Often in discussions of prayer we confuse it with other valid aspects of any life in which prayer is functioning as it ought. And that is not helpful. In fact, it can result in prayer’s being replaced and omitted. We may confuse prayer with special states or...
There is nothing that makes us love a person so much as praying for him or her… By considering yourself an advocate with God for your neighbors and friends, you would never find it hard to be at peace with them.
God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one. But we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things. For in prayer...
A woman in my church, Rachel, lost her twenty-three-year-old daughter in a tragic accident; she lost her legs and then took several weeks to die. Rachel said, “I can’t pray. People think I’m terrible because I can’t pray.” Lay off her! I thought of those who would...
Miss Watson, she took me in the closet and prayed but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it wasn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fishline, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the...
Surrender—putting one’s life at God’s disposal—is the most truly Christian prayer. It is the prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane—”Not my will, but thine.” It is the heart of the prayer Jesus taught the apostles—”Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth...
Jesus never mentioned unanswered prayer. He had the unlimited certainty of knowing that prayer is always answered. Do we have through the Spirit of God that inexpressible certainty that Jesus had about prayer, or do we think of the times when it seemed that God did...
Prayer is…a very dangerous business. For all the benefits it offers of growing closer to God, it carries with it one great element of risk: the possibility of change. In prayer we open ourselves to the chance that God will do something with us that we had not...
Whenever you see someone who has to be right, you are looking at someone who is spending more time reading about God than praying to him. They have assumed that we are in a relationship with propositions instead of a Person. When we go before the God of the universe,...
Healing prayer is part of the normal Christian life. It should not be elevated above any other ministry in the community of faith, nor should it be undervalued; rather it should be kept in proper balance. It is simply a normal aspect of what it means to live under the...