America is Too Young to Die
AMERICA IS TOO YOUNG TO DIE
Leonard Ravenhill
It would be a good start to moral recovery and international prestige if we put the Bible back into the schools and the family altar back into our homes. (p. 32)
Eleven times in this book of Jeremiah (more times than in any other book in the Bible) we reads “God rose up early.” God tried to intervene. (p. 36)
WE have substituted organizing for agonizing and equipment for “enduement.” (p. 36)
No nation is better than its church, and no church is better than its people. Only God-transformed personalities can change the moral fiber of the Nation. (p. 37)
Every church needs a prayer meeting every night of the week right now. (p. 38)
The trouble, as I see it, with the present interpretation of “the promise to you” is that:
It is all sugar and not salt,
All daylight and no darkness,
All pleasure and no prisons,
All privileges and no privations,
All feastings and no fastings. (p. 44)
Right here I’m thinking again of that smart word of Charles H. Spurgeon’s, “The Bible suffers more from its exponents than from its opponents. (p. 45)
“The Church in our generation needs reformation, revival, and constructive revolution; …Reformation refers to a restoration to pure doctrine, revival refers to a restoration in the Christian’s life.
…. There cannot be true revival unless there has been reformation; and reformation is not complete without revival. (p. 51)
… Edward Gibbon cites five primary causes for the dissolution of that great society:
1. ..rapid increase in divorce…
2. …spiraling rise of taxes and extravagant spending.
3. The mounting craze for pleasure and the brutalization of sports.
4. The building of gigantic armaments and the failure to realize that the real enemy lay within the gates o f the empire, in the moral decay of its people.
5. The decay of religion and the fading of faith into a mere form, leaving the people without a guide. (p. 51)
The decline of these empires goes like this:
From bondage to faith, from faith to courage
From courage to liberty, form liberty to abundance
From abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency
From complacency to apathy, form apathy to dependence
From dependence to bondage. (p. 52)
The secret of this amazing John Baptist is easy to discover. He was a single man, with a single eye to God’s glory; a single purpose, to do God’s will; and a single message to hail and introduce the Christ, the anointed of God, as the world’s Redeemer. (p. 59)
We offer Band-Aids to folk who need radical spiritual surgery for the cancer of carnality in the breast. (p. 63)
Revivals are birthed by spiritual giants, not slick talkers and golfing evangelists. (p. 64)
I am sure that we are ineffective preaching before men because we are impotent in pleading in prayer before God. (p. 65)
To the nation dead in politics and with icicles on the pulpits and snowmen in them, Wesley brought the torch of Holy Ghost anointed preaching and the nation melted before him. (p. 67)
Only a simple, unlearned evangelist would expect to break up the fallow ground, sow the seed, water it, and gather a harvest in twenty minutes. (p. 70)
But the average evangelist, with his eye on the crowd or on the love offering, has a “gospel” which, in Paul’s words, is “another gospel.” (p. 71)
Woe unto us that the pulpit is now so anemic, so pathetically lacking in Holy Ghost magnetism that so-called intelligent people have to be reached on the children’s level with a dummy to speak and a dummy to operate him! (p. 75)
There is a famine of great preaching, a famine of strong expository preaching, a famine of conscience-stirring preaching, a famine of heartbreaking preaching, a famine of soul-tearing preaching, a famine of that preaching like our fathers knew which kept men awake all night lest they fall into hell. (p. 79)
We need preachers who are eternity-consciou, who come to the pulpit bowed with the sin of the world, yes, and perhaps the sin of the congregation. (p. 83)
The sickness of the Church, I believe, is twofold. First, we have taught people to witness and to work but we have not taught them to worship. …. The second cause of the Church’s sickness is that the prayer meeting has become almost obsolete. (p. 84, 85)
To be painfully honest, what we have preached for the last twenty-five years by the biggest budgets that the Church has ever known has not move the Nation to God. Why continue a formula that has been so patently ineffective? (p. 95)
If our average Christian was no more healthy in body than he is in soul, the Church would have to subsidize wheelchairs. (p. 109)
Since when have men begged for God’s money of widow’s tithes and offerings to build tennis courts and lavish surroundings while half the world is hungry and overseas missions lack money. (p. 109)
I ask myself each time I leave the sanctuary not what I got out of the service or what the other listeners got but what did the Lord get out of the meeting. (p.120)