For the last in the series on ‘The Preacher and….Prayer’ I have pulled together an assortment of quotes on the subject from my own collection. Watch out for a new ‘The Preacher and……’ theme next week.
Prayer is not an elective but the principal element in the kaleidoscope of spiritual characteristics that mark a preacher. These traits unite into a powerful spiritual force; they build a spokesman for God. Jesus, the finest model, and other effective spokesmen for God have been mighty in prayer coupled with the virtues of godliness and dependence on God. The composite of spiritual qualities that centres in prayer is conspicuous in God’s long line of proclaimers in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and in church history, even to the present day…..Preachers who follow the biblical model take prayer very seriously. In sermon preparation, they steep themselves in prayer.” James E Rosscup
“Prayer must carry on our work as well as preaching: he preacheth not heartily to his people, that prayeth not earnestly for them. If we prevail not with God to give them faith and repentance we shall never prevail with them to believe and repent.” Richard Baxter
“Satan dreads nothing but prayer. His one concern is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks our wisdom, but trembles when we pray.” Samuel Chadwick
“Strange it is that any discussion of preaching should take place outside the context of believing prayer. We have not prepared until we have prayed….We cannot represent God if we have not stood before God. It is more important therefore for me to teach a student to pray than to preach….” David Larsen
“The young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strength on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the clamour for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and brilliance instead of holiness.” E M Bounds
“If we would prevail with men in public we must prevail with God in secret.” H A Ironside
“A sermon steeped in prayer on the study floor, like Gideon’s fleece saturated with dew, will not lose its moisture between that and the pulpit. The first step towards doing anything in the pulpit as a thorough workman must be to kiss the feet of the Crucified, as a worshipper, in the study.” Thomas Armitage
A Prayer of George Whitefield:
““Yea…that we shall see the great Head of the Church once more . . . raise up unto Himself certain young men whom He may use in this glorious employ. And what manner of men will they be? Men mighty in the Scriptures, their lives dominated by a sense of the greatness, the majesty and holiness of God, and their minds and hearts aglow with the great truths of the doctrines of grace. They will be men who have learned what it is to die to self, to human aims and personal ambitions; men who are willing to be ‘fools for Christ’s sake’, who will bear reproach and falsehood, who will labor and suffer, and whose supreme desire will be, not to gain earth’s accolades, but to win the Master’s approbation when they appear before His awesome judgment seat. They will be men who will preach with broken hearts and tear-filled eyes, and upon whose ministries God will grant an extraordinary effusion of the Holy Spirit, and who will witness ‘signs and wonders following’ in the transformation of multitudes of human lives.”
