Quotes by Clergymen - Page 3

Prayer is not logical it is a mysterious moral working of the Holy Spirit.
Oswald Chambers
Prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned God-ward.
Phillips Brooks
Prayer is the supreme activity of all that is noblest in our personality and the essential nature of prayer is faith.
Oswald Chambers
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.
E.M.Bounds
The greatest answer to prayer is that I am brought into a perfect understanding with God and that alters my view of actual things.
Oswald Chambers
God's "nothings" are His most positive answers. We have to stay on God and wait. Never try to help God to fulfill His word.
Oswald Chambers
Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things the simplest and the sublim-est the weakest and the most powerful its results lie outside the range of human possibilities-they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.
E.M.Bounds
Prayer like faith obtains promises enlarges their operation and adds to the measure of their results.
E.M.Bounds
One great effect of prayer is that it enables the soul to command the body. By obedience I make my body submissive to my soul but prayer puts my soul in command of my body.
Oswald Chambers
Prayer puts God's work in His hands-and keeps it there.
E.M.Bounds
It is hard to wait and press and pray and hear no voice but stay till God answers.
E.M.Bounds
Pray because you have a Father not because it quietens you and give Him time to answer.
Oswald Chambers
We impoverish God in our minds when we say there must be answers to our prayers on the material plane the biggest answers to our prayers are in the realm of the unseen.
Oswald Chambers
Our Lord never referred to unanswered prayer he taught that prayers are always answered. He ever implied that prayers were answered rightly because of the Heavenly Father's wisdom.
Oswald Chambers
Beyond our utmost wants His love and power can bless To praying souls he always grants More than they can express.
John Newton
Never was a faithful prayer lost. Some prayers have a longer voyage than others but then they return with their richer lading at last so that the praying soul is a gainer by waiting for an answer.
William Gurnall
Those who trade with heaven by prayer grow rich by quick returns.
William S. Plumer
Our understanding of God is the answer to prayer getting things from God is God's indulgence of us. When God stops giving us things He brings us into the place where we can begin to understand Him.
Oswald Chambers
If God sees that my spiritual life will be furthered by giving the things for which I ask then He will give them but that is not the end of prayer. The end of prayer is that I come to know God Himself.
Oswald Chambers
You say "But He has not answered." He has He is so near to you that His silence is the answer. His silence is big with terrific meaning that you cannot understand yet but presently you will.
Oswald Chambers
When we pray "in the Name of Jesus" the answers are in accordance with His nature and if we think our prayers are unanswered it is because we are not interpreting the answer along this line.
Oswald Chambers
God's silences are His answers. If we only take as answers those that are visible to our senses we are in a very elementary condition of grace.
Oswald Chambers
Visualize "prayerize " "actionize " and your wishes will come true.
Charles L. Allen
There is a time for all things a time to preach and a time to pray but those times have passed away there is a time to fight and that time has come!
General Peter Muhlenberg
Prayer is often a temptation to bank on a miracle of God instead of on a moral issue i.e. it is much easier to ask God to do my work than it is to do it myself. Until we are disciplined properly we will always be inclined to bank on God's miracles and refuse to do the moral thing ourselves. It is our job and it will never be done unless we do it.
Oswald Chambers
Real prayer seeks an audience and an answer.
William S. Plumer
Whenever the insistence is on the point that God answers prayer we are off the track. The meaning of prayer is that we get hold of God not of the answer.
Oswald Chambers
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.
E.M.Bounds
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.
E.M.Bounds
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
Prayer covers the whole of man's life. There is no thought feeling yearning or desire however low trifling or vulgar we may deem it which if it affects our real interest or happiness we may not lay before God and be sure of sympathy. His nature is such that our often coming does not tire him. The whole burden of the whole life of every man may be rolled on to God and not weary him though it has wearied man.
Henry Ward Beecher
O Lord let me not live to be useless!
Bishop John de Stratford
Watch your motive before God have no other motive in prayer than to know Him.
Oswald Chambers
God does not exist to answer our prayers but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God.
Oswald Chambers
Don't pray to escape trouble. Don't pray to be comfortable in your emotions. Pray to do the will of God in every situation. Nothing else is worth praying for.
Samuel M. Shoemaker
The whole meaning of prayer is that we may know God.
Oswald Chambers
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.
E.M.Bounds
There must be fired affections before our prayers will go up.
William Jenkyn
We may as well not pray at all as offer our prayers in a lifeless manner.
William S. Plumer
There is neither encouragement nor room in Bible religion for feeble desires listless efforts lazy attitudes all must be strenuous urgent ardent. Flamed desires impassioned unwearied insistence delight heaven. God would have His children incorrigibly in earnest and persistently bold in their efforts. Heaven is too busy to listen to half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls. Our whole being must be in our praying.
E.M.Bounds
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.
E.M.Bounds
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.
E.M.Bounds
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.
E.M.Bounds
Intercessory prayer for one who is sinning prevails. God says so! The will of the man prayed for does not come into question at all he is connected with God by prayer and prayer on the basis of the Redemption sets the connection working and God gives life.
Oswald Chambers
We look upon prayer as a means of getting things for ourselves The Bible idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.
Oswald Chambers
We pray pious blether our will is not in it and then we say God does not answer we never asked Him for anything. Asking means that our wills are in what we ask.
Oswald Chambers
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.
E.M.Bounds
Prayer is not only asking it is an attitude of heart that produces an atmosphere in which asking is perfectly natural and Jesus says "every one that asketh receiveth."
Oswald Chambers
You are coming to a King Large petitions with you bring For his grace and power are such None can ever ask too much.
John Newton
If we rely on the Holy Spirit we shall find that our prayers become more and more inarticulate and when they are inarticulate reverence grows deeper and deeper.
Oswald Chambers
None can pray well but he that lives well.
Thomas Fuller
Straight praying is never born of crooked conduct.
E.M.Bounds
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.
E.M.Bounds
Our praying to be strong must be buttressed by holy living. The life of faith perfects the prayer of faith.
E.M.Bounds
We cannot talk to God strongly when we have not lived for God strongly. The closet cannot be made holy to God when the life has not been holy to God.
E.M.Bounds
If we would have God in the closet God must have us out of the closet. There is no way of praying to God but by living to God.
E.M.Bounds
Men would pray better if they lived better. They would get more from God if they lived more obedient and well-pleasing to God.
E.M.Bounds
It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.
Henry Ward Beecher
God may turn his ears from prattling prayers or preaching prayers but never from penitent believing prayers.
William S. Plumer
Two went to pray? Better to say one went to brag the other to pray.
Richard Crashaw