's
any revival in America.
I'm too smart to know that.
And I'll bring you statistics that will drown
you.
And I'll bring you evidence that makes us
realize the fact that we've all been sold.
And the great need in America tonight, I'm
convinced of this, as good as Bible schools
are with their assembly lines and producing their
preachers, the greatest need in America tonight is
prophets.
And as Deer Trooper used to say, if
you're going to be a prophet, brother, you
better settle.
Or it was Dr. Parker who originally said,
if you're going to be a prophet, you'll
have to preach repentance and before you start,
dedicate your head to heaven because you won't
last much more than six months maybe.
John the Baptist himself didn't.
This man's father then was a very wonderful
man and he had a very wonderful wife.
But she was a barren woman.
It was a barren woman that brought to
birth Samuel.
It was a barren woman that brought to
birth the amazing man by the name of
Samson.
It was a woman who one day was
no longer magnetized by her beauty, was no
longer fascinated by her beautiful garments, was no
longer adored or interested in the adoration of
the people because unquestionably she was the queen
of the tribe.
But one day she came unto herself in
prostration and I think with tears in her
eyes and her hair no longer beautifully done
and she fell down before her husband and
said, Jacob, give me cure.
And I say to you with all the
power of my hands and being tonight that
I think the time has come when we
share.
Wonderful cry.
When you remember he said, give me liberty
or give me death.
But if you've got an ounce of Christ
in you, this is the hour to say,
give me a revival or give me death.
Because if we can live without revival, then
we're not where God wants us to be.
Our brother spoke his 13th word.
I wish you'd heard it this morning.
Get a tape.
If you don't get any of mine, I
wouldn't care.
That message on Hosea, brother that, in the
saliva of whoever hides out.
That brother showed us, brother Conrad Morel whose
book is on the table there, he showed
us, I believe, exactly where the nation is
today.
And the judgments that are going to fall
if we don't get revival and maybe it's
but Christ and chaos.
Not revival or revolution, but revival and revolution.
Not revival without concentration camps.
Maybe the only place you'll get it is
in concentration camps.
But as sure as that's my hand, I'm
sure God is going to give us revival.
And this man had prayed and his wife
had prayed.
And they decided that God would give them
just one thing that seemed very natural.
The husband was given a very wonderful privilege
because only once in the life of a
priest did he go into the temple and
minister in the way that Zacharias was ministering
on this occasion.
After all, there was a long line of
20,000 priests and most of them wouldn't
get in on it anyhow.
And so just once in his priestly life,
when at nine o'clock in the morning
on the temple porch of Herod, because Herod
financed the building of it, some men stood
with their trumpets to heaven and sounded a
blast and the court opened its doors and
the priest went down the aisle there and
as he went down nervous under the burden
of his garments, doing something that was unrehearsed,
doing something he would never do again, he
walked up there to the front of the
temple and as he walked there I say
I believe nervous.
I believe he was maybe just shaking from
head to foot.
And lo behold as he got there right
to the side of the temple, there was
an angel standing there.
Well don't you think some of you preachers
would be startled if an angel came and
stood at the side of you next Sunday
morning while you were preaching?
I think I might.
And as soon as he saw the angel
his nervousness was intensified and the angel said,
I am Gabriel.
Gabriel sent from the presence of God and
he said he stood on the right side
of the altar because when he was going
to speak to the nation he stood on
the left side of the altar.
But here he is on the right side
of the altar and he says, fear not
thy prayer is heard, thy wife Elizabeth shall...
And I think that some of the greatest
shocks you and I could have would be
to have our prayers answered.
We're so used to praying and nothing happened
that if they got answered we'd be startled.
My wife is going to bear a son.
Yes she's going to bear a son.
And he's to be great in the sight
of God.
The man couldn't believe it and because of
this you remember he was smitten with dumbness.
And eventually they brought him a pad and
a table and he wrote and he said
what his name was going to be and
they said well there's no one.
It was of this little child that Jesus
said he should be the greatest man that
was ever born of woman.
And when this woman was pregnant with this
child she went to see her cousin who
was pregnant and immediately she got into the
presence of Jesus.
I'm going to stress that, not until that.
Immediately Elizabeth came with a child in her
womb and got to marry with a child
in her womb.
Then the child left within her womb and
it says, and this is the wonder of
the whole thing to me.
It says that Zacharias was filled with the
Holy Ghost.
It says Elizabeth was filled with the Holy
Ghost.
And it says that John Baptist was filled
with the Holy Ghost through his mother.
What an amazing thing.
Everything about this is all according to a
divine plan, moving in the realm of the
spirit of God.
You see I discovered something.
I'm convinced, you may be convinced otherwise, but
I am convinced there never has been a
supernatural birth either of an individual or revival
without prayer.
And it says here in the thirty-seventh
verse of the second chapter of Luke, there
was a widow of four score and four
years and she departed not from the temple
and she was over a hundred years of
age.
She didn't depart from the temple.
She stayed in the presence of God with
fasting and with prayer and in the night
and in the day.
Think of this amazing man Simeon.
Mary and Joseph come into the temple and
they present to Simeon a child.
There's nothing unusual about this.
This is a routine every day.
And suddenly as he vacates this child, suddenly
he says, my God, here is the salvation
of the nation.
Do you think that wasn't a Claude Van
Jerusalem that night that a deliberate couple was
going to get Israel from abusing the Pharisees
and the Sadducees and the High Priests and
the Holy Ghost was yet born?
He says here is the child.
Here is the desire of all the nations.
Terminated in the womb of the Virgin Mary
and all New Testament prophecy was born.
That Christ was the fulfillment of the old
and he was the fulfillment of the new.
And then we know very little about John
Baptist.
He went into the wilderness until the day
of his showing forth.
Oh, I'd love to have heard John Baptist
preach, wouldn't you?
I'd like to have seen this man when
God said, John, you've been here twenty years.
I told you this morning it takes God
twenty years to make it.
You boys went to Bible school for six
months and been preaching twenty years.
No wonder you're dry.
You better go back.
Go back to the wilderness.
Go back.
There's nothing on God's earth like silence.
Just take your Bibles, forget everything and everybody
and shut up.
And John came.
Oh, I'd like to have seen him.
He was a strange man.
He didn't wear any clerical attire like in
our country all the preachers, Pentecostals, Presbyterians all
wear their collars backwards way.
Because most of them are going backwards way.
But anyhow, they wore clerical attire.
The priest would go down the street and
they would say the distinctive marks of God.
But John wore no strange garments.
He was strange by the fact he wore
only a little girdle around his loins.
That was his strange dress.
He was no gourmet.
He didn't go through the long, long menu
and say, well, I don't know, my jaded
appetite, there's nothing.
You sure you don't have shrimp with a
special?
He just caught the flies as they were
going past.
The locusts.
Pulled the wings off and put them on
a hot rock.
He had locust burgers every day.
And all the prophets had honey, you know,
and Jesus ate honey too.
And Samson ate it.
You know, it's true that wherever honey goes,
no germs ever follow it.
It's one of the greatest foods you can
get.
And John Baptist had it.
Strange in his dress, strange in his diet,
strange in his doctrine.
But I don't care how you measure this
man.
Sometimes we think he's kind of an errand
boy, just opening the door to let Jesus
in.
Look, you do a bit of research and
you'll discover that John Baptist was a preacher
and a prophet in his own right and
he preached no less than 29 different points
of doctrine in the slight evidence that we
have in the New Testament.
29 different points of doctrine that he preached.
I say there have been a period of
400 years.
That's an awful...
Do you think that God Almighty might save
America by giving us 400 years of total
darkness?
And do you think we could survive it?
A lot of people want Jesus to come
today because they're scared stiff of suffering, that's
why.
After all, the church has been getting lashed
and tormented and stripped and prostituted.
There's a little man, some of you read
his book, God's Smuggler.
How many read his book, God's Smuggler?
Wonderful, exciting book.
I know that little man, he said, I
gave him that title before either he put
the book together.
I said, well, you're God's Smuggler.
And he had been over in China.
And he said when he was in Shanghai,
he noticed men sitting on the side of
the road.
They'd been for a haircut.
And when their hair was cut, they left
a cross in the middle of their heads.
Cut it, the patches out, left their hair
standing up in a cross there.
And then they had to sit on the
sidewalk.
And the young communists came past and hoisted
all the flesh they could and spat on
their heads.
The church tonight is suffering untold agony.
You listen to the sweet little boys over
the radio, they'll tell you that the Russians
are going to come and burn the country.
You're so thin with your fasting, and your
homes are so poor and poverty stricken, and
you haven't too many dimes to your name,
and you're so stricken and helpless, that just
out of his great mercy, the Lord's going
to rapture you.
...is for the Christians in Russia and the
Christians in China.
But no body in America is going to
suffer because we're the most faithful.
Isn't that lovely?
Well, the man who tells you that is
a liar.
I know a preacher who was in Shanghai,
and when he was there, because he had
preached, pardon me, he was in Formosa, and
because he had preached in Shanghai twenty years
before and found the Chinese people were in
Shanghai, were in Formosa where they are now,
he went in to see them, and he
greeted them in his eloquent Chinese, and they
ignored him.
One man looked up from his busy work
and just frowned and said, you're a false
prophet.
A what?
You're a false...
a false prophet?
Why, I gave you lectures on Mormonism and
the other reasons.
I am not a false...
We remember when you were our pastor in
Shanghai, and you had some maps of the
world, and someone...
and you told us that for a long
time we were going to be washing...
but you said, don't you worry about that,
because just before that happened, the Lord's going
to...
The man said with tears streaming down his
face, my wife was dragged out of my
arms, and the last time I heard she'd
had three children to the Russian guards.
My daughter was taken away, and my sons
and my children were taken away.
You told us everything...
the Lord didn't spare us, we're living in
anguish and suffering.
Oh, we're living here now in a little
bit of ease and comfort, but there's nothing
that can bind us...
You're a false prophet, we can't listen to
you.
You better watch it, preacher, because one day
you might go into concentration camp and some
of your church...
it's easy to stand up and say excitedly,
we glory in tribulation and infirmity in necessities,
and you go home and have a steak...
Well, very reluctantly you did go to church,
sonny.
Sure did.
Oh, brother, we're heading for trouble, I'll tell
you.
God let these dear people, the darlings of
his heart, he let them go into captivity
for four hundred years...
And God never speaks.
Four hundred years and God never moves.
Four hundred years of ritual and formality and
sacrifice and all the ritualism that they went
through, but somehow it was a form of
godliness, and God decided to upset the apple
cart, if you like.
What did he do, send a legion of
angels?
No, no, no, no, no.
He took a little man, a baby, out
of the womb of its mother, and
he didn't find some secret way of coming
out.
If you'd walked down the desert there, you
could hardly tell the man the color of
his skin was...
I've broken my laws.
Sure.
You see, we think if we're really blessed
and successful, we're going to have to wear
a thirty dollar suit, and
in the richest, most country, we think of
the masters of...
Ah, the provincial men who walked with God.
They felt like God, they saw like God,
they wept like God, they...
They had no satisfaction in seeing the beauty
of the temple, the ritual formality, all the
things that they went through.
No, no, no, no.
God has gone from them.
My brother emphasized that this morning.
The spirit of the Lord departed from Samson
and he wept not.
One good Baptist preacher said to Dr. Tozer,
he told me this himself, he said, Len,
a Baptist preacher said something the other day
that shook me, but I think he's right.
He said if God withdrew the Holy Spirit,
tomorrow my church would function just the same.
He wouldn't even know that he'd gone.
We keep up the formality, the money is
coming in, people are nice, one or two
come to the...
But oh, what a difference when a man
gets a heart that craves for revival.
When John Baptist came, he came with no
lip that was buttoned.
He had nobody to please, he had no
program, he had no priorities that he was
trying to push ahead.
I remember preaching on one occasion, a brother
came up very graciously afterwards and he said,
you know, Brother Ravenhill, I believe God's given
you a ministry.
Well, I didn't need anybody to tell me
that, because if he hadn't, I wouldn't preach.
But he said if you'd only get along
on a mountain somewhere and just persuade God
to give you the gift of healing, I
think you could have the...
well, you could be one of the top
ten preachers in America.
Well, the Holy Ghost never told me I
had to be one of the top or
one of the bottom...
ten bottom ones.
I wouldn't care where I was.
But he said, you know, this is a
great drawing card.
Oh, Brother Miracle is the end.
And do you know what he says of
John Baptist?
It is true that Jesus produced miracles.
And I've heard men say about four-fifths
of his ministry.
Sure it was, because he had no gospel
to preach.
And he was trying to persuade them by
the very thing.
Because when he went into the temple in
the sentence of John, a woman said to
the big shots there, well, why don't you
arrest him?
Will the Messiah do more miracles when he
comes on this land?
But I want to tell you something for
nothing, that after this 400 years of stillness,
people were not running out to the desert
saying, have mercy on my son, he's a
lunatic.
People were not saying, hey, do you see
who I am?
I used to be blind at the street
corner, but now my eyes, I can see.
I used to be deaf.
I used to have a crippled arm.
There was no river of derelict humanity following
John Baptist.
No miracle?
No, sir.
Never opened blind eyes?
No, sir.
Never unplugged deaf ears?
No, sir.
He never raised a dead man?
No, he didn't raise a dead man, he
raised a dead nation.
And he did it without the miraculous.
He did it in the power of the
Holy Ghost.
Oh, when John came, I say he was
a successor than any other.
I think John had already had his program
from God and the Lord said, you'd better
get busy, boy, because you're not going to
be around here very long.
No, sir, they'll chop your head off if
you start preaching this.
Boy, we do have a few men that
are prepared to lose their heads for Jesus
right now.
I say again, most of you men know
to preach better than you do know, than
you do preach, but you won't do it
because you'll get kicked out of the synagogue.
You'll really have to trust God and that'll
be trouble, won't it?
And you've been paying in the minister's pension
fund.
Oh, brother, wouldn't that be awful to have
to sacrifice that for Jesus?
You say, I'll lay everything on the earth.
I'll set my golf club to my minister's
pension fund and my big TV and if
anything else you can have, Lord, but don't
intrude just too much on me kind of
thing.
Oh, I like to think of John Baptist
standing there, no sponsors, nobody to agree or
disagree with him.
He stood there and they came to see
this strange man, anointed by the Holy Ghost.
And I tell you, anointed by the Holy
Ghost.
You see, when you're a young guy, you
want people to recognize your ministry and you
have to go around begging.