Give yourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word. If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry, as He did me, to teach you to pray.
Robert Murray M'CheyneRead
Learn that urgency in prayer does not so much consist in vehement pleading, as in vehement believing. He that believes most the love and power of Jesus will obtain the most in prayer.
Interpretation
The intensity of prayer comes from deep belief rather than desperate pleading.
This quote emphasizes that effective prayer is rooted in genuine faith and conviction in the love and power of Jesus. It suggests that those who truly believe will find their prayers more impactful, as their belief fuels their connection with the divine.
In practice
During a church sermon emphasizing the importance of faith in prayer.
Give yourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word. If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry, as He did me, to teach you to pray.
I ought to pray before seeing any one. Often when I sleep long, or meet with others early, it is eleven or twelve o'clock before I begin secret prayer. I feel it is far better to begin with God-to see His face first, to get my soul near Him before it is near another.
Rose early to seek God and found Him whom my soul loveth. Who would not rise early to meet such company?
I ought to spend the best hours of the day in communion with God. It is my noblest and most fruitful employment, and is not to be thrust into any corner.
Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little In comparison to eternal realities.
If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies.
For we are so preciously loved by God that we cannot even comprehend it. No created being can ever know how much and how sweetly and tenderly God loves them. It is only with the help of his grace that we are able to persevere in spiritual contemplation with endless wonder at his high, surpassing, immeasurable love which our Lord in his goodness has for us.
It is not because we are drawn to prayer that we first begin to pray; more often, we have to begin prayer, and then the taste and the desire for it come.
Prayer is the human response to the perpetual outpouring of love by which God lays siege to every soul.
Like a child exploring the attic of an old house on a rainy day, discovering a trunk full of treasure and then calling all his brothers and sisters to share the find, Richard J. 'Foster has 'found' the spiritual disciplines that the modern world has stored away and forgot, and has excitedly called us to celebrate them. For they are, as he shows us, the instruments of joy, the way into mature Christian spirituality and abundant life.
"My aim is to institute perpetual adoration," spoke St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, Franciscan priest and founder of the Knights of the Immaculata. For he said that this is "the most important activity," and "if half of the Brothers would work, and the other half pray, this would not require too much."
Remember God is not surprised by your inabilities, your imperfections, or your faults. He has always known everything about you that you are just now finding out, and he chose you on purpose for himself.
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