Praying men

At one prayer meeting, Leonard Ravenhill mentioned a young man:

I talked this morning again with a young man who was here not long ago. Maybe you didn’t see him. Some of you don’t know about him. He prays a minimum of eight hours each day. But if you tell that to someone who goes to seminary in Dallas, he’ll think you’re nuts. The seminarians these days would also say that Joshua was nuts if he thought he was told to march around the city a number of times. But some foolish things are the wisdom of God and some wise things are the foolishness of God.

Leonard personally knew men who had a hidden life of prayer. A young man in east Texas was one of those men. Leonard spoke of him at times: “There’s a thirty-two year old man who lives fifty miles from here who prays ten hours a day. I’m not talking about the days of David Brainerd or Praying John Hyde. That’s here in America right now.”

About praying men, he agreed with Samuel Chadwick who said: The one concern of the devil is to keep Christians from prayer. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, and prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil and mocks our wisdom, but trembles when we pray. No man is greater than his prayer life.

Leonard spoke about prayer often in his letters, as he was always encouraging others toward a deeper prayer life. In March 1961 he wrote his friends, the Blooms:

I would rather hear a man pray than hear him preach. A ninety-five year old woman in England often heard C. H. Spurgeon preach and pray. She said to me that his prayers lifted the congregation into eternity. Prayer changed Hannah. She prayed for a child. But she not only got a child, she got a prophet. Prayer changed Hannah and her son changed Israel.