Prayer lays hold of God's plan and becomes the link between His will and its accomplishment on earth. Amazing things happen, and we are given the privilege of being the channels of the Holy Spirit's prayer.
Interpretation
Prayer connects us to God's intentions and enables their realization through us.
This quote by Elisabeth Elliot emphasizes the power of prayer as a means of aligning ourselves with God's divine plan. It suggests that through prayer, we become instruments of His will on earth, facilitating significant and miraculous events while serving as channels for the Holy Spirit’s intercession.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the importance of prayer in our lives.
We are not asked to SEE," said Amy. "Why need we when we KNOW?" We know--not the answer to the inevitable Why, but the incontestable fact that it is for the best. "It is an irreparable loss, but is it faith at all if it is 'hard to trust' when things are entirely bewildering?
What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the servants offer and had said to him instead, “let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be - let me be a woman'?
Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.
Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy. Peace does not dwell in outward things, but in the heart prepared to wait trustfully and quietly on Him who has all things safely in His hands.
If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.
Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all.
There are not three stages in spiritual life-worship, waiting, and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs. We jump from worship to waiting to work. God's idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of our Lord.
Too often we treat prayer as the preparation for the work of the church. Do you not see? Prayer IS the work of the church.
The prayer life does not consist of perpetual repetition of petitions. The prayer life consists of life that is always upward and onward and Godward
A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.
We pray not to inform God or instruct Him but to beseech Him closely, to be made intimate with Him, by continuance in supplication; to be humbled; to be reminded of our sins.
Before His gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with Him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves... His gaze, the touch of His heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation "as through fire". But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of His love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.
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