THEOLOGY & PRAYER

'If you are a theologian, you will truly pray; and if you pray truly, you will be a theologian.'

Evagrius in Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.39,

DON'T BE A FISH OUT OF WATER

'As a fish lives in the water as in its element, and dies when it is out, so a Christian lives in prayer as in his element, and his heart dies when he is out of it.'

William Bridge in Matthew Bingham, A Heart Aflame for God, p.167.

HOPELESS? HOPEFUL PRAYER

His prayers lean upward
on the dark and fall
like flares from a catastrophe.
He is a man breathing the fear
of hopeless prayer, prayed
in hope.

Wendell Berry, from '1994 VI' in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.181. 

GOD'S POWER MADE PERFECT IN WEAKNESS

'Where on earth does the glory of God dwell in power? It is in people that are needy and at their end - people that have given up on believing that they can be the hero of their story or that their dreams of a designer life will deliver. So God abides - his power to strengthen sits over, rests upon, and meets with people in the lowly place of acknowledged weakness and need.'

Ste Casey, I prayed and nothing changed: What God is up to in the silence, p.114.

HONESTY ABOUT PRAYER

'I sometimes think that the prayers of believers afford a stronger proof of a depraved nature, than even the profaneness of those who know not the Lord. How strange is it, that when I have the fullest convictions that prayer is not only my duty—not only necessary as the appointed means of receiving those supplies, without which I can do nothing, but likewise the greatest honour and privilege to which I can be admitted in the present life—I should still find myself so unwilling to engage in it.

However, I think it is not prayer itself that I am weary of, but such prayers as mine. How can it be accounted prayer, when the heart is so little affected,—when it is polluted with such a mixture of vile and vain imaginations—when I hardly know what I say myself—but I feel my mind collected one minute, the next, my thoughts are gone to the ends of the earth.

If what I express with my lips were written down, and the thoughts which at the same time are passing through my heart were likewise written between the lines, the whole taken together would be such an absurd and incoherent jumble—such a medley of inconsistency, that it might pass for the ravings of a lunatic. When he points out to me the wildness of this jargon, and asks, is this a prayer fit to be presented to the holy heart-searching God? I am at a loss what to answer, till it is given me to recollect that I am not under the law, but under grace—that my hope is to be placed, not in my own prayers, but in the righteousness and intercession of Jesus. The poorer and viler I am in myself, so much the more is the power and riches of His grace magnified in my behalf.

Therefore I must, and, the Lord being my helper, I will pray on, and admire his condescension and love, that He can and does take notice of such a creature—for the event shows, that those prayers which are even displeasing to myself, partial as I am in my own case, are acceptable to him, how else should they be answered? And that I am still permitted to come to a throne of grace—still supported in my walk and in my work, and that mine enemies have not yet prevailed against me, and triumphed over me, affords a full proof that the Lord has heard and has accepted my poor prayers–yea, it is possible, that those very prayers of ours of which we are most ashamed, are the most pleasing to the Lord, and for that reason, because we are ashamed of them. When we are favoured with what we call enlargement, we come away tolerably satisfied with ourselves, and think we have done well.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.205.

EDEN RESTORED

'When a human being, by the power of God’s grace, expresses a desire that is rooted not in his own selfishness (‘My will’) but rather in God’s plan for creation (‘Thy will’), such a posture reverses the bias of the Fall in that individual’s own life and re-establishes a little piece of Eden, through him or her, on earth.’

Pete Grieg, God on Mute, p.162.

WHAT KEEPS RELATIONSHIP GOING

'Delight without discipline eventually, inevitably dissipates. It runs out of steam. But when delight and discipline learn to dance, relationships thrive. They mature and endure.'

Pete Grieg, How to Pray: A simple guide for normal people, p.25.

WHAT PRAYER DOES

'Prayer is not a way in which we order things; it is a way in which we become ordered.'
Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God, p.75.

DRESSING UP AS JESUS TO PRAY

'Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of the Son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.187.

THE TRINITY & PRAYER

'An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying - the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on - the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to the goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.163.

HEARING GOD'S VOICE

'Why is it that when when we speak to God we are said to be praying, but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?'

Lily Tomlin in Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Building an intimate relationship with the Creator, p.5.

PRAYER IS ENGAGING GOD

'Some of us are taught to think that reading the Bible means sitting in God's classroom and that prayer is politely raising our hand when we have a question about what he is teaching us in his Deuteronomy lecture. The Psalms, our prayer text within the biblical text, show us something quite different: prayer is engaging God, an engaging that is seldom accomplished by a murmured greeting and a conventional handshake. The engagement, at least in its initial stages, is more like a quarrel that a greeting, more like a wrestling match than a warm embrace.'

Eugene H Peterson, Eat this Book, p.104.

PRAYER IS A NATURAL INSTINCT

'I struggle to imagine a god that I would be willing to pray to, but still I am drawn to prayer for prayer's sake. It is an act that my mind knows, that happens without my intervention. "Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer / utter itself" begins Carol Anne Duffy's most famous poem. "Prayer," which later goes on to show the faithless turning to piano scales and the Shipping Forecast to capture a little of the quality of prayerfulness. Praying is something that I can do, and so I do it. It seems to represent an atavistic impulse on my part, a desire to find life in the world around me, the trees and stones and bodies of water, the birds and mammals that enter my line of sight. Mine is a personal animism, hushed by my conscious brain, nurtured by unconscious.'

Katherine May, Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times, p.133.

YOUR WILL BE DONE

'In petitionary prayer, we set ourselves against what seems "normal." If a world filled with cancer, AIDS, sex slavery, rapacious greed, and toxic waste seems to us like "just the way things are," then petitionary prayer invites us to imagine a different world - the world as God meant it to be and will ultimately make it, a world in which those things are profoundly abnormal. To pray "Your will be done" is to adopt an appropriate distress over the world as it exists now and to hold on to the conviction that God will even now begin to change the world.' 

Wesley Hill, The Lord's Prayer, p.42.

PERMISSION TO FAIL AT PRAYER

'I was liberating to me to understand that prayer involved a learning process. I was set free to question, to experiment, even to fail, for I knew I was learning.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.46. 

A BEAUTIFUL PRAYER

'Guard Thou my soul,
strengthen my body,
elevate my senses,
direct my course,
order my habits,
shape my character,
bless my actions,
fulfill my prayers,
inspire holy thoughts,
pardon the past,
correct the present,
prevent the future.'
Lancelot Andrewes, Private Devotions - Seventh Day: Intercessions (Edited by Alexander Whyte), p.25. 

GOD WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU

'It is difficult for us to understand it, and it even surprises us, but God does want to be with us. The Lord is delighted when his children seek him. God is self-sufficient, he has need of nothing; nonetheless, he takes great pleasure in our relationship with him, in our prayers.' 

Pablo Martinez, Praying with the Grain, p.101. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF PRAYER TO THE SELF

'Prayer enables us to rebuild the very foundations of our existence, and gives back to a person the true purpose of their life: relationship with God. It provides an authentic self-fulfillment because it restores free and constant dialogue, that intimate fellowship with our Creator. Prayer is the vehicle that allows us to meet our deepest need, our thirst for God.' 

Pablo Martinez, Praying with the Grain: How Your Personality Affects The Way You Pray, p.96. 

CHRISTIANS TALK TO THEMSELVES

'...he is no fool that...talks to himself and excites his own soul to that which is good.'

Matthew Henry in Julian Hardyman, Fresh Pathways in Prayer, p.27.  

SCRIPTURE & PRAYER ARE INSEPERABLE

'Scripture and prayer are not two separate entities. My pastoral work was to fuse them into a single act: scriptureprayer or prayerscripture. It is this fusion of God speaking to us (Scripture) and us speaking to him (prayter) that the Holy Spirit uses to form the life of Christ in us.' 

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.196.