On Prayer...

“Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.”--Corrie Ten Boom

"Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?"-- Corrie Ten Boom

"When a Christian shuns fellowship with other Christians, the devil smiles. When he stops studying the Bible, the devil laughs. When he stops praying, the devil shouts for joy." --Corrie Ten Boom

"When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't pray, they don't." --William Temple

"Do you know what prayer is? It is not begging God for this and that. The first thing we have to do is to get you beggars to quit begging until a little faith moves in your souls." --John G. Lake

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers, pray for powers equal to your task." --Phillips Brooks

"If God will do whatever He wishes, regardless of whether we pray or not, then we do not need to pray at all, and the Lord's instructions on praying for the Kingdom and the Will are superfluous. But the truth is that God waits for a Remnant to rise up and to pray in agreement with His Purpose before He does anything - He will do nothing apart from the Church. Apart from HIM, we CAN do nothing; apart from US, He WILL do nothing ."–Chip Brogden

"We lean to our own understanding, or we bank on service and do away with prayer, and consequently by succeeding in the external we fail in the eternal, because in the eternal we succeed only by prevailing prayer." --Oswald Chambers

"Let the fires go out in the boiler room of the church and the place will still look smart and clean, but it will be cold. The Prayer Room is the boiler room for its spiritual life." --Leonard Ravenhill

"The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men…Men of prayer." --E. M. Bounds

"I must secure more time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The shortening of devotions starves the soul, it grows lean and faint. I have been keeping too late hours." --William Wilberforce

"Why is it so important that you are with God and God alone on the mountain top? It's important because it's the place in which you can listen to the voice of the One who calls you the beloved. To pray is to listen to the One who calls you "my beloved daughter," "my beloved son," "my beloved child." To pray is to let that voice speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice resound in your whole being." --Henri Nouwen

"Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one's heart, its pleasures and its pains, to a dear friend. Tell God your troubles, that God may comfort you; tell God your joys, that God may sober them; tell God your longings, that God may purify them; tell God your dislikes, that God may help you conquer them; talk to God of your temptations, that God may shield you from them: show God the wounds of your heart, that God may heal them. If you thus pour out all your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say. Talk out of the abundance of the heart, without consideration say just what you think. Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved with God." --Francois Fenelon

"Men may spurn our appeals, reject our message, oppose our arguments, despise our persons; but they are helpless against our prayers." --J. Sidlow Baxter

"God never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may intercede." -- Oswald Chambers

"There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him." --William Law

"God does not stand afar off as I struggle to speak. He cares enough to listen with more than casual attention. He translates my scrubby words and hears what is truly inside. He hears my sighs and uncertain gropings as fine prose." --Timothy Jones

"In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart." -- John Bunyan

"There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God." --Brother Lawrence

"Prayer does not fit us for the greater work, prayer is the greater work." --Oswald Chambers