Quotes about Prayer

Thank you, God, for this new day. Thank you for this new beginning.

Kneel for five or ten minutes and welcome the presence of Jesus. You may not think it will make any difference to kneel when you pray, but try it anyway. Then consider the difference it may have made. As you pray, give the day up to God, renewing your invitation to him to be with you each moment.

That is not the way of God. It is asking, it is seeking, it is knocking.

Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks. Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God's sake which we commonly do for our own…. It is a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times. We are as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in the season of prayer.

When the prophet Samuel was a young boy, Eli the priest gave him unerring advice on listening for the voice of God. It is a simple but profound prayer: "Speak, LORD, for Your servant hears" (1 Sam. 3:9). When we get up out of bed in the morning, among our first thoughts should be this: Lord, speak to me. I'm listening. I want to hear your voice.

Prayer, it is rightly said, is the method of genuine theological research, the method of understanding what and who God is.

Train yourself to use each change of person or event to remind you to pray and to bless, so that mere change becomes a signal to turn your mind back to God.

Giving is not the same as imposition. That is why God does not just give us what we need without being asked. Prayer is nothing but a proper way for persons to interact.

So prayer is a total activity, incorporating many elements essential to a personal relationship between two persons—persons different from and related to one another as the Father is to his children on earth. But still the heart of prayer is the request.

What has to be done, instead of trying to drive people to do what we think they are supposed to, is to be honest about what we and others really believe. Then, by inquiry, teaching, example, prayer, and reliance upon the spirit of God, we can work to change the beliefs that are contrary to the way of Jesus. We can open the way for others, Christians or not, to heartily choose apprenticeship in the kingdom of God.

Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. It combines freedom and power with service and love.

Reign is no doubt wording that is a little too grand for the contemporary mind, though what it refers to is what everyone actually pursues in life. We have been trained to think of "reigning" as exclusionary of others. But in the heart of the divine conspiracy, it just means to be free and powerful in the creation and governance of what is good. In the life of prayer we are training for, we reign in harmonious union with the infinite power of God.