Edward McKendree Bounds
Prayer, like faith, obtains promises, enlarges their operation, and adds to the measure of their results.Collection: Prayer
Every mighty move of the Spirit of God has had its source in the prayer chamber.Collection: Prayer
Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things; the simplest and the sublimest; the weakest and the most powerful; its results lie outside the range of human possibilities-they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.Collection: Prayer
The little estimate we put on prayer is evidence from the little time we give to it.Collection: Prayer
Prayer is of transcendent importance. Prayer is the mightiest agent to advance God's work. Praying hearts and hands only can do God's work. Prayer succeeds when all else fails.Collection: Prayer
Paul, Luther, Wesley —what would these chosen ones of God be without the distinguishing and controlling element of prayer? They were leaders for God because mighty in prayer. They were not leaders because of brilliancy in thought, because exhaustless in resources, because of their magnificent culture or native endowment, but leaders because by the power of prayer they could command the power of God.Collection: Prayer
Enthusiasm is more active than faith, though enthusiasm cannot remove mountains nor call into action any of the omnipotent forces which faith can command. Activity is often at the expense of more solid, useful elements, and generally to the total neglect of prayer. To be too busy with God's work to commune with God, to be busy with doing church work without taking time to talk to God about His work, is the highway to backsliding, and many people have walked therein to the hurt of their immortal souls.Collection: Hurt
if the devil can get the church to withdraw from prayer by believing reasonable excuses, the church is under his dominion.Collection: Prayer
God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. The lips that uttered them may be closed to death, the heart that felt them may have ceased to beat, but the prayers live before God, and God's heart is set on them and prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them; they outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world.Collection: Prayer
The story of every great Christian achievement is the history of answered prayer.Collection: Christian
Prayer is a trade to be learned. We must be apprentices and serve our time at it. Painstaking care, much thought, practice and labour are required to be a skillful tradesman in praying. Practice in this, as well as in all other trades, makes perfect.Collection: Prayer
The stream of praying cannot rise higher than the fountain of living.Collection: Prayer
It is hard to wait and press and pray, and hear no voice, but stay till God answers.Collection: Prayer
Prayer is the highest intelligence, the profoundest wisdom, the most vital, the most joyous, the most efficacious, the most powerful of all vocations.Collection: Christian
That man cannot possibly be called a Christian, who does not pray.Collection: Christian
Prayer makes a godly man, and puts within him "the mind of Christ," the mind of humility, of self-surrender, of service, of pity, and of prayer. If we really pray, we will become more like God, or else we will quit praying.Collection: Prayer
We are constantly straining to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.Collection: Men
Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on or followed up by private praying.Collection: Prayer
When trust is perfect and there is no doubt, prayer is simply the outstretched hand ready to receive.Collection: Prayer
Praying gives sense, brings wisdom, broadens and strengthens the mind. The closet is a perfect school-teacher and schoolhouse for the preacher. Thought is not only brightened and clarified in prayer, but thought is born in prayer. We can learn more in an hour praying, when praying indeed, than from many hours in the study.Collection: Prayer
Praying that does not result in right thinking and right living is a farce. We have missed the whole office of prayer if it fails to purge our character and correct conduct. We have failed entirely to understand the virtue of prayer, if it does not bring about the revolutionizing of life. In the very nature of tings, we must either quit praying or quit our bad conduct.Collection: Prayer
The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.Collection: Prayer
Private place and plenty of time are the life of prayer.Collection: Prayer
Prayer is the lungs through which holiness breathes. Prayer is not only the language of spiritual life, but also makes its very essence and forms its real character. O for a faith that will not shrink though pressed by every foe; That will not tremble on the brink of any earthly woe. Lord, give us such a faith as this... whatever may come.Collection: Spiritual
Importunity is a condition of prayer. We are to press the matter, not with vain repetitions, but with urgent repetitions. We repeat, not to count the times, but to gain the prayer. We cannot quit praying because heart and soul are in it. We pray "with all perseverance." We hang to our prayers because by them we live. We press our pleas because we must have them, or die.Collection: Perseverance
The ministry of prayer, if it be anything worthy of the name, is a ministry of ardor, a ministry of unwearied and intense longing after God and after his holiness.Collection: Prayer
We regard prayer no longer as a duty which must be performed, but rather as a privilege which is to be enjoyed, a rare delight that is always revealing some new beauty.Collection: Prayer
The soul which has come into intimate contact with God in the silence of the prayer chamber is never out of conscious touch with the Father; the heart is always going out to Him in loving communion, and the moment the mind is released from the task upon which it is engaged, it returns as naturally to God as the bird does to its nest.Collection: Prayer
We can do nothing without prayer. All things can be done by importunate prayer. That is the teaching of Jesus ChristCollection: Jesus
Trouble and prayer are closely related. Trouble often drives men to God in prayer, while prayer is but the voice of men in trouble.Collection: Prayer
Men would pray better if they lived better. They would get more from God if they lived more obedient and well-pleasing to God.Collection: Prayer
Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man and a saint. 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.Collection: Men
The men who have most fully illustrated Christ in their character and have most powerfully affected the world for Him have been men who spend so much time with God as to make it a notable feature in their lives.Collection: Character
Prayer is God's plan to supply man's great and continuous need with God's great and continuous abundance.Collection: Prayer
God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. They outlive the lives of those who uttered them.Collection: Prayer
God shapes the world by prayer. The prayers of God's saints are the capitol stock of heaven by which God carries on His great work upon the earth.Collection: Prayer
Prayer is the greatest of all forces, because it honors God and brings him into active aid.Collection: Prayer
Prayer and a holy life are one. They mutually act and react. Neither can survive alone. The absence of the one is the absence of the other.Collection: Prayer
A holy life does not live in the closet, but it cannot live without the closet.Collection: Prayer
Bread for today is bread enough.Collection: Today
God's willingness to answer our prayers exceeds our willingness to give good and necessary things to our children, just as far as God's ability, goodness and perfection exceed our infirmities and evil.Collection: Prayer
There is power through prayer. For many Christians, prayer is nothing special, just something we're supposed to do - go to church, tithe, read the Bible, pray. But prayer should be so much more than an item on our "to do" lists.Collection: Christian
The first and last stages of holy living are crowned with praying.Collection: Lasts
It is not great talents or great learning or great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God.Collection: Christian
Holy living is essential preparation for prayer.Collection: Prayer
Walking with God down the avenue of prayer we acquire something of His likeness, and unconsciously we become witnesses to others of His beauty and His grace.Collection: Prayer
No insistence in the Scripture is more pressing than that we must pray...How clear it is, when the Bible is consulted, that the almighty God is brought directly into the things of this world by the prayers of His people.Collection: Prayer
The character of our praying will determine the character of our preaching. Light praying makes light preaching.Collection: Character
Those who know God the best are the richest and most powerful in prayer. Little acquaintance with God, and strangeness and coldness to Him, make prayer a rare and feeble thing.Collection: Prayer