Quotes About Prayer

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human.

In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego.

Talking to God, I felt, is always better than talking about God; those pious conversations—there's always a touch of self-approval about them. THERESE OF LISIEUX[1] I

The Scriptures, read and prayed, are our primary and normative access to God as He reveals Himself to us. The Scriptures are our listening post for learning the language of the soul, the ways God speaks to us; they also provide the vocabulary and grammar that are appropriate for us as we in our turn speak to God.

Abruptly Jesus broke into prayer: "Thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. You've concealed your ways from sophisticates and know-it-alls, but spelled them out clearly to ordinary people. Yes, Father, that's the way you like to work.

A place of worship is a place for listening—listening to God speak. But it is also a place for answering, responding to what is spoken. God's words initiate a conversation. We come together as a congregation in worship to speak "through prayer and praise" with the God who speaks with us.

Prayer is what develops in us after we step out of the center and begin responding to the center, to Jesus.

Neither prophets nor priests nor psalmists offer quick cures for the suffering: we don't find any of them telling us to take a vacation, use this drug, get a hobby. Nor do they ever engage in publicity cover-ups, the plastic-smile propaganda campaigns that hide trouble behind a billboard of positive thinking. None of that: the suffering is held up and proclaimed—and prayed.

I was neither capable nor competent to form Christ in another person, to shape a life of discipleship in man, woman or child. That is supernatural work, and I am not supernatural. Mine was the more modest work of Scripture and prayer—helping people listen to God speak to them from the Scriptures and then joining them in answering God as personally and honestly as we could in lives of prayer.

It is this fusion of God speaking to us (Scripture) and our speaking to him (prayer) that the Holy Spirit uses to form the life of Christ in us.

The fusion is accomplished by reading these Scriptures slowly, imaginatively, prayerfully and obediently. This is the way the Bible has been read by most Christians for most of the Christian centuries, but it is not commonly read that way today. The reading style employed more often than not

As aparências enganam: a oração nunca é a primeira palavra, mas sempre a segunda. Deus tem a primeira palavra. A oração é uma fala que responde; ela não é primariamente "petição", mas "resposta".

Prayer is speech at its most alive. The breath that is breathed into us by God we breathe back to God.

Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves.

Mercy, GOD, mercy!": the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ. In

The practice of prayer, if it is going to amount to anything more than wish lists and complaints, requires a recovery of personal, relational, revelational language in both our listening and our speaking.

In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego. Usually, for that to happen there must be a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day, a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self.

We must pray who we actually are, not who we think we should be.

The prayer of David traditionally assigned to this story is Psalm 57. While there are lines in that psalm that convey David's fugitive state at the time, its overwhelming impression is of energetic and ebullient praise of God. This means that while Saul was the occasion for David's being in the wilderness, Saul neither defined nor dominated the wilderness. The wilderness was full of God, not Saul.

Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.

Money and machines anesthetize neediness. They put us in charge, in control. As long as the money holds out and the machines are in good repair, we don't need to pray.

There is nothing quite as destructive to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the use of language that dismisses the way Jesus talks and prays and takes up instead the rhetoric of smiling salesmanship or vicious invective.

30.7-9] And then he prayed, "God, I'm asking for two things before I die; don't refuse me—Banish lies from my lips and liars from my presence. Give me enough food to live on, neither too much nor too little. If I'm too full, I might get independent, saying, 'God? Who needs him?' If I'm poor, I might steal and dishonor the name of my God.

Faith" is not a generalized abstraction but a way of life that is expressed in persistent prayer.