Edward 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

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

Prayer is our most formidable weapon, the thing which makes all else we do efficient. — 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

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

We can do nothing without prayer. All things can be done by importunate prayer. It surmounts or removes all obstacles, overcomes every resisting force and gains its ends in the face of invincible hindrances. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

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

He who would pray, must obey. — 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

The pride of learning is against the dependent humility of prayer. — 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

God's Word does not say, "Call unto me, and you will thereby be trained into the happy art of knowing how to be denied. Ask, and you will learn sweet patience by getting nothing." Far from it. But it is definite, clear and positive: "Ask, and it shall be given unto you." — Edward McKendree Bounds

The life of the individual believer, his personal salvation, and personal Christian graces have their being, bloom and fruitage in prayer. — 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

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. — 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

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

It must never be forgotten that Almighty God rules this world. He is not an absentee God. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Prayer is the one prime, eternal condition by which the Father is pledged to put the Son in possession of the world. Christ prays through His people. Had there been importunate, universal, and continuous prayer by God's people, long ere this the earth had been possessed for Christ. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

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

A holy life does not live in the closet, but it cannot live without the closet. — 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

Praying men are God's agents on earth, the representative of government of Heaven, set to a specific task on the earth. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Prayer, like faith, obtains promises, enlarges their operation, and adds to the measure of their results. — 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

Prayer is of transcendent importance. Prayer is the mightiest agent to advance God's work. Praying hearts and hands only can do God's work. Prayer succeeds when all else fails. — 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

Faith does the impossible because it brings God to undertake for us, and nothing is impossible with 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

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

Experience has taught us that material wants know no natural bounds, that they will expand without end unless we consciously restrain them. Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough. — Robert Skidelsky Edward Skidelsky

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

Our praying, however, needs to be pressed and pursued with an energy that never tires, a persistency which will not be denied, and a courage which never fails. — Edward McKendree Bounds

When trust is perfect and there is no doubt, prayer is simply the outstretched hand ready to receive. — Edward McKendree Bounds

God shapes the world by prayer. The prayers of God's saints are the capitol stock of heaven by which God carries on His great work upon the earth. — 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

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

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

The more praying there is in the world, the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil everywhere. — Edward McKendree 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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The character of our praying will determine the character of our preaching. Light praying makes light preaching. — 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

Apostolic preaching cannot be carried on unless there be apostolic prayer. Men of God, before anything else, are indispensable to the furtherance of the kingdom of God on earth. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — 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

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

Prayer honors God, acknowledges His being, exalts His power, adores His providence, secures His aid. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — 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

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — 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

It is hard to wait and press and pray, and hear no voice, but stay till God answers. — 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

The reformer is one who with clarion voice will call the ministry back to it's knees. — 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

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

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

You will find out that in the measure you have allowed yourself to look back you have missed that which God has for you. — 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

Straight praying is never born of crooked conduct. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

It is not great talents or great learning or great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God ... — Edward McKendree Bounds

The world needs more true praying to save it from the reign and ruin of Satan. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — 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

Love is kindled in a flame, and ardency is its life. Flame is the air which true Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it can withstand anything rather than a feeble flame; but when the surrounding atmosphere is frigid or lukewarm, it dies, chilled and starved to its vitals. True prayer must be aflame. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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. — Edward McKendree Bounds

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

God requires to be represented by a fiery Church ... two things are intolerable to Him-insincerity and lukewarmness. — 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