I find that the most stirring, profitable thing
in my life is to read the biographies
of great men, and particularly to read the
life stories of men in the Bible.
And I want to talk about one tonight
that, in my judgment, is one of the
greatest men that ever crossed the bridge of
time.
Is that okay?
Okay, we'll start soon.
His life is all wrapped up in the
miraculous.
He changed the climate.
He raised the dead.
He subdued armies.
And yet God has wrapped up the life
of this man in two very simple words.
There are many great biographies written in two
volumes.
Degby gave us two great lives of William
Boole, the founder of the Salvation Army, in
two great volumes.
The life of the founder of the China
Inland Mission is given in two great volumes.
And as a writer, I don't think it's
very difficult to condense the life of a
man into two volumes, but it's rather difficult
to condense the life of a person, particularly
a man who stands as a giant in
history, into two simple words.
And God has done exactly that.
Because he says of this enabling man Elijah,
he prayed.
I don't believe that any man is greater
than his prayer life.
I don't believe that any church is stronger
than his prayer life.
The other day I saw a monstrous machine
coming up the road, I don't know, an
18-wheeler or bigger than that, and it
had an oversized load.
And as it came past, the machine was
almost groaning under the immense weight of this
huge machine, whatever was on it.
And you know, I'm not an engineer, but
I knew that that 18-wheeler didn't have
a Volkswagen engine in it.
If it had, it would never have pulled
that load.
And yet we've got churches that have massive
organization, and yet they're trying to run on
a Volkswagen prayer meeting.
No church is greater than its prayer life.
No man is greater than his prayer life.
I don't care how great his intellect is.
Now this man Elijah came on the scene
in the history of Israel in a crisis
hour.
Quite recently in the Wall Street Journal there
was a statement.
I don't take the Wall Street Journal, I
don't have any investments.
I'm sure some of you do.
But the Wall Street Journal said that presently
there is a revival sweeping America from the
Californian coast into New York.
A great evangelical revival it said, but it
is having very little effect.
To me that's like saying that last night
there was an earthquake 9.5 on the
Celtic.
Just as ridiculous.
Now I want to talk about prayer and
talk about revival, because right now there's a
spirit of lethargy over the nation.
We've kicked all the old rascals out of
Washington.
We've got a new bunch of rascals.
Anyhow, we've got a new bunch in.
And now the attitude is, relax and be
raptured.
What can go wrong?
Now we've got Mr. Reagan in.
There's something far more deep-seated that's wrong
with the nation than politics or economics or
a bankrupt dollar.
There's no way in the world that we
can turn the nation around.
We're always trying to bail God out.
The latest effort is to have a moral
majority.
Why didn't Jesus have a moral majority?
He had the most moral men in the
world around him.
Pharisees and Sadducees, they were impeccable in their
morality.
But Jesus attacked them pretty severely.
You see, we'll do just about anything in
the world except obey God.
I'm trying to write a book right now,
Revival God's Way.
Do you know why?
Because we've tried every other way.
We've tried to glamorize the gospel.
Tomorrow morning, turn your TV on, you'll see
ladies swinging there in what look like night
dresses, long gowns to the ground, you know,
and faultless hairdos.
And men, you know, have their hair blown
and some blown away.
But uh, you see them all dressed immaculately
there, suave and sweet.
And nobody says anything that will disturb anybody,
because if you do, you'll cut the finances
off.
Now listen, let's be intelligent.
I'm sure you must love God when you
could be at home watching that intellectual rubbish
on TV, and you left it to come
here Saturday night.
That's not very normal, and I'm very glad
you're here.
But friends, we're not going to move this
generation to God except by a holy ghost
revival.
We have the most extensive evangelism in history.
That revival has never become, never been born
through a famous personality.
Revival cannot be nationalized.
Revival cannot be organized.
Revival cannot be denominationalized.
The church of Jesus Christ began in the
upper room with a bunch of men agonizing.
It's ending in the supper room with a
bunch of women organizing.
We mistake rattle for revival.
We mistake commotion for creation.
We mistake action for unction.
Anybody that's read the Bible knows how Elijah
went off the stage.
He went up in a whirlwind.
He had a kind of a private rapture.
He went up in a whirlwind and in
a chariot of fire.
How did he come on the stage?
Where had he been?
Who were his father?
Who were his mother?
Why did he live?
Nobody knows.
He is classified, in my judgment, in the
greatest classification of men this world has ever
known.
He is classified as a prophet, and prophet
to God's emergency men for crisis hours in
history.
To some people, judgment isn't in the earth.
To some people, judgment won't be in America
until the Empire State Building falls down, and
there's a new gap where, you know, when
California falls into the sea.
But one of the judgments of God is
he gives a nation no profit, and right
now we have no profit.
The superstar evangelist.
He's a lot of organization, many organized.
Who will do the agonizing?
Elijah comes on the stage 58 years after
the dividing of the kingdom.
Prior to his coming, there was a wicked
king by the name of Ahab.
He had superseded all the iniquity of every
king that came before him.
There had been at least six kings.
The second king did more evil than the
first.
The third did more evil than the second.
The fourth did more evil than the third.
The fifth did more evil than the fourth.
The sixth, the last one, Ahab, did more
evil than all the iniquity of the kings
before him.
Then, to make bad words of the Irish,
say he rebuilt Jericho, which you remember had
been destroyed, and they laid the foundation in
the blood of a child, and then he
married a wicked woman.
You see, today people are snatching at scripture.
I get literature from all over the world
because my books go all over the world,
and nearly every one of them quotes 2
Chronicles 7 14.
If my people were called by my name,
a hundred and thousand pray and speak my
face.
But wait a minute.
You can't snatch that out of the scripture.
That was given to the Jews.
Is it valid today?
Yes, it is.
But there's a scripture beyond that, that has
a tag on it.
And you see, the preachers like to say,
if my people, that shoves all the responsibility
on you.
I believe the key to revival is in
Joel.
Let the priests weep between the altar and
the doorposts.
I was in a very famous college not
long ago, and God was on that meeting
that morning, and I just stepped around the
podium, and I said to all the brilliant
doctors of divinity and all the other scholars
that were there, I want to ask you
a simple question.
You have hundreds of students that are going
into the ministry.
Do you have a course on weeping?
And if they graduate in weeping, do you
have a course on howling?
There's a stony silence.
What would you think if people gave a
blind man a license to drive an automobile?
You say, that's insanity.
We give boys in college a certificate to
stick on the wall, to prove that they're
preachers, just because they know the word of
God.
But they do not know the God of
the word.
They know how to divide Romans chapter 1
to 7, 8 to 11.
They can tell you which is doctrinal and
practical and so forth.
I think so often the disciples, I guess
you do, you read about them.
I think of them coming to Jesus and
saying, Lord Jesus, to pray.
I wonder why they never said, Lord Jesus,
to preach.
He preached the greatest sermon the world has
ever had.
It's got the answer for our day.
Christianity has not been weighed in the balances
and found wanting.
Christianity has been tried, found difficult, and rejected.
Christianity is not only too difficult for the
world, it's too difficult for the church.
God's problem in the world is not communism,
Romanism, Moonism, or any other ism.
God's problem in America is dead fundamentalism.
We know all the cliches.
We know all the words.
I would have loved to have heard Jesus.
I'm going to teach a course, maybe start
next week, with the Agape, not in the
Agape course.
They're up the street from us.
We live in the New Jerusalem.
We've got the Agape course on one side
of us.
We've got Y1 with 250 students behind us.
We've got Keith Green's group down the road
there.
We've got Calvary Commission up the road here.
We've got Barry McGuire just lives up the
street there.
And we've got Dallas Holmes lives behind us.
And I don't know who lives there.
Great bunch of folk, and I sure like
to get amongst those students.
And I'm going to teach there in about
a couple of weeks.
One group I'm going to teach on Hebrews
11, heroes in Hebrews.
And with Keith Green's group on the kingdom,
the great teaching of Jesus in what we
call the Beatitudes.
And people say, well what are the Beatitudes?
Well, I'll tell you.
They should be attitudes in our lives.
You know what?
If every professing believer in America lived the
Sermon on the Mount for 24 hours, we'd
turn this country round.
We don't know about one or more preaching.
If I were a kind of a Protestant
Pope, I'd close every evangelical church down for
the next month.
Leave enough knowledge to give us the biggest
beating we can ever get when we get
to the judgment seat.
Some young people said to me not long
ago, you know, they tell us that when
we're old enough to get married, there won't
be any material.
We'll have run out of wood.
We're cutting all the trees down, and we
won't have any bricks to build the houses.
I said, you just forget it.
You'll all be able to build a house.
They said, what with?
I said, you're cassette.
I find youngsters who say, you know, I've
got 300 cassettes.
Oh, I've got 400 cassettes.
Oh, I've got so many cassettes.
The nation is drowning right now in theological
knowledge.
There are millions of cassettes.
There are hundreds and hundreds of seminars.
I'm thinking of having a seminar on teaching
seminars.
Everybody's having seminars and weekend meetings, and you
can go into hotels and have meetings and
breakfasts and banquets and bankruptcy.
Well, anyhow, they've all these things going, and
we're getting nowhere.
The disciples said, Lord, teach us to pray.
I would rather pray than be the greatest
preacher in the world.
Preaching, we stand before men on behalf of
God.
Praying, we stand before God on behalf of
men, which is the greatest.
The disciples said, Lord, teach us to pray.
You know, there are people who say, well,
you know, the Lord has no favorite.
Well, he has.
I want to tell you very surely he
has.
Jesus went to the house of Jairus to
raise his daughter from the dead.
Who did he take with him?
Right, Peter, John, and James.
You got them backwards.
Maybe that's all right.
Peter, James, and John.
And then he went to the Mount of
Transfiguration, and he took with him, and he
was transfigured.
And Luke said it was while he was
praying that he was transfigured.
And these men said, Lord, teach us to
pray.
And when he went back, they were asleep.
I can't believe that.
You have heard Jesus praying?
Okay, I'll excuse them.
They were all tired.
They weren't used to spending all night.
He spent all night in prayer, time after
time, year after year.
And they weren't used to it.
But he took them into the most amazing
event that ever happened in the world.
The greatest battle fought in the world wasn't
somewhere back in history.
It wasn't in World War I at Vimy
Ridge or Passchendaele or Mons.
It wasn't in World War II.
The greatest battle ever fought was fought by
one man in a place called Gethsemane.
And three men were allowed to go into
the garden to pray with him.
And they, oh not again.
I mean these three men were allowed to
be with the Son of God.
He's making history like no one else.
And they fell asleep.
And he came back a second time, and
they were asleep.
And he came back a third time.
And they, isn't that incredible?
You know, pastors and teachers get discouraged.
I don't think people understand what we're saying.
I don't think they really understand.
I don't think they're following us.
Well, cheer up.
Jesus had the same problem.
I don't believe the disciples believed the word
that Jesus said.
You say that's true?
Let me prove it to you.
He told them over and over and over
again he was going to die and rise
on the third day.
And the morning he rose, at the resurrection,
there wasn't one of them at the sepulcher.
Therefore, they didn't believe it right from the
day.
Otherwise, they'd have been lining up there.
And the women jumped there and said, no
the men failed him, but we got there.
Women live everywhere.
But anyhow, no the woman didn't go there
to see the resurrected Christ.
She went in to anoint his body, didn't
she?
So don't get discouraged.
People are dumb and stupid.
Every time I look at the congregation, I
remember the Lord commissioned me to comfort the
people minded.
But anyhow, the things go very slow with
us.
You know, five minutes inside eternity, every one
of us will wish we'd be more prayerful,
more sacrificial.
I heard somebody say the other day, oh
it's going to be wonderful in heaven, you
know.
There'll be no tears, there'll be no this,
there'll be no that, no the other.
Where does it say there'll be no tears?
In the book of Revelation.
All right, you know what it says in
the book of Revelation?
God shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes.
So how can there be tears if there
are no tears?
I believe those tears, those scowling tears, will
pour down the faces of men and women
at the judgment feet of Christ, because we're
all going to stand there.
Mr. Kennedy's going to listen to that murder
affair at Chappaquiddick.
It's all coming to the surface.
And Mr. Nixon's going to hear those 18
minutes on the tape played over.
He forgot about that when he was doing
the dirty trick.
But I'll tell you what, if you want
to know how bankrupt preaching is today, Dave
Wilkerson is my neighbor.
We talk together often.
He was telling me recently, he said Len,
do you know 18 different preachers went to
preach to Nixon in the White House, and
not one of them got through to him.
Do you think Elijah would have got through
to him?
Do you think if Elijah preached on TV
this Sunday, he'd get back on TV next
Sunday?
Elijah comes on the stage in the most
critical hour in history for Israel.
They'd had a series of wicked kings.
Iniquity had abounded.
They'd been destroyed to God.
They'd built groves to ash trough and veil.
A wicked woman had got married to the
king and thought everything was in order.
And one day there came a little rugged,
ragged kind of man, and maybe she was
gathering flowers.
Do you remember in Ephesians 6 19, Paul
says, pray for me that utterance may be
given to me.
What does he mean?
He means authority in the word of God.
I don't offer people an option.
I offer an ultimatum.
Preaching can be the most authoritative thing in
the world.
Not something to tickle ears.
If your ears are tickling, I'm not going
to scratch them.
I have no commission to scratch itching ears.
I believe the trouble with the pulpit in
America today is it's filled with puppets instead
of prophets.
Again, prophets are God's emergency men for crisis
out.
Elijah comes onto the stage.
Again, a prophet, the most amazing man the
world has ever had.
Colossal men like Jeremiah and Isaiah and the
minor prophets, and then the apostles take over
afterwards.
Dr. Burt Bathan, the distinguished Jewish scholar who
was converted to Christianity, gave me a definition
that I like very much.
He said the prophet, by the very nature
of his calling, is a tragic figure.
Why?
Because he has a fierce loyalty to God,
and he has a tremendous love for a
nation, and he's torn between the two.
He doesn't see sin as something that's helping
a people, first of all.
He sees sin helping God.
As I said this morning, you don't hear
people saying, oh for Buddha's sake do this,
or Buddha's sake doing that.
They pray for Christ's sake.
They take Christ's name in vain.
Before you go to bed tonight, there'll be
more divorced people in America than when you
got out of bed this morning.
There'll be more drunkards, more harlots.
Almost 3,000 girls under 17 get pregnant
every night in the year.
People were screaming a few years ago, it's
wrong to go to war in Vietnam, it's
wrong to go to war in the...
Why?
Because we're killing people, and now they kill
babies before they get out of the womb.
You think God Almighty is going to put
up with America I don't.
Sure I was in the 700 club there,
and Pat Robertson says he thinks God's already
taken his hands off the nation.
I get people calling me, forming me, writing
to me, saying why do you spend your
energy, why don't you retire?
The devil's been trying to get me to
do that for 60 years, but I'm not.
After all, I'm only 75, so I'm still
young.
74, but anyhow, I've still a long way
to go.
Abraham didn't start till he was 75, so
I'm just, I'm just...
Where's Abraham was?
He finished 175.
I don't think I'll make it so long,
but anyhow.
Give up this, the greatest job in the
world?
Elijah comes on the stage in a situation
identical to our national situation.
The country was given up to idolatry, and
impurity, and iniquity, and infidelity, and everywhere smokers
going up from altars, groves to ash trough
and to bale.
Every time he sees something like that, he
stinks in his nostrils, and he knows that
God is a holy God.
You remember it said in Deuteronomy that if
a nation sins, he'll shut up heaven.
Oh come on, do you, do you, do
you love a, do you love, not America,
forget America.
You've got an American and then a Christian,
you're in, you're in bad shape.
You should be a Christian before you're an
American.
I left the union jack at the cross
when I got saved.
Do you love America enough to say, changing
the words of Patrick Henry from give me
liberty, or to give me death, to give
me revival, or give me death?
The words of Rachel that didn't do her
hair prettily that morning, and dress up, and
get a ripe perfume, that she came to
the place where she realized she wasn't functioning
as she should function as a woman, and
she throws herself at the feet of her
husband Jacob, and she says, Jacob give me
children or I die.
See we want Pentecost in our terms.
We want a painless Pentecost.
We want something, we want to set our
schedule, or get us out of bed too
early, or keep us fasting when we're hungry,
and commit us.
Prayer is the language of the poor.
The self-sufficient don't need to pray.
The self-satisfied don't want to pray.
The self-righteous can't pray.
The only people who can pray are those
who realize that we need a power outside
of ourselves.
Whether you think of government, or religious organization,
or fundamentalism, or whatever it is.
Again, I say Elijah comes on the stage,
he's not concerned about himself.
He's concerned that the enemies of God are
triumphing, and the God of Israel, the God,
the maker of heaven and earth, is being
mocked by shrines all over the area, and
every time he sees them his heart is
broken, he feeds on tears, and affliction, and
sorrow.
You remember when Paul went to the intellectual
capital of the world, which was Athens, and
he went down the street, and everywhere he
turned there was an altar to a strange
God, and he said in the sleepy Elizabethan
English here, that his spirit was stirred within
him.
He said in the Amplified, when he saw
those altars to strange gods, he was angry.
Do they anger us?
Do you get angry about them, or just
say, there's a nice building, a lovely building,
the Mormons are building it, there's a lovely
building over there, am I right?
The old witnesses are building it.
I mean, do we see with these natural
eyes, like every other drunkard down the street,
or businessman, or do we say that place
is an offense to a holy God?
You know, I've been in many countries of
the world, and I find very often I'm
challenged right down to my toes, at the
zeal and ambition of those people.
I preach in a great conference in Karisar,
to hundreds of missionaries from Japan and Korea,
and afterwards one of them said to me,
you know, Brother Ravenhill, Christian missionaries have been
here for 104 years, that was about 10
years ago, 104 years, and the only penetration
that we've made of this nation, Japan, is
a half of one percent, and that means
Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Protestants, a half of
one percent.
I said, well friend, I don't want to
be rude, but the way you're going about
it, it will take another hundred years to
get the other half of that one percent.
All people go there, have a crusade, and
a show, and they run out, and give
a few tracks, and whatnot, and come home
and make reports.
One of the leading TV Christian organizations in
this country, one of their men told me,
that they went down to the Philippines, and
they stopped coming on the way back, they
stopped in Japan, and they checked on the
streets.
They'd had reports that their TV, Christian TV
message was going through Japan, and all kinds
of decisions were being made, and all kinds
of people were being converted, and he said,
we went to city after city, and we
could not find one single person who had
been converted through that TV program, not one.
A year after I'd been to that conference,
we were living up with a brother there,
that's sitting right there for the bump, in
Rockford, Illinois.
The Western Methodist had a preacher, and I
went to hear him, I said to my
wife, Rita, this is the man who was
the chairman of the conference when we were
in Japan.
When I saw him, I said to him,
you don't look so well.
No.
Did you have a bad flight from Japan?
No.
What's wrong?
I didn't have a bad flight, I had
a bad experience.
Oh, what happened?
Well, I thought I'd get my hair cut
in Japan, it's a bit cheaper.
So, I got a haircut last night, and
as I sat in the chair, the man
clipped my hair, and then finally he said,
ha, you are a Yankee.
Uh, well, he said, I'm not quite a
Yankee, I'm an American.
No making such a difference.
Ah, you are an American businessman.
No.
Ah, you are an American tourist.
No.
What kind of American are you?
I'm a missionary.
Ah, good, good, said the man.
I am a missionary too.
Oh, I thought you were a barber.
Barber in the morning, nine o'clock till
five.
I go home, I beg, and then I
go on the street at six o'clock,
fill my pockets with crack, take my phonograph,
knock on your door.
I give you lecture number one tonight, I
come a week tonight, give you lecture number
two, I come the week after, give you
lecture number three, I come the week after,
give you lecture number four.
This is a new combination of religion and
politics.
Bugger Garty.
And he's crazier than Christianity.
He's going to wipe Christianity out of Japan
and these other nations.
You go out at six o'clock at
night, huh?
Yeah, yeah, I go out at six o
'clock, till two o'clock in the morning.
How many nights a week?
Seven nights a week.
You go out every night at six o
'clock and you don't go to bed till
two in the morning.
I didn't say that.
You did say that.
I didn't say that.
What did you say?
I said I don't get home until two
o'clock in the morning, and then he
said I pull a curtain on one side,
and I cross my legs, and I meditate
on my God for two hours to renew
my strength.
Maybe that sounds a bit like Isaiah 40,
they that wait upon the Lord to renew
their strength.
But here's a heathen man bowing down before
his Buddhist God.
And the mystery was so confused and embarrassed
that a heathen man would go from six
till two in the morning, and then pray
from two till four.
What time do you get up?
Seven thirty.
You live on three and a half hours
sleep each night.
How long have you done this?
Seven years, he said.
You think I felt like coming home to
America to talk about revival and prayer and
the need in that country?
My simple definition is this, dear friends, of
all the Church of God in America or
England or anywhere else, the one single reason
we do not have revival is we're content
to live without it.
The price is too stiff.
Don't disorganize my life.
Don't ask me to open my business half
an hour after day instead of a whole
day.
Don't ask me to stay up at night.
Don't ask me to abolish my TV.
Don't ask me to get rid of the
trigger in my life.
I mean I'm saved, I'm not going to
hellfire, and so I'm a nice Christian for
what?
Look here, friend, there are more lost people
in the world at this moment, this moment,
than any period in history, and the Church
has never been more paralyzed.
Again, I say that no church is greater
than its prayer life.
You see, our revivals are predictable.
We ship in the best guy, the fellow
with the big reputation.
Revival is totally unpredictable.
A crusade for a big city now can
cost a million dollars.
Revival never costs one red cent.
There's only one revival I know of in
the world right now.
It's up in Nagaland in northeast India.
It burst out in 1977, three years ago.
Until that time, that state was the most
troubled state in India.
It had more crime, it had more juvenile
delinquency, prostitution, drugs, kids fighting in the street,
and then suddenly there was revival.
Do you know what revival is?
Revival is a divine intervention in the affairs
of men.
Revival is God's people getting cleansed, and then
jeweled with power, and evangelism is those people
going out in the streets.
But the blockage is in the Church.
Do you know how effective that revival is?
Do you know how you test a revival?
There can be a reviving in the Church,
people get a little bit of a mess
in their life.
Do you know how you test a real
revival?
It changes the moral climate of the community.
The government has come down now and said,
hey, crime has gone down like this.
We've hardly any crime in the nation.
The girls aren't getting raped.
Drug addiction has gone down to zero nearly.
The police aren't having much to do.
What in the world has happened?
And they discover that God had come in
all his amazing power in revival, and mocked
up these wretched, filthy aliens, and revolutionized the
society.
And Paul Coffman is a very distinguished missionary
statesman.
He lives in Hong Kong.
I was going to see him when I
was there.
I didn't, and I've regretted it ever since.
Paul Coffman went to see this revival.
You see, almost everybody has tunnel vision on
revival in America.
It must come like Finney has it.
But it ain't going to come like that,
Gwen.
We're not living in Finney's day.
We're not living in a day of arrogant
militantism.
Arrogant militant paganism.
We're living in a day when people boast
about sin.
People used to do in a corner and
brush if they were found out.
The girl used to be embarrassed and humiliated,
and did a letter in the area when
I lived in England years ago, when I
was a boy, 60 years back.
A girl that got pregnant.
Oh, did you hear about it?
Oh, it was a tragedy.
People used to groan and weep and feel
ashamed.
She polluted the whole district.
She was having a baby out of wedlock.
And now you get women on TV boasting
they've had a number of them.
You get people openly brazenly talking about the
method to this.
Can you think of an educated nation where
somebody puts a gadget into a woman and
rips an unborn baby, and then you flush
it down the toilet, and you call that
education?
Listen, if living any old how, and drinking
any old how, and sleeping any old how,
and living a hellish life to satisfy the
passions as people will do all night when
you and I are in bed, if that's
the joy of life, why is the suicide
rate so high?
Do you think people want to live a
hundred years to shack up and live in
sin?
But there comes a point, you see, where
the wages of sin is death.
Not only eternal death, but people are going
out the best way they can by suicide.
Why?
Because they've given them to all the passions,
and indulge themselves in iniquity to that degree.
It was like that when Elijah came on
the stage.
What are you going to do?
All the other preachers have gone underground.
I think we have to learn the game.
At least I have that one man with
God is the majority.
Elijah didn't have a finance committee behind him.
I don't know how he got on.
He didn't even have a mailing list.
Look, if we don't have the holy ghost,
we'd better have every gadget that we can
get.
But if we have the holy ghost, well,
he's all we need.
I'm asked to believe these days, you know,
when I see this, and that God built
this place in answer to believing prayer, when
all the time most of these big evangelistic
societies even are monuments to human genius, human
ingenuity, Madison Avenue tactics, public relations know-how,
and clever advertising.
Isn't it something when these big evangelistic groups
say, we have more computers than the IBM
down the road?
I don't think there are any computers in
the upper room, do you?
No, no, no, no, we're not going to
have any superstar evangelists anymore.
I'm sorry we ever had any in one
sense.
But I'll tell you what I'm believing.
Oh, I can paint a picture as black
as hell.
I can give you statistics that would tear
you inside out.
But I want to tell you, the greatest
tragedy in the world tonight is not the
betrayal of Vietnam.
It's not that Cambodia was raped.
The connivance of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger
knew about it.
It's not that Afghanistan has been destroyed by
an invading army, and we didn't do a
thing about it.
If ever you saw the impotence of politics
or money, why have those boys been in
prison for 444 days?
The United Nations did nothing about it, so
they're a pretty helpless bunch.
And the government did nothing about it, so
they're a pretty helpless bunch.
And worst of all, the Church of God
did nothing about it.
Isn't it amazing that the Russian government will
let 10,000 to 20,000 Jews and
other people come out of Russia every year,
but they won't let seven Pentecostals come out?
There are seven Pentecostal people have been hiding
in the American embassy in Moscow for two
years now, and they can't get out.
When Mr. Carter was asked about it, he
said, well, of course, that's got to do
with religion.
Oh, so religious people don't have human rights,
eh?
I'm saying that to show you the impotence.
There's a time when bombs and armies and
banks and everything can do nothing.
And we're in that crisis moment right now.
If God, the Holy Ghost, doesn't come on
America, watch out.
The next two years are going to be
years of starvation and hardship such as we
have never known in this country before.
God's problem in the Old Testament was not
Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites and Hamorites.
God's problem in the Old Testament was Israel.
Again, God's problem tonight is not communism and
all the other isms.
God's problem tonight is a disobedient, bankrupt, worldly
church.
All right, Elijah comes on the scene.
This woman has got it all her own
way.
Just like turning these lights out one by
one, she plunges the nation into darkness, then
the guilt grows to ash, froth and veil,
then the invaded law of the priest.
And she thought everything in the garden was
lovely, and whoops, up comes one man.
I think she must be near a nervous
breakdown.
He puts his finger up and says, there's
going to be no rain, according to my
word, and lots of heaven.
I think this was one of the greatest
partners in the world.
Do you know what they did to try
and find a good preacher?
They turned the army out.
We have an evangelist come to town, we
give him the key, the mayor meets him
at the town.
They're not afraid of our evangelism anymore.
Nobody met Phineas at the gates of the
city with a golden key.
They didn't bring everybody and his brother to
a big banquet.
They were terrified of the prophet.
I long to see the day when men
are terrified of my faith or somebody else's
faith, because they know we carry the authority
and anointing of God.
And hypocrisy can't live.
I shut up heaven that there be no
rain.
Say, do you love America enough to ask
God to shut up heaven?
Because it means shutting up heaven, you'll strangle
the economy, the cattle die, the crops won't
grow.
Oh, I used to be in bread lines
in England in First World War.
Out of bed at four o'clock in
the morning to try and get a lot
of bread.
Standing in the shivering rotten English climate there,
with snow and sleet coming down.
Are you really ready to get rid of
some preacher comforts and not have so much
stuff stuffing in your refrigerators and then stuffing
you afterwards?
No, we want everything the same.
We hope gas won't get much more costly.
My boys on the mission field in Paraguay,
was home until two weeks ago.
They paid five dollars and fifty cents a
gallon for gas on a missionary's allowance.
Can you think of that?
Six thousand dollars for a refrigerator that costs
six hundred down the road there at Sears.
We're still living in a paradise in America.
It's a fool's paradise right now, but we
enjoy it anyhow.
We've got the good men up in Washington,
so do you know what the feeling of
the nation, the believers is?
Relax and be raptured.
Revival comes only through blood and sweat and
tears.
Elijah, the anointed of God, he's been in
the secret place of the most high.
He comes on the stage of full grown
men.
He shuts up the whole nation, starves the
economy, terrifies the king.
Go hide out there.