David:     If you were given the privilege of having a conversation with someone you both respected and admired, who might that person be?

Karen:     And what if you didn’t have to limit your choice to just one such individual, but instead you had numerous such opportunities?

David:     Karen, anyone given such a privilege should consider himself or herself most fortunate.

Karen:     I agree with you, David, and that’s something the Lord most graciously granted to us time and time again when we were broadcasting for twenty years with the Chapel of the Air.

David:     Right.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:     This visit you will hear the voice of Leonard Ravenhill. These interviews were first aired in 1983 on the Chapel of the Air. That’s like thirty-seven years ago.

Karen:     Leonard Ravenhill was a well-known British writer and preacher who had moved to America and you and he connected because he had written a book, many books. But the one that stood out to you was “Why Revival Tarries,” which sold over a million copies, and that was the topic that was very dear to your heart.

David:     Yeah, Ravenhill was a close friend of the musician Keith Green. Karen, I remember as a family traveling out in the West and hearing on the car radio that Keith Green had died. That was very shocking.

Karen:     He was a young man.

David:     Yeah, he had a great ministry and Green considered Ravenhill his mentor.

Karen:     Oh, that’s great. You know, some of these tapes because they’re older, they have some distortion in them. In fact, we had some tapes that just basically went, mowahhh.

David:     The tapes degraded. The worst of that has all been cut out.

Karen:     Most of them. There’s a few little places in here. It was really hard to cut those pieces out because what Ravenhill was saying about prayer was so powerful and yet it just was very distracting. So, we ask our listener’s tolerance for those places we did leave in just because we felt like what he’s saying was so great.

David:     Leonard Ravenhill died in 1994. He was in his late 80s. I’d just like to give at the beginning our own response as we re-heard these interviews. And then I’m going to give the bulk of the time to the conversations as they actually went on. I was moved again as I heard these. I think the thing that stood out to me so much was his call for prayer and my awareness that even now that prayer base is quite thin in my mind across the country.

Karen:     Well, he made a point that ministers have to be praying people. And they will not have praying churches unless they’re praying people. But I mean he’s talking about spending hours in prayer. Dave, I used to hear that, but I don’t hear that much now. I mean we used to have Wednesday night prayer meetings. That was just something that the Churches did.

David:     That was normal part of the church.

Karen:     But this is another level of prayer commitment that I don’t think were being called too much in this nation. And it’s very convicting to listen to him talk because that’s really what he’s saying. We have to be a praying leadership. If ministers are not praying, ministers or congregations will not be praying congregations. So, I was very moved by what he said and I thought a lot about these interviews since we first listened to them.

David:     I believe God has called me to both pray for and call for another sweeping revival to powerfully touch the nation’s churches and then our society in general. And I, you know, people say “Are you retired?” I get up and my work is to pray. If I had opportunity to preach as much as I used to, I don’t think what I have to say is that important as my time in prayer. And being able to come out of that with a sense that I’ve gotten very close to the heart of the Lord.

So yes, and I’m not saying that for other people, I’m saying that for me. So anyway, we will back off now and allow Leonard to have the major amount of the time of this podcast and I think you’ll find it very moving.

A name that for a long time has been on my list of people I would like very much to meet is that of Leonard Ravenhill. Years ago, I first read books of his like “Why Revival Tarries” and “Revival Praying”. Some of these and newer ones like “Meet for Men” I’ve read several times over.

Leonard Ravenhill, some people say, and I’ve even heard preachers say it, that in America we are presently experiencing a great revival. Is that your belief?

Leonard:  It may be a revival, but it’s not a revival of the biblical revival. It’s not a spiritual revival. There’s a shallow thing that has come up which draws crowds, but it’s not changing character. It’s not changing people’s lifestyle. They don’t seem to have any vibrant living relationship with God. I would say that we’re not having revival in the framework of historic revival.

Whereas Dr. Tozer used to say to me so often that revival changes the moral climate of a community. We’re further down the drain now with all these so-called revivals in the last 25 years. Our prisons are more crowded. Our divorce rate is higher. Our diseases, sexual diseases, are more prevalent. Crime is worse. Children are more rebellious. The salt somehow has lost its savor.

David:     Give us a feel of what you have in mind when you use that word revival. How would you define the term?

Leonard:  Well again, revival changes the nation. There have been bloody revolutions in France when they swept the monarchy into the garbage can and they put up their flag with liberty, fraternity, and equality on it. Even Lecce, a secular historian, says that that bloodbath would have swept into England, and he quotes himself, God raised up two men, Charles Wesley, and John. Well, he raised, of course, maybe the most powerful, was maybe the greatest revivalist ever since the day of Pentecost and that was Whitfield. But he acknowledged that that built a barrier which stopped the flood of the enemy. The enemy was coming in like a flood and God raised up that barrier and it completely changed the deists had been in power. They said every preacher practically was a drunkard. Every other house in London was a gin palace. Wesley came along, like most prophets. He had to walk the streets out of 600 sermons. He preached only six inside of buildings. He had to preach in streets and yet they turned the nation around.

David:     It’s fascinating reading it, isn’t it?

Leonard:  Yes.

David:     Does revival preaching begin being directed toward Christians? Or do you see it being directed to non-Christians?

Leonard:  I believe that revival is the work of the spirit in the church. And evangelism is that church revived going out to seek the lost. Revival really means to revitalize. Well, you can’t revitalize what never had life.

David:     So, to a large degree, revival preaching is aimed at the church then, you would say.

Leonard:  Yes.

David:     It’s stating that the American church stands in need of revival. Another way of saying that you believe the church is backslidden.

Leonard:  Yes, because time and again my heart aches when I go through a town say Friday night and every church is locked up, every tavern, every hellhole is opened. I’ve just been in New York City for a week and it’s crushing. It’s a world in itself. There’s every nation under heaven. And as I said to the pastor, if the Holy Spirit fell on this town, even amongst the believers they wouldn’t need the gift of tongues, as Pentecost, they’re already bilingual. You go down a street and you hear nothing but Greek or Portuguese or Italian or Japanese. If they got filled with God, they could go as ready-made evangelists of their own country.

David:     Do you see the possibility of a city like New York being touched by revival fires again?

Leonard:  Yes, in the Brooklyn Tabernacle where I ministered last week there were over a thousand at the prayer meeting. And they were all praying and there was nothing ragged about it. It wasn’t raucous, it was smooth and sweet. And I looked out on Japanese and Vietnamese and Greeks and converted Jews, converted Jehovah’s Witnesses, what have you got? And the pastor said this, “Look, if the JWs can take the Yankee Stadium every few years and pack it with 60-70,000 people and have their back, why can’t we have one colossal prayer meeting?” That’s his goal, to rent the stadium and have no star preachers, just say this next session is for prayer and so on and so forth. And spend a whole day of prayer is expecting to get 60,000 people to that prayer meeting.

David:     I appreciate the vision of people who have been…

Leonard:  Right. For my young man, he’s not old. Foggy like me, he’s young and maybe 50 years, nearly older than he is.

David:     Recently you wrote a book entitled “America is too young to die.” What do you see as a head for this land if the church doesn’t experience a revival?

Leonard:  A revolution.

David:     Can you amplify that some?

Leonard:  Yeah, I think the option, Brother David, is that we are the concentrating prayer or we’re praying concentration camps, it’s our option. But what you do when you go to churches, big churches with five, six, seven thousand members who do not even have a prayer meeting? Churches where there’s not even a prayer meeting in them. Other churches that have known at least a little measure of revival. And every church seems to have a history where it’s had, what I call, a divine invasion where God has suddenly come in and taken control. It’s a shattering experience. I mean, you don’t get revival sitting back on a chair. You get it lying on your belly in tears and grown in agony. And if Zion doesn’t travail, how can she bring forth to you? If Zion doesn’t travail, the world doesn’t travail.  

David:     But what you’re saying is so contrary from where most evangelical Christians are, say, in this land. I don’t see your words even being anywhere near what the reality of the picture is here.

Leonard:  No, but on the other hand, I get phone calls from all over the country. Guys will talk to me 40, 50, 60 minutes. I had one coming from Western Canada. They called me last Saturday and they said, “Brother Leonard, I’m in Western Canada. I will fly to Dallas if you’ll talk to me one hour.”

Now think of the expense and the long travel. I said, “I won’t talk to you for now.” I said, “You won’t?” I said, “No, I’ll talk to you for three hours if you come all that way.”

I have men coming from other countries. But when they come, they’re disgusted with what they see in our country. And they want to go back. Yeah, one guy said, “I want to go back tomorrow to my own country because we pray, we travail, and I don’t find it here. You’re so self-satisfied. You’re so sophisticated. There’s no deep passion and that has to come.” But it not only has to start in the church, but it also has to start with the pastors.

David:     Do you see this prayer base being behind what’s happening, say, in other continents like in Africa where there is revival?

Leonard:  Yes. A man visited me less than a month ago and he said, “If they have a service at seven at night, the people begin to gather in hundreds at five and they pray for two hours.”

One of my arguments lately, Brother David, has been this. That when I was a boy, if you went to a holiness church or a Pentecostal church, there were more people at the altar before the service started than after the service. And they used to pray, “God, come down in the midst.” I was terrified he’d come. Or “Send the fire.” I consider myself trying to hold my head so no fire would fall and burn me up. But there’s a passion, there’s a fervor there. It’s gone. It’s not in any church. Well, I was going to say names, but we better leave it. But it’s not there.

David:     I’m talking with Leonard Ravenhill. Pardon the expression but let me ask you this way. What are your gut feelings about America? Is revival still possible here?

Leonard:  Yes. Because I believe God can raise the dead. But I do not believe revival is important. I believe it’s imperative. We have it or we go to hell. We need it as much as we needed in the 1740s when Jonathan Edwards was around and that was an awesome revival. And we’ve gone up and then we’ve gone down and we’re in the place now where we need a real divine invasion.

David:     How much of a time factor is there left? Do you have any idea on that as to either the nation turns or otherwise?

Leonard:  I feel the next five years, in fact, news of phrase are super critical. I don’t think there’s much time left. If you get the underground knowledge of what’s happening in the Middle East, I don’t know if you know a paper, a special office bureau, a Christian aristocrat in England sent, he’s Irish actually, but he sends it out of England. And he has the pulse of the nation. He can tell you something that CBS or Time Magazine will tell you in a month from now. And when you know what’s going on underneath, it’s terrible.

David:     Leonard Ravenhill, I want you to imagine yourself talking to the average evangelical church person. What word from the Lord do you feel you have for such an individual?

Leonard:  Well, the first thing I ask them, “Do they have a family altar?” And they think it’s something you buy at a bookstore. When I talked with Duncan Campbell about the revival in the Hebrides, he said, “Brother Ravenhill, in the Hebrides, it may be different now.” We’re talking about 1950. Ok. You could not go to a house in the Hebrides where there wasn’t a family altar, where either before school or after the dishes were put in the sink and daddy reads a psalm. As they say, and they read the psalms. The children know the word of God from the almost infancy. On top of that, they memorize the short catechism. And I just said, “You give me the answer to revival.” He said, “What?” I said, “The seed has been sown.” Paul plants, Apollos waters. God gives the increase. They had awesome meetings there. And yet some outstanding names I could give you expositors stood outside and said, “Ah, it’s not of God.”

But the breakdown, as David Wilkins used to say, “Go, there are no delinquent children, only delinquent parents.” And I’m staggered when I go into pastors’ homes even. The Bible isn’t opened in a week. I was raised in a home where daddy prayed with us every day. And the greatest thing, Brother David, that my daddy ever did for me was take me to a whole night of prayer when I was 14 years of age. And once I’d seen men like my big daddy take his coat off and sweat and play and travail and weep, I was spoiled forever. I ached to go back. Children don’t see that anymore.

Do you know one reason we don’t have revival? Number one reason, we’re content to live without it. Number two, we don’t know what it is.

David:     I think that we don’t, yes. And part of this broadcast is holding up a vision for people, because until you have a vision, you never want to attain to it. Do you view yourself as fitting in the church today? Or are you, kind of a misfit?

Leonard:  I’m a misfit to many. But on the other hand, pastors will fly a thousand miles. “Would you talk to me if I would fly a thousand miles if you talk to me?” Okay, so they come. I talk to them and some of them say, “No, oh, well, I don’t think that would go over in my just.” They’d rather someone else went who was maybe had a bit of a cobblery and didn’t get a breakdown and weep when I’m preaching. Or are you, certain language? In their heart of hearts, they know that what they have. What do you do when a guy comes and says, “I have 6,000 members, we get 25 to the prayer meeting.” Well, I say, “If you want to know how popular a church is, you go Sunday morning. If you want to know how popular the preacher is, you go Sunday night. That’s pretty hard. If you want to know how popular God is, you go to the prayer meeting. No church is stronger than his prayer meeting.”

David:     Often in your books, which call for revival, you refer to ministers. Is there a special relationship between those God has called into ministry and the present condition of the American church?

Leonard:  Well, to use an old phrase, yes, I think “like priests like people.” And I go to many ministers’ conferences, small ones, great ones. I know if I get under a certain theological subject, I’m throwing a cat amongst the pigeons as you say, or a tiger amongst the peacocks. But I find the most vulnerable spot with preachers is to talk about their prayer life. And sometimes I say, “How much do you pray?” And they duck their heads.

The early church, the apostolic church, was a praying church. I like, I don’t know if you read that definition, but I think it’s superb. I don’t think it’s an unsurpassed definition of the early church by J.B. Phillips, in which when he read the first six chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, he says, “This is the church before it became fat and out of breath by prosperity. This is the church before it became muscle bound by over organization. This is the church where they did not gather together a brilliant people to study psychosomatic medicine to heal the sick. This is where you did not sign articles of faith. You acted in faith.”

And then he says, “And this is where they did not say prayers, but they prayed in the Holy Ghost.” The preacher has only two things to do with, David, as far as I know. According to Acts 6, he gives himself continually to prayer and to the word of God. If you don’t get a praying pastor, you don’t get a praying church.

And there is a little book that’s out of print now. I think, called “The Burden of the Lord” by Ian McPherson. He’s a leader of the apostolic in England. And he refers to the fact that the preachers of old in the past century, they had one whole day they were not available to the congregation. They gave that day to preparing the message. And then Saturday they were not available because they prepared the man to deliver the prepared message. We don’t find that.

McLaren did that when he went to Manchester. He told the deacons, you can have my head or my feet, but not both. And so, they appointed people to visit hospitals and so forth. And he preached that from Genesis to Revelation in what’s still one of the classic expositions of the scripture. And I believe the great failure I get preachers that will, that after churches two, three, four, five, six thousand, but they come to my office and privately say, I have no prayer life. And I believe that that’s the failure.

David:     What do you see as affirming about the clergy in America today? Is there some good sign to you?

Leonard:  The good sign is that some of these men have got to the end of their confidence in their degrees and their academic knowledge. And what I say to them, I say, “Look, brother, what we’re doing today?” It’s like me going into a restaurant. They bring me an elaborate, very gorgeous menu and I ask for this. “Oh, I’m sorry. We don’t have that.” I said, “We can all make the menu. We can’t make the meal.” We can all say what the church should be. Who’s doing it?

Other countries, there’s a pristine innocence and beauty about it to use the words of the apostle when he said, “I have nothing, but I possess all things.” Now the church possesses every gimmick and gadget and does nothing. I mean, okay, 120 people were in the upper room and they turned the world upside down. Now we have 120 churches at least and nobody knows we’re in the city.

Well, I’ve asked this question, David, to leading Pentecostals in the world. Nobody gives me an answer. “What’s the difference between their baptism of the spirit and our baptism of the spirit? How could 120 men turn a nation upside down when we say we’ve 10 million people in this country with the baptism of the spirit?”

David:     An interesting aspect of ministry in our contemporary scene is that of music. The whole ministry of music has just arisen in a phenomenal way. Is this an encouraging scene to you? I know you were very close to the late Keith Green and have been close to numbers of contemporary musicians.

Leonard:  I think it’s both good and bad. I think they become obsessed. It’s the only thing and it’s the main thing to reach. I don’t believe that. You’re trying to tell me there’s a substitute for Holy Ghost anointing, Holy Ghost brokenness. I don’t believe that. As I said to one of the best-known singers in the world, there’s many records out there. And he was talking about his singing. I said, “Well, while you were talking, I was singing of the disciples coming to Jesus when they said, ‘Lord, teach us to sing.’” And they looked. “Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry, I got that wrong. It was the Apostle Paul who said, sing without ceasing. Or was it James that said, if you’re sick, sing to anointing?” I said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “It amazes me that the disciples went to Jesus. They didn’t even say, ‘Lord, teach us to sing.’ They didn’t even say, ‘Lord, that’s someone on the Mount teaches to preach.’ They said, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’”

And we’re most deficient is this: What if we spent as much time, Brother David, teaching people to pray as we teach training a choir? The choir master says 10% of the choir were missing last Thursday night.

A preacher would hit the ceiling if he said, you know, only 10% of our 7,000 members were missing in the prayer meeting. We put an emphasis. It’s glamorous. It brings money into the church. We sell records for our choir. With all we talk about modern singing and what everybody’s writing their own songs, there’s nobody in the Acts of the Apostles, nobody in the New Testament ever touched the pens of glory that the psalmist touched. And people say, “He wasn’t filled with the spirit. What was he filled with?”

Lift up your heads or your gates, be lifted up. You have a last, he’s surely has sang on the resurrection. Nobody’s written anything like the 23rd Psalm. There’s nothing to touch the Psalms, which was and is the hymn book of the Jews. Every revival has seen a birth of two things. It has seen a birth of new hymns, genuine hymns, and it has seen a birth of missionary activity.

David:     Why is it that preachers have such a struggle with prayer? There must be some reason behind that because it seems to be almost a universal.

Leonard:  Okay, this startles people. I’ve talked a number of times with Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones of London, one of the greatest, some say the greatest modern expositor. He was very graceful said, “Mr. Ravenhill, I want to tell you that everything you write, I read it avidly.” I said, “Well, that’s an encouraging thing.” Now he said, “I can sit for hours writing exposition of Ephesians. I can write for hours.” And he shook his head, and “Mr. Ravenhill prayer is very difficult to me.” Now that stunned me. I never quoted it while he was alive. Never. And very seldom since because he told me privately.

Now on the other hand, I preached in the Bible School of Wales. After I talked with the students and staff, we went upstairs in the big old mansion. And Mrs. Howells is telling me her husband, Reese, went into that room at six o’clock in the morning and stayed till six at night, every day for 11 months with the exception of the one day when his mother died.

David:     That was Reese Howells.

Leonard:  That was Reese Howells intercessor. I told Norman Grubb; I’ve known Norman Grubb 50 years. I said, his name is Ruby. You know, they give them fancy names on the mission field. I said, “Ruby, you wrote a marvelous book.” I said, “You were very brave to call him an intercessor.” And he said “He was an intercessor.”

The intercessor, it must come through me. There’s a level of justification. There’s a higher level of sanctification. There’s a level of praise. There’s a higher level of worship. There’s a level of prayer. There’s a higher level of intercession.

David:     We need to probably define that word for people too. We’re talking about praying on behalf of others.

Leonard:  Right.

David:     We’re interceding.

Leonard:  Right.

David:     And so, it’s one thing just to pray. And then there’s another thing to really travail or intercede on behalf of others or for a nation even.

Leonard: Ok. This coverage may be wrong, but it suits me. Prayer is preoccupation with our needs. Praise is preoccupation with our blessings. Worship is preoccupation with God Himself.

Okay, the average prayer meeting, we wanted to pray for money for this. We wanted to pray for that. How often are lots of the prayer meetings now? Pray for America. And I say, “Hold it a minute. America isn’t the church of God. She’s possibly the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to spirituality, for organization and big showmanship, yes. But when you go to foreign countries and prayer meetings last five and six hours, where the normal thing in a church like that, in the meetings that books sing as.” When I asked him about, he said to me, “I got to big churches in America. They’re very good. They’re very generous. I’ve never been in a church where they know how to worship.” So, I said, “Well, what happens in your church on the Lord’s Day?” He said, “The first three hours, we give to praise, adoration, so forth.”

All right. “The second three hours, we give to prayer, intercession, so forth. The third three hours, we give to breaking of bread.” I said, “You have nine hours every Sunday.” He said, “No, no, no. Some Sundays when the glory comes down with every 11 hours and 12 hours.”

We don’t know a thing about that, that they’ll have a three, four-hour prayer meeting. Nobody thinks it’s abnormal.

David:     Let me come back to where some people can still identify even with your words. Say back in our early history in America in the 1800s, they had what they called Aaron and her societies, when the people of the church would hold up the hands of the minister in prayer. Could that be revived in our churches, do you feel? Is it even conceivable that people would start to pray on behalf of preachers? Because I think for the most part, the sermons are preached without the prayer support of the people.

Leonard:  Okay. When I was a boy, if you went to a Pentecostal or a holiness church, there were more people at the altar before the service than after. We gathered 30 to 40 minutes before and there was a battery of prayer that brought the glory of God down. The atmosphere was already made. You didn’t have to get everybody clapping, happy. God was there. There was a sense of His majesty in it, which we’re not having. We don’t have the majesty of God. Our people are not eternity conscious. They don’t come to church to meet God. They come to church to hear a sermon about Him.

David:     That’s a tragic thing, isn’t it? Leonard Ravenhill, during past times of revival, it’s been common for individuals in churches to experience what might be called an overwhelming sense of the presence of the Lord. Is this something that is worth seeking?

Leonard:  Yes. The scripture that comes to my mind is His presence, His salvation. I think that is a key feature. The people I’ve talked within Wales about the Welsh revival, of course, they’re up in years now, but the distinct memory was the overwhelming presence of God. As in the case of the revival of Jonathan Goforth, as his wife says, you will go to a meeting one day and stand up and sing for six hours and not know you’d been on your feet all that time. Another day he would pray. The whole congregation would pray for five hours. Another day he would sit in his presence and there wasn’t a word of prayer, there wasn’t a word of singing, and the most impressive thing was the presence of God.

Well, that must be something for five or six hours to be so glued as it were and not just having mental visions. But David, we are spirits and God is a spirit. And the old method is hymns, spirit to spirit, now to speak. And the Father seeketh. What else does he seek?

We can’t make him rich. He seeketh such to worship him. We have taught people to witness. We have taught people to work. We have not taught people to worship. When I talk about worship, preachers will come, people will come and say, it’s the first time I’ve heard the message in my life. Dr. Tozer told me in about 50 years of going around, he had never once heard the sermon on worship.

David:      Dr. Tozer wrote a little book on worship.

Leonard:  Right, The Jewel Of The Soul.

David:     Yes, right. I’m not sure people always understand what we mean when we say that word even. It’s as though Christ were to come into your midst, and I would ask, now what do you want to do? Probably you would want to kneel and that attributing worth or giving of adoration is what the word worship means to a tribute worth.

Leonard: Right. In Revelation chapter 4, it says the 4 and 20 elders fall before him. And it says in verse 8 of chapter 5, the 4 and 20 elders fell down before the Lamb to obliterate everything else. If you’re on your face and in fact Dr. Tozer, I remember now, Dr. Tozer said to me, “Len, let other people do what they like. You and I will seek God face downward. Because again, you can’t see anything if you face downward.”

David:     It’s almost the prostrate position there.

Leonard:  Yes, as Dr. Tozer said, “I can stay four or five hours and not say a word of prayer or praise.” And people say, “What’s the difference between praise and worship?” Well, you go into many meetings these, “Let’s all stand up, raise our hands and worship the Lord.” That is its collective praise.

Prayer again, it’s preoccupation with our needs, praise is preoccupation with our blessing and worship is preoccupation with God himself. And that’s why Tozer liked to go to men like Faber and Madame Guillain because they knew how to gaze on God. And as Dr. Tozer would say and did say to me, “We need to take one aspect that God is so glorious in His Majesty that you would take, one day you would dwell on adoration, another day you would dwell on His faithfulness, another day on His mercy. And it’s not difficult to spend hours when you get into that area.”

Again, David, we lost sight of the holiness of God. And it took me years, in fact, I never heard it preached. But I wonder why the woman brought the alabaster box of ointment. And then I realized she came to worship. Why? Because she never said a word.

Secondly, she brought her most costly gift. Well, you can’t rush into worship. You can’t say, Lord, “I’m going to worship you for 10 minutes just before I go down to Sears.” It’s somebody that gets hold of you and while it casts you down physically, it lifts you into eternity. And we’re not eternity conscious.

David:     I think people are struggling now with what you’re saying. I am a person who practices worship. In other words, spends time saying, “Today, God, I want to praise you that you are loved.” Worship doesn’t dwell like you’re saying in our world. It concentrates on who God is. And even though I don’t experience your love, God, I still praise you that you are loved. And I quote these verses that I’ve learned about you back to you. I give you this worth that I place in your character.”

Sometimes when people think of worship or sensing this presence of the Lord in one’s prayer life, they almost picture that what happens is God makes himself visibly known to an individual or he speaks out loud. Have you ever had him do that in your case? Actually, show himself to you or speak aloud?

Leonard:  I’ve not had any vision of like people I’ve met who said Christ was in my room. Okay, I don’t argue with that. I felt his inward voice.

David:     Okay, now I want you to describe that. So, people know what you’re talking about.

Leonard:  Well, I best do it as again, Mr. Wesley said, I am a spirit. God is a spirit. And there’s a level in which I’m who was it? Thomas Merton that revived the state. No man is an island, but he got that from John Donne in the 1500s. I reverse that I say every man is an island. A man is an entity. I’m private. There isn’t another edition of me, and I suppose the world’s thankful for that. And you are in the world. But I’m tuned in at one wavelength to God. And I get an inward communication. And once God has said that, I mean, you know, I can come as a world would say come hell or high water, you won’t shift me from it. I’ve got well Wesley said, “I get an impression in my spirit just thinking of his wound.” And he said, “I move on that impression. And I do not listen to any other voices or any other advice. This is what God wants. And I do it.”

David:     People would say, “I’m hearing you talk, but I don’t have time to spend like you’re talking about being in the Lord’s presence.” Do you agree with them?

Leonard:  No, not for a moment, because most of them could do it if they’d banish the TV sets. It’s like a fellow say, “Well, I don’t have a day like you do.” I say, “What do you do on Sundays?” In fact, preachers will admit that they’re the first to rush out of the sanctuary, put up their feet and watch football for two hours. And I say, “Well, tell me this, when did you last spend two hours with God? Just alone. Not asking him for anything. Not thanking him. Just adoring his person. Just thinking of what rapture will it be. Prostrate before thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on thee as famous as it.”

David:     Most people would say that doesn’t sound very interesting to me. Now I’m with you in the sense that I find now that I’m almost drawn by the Lord to do this. And it’s a very thrilling experience. And I say, nobody could be more fortunate because I’m actually communicating in a way that I know I’m being received by the Lord with the very one who has made me with my Creator. It’s a thrilling thing.

Leonard:  Well, don’t you think, David, that lots of people have fallen in love with a theology or a pattern? You can’t love a theology? You can only love a person. You can’t even love your dog in the trees, people, I love that. No, no, no, they don’t. You can only love what can respond to you. And if we can’t love God, we’re commanded to love him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. That doesn’t leave much room for anything else.

David:     Yes, I’m very much in agreement.

Leonard:  You don’t have the appetite for it.

David:     That’s what I would like to create by our conversation as I was praying before we came here. That somehow, we could create an appetite for the presence of the Lord in one’s life. How much entwined is this presence of the Lord that a person experiences in the whole matter of revival?

Leonard:  Well, I think actually basically people like, for instance, you say that Evan Roberts was maybe 24 years of age, but I understand that for 13 years now, he’s only 24, for 13 years he had meditated and concentrated on revival.

David:     Just let me interrupt. Evan Roberts was the key figure God used in the Welsh revival.

Leonard:  In the Welsh revival. Now, there’s a lot of faults and things being said about him. But it’s true of him and of others that they had such a concept of the holiness of God. For instance, Martin Luther did not invent justification by faith, he revived it.

Wesley did not invent the doctrine of entire sanctification, but when he moved up into that area and said, “We can not only love God, but we can also be made perfect in love.” I think very often we’ve offered people a kind of a carte blanche. So, listen, you get filled with the Holy Spirit. That’s the end of all your problems. It is the end, the beginning end, because we’ve said you’re filled. But Paul says to folk, fill with the spirit. I wanted you to be filled with all the fullness of God. I want you to be filled with the knowledge of his will. As I say, we come in this room, it’s dark, you put the light on, it’s filled with light. It’s cold, you can fill it with heat. It’s quiet, we can fill it with conversation. We could sing, fill it with prayer. You can fill what’s full in 10 different ways, but we haven’t said that to people and they’ve gone away disappointed. I went to a certain meeting. I’d been a Christian, I trusted God to fill me with the spirit. There wasn’t much difference because we have not shown them that step by step. Your child is born, he’s got a brain, he hasn’t got knowledge, he hasn’t got wisdom, but because he has a brain you can work on it.

Well surely then if I’m a child of God, I’m going to get to maturity, I’m going to shed a lot of the toys. I think one danger is this, that very often people in the pew become more spiritual than the pastor and that grates on them.

David:     I hope that’s not the case through this land. I’m seeing that there is a great hunger on the part of peers in the ministry and I’m encouraged by where a lot of their hearts are and they’re moving toward God, but unfortunately there’s no way to see the country where it is and the church where it is not to some degree tie that to the pastors, I agree.

Leonard:  I would prefer to go around the country if God wants me to do it and talk to a dozen pastors and then talk to 5,000 people every now and then because they’re the key to the situation. But we seem to have just got back to hand clapping and emotion and attracted to personalities and we’ve set up our own little popes as it were.

David:     Some people go to a meeting and hear someone sing and they possibly mistake that for the presence of the Lord. This feeling of good and all wasn’t that a talented person. That’s not what you’re talking about though.

Leonard:  No, no. I think David that many people do not know the difference between what is soulish and what is spiritual. And you say, “Why are you crying?” “Well, we finished the meeting singing my grandmother’s favorite hymn.”

Now they got moved there. They’ve listened like a tone to the message, a man with a burning heart and they’ve hardly had ears to hear but touch them on the emotional level and then you take an offering right after that because everybody’s disturbed.

David:     When God truly comes into a situation there is again this sense of the human becoming smaller and God becoming bigger and him being magnified and that’s what we need to recapture today, isn’t it?

Leonard:  I had some meetings in 1949 in Wales in a church that had been used in the revival. After about four days a lady came to me, she said, “This is the nearest to the Welsh revival.”

I said, “Well, what’s the indication?” She said, “We walked up the hill to the crossroad and in Welsh they say, ‘NorthStar for good night’ and we suddenly realized for four nights we’d walked up that hill and never said a word.” The living presence of God had been such and that’s what I take to again that when you don’t want to talk about a single thing, you won’t intrude on somebody else’s worship which is still going on even they’ve stepped out of the sanctuary. There’s a kind of a mantle over them. There’s an adoration. You just feel, Lord, I could lay my life down at this moment again overwhelmed with his mercy and his graciousness that he didn’t cut us off in our sins and he didn’t forget us in our backslidings and that’s why I say it demands contemplation and meditation and concentration.

David:     And we go to the church and instead of just meeting with human beings as good as that is, because we’re brothers and sisters in the Lord, we actually meet with the risen Lord, and he is there. The time always goes too fast. I’ll look forward maybe sometime in the future being able to talk with you. That will be my pleasure and I’m sure you feel that way as well, my listening friend.

Outgo:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address,  hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2020 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois, 60187.