Quotes about Prayer

I loved to teach, I loved my students, but I wanted to find a community. I prayed: "Lord, show me where you want me to go. I will go wanted wherever you call me - but please be clear."

He [God] wants us to talk to him as to a friend or father - authentically, reverently, personally, earnestly.

When fathers come home after a tough day at work, they should come home to serve, like my father did, teaching lessons around the dinner table and leading the family in worship and prayer.

I'm not ready to walk on water, but I'm also not ready to let the televangelists and prosperity preachers hijack the supernatural stuff from the rest of us. Imagine what would happen if the prayer movement and social justice movement converged, and we had Christians who prayed like they depend on God and lived like God depended on them?

Lord, steady our feet when the world tries to rock and shake our faith. When materialism beckons with coy hands, steady our feet. When lust sashays within us, steady our feet. When fear tugs at our knees, steady our faith. Show us your goodness, and steady our hearts in you. Amen.

Augustine of Hippo: "In affliction, then, we do not know what it is right to pray for. Because affliction is difficult, troublesome and against the grain for us, weak as we are, we do what every human would do. We pray that it may be taken away from us. However, if he does not take it away, we must not imagine that he has forgotten us. In this way, power shines forth more perfectly in weakness.

Imagine what would happen if the prayer movement and social justice movement converged, and we had Christians who prayed like they depend on God and lived like God depended on them? Hallelujah.

May the Lord bless us and keep us from all harm, and may God lead us to eternal life. Amen.

Prayer is less about trying to get God to do something we want God to do and more about getting ourselves to do what God wants us to do and to become who God wants us to become.

God's deepest longing is for the church to be united as one body. In Jesus' longest recorded prayer, he prayed that we would be "one as God is one." As one old preacher said, "We gotta get it together, because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming for a bride, not a harem.

Andre Trocmé, who pastored the remarkable Le Chambon community during World War II, said, "Nonviolence was not a theory superimposed upon reality; it was an itinerary that we explored day after day in communal prayer and in obedience to the commands of the Spirit.

I spent most of my time talking to God more than to people.