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 have been crucified, and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.
Edward McKendree Bounds
It must never be forgotten that Almighty God rules this world. He is not an absentee God.
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.
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.
Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows.
God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.
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.
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 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 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.
The preachers who gain mighty results for God are the men who have prevailed in their pleadings with God ere venturing to plead with men.
Nothing is more important to God than prayer in dealing with mankind. But it is likewise all-important to man to pray.
Leaders in the realm of religious activity are to be judged by their praying habits and not by their money or social position. Those who must be placed in the forefront of the Church's business must be, first of all, men who know how to pray.
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.
Praying men are God's agents on earth, the representative of government of Heaven, set to a specific task on the earth.
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.
In doing God's work, there is no substitute for praying. The men of prayer cannot be displaced with other kinds of men.
Prayer must be broad in its scope - it must plead for others. Intercession for others is the hallmark of all true prayer. When prayer is confined to self and to the sphere of one's personal needs, it dies by reason of its littleness, narrowness and selfishness.
Man's access in prayer to God opens everything and makes his impoverishment his wealth. All things are his through prayer.
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.
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.
Prayer-leadership preserves the spirituality of the Church, just as prayerless leaders make for unspiritual conditions.
The Bible nowhere enters into an argument to prove the person and being of God. It assumes His being and reveals His person and character.
Bible revelations are not against reason but above reason, for the uses of faith, man's highest faculty.
A denial of the reality of demonical possessions on the part of anyone who believes the Gospel narrative to be true and inspired may justly be regarded as simply and plainly inconceivable.
The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself.
Faith accepts the Bible as the word and will of God and rests upon its truth without question and without other evidence.
The Scriptures bear ample and continuous evidence that the faith of the resurrection of the body lies in the faith that Jesus Christ died and rose again.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ was necessary to establish the truth of his mission and put the stamp of all-conquering power on his gospel.
The more praying there is in the world, the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil everywhere.
Woe to the generation of sons who find their censers empty of the rich incense of prayer, whose fathers have been too busy or too unbelieving to pray, and perils inexpressible and consequences untold are their unhappy heritage.
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.
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.
Christianity is not rationalism, but faith in God's revelation. A conspicuous, all-important item in that revelation is the resurrection of the body.
The transfiguration of Jesus is one of the typical facts of the resurrection of the body; not only of the glorious change, but of the renewed life of the body and of the general judgment day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When we say that prayer puts God to work, it is simply to say that man has it in his power by prayer to move God to work in His own way among men, in which way He would not work if prayer was not made.
The life of the individual believer, his personal salvation, and personal Christian graces have their being, bloom and fruitage in prayer.
Prayer concerns God, whose purposes and plans are conditioned on prayer. His will and His glory are bound up in praying.
While the pulpit must hold to its unswerving loyalty to the Word of God, it must, at the same time, be loyal to the doctrine of prayer which that same Word illustrates and enforces upon mankind.
Men who pray are, in reality, the only religious men, and it takes a full-measured man to pray.
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.
Men of prayer, before anything else, are indispensable to the furtherance of the kingdom of God on earth. No other sort will fit in the scheme or do the deed. Men, great and influential in other things but small in prayer, cannot do the work Almighty God has set out for His Church to do in this, His world.
In all God's plans for human redemption, He proposes that men pray. The men are to pray in every place, in the church, in the closet, in the home, on sacred days and on secular days.
The sanctity of prayer is needed to impregnate business. We need the spirit of Sunday carried over to Monday and continued until Saturday. But this cannot be done by prayerless men, but by men of prayer.
