The men that will change the colleges and seminaries here represented are the men that will spend the most time alone with God … It takes time for the fires to burn. It takes time for God to draw near and for us to know that He is there. It takes time to assimilate His truth. You ask me, How much time? I do not know. I know it means time enough to forget time.
– John R. Mott –
The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.
– David Brainerd –
The Holy Spirit will give to the praying saint the brightness of an immortal hope, the music of a deathless song, in His baptism and communion with the heart, He will give sweeter and more enlarged visions of heaven until the taste for other things will pall, and other visions will grow dim and distant. He will put notes of other worlds in human hearts until all earth’s music is discord and songless.
– EM Bounds –
A sinning man stops praying. A praying man stops sinning.
– Leonard Ravenhill –
O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.
– AW Tozer –
Dear friends, you may have awakenings, enlightenings, experiences, a full heart in prayers, and many signs, but if ye lack holiness, you will never see the Lord. A real desire after complete holiness is the truest mark of having been born again. The Saviour first covers the soul with His white raiment, then makes the soul glorious within – restores the lost image of God, and fills the soul with pure heavenly holiness. Unregenerate men among you cannot bear this.
– Robert Murray M’Cheyne –
Prayer meetings are dead affairs when they are merely asking sessions; there is adventure, hope, and life when they are believing sessions, and the faith is corporately, practically, and deliberately affirmed.
– Norman Grubb –
It is a source of deep sorrow to me, that, notwithstanding my having so many times before referred to this point, thereby to encourage believers in the Lord Jesus, to roll all their cares upon God, and to trust in Him at all times, it is yet, by so many, put down to mere natural causes, that I am helped; as if the Living God were no more the Living God, and as if in former ages answers to prayer might have been expected, but that in the nineteenth century they must not be looked for.
– George Müller –
The first thing in closet-prayer is: I must meet my Father. The light that shines in the closet must be: the light of the Father’s countenance. The fresh air from heaven with which Jesus would have it filled, the atmosphere in which I am to breathe and pray, is: God’s Father-love, God’s infinite Fatherliness. Thus each thought or petition we breathe out will be simple, hearty, childlike trust in the Father. This is how the Master teaches us to pray: He brings us into the Father’s living presence.
– Andrew Murray –