Prayer
by Patrick Chong
- Prayer exposes sin. Just like any rightful worship of god should magnify His glory and our need for his grace. It requires commitment and repentance. (Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life)
- Pray about what your mind is wandering to. Maybe it is something that is important to you. Maybe the Spirit is nudging you to think about something else. (Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life)
- When you know that you (like Jesus) can’t do life on your own, then prayer makes perfect sense. (Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life)
- If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money and talent are all your need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find time to pray. (Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life)
- If we think we can do life on our own, we will not take prayer seriously.
- Our failure to pray will always feel like something else - a lack of discipline or too many obligations. (Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life)
- To become more like Jesus is to feel increasingly unable to do life, increasingly wary of your heart. (Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life)
- The prayer of a Christian is not an attempt to force God’s hand, but a humble acknowledgment of helplessness and dependence. When we are on our knees, we know that it is not we who control the world; it is not in our power, therefore, to supply our needs by our own independent efforts; every good thing that we desire for ourselves and for others must be sought from God, and will come, if it comes at all, as a gift from his hands. If this is true even of our daily bread (and the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that it is), much more is it true of spiritual benefits. This is all luminously clear to us when we are actually praying, whatever we may be betrayed into saying in argument afterward. In effect, therefore, what we do every time we pray is to confess our own impotence and God’s sovereignty. The very fact that a Christian prays is thus proof positive that he believes in the lordship of his God. (J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God)