The Christian's heart must be soaked in prayer before the true spiritual fruits begin to grow.
Prayer will become effective when we stop using it as a substitute for obedience.
You can delegate many things, but prayer is not one of them.
When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart.
It's not my business to try and make God think like me... but to try, in prayer and penitence, to think like God.
To pray without expectation is to misunderstand the whole concept of prayer and relationship with God.
Sometimes I go to God and say, "God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already. God’s already put me so far in debt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me.
Prayer is the most sacred occupation a person could engage in.
Whatever God can do faith can do, and whatever faith can do prayer can do when it is offered in faith. An invitation to prayer is, therefore, an invitation to omnipotence, for prayer engages the Omnipotent God and brings Him into our human affairs. Nothing is impossible to the man who prays in faith, just as nothing is impossible with God. This generation has yet to prove all that prayer can do for believing men and women.
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.
If Bible Christianity is to survive the present world upheaval, we shall need to have a fresh revelation of the greatness and the beauty of Jesus.... He alone can raise our cold hearts to rapture and restore again the art of true worship.
Prayer is never an acceptable substitute for obedience. The sovereign Lord accepts no offering from His creatures that is not accompanied by obedience. To pray for revival while ignoring or actually flouting the plain precept laid down in the Scriptures is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble.
Leadership requires vision, and whence will vision come except from hours spent in the presence of God in humble and fervent prayer?
The key to prayer is simply praying.
Yes, worship of the loving God is man's whole reason for existence.
Prayer is always in danger of degenerating into a glorified gold rush. How to get things from God occupies most [books].
Any sermon that is not birthed in prayer is not a message from God no matter how learned the preacher.
The most critical need of the church at this moment is men, bold men, free men. The church must seek, in prayer and much humility, the coming again of men made of the stuff of which prophets and martyrs are made.
[Prayer] takes no time, but it occupies all our time.
The church that is not jealously protected by mighty intercession and sacrificial labors will before long become the abode of every evil bird and the hiding place for unsuspected corruption. The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray.
When we become too glib in prayer we are most surely talking to ourselves.
Prayer for revival will prevail when it is accompanied by radical amendment of life; not before.
All things else being equal, our prayers are only as powerful as our lives. In the long pull we only pray as well as we live.
While we are looking at God we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance.
Let us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of repentance and the new birth have been wrought. He is now living according to the will of God as he understands it from the written Word. Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord's Supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole of life into a sacrament.
