Edward McKendree Bounds Quotes & Sayings

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The word of God is the food by which prayer is nourished and made strong. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Our praying, to be strong, must be buttressed by holy living. The life of faith perfects the prayer of faith. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The conditions of praying are the conditions of righteousness, holiness, and salvation. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Nothing is more important to God than prayer in dealing with mankind. But it is likewise all-important to man to pray. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The lazy man does not, will not, cannot pray, for prayer demands energy. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Praying men must be strong in hope, and faith, and prayer. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Faith accepts the Bible as the word and will of God and rests upon its truth without question and without other evidence. — Edward McKendree 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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Every mighty move of the Spirit of God has had its source in the prayer chamber. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

In prayerful sympathy and love. Hold to the old truth
double distilled. — Edward McKendree 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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Prayer breaks all bars, dissolves all chains, opens all prisons, and widens all straits by which God's saints have been held. — Edward McKendree 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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Praying gives sense, brings wisdom, and broadens and strengthens the mind. The prayer closet is a perfect schoolteacher and schoolhouse for the preacher. Thought is not only brightened and clarified in prayer, but thought is born in prayer. — Edward McKendree Bounds

We can do nothing without prayer. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

I feel it is far better to begin with God, to see His face first, to get my soul near Him before it is near another. In general it is best to have at least one hour alone with God before engaging in anything else. — Edward McKendree Bounds

We can learn more in an hour praying, when praying indeed, than from many hours of rigorous study. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The stream of praying cannot rise higher than the fountain of living. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Private place and plenty of time are the life of prayer. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

There is power through prayer. For many Christians, prayer is nothing special, just something we're supposed to do - go to church, tithe, read the Bible, pray. But prayer should be so much more than an item on our "to do" lists. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Praying that does not result in right thinking and right living is a farce. We have missed the whole office of prayer if it fails to purge our character and correct conduct. We have failed entirely to understand the virtue of prayer, if it does not bring about the revolutionizing of life. In the very nature of tings, we must either quit praying or quit our bad conduct. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Prayer is not learned in a classroom but in the closet. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Prayer puts God's work in his hands-and keeps it there. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

A life growing in its purity and devotion will be a more prayerful life. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The soul which has come into intimate contact with God in the silence of the prayer chamber is never out of conscious touch with the Father; the heart is always going out to Him in loving communion, and the moment the mind is released from the task upon which it is engaged, it returns as naturally to God as the bird does to its nest. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Sainthood's piety is made, refined, perfected, by prayer. The gospel moves with slow and timid pace when the saints are not at their prayers early and late and long. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Other duties become pressing and absorbing and crowd our prayer. "Choked to death" would be the coroner's verdict in many cases of dead praying if an inquest could be secured on this dire, spiritual calamity. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Bread for today is bread enough. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The most important lesson we can learn is how to pray. Prayers do not die, prayers live before God, and God's heart is set on them. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree 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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

Prayer, in one phase of its operation, is a disinfectant and a preventive. It purifies the air; it destroys the contagion of evil. — Edward McKendree Bounds

That man cannot possibly be called a Christian, who does not pray. — Edward McKendree Bounds

To give prayer the secondary place is to make God seconday in life's affairs. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

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

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

No insistence in the Scripture is more pressing than that we must pray ... How clear it is, when the Bible is consulted, that the almighty God is brought directly into the things of this world by the prayers of His people. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Holy living is essential preparation for prayer. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree 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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Prayer is no fitful, short-lived thing. It is no voice crying unheard and unheeded in the silence. It is a voice which goes into God's ear, and it lives as long as God's ear is open to holy pleas, as long as God's heart is alive to holy things. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

God is waiting to be put to the test by His people in prayer. He delights in being put to the test on His promises. It is His highest pleasure to answer prayer, to prove the reliability of His promises. — Edward McKendree Bounds

God shapes the world by prayer. The more prayer there is in the world the better the world will be, the mightier the forces of against evil — Edward McKendree Bounds

Bible revelations are not against reason but above reason, for the uses of faith, man's highest faculty. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The story of every great Christian achievement is the history of answered prayer. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

Heaven is too busy to listen to half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Importunate praying is the earnest inward movement of the heart toward God. — Edward McKendree Bounds

All God's plans have the mark of the cross on them, and all His plans have death to self in them. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. The lips that uttered them may be closed to death, the heart that felt them may have ceased to beat, but the prayers live before God, and God's heart is set on them and prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them; they outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

It is necessary to iterate and reiterate that prayer, as a mere habit, as a performance gone through by routine or in a professional way, is a dead and rotten thing. — Edward McKendree 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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The first and last stages of holy living are crowned with praying. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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