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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