Guidance & Wisdom
None but praying leaders can have praying followers. Praying apostles will beget praying saints. A praying pulpit will beget praying pews.
Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the preacher creates death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in prayer is feeble in life-giving forces.
This divine unction is the feature which separates and distinguishes true gospel preaching from all other methods of presenting the truth, and which creates a wide spiritual chasm between the preacher who has it and the one who has it not. It backs and impregnates revealed truth with all the energy of God. Unction is simply putting God in his own word and on his own preachers.
Unction is a thing which you cannot manufacture, and its counterfeits are worse than worthless.
The pulpit of this day is weak in praying.
Without this unction on the preacher the gospel has no more power to propagate itself than any other system of truth.
Truth unquickened by God’s Spirit deadens as much as, or more than, error.
Unctionless preaching makes everything hard, dry, acrid, dead.
Praying makes the preacher a heart preacher. Prayer puts the preacher’s heart into the preacher’s sermon; prayer puts the preacher’s sermon into the preacher’s heart. The heart makes the preacher.
Professional praying chills and kills both preaching and praying.
The real sermon is made in the closet. The man—God’s man—is made in the closet. His life and his profoundest convictions were born in his secret communion with God.
A prayerless ministry is the undertaker for all God’s truth and for God’s Church.
This unction is the art of preaching. The preacher who never had this unction never had the art of preaching. The preacher who has lost this unction has lost the art of preaching. This unction vitalizes God’s revealed truth, makes it living and life-giving.
A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon.
To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the littlest and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results for good; and poor praying, the least.
He who fritters away the early morning, its opportunity and freshness, in other pursuits than seeking God will make poor headway seeking him the rest of the day. If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, he will be in the last place the remainder of the day.
We live shabbily because we pray meanly.
No learning can make up for the failure to pray.
The preacher must, by prayer, put God in the sermon. The preacher must, by prayer, move God toward the people before he can move the people to God by his words. The preacher must have had audience and ready access to God before he can have access to the people.
God does not bestow his gifts on the casual or hasty comers and goers.
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