Quotes on Prayer

Our church family will be devoting 24 hours of prayer this September 21-22.

I personally have experienced most or all levels of desire to pray.

I have wondered if my prayers were heard, I have doubted that prayers were useful, I have prayed because I thought it was the right thing to do, I have yearned for a heart that longed to pray, I have had my interest spurred by people who can not survive without prayer, I have asked God to give me the desire to pray, I kept on asking God, and kept on asking, I opened up space in my day for prayer, I made prayer time a priority, I realized that if I didn't pray that I was allowing satan to be the voice I listened to.

Too busy, too tired, too disenchanted, too doubtful...those words are not from the Holy Spirit.

They are ploys to keep me from connecting to God in a place that speaks to the most inner part of me.

If I am not dedicated to prayer I will truly be operating on my own power and strength. I will have closed the channel that God gives me to truly know Him, and if I don't know God, I don't trust God, if I don't trust God then pass me the apple off the tree because I will think He doesn't have my best interests at heart, and will take my life into my own hands.

 God has heard my plea, He has taken my hard heart, and softened it to a place that if I don't make time to pray I am parched. It is the time for my soul to rest with God. There is no right or wrong way to pray, but this is where my journey has me right now. I pray some scriptures, I lift the names of my husband and children, I pray for people whose souls are desperate for Him, and for those who don't know they are desperate for Him, I pray for marriages, I pray for physical help for the sick, and then I rest in a place of stillness with God for however long I can. Some days it is 5 minutes, some it is 35 minutes. When I pray for others I take the time to see their faces in my mind, I lift them to God in my mind. There is something beautiful about this process of pause as I ponder the faces of those I love with God's love. They set more firmly in my heart when I see their eyes, their smiles or their tears. It is a beautiful time of praying for others, it blesses my heart.

As I wrote above, it was through reading that I witnessed the hearts of men and women whose hearts were sold out to praying with God. It was through their words that I read if they had a busy day ahead then it was even more necessary to pray. I read through their words that in prayer came a connection to God that I desperately wanted. It was through their words that I saw that prayer does change things, most of all it changes the one who is praying. I can say that prayer has given me peace in desperate circumstances, it has given me love for those that have broken my heart, it has given me a passion to speak words that bring life and love, all this is from the Father. The only thing I have done is to pursue God (which is actually just a response to God's voice drawing me to Him) and beg Him, plead in the way that Jacob pled when he would not let go of God unless he was blessed. God does it all, if we will just ask with our heart and not let go.

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Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting some quotes that I love on prayer from different authors. Some are quotes that drew me in to a yearning for prayer years ago, some are new quotes that I love, too. This list will keep growing, but I wanted to have a place where I could go back and find all the quotes I posted in one place. So starting us off:

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"This evening we had a precious prayer meeting. When the usual time for closing the meeting came, some of us wanted to continue to wait upon the Lord. I suggested that those who had bodily strength, time, and a desire to wait longer upon the Lord, do so. At least thirty remained, and we continued in prayer until after ten. I never knew deeper prayer in the Spirit. I experienced an unusual nearness to the Lord and was able to pray in faith, without doubting."  

January 3, 1842, George Muller from the Autobiography of George Muller. This book is a very special book to me, for the first time (outside the Bible) I had read about someone who through his journey learned to completely rely upon God through prayer for provision for himself and the orphans he was responsible for.

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"I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is the friend of silence - we need to listen to God because it's not what we say but what He says to us and through us that matters. Prayer feeds the soul-as blood is to the body, prayer is to the soul-it brings you closer to God. It also gives you a clean and pure heart. A clean heart can see God, can speak to God, and can see the love of God in others. When you have a clean heart it means you are open and honest with God, you are not hiding anything from Him, and this lets Him take what He wants from you."
Mother Teresa, A Simple Path
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"In the cell of silence and solitude, this is the essential kernel of truth that is heard: when all is said and done, it is good to be near God. by removing the noise and external clutter for periodic entry into the "sanctuary," into the very conscious presence of God, we make ourselves available to gain a completely different perspective, a life-giving rule that equips us to live in an obsessive, materialistic world." 

From the book, Thin Places by Tracy Balzer