Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Oswald Chambers Quotes on Prayer Part 4



Prayer is the evidence that I am spiritually concentrated on God.

Prayer is the exercise of drawing on the grace of God. Prayer is the vital breath of the Christian; not the thing that makes him alive, but the evidence that he is alive.

Prayer means that I come in contact with an almighty Christ, and almighty results happen along the lines He laid down.

See that you do not use the trick of prayer to cover up what you know you ought to do.

The greatest answer to prayer is that I am brought into a perfect understanding with God, and that alters my view of actual things.

The prayer of the feeblest saint who lives in the Spirit and keeps right with God is a terror to Satan. The very powers of darkness are paralyzed by prayer; no spiritualistic séance can succeed in the presence of a humble praying saint. No wonder Satan tries to keep our minds fussy in active work till we cannot think in prayer.

The prayer of the saints is never self-important, but always God-important.
The purpose of prayer is the maintenance of fitness in an ideal relationship with God amid conditions which ought not to be merely ideal but really actual. …by prayer we lay hold on God and He unites us into His consciousness.

The purpose of prayer is to reveal the presence of God equally present, all the time, in every condition.

The revelation of our spiritual standing is what we ask in prayer; sometimes what we ask is an insult to God; we ask with our eyes on the possibilities or on ourselves, not on Jesus Christ.

The tendency nowadays is to worship prayer, stress is put on nights of prayer and the difficulty and cost of prayer. It is not prayer that is strenuous, but the overcoming of our own laziness.

 If we make the basis of prayer our effort and agony and nights of prayer, we mistake the basis of prayer. The basis of prayer is not what it costs us, but what it costs God to enable us to pray.

The whole meaning of prayer is that we may know God.

There is nothing to be valued more highly than to have people praying for us; God links up his power in answer to their prayers.

To pray strenuously needs careful cultivation. We have to learn the most natural methods of expressing ourselves to our Father.

We do not pray at all until we are at our wits’ end.

We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties. 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.

We think of prayer as a preparation for work, or a calm after having done work, whereas prayer is the essential work. It is the supreme activity of everything that is noblest in our personality.

When we learn to pray in the Holy Ghost, we find there are some things for which we cannot pray, there is a sense of restraint. Never push and say, I know it is God’s will and I am going to stick to it. Beware, remember what is recorded of the children of Israel: He gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul.


When we pray for others the Spirit of God works in the unconscious domain of their being that we know nothing about, and the one we are praying for knows nothing about, but after the passing of time the conscious life of the one prayed for begins to show signs of unrest and disquiet. We may have spoken until we are worn out, but have never come anywhere near, and we have given up in despair. But if we have been praying, we find on meeting them one day that there is the beginning of a softening in an inquiry and a desire to know something. It is that kind of intercession that does most damage to Satan’s kingdom. It is so slight, so feeble in its initial stages that if reason is not wedded to the light of the Holy Spirit, we will never obey it, and yet it is that kind of intercession that the New Testament places most emphasis on.


If you desire to "experience" a time of prayer - join us this evening at North Raleigh Church of the Nazarene at 6:30! 

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