Quotes about Prayer

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.

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.

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.