Ravi Zacharias has said this about Leonard Ravenhill:
The truth is, even though I am known now as an apologist for the Christian faith, dealing with the intellectual issues of Christianity, I really owe an passion for God, for prayer and for true revival that initially began in me, to Leonard Ravenhill. He, by God’s grace, was the catalyst that has caused the passion to know God to continue to this day.
Leonard Ravenhill (1907-1994) was an English preacher and evangelist who devoted his entire career to preaching about revival and prayer. He is probably best known for his book Why Revival Tarries. Recently, my old friend Mack Tomlinson completed the first ever biography of Leonard Ravenhill. It is titled In Light of Eternity: The Life of Leonard Ravenhill, and you can purchase it here.
Tomlinson says this about the legacy of Ravenhill:
Ravenhill was one of the few specialists in the twentieth century in the area of prayer and revival. His message of genuine revival, like J. Edwin Orr in America and D. M. Lloyd-Jones in Great Britain, was vital for the evangelical church for over sixty years in Great Britain and the United States…
The only way to understand the life of Leonard Ravenhill is to realize he was primarily a man of prayer. D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the minister of Westminster Chapel in London from 1938-1968, after hearing Ravenhill preach on prayer, said to him, “The kind of praying you are speaking of is foreign to me; I can study all day, but real prayer is hard work for me.” These were the words of a man who, though a prayerful man himself, heard and saw something of the depth concerning prayer which came through Leonard’s life (pp. vii, viii).
