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HERE IS TODAY'S CROSS TALK.
The boy wrote this, only one life will
soon be passed, only what's done for God
will last.
And when I am dying, how glad I
shall be if the lamp of my life
has been burned out for thee.
Only one life will soon be passed.
That's the voice of Leonard Ravenhill.
Excuse me, this is Ingrid Sleater.
Welcome to Cross Talk today.
We begin the program with just a little
audio from the preaching of an evangelist and
a preacher who made a very big impact
for the Lord Jesus Christ in the 20th
century.
And we're going to talk about him today
and discuss his life with someone who has
written a brand new biography of his life.
It's coming out in just a few weeks
time.
And I saw the promotion for this biography,
watched some of the video.
And I realized this was something that was
really needed on Cross Talk.
That we needed to talk about those that
God has used.
You know, so often on this program we
discuss what has gone wrong in the evangelical
church.
And we talk about all of the corruption
and the sad things that are going on
doctrinally.
But how wonderful to go back and to
see those that God has used to learn
from their example, to learn from their lives.
And to be encouraged to see that God
is still at work.
That there is a lot of counterfeit out
there, but there still is the genuine article.
And that's why we're doing this particular program
today.
I'd like to introduce our guest today.
His name is Mack Tomlinson.
And he is a pastor at Providence Chapel
in Denton, Texas.
He's a graduate of Hardin-Simmons University in
Abilene, Texas.
And Veritas Theological Seminary in Heber Springs, Arkansas.
He has pastored four churches since 1977 to
the present.
He also serves as the editorial director for
Free Grace Press in Conway, Arkansas.
He also travels widely in an itinerant preaching
ministry to churches and conferences here in the
United States and overseas.
He has been married to his wife, Linda,
for 32 years.
And they have six children and three grandchildren.
And he and his wife, Linda, were friends
with Leonard and Martha Ravenhill from 1977 until
their deaths in 1994 and 2001.
And he is uniquely qualified to do this
biography.
And I want to begin, first of all,
by welcoming our guest, Mack Tomlinson.
Hi, welcome to Crosstalk.
Hello, good afternoon.
It's nice to be with you.
Thank you for having me on.
Who was Leonard Ravenhill and why does it
matter today?
Well, Leonard Ravenhill was an Englishman born in
Leeds, England in 1907.
And he ministered for 28 years in the
British Isles and then moved to America in
1958.
And he was here for 36 years in
America and ministered all over the world.
And though he's been dead now 17 years
and with the Lord in heaven, his message
is timeless and is very applicable to Christians
today and to the Church of Jesus Christ.
You know, when you hear the kind of
preaching that Leonard Ravenhill did, it makes you
sit up in your chair and listen.
It's very sobering.
It's not cotton candy.
It's not being dispensed by some of the
happy preachers on television today.
It's nothing like that.
But it's the kind of thing that is
immediately convicting.
It pierces your heart almost instantly when you
hear this man preaching about the serious things
of God.
And that's one of the reasons I wanted
to let some of our listeners know about
his ministry.
In the famine we have today in the
country for solid preaching, for prophetic preaching that
says, this is what does say of the
Lord.
This is what his word says.
And so that is why I wanted to
do this particular program.
Let's talk about his beginnings.
He had a very interesting start to his
ministry.
He did a lot of walking or trekking,
as they called it.
Yes.
He grew up in a strong Methodist home
in the north of England in Leeds with
godly parents.
His father, who was not a Christian originally
when Leonard was young, had a powerful conversion
to Christ.
And then Leonard became a Christian himself at
the age of 15 because he saw a
difference in his father.
He saw his father had a reality that
he himself didn't have.
So Leonard came to Christ at the age
of 15.
And he immediately began to have a real
prayer life and began to engage in personal
evangelism around the north of England even as
a teenager.
Then five years later, he answered God's call
to the Christian ministry when he was 20
years old while working as a tailor there
in Leeds.
And he left immediately to move near Sheffield,
England, which is north of London, and to
Cliff College where the famous Samuel Chadwick was
the principal.
Chadwick was one of the better known preachers
in Britain.
And Leonard went there to study under Samuel
Chadwick.
While he was there, Leonard read two books
that had a powerful influence on him and
began to shape his whole life.
The first was The Life of David Brainerd,
the American missionary to the Indians in New
England in the 18th century.
And then the second book was by D.
M.
McIntyre, The Hidden Life of Prayer.
These two books showed Ravenhill a reality of
prayer that he didn't realize existed.
And so he began to develop a real
prayer life.
And as a result of that, he developed
a reputation as a very forthright, bold, and
powerful preacher known for his evangelistic gift in
preaching, but also known for his fearless and
powerful proclamation of truth.
And then he probably became more widely known
in the late 50s around 1960 when his
first book was published, Why Revival Tarries.
And he is known primarily by that book
title in a clear international way.
I love what you said on the video
promoting this book, the biography that's coming out
shortly on his life called In Light of
Eternity.
I like what you said where they called
him the gospel trekkers and they had some
kind of a cart they pushed around England
in their evangelistic efforts.
They really literally carried it all over England.
They did.
The trekking ministry, the word trek, originally I
think was a South African origin meaning to
walk long distances, a long journey on foot.
And Samuel Chadwick at Cliff College had a
vision of the young evangelist at the college
taking the gospel to the unreached masses of
society around Britain, the people unchurched.
And so teams of young men in their
20s and 30s, most of whom were single,
they weren't married, a few of them were,
they literally had a cart and they would
have basically a personal backpack on it with
bare necessities that they needed to carry with
themselves.
And then they had a large tent on
the cart.
And they literally walked across England from the
south to the north, from the west to
the east, and they would go into towns
for two or three weeks at a time.
They would pitch the tent and they would
be there for two or three weeks preaching,
doing evangelism, and sometimes they ended up staying
for two or three months.
So they walked village to village, town to
town.
Well, you know, I've heard people criticize what
they call, quote, revivalism.
But I want to say something about this
kind of preaching ministry.
My grandmother was actually converted to Christ as
a teenage girl when she was walking down
the street in her neighborhood and came across
a vacant lot.
And on that lot, an evangelist had pitched
a tent.
And that is where she heard the gospel
and God really grabbed her heart and she
was converted to Christ and she ultimately became
a missionary here in the United States planting
Sunday schools.
She and several of her colleagues after Bible
college did much like Ravenhill's group there did
and took the gospel to some of the
areas out there in South Dakota.
And there's a church, in fact, alive today
that began as a small Sunday school for
children.
And God raised up some men and a
church was raised up.
And so I want to just say to
those who say, well, I don't know about
this revivalist stuff.
You know, doesn't that leave problems in communities?
When the gospel goes forth in power, God
chooses sovereignly how he uses that gospel as
it goes forward.
And it excites me to hear about a
ministry where they didn't have any fancy sort
of self-fulfillment, life enhancement messages, but they
had the truth that Jesus Christ came into
the world to save sinners and that he
wants us to have a relationship with him
through his son.
And I think that's exciting.
I want to talk about his message spoke
much about holiness throughout his life.
Many of the sermons I hear by Ravenhill
had to do with the topic of holiness.
And I know that was also a theme
frequently of A.W. Tozer and some of
the other great preachers of the past.
He was saying something at his time in
the 20th century already in the evangelical church
that troubled him.
Could you just talk about that for a
moment?
Yes, well, that's true.
Like his close friend, Dr. Tozer, Leonard felt
troubled and grieved in his heart that he
did not see professing Christians living according to
biblical standards.
He felt that it was due to several
reasons.
Number one, he believed many church members were
not true Christians, that though they had been
baptized perhaps, joined the church, they had not
experienced true regeneration and conversion by the Holy
Spirit.
So he felt many were not true Christians
in the church.
Secondly, he saw compromise and worldliness among professing
Christians.
He saw a lack of seriousness about God
and professing believers living like the world.
And he was troubled very much by it.
He felt many Christians often lived below their
spiritual inheritance in Christ and the privileges that
were there for them.
So the common themes in his preaching were
really several.
Holiness of life for the Christian, true prayer,
genuine revival and spiritual awakening, and the glory
and greatness of Jesus Christ and the power
of the gospel.
Those were the themes that most of his
preaching centered around.
And that's why his preaching is still relevant
today and such an encouragement in his exhortations.
I heard someone commented on our Crosstalk blog
that what he was hearing smacked of legalism.
And I wrote back and I said this
kindly, but I said, you know, I think
we are so far removed from the kind
of preaching that Leonard Ravenhill and Tozer and
these others did that it offends our soft
sensibilities to have anyone call out and point
us back to Christ.
When I hear this kind of preaching, my
reaction is analyze my heart.
Let's see what's going on in my own
life.
Am I and isn't that what the Apostle
Paul said that we are to examine ourselves
to see whether we are in the faith
that we're not to just float through life
with this kind of complacency.
And of course, that is what we see
in so much of the Laodicean church is
this kind of lukewarm, nominal Christianity that has
absolutely no impact on the real way that
we live.
Yes, I agree.
And Leonard Ravenhill would certainly agree with that.
Well, we are going to take a break
in just a moment.
And as we go to the break, I
want to mention your website where people can
watch.
I actually can see the video or excuse
me.
I believe that video is connected to your
website, isn't it?
The promo video for the book.
Okay, it's ravenhillbiography.com.
That's the website.
You can pre-order the book if you'd
like.
We'll talk more about the book when we
come back from the break because this is
not your ordinary paperback biography with just a
few little notations.
This is a very thorough job and it
has some beautiful pictures in it.
We'll talk more about that when we return.
But the website ravenhillbiography.com.
We'll be right back.
Back to Genesis with Dr. John Morris, scientist
with the Institute for Creation Research.
Dr. Morris, what can you tell me about
bird calls?
Chris, birds employ many types of calls for
different purposes and to communicate different thoughts.
Consider the cassowary bird in Australia.
They make many distinctive calls that humans can
hear, but they also make low-pitched sounds
that we can't hear.
These enable the birds to communicate over long
distances in the forest.
They not only have the vocal apparatus, but
they have an unusual hearing apparatus too.
It's all quite mysterious and quite similar to
the ear of a whale.
But these two are not supposed to be
closely related according to evolution.
And that's the point.
They didn't evolve from a common ancestor.
They were created by an intelligent god to
perform a variety of functions in a variety
of environments.
It's necessary to have a back-to-Genesis
perspective to really understand the world around us.
For more information, you can find us on
the web at www.icr.org.
Welcome back to Crosstalk.
Today I'm Ingrid Schleter and our guest today
is Mac Tomlinson.
He is pastor at Providence Chapel in Denton,
Texas.
And we are talking about his new biography,
about to be released, called In Light of
Eternity.
This is the story of Leonard Ravenhill.
Our guest was friends, along with his wife,
of Martha and Leonard Ravenhill from 1977 until
their deaths, and has written quite a comprehensive
look at the ministry of a remarkable servant
of Christ.
Can you tell us something about the book
itself?
This is not a short little read, is
it?
No, I have been working on the book
on and off for about six years through
research and gathering of material.
It is pretty comprehensive, around 600 pages, 40
pages of pictures scattered throughout the book.
It covers from Leonard's birth all the way
through the end of his life and his
legacy.
It is a chronology of his whole life
and ministry in Britain and America and around
the world.
There are many chapters that deal with topics
such as preaching, prayer, revival, Ravenhill's theology, and
other various topical chapters that endeavor to give
a full view of his ministry and his
viewpoints and his perspective on life and ministry
and all things.
We have tried to make it as extensive
as possible.
If anyone is interested, that website, once again,
ravenhillbiography.com.
I want to go to a clip of
Mr. Ravenhill's preaching.
I have found this very convicting.
I know several people that saw it on
our Crosstalk blog commented the very same thing.
This is a montage of excerpts from his
various sermons having to do with eternity and
the judgment seat of Christ.
Oh God, stamp eternity on my eyeballs.
If God should stamp eternity or even judgment
on our eyeballs or, if you like, on
the fleshy table of our hearts, I'm quite
convinced we'd be a very, very different tribe
of people, God's people, in the world today.
We live too much in time, we're too
earthbound.
We see as other men see, we think
as other men think.
We invest our time as the world invests
it, we invest our money.
We're supposed to be a different breed of
people.
I believe that the church of Jesus Christ
needs a new revelation of the majesty of
God.
They're all going to stand one day, can
you imagine it?
At the judgment seat of Christ, to give
an account for the deeds done in the
body.
This is what?
This is the king of kings.
And he's the judge of judges.
And it's the tribunal of tribunals.
And there's no court of appeal after it.
The verdict is final.
Listen, when you see Jesus, you're not going
to often say, Hey, buddy, I'm glad you
died for me.
When you see Jesus, you'll be almost paralyzed
with fear unless you have a glorified body
and a glorified mind.
You say, well, Mr. Raymond, I won't be
in serious trouble because, you know, I don't
have a good memory.
Well, I'll tell you what, you'll have one
that day.
In Malachi, it says that God has a
book of remembrance.
And I think it would do you good
before you go to bed every night this
week to ask God, What did you put
in your book today for my life?
Did you get up this morning and thank
God you're pure?
Did you thank him that that devilish fever
you used to have for sniffing cocaine and
drugs or something, that he broke the fetter
of it?
Are you really glad you're not a prostitute
now?
You're going to be a part of the
bride of the Lamb?
Are you glad he's removed from your heart
covetousness and bad temper and all those creepy,
horrible things that used to master you?
The most shattering thought I've ever had is
my personal accountability to God one day.
We're not going to be judged just because
of what we've done.
We've got to be judged for why we
did it.
Not for the action, for the motive.
What motivated your giving?
Why?
What's the motive behind it?
It doesn't just take your sins, it takes
yourself.
It takes the government of your life.
It's not only true that we live in
a world of bankrupt politics.
We live in a world, and this is
the most tragic of all, of a bankrupt
church.
When in God's name is the church going
to open a heart again and open a
mind again and see again?
Can God forgive every sin I've ever committed?
I said, he sure can.
That is, if you repent of your sin
and you plead for the blood of Christ
and you ask for mercy, that tender Christ
who went about doing good and he kissed
little babies and blessed people, now, ah, there's
nothing more beautiful than a little lamb.
There's nothing more terrible than the wrath of
the lamb.
God should bring every work into judgment with
every secret thing.
The dead, small and great, are going to
stand before God in that awesome day.
But say, am I just a showman?
What's my secret life like?
For God has not merely given us Jesus
Christ, he's given us all things.
And because there isn't enough joy in the
house of God, we need entertainment.
Because entertainment is the devil's substitute for joy.
I think before we point the finger at
the world, we'd better turn to the church
and say, look, we'd better all get sacked
off in ashes and humble ourselves and say,
almighty God, when I see the church in
the New Testament, they didn't have stately buildings.
They didn't have paid evangelists.
They didn't have a lot of money.
They didn't have organizations.
They couldn't get on TV and beg.
But I'll tell you what they did, they
turned the world upside down.
And I'm embarrassed to be part of the
church of Jesus today, because I believe it's
an embarrassment to a holy God.
Most of our joy is clapping our hands
and having a good time, and then afterwards
we're talking all the drivel of the world.
Oh, to be lost in him, to be
consumed in him.
You get so near to the heart of
God that you'll share his grief over a
world and over a backslidden church that we
have today.
Because if you're going to get mature in
God, all the dwarfs around you will criticize
and sneer at you and say you're trying
to be holier than the rest of us,
eh?
You'll discover this, the men who have been
most heroic for God have been the men
with the greatest devotion of life.
The only thing that will tie me in
victory continually through the blood of Christ is
my personal devotion to him, the Son of
God.
My adoration that I give him my tribute
every day.
It's more than my service.
It's more than giving my money.
That I love him and I adore him
and I magnify him.
I take him as he were by the
feet.
That is the voice of Leonard Ravenhill, a
preacher and an evangelist who had a big
impact in the 20th century.
There's a new biography out by our guest
today, Mack Tomlinson.
Did writing this book change you in any
way?
Well, just hearing that clip reminds me of
so many times that I heard him preach
like that over the years.
And you could not hear Ravenhill without being
changed, either hardened or softened, without being made
angry or your heart being broken.
And so yes, the book was life-changing
for me.
I suppose in a number of ways, just
to realize the afresh, the power of the
ministry that God gave him and how important
his message is, and to learn about his
British years and the ministry he had there
because he never kept a diary or a
journal.
And so there was very little record of
that that his family, his sons knew existed
until I went to England and researched his
British years and found out that there was
much recorded there that was discovered that God
put into my hands.
So to learn about his British ministry and
to see that he had a powerful ministry
of over 25 years in Britain before he
ever came to America or was even known
here.
He was controversial.
And if you heard that clip where he
talked about the American church, it's not difficult
to see why this offended some in leadership.
Some pastors may not have liked to have
heard that message.
Tell us about the controversy and how he
handled that.
Well, Leonard Ravenhill was a fearless man.
And he was motivated by one thing, a
fierce loyalty to God and a fierce loyalty
to the truth of Scripture and to the
Gospel.
And God made him in such a way
to be a preacher that did not care
about men's opinions.
He did not preach to please people or
to entertain, certainly.
He had a message burning in his heart
that he felt like God wanted him to
preach, that he felt like the people he
was preaching to needed.
And so he would preach it with boldness,
with fearlessness, with a powerful anointing of the
Holy Spirit, and he just let the chips
fall where they may, as they say.
He did not care if it offended people.
He cared if it was the truth because
he knew it was the truth that people
needed to hear and it was the truth
that would set men free.
So you either loved his preaching or you
hated it.
A.W. Tozer said of Ravenhill, Toward Ravenhill
you cannot be neutral.
You will either love him or hate him,
but you will not go away unmoved or
neutral.
That's right.
No neutrality when you hear that kind of
preaching.
You're either with it or you are not.
You'll be offended by it and discard it
and carry on, or you will be convicted
by the Lord who is so very obviously
with him in his preaching, as I listened
to that.
I wanted to say, you know, there are
not many preachers like this in America today.
Could you just comment on why that is?
Well, I think there are several reasons possibly.
I think many ministers today have given in
to an attitude of political correctness where they
don't want to offend people.
They want to inform people and they even
want to entertain or encourage people, but they
fear losing popularity or losing people from their
congregation, so they will not preach forthright the
way Ravenhill did.
Perhaps fear of man, fear of consequences, fear
of loss of position.
And so if you have a view that
your sermons must please everyone or be entertaining
or simply be positive and encouraging, then you're
not going to fully preach the truth because
the truth will build up and tear down.
It will encourage and it will rebuke.
It will be both positive and negative.
And Ravenhill's view of preaching was so high
and his fear of God was so much
that he didn't preach to please men.
He had many sayings that he was famous
for, but one of the most famous was,
he said, this generation has itching ears, but
I have no commission from God to scratch
them.
Amen.
And so there aren't too many men today.
They are out there.
I think lesser known men, unknown men who
have the same loyalty and same commitment to
faithfulness to the truth, but they're not as
widely known as Leonard Ravenhill is.
You know, and of course, as a young
person in ministry, young man in ministry, many
of them are coming out of seminaries that
have totally discarded biblical theology and knowledge of
the scriptures anyway.
And those classes have been substituted by things
like church growth methods, how to be missional,
how to be to run these very popular
churches, how to be a leader.
You hear this constantly.
I have a book sitting here right next
to me, a pile of books.
And one of them is about how to,
the biggest need of the church claims the
book.
This brand new book is leadership.
It's leadership.
How to make leaders, how to make leaders,
not a word about the Holy Spirit, not
a word about being called to the ministry,
not a word about the role of the
gospel.
And so it's little wonder that many of
the pastors today are simply careerists who see
a great job, nice benefits, a chance to
be somebody, chance to develop themselves and be
positive.
But that is not the gospel.
That's not the shepherd.
That's not the shepherd that scripture talks about.
So you can see why there is not
much of a taste or an appetite for
truth today.
We are going to continue our discussion in
just a moment.
You're listening to Crosstalk.
Perhaps you're a person that is active on
the issues of today.
And while these things are necessary, there's nothing
more important than your personal relationship to Jesus
Christ.
Have you met him as your personal savior?
All the issues we face on earth pale
in comparison to the real issue of your
relationship to God.
What really matters is eternity, and we hope
that you're ready for it.
I'd like to send you a brochure that
is absolutely free.
This will help you to consider this very
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It's entitled, Where Will You Spend Eternity?
It's brief, it's to the point, and it
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a personal relationship to Jesus Christ.
If you'd like to receive a free copy
of this pamphlet, right now pick up your
phone and call 800-729-9829 and ask
for the brochure.
That's 800-729-9829.
Call now.
We're back on Crosstalk with Mac Tomlinson.
We are going to just, I want to
mention the website, ravenhillbiography.com.
I also would like to mention the other
website.
Our guest today is the Editorial Director for
freegracepress.com, freegracepress.com, if you'd like to
see some of their other offerings.
I want to return to our guest right
now.
We were talking before the break about why
there seems to be, there seem to be
so few preachers like this today, whether pastors
or evangelists.
And I want to return to our guest
who has a few more thoughts on that.
Well, I think one reason there seems to
be less kind of preaching like this today
is I believe it's rooted in what preachers
depend on when they preach.
Ravenhill used to say, unanointed preaching is the
unpardonable sin of the modern pulpit.
And I think there's so little preaching like
Ravenhill's today because men don't have the anointing
of the Holy Spirit like Ravenhill had.
So how do they get that?
Well, seeking the face of God.
First of all, seeing their need for it.
Preachers today often depend on their education, their
degrees, their knowledge, their personality and such.
And so if that's what they're depending on,
they're not depending on the Holy Spirit when
they go into the pulpit to preach.
They're depending on their preparation, their personality, anything
except the Holy Spirit.
Another reason for the lack of such preaching
is that there is a low view of
preaching today.
Leonard had a very high view of preaching.
And that high view has been greatly lost
in our day.
Preaching has been dumbed down today.
There's mostly teaching today which is needed, but
that's generally just the giving out of biblical
information.
And it's not even just the need of
doing expository preaching.
Some exposition of Scripture is often not preaching.
It's merely teaching.
And as I intimated earlier, men today in
the pulpit don't want to offend anyone.
They just want people to enjoy their sermon
or be informed by their message.
But Leonard believed what the Puritan Richard Baxter
said.
Baxter said, I must preach as if I
will never preach again and preach as a
dying man to dying men.
Ravenhill believed that every sermon was a word
from God for the people who were hearing
him.
And he believed that he would give an
account to God for every word he spoke.
So he took it very seriously.
He realized that there were people in the
audience who were unconverted and that their eternity
was at stake in their response to the
truth of God.
So Leonard preached very seriously with eternity's values
in view.
Well, I would like to give out our
phone number today to our listeners who may
want to talk with you.
800-733-9829 800-733-9829 It's, I
think, you know, I commented about some of
the negative response that he got during his
lifetime and also just watching it and thinking
to myself, it's the gravity and the seriousness
of his presentation that makes you sit up
and take notice.
How many times have I sat in a
pew and listened to pastors that act like
they use sports jokes and movie references and
I just shut my mind off.
How many times our family sat at a
Thanksgiving service that had wonderful hymns, wonderful hymns
of the faith and then after the scriptures
were used and then all of a sudden
it comes to the sermon.
Pastor gets into the pulpit.
He's a young guy.
He opened it up with a line from
Dr. Seuss and his theme vaguely was something
about taste and see that the Lord is
good.
So the book Green Eggs and Ham broke
the audience up, audience, the congregation up and
it was a great laughing.
It never got better from there.
That, I think, is what, is the thing
I noticed about his videos and there's many
of these, of course, on YouTube if anyone's
interested.
But listening to him, it's the seriousness of
his presentation that makes you think seriously about
God and if we're going to present the
Lord in a light fashion, just like much
of the music does today as well, I
might add, it has no reverence, no sense
of awe and here we're talking about the
God of the universe from whom we escaped
for our sins by this grace alone in
the sending of his son and yet we
treat him like a buddy.
I mean, that is revolting but I think
it just ties in with what you were
saying about the fact that when the Holy
Spirit is present, there is a seriousness and
you realize, eternity is forever and ever and
ever and I heard Mr. Ravenhill say in
one of his sermons, he said, there's a
million roads into hell and there's not one
road out.
Just that sentence alone, a million roads into
hell and not one road out.
That they're singing in heaven, worthy is the
Lamb, but in hell, they are singing only
one song, the harvest is over, we have
not been saved and it just very, very
much imprints upon your mind what we're dealing
with.
We're dealing with souls that will live forever
in all eternity.
Shouldn't we also be serious about that?
We're going to, let's see, I want to
see, we've got some callers online here today
and who may want to ask some questions.
We're going to start with Keith calling from
Oregon and Keith, welcome to Crosstalk.
Hi, thank you for having me on here.
The first thing I want to say is
I'm shocked.
I am so shocked because I'm hearing a
breath of fresh air in the midst of
milk toast, watered down, sad, sad, what is
called Christian preaching today on Christian radio and
then I was just driving down the street
and heard this and almost drove off the
side of the road because as far as
Ravenhill goes and what he's preaching, I hate
to say this, but in the Kingdom of
God, this is common sense stuff.
This is common sense, what he's preaching.
This is the way it's supposed to be.
I wouldn't be offended listening to him.
If I were offended, that would only be
a testimony that something's not right in my
life.
What happened to us here in America if
we are so far departed from this that
we have lost such a perspective in the
Church that the kind of preaching he did,
oh, maybe you don't like his style, maybe
you don't agree with everything he said, but
in Biblical Christianity, man, that's common sense.
This is what we're called to live.
There is no other, there's nothing to negotiate
here, and that's all Ravenhill made clear was
this is not negotiable, this is the way
it is.
And I just wanted to say I'm shocked
to hear a breath of fresh air on
Christian radio.
Thank you.
Thank you so very, very much because there's
a lot of us out here who are
frustrated, who are looking to God and saying
where is the true manna from Heaven?
Well, what has happened?
I mean, as we watch the country unfold
and unravel, so thank you very, very much.
Well, Keith, thank you for calling, and God
bless you.
I'm so glad that it was an encouragement
to you.
That was our prayer.
That was my guest's prayer going into the
program that this would encourage and lift up
the heads of a lot of us who
simply say, you know, this stuff, this kind
of preaching is far, far too rare today.
Appreciate that call from Oregon today.
We're moving.
Did you have any comment?
Mac, did you want to say something?
Yes.
Well, thank you, Keith, for the call, and,
you know, it's exactly right.
It is.
What Leonard Ravenhill preached was not deeper life
Christianity or superior Christianity.
It was true Christianity and biblical Christianity.
And America has lost that, and so when
the real thing comes along, people aren't used
to it and they are shocked by it.
Ravenhill, he did...
You know, Keith referenced how he wanted to
pull off the road.
That's what Ravenhill's preaching did to people.
It gripped you and it stopped you.
I mean, he was well known for his
many single stand-alone statements that were gripping.
I might just mention a few of them.
He said, a man who is intimate with
God needs never to be intimidated by men.
Amen.
Or a sinning man stops praying and a
praying man stops sinning.
True.
God isn't training Boy Scouts.
He's training soldiers.
That's right.
So Leonard had these statements that he would
throw out, and he didn't...
I mean, he was theologically sound and biblically
sound, but he didn't care if his words
passed someone's theological test.
He was wanting to stir people and awaken
them, and that's why he would say the
things that he said.
That's right, and you can get lost in
some of those debates when what really needs
to be said is thus sayeth the Lord
and Scripture at the ready to prove it,
and that's what he had.
And I saw an interview with him that
is on YouTube.
If anyone's interested, just type in Leonard Ravenhill
interview.
It's a 59-minute interview about what was
wrong with the American church.
It was recorded in 1989.
Absolutely jaw-dropping candor.
This was not Joel Osteen on Larry King,
friends.
This was just...
He was speaking, I believe, to a group
of pastors and their wives, but this interview
was very, very gripping and interesting.
What's wrong with the church?
And he started with the term prayerlessness, prayerlessness,
and he really drove that point home about
what's happened, why prayer meetings are basically not
attended anymore and why pastors need to stop
preaching on Wednesday nights and require prayer meetings
because he said that is where God gets
a hold of our hearts, and that's where
he comes to us and how we, our
ministries, how barren ministries are that do not
have prayer, are not rooted and grounded in
prayer.
We're moving along.
We have Timothy in Waukesha calling, Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Hi, Timothy.
Hi, yeah.
I think it's mainly, from my perspective, an
American problem with the pastors or the church
probably overall, and I think we have it.
We have our widescreen TVs, three cars.
We have our four PCs in the house.
We have our laptops.
We have all the entertainment, the DVDs to
replace.
I mean, we're really not a hurting church,
and we're tempted by all these temptations of
the world that in other countries where perhaps
they don't have all these things, they probably,
for the most part, have a closer relationship
with God.
I think we're just like in the tent,
the 12 spies that went in to scout
out Jericho.
Only two were really obedient, and I feel
like America, we're like the 10 spies.
Yeah, that's a very good analogy.
Or the disobedient ones.
Yeah, yes, I hear what you're saying.
Well, Timothy, thank you for calling today from
Waukesha to make that point.
We live, I want to paraphrase a columnist
I read recently.
She wrote that we live in a global
technocracy of gadgets but emotional poverty, and I
would say the same is true spiritually.
We have every electronic gadget known to man,
but we are spiritually impoverished in the church
today.
Does it matter if we have smoke machines
from Caesar's Palace in our congregation, state-of
-the-art sound systems, theater seating with cup
holders to hold the hot drinks we bought
at the kiosk in the lobby of the
church?
Spiritually poor, wretched, blind, and naked, and that's
what Revelation, that's what Christ said about the
church of Laodicea in the book of Revelation.
We are going on.
We have more callers holding here.
We're moving along next to Harry who's calling
from Port Huron, Michigan.
Hi, Harry.
Thank you very much for this today.
I would say one thing as far as
one of the comments that you made earlier.
I didn't read the book you mentioned that
was offending, but I will say this as
a man.
There is a lack of leadership in our
churches today, and that starts in the pulpit
and it starts in the home.
Right.
Harry, I wouldn't disagree with you.
The book I was referring to is from
Leadership Network.
It's spewing forth emergent teachers, emergent church teachers,
and one of the hallmarks of that movement
is the clamoring about the creation of leadership
without any effort made whatsoever to ask where
people are being led.
That was kind of the point I was
trying to make about how many leadership books
there are about personal development absent any reference
to the gospel and the true office of
the ministry.
I just wanted to clarify that I wouldn't
disagree with you.
Godly leadership is in short supply.
We're going to take a break and return
in a moment with our guest Mack Tomlinson,
author of the book In Light of Eternity,
the biography of Leonard Ravenhill.
You can pre-order the book.
It's about to be released in a couple
of weeks.
You can pre-order at RavenhillBiography.com.
We'll be right back.
For the Worldview Week and Minute, I'm Brandon
House.
I talk to Christians every day who are
getting discouraged because of all this happening But
I'm here to tell you, don't be discouraged.
This could be our greatest hour.
Even when we appear to lose, we're really
winning.
Peter Marshall put it this way, it's better
to fail in a cause that will ultimately
succeed than to succeed in a cause that
will ultimately fail.
Dr. Erwin Lutzer added to this by saying,
better to fail within the church than to
be successful outside of it.
God wins even when the church appears to
lose.
My friends, God has a remnant and the
dominant false church is and will persecute the
remnant.
But we invite the opportunity if it brings
an understanding to the lost that our hope
is not in this world but in the
next.
For more information on a biblical worldview and
making disciples in these the last days, our
website is worldviewweekend.com worldviewweekend.com where you
can find columns as well as my daily
radio show all at worldviewweekend.com We
are back on Crosstalk with Mack Tomlinson and
I'd like to go ask our guest a
question.
We will take more calls so hang in
there callers.
Mack, can you tell us please, we were
talking about the role of prayer in the
life of Leonard Ravenhill and how much he
preached on that theme.
Was this a man who practiced what he
preached?
Yes, it is true.
He was a man Leonard had a favorite
saying, a man's ministry is never greater than
his prayer life.
And Leonard Ravenhill, I've known a lot of
preachers and pastors over the past four decades,
but Leonard was the only man I've ever
known who prayed probably more than he studied
and more than he spent time in public
with people.
From the time he was a teenager, he
prayed for hours each day and probably in
every day as he got into adulthood and
into full-time ministry, I would imagine six
to eight hours daily in private prayer, sometimes
more.
And then in addition to that, several hours
of reading and meditating in Scripture and reading
the best books.
So he probably spent 13 to 14 hours
alone with God every day for the whole
course of his life.
Several hours in the morning and the same
in the afternoon and then generally around midnight
he would get up and he would be
in his study until 4 or 5 or
6 a.m. He rarely slept through the
night.
He'd be in his study in prayer.
And so his life was an amazing example
of a hidden life of prayer.
And he believed that prayer was more important
for a preacher than anything.
Famous, well-known pastors from all over the
world would call him and come to see
him.
And they would get honest and they would
break down in tears and they would say,
you know, I don't even pray five minutes
a day.
I lead committees.
I do this.
I do that.
I'm very busy.
But my life spiritually is empty.
I don't pray.
I don't seek God.
And Ravenhill called men of God back to
the prayer closet to truly pray and seek
God because he knew that only there was
the anointing of the Holy Spirit and the
authority of Christ secured for public ministry.
Well, amen to that.
I want to ask you quickly because our
time is going so fast.
I want to ask you, what are some
of the titles of books that Ravenhill wrote,
just in case some of our listeners are
interested?
Yeah, his books are, there are seven books
he wrote.
Why Revival Carries is the most well-known
one.
And he wrote Meet for Men, Revival Praying,
Tried and Transfigured, Sodom Had No Bible, America
is Too Young to Die, and his last
book was Revival God's Way.
And then he edited an eighth book.
He compiled and edited a book, A Treasury
of Prayer, which was the best of the
writings of E.M. Bownes on prayer.
Oh, excellent.
Yes, I love E.M. Bownes.
Well, great.
Well, thanks for giving that to us.
I want to quickly go back to our
callers, take a couple of more at least.
I want to go, let's see, who is
next?
We have David calling from, oh, Tom's waiting,
from Spanish Fort, Alabama.
Hi, Tom.
Hi, Ingrid.
Good afternoon.
Hi, Matt.
Hello.
It's just a miracle that I was in
my automobile and heard the name Leonard Ravenhill.
And I just want to share quickly with
you, in Mobile, Alabama, back in the late
70s, early 80s, he came to Cottage Hill
Baptist Church.
And what was to be a week revival
meeting turned into two weeks.
And it was not uncommon, as you said,
for Leonard Ravenhill to pray all night and
call us to pray all night.
And just a couple of things.
I remember one of the statements was that
God had written Ichabod across most of the
doorways of churches in America.
And this was back in the 70s, which,
as you know, Ichabod means God has departed.
And he always preached about the challenge the
pastors that would come to these revival meetings.
And several of them came from the local
area to this revival that you preach a
lot about God's love, but you don't preach
about God's holiness.
And then he would challenge us there was
no real grieving over sin, not only individual
sin, but corporate sin in the church.
And then one story that I remember that
you mentioned during ministry, his ministry in Britain.
I'm sure you probably included this in your
biography.
When he went to live on the streets
with those homeless people, that he was sitting
one night in a cold, damp, rainy side
of the street.
And there was a homeless woman there.
She had not bathed.
She was unkempt.
Her hair was stringy and straggly.
She smelled.
And he was sitting there next to her,
huddled up, you know, by this small fire.
And she had a small, dirty cup of
tea that she had brewed.
She found a used teabag.
And she took a sip and she handed
it out to Leonard to offer it to
him.
And it revulsed him, you know.
And he said, I can't drink out of
that cup.
And God immediately shared with him.
He said, I drank of the cup, of
a cup much dirtier than this for your
sake.
And it, you know, it so impacted his
life.
But his life was filled with those kinds
of testimonies and stories where God used him
when he placed, when Leonard placed himself in
a point of total obedience and surrendered to
Christ.
And finally, your message, the clip that you
played while ago brought tears to my eyes
and grief and repentance to my heart even
today.
Amen.
Thank you, David.
Wow.
I'm so glad to hear that.
That was our prayer at the outset of
the program.
Tom, I'm sorry.
I appreciate that call today.
Have to move along quickly.
Spanish Fort, Alabama.
Appreciate that.
Very quickly, we have one last caller.
Andrew, David is calling from Ohio.
David, sorry to make you wait so long.
Oh, it's okay.
Hey, Mac, this is David.
How's it going?
Good.
Hello, David.
Hey, I just want to share real quick.
I've been in ministry about 23 years, and
a bunch of years ago I got this
idea in my head.
I love Leonard Ravenhill's books and his messages.
I'm just going to see if his number's
listed.
And so I called and it was listed.
And when I got him, he was just
so nice with me, so respectful.
I mean, I was so fearful.
It was like standing in judgment or something,
that he would see something not right or
say something to me.
And one thing he always encouraged me more
than one time.
It was, as a young minister, read 1
and 2 Timothy.
And to me, there's so many days I
still cry out to God after 20 years
of preaching.
I'm humbled in his presence that he saved
me, and I'm humbled that he called me.
But at times it's been a lonely road.
I weep and I say to my wife,
I wish I could talk to Leonard Ravenhill
again on the phone.
I wish I could talk to him and
just share what I'm going through.
But I just want to just say that
he's changed my life, and he's changed many
other people's lives.
And I just want to encourage everybody to
realize that what Ravenhill was, he said this,
you have as much of God as you
want to have.
I want to come to a place where
there's none of me and all of him.
And this is what he really inspired in
my heart, 2 Corinthians 5.15. Thank you
so much.
I appreciate that call, David, that testimony in
Ohio.
I'm so sorry our time has gone, Mac.
Well, thank you very much.
It's been a delight.
Well, I'm glad to have had you again.
Ravenhillbiography.com if you'd like to read the
biography written by our guest today.
Thanks for joining us today on Crosstalk.
I'm Ingrid Schleter.
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