1. “Nothing is well done without prayer for the simple reason that it leaves God out of the account.”
2. “Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.”
3. “For trust in the person of God must precede trust in the Word of God.”
4. “The church is not a democracy in which we have chosen God, but a theocracy in which He has chosen us. The church is the only society in the world that never loses any of its members, even by death. The church upon its knees would bring heaven upon the earth.”
5. “The preachers who are the mightiest in their closets with God are the mightiest in their pulpits with men.”
6. “A school to teach preachers how to pray, as God counts praying, would be more beneficial to true piety, true worship, and true preaching than all theological schools.”
7. “Prayer is the outstretched arms of the child for the Father’s help.”
8. “Prayer breaks all bars, dissolves all chains, opens all prisons, and widens all straits by which God’s saints have been held.”
9. “Four things let us ever keep in mind: God hears prayer, God heeds prayer, God answers prayer and God delivers by prayer.”
10. “God shapes the world by prayer. The more praying there is in the world the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil…”
11. “God must help man by prayer. He who does not pray, therefore, robs himself of God’s help and places God where He cannot help man.”
12. “Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth. God does nothing but in answer to prayer. – John Wesley.”
13. “The “poor in spirit” are eminently competent to pray.”
14. “Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight the root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive, blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil.”
15. “Prayer is faith passing into act. A union of the will and intellect realising in an intellectual act.”
16. “Our praying needs to be pressed and pursued with an energy that never tires, a persistency which will not be denied, and a courage that never fails.”
17. “All the true revivals have been born in prayer.”
18. “God’s cause is committed to men; God commits Himself to men. Praying men are the vice-regents of God; they do His work and carry out His plans.”
19. “Prayer was the secret of His power, the law of His life, the inspiration of His toil and the source of His wealth, His joy, His communion and His strength.”
20. “God is vitally concerned that men should pray. Men are bettered by prayer, and the world is bettered by praying. God does His best work for the world through prayer. God’s greatest glory and man’s highest good are secured by prayer. Prayer forms the godliest men and makes the godliest world.”
21. “The little estimate we put on prayer is evidence from the little time we give to it.”
22. “Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul.”
23. “God’s revelation does not need the light of human genius, the polish and strength of human culture, the brilliancy of human thought, the force of human brains to adorn or enforce it; but it does demand the simplicity, the docility, humility, and faith of a child’s heart.”
24. “What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use — men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men — men of prayer.”
25. “Prayer gives us eyes to see God. Prayer is seeing God.”
26. “Whitfield once thus prayed, “O Lord, give me souls or take my soul.” After much closet pleading, “he once went to the Devil’s fair and took more than a thousand souls out of the paw of the lion in a single day.”
27. “Holy living is essential preparation for prayer.”
28. “The deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless mumble of words.”
29. “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. There.”
30. “The preaching of the Word to a prayerless congregation falls at the very feet of the preacher.”
31. “Prayer must be aflame. Its ardour must consume. Prayer without fervour is as a sun without light or heat, or as a flower without beauty or fragrance. A soul devoted to God is a fervent soul, and prayer is the creature of that flame. He only can truly pray who is all aglow for holiness, for God, and for heaven.”
32. “Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still. He will never talk well and with real success to men for God who has not learned well how to talk to God for men.”
33. “To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the littlest and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results for good; and poor praying, the least. We cannot do too much of real praying; we cannot do too little of the sham. We must learn anew the worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer. There is nothing which it takes more time to learn. – The Power of Prayer.”
34. “Your efforts have been unsuccessful, because you have sought without what you can only find within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will not fail to find Him.”
35. “Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of hurry.”
36. “Prayer is not learned in a classroom but in the closet.”
37. “All God’s plans have the mark of the cross on them, and all His plans have death to self in them.”
38. “The story of every great Christian achievement is the history of answered prayer.”
39. “Men of piety are always men of prayer. Men are never noted for the simplicity and strength of their faith who are not preeminently men of prayer. Piety flourishes nowhere so rapidly and so rankly as in the closet. The closet is the garden of faith.”
40. “The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees. He who fritters away the early morning, its opportunity and freshness, in other pursuits than seeking God will make poor headway seeking Him the rest of the day. If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, He will be in the last place the remainder of the day.”
41. “The dispensation of the Holy Spirit is a dispensation of prayer, in a preeminent sense.”
42. “Heaven is too busy to listen to half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls.”
43. “A holy life does not live in the closet, but it cannot live without the closet.”
44. “Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life.”
45. “The word of God is the food by which prayer is nourished and made strong.”
46. “The Bible is a revelation, not a philosophy nor a poem, not a science. It reveals things and persons as they are, living and acting outside the range of earthly vision or natural discovery.”
47. “The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.”
48. “Prayers are deathless. They outlive the lives of those who uttered them.”
49. “It is necessary to iterate and reiterate that prayer, as a mere habit, as a performance gone through by routine or in a professional way, is a dead and rotten thing.”
50. “You can do more than pray after you have prayed,” said the godly Dr. A. J. Gordon, “but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”
51. “Prayer is the channel through which all good flows from God to man, and all good from men to men.”
52. “Blessed is that home which has in it an altar of sacrifice and of prayer, where daily thanksgivings ascend to heaven and where morning and night praying is done.”
53. “It is only when the whole heart is gripped with the passion of prayer that the life-giving fire descends, for none but the earnest man gets access to the ear of God.”
54. “One of Satan’s wiliest tricks is to destroy the best by the good.”
55. “If prayer puts God to work on earth, then, by the same token, prayerlessness rules God out of the world’s affairs, and prevents Him from working. And if prayer moves God to work in this world’s affairs, then prayerlessness excludes God from everything concerning men, and leaves man on earth the mere creature of circumstances, at the mercy of blind fate or without help of any kind from God.”
56. “We have emphasized sermon-preparation until we have lost sight of the important thing to be prepared—the heart. A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.”
57. “They are not leaders because of brilliancy…but because, by the power of prayer, they could command the power of God.”
58. “Pray for “all men.” We usually pray more for things than we do for men. Our prayers should be thrown across their pathway as they rush in their downward course to a lost eternity.”
59. “Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still.”
60. “Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish.”
61. “The preacher is commissioned to pray as well as to preach. His mission is incomplete if he does not do both well.”
62. “It is the effectual, fervent prayer that influences God.”
63. “A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.”
64. “Prayer succeeds when all else fails.”
65. “The Word of God is the fulcrum upon which the lever of prayer is placed, and by which things are mightily moved.”
66. “The goal of prayer is the ear of God,” a goal that can only be reached by patient and continued and continuous waiting upon Him, pouring out our heart to Him and permitting Him to speak to us.”
67. “Luther said: “If I fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the devil gets the victory through the day. I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.”
68. “When faith ceases to pray, it ceases to live.”
69. “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. ”
70. “Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of the essence. The ability to wait, and stay, and press belongs essentially to our intercourse with God.”
71. “Our eyes should be taken off self, removed from our own weakness and allowed to rest implicitly upon God’s strength.”
72. “The conditions of praying are the conditions of righteousness, holiness, and salvation.”
73. “The young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strength on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the clamor for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness.”
74. “It is neither words, nor thoughts nor ideas, nor feelings, which shape praying, but character and conduct.”
75. “Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God’s work and is powerless to project God’s cause in this world.”
76. “The preacher must have, “bonds of a servant with the spirit of a king, a king in high, royal, independent bearing, with the simplicity and sweetness of a child.”
77. “To have God thus near is to enter the holy of holies – to breathe the fragrance of the heavenly air, to walk in Eden’s delightful gardens. Nothing but prayer can bring God and man into this happy communion.”
78. “Prayer should not be regarded as a duty which must be performed, but rather as a privilege to be enjoyed, a rare delight that is always revealing some new beauty.”
79. “We must remember that the goal of prayer is the ear of God. Unless that is gained the prayer has utterly failed.”
80. “He only can truly pray who is all aglow for holiness, for God, and for heaven.”
81. “Public prayers of are of little value unless they are founded on or followed up by private praying.”
82. “Whatever affects the intensity of our praying affects the value of our work.”
83. “God’s conquering days are when the saints have given themselves to mightiest prayer.”
84. “Prayer is the creator as well as the channel of devotion. The spirit of devotion is the spirit of prayer. Prayer and devotion are united as soul and body are united, as life and the heart are united. There is no real prayer without devotion, no devotion without prayer.”
85. “ABOVE ALL things, cultivate your own spirit. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear and your heart full of God’s Spirit is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.”
86. “Mr. Wesley spent two hours daily in prayer. He began at four in the morning. Of him, one who knew him well wrote: “He thought prayer to be more his business than anything else, and I have seen him come out of his closet with a serenity of face next to shining.”
87. “The value of prayer does not lie in the number of prayers, or the length of prayers, but its value is found in the great truth that we are privileged by our relations to God to unburden our desires and make our requests known to God, and He will relieve by granting our petitions.”
88. “Faith is the first, the foundation stone. Faith builds on Jesus Christ. Here faith is the foundation on which the whole spiritual building is reared. A foundation will do no good and will be ruined if no house is built on it The snow, the rain, the dew, the frost, the air, the sunshine, the breeze, will dissolve a foundation of adamant if no house be built on it On faith’s foundation, by all diligence, the spiritual superstructure must be reared.”
89. “Importunate praying is the earnest inward movement of the heart toward God.”
90. “The lazy man does not, will not, cannot pray, for prayer demands energy. Paul calls it a striving, an agony.”
91. “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.”
92. “If two angels were to receive at the same moment a commission from God, one to go down and rule earth’s grandest empire, the other to go and sweep the streets of its meanest village, it would be a matter of entire indifference to each which service fell to his lot, the post of ruler or the post of scavenger; for the joy of the angels lies only in obedience to God’s will.”
93. “Few Christians have anything but a vague idea of the power of prayer; fewer still have any experience of that power. The Church seems almost wholly unaware of the power God puts into her hand; this spiritual carte blanche on the infinite resources of God’s wisdom and power is rarely, if ever, used – never used to the full measure of honouring God.”