E.M. Bounds

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.

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 al…

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

We cannot run our spiritual operations on the prayers of the past generation.

The city of our God becomes the city of the dead; the Church a graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise and prayer are stifled; worship is dead. The preacher and the preaching have helped sin, not holiness; peopled hell,…

Nothing is so dead as a dead orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to pray.

Prayer puts God in full force in the world.

As the engine never moves until the fire is kindled, so preaching, with all its machinery, perfection, and polish, is at a dead standstill, as far as spiritual results are concerned, till prayer has kindled and created t…

Prayer freshens the heart of the preacher, keeps it in tune with God and in sympathy with the people, lifts his ministry out of the chilly air of a profession, fructifies routine and moves every wheel with the facility a…

We are a generation of non-praying saints. Non-praying saints are a beggarly gang of saints, who have neither the ardour nor the beauty, nor the power of saints.

Many persons believe in the efficacy of prayer, but not many pray.

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…

Dead men give out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill.

No learning can make up for the failure to pray. No earnestness, no diligence, no study, no gifts will supply its lack.

Prayer is absolutely dependent upon faith. Virtually, it has no existence apart from it, and accomplishes nothing unless it be its inseparable companion.

Importunate prayer is a mighty movement of the soul toward God. It is a stirring of the deepest forces of the soul, toward the throne of heavenly grace. It is the ability to hold on, press on, and wait.

It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man.

The preachers who are the mightiest in their closets with God are the mightiest in their pulpits with men.

God’s acquaintance is not made by pop calls.

Much time spent with God is the secret of all successful praying.

Prayer makes the man; prayer makes the preacher; prayer makes the pastor.

Having everything else and lacking prayer, they must fall. Having prayer and lacking all else, they can succeed.

God can work wonders if He can get a suitable man. Men can work wonders if they can get God to lead them.

Never did the cause of God need perfect illustrations of the possibilities of prayer more than in this age.

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 smallest and meanest of things.

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.

Prayer is the preacher's mightiest weapon. An almighty force in itself, it gives life and force to all.

The preaching is but a voice. The voice in silence dies, the text is forgotten, the sermon fades from memory; the preacher lives.

The man makes the preacher. God must make the man. The messenger is, if possible, more than the message. The preacher is more than the sermon.

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.

Men of God are indispensable to the furtherance of the kingdom of God on earth.

Should Sorrow lay her hand upon thy shoulder,
And walk with thee in silence on life’s way,
While joy, thy bright companion once, grows colder,
Becomes more distant day by day;
Shrink not from the companionship of Sorrow,…

Lack of spiritual desire should grieve us and lead us to lament its absence, to seek earnestly for its bestowal, so that our praying, henceforth, should be an expression of the soul's sincere desire.

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.

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.

Neglect of the inner chamber is the solution of most spiritual failure.

The preacher is not sent to merely induce men to join the church, nor merely to get them to do better. It is to get them to pray, to trust God, and to keep God ever before their eyes, that they may not sin against him.

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.

Invested with such gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great evils, involving so many grave responsibilities, it would be a parody on the shrewdness of the devil and a libel on his character and reputation if he did not…

Fervency has its seat in the heart, not in the brain, nor in the intellectual faculties of the mind.

The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself.

It is impossible for the preacher to keep his spirit in harmony with the divine nature of his high calling without much prayer. That the preacher by dint of duty and laborious fidelity to the work and routine of the mini…

Heavenly citizenship and heavenly homesickness are in prayer.

Your sermons last but an hour or two; your life preaches all the week.

The preaching man is to be the praying man. Prayer is the preacher's mightiest weapon.

The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh and the world hav…

Prayer is humbling work. It abases intellect and pride, crucifies vainglory, and signs our spiritual bankruptcy, and all these are hard for flesh and blood to bear. It is easier not to pray than to bear them.

No man gets God who does not follow hard after him, and no soul follows hard after God who is not after him in early morn.

In the ultimate issue, prayer is simply faith, claiming its natural yet marvelous prerogatives-faith taking possession of its illimitable inheritance.

Prayer projects faith on God, and God on the world. Only God can move mountains, but faith and prayer move God.