O brother, pray; in spite of Satan, pray; spend hours in prayer; rather neglect friends than not pray; rather fast, and lose breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper – and sleep too – than not pray. And we must not talk about prayer, we must pray in right earnest. The Lord is near. He comes softly while the virgins slumber.
– Andrew Bonar –
is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge –
Satan fools and feigns, blows and bluffs, and we so often take his threats to heart and forget the “exceeding greatness of God’s power to us.”
– Leonard Ravenhill –
I fear not the tyranny of man, neither yet what the devil can invent against me
– John Knox –
“Above all, taking the shield of faith.” Faith is unbreakable confidence in the personality of God, not in His power. There are some things over which we may lose faith if we have confidence in God’s power only. There is so much that looks like the mighty power of God that is not.
We must have confidence in God over and above everything He may do, and stand in confidence that His character is unsullied. Faith stands all tests – “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” When we take the shield of faith, none of these things can get through without breaking the shield. We are protected by the covering shield.
Oswald Chambers
from his book If You Will Ask
Prayer is, and God has decreed that it should be, a power in the universe, as distinct, as real, as natural, and as uniform, as the power of gravitation, or of light, or of electricity. A man may use it, as trustingly and as soberly as he would use either of these. It is as truly the dictate of good sense, that a man should expect to achieve something by praying, as it is that he should expect to achieve something by a telescope, or the mariner’s compass, or the electric telegraph.
– Austen Phelps –
from his book The Still Hour: Communion with God in Prayer, 1859
No one can believe how powerful prayer is and what it can effect, except those who have learned it by experience. Whenever I have prayed earnestly, I have been heard and have obtained more than I prayed for. God sometimes delays, but He always comes.
– Martin Luther –
The greatest old or new testament saints were on a level that is quite within our reach. The same spiritual power that enabled them to become our spiritual heroes, is also available to us.
– Goulburn –
No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. Poverty-stricken as the Church is today in many things, she is most stricken here, in the place of prayer. In the matter of New Testament, Spirit-inspired, hell-shaking, world-breaking prayer, never has so much been left to so few. For this kind of prayer there is no substitute. We do it – or we die!
– Leonard Ravenhill –