Leonard Ravenhill

Matt Self over at The Gad(d)about, besides having the common sense to pick drums over all other musical instruments, also has the brains to quote Leonard Ravenhill. Good for Matt. The American Church needs to hear more Ravenhill.

If you haven’t been around Cerulean Sanctum very long, you’ll get to know Ravenhill soon enough. He and A.W. Tozer are the “patron saints” of this blog. No one in the last century wrote blistering words like Tozer and no one preached with more fire than Ravenhill. That they were friends in real life is the icing on the cake.

I don’t do a lot of imploring on this blog, but if you’ve never heard Ravenhill preach, I implore you to go to SermonIndex.net and check out the Ravenhill section at this link (with videos at this link).

Ravenhill was more than a preacher, though; he may have been the last true English-speaking revivalist with roots that went back to the Welsh Revival. He passed away in 1994, and one of the greatest losses in my own life is that I mismarked a calendar and missed him preaching at a local church. He passed away not too long afterward.

Yet he lives on in his teaching tapes, and most of them are incendiary. Not only did Ravenhill handle the Scriptures in a way unmatched today, but he could draw parallels and bring two disparate Biblical concepts together like no other preacher I’ve ever heard. He not only knew the ins and outs of the Bible, but hundreds of hymns, too. Best of all, he had a solid understanding of how the charismata work today. He was the total package. Listening to him is so convicting I find it hard not to keep from rending my clothes and pouring ashes on myself. If you want to know that “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” may have sounded like to Jonathan Edwards’ listeners, check out few of the highest-rated Ravenhill sermons on SermonIndex.net, especially those before he was slowed by a stroke in the mid-1980s.

God knows that we need another like him to rouse the Church in 2006.

And though it’s a shame to limit the breadth of Leonard Ravenhill’s wisdom to a few zingers, I’ll end with some of his more pithy statements:

The only time you can really say that ‘Christ is all I need’ is when Christ is all you have.
If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, He would never have been crucified.
A popular evangelist reaches your emotions. A true prophet reaches your conscience.
The last words of Jesus to the church (in Revelation) were ‘Repent!’
A true shepherd leads the way. He does not merely point the way.
Your doctrine can be as straight as a gun barrel…and just as empty!
John the Baptist never performed any miracles; yet, he was greater than any of the Old Testament prophets.
I doubt that more than two percent of professing Christians in the United States are truly born again.
Our God is a consuming fire. He consumes pride, lust, materialism, and other sin.
There are only two kinds of persons: those dead in sin and those dead to sin.
[Concerning the darkness that has enveloped most of Christendom:] When you’re sitting in a dark room, you can either sit and curse the darkness, or you can light a candle.
Children can tell you what Channel 7 says, but not what Matthew 7 says.
Some women will spend 30 minutes to an hour preparing for church externally (putting on special clothes and makeup, etc.). What would happen if we all spent the same amount of time preparing internally for church, with prayer and meditation?
Maturity comes from obedience, not necessarily from age.
What good does it do to speak in tongues on Sunday if you have been using your tongue during the week to curse and gossip?
The Bible is either absolute or it’s obsolete.
Why do we expect to be better treated in this world than Jesus was?
Today’s church wants to be raptured from responsibility.
Testimonies are wonderful. But so often our lives don’t fit our testimonies.
[Concerning one of the new movements in the church that was causing a stir among Christians:] There’s also a stir when the circus comes to town.
My main ambition in life is to be on the Devil’s most wanted list.
You can’t develop character by reading books. You develop it from conflict.
When there’s something in the Bible that churches don’t like, they call it ‘legalism.’
We can’t serve God by proxy.
We must do what we can do for God before He will give us the power to do what we can’t do.
There’s a difference between changing your opinion and changing your lifestyle.
Our seminaries today are turning out dead men.
How can you pull down strongholds of Satan if you don’t even have the strength to turn off your TV?
Everyone recognizes that Stephen was Spirit-filled when he was performing wonders. Yet, he was just as Spirit-filled when he was being stoned to death.
If a Christian is not having tribulation in the world, there’s something wrong!
[Concerning the fixation that today’s church has with numbers, with growth at any price:] The church has paid a terrible price for statistics!
Any method of evangelism will work if God is in it.
Church unity comes from corporate humility.
You can have all of your doctrines right, yet still not have the presence of God.
Many pastors criticize me for taking the Gospel so seriously. But do they really think that on Judgment Day Christ will chastise me, saying, ‘Leonard, you took Me too seriously’?
You can know a lot about the atonement and yet receive no benefit from it.
If the whole church goes off into deception, that will in no way excuse us for not following Christ.
You never have to advertise a fire. Everyone comes running when there’s a fire. Likewise, if your church is on fire, you will not have to advertise it. The community will already know it.

When Believers Stumble: Worry

Worry Normally, I post about four times a week. I write on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, posting just after midnight so that the posts run Monday through Thursday.

I was shy a post last week because I ran up against my own failure. I stopped to write on Worry about a half dozen times, but every time I crashed into writer’s block—not a typical problem for me.

Over this weekend, I confronted my blockage and realized what had monkey-wrenched my gears. The reason I suddenly found myself at a loss for words is that worry is the single biggest sin in my own life.

I didn’t start out being a worrier. I don’t believe that any Christian who struggles with worry does. You can’t get sidetracked unless you’re already on the journey.

No one thought of me as a worrier, quite the opposite; I was the quintessential optimist. Still, I had my share of setbacks as I entered my twenties.

One of my friends took special note of the particularly harsh events that followed me around for a few years. Going for a drive together one night, he confessed to me that the reason he wasn’t a Christian was me. I was shocked. Hadn’t I been a good witness? Where had I gone wrong? He told me that it had nothing to do with how I lived out the Faith. My friend explained that he could not understand how God could treat one of His followers—me—so badly. If that is how God worked, he didn’t want any part of that God. Of course, I tried to sway him, but he didn’t want to hear it.

I shook off the funk of that night, but something had been planted in me that took root. I started noting how I fell into worst case scenarios quite often. Didn’t know why. That’s not the way that I prayed.

So I started worrying. I started thinking about the worst thing that could happen. I worried when I considered decisions. I learned to ignore shock when the worst possible thing actually came to pass. I didn’t become a pessimist as much as a disillusioned optimist.

But I’m a Christian, right?

We all know Abraham as one of the patriarchs of the Faith. Abraham was a worrier, though. Like most worriers, he envisioned the worst possible outcome. Think about this: Abraham worried that as he traveled, foreign kings would think his wife was such a hottie that he’d be killed and his wife wife-napped. So he hatched a plan to pass her off as his sister. Strangely enough, his worst case scenario came to pass. Twice!

Elijah fled into the desert, fearing that Jezebel would hunt him down and have his head. God fed him by ravens, yet Elijah still wallowed in his worry.

The Bible doesn’t have nearly as many verses on worry and anxiety as some other issues believers face. Jesus’ well-known words on worry, lilies, and sparrows is one of the most direct passages. Most of us know Philippians 4:6-7 by heart.

But as someone who struggles with worry, I’ve wondered why so many other Christians are tripped up by this problem.

Christianity is a faith that has strong roots in the past and a vision always looking to the future. Both the past and future play into worry. We can worry that choices we made in the past will somehow culminate in heartbreak later in the future. Worry, by its nature, fears what might be coming around the bend. Worriers prepare with hopes to prevent the future they don’t wish to see. Worriers, therefore, are people who can never live in the present.

Because there is such a strong emphasis in Christianity on eternal reward, Christians who struggle with worry are always fighting to ensure they are laying up treasure in heaven, fretting when that goal isn’t being met. And for Christians who worry, self-examination is never the issue. They are always keenly aware of each and every sin, every lack, every area that needs growth. Sometimes it seems overwhelming

Was what I did enough? Why did that happen? I did as God said to, but I failed. Why? The Bible says this, but the experience was just the opposite. I must have done something wrong since the Scriptures are always right.

Do any of those sound familiar?

At the heart of worry is fear. At the heart of that fear is loss.

You’d expect churches to deal with loss better than any other group, but in America that is often not the case. I think the Church does well with death in most cases, but other kinds of loss are bobbled. I know from personal experience that job loss is not handled well. Downward mobility is also problematic for some churches. I’ve known widows and widowers who received plenty of comfort within weeks of losing a spouse, but a year later their support had vanished. And for every heartwarming story of church support for those who have lost their health, there are others that border on horrifying.

So some Christians who face those issues worry.

For me, all I want is to be in God’s will because I know that being in His will means that I am living life to the fullest this side of heaven. I want with all my heart to go the Scriptures and find the answers for each situation I find myself in day by day.

What makes this harder is when the message of American Christianity intersects with that desire and crushes it.

As most of you know, I’m a stay-at-home dad. I do have a writing business, but my wife works outside of the home. Life is tough in Ohio right now. Our unemployment rate (from what I read a couple days ago in the local paper) is running 7% above the rest of the country. That means that a little more than one out of ten people in this state are unemployed. Many people we know are struggling and all the couples we know who were vehement about not falling into a dual-breadwinner household are finding that reality and theory aren’t intersecting any longer.

From where I sit, parts of the Godblogosphere and many portions of American Christianity have tried, convicted and sentenced to hell folks like us. There are a lot of Christian voices out there, many of them quite wise, but when they come down on your own little noggin, it’s hard to avoid worry for those of us who want to be doing the right thing. I don’t know how many times I’ve just wanted to burn my computer and forget blogging or reading blogs because yet another person I respected told me I was as bad as an unbeliever because I wasn’t the primary breadwinner.

Pick any aspect of Christianity and there’s a person laboring under a millstone of worry because they aren’t stacking up to the “accepted standard.”

I started out this post by saying that worrying is a sin. It’s rooted in fear and lack of trust; there’s no excuse for it.

But to all those Christians who don’t struggle with worry, I ask that instead of making it harder for worriers to triumph over worry, come alongside them. I know that I try very hard not to create burdens for people who come to Cerulean Sanctum. Millstones are plentiful in the American Church, unfortunately, and when we’re not placing them on each other, we’re often failing to help others remove the stone necklaces the world adds.

Some days are better than others for me. I pray that every day I shake off more worry. I know I’m not alone. As much as we talk about trusting God, there are more people like me in American churches than I could count in my lifetime.

We say that faith is like jumping off a cliff, but we don’t have a good answer for folks who wind up like Wile E. Coyote, nothing more than a poof of sand and a crater at the bottom of the canyon. If we did a better job backing up people, perhaps we’d have a lot fewer worriers in the Church.

When Believers Stumble: Trusting Our Senses Over God’s Truth

Peter sinks I’ll start by giving credit where credit is due. The pastor of my church preached on the Numbers and Judges passages below, so credit goes to Mark Otten for inspiring part of this post. Yet because this fits so well with the posts to come—and is an issue discussed recently on other blogs—I felt it was a great place to start this mini-series, “When Believers Stumble.”

We say it’s always about faith, but anymore, I wonder just how much faith we really have. How many people who claim to be Christians are willing to ask themselves the tough question: Do I really have enough faith? You’d be hard pressed to find a die-hard Christian who would admit that they don’t have enough faith to believe for the most impossible situations. I think that our classification of what is “impossible” is slipping, though. Skimming through about a hundred Godblogs shows a remarkable amount of “We believe, but….”

Why is it so hard to take God at His word? If someone says that the Bible isn’t inerrant, most of us will protest vociferously. But press us on which parts we actually believe and the flopsweat forms and the excuses flow.

This isn’t self-righteousness on my part. I struggle with truly believing some parts of the Scriptures. Mentally, I can assent to everything, but when push comes to shove, some parts are almost too good to be true. Now before someone labels me just another wolf in sheep’s clothing, my defense is that I’m in good company.

Take Gideon for example. Some people might call his actions “discernment,” but I read this passage and see a guy with a bagful of “buts.” And before whom is he pulling them out? God Himself:

Now the angel of the LORD came and sat under the terebinth at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, while his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites. And the angel of the LORD appeared to him and said to him, “The LORD is with you, O mighty man of valor.”
And Gideon said to him, “Please, sir, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us, saying, ‘Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the LORD has forsaken us and given us into the hand of Midian.”
And the LORD turned to him and said, “Go in this might of yours and save Israel from the hand of Midian; do not I send you?”
And he said to him, “Please, Lord, how can I save Israel? Behold, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.”
And the LORD said to him, “But I will be with you, and you shall strike the Midianites as one man.”
And he said to him, “If now I have found favor in your eyes, then show me a sign that it is you who speaks with me. ”
—Judges 6:11-17 ESV

Things have been so bad for so long, that Gideon can’t let it go. God’s talking to him and he’s so stuck in a rut that it doesn’t seem to matter. He vents like a pent-up volcano. Even when God says He’s going to make it all better through Gideon, the puniest guy in the tribe of Manasseh just won’t drop the disbelief. His eyes tell him all he needs to know. He’s seen the Midianite oppression and no one, not even God, is going to convince him of another truth.

Now the happy ending of the story has Gideon eventually triumphing over the Midianites, but I’ve got to think that God wasn’t entirely happy with his pushback.

It gets worse when all of Israel is called to believe:

At the end of forty days they returned from spying out the land. And they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the people of Israel in the wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh. They brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. And they told him, “We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb. The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country. And the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.”
But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.”
Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.” So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
—Numbers 13:25-33 ESV

God came out and said, “I’m giving you a land flowing with milk and honey,” and the response was “We’ll be crushed like gnats by those sons of a Nephilim!” One man here, Caleb, believed God despite what his eyes told him. It didn’t matter how big the giants were; those monsters were the real gnats because Caleb’s God can’t be contained by the whole universe. Caleb’s eyes were focused on a world bigger than the one the rest of the spies saw, his ears attuned to a promise everyone else drowned out with cries of doubt. “Let us go up at once….”—is there a speck of unbelief in that statement? None that I can find.

What is particularly sad about this is what follows in Numbers 14. Read it and ask what happens when God speaks and the people would rather believe their senses than the Author of Truth. We know the wandering that results from this distrust. We know that God let an entire generation of faithless people pass on before the Israelites took possession of that golden land. We can’t believe how crazy they were not to believe, but at the same time, we squirm in our seats.

Lastly, we come to Peter, one of Jesus’ handpicked, the brashest of the bunch:

And in the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, “It is a ghost!” and they cried out in fear.
But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.”
And Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
He said, “Come.”
So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, “Lord, save me.”
Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”
—Matthew 14:25-31 ESV

Why is this passage in the Scriptures? It wasn’t only for the early Church. What does it say to us in 2006?

The Lord commanded Peter and he came, but looked at the waves.

The Lord commanded the Israelites and they looked at the giants.

The Lord commanded Gideon and he looked at his circumstances.

They all had their senses attuned to the natural world, not the supernatural. They could see past their noses, but not past their preconceptions. They heard God, but relegated Him to a distant second place, choosing instead their fallen, shrill cry of faithlessness.

We are very much like them.

What troubles me is that we don’t have to be. God can do so much more if we believe:

When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to [Jesus], “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.”
And he said to him, “I will come and heal him.”
But the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.” And the servant was healed at that very moment.
—Matthew 8:5-10

Jesus, say the word and it will be done. No hesitation on the centurion’s part, none on the Lord’s in answering. And here’s the part that really wows: The centurion’s faith was so strong that Jesus didn’t even have to be in the presence of the centurion’s slave in order to heal.

How easy it is when we believe!

Times are not going to get easier for us Christians, though. There’s no cruise control on this car. Honoring Christ means believing the whole counsel of Scripture, not the parts that are easy to grasp, convenient to believe. Moving beyond our senses is at the core of Christian maturity.

One of the charismata is the gift of faith. You’ll get arguments from theologians as to what exactly that gift entails, but the one thing I know is that we all need to be praying that God would pour it out on us in full measure. We’ll need it in the days to come.