A Follow Up From the Message on Prayer From Sunday

There is a really good book out called The Praying Life. It is where I got the idea for carrying index cards with prayer requests on them in order to pray wherever you are (the author, Paul Miller, uses them all the time). A guy named Bob Thune,  listed a number of great quotes from the book, so I reproduced them below. I hope they encourage you to pray without ceasing.

• Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart.
• If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life.
• Less mature Christians have little need to pray… there is no complexity to their worlds because the answers are simple.
• Cynicism [the attitude that nothing can be done to fix our problems] is the air we breathe, and it is suffocating our hearts. Our only hope is to follow Jesus as he leads us out of cynicism.
• The persistent widow [Luke 18:1-8] and the friend [Luke 11:5-8] at midnight get access, not because they are strong but because they are desperate. Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.
• I do not understand prayer. Prayer is deeply personal and deeply mysterious. Adults try to figure out causation. Little children don’t. They just ask.
• Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant.
• We think spiritual things – if done right – should just ‘flow.’ But if you have a disability, nothing flows, especially in the beginning.
• There is a tendency among Christians to get excited about ‘listening to God’ as if they are discovering a hidden way of communicating with God that will revolutionize their prayer lives… This subtly elevates an experience with God instead of God himself. Without realizing it, we can look at the windshield instead of through it.
• How would you love someone without prayer? People are far too complicated; the world is far too evil; and my own heart is too off center to be able to love adequately without praying.