We've had the enviable pleasure the last few
weeks of having a rich gift of God
among us.
The Raven Hills have been here for several
weeks now.
Leonard's been preaching four and five times a
week, and it's been wonderful.
It's been glorious.
Our prayer meeting attendance, which we thought was
good to begin with, is up four to
five times now.
It's a number, and the meetings have gone
extended now for several hours, some of them,
as the Spirit of God has been wooing
and stirring and ministering to us.
The idea for Leonard's coming here was given
to me by the Holy Spirit.
I had heard of him before.
I'd read two books, I believe, one of
them on the wide Revival Terries, and then
one several years before that.
And I knew of him from various and
sundry places, but I'd never met him.
And this last year, I had an opportunity
to meet him while in Kansas City and
to go to lunch with him.
And as we were sitting there, the Lord
said to my heart, this is a treasure,
and I want to pour it out among
you.
So I blurted out, hey, could you come
and see us for a few months?
Fully expecting him to say no.
And within hours, he came back and said,
yes, I can, and it'll be a very
important meeting.
And so we've lived with that excitement in
our souls for the last few months, waiting
for him to come.
There's many things I could say about him
that would probably embarrass him.
We've learned to love him not only as
a preacher and a man who has fire
in his bones, but as a friend.
His tenderness to us privately is just beyond
belief.
His fierceness when he gets behind a microphone
is also beyond belief.
Somewhere between the two places is the man,
I think.
And we've learned to love him.
Let's welcome Brother Leonard Ravenhill.
Well, if a friend says I'm fierce, what
do my enemies say?
No, I want to, first of all, thank
God for putting in the heart of John
to have this conference.
And secondly, that he obeyed the Lord.
And thirdly, that he had the wisdom to
call me.
I was just saying to Carol there, you
know, if anybody ever says to me, do
you believe Jesus fed the 5,000?
They'll say, well, John Wimber did it.
Okay.
Today there are many, many versions of the
Bible.
My son David says there are 10 versions.
Five are wise and five are foolish.
You know, the Bible says do things decently
in order.
Don't see anybody decent around here.
So why should I wear a tie?
So now you can tell people you were
there when I got rid of my bondage.
Well, I'm going to read a scripture from
the NIV version.
Just a minute, just a minute.
The NIV is the never improved King James.
So now I got you.
I'm like the old lady in England.
She said it was good enough for the
apostle Paul.
So it's good enough for me.
Okay.
The prophet Isaiah chapter six.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I
saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne
high and lifted up and his train filled
the temple.
Above it stood the seraphims.
Each one had six wings.
With train or with two, he covered his
face.
With two, he covered his feet.
And with two, did he fly.
And one cried unto another and said, Holy,
holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
And the posts of the door moved at
the voice of him that spoke.
And him that cried and the house was
filled with smoke.
Then said I, woe is me for I
am undone.
For I am a man of unclean lips
and I dwell in the midst of a
people of unclean lips.
For mine eyes have seen the King, the
Lord of hosts.
Then flew one of the seraphims unto me
with the light cold in his hand, which
you take with the tongues from off the
altar.
And he laid it upon my mouth and
said, Lo, this has touched thy lips.
Thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin
purged.
Also I heard the voice of the Lord
saying, whom shall I send and who will
go for us?
Then said I, here am I.
Send me.
And he said, go.
There are three simple words.
They're very simple.
Verses five, seven, and nine.
They're so simple you can remember them even
if you've been to college.
In verse five, the word woe.
In verse seven, the word lo.
And in verse nine, the word go.
The first is a word of a man.
The second is the word of a seraphim.
And the third is the word of God.
The first is a word of confession.
Woe is me.
The second is a word of cleansing.
Lo, this has touched thy lips.
And the third is a word of commission.
Go.
I must tell you college people something else.
If you have a notebook, put it down.
If not, get the tape.
Because I want to tell you there are
66 books in the Bible.
Did you get that?
There are also 66 chapters in Isaiah.
The Old Testament has 39 books, so that's
the main division in the scripture.
The first 39 chapters in Isaiah divide the
book.
In chapters 1 to 39, there are no
less than 12 references to the holiness of
God.
Then from the 40th chapter to 66, there
are 17 references to the holiness of God.
This scripture is very carefully dated for us.
In the year that King Uzziah died, Esau
saw the Lord.
I don't know, but many of the scholars
tell us that Isaiah and Uzziah were very
close friends, and that Isaiah was a kind
of aristocrat in his generation.
But there's a crisis in his life.
In the year that King Uzziah died, he
saw the Lord.
The one obstruction to him seeing the Lord
was his closest friend.
The closest business partner was his chief blockage,
if you like, for him seeing the King
in his beauty.
If you want to get a slight rundown
on the life of Uzziah, we find it
here in the 26th chapter of the second
book of Chronicles.
I'll just skip through it very quickly here.
Two Chronicles, chapter 26 and verse 1.
Then the people of Judah took Uzziah, who
was 15 years old, and made him king
in the womb of his father.
Now that's very interesting, isn't it?
I mean, what's your 15-year-old doing,
apart from collecting baseball cards?
Here is a man at 15 years, a
boy at 15 years of age, who has
to take command of a great nation, a
very, very powerful nation.
I guess in our day, we call this
boy a whiz kid, because everything he did
was, he turned to prosperity.
He took over the economy, and it began
to blossom as it had never blossomed before.
He took over agriculture, and that came to
its greatest peak in the period when he
was in authority.
Then he went and took over the military,
and we have a description here of the
army.
Let's read verse 5 here.
He sought God in the days of Zechariah,
who had understanding in the visions of God,
and as long as he sought the Lord,
God made him to prosper.
Verse 7 says, God helped him against the
Philistines and against the Arabians that dwelt in
Gilbeyah.
Verse 8 says, the Ammonites gave gifts to
Uzziah, and his name spread abroad even to
the entering of Egypt.
Verse 10 tells us how he digged towers,
irrigated the country, made everything that he touched
just come to perfection in due course.
In verse 12 it says, the number of
the chiefs of the fathers of the mighty
men of valor were 2,600.
In the next verse, it gives you the
number of people, 207,000 that were fighting
for him.
Verse 15, he made in Jerusalem engines invented
by cunning men to be put on the
towers, otherwise there were huge catapults, and they
hurled great big rocks and crushed the wooden
walls of the cities that they attacked.
So everything on every level is getting on
fine.
But then something happened.
He made in Jerusalem engines invented by cunning
men to be on the towers and upon
the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones
with all.
And his name spread far abroad, for he
was marvelously held until he was strong.
But when he became strong, his heart lifted
up to destruction.
You know, many more people can stand adversity
than can stand prosperity.
Everything this man has, his towers, are fabulous.
His name is known to the dead known
world as a genius.
On every level he's never fallen flat on
his face.
It seems like the scripture, everything that he
doeth shall prosper.
But then suddenly a little thing came into
his heart, a thing that we call pride
and self-confidence.
And when God, when man comes in like
that, God goes out.
But when he was strong, his heart was
lifted up to destruction.
He transgressed against the Lord his God.
And he said, look, I took over the
economy, I took over education, I took over
the army, I took over everything, and so
I'm the man you need.
I'm the man in authority, and I'm going
to take over the ministry.
He knew very well the dangers about that.
And it says in his verse 16, his
soul was lifted up to destruction.
He transgressed against the Lord his God and
went into the temple and the Lord to
burn incense on the altar.
Now look at this, Azariah, the priest, went
in after him with four score priests, 81
people, 81 strong men tried to stop him.
In my opinion, this man's demon possessed.
How can he fight single-handedly 81 men
that are going to stop him from getting
to the altar?
But that demon power in him overcame and
he went forward and he started doing the
job.
And Azariah, the priest, went in after him
and with him four score priests of the
Lord who were valiant men.
And they tried to restrain him.
Then verse 19 says, Uzziah was wroth.
He had a scent in his hand to
burn incense.
And while he was wroth, the priests' leprosy
covered him, overcame him, and so he was
defiled.
There's a very fascinating part of history.
One of the great Caesars, we have a
city in England where the Caesars are in
models, Julius Caesar, Tiberius Caesar, all the other
Caesars there in the town.
And the most, the best known, I suppose,
is Julius Caesar.
Well, when Julius Caesar was in his prime,
he had a man by the name of
Pompey who was a superior general and they
became very contentious and envious of each other.
And so the best thing that Julius Caesar
could do was ship this man to a
far country.
And that happened to be the other end
of Mediterranean.
And so he sent this fellow Pompey there.
And when he arrived, Pompey arrived true to
his name, pompously.
Soldiers got off their boats.
They had wonderful horses with saddlecloths.
You know, you see the old style in
England where the saddlecloths come down to their
knees, these beautiful horses.
And the soldiers had helmets and everything stunned
them.
They took him around the town to show
him what Jerusalem was.
They pointed various historic places to him.
Then finally he said, what's that building?
Oh, they said, you can't go near that.
You're regarded as a heathen.
He said, no, I'm one of the most
powerful men in the world.
No, you can't go near to it.
Why not?
Because God is there.
God?
We've hundreds of gods in Rome.
What God is this?
Name that God.
And they told him it was Jehovah God.
He made heaven and earth.
He hung the stars in the sky.
He put the light there.
He governs everything.
This is the God, Lord, God Almighty.
As we would say, God immortal, invisible, God
only wise, in light, inaccessible, hid from our
eyes.
This man was furious.
I have a right to go in there.
You can't go in there.
Well, he said, tomorrow afternoon I shall enter
that temple.
And they said, you won't.
So he came down Main Street there in
all his panoply and all his soldiers, behind
him 2,000 people.
And Caesar, this fellow was actually going, Pompey
was going to the temple.
And people made a barrier, but they were
crushed down by the horses.
And they said, you can't go in there.
That's dangerous.
God is there.
Do you know it's dangerous here tonight because
God is here?
Do you know God's going to plunder this
place tonight?
Do you know this one meeting is going
to reach the ends of the earth?
People say to me sometimes, Rainhill, you've wasted
your time.
I prayed for revival 66 years.
You're wasting your time.
God's finished with our generation.
America's had more lights than a nation in
the world.
She has more Bible schools.
She has more printing presses.
She has more broadcasts every day.
God's through.
My rebuttal to that is this.
And I say with some anger, I say,
listen, when I was a boy in years
back, even before that, the population of the
world was 5 million.
That's at the time when most of the
great missionary societies were launched, when the world
was a family of only 5 million people
and God loved it.
Are you telling me that God doesn't love
the world now it's 5 billion people?
The situation is a thousand times more difficult,
a thousand times more challenging.
I don't know when this army of, what
do you call it now, Joel's army is
going to start, but I'll tell you what,
remember it's an army.
It's not a picnic.
It's not a tea party.
It's a warfare.
I believe we're going to move into a
situation that's never been known in the history
of the world, but God's going to raise
up his men.
This man goes barging into the temple and
he refused to be driven back.
But when he got there, he was spinned
by leprosy.
He came as doctor, I was going to
say Dr. Chaucer.
Dr. Criswell is one of the great old
guys.
He's like me, he's pretty old and so
he's very good.
And he has a little paperback book on
the prophecy of Isaiah, which I think is
very beautiful.
And I looked it up on this chapter
and he says, here is this arrogant man
coming.
I have military power.
I have money.
I have the Roman empire behind me.
Who is God?
I'll show you what I can do.
Again as he goes in, they stand against
him.
He comes sweeping through the outside part of
the temple.
There's a very brilliant young man here, knows
all the Jewish traditions and whatnot.
I'll check with you after Mike.
If I'm wrong, don't say anything.
So as a good old doctor says, this
panoply, this great display of power that had
never been seen in that part of the
world.
They'd never seen men with breastplates and plumes.
They'd never seen men on horseback.
They'd never seen all this panoply and they
stood aghast to see coming down the street,
moving towards the sacred place.
And then he says, Pompey came through the
outer court of the Gentiles.
Then he came to the court of Israel.
Then he came to the court of women.
And then he came, as he says, to
the courts of priests.
He came to the division in the temple.
What's the first place?
The holy place.
Went a bit further, broke his way through
there.
Came to the holy of holies with a
curtain.
How thick was it?
Six inches?
Something like that.
And there's that tremendous curtain.
I don't see anything different here.
These different courts mean nothing to me.
No.
God is behind that shield of a curtain.
The holy one.
Elsewhere, you remember, he's called a high and
lofty one who inhabits eternity.
And this arrogant man says, I don't care.
There's nothing sacred to me.
I'm going in there.
I've come all this way and I must
see your God.
You can't go in.
He dwells in light.
If you step into his presence, you'll go
blind with the kind of glory.
If you get in there, you'll be the
most uncomfortable you've ever been in your life.
The majesty of God is there.
But he still persisted and he went in.
He comes through the outer court.
There was nothing.
The Gentile court.
Israel's court and whatnot.
Now he comes up against this barrier.
Just one great big curtain.
And behind it, God almighty lives.
So finally, he told men, you take your
swords and cut through there.
I'm going in.
And they pulled the curtain on one side
and it was pitch dark.
And he burst into anger.
He screamed, you lied to me.
You told me it was blinding light and
it's darkness.
You told me a living God is there.
There's nobody there.
You liars.
Your gods have no more power than my
God.
I translate that this way.
We went to a church a few years
ago to preach.
We told the big shots came over from
England.
And the church was 35 acres of land.
There were tennis courts and I don't know
what kind of courts were there.
And I visualized, instead of this brilliant young
military man coming here into the temple of
old, some young people in America come.
They come to the outside.
They pass the tennis courts and everything.
And finally, they come into the temple and
they say, where is your God?
Is that what people are asking today?
Where is the Lord God Elijah?
The prayer meetings this week have been terrible.
The first week, I thought they were good.
The second week, they got better.
But this week, there's been despair.
I believe this meeting is historic.
There's never been a prayer meeting in American
history like this.
There have never been millions of prayer.
Never been tens of thousands of people fasting
in different parts of the world for this
week.
It's too late to delay any longer.
We've waited too long.
We need to see the salvation of our
God.
People have been crying all that thou wouldst
render heavens.
Last Friday morning, we had a prayer meeting.
There were two women there.
One prayed.
And I thought, I would like to pray
after that.
The majesty of God was there.
I would like to pray.
Another woman prayed after that.
And it was terrible to listen to.
I went home.
I said to Martha, I haven't heard praying
like this since the revivals in 1930.
That's 60 years ago.
What is God birthing?
Then we went to the prayer meeting at
the end of the day.
Friday night, we weren't trying to beat the
clock, but we prayed till almost midnight.
I think it was Friday night, was it?
And suddenly a man about half past 11
stood up.
I've never heard a man in 50 years
with holy anger.
He was just blasting the powers of the
devil.
Why is the devil running loose in America?
Why are our girls, before they get to
women, the girls giving birth to girls?
Why are boys captivated by lust and drink?
And so he went on, and there was
a holy anger there.
I fully expected a flash of lightning from
eternity.
You see, there's this consuming desire.
Let me tell you nakedly, because I'm a
bit of a rough boy.
Vicious, my friend says, so I have to
live up to my reputation tonight.
The first week, one young man said this,
oh God, if this thing that we have
is Christianity, it's a pitiable thing.
After saying that, after Gethsemane, after Jesus gone
to hell and back, as it were, after
he shattered death and brought life and immortality
to life and delegated to us, not to
seraphims and cherubims, but he's delegated to us
authority over all the power of the enemy.
I don't care what disease or diabolical disorder
the mind has, Jesus Christ conquered it.
Whatever was brought into the world by the
first Adam was answered by the last Adam.
There wasn't a second Adam.
If there was a second Adam, he could
have a third and a fourth.
But the last Adam did the job.
I tell you the moment that Jesus rose
from the dead, there was panic in hell.
I like to think, thank you, now follow
your father.
You know that the greatest, one of the
greatest operas, I call them uproars, that was
ever presented, but was, was it Verdi's Aida?
And he celebrated in the great theater, the
La Scala, in Milan, Italy.
When he finished, the character, you know, that's
dead, laid out, and he was supposed to
be dead, the whole place went shrieking mad.
They shouted, they whistled, they clapped.
At 11 o'clock at night, they were
still there at one, they were still there
at two, they were still there at three,
they were still there at four, shouting Verdi,
Verdi, Verdi.
You know, the most awful thing in America
tonight is not sin.
As we think of it, drunkenness and abortion.
I believe the greatest hindrance in the world
tonight is unbelief.
We do not believe God.
And that's what he asked of us.
The disciples didn't believe the Lord Jesus Christ.
If they believed him, they'd have been lining
up at the, at the tomb.
But they weren't lining up at the tomb.
They were far, far away.
I think the most amazing thing and disgusting
thing in the life of the Lord Jesus
Christ was that morning, when he woke up
from the resurrection, there wasn't a single person
there to meet him.
He told them over and over again, I'm
going to rise from the dead.
But they just ignored him.
But he rose.
And I believe it was then that Psalm
45 was shouted by millions of angels in
heaven.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and
be lifted up, ye everlasting doors, for the
King of glory shall come in.
We have to recapture the majesty of Jesus
Christ.
I quoted this morning in the early prayer
meeting, John Wesley, Charles Wesley said, oh, for
a trumpet voice and all the world to
call.
But then he followed that by saying, my
heart is full of Christ, and longs this
glorious message to declare.
He didn't say, my head's full of theology.
Over and over again in his wonderful diary,
John Wesley says, I went to London, or
I went to Birmingham, or I went to
Manchester, and I offered men Christ.
He didn't offer them forgiveness.
He didn't offer them pardon.
He didn't offer them peace.
He didn't offer them wealth.
He said, I offer you Christ.
Christ is entirety as your Lord and your
master to direct and control your life.
Christ in you, the hope of glory.
We're stacked up with theology today.
But where is the living Christ?
I fully expect this place to rock in
the power of God this week.
Now let's go back a minute here to
Isaiah chapter six.
I call him Isaiah, or whatever you want
to call him.
Isaiah, good English.
In a year that continues out, let's take
these divisions which are automatic.
In verse five, the word wall.
In verse seven, the word low.
And in verse nine, the word go.
The first is a word of a man.
The second is a word of confession.
And the third is a word of cleansing.