A word of advice. Don’t listen to the likes of Leonard Ravenhill, David Wilkerson, or Dutch Sheets unless you are ready for your whole day to be ruined and your to-do list to go out the window.
During an impromptu time of prayer with some of our staff I felt prompted to play ‘Go Hide Thyself‘ from one of Leonard Ravenhill’s sermons, and so began a number of sermon jams from some of the most raw revivalists of the past century. After listening to these men I just began to pray by the Spirit ‘God! Increase my burden!’ And He is saying back to me right now ‘son, the only way your burden increases is by getting close enough to my heart to feel what I feel.‘
Some people just want to change things, awaken the church, and ‘wish them better’ but I’ve found that God will not mantle you for change until you have an overwhelming BURDEN that change is needed. Burden is not saying ‘that would be nice.’ It’s living and posturing your life in a hidden place where your cry is ‘God use me and break me’ and positioning yourself in the public place where the fear of the Lord drives every move. Most preachers don’t have a burden. They have charisma with a microphone. Most Christians don’t have a burden. They live in blissful ignorance that most people will spend a real eternity in a real hell. A true burden is easy to recognize and impossible to impersonate. It’s marked by power. It’s marked by glory. But more than anything it’s marked by tears and anguish and agonizing over souls in the secret places of God.
William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once said ‘I wish I could hang my soldiers over hell for 24 hours so they could hear the cries of the damned.‘ His desire was to create a true burden in his men and women because he knew that true burdens don’t leave overnight. You can’t shake them. They are ever present and unless you slip into immaturity and compromise they never wane.
My yearning is for the Holy Spirit to begin impart the genesis of anguish in each of us that David Wilkerson speaks of in the video below. If the only time you have a ‘burden’ is in church…you don’t have one. You’re drawing off of someone else’s. If the only time you feel a ‘burden’ is even in the secret place…you don’t have one. God is trying to give you one, but you haven’t take it yet. Take it now, friend! Let it permeate your life until it changes your very spiritual DNA. Look at your life in the secret place and count the tears that have been shed there. Let us be honest at least with ourselves and admit that many of us haven’t hidden ourselves in the heart of God to the extent that the depth of his agony for the lost, the hurting, the broken, and yes even the the religious has impacted us. I hear the Lord saying even now that ‘until you have wept over them I can send you to them.’
Watch this video below and let it stir you for more.