Edward McKendree Bounds Quotes

Prayer puts God's work in his hands-and keeps it there.

I think Christians fail so often to get answers to their prayers because they do not wait long enough on God. They just drop down and say a few words, and then jump up and forget it and expect God to answer them. Such praying always reminds me of the small boy ringing his neighbor's door-bell, and then running away as fast as he can go.

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.

Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.

Non-praying is lawlessness, discord, anarchy.

Jesus taught that perseverance is the essential element of prayer. Men must be in earnest when they kneel at God's footstool. Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point where we ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an unfailing and resistless will.

The pride of learning is against the dependent humility of prayer.

It is hard to wait and press and pray, and hear no voice, but stay till God answers.

True praying has the largest results for good. Poor praying the least. We cannot do too much of real praying. We cannot do too little of the sham. If we would learn the wondrous power of prayer, we must not give a fragment here and there - A little talk with Jesus, as the tiny saintlets sing - but we must demand and hold with an iron grasp the best hours of the day for God and prayer, or there will be no praying worth the name.

Little praying is a kind of make believe, a salve for the conscience, a farce and a delusion.

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.

No erudition, no purity of diction, no width of mental outlook, no flowers of eloquence, no grace of person can atone for lack of fire. Prayer ascends by fire. Flame gives prayer access as well as wings, acceptance as well as energy. There is no incense without fire; no prayer without flame.

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.

To say prayers in a decent, delicate way is not heavy work. But to pray really, to pray till hell feels the ponderous stroke, to pray till the iron gates of difficulty are opened, till the mountains of obstacles are removed, till the mists are exhaled and the clouds are lifted, and the sunshine of a cloudless day brightens-this is hard work, but it is God's work, and man's best labor.

Holy living is essential preparation for prayer.

Prayer lays hold upon God and influences Him to work. This is the meaning of prayer as it concerns God. This is the doctrine of prayer, or else there is nothing whatever in prayer.

They are not leaders because of brilliancy ... but because, by the power of prayer, they could command the power of God.

Faith can make no appeal to reason or the fitness of things; its appeal is to the Word of God, and whatever is therein revealed, faith accepts as true.

We must lose all for Christ in order to gain all for Christ.

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.

Christianity is not rationalism, but faith in God's revelation. A conspicuous, all-important item in that revelation is the resurrection of the body.

Prayer thrives in the atmosphere of true devotion.

The possibilities of prayer are found in its allying itself with the purposes of God, for God's purposes and man's praying are the combination of all potent and omnipotent forces.

If the devil can get the church to withdraw from prayer by believing reasonable excuses, the church is under his dominion.

Prayer-leadership preserves the spirituality of the Church, just as prayerless leaders make for unspiritual conditions.

In prayerful sympathy and love. Hold to the old truth
double distilled.

The strong argument for Heaven as a place centers in and clusters about Jesus. The man Jesus, bearing a man's form, the body He wore on earth, has a place assigned Him - a high place.

Prayer is God's plan to supply man's great and continuous need with God's great and continuous abundance.

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.

Heavenly citizenship and heavenly homesickness are in prayer. Prayer is an appeal from the lowness, from the emptiness, from the need of earth, to the highness, the fullness and to the all-sufficiency of heaven.

Apostolic preaching cannot be carried on unless there be apostolic prayer. Men of God, before anything else, are indispensable to the furtherance of the kingdom of God on earth.

We can never know God as it is our privilege to know Him by brief repetitions that are requests for personal favors, and nothing more.

The only limits to prayer are the promises of God and His ability to fulfill those promises.

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. Only by so doing can we expect to know Him, and as we come to know Him better we shall spend more time in His presence and find that presence a constant and ever-increasing delight.

The life of the individual believer, his personal salvation, and personal Christian graces have their being, bloom and fruitage in prayer.

Prayer, like faith, obtains promises, enlarges their operation, and adds to the measure of their results.

That man is the most immortal who has done the most and the best praying. They are God heroes, God's saints, God's servants, God's vicegerents.

The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is committed to the preacher. He makes or mars the message from God to man. The preacher is the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows.

Men who pray are, in reality, the only religious men, and it takes a full-measured man to pray.

The glorified will not be pilgrims, transient visitors, or tenants at will, but settled, permanent, walled, established by title, through eternity by warrantee deed, signed, sealed, recorded, possession given. No renters, no lessees of Heaven, but all property and home owners.

By prayer, the ability is secured to feel the law of love, to speak according to the law of love, and to do everything in harmony with the law of love.

Trust is faith that has become absolute, approved, and accomplished. When all is said and done, there is a sort of risk in faith and its exercise. But trust is firm belief; it is faith in full bloom. Trust is a conscious act, a fact of which we are aware.

Safety is in Heaven. Put your values there only; put your heart there. No tears are there to flood your heart, no sorrows there to break it, no losses there to grieve and embitter.

Four things let us ever keep in mind: God hears prayer, God heeds prayer, God answers prayer, and God delivers by prayer.

Our praying, however, needs to be pressed and pursued with an energy that never tires, a persistency which will not be denied, and a courage which never fails.

Prayer honors God, acknowledges His being, exalts His power, adores His providence, secures His aid.

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.

Prayer is a specific divine appointment, an ordinance of Heaven, whereby God purposes to carry out His gracious designs on earth and to execute and make efficient the plan of salvation.

We can never expect to grow in the likeness of our Lord unless we follow His example and give more time to communion with the Father. A revival of real praying would produce a spiritual revolution.

A man can pray better because of the prayers of the past; a man can live holier because of the prayers of the past; the man of many and acceptable prayers has done the truest and greatest service to the incoming generation.

Praying which does not result in pure conduct is a delusion. We have missed the whole office and virtue of praying if it does not rectify conduct. It is in the very nature of things that we must quit praying, or quit bad conduct.

The reformer is one who with clarion voice will call the ministry back to it's knees.

The prayers of God's saints strengthen the unborn generation against the desolating waves of sin and evil.

It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting.

The conditions of praying are the conditions of righteousness, holiness, and salvation.

The first and last stages of holy living are crowned with praying.

Private place and plenty of time are the life of prayer.

A severe apprenticeship in the trade of praying must be served in order to become a journeyman in it.

Preaching is God's great institution for the planting and maturing of spiritual life. When properly executed, its benefits are untold; when wrongly executed, no evil can exceed its damaging results.

We may excuse the spiritual poverty of our preaching in many ways, but the true secret will be found in the lack of urgent prayer for God's presence in the power of the Holy Spirit.

He only can truly pray who is all aglow for holiness, for God, and for heaven.

Heaven is too busy to listen to half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls.

We are feeble, weak and impoverished because of our failure to pray. God is restrained in doing because we are restrained by reason of our non-praying. All failures in securing heaven are traceable to lack of prayer or misdirected petition.

Prayer is our most formidable weapon, the thing which makes all else we do efficient.

Straight praying is never born of crooked conduct.

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.

The lazy man does not, will not, cannot pray, for prayer demands energy.

Prayer is the one prime, eternal condition by which the Father is pledged to put the Son in possession of the world. Christ prays through His people. Had there been importunate, universal, and continuous prayer by God's people, long ere this the earth had been possessed for Christ.

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 ...

The story of every great Christian achievement is the history of answered prayer.

Prayer concerns God, whose purposes and plans are conditioned on prayer. His will and His glory are bound up in praying.

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.

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.

Bread for today is bread enough.

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.

Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as well in the market.

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.

Man's access in prayer to God opens everything and makes his impoverishment his wealth. All things are his through prayer.

No man can do a great and enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man of prayer who does not give much time to praying.

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.

The central significance of prayer is not in the things that happen as results, but in the deepening intimacy and unhurried communion with God at His central throne of control in order to discover a sense of God's need in order to call on God's help to meet that need.

The most casual reader of the New Testament can scarcely fail to see the commanding position the resurrection of Christ holds in Christianity. It is the creator of its new and brighter hopes, of its richer and stronger faith, of its deeper and more exalted experience.

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.

In doing God's work, there is no substitute for praying. The men of prayer cannot be displaced with other kinds of men.

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.

Prayer in Jesus' name puts the crowning crown on God, because it glorifies Him through the Son and it pledges the Son to give to men 'whatsoever and anything' they shall ask.

Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this matter of prayer; but a capacity for faith, the power of a thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of one's self in God's glory and an ever present and insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fullness of God.

Love is kindled in a flame, and ardency is its life. Flame is the air which true Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it can withstand anything rather than a feeble flame; but when the surrounding atmosphere is frigid or lukewarm, it dies, chilled and starved to its vitals. True prayer must be aflame.

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.

The men to whom Jesus Christ committed the fortunes and destiny of His Church were men of prayer. To no other kind of men has God ever committed Himself in this world.

In the Bible, we have the facts and history of man's redemption. Incidentally or essentially, other worlds and other beings are brought prominently on the stage of redemption purposes and plans.

Trust perfected is prayer perfected. Trust looks to receive the thing asked for and gets it. Trust is not a belief that God can bless or that He will bless, but that He does bless, here and now. Trust always operates in the present tense. Hope looks toward the future. Trust looks to the present. Hope expects. Trust possesses. Trust receives what prayer acquires. So, what prayer needs, at all times, is abiding and abundant trust.

That man cannot possibly be called a Christian, who does not pray.

He who would pray, must obey.

Every mighty move of the Spirit of God has had its source in the prayer chamber.

Prayer is the highest intelligence, the profoundest wisdom, the most vital, the most joyous, the most efficacious, the most powerful of all vocations.

None but praying leaders can have praying followers. A praying pulpit will beget praying pews. We do greatly need pastors and evangelists who will set the saints to this business of praying. We are not a generation of praying saints. Who will restore this breach? The greatest will he be of reformers who can set the Church to praying.

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

Praying men must be strong in hope, and faith, and prayer.

The houses of Heaven are God-built and are as enduring and incorruptible as their builder. We will have bodies after the resurrection; transfigured they will be after the model of Christ's glorious body.