Quotes About Prayer

The twentieth-century Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when asked why he meditated, replied, "Because I am a Christian.

But when we pray, genuinely pray, the real condition of our heart is revealed. This is as it should be. This is when God truly begins to work with us. The adventure is just beginning.

For now, do not worry about "proper" praying, just talk to God. Share your hurts, share your sorrows, share your joys—freely and openly. God listens in compassion and love, just like we do when our children come to us.

Darkness is a definite experience of prayer. It is to be expected, even embraced.

Prayer is a little like that. With simplicity of heart we allow ourselves to be gathered up into the arms of the Father and let him sing his love song over us.

Martin Luther declares that the life of the Christian should be one of daily repentance. Daily we confess, daily we repent, daily we "turn, turn, 'til we turn 'round right." The Prayer of Tears is the primary aid to our turning.

Dallas Willard writes, "If you want to experience the flow of love as never before, the next time you are in a competitive situation, pray that the others around you will be more outstanding, more praised, and more used of God than yourself. If Christians were universally to do this for each other, the earth would soon be filled with the knowledge of God's glory."4

PRAYER IS THE serious business of the Church, the first and best business it renders for the world.

Through prayer and study, worship and service, we regularly digest God's word into the core of our being, where it feeds and transforms us. Continue

Today, O Lord, I yield myself to you. May your will be my delight today. May your way have perfect sway in me. May your love be the pattern of my living. —Richard J. Foster, Prayers from the Heart12

The primary purpose of prayer is to bring us into such a life of communion with the Father that, by the power of the Spirit, we are increasingly conformed to the image of the Son.

Once we have made generous latitude for individual differences and schedules, we must firmly discipline ourselves to a regular pattern of prayer. We cannot assume that time will somehow magically appear. We will never have time for prayer—we must make time. On this score we have to be ruthless with our rationalizations. We must never, for instance, excuse our prayerlessness under the guise of "always living prayerfully.

we are not just saved by grace; we live by grace. And we pray by grace and fast by grace and study by grace and serve by grace and worship by grace.

To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.

Prayer is the human response to the perpetual outpouring of love by which God lays siege to every soul. When our reply to God is most direct of all, it is called adoration.

There are two sides to the Prayer of Adoration: thanksgiving and praise. The usual distinction between these two experiences is this: in thanksgiving we give glory to God for what he has done for us; in praise we give glory to God for who he is in himself.

But all authentic prayer is a scraping of the heart whereby the dregs of the soul are offered up to God. Nehemiah's

To be effective pray-ers, we need to be effective lovers.

As Foster writes, "We will never have pure enough motives, or be good enough, or know enough in order to pray rightly. We simply must set all these things aside and begin praying. In fact, it is in the very act of prayer itself—the intimate, ongoing interaction with God—that these matters are cared for in due time."1

Praying with frequency gives us the readiness to pray again as needed from moment to moment. The more we pray, the more we think to pray, and as we see the results of prayer—the responses of our Father to our requests—our confidence in God's power spills over into other areas of our life." —Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines4

Real prayer is life creating and life changing.

To believe that God can reach us and bless us in the ordinary junctures of daily life is the stuff of prayer.

John Wesley says, "God does nothing but in answer to prayer

It is that we should learn to pray even while we are dwelling on evil. Perhaps we are waging an interior battle over anger, or lust, or pride, or greed, or ambition. We need not isolate these things from prayer.