A deep, practical conviction of the need of the Spirit, would make us men of prayer, would send us to our closets, and keep us there! Here perhaps is the cause why we have not more success in our ministry, and are not more frequently and more heartily gladdened by the conversion of souls to God; we seek to be men of the pulpit merely, and are not sufficiently men of the closet.
...[W]e do not pray as if we believed we were sent to save souls from eternal death, and that we could not be successful in a single instance without the grace of God! Who of us can read the diaries of such men as Doddridge, Brainerd, Payson, and Martyn, and very many others, and not stand reproved for our lamentable deficiency in the exercise of earnest prayer?
...A praying ministry must be an earnest one - and an earnest ministry a praying one!
...The eternal destinies of our hearers hang not only upon our sermons but upon our prayers; we carry out the purposes of our mission, not only in the pulpit - but in the closet; and may never expect to be successful ministers of the New Covenant - but by this two-fold importunity in first beseeching sinners to be reconciled to God, and then beseeching God to pour out his Spirit upon them - thus we honor his wisdom in the use of the means he has appointed, and then his power by confessing our dependence upon his grace.
--Taken from An Earnest Ministry, John Angell James
