Faith & Spirit Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Prayer, for E. Stanley Jones, isn’t a soothing spiritual side-channel; it’s a full-body enlistment. He refuses the common bargain-version of faith: I’ll consult God on the parts of life that feel safely “religious,” while keeping the rest under private management. That “certain things held back within” is the tell. Jones is naming the inner hoard we protect with respectable excuses - ambition, resentment, money, sex, status, control - the areas we’d prefer God treat as a sealed room.

The rhetoric works because it shifts prayer from mood to contract. “Co-operate” sounds modest, even practical: two parties working together. Jones then tightens the screw by insisting the only real cooperation is total-person cooperation, which means there’s no neutral ground. You’re either collaborating with God as an integrated self, or you’re not collaborating at all. The final move - “co-operation equals commitment” - is deliberately blunt, almost algebraic. It strips away romantic spirituality and leaves a hard spiritual metric: prayer isn’t what you feel, it’s what you yield.

Context matters here. Jones, a Methodist missionary and evangelist shaped by early 20th-century revivalism and cross-cultural work in India, preached a Christianity meant to be livable, public, and ethically coherent. In a world of compartmentalized modern selves, his line reads like an intervention: if prayer doesn’t reorder your whole life, it’s functioning as a spiritual accessory, not a relationship.