It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God – men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These can mold a generation for God.
– EM Bounds –
Let me burn out for God. After all, whatever God may appoint, prayer is the great thing. oh, that I may be a man of prayer!
– Henry Martyn –
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 wise cracks, but in the prayer closet.
– Leonard Ravenhill –
The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn
– Martin Luther –
Wherever there is complaint of a lack of workers or of competent helpers for God’s work, prayer holds the promise for their supply. There is no work for God where He is not ready and able to provide workers for it. It may take time and importunity, but Christ’s command to ask the Lord of the harvest is the pledge that the prayer will be heard: “I tell you, he will get up and give him as much as he needs” (Luke 11:8).
– Andrew Murray –
from Teach Me to Pray
Whether you have family prayers in your house or not, your relations know. But whether you pray in private or not, is a matter between yourself and God.
– JC Ryle –
From A Call to Prayer
… and most important of all, we must earnestly ask God in prayer to open our blind eyes to the meaning of the Scriptures; “Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things from Your law” (Psalm 119:18); “I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire… and anoint your eyes with eye-salve, that you may see” (Rev. 3:18).
– William Bridge –
Christians often have little faith in prayer as a power in real life. They do not embrace cordially, in feeling as well as in theory, the truth which underlies the entire scriptural conception and illustration of prayer, that it is literally, actually, positively, effectually, a means of power.
– Austen Phelps –
From The Still Hour: Communion with God in Prayer, 1859
If we are struggling in prayer it is because the wiles of the enemy are getting the upper hand, and we must look for the cause in our lack of discipline. There are some things we have not been strenuously practicing. We used to pray in the morning, do we now? We used to commune with God over the Bible, do we now? We used to be in contact with God wherever we went, are we now? Put on the whole armor of God and continuously practice, then the wiles of the devil cannot get you unaware.
– Oswald Chambers –
from If You Will Ask, 30