Robert Murray M'Cheyne

Give yourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word. If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry, as He did me, to teach you to pray.

I ought to pray before seeing any one. Often when I sleep long, or meet with others early, it is eleven or twelve o'clock before I begin secret prayer. I feel it is far better to begin with God-to see His face first, to get my soul near Him before it is near another.

Rose early to seek God and found Him whom my soul loveth. Who would not rise early to meet such company?

I ought to spend the best hours of the day in communion with God. It is my noblest and most fruitful employment, and is not to be thrust into any corner.

Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little In comparison to eternal realities.

If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies.

The greatest need of my people is my own holiness.

Most of God's people are contented to be saved from the hell that is without; they are not so anxious to be saved from the hell that is within.

Use your health while you have it, my dear friend and brother. Do not cast away peculiar opportunities that may never come again. You know not when your last Sabbath with your people may come. Speak for eternity. Above all things, cultivate your own spirit. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God's Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.

Seek to be made holier every day; pray, strive, wrestle for the spirit, to make you like God. Be as much you can with God. I declare to you that I had rather be one hour with God than a thousand with the sweetest society on earth or in Heaven. All other joys are but streams; God is the fountain.

Get your texts from God - your thoughts, your words, from God... It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God's Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.

Remember also, the present is your only time to be saved. There is no believing, no repenting, no conversion in the grave---no minister will speak to you there. This is the time of conversion.

Your afflictions may only prove that you are more immediately under the Father's hand. There is no time that the patient is such an object of tender interest to the surgeon, as when he is bleeding beneath his knife. So you may be sure if you are suffering from the hand of a reconciled God, that His eye is all the more bent on you.

Learn that urgency in prayer does not so much consist in vehement pleading, as in vehement believing. He that believes most the love and power of Jesus will obtain the most in prayer.