Quotes on Prayer

"A sinning man stops praying, a praying man stops sinning." ~ Leonard Ravenhill

"None can believe how powerful prayer is, and what it is able to effect, but those who have learned it by experience. It is a great matter when in extreme need to take hold on prayer. I know, whenever I have prayed earnestly, that I have been amply heard, and have obtained more than I prayed for. God indeed sometimes delayed, but at last He came." ~ Martin Luther

"True prayer is a lonely business." ~ Samuel Chadwick

"He who runs from God in the morning will scarcely find Him the rest of the day."  ~ John Bunyan

"If your faith does not make you pray, have nothing to do with it: get rid of it, and God help thee to begin again." ~ C. H. Spurgeon

"I live in the spirit of prayer; I pray as I walk, when I lie down and when I rise, and the answers are always coming." ~ George Mueller

"Notice, we never pray for folks we gossip about, and we never gossip about the folk for whom we pray! For prayer is a great deterrent." ~ Leonard Ravenhill

"See that you do not use the trick of prayer to cover up what you know you ought to do." ~ Oswald Chambers

"You can do more than pray after you've prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed." ~ John Bunyan

"The more helpless you are, the better you are fitted to pray, and the more answers to prayer you will experience." ~ O. Hallesby

"Nothing tends more to cement the hearts of Christians than praying together. Never do they love one another so well as when they witness the outpouring of each other's hearts in prayer." ~ Charles Finney

"And there you have the reason why many people pray for the power of the Holy Ghost, and they get something, but oh, so little! because they prayed for power for work, and power for blessing, but they have not prayed for power for full deliverance from self." ~ Andrew Murray

”Worship and intercession must go together, the one is impossible without the other. Intercession means that we rouse ourselves up to get the mind of Christ about the one for whom we pray.” ~ Oswald Chambers

”History is silent about revivals that did not begin with prayer.” ~ Edwin Orr

”There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.” ~ William Law

”The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. 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." ~ E. M. Bounds

”Pray, and let God worry.” ~ Martin Luther

”Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?” ~ Corrie Ten Boom

”I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had absolutely no other place to go.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

”Faith in a prayer-hearing God will make a prayer-loving Christian.” ~ Andrew Murray

”Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers, pray for powers equal to your task.” ~ Phillips Brooks

”Rich is the person who has a praying friend.” ~ Janice Hughes

"I would rather train twenty men to pray, than a thousand to preach; A minister's highest mission ought to be to teach his people to pray." ~ H. MacGregor

"Time spent in prayer will yield more than that given to work. Prayer alone gives work its worth and its success. Prayer opens the way for God Himself to do His work in us and through us. Let our chief work as God's messengers be intercession; in it we secure the presence and power of God to go with us." ~ Andrew Murray

"Prayer is the real work, Evangelism is just the mopping up." ~ Anonymous

“The great people of the earth today are the people who pray! I do not mean those who talk about prayer; nor those who say they believe in prayer; nor those who explain prayer; but I mean those who actually take the time to pray. They have not time. It must be taken from something else. That something else is important, very important and pressing, but still, less important and pressing than prayer. There are people who put prayer first, and group the other items in life's schedule around and after prayer. These are the people today who are doing the most for God in winning souls, in solving problems, in awakening churches, in supplying both men and money for mission posts, in keeping fresh and strong their lives far off in sacrificial service on the foreign field, where the thickest fighting is going on, and in keeping the old earth sweet a little while longer.” ~ S. D. Gordon

"Since the days of Pentecost, has the whole church ever put aside every other work and waited upon Him for ten days, that the Spirit’s power might be manifested? We give too much attention to method and machinery and resources, and too little to the source of power." ~ Hudson Taylor

"Prayer is not learned in a classroom but in the closet." ~ E. M. Bounds

"Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still." ~ E. M. Bounds

"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." ~ E. M. Bounds

“Those persons who know the deep peace of God, the unfathomable peace that passeth all understanding, are always men and women of much prayer.” ~ R. A. Torrey

"The essence of prayer does not consist in asking God for something but in opening our hearts to God, in speaking with Him, and living with Him in perpetual communion. Prayer is continual abandonment to God. Prayer does not mean asking God for all kinds of things we want; it is rather the desire for God Himself, the only Giver of Life, Prayer is not asking, but union with God. Prayer is not a painful effort to gain from God help in the varying needs of our lives. Prayer is the desire to possess God Himself, the Source of all life. The true spirit of prayer does not consist in asking for blessings, but in receiving Him who is the giver of all blessings, and in living a life of fellowship with Him." ~ Sadhu Sundar Singh

“Closet communion needs time for the revelation of God’s presence. It is vain to say, ‘I have too much work to do to find time.’ You must find time or forfeit blessing. God knows how to save for you the time you sacredly keep for communion with Him.” ~ A. T. Pierson

“I have seen many men work without praying, though I have never seen any good come out of it; but I have never seen a man pray without working.” ~ James Hudson Taylor

"Beware in your prayers, above everything else, of limiting God, not only by unbelief, but by fancying that you know what He can do. Expect unexpected things 'above all that we ask or think.'" ~ Andrew Murray

”Worshipping God is the great essential of fitness.  If you have not been worshipping…when you get to work you will not only be useless yourself, but a tremendous hindrance to those who are associated with you.” ~ Oswald Chambers

"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." ~ E. M. Bounds

"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." ~ E.M. Bounds

"Prayer succeeds when all else fails." ~ E.M. Bounds

"All that true prayer seeks is God Himself, for with Him we get all we need." ~ The Kneeling Christian

"Our prayer must not be self-centered. It must arise not only because we feel our own need as a burden we must lay upon God, but also because we are so bound up in love for our fellow men that we feel their need as acutely as our own. To make intercession for men is the most powerful and practical way in which we can express our love for them." ~ John Calvin

"We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties." ~ Oswald Chambers

"Satan laughs at our toiling, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray." ~ The Kneeling Christian

"He who knows how to overcome with God in prayer, has heaven and earth at his disposal." ~ C. S. Spurgeon

"Pray alone. Let prayer be the key of the morning and the bolt at night. The best way to fight against sin is to fight it on our knees." ~ Philip Henry

"The secret of all failure is our failure in secret prayer." ~ The Kneeling Christian

"People may spurn our appeals, reject our messages, oppose our arguments, despise our persons; but they are helpless against our prayers." ~ Thomas Lindberg

"The prayer of the saints is never self-important, but always God-important." ~ Oswald Chambers

"Unless the heart is right the prayer must be wrong." ~ The Kneeling Christian

"There is no greater test to spirituality than prayer. The man who tries to pray quickly discovers just where he stands in God's sight." ~ The Kneeling Christian

"...a man who kneels before God will stand before men." ~ Leonard Ravenhill

"... he that is never on his knees on earth, shall never stand upon his feet in heaven." ~ C. H. Spurgeon

"The purpose of prayer is to reveal the presence of God equally present all the time in every condition." ~ Oswald Chambers

"Every work of God can be traced to some kneeling form." ~ Dwight L. Moody

"We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties." ~ Oswald Chambers

"We think of prayer as a preparation for work, or a calm after having done work, whereas prayer is the essential work. It is the supreme activity of everything that is noblest in our personality." ~ Oswald Chambers

"Prayer is not getting things from God, that is the most initial stage; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God; I tell Him what I know He knows in order that I may get to know it as He does." ~ Oswald Chambers

"It will be a wonderful moment for some of us when we stand before God and find that the prayers we clamoured for in early days and imagined were never answered, have been answered in the most amazing way, and that God's silence has been the sign of the answer. If we always want to be able to point to something and say, "This is the way God answered my prayer," God cannot trust us yet with His silence. " ~ Oswald Chambers

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks." ~ Phillips Brooks

". . . 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." ~ E. M. Bounds

"When the devil sees a man or woman who really believes in prayer, who knows how to pray, and who really does pray, and, above all, when he sees a whole church on its face before God in prayer, "he trembles" as much as he ever did, for he knows that his day in that church or community is at an end." ~ R.A. Torrey

"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." ~ E. M. Bounds

"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." ~ E. M. Bounds

"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." ~ E. M. Bounds

"A holy life does not live in the closet, but it cannot live without the closet." ~ E. M. Bounds

"No man - I don't care how colossal his intellect - No man is greater than his prayer life." ~ Leonard Ravenhill

"Fall on your knees and grow there. There is no burden of the spirit but is lighter by kneeling under it. Prayer means not always talking to Him, but waiting before Him till the dust settles and the stream runs clear." ~ F. B. Meyer

"A loving spirit is a condition of believing prayer. We cannot be wrong with man and right with God. The spirit of prayer is essentially the spirit of love. Intercession is simply love at prayer." ~ The Kneeling Christian

"He who is too busy to pray will be too busy to live a holy life. Satan had rather we let the grass grow on the path to our prayer chamber than anything else." ~ E. M. Bounds

The world has yet to see what God can do with and for and through and in and by the man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him. I will try my utmost to be that man.  ~ D.L. Moody

 “If Christians spent as much time praying as they do grumbling, they would soon have nothing to grumble about.” ~ Anonymous

“Don’t pray when you feel like it. Have an appointment with the Lord and keep it.” - Corrie Ten Boom

God never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may intercede. ~ Oswald Chambers

Worship and intercession must go together, the one is impossible without the other.  Intercession means that we rouse ourselves up to get the mind of Christ about the one for whom we pray. ~ Oswald Chambers

"Satan does not care how many people read about prayer if only he can keep them from praying. ~ Paul E. Billheimer

"The little estimate we put on prayer is evidence from the little time we give to it." ~ E.M. Bounds

"If the church wants a better pastor, it only needs to pray for the one it has."

When asked how much time he spent in prayer, George Muller's reply was, "Hours every day. But I live in the spirit of prayer. I pray as I walk and when I lie down and when I arise. And the answers are always coming." ~ Source Unknown.

“The one concern of the devil is to keep Christians from praying.  He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work and prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but he trembles when we pray.” ~ Samuel Chadwick

“I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach.” ~  Charles Spurgeon

“The man who mobilizes the Christian church to pray will make the greatest contribution to world evangelization in history.” ~ Andrew Murray

"Our prayer must not be self-centered. It must arise not only because we feel our own need as a burden we must lay upon God, but also because we are so bound up in love for our fellow men that we feel their need as acutely as our own. To make intercession for men is the most powerful and practical way in which we can express our love for them." ~ John Calvin

"Faith in a prayer-hearing God will make a prayer-loving Christian." ~ Andrew Murray

“Those persons who know the deep peace of God, the unfathomable peace that passeth all understanding, are always men and women of much prayer.” ~ R. A. Torrey