Prayer sweeps the battlefield, slays the enemy, and buries the bones.
Interpretation
Prayer is a powerful tool that can bring about change and resolution in difficult situations.
In this quote, Charles Spurgeon emphasizes the transformative and powerful nature of prayer, suggesting that it has the capacity to alter circumstances, defeat opposition, and provide closure. The imagery of sweeping a battlefield indicates that prayer can be a means of gaining victory over challenges and finding peace after conflict.
In practice
In a speech about resilience, one might invoke this quote to inspire a group facing challenges.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
The real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons.
Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.
I think midlife crisis is just a point where people's careers have reached some plateau and they have to reflect on their personal relationships.
There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.
Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin: The anxiety of those surveilled is deeply connected to the anxiety of the surveillers. But the anxiety of the surveillers is generally hard to see; it's hidden in classified documents and delivered in highly coded languages in front of Senate committees.
Angels and ministers of grace defend us.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.