Some of the great saints of recent times need to be spiritually bathed in more than merely written about. Reading their books and hearing their sermons is often far superior to just reading a written report about them. This is certainly true about the great Leonard Ravenhill. He was known especially for three things: a life of prayer, the work of evangelism, and a passion for revival.
The only full length biography of him that I am aware of is the 600-page volume by Mack Tomlinson, In Light of Eternity, The Life of Leonard Ravenhill (Free Grace Press, 2010). So it is from this volume that I draw much of my material.
He was born in Yorkshire, England in June 1907, and was influenced by his godly mother and grandmother, and later by his father who was eventually converted when Leonard was just five. It was sometime in 1907 when he was 14 that he himself was soundly converted.
Early on he became active in street evangelism, and he spent round nine months from 1930 to 1931 at a ministry training school, Cliff College near Sheffield. That was the only formal theological training he had. In 1937 he was ordained as a Methodist preacher.
His real passion was evangelism and he saw many conversions during almost three decades of ministry in the UK, as well as many churches planted. He married an Irish woman, Martha, in 1939, and had three sons. In 1951 he went to Chicago to preach at A. W. Tozer’s church.
He nearly died when a fire broke out in his hotel there, and a three story fall meant he suffered pain for most of the rest of his life. While recovering in hospital for months he especially learned that “Prayer is preoccupation with our needs. Praise is preoccupation with our blessings. Worship is preoccupation with God himself.”
In 1958 the Ravenhill family moved to the US. He preached, evangelised and ministered throughout America, and also did many overseas ministry trips, including Australia and New Zealand in 1960-61. They lived in Minneapolis for six years, then New York for a few years.
His last two decades was spent in Texas, where he lived near and ministered to a number of Christian leaders, ministries, and movers and shakers, including Keith Green, Agape Force, Teen Challenge, David Wilkerson, the Second Chapter of Acts, Winkey Pratney and many others.
After preaching, teaching and praying for revival for more than seventy years, he passed away on November 27, 1994.
He had a huge impact on so many Christian leaders, including Green, David Wilkerson, Michael L. Brown, Charles Stanley, Paul Washer, and Ravi Zacharias. Ravi said this about the man: “Ravenhill’s writing, more than any other single influence during my Bible college years, shaped my thinking about prayer, preaching and the importance of getting near to God.”
He was very close to other great preachers like Vance Havner, and was especially in a mutually, spiritually powerful relationship with A W Tozer, until he died in 1963. Tozer said this about the man:
Those who know of Leonard Ravenhill recognize in him the religious specialist, the man sent from God to battle the priests of Baal on their own mountain top, to shame the careless priest at the altar, to face the false prophet, and to warn the people who are being led astray by him. Such a man as this is not an easy companion. He insists on being a Christian all the time and everywhere. That marks him out as different. Why do we have men of such fiery swords as Ravenhill? They are sick inside when they see the children of heaven acting like the sons of earth. To such men as these, the church owes a debt too heavy to pay.
He loved and collected books, with over 3000 volumes. He especially relished biographies, autobiographies, hymnals, and all the great classic Christian writings, whether of Baxter, Brainerd, Gurnall, Pink, Chadwick, Owen, Edwards, Tozer and Packer. Commentaries, theology, and Christian history were all parts of his staple diet.
He was known as a man of prayer, and it was common for him to pray as much as four, six or eight hours a day! Deep, sustained and soul-agonising prayer was the key to his life and ministry. His view was, “Little prayer – little power; more prayer – more power; much prayer – much power.”
He was an anointed and powerful preacher, who emphasised repentance, holiness, revival and evangelism. Because of his uncompromising and no-nonsense messages, he often offended his audiences, and many times he was never invited back for a second time. One woman called him arrogant and unanointed for saying that missionary candidates without a prayer life should not go to the mission field!
He was of course not perfect, and he could at times be overly harsh and critical of others. But he was one of the greatest men of God we had last century, and not many people come close to this spiritual giant. All up he wrote seven books and compiled an eighth. They are:
-Why Revival Tarries (1959)
-A Treasury of Prayer (writings of E. M. Bounds, edited by Ravenhill – 1961)
-Meat for Men (1961)
-Revival Praying (1962)
-Tried & Transfigured (1963)
-Sodom Had No Bible (1971)
-America is Too Young to Die (1979)
-Revival God’s Way (1983)
Says Tomlinson, Ravenhill was “a better preacher than a writer” while Tozer was “a better writer than a preacher”. Various editions of his books are still available, and many of his audio sermons (and even a few videos) can also be found online.
Let me finish by offering a few quotes from this champion of the faith (and there are just so many to choose from):
“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’?”
“If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, He would never have been crucified.”
“There is a terrible vacuum in evangelical Christianity today. The missing person in our ranks is the prophet. The man with a terrible earnestness. The man totally otherworldly. The man rejected by other men, even other good men, because they consider him too austere, too severely committed, too negative and unsociable.”
“A popular evangelist reaches your emotions. A true prophet reaches your conscience.”
“Many believers live as if this world were a playground instead of a battleground.”
“The only reason we don’t have revival is because we are willing to live without it!”
“The trouble today is that we have too many dead preachers giving out dead sermons to dead people.”
“I get calls from all over the world, everyone wants my anointing and mantle… but nobody wants my sackcloth and ashes.”
“Today’s church wants to be raptured from responsibility.”
“The greatest thing that God can do on earth is to take a sinful man out of this sinful world and make that man holy and put him back into that sinful world and keep him holy.”
“If weak in prayer, we are weak everywhere.”
“How can you pull down strongholds of Satan if you don’t even have the strength to turn off your TV?”
“Nobody stood by Jesus. Maybe nobody will stand by you. It’s a lonely life but it’s a glorious life.”
“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. Everyone around will already know it.”
“Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?”
“A sinning man stops praying, a praying man stops sinning.”
“There’s one thing we need above everything else; it’s something we don’t talk about these days. We need a mighty avalanche of conviction of sin.”
“You can’t say, ‘Christ is all I need,’ until Christ is all you have.”
“God pity us that after years of writing, using mountains of paper and rivers of ink, exhausting flashy terminology about the biggest revival meetings in history, we are still faced with gross corruption in every nation, as well as with the most prayerless church age since Pentecost.”
“The reason we have so many pygmies in our pews is because we have so many puppets in our pulpits.”
“Each of us are as godly as we want to be.”
“The Bible is either absolute or obsolete.”
“One of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed.”
“The Church used to be a lifeboat rescuing the perishing. Now she is a cruise ship recruiting the promising.”
“My main ambition in life is to be on the devil’s most wanted list.”
“The only people who want to change the gospel are those who are unchanged by it.”
“If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, He would never have been crucified.”
“Entertainment is the devil’s substitute for joy.”
“Holiness is not a luxury it’s a necessity. If you’re not holy, you’ll never make it to heaven.”
“I’d rather have ten people that want God than 10,000 people who want to play church.”
“Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?”
[1555 words]