On Prayer

It gathers the Christian classics on the inner life of prayer — learning to pray, and learning to keep praying, from the secret place of private devotion to prevailing intercession for others. The shelf ranges from gentle beginners' guides to bracing calls to persevere, and takes as its keynote the promise of Jeremiah 33:3: "Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not."

Among them are Andrew Murray's "The Inner Chamber" and "Lord, Teach Us to Pray," Spurgeon's teaching on prayer and his "Cheque Book of the Bank of Faith," Jeanne Guyon's "A Short and Easy Method of Prayer," E. M. Bounds on prevailing and persistent prayer, George Müller's "Answers to Prayer," and Andrew Murray's "The Ministry of Intercession" — a spread across centuries and traditions united by a single subject.

Andrew Murray's "Lord, Teach Us to Pray" and "The Inner Chamber" are gentle, practical starting points that assume you are learning. From there, Guyon draws the reader toward contemplative prayer of the heart, E. M. Bounds presses the urgency and cost of intercession, and George Müller's record of answered prayer builds confidence that God hears — so the shelf can be walked from first steps toward a settled life of prayer.

It is praying through to an answer and standing in the gap for others rather than only for oneself — the persistent, believing prayer the shelf's authors treat as every Christian's calling. E. M. Bounds and Watchman Nee especially press it: that God has chosen to work through the prayers of his people, so that intercession is real labour with real effect, not a formality.

It answers discouragement with both realism and hope. George Müller's "Answers to Prayer" records decades of specific requests met by God, while the whole collection urges persistence on the ground of Jeremiah 33:3 — that God invites us to call and promises to answer. The classics distinguish delay from denial and teach the believer to keep asking, aligning the will with God's rather than abandoning the request.

It is the practice of private, hidden prayer — withdrawing from the noise of the day to meet God alone, as Jesus taught his disciples to enter the closet and shut the door. Andrew Murray's "The Inner Chamber" is the shelf's fullest treatment of it: that the strength of all public and intercessory prayer is drawn from this unseen, personal communion with God.

The shelf draws together Andrew Murray, Charles Spurgeon, Jeanne Guyon, E. M. Bounds, George Müller and Watchman Nee, among others — Reformed and Wesleyan, Victorian and modern, Western and Chinese. What unites such different writers is a shared conviction that prayer is the pulse of the Christian life and that it can be learned.

Because the difficulty of prayer has not changed, and these writers faced it honestly — dryness, distraction, delay, and the temptation to give up. Tested across generations, their counsel is practical rather than sentimental, and it consistently points past technique to the God who says, "Call unto me, and I will answer thee." They teach not a method to master but a relationship to keep.