“The more praying there is in the world the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil everywhere.”

“The requisites of true prayer are the requisites of scriptural, vital, personal religion. They are the requisites of real religious service in this life. Primary among these requisites is that in serving, we serve. So in praying, we must pray. Truth and heart reality, these are the core, the substance, the sum, the heart of prayer. There are no possibilities in prayer without we really pray in all simplicity, reality and trueness. Prayerless praying—how common, how popular, how delusive and vain!”

“Praying which does not result in pure conduct is a delusion.”

“Always does not mean that we are to neglect the ordinary duties of life; what it means is that 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, that the heart is always going out to Him in loving communion, and that 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.”

“God! If there were always reverent bended hearts when bended knees are uttering words before God to please men’s ears! There is nothing that will preserve the life of prayer; its vigour, sweetness, obligations, seriousness and value, so much as a deep conviction that prayer is an approach to God, a pleading with God, an asking of God. Reality will then be in it; reverence will then be in the attitude, in the place, and in the air. Faith will draw, kindle and open. Formality and deadness cannot live in this high and all-serious home of the soul. Prayerless praying lacks the essential element of true praying; it is not based on desire, and is devoid of earnestness and faith. Desire burdens the chariot of prayer, and faith drives its wheels. Prayerless praying has no burden, because no sense of need; no ardency, because none of the vision, strength, or glow of faith. No mighty pressure to prayer, no holding on to God with the deathless, despairing grasp, “I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me.” No utter self-abandon, lost in the throes of a desperate, pertinacious, and consuming plea: “Yet now if Thou wilt forgive their sin—if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book;” or “Give me Scotland, or I die.” Prayerless”

“Prayerless praying stakes nothing on the issue, for it has nothing to stake. It comes with empty hands, indeed, but they are listless hands as well as empty. They have never learned the lesson of empty hands clinging to the cross; this lesson to them has no form nor comeliness. Prayerless”

“Prayer preachers are boldest, the truest and the swiftest ministers of God. They mount up highest and are nearest to Him who has called them. They advance more rapidly and in Christian living are most like God.”

“God’s house is the house of prayer; God’s work is the work of prayer. It is the zeal for God’s house and the zeal for God’s work that makes God’s house glorious and His work abide.”

“First of all, it takes thought to pray. The intellect teaches us we ought to pray. By serious thinking beforehand the mind prepares itself for approaching a throne of grace. Thought goes before entrance into the closet and prepares the way for true praying. It considers what will be asked for in the closet hour. True praying does not leave to the inspiration of the hour what will be the requests of that hour. As praying is asking for something definite of God, so, beforehand, the thought arises—“What shall I ask for at this hour?” All vain and evil and frivolous thoughts are eliminated, and the mind is given over entirely to God, thinking of him, of what is needed, and what has been received in the past. By every token, prayer, in taking hold of the entire man, does not leave out the mind. The very first step in prayer is a mental one. The disciples took that first step when they said unto Jesus at one time, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

“separation to God’s work by the power of the Holy Spirit is the only consecration recognized by God as legitimate. The”

“Wesley at eighty-six could still preach on the streets for thirty minutes. Bounds was able at seventy-five in the first hour of the fourth watch to pray for three hours upon his knees.”

“No man can do a great and enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer,”

“The prayer of faith is the only power in the universe to which the Great Jehovah yields. Prayer is the sovereign remedy.—Robert Hall”

“Here is the secret of prevailing prayer, to pray under a direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit,”

“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”

“Prayer has to do with the entire man. Prayer takes in man in his whole being, mind, soul and body.”

“Two things,” says his biographer, “he seems never to have ceased from—the cultivation of personal holiness and the most anxious efforts to win souls.” The two are the inseparable attendants on the ministry of prayer.”

“The preaching man is to be the praying man. Prayer is the preacher’s mightiest weapon. An almighty force in itself, it gives life and force to all.”

“Prayer can do anything that God can do. The pity is that we do not believe this as we ought, and we do not put it to the test.”

“Intercession” is an enlargement in prayer, a going out in broadness and fullness from self to others. Primarily, it does not centre in praying for others, but”