Quotes from Pete Greig

Everyone prays,' he pointed out. 'Even non-Christians pray. The difference when Christians do it is that they are climbing into the lap of their heavenly Father.

A prayer room is first and foremost a living room—a place where the Father waits for his children to come and climb into his arms.

The best bit of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up.

Life sometimes hurts like hell but I've discovered that deleting God from the equation doesn't actually help. It merely removes all meaning and morality from the mess, and all real hope from the future

The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own personal agenda. To stop talking at God long enough to focus on the wonder of who he actually is. To 'be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him'.

A Christian who prays only when they feel like it may survive but they will never thrive. Their vast, innate potential will be stunted because grace needs a little space to take root between the cracks of a person's life.

We are qualified for Christian service by our praying not our preaching, by our desire to worship him and not our workload on his behalf, by knowing Jesus personally and not just by knowing a lot of interesting things about him. If you lose God's presence you lose everything, but if you know his presence you already have everything you will ever need.

It's more important to know whom you are called to be with than what you are called to do.

Greatest theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, said that 'to clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world'.

So I'm waiting for God, and God is waiting for me to see if I am really waiting for him, and not just wanting things from him.

Archbishop Justin Welby says, the Lord's Prayer is 'simple enough to be memorised by small children, and yet profound enough to sustain a whole lifetime of prayer'.

As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton says: 'God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.