"...True prayer is measured by weight, not by length. A single groan before God may have more fullness of prayer in it than a fine oration of great length."

- C. H. Spurgeon

"Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still."

- E.M. Bounds

"The man who mobilizes the Christian church to pray will make the greatest contribution to world evangelization in history."

- Andrew Murray

"We must begin to believe that God, in the mystery of prayer, has entrusted us with a force that can move the Heavenly world, and can bring its power down to earth."

- Andrew Murray

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

- Oswald Chambers

As you develop your relationship with your heavenly Father, you’ll change. You’ll discover nests of cynicism, pride, and self-will in your heart. You will be unmasked. None of us likes being exposed. We have an allergic reaction to dependency, but this is the state of the heart most necessary for a praying life. A needy heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer. So when it starts getting uncomfortable, don’t pull back from God. He is just starting to work. Be patient.

- Paul E. Miller. A Praying Life (p. 24).

Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of outer busyness we can develop an inner quiet. Because we are less hectic on the inside, we have a greater capacity to love … and thus to be busy, which in turn drives us even more into a life of prayer.

- Paul E. Miller. A Praying Life (p. 23).

Prayer is simply the medium through which we experience and connect to God. Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God.

Paul E. Miller. A Praying Life (p. 20).

Any relationship, if it is going to grow, needs private space, time together without an agenda, where you can get to know each other. This creates an environment where closeness can happen, where we can begin to understand each other’s hearts. You don’t create intimacy; you make room for it. This is true whether you are talking about your spouse, your friend, or God. You need space to be together. Efficiency, multitasking, and busyness all kill intimacy. In short, you can’t get to know God on the fly.

- Paul E. Miller. A Praying Life (p. 47).

If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you 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 the time to pray.

Paul E. Miller. A Praying Life (p. 49).

A praying life isn’t simply a morning prayer time; it is about slipping into prayer at odd hours of the day, not because we are disciplined but because we are in touch with our own poverty of spirit, realizing that we can’t even walk through a mall or our neighborhood without the help of the Spirit of Jesus.

Paul E. Miller. A Praying Life (p. 68).

Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change— the reordering of our loves. Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. We must learn to pray. We have to.

- Keller, Timothy. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (p. 18).

There are three basic kinds of prayer to God. There is “upward” prayer— praise and thanksgiving that focuses on God himself. We could call this the “prayer of awe.” Then there is “inward” prayer— self-examination and confession that bring a deeper sense of sin and, in return, a higher experience of grace and assurance of love. That is the prayer of intimacy. Finally, there is “outward” prayer— supplication and intercession that focuses on our needs and the needs of others in the world. This prayer requires perseverance and often entails struggle.

- Keller, Timothy. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (p. 189).

We must make our desires known— and also rest in his wisdom. These elements come back-to-back in the Lord’s Prayer, and we also see them together in Jesus’ own great prayer in Gethsemane: “If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matt 26: 39).

- Keller, Timothy. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (p. 230).

Every situation in life is represented in the book of psalms. Psalms anticipate and train you for every possible spiritual, social, and emotional condition— they show you what the dangers are, what you should keep in mind, what your attitude should be, how to talk to God about it, and how to get from God the help you need.

- Keller, Timothy. The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (p. 1).

We are, in a sense, to put them inside our own prayers, or perhaps to put our prayers inside them, and approach God in that way. In doing this the psalms involve the speaker directly in new attitudes, commitments, promises, and even emotions.

- Keller, Timothy. The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (p. 1).

Most of all the psalms, read in light of the entire Bible, bring us to Jesus. The psalms were Jesus’s songbook. The hymn that Jesus sang at the Passover meal (Matthew 26: 30; Mark 14: 26) would have been the Great Hallel, Psalms 113– 118.

- Keller, Timothy. The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (p. 1).

This brings a reality to our prayer lives that nothing else can. “Left to ourselves, we will pray to some god who speaks what we like hearing, or to the part of God we manage to understand. But what is critical is that we speak to the God who speaks to us, and to everything that he speaks to us. . . . What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God.” 7

- Keller, Timothy. The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (p. 1).

The psalms, by contrast, give us a range of divinely inspired voices of different temperaments and experiences. No other book, even of the Bible, can compete with it as a basis for daily prayer.

- Keller, Timothy. The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (p. 1).

The simplest way is to read the psalm and the meditation slowly, and then use the prayer to begin praying the psalm yourself. The prayers offer an opportunity to continue praying to God about anything in your heart and anything personal you are facing that day. This could take no more than fifteen minutes.

- Keller, Timothy. The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (p. 1).

“God’s Sovereignty doesn’t make prayer pointless, it makes it possible”

- John Piper

"I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach."

- Charles Spurgeon

What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use--men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. 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

"Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work."

- Oswald Chambers

"Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His' voice in the depth of our hearts."

- Mother Teresa

It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

- Lewis, C. S.. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (pp. 22-23).

Shall we not agree with J. I. Packer when he writes, “I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is, so that how we pray is as important a question as we can ever face”?

- D.A. Carson. Praying with Paul page xiv

"He who runs from God in the morning will scarcely find Him the rest of the day."

- John Bunyan

“In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

- John Bunyan

"I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer."

- Martin Luther

"He who kneels the most, stands the best."

- D.L. Moody