Quotes about Prayer

The ninth verse is part of His discourse on prayer: "So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

Prayer is therefore not an option for mankind but a necessity. If we don't pray, heaven cannot interfere in earth's affairs. It is imperative that we take responsibility for the earth and determine what happens here by our prayer lives.

Yet James said that if we doubt, we are being double-minded. That means that we don't have integrity—we're not holy. Since God is holy, we also have to be holy if we want to receive answers to our prayers.

Purpose is the raw material for your prayer life.

Prayer should not be open-ended. It should be purpose-driven, motivated by a knowledge of God's ways and intentions.

When Jesus's followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn't tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts.

The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

After defending the value of prepared prayers, the author cautions against over-reliance on them. Just as David could not fight in the armor of King Saul, we are called to fight in the way God has equipped us uniquely.

When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of his own sense of vocation, his own understanding of his Father's purposes. If we are truly to enter into it and make it our own, it can only be if we first understand how he set about living the Kingdom himself.

In a sense, learning to follow Jesus is simply learning to pray the Lord's Prayer.

This prayer doesn't pretend that pain and hunger aren't real. Some religions say that; Jesus didn't. This prayer doesn't use the greatness and majesty of God to belittle the human plight. Some religions do that; Jesus didn't. This prayer starts by addressing God intimately and lovingly, as `Father' - and by bowing before his greatness and majesty. If you can hold those two together, you're already on the way to understanding what Christianity is all about.

The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive a car we did not construct entirely by ourselves.