Best 6082 quotes in «prayer quotes» category

We cannot judge our prayer...by how we feel when we pray, but rather by how we are loving when we live.

We cannot simply pray and then wait for God to do the rest.

We cannot save ourselves. Only God has the power to save us.

We cannot live a life of prayer, we cannot go ahead Godwards, unless we are free form possession in order to have two hands to offer and a heart absolutely open - not like a purse which we are afraid of keeping open because our money will drop out of it, but like an open and empty purse - and an intelligence completely open to the unknown and the unexpected. This is the way in which we are rich and yet totally free from richness. And this is the point at which we can speak of being outside the Kingdom and yet be so rich inside and yet also so free.

We can prevail with prayer.

We can't tell you the origin of the experience. But we can tell you the brain does appear to be built to have these [mystical] experiences. There are examples of people reaching similar states, spontaneously. But for the most part, it takes work. Meditation and these powerful prayer experiences require dedication and practice. But people have figured out how to do this, and the question is, 'What is the source of that experience?' The answer is, 'We don't know.' Science doesn't really have an answer for you.

We could all use the power of prayer now and then, but it seems to me that the people who are sure they have a direct line to heaven are most often calling collect with bad news.

We do not forget to eat: we do not forget to take the shop shutters down: we do not forget to be diligent in business: we do not forget to go to our beds to rest: but we often do forget to wrestle with God in prayer, and to spend, as we ought to spend, long periods in consecrated fellowship with our Father and our God.

We do not pray to inform God of our needs, because He knows what we need before we ask. What is prayer like for you? Is it a religious ritual that you perform out of habit? Is it a spiritual discipline that you practice because you want to be the best Christian you possibly can be? Is it a mechanism by which you can bring your “shopping list” to God in order to have your needs met? Or are you running to meet your Lover, to commune with Him, hungering to find your joy in Him, and to be fulfilled in His presence?

We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves.

We do not pray to tell God what he does not know, nor to remind him of things he has forgotten. He already cares for the things we pray about... He has simply been waiting for us to care about them with him.

We do not want to be beginners (at prayer), but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners all of our lives. --Thomas Merton

We do not see God in contemplation - we know Him by love: for his pure love and when we taste the experience of loving God for his own sake alone, we know by experience who and what he is.

We don't proclaim material gain through prayer, but we proclaim divine wisdom that enables us to acquire our needs.

We don’t find God in temples and cathedrals. We don’t find Him by standing on a prayer rug or sitting in a pew. God appears when we love someone other than ourselves. And we continue to feel His presence when we do good for others. Because God is not found in mosques and synagogues. He resides in our hearts.

We don’t read the Bible, the Bible reads us.

We do well to be reminded that the devil hates a praying leader and a praying church. When we begin to pray, we pick a fight with the devil at a whole new level. Yet, our calling is to be praying menaces to the enemy.

We experience a new life with divine encounter.

We fail to prevail with unconverted men because of our more fundamental failure to prevail with God in prayer.

We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep"; beseeching Him of His mercy, that as in the beginning He discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so He would now discover land to us, that we might not perish.

We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep".

We formed an impromptu circle just so we could look at each other and memorize faces. We hardly noticed the waiting officials. We hardly noticed anything but our little family whose ties weren’t loosening at all. In fact, this impending separation only seemed to be binding us together with a double overhand knot, hard to untie and unfailing.

We give to God of our strength, not our weakness. But we also say: “Da lifneh mi ata omed”—Know before whom you stand. We know what we are in the face of that. We see the full picture—God and ourselves. We cannot see ourselves as more than we are because we see how much greater is the reality. But we must not lessen our value in our own eyes either, because we are a necessary part of this reality. It is no small thing that we are able to “stand” and to address that reality. It would be good if we could approach life the way we approach prayer, knowing before whom we stand.

We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch "Christian" cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right "worldview" talking points. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of "groanings too deep for words" (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are.

We have joy for the assurance of the promise.

We have confident; God gives only what pleases Him.

We have not yet learned that we are more powerful on our knees than behind the most powerful weapons that can be developed.

We have the keys to open the Heavens door; Bible reading and prayer.

We have to bring in captivity every high thing in people’s mind.

We have to believe that our prayers, if pure and powerful can transform any catastrophic situation, regardless of its magnitude.

We held on to great memories. This sustains us in every moment.

we know little of the things for which we pray

We must approach our meditation realizing that 'grace,' 'mercy,' and 'faith' are not permanent inalienable possessions which we gain by our efforts and retain as though by right, provided that we behave ourselves. They are CONSTANTLY RENEWED GIFTS. The life of grace in our hearts is renewed from moment to moment, directly and personally by God in his love for us.

We must give each other the chance to change.

We must lift our hands to God in prayer, crying out to Him to help us fulfill what He has called us for, to fulfill His will

We ought to test for the living water.

We need to come to God humbly. We are not his master he is our master.

We must repent of our prayerlessness. We must make prayer our priority. Even our churches today have gotten away from prayer meetings.

We often conceive of worldly life as merely a kind of default existence that anyone who is not specially called to monasticism or ordination sipmly ends up leading. We assume that it is only the monk, nun or priest who has a special call, while the married woman, for instance, has merely been passed by. [...] But we must not allow ourselves to approach it merely in these terms. Instead, every one of us should, indeed must, treat lay life as a calling just the way we think of monasticism and ordination. We must sit down with ourselves and with God in prayer to discern if life in the world really is what we are meant for, and if we discover that it is, we must reat this call with the same seriousness with which we would treat a call to a hermit's life in the desert. We are not lay people simply because we happen not to be monks or priests. We are lay people because God wills that we lead a life weeking our salvation through the world.

We ought to be silent and listen to the voice of God.

We prayed until our faith passed into an exhaustion that numbed us to sleep.

We’re the beneficiaries of prayers we know nothing about. God was working long before we arrived on the scene and He’s using us to set up the next generation. We tend to think right here, right now. God is thinking nations and generations. We have no idea how our lives are going to alter the course of history downstream, but there is a divine domino effect for every decision we make. Don’t underestimate the potential impact of obeying God’s prompts. Those are the whispers that will echo for all eternity!

We religious types, even those who detest organized religion, pray for deeper faith and a greater sense of oneness with God.

We remain free, however, to listen to God's communication or not to listen, and free to respond or not to respond to what we hear. When we speak of contemplative prayer, we are speaking at the same time of awareness of this communication by God and of a willingness to listen and respond. Conscious relationship begins when I choose to listen to or to look at what the other is doing. After I have made this choice, I then freely decide whether to respond or not. Thus, by contemplative prayer we mean the conscious willingness and desire to look at and listen to God as God wishes to be for me and to respond. I may accept or reject God's initiative. in either case I have responded. When this process occurs, the person has the 'foodstuff' for beginning spiritual direction." (p. 34

We receive the authority when we are born again. As we are made new creatures in Christ Jesus, we inherit the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we can use it in prayer against the enemy.

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle… What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.

We sometimes feel sorry for someone because of a situation or an event for which they have prayed.

We should pray in the name of Jesus because He is the way. Jesus told him, 'I am the way, the truth, and life. No one comes to father except through me'(John14:6, NLT).

We think we know what we want, but we can never really know until we've got it. And sometimes when we have, we discover we never really wanted it in the first place - but then it's too late.

We shouldn't live in a world where we live in constant terror. We need less dying and more living. We need less destroying and more building. We need less hate and more love.