With All Thy Getting, Get Unction!

My husband suggested I read a book he just devoured by Leonard Ravenhill. I usually shy away from anything, especially books, using the word “revival” in the title because frankly I just tire of the word. However, I thought I’d give Why Revival Tarries a chance, since the author was a different breed of person I thought the book might be too. I was right.

Every pastor, bible student, God-seeker, church planter, missionary, and leader should read this book.

Chapter 1 has so pierced my heart and shattered my carnal admiration of intellect all I can do is repent and say “Oh God, give me unction!”

Excerpts From Chapter 1: With All They Getting, Get Unction

Unction is God’s knighthood for the soldier-preacher who has wrestled in prayer and gained the victory. Victory is not won in the pulpit by firing intellectual bullets or wisecracks, but in the prayer closet. The meeting is won or lost before the preacher’s foot enters the pulpit. Unction is like perfume. Unction is like dynamite. Unction comes not by the medium of the bishop’s hands, neither does it mildew when the preacher is cast into prison. Unction will pierce and percolate. It will sweeten and soften. When the hammer of logic and the fire of human zeal fail to open the stony heart, unction will succeed.

Unction cannot be earned, only learned – by prayer.

Preachers used to sow seed; now they string intellectual pearls.

Away with palsied, powerless preaching which is unmoving because it was born in a tomb instead of a womb and nourished in a fireless, prayerless soul. We may preach and perish but we cannot pray and perish.  With all thy getting, get unction, lest barren altars be the badge of our unctionless intellectualism.

"Everyone wants my mantle but nobody wants my sackcloth"