PRAYER-PERSPECTIVES
I hear men praying everywhere for more faith, but when I
listen to them carefully, and get to the real heart of their prayer, very often
it is not more faith at all that they are wanting, but a change from faith to
sight. Faith says not, “I see that it is good for me, so God must have sent
it,” but, “God sent it, and so it must be good for me.” Faith, walking in the
dark with God, only prays Him to clasp its hand more closely.
Phillips Brooks
When God is about to bestow some great blessing on His
church, it is often His manner, in the first place, so to order things in His
providence as to show His church their great need of it, and to bring them into
distress for want of it, and so put them upon crying earnestly to Him for it.
Jonathan Edwards
Those
who know God the best are the richest and most powerful in prayer. Little
acquaintance with God, and strangeness and coldness to Him, make prayer a rare
and feeble thing.
E.M. Bounds
He that hears
without ears understands us without our words. Yet as language is of absolute
necessity in social prayer, that others may join with us in our addresses to
God, so for the most part we find it necessary in secret, too, for there are
few persons of so steady and fixed a power of meditation as to maintain warm
devotion and to converse with God, or with themselves profitably, without
words.
Isaac
Watts
A Guide to Prayer, p. 69.
When you
pray, remember whose attention you wish to gain.
Robert Reymond
Quoted in: G. Chewter,
The Church Prayer Meeting, Its decline and Revival.
Prayer must
not be approached only as a means for the gain of something else. Prayer is in
itself good and at the heart of our worship of the Triune God.
Thomas Nettles
Concerts of Prayer, Revival Commentary, v. 2,
n. 1, p. 11.
Prayer is the
way and means God has appointed for the communication of the blessings of His
goodness to His people.
A.W. Pink
Nothing is
too great and nothing is too small to commit into the hands of the Lord.
A.W. Pink
Recently I
read again of a woman who simply decided one day to make such a commitment to
pray, and my conscience was pricked. But
I knew myself well enough to know that something other than resolve was being
called for. I began to pray about
praying. I expressed to God my
frustrated longings, my jaded sense of caution about trying again, my sense of
failure over working at being more disciplined and regular. I discovered something surprising happening
from such simple praying: I was drawn
into the presence of One who had, far more than I did,
the power to keep me close. I found my
focus subtly shifting away from my efforts to God’s, from rigor to grace, from
rigidity to relationship. I soon
realized that this was happening regularly.
I was praying much more. I
became less worried about the mechanics and methods, and in turn I was more
motivated. And God so cares for us, I
realized anew, that He Himself helps us pray.
When we “do not know what we ought to pray for… the Spirit Himself
intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Rom. 8:26).
Timothy K. Jones
What Can I Say? Christianity Today, Nov. 5,
1990, p. 28.
Never
say you will pray about a thing; pray about it.
Oswald Chambers
Prayer
is the vital breath of the Christian; not the thing that makes him alive, but
the evidence that he is alive.
Oswald Chambers
It was a
great breakthrough to realize that God was not necessarily leading me to pray
for everything with equal intensity. To try to do so will kill a prayer life.
To learn to let God set the agenda of our prayer life will resurrect it.
Bill Thrasher
A Journey to Victorious Praying, Moody Publishers, 2003, p. 54.
Praying is
the same to the new creature as crying is to the natural. The child is not
learned by art or example to cry, but instructed by nature; it comes into the
world crying. Praying is not a lesson got by forms and rules of art, but
flowing from principles of new life itself.
William Gurnall
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 210.
Though an
unbeliever sin in praying, yet it is not a sin for him to pray. There is sin in
the manner of his praying; but prayer, as to the act and substance of it, is
his duty. He sins, not because he prays, that is required of him, but because
he prays amiss, not in that manner that is required of him. There are
abominations in the prayers of a wicked man, but for him to pray is not an abomination, it is the good and acceptable will of
God, that which He commands.
David Clarkson
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 217.
There are
three degrees in prayer. The lowest is that spoken only by the lips. The next
is when, by a resolute effort, we succeed in fixing our thoughts on Divine
things. The third is when the soul finds it hard to turn away from God.
Author
Unknown
The Kneeling Christian, circa 1930, ch. 5.
It may be
just letting your request be made known unto God (Phil. 4:6). We cannot think
that prayer need always be a conflict and a wrestle. For if it were, many of us would soon become physical wrecks,
suffering from nervous breakdown, and coming to an early grave.
Author
Unknown
The Kneeling Christian, circa 1930, ch. 7.
Do
not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers.
Pray for powers equal to your tasks.
Phillips Brooks
Every true prayer has its background and its foreground.
The foreground of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain
blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the
background of prayer is the quiet, earnest desire that the will of God,
whatever it may be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of
Jesus in Gethsemane! In front burns the strong desire to escape death and to
live; but behind there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the whole life
for the doing of the will of God... Leave out the foreground, let there be no
expression of the will of him who prays, and there is left a pure submission
which is almost fatalism. Leave out the background, let there be no acceptance
of the will of God, and the prayer is only an expression of self-will, a
petulant claiming of the uncorrected choice of him who prays. Only when the two
are there together, the special desire resting on the universal submission, the
universal submission opening into the special desire is the picture perfect and
the prayer complete.
Phillips Brooks
Whatsoever we beg of God, let us also work
for it.
Jeremy Taylor
It grieves me
that so many believers view the doctrine of God's sovereignty as a deterrent to
a healthy, vibrant prayer life. That
kind of thinking demonstrates an inadequate, incomplete and unacceptable
understanding, both of God's sovereignty and of prayer. In truth, we pray because God is sovereign –
He alone has power over all human events.
In praying, we don't run from His sovereignty, we run to it. It's absolutely true that God is sovereign
over every detail of our lives. Job
acknowledged that even the number of every person's days is determined (Job
14:5). Life and death are in His hands
(Jas. 4:15). Yet we eat and breathe and
sleep and take measures to avoid any kind of calamity that might end our lives
prematurely. Why? That's the very same question as, "Why
pray if God is sovereign?" Here's
the answer to why we need to breathe, and why we need to pray: God ordains the
means as well as the end. And our
prayers are one of the important means by which He accomplishes His will and
glorifies Himself in the process.
John MacArthur
Grace to You, Newsletter, April 17, 2007.
The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does
regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many
who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically
impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.
Every saint
is God's temple, and he who carries His temple about him, may go to prayer when
he pleaseth.
Augustine
The eminence
of great leaders of the Bible is attributed to their greatness in prayer.
Ted W. Engstrom
The Making of a Christian Leader, Zondervan,
1976, p. 118. www.zondervan.com.
It is impossible
to pray for someone without loving him, and impossible to go on praying for him
without discovering that our love for him grows and matures.
John Stott
The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, IVP, 1978, p.
119.
All of us
would be wiser if we would resolve never to put people down, except on our
prayer lists.
D.A.
Carson
A Call to Spiritual Reformation, Baker, 1992,
p. 29.
When a man
is speaking to God he is at his very acme. It is the highest activity of the
human soul, and therefore it is at the same time the ultimate test of a man’s
true spiritual condition. There is nothing that tells the truth about us as
Christian people so much as our prayer life. Everything we do in the Christian
life is easier than prayer.
D.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, Eerdmans,
1971, v. 2, p. 46.
You can do
more than pray, after you have prayed, but you can never do more than pray
until you have prayed.
A.J.
Gordon
Prayer,
genuine and victorious, is continually offered without the least physical
effort or disturbance. It is often in the deepest stillness of soul and body
that it wins its longest way. But there is another side of the matter. Prayer
is never meant to be indolently easy, however simple and reliant it may be. It
is meant to be an infinitely important transaction between man and God. And
therefore, very often…it has to be viewed as a work involving labor,
persistence, conflict, if it would be prayer indeed.
C.F.D.
Moule
There is a
general kind of praying which fails for lack of precision. It is as if a
regiment of soldiers should all fire off their guns anywhere. Possibly somebody
would be killed, but the majority of the enemy would be missed.
C.H. Spurgeon
No man can do
me a truer kindness in this world than to pray for me.
C.H. Spurgeon
Spurgeon at His Best, Baker, 1991, p. 143.