On Prayer

I'm even hesitant to discuss prayer as I have been a slothful, lax, negligent pray-er for most of my 60 years. I've had times of devout praying; I've had years with virtually none.

I've been reading about prayer. Figures...it's always easier to read about something than to actually do it. Nevertheless, I offer the following truths about prayer found in my recent readings.

From E.M. Bounds' important book, Power through Prayer, (how come I haven't read this before now?):
NOTE: This book was written specifically to pastors, so everywhere the words pastor, minister etc. appear I simply substitute Christian, child of God, or believer.

• "The preacher's relationship to God is the insignia and credentials of his ministry. If he does not excel in grace, he does not excel at all. If he does not preach by life, character, and conduct, he does not preach at all."
• Martin Luther's motto was "He that has prayed well has studied well."
• "The preacher must primarily be a man of prayer. In the school of prayer, only the heart can learn to preach. No learning can make up for the failure to pray. No earnestness, no diligence, no study, no gifts will supply its lack."
• "Our laziness after God is our crying sin."
• "No man who is not a man of prayer can do a great and enduring work for God, and no man can be a man of prayer without giving much time to prayer."
• "Public prayers, as a rule, ought to be short and condensed. Our short prayers are effective and efficient because long ones have preceded them. The short, prevailing prayer cannot be prayed by one who has not prevailed with God in a mightier struggle of long continuance."
• "A prayerful ministry is the only ministry that brings the preacher into sympathy with the people. Colleges, knowledge, books, theology, and preaching do not make a preacher, but praying does."

From Elizabeth Elliot's Notes on Prayer: "One way of laying down our lives is by praying for somebody. In prayer I am saying, in effect, 'my life for yours.' My time, my energy, my thought, my concern, my concentration, my faith--here they are, for you. So it is that I participate in the work of Christ. So it is that no work of faith, no labor of love, no smallest prayer is ever lost, but, like the smoke of the incense on the golden altar, rises from the hand of the angel before God."

I do not know who authored the following but I found it in an old tract that belonged to my sister:

He prayeth best who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the great God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

And finally this from The Meaning of Prayer by Harry Emerson Fosdick: "The Eternal God calls us every one by name. He is not the God of mankind in the mass; He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob! All great pray-ers have lived in the power of this individual relationship with God. They have said with the Psalmist, 'I will give thanks in the great assembly: I will praise thee among much people.' (Ps.35:18)"