Quotes about Prayer

In other words, once the Spirit causes a person to begin to cry, "Abba! Father!" he continues creating Godward looks and pleas in that person forever.

To quote Charles Spurgeon, I trust there are none here present, who profess to be followers of Christ who do not also practice prayer in their families. We may have no positive commandment for it, but we believe that it is so much in accord with the genius and spirit of the gospel, and that it is so commended by the example of the saints, that the neglect thereof is a strange inconsistency.

They are direct commands. This means too little time, too many responsibilities, too many kids, too much work, too little desire, too little experience, and so on are not excuses that exempt us from the expectation to pray.

The reason we come away so cold from reading the word is because we do not warm ourselves at the fire of meditation.

I maintain that people—truly born-again, genuinely Christian people—often do not pray simply because they do not feel like it. And the reason they don't feel like praying is that when they do pray, they tend to say the same old things about the same old things.

So basically what you are doing is taking words that originated in the heart and mind of God and circulating them through your heart and mind back to God. By this means his words become the wings of your prayers.

Martin Luther expressed God's expectation of prayer this way: "As it is the business of tailors to make clothes and of cobblers to mend shoes, so it is the business of Christians to pray."

To pray the Bible, you simply go through the passage line by line, talking to God about whatever comes to mind as you read the text.

Many of the great movements of God can be traced to a small group of people He called together to begin praying.

When there is little awareness of real need, there is little real prayer.

Maybe I was praying for him then, in my own way. Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?

We must practice the presence of God. He said that when two or three are gathered together, there he is in the midst of them. He is with us in our kitchens, at our tables, on our breadlines, with our visitors, on our farms. When we pray for our material needs, it brings us close to his humanity. He, too, needed food and shelter; he, too, warmed his hands at a fire and lay down in a boat to sleep.