Why Don't They Stir Themselves?

America cannot fall - because she is already fallen! This goes for Britain, too. She cannot go into slavery - because her people are fettered at the moment in the chains of self-forged, self-chosen moral anarchy. Here are millions, diseased morally, with no longing for healing. Here are men paying for shadows at the price of their immortal souls, men who not only reject the Substance, but who openly sneer at and caricature it.

An unprecedented tidal wave of commandment-breaking, God-defying, soul-destroying iniquity sweeps the ocean of human affairs. Never before have men in the masses sold their souls to the devil at such bargain prices. "There is none ... that stirreth up himself to take hold of Thee" (Isaiah 64:7). What hell-born mesmerism holds them? How does the spell bind? Who brainwashed them? Why don't they wake and stir themselves?

Directed by the devil, the world has given a new injection to the flesh. One of the signs of "the last days" is that men are lovers of pleasures." (Note that it is in the plural). And where is hell's broth stewed? In the breweries of the world. It is a lame argument that in some cased subsidies are granted to help the breweries keep men employed. Breweries are maternity clinics that breed men-slayers operating with guns, and men driving on the highways while drunken. Courts deal with the fruit of liquor; revival would slay this deadly tree at the roots.

The mad merry-go-round of sensuality is filled with millions awaiting their turn for initiation into iniquity. When wrong is so sweet a morsel, the sin-soaked, sex-slain youth could not care less about doing right. One crowded hour of glorious "life" - so they argue - is worth a gamble on the speculation of the theologians so-called "eternity."

Look for one bitter moment. Could anything be less intelligent and unmanly than a drinking match? The prize winner is the last man still standing on his feet when all others, grunting like hogs, have fallen to the floor, unconscious in drink. This is a sport not of stone-age men of the Baliem Valley, but of the new intellectuals, satiated in body, stained in soul, and recklessly abandoned to iniquity!

Loaded with lechery, gutted with gambling, damned in drink, such men (who are adult in body, but moral imbeciles) whine out Lord Byron's lament:

"I now have ashes where once I had fire,
The soul of my body is dead;
The thing I once loved, I now merely admire,
My heart is as gray as my head."

If the Church had something vital and victorious to offer, these men who choose golf clubs by day and night clubs by night might be drawn from these fleshpots.

Since in their freedom men will not heed God, will He have to enslave to Communism the mighty millions of America that they might have time to remember His day, His way, and His Son? Better to die bound in body and free in spirit than free in body and bound in soul!

We stand aghast when we see fine men magnetized by science, but mystified by the Christian religion. When these have forsaken faith, they feed on films and football. In the light of "a thousand years being as one day," it has taken science a matter of mere seconds to bring us from the chuck wagon to the station-wagon, and from the covered-wagon to the Sputnik.

But after admitting that science does hold and attract when it drills a hole two miles deep into the earth for oil, and if there is none, does the same thing in the sea - let us seriously consider that science has diabolic and deadly forms too - even lobotomization!

Keeping lobotomized millions in mind, meditate on this from the pen of famed Bertrand Russell, whose "Principles of Logic" has made him the uncrowned king of modern philosophers: "Man now needs for his salvation only one thing: to open his heart to joy, and leave fear to gibber through the glimmering darkness of a forgotten past. He must lift up his eyes and say? "No, I am not a miserable sinner; I am a being who, by a long and arduous road, has discovered how to ... master natural obstacles, how to live in freedom and joy, at peace with myself and, therefore, with all mankind."

Would it be hard to persuade yourself that this "false prophet" of peace is dedicated to deception, consciously or otherwise? The same Bertrand Russel has trouble in trying to accept the incarnation. But would the relatives of the massacred Hungarians think his message a gospel of hope?

This is an hour in need of burning hearts, bursting lips, and brimming eyes! If we were a tenth as spiritual as we think we are, our streets would be filled each Sunday with throngs of believers marching to Zion - with sacks on the bodies and ashes on the shaking heads, shaking at the calamity that has brought the Church to be the unlovely unnerved, unproductive thing that she is!

If we wept as much in the prayer closet as devout Jews have done at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, we would now be enjoying a prevailing, purging revival! If we would return to apostolic practice - waiting upon the Lord for apostolic power - we could then go forth to apostolic possibilities! This is the hour when we are asked over and over again, "Is everybody happy?" God's purpose for us is not happiness, but HOLINESS! Soberness has given way to silliness, even though Paul in writing to Titus warns both young and old, "Be sober."

We surely need again to climb Calvary's hill on our knees, to survey the wondrous Cross in an attitude of humiliation and adoration. The Church must first repent; then the "world" will break! The Church must first weep; then our altars will be filled with weeping penitents.

At the very pinnacle of his power, William James, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard University, was struck down by a mysterious malady. His nerves were upset. He had insomnia and deep depression, but knew no cure for himself. He dashed off to Europe. Would Berlin have the answer? No door of hope opened. What about Vienna? The same answer. Might not Paris shelter a cure? But the panacea was not there.

Despair was heightening. London was near, but his call was but an echo. Scotland had eminent sons in this field. But there was no balm in this Gilead either. Back to America he came, the thought of suicide dancing in his brain. At last a man of prayer and of great faith for healing was recommended. Faith healing was anathema to William James, the distinguished philosopher and famed psychologist. His acute mind and mental training strongly protested against going this way. But needs must. James went. The simple, unlettered man of God put his humble hands on William James' head, who later said, "I felt a mysterious energy thrilling and tingling through my body which was followed by a sense of peace. "I knew I was healed!"  To cure the raging ills of this maddened world, the "Abana of Science" and the "Pharpar of Politics" are more attractive to our stubborn wills and warped intellects than the wondrous Cross. But for mankind to be made whole, we shall have to be as humble as William James was by getting back to the Cross of Jesus and its life-giving stream.

~Leonard Ravenhill~