Why Revival Tarries by Leonard Ravenhill

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   I have been thinking again about RavenhillΓÇÖs rebuke in Why Revival Tarries: ΓÇ£The tragedy of this late hour is that we have too many dead men in the pulpits giving out too many dead sermons to too many dead people.ΓÇ¥ He wrote that in 1959, arguing that the real crisis in the church is not the hardness of the world but the lifelessness of the men preaching to it. A man can have learning, personality, and skill, and still deliver a sermon that has no pulse because he has not stood before God in prayer. E. M. Bounds said the same thing a generation earlier: unction is not talent and not eloquence. It is ΓÇ£the sweetest exhalation of the Holy Spirit,ΓÇ¥ something no amount of industry can produce. It is GodΓÇÖs own mark on a man, and it comes only through the kind of prayer that actually breaks him. One of the clearest pictures of this is Robert Murray MΓÇÖCheyne. His friends said he sometimes trembled before walking into the pulpit, not out of fear of the people, but because he felt the weight of speaking for God. He once told a fellow minister that a holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God, and he feared entering the pulpit without that holiness. His sermons were short, simple, and blazing with spiritual reality because they were born in tears and prayer, not mere study. That is the point Ravenhill and Bounds are both making. Dead sermons come from dead men. Living sermons come from men who have actually been with God. And nothing else will wake a sleeping church.