Some quotes from A.B. Simpson on prayer …
“Help me to work and pray, help me to live each day, that all I do may say, Thy kingdom come.” —A.B. Simpson
“Prayer, always prayer; when sickness wastes thy frame, prayer brings the healing power of Jesus’ name.” —A.B. Simpson
“All earth-born hopes with time must pass away; prayer grasps eternal things; pray, always pray.” —A.B. Simpson
A challenging and educational look at prayer from the unique perspective of Oswald Chambers is If Ye Shall Ask. You can read my book review of this book and another book on prayer Chambers wrote by clicking here. These are some of the quotes that I especially liked from this book.
“Prayer is not an interruption to personal ambition, and no man who is busy has time to pray. What will suffer is the life of God in him, which is nourished not by food but by prayer.”
“The purpose of prayer is to reveal the Presence of God, equally present at all times and in every condition.”
“Our Lord in His teaching regarding prayer never once referred to unanswered prayer; He said God always answers prayer.”
“As long as we are self-sufficient and complacent, we don’t need to ask God for anything, we don’t want Him; it is only when we know we are powerless that we are prepared to listen to Jesus Christ and to do what He says.”
“If prayer is not easy, we are wrong; if prayer is an effort, we are out of it.”
“If once we accept the Lord Jesus Christ and the dominion of His Lordship, then nothing happens by chance, because we know that God is ordering and engineering circumstances.”
“A thing is worth just what it costs. Prayer is not what it cost us, but what it cost God to enable us to pray. It cost God so much that a little child can pray. It cost God Almighty so much that anyone can pray.”
“It is not a prayer that is strenuous, but the overcoming of our own laziness.”
“We must be in continual practice so that when we find ourselves in a tight place we are perfectly fit to meet the emergency.”
“There is no such thing as a holiday for the beating of your heart. If there is, the grave comes next. And there is no such thing as a moral or spiritual holiday. If we attempt to take a holiday, the next time we want to pray it is a struggle because the enemy has gained a victory all around, darkness has come down and spiritual wickedness in high places has enfolded us. If we have to fight, it is because we have disobeyed; we ought to be more than conquerors.”
“God’s silences are His answers.”
“Can it be said of us that Jesus so loved us that He stayed where He was because He knew we had a capacity to stand a bigger revelation?”
“Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand.”
“Jesus Christ does not make monks and nuns, He makes men and women fit for the world as it is (see John 17:15).”
“God does not expect us to work for Him, but to work with Him.”
“God will not leave us alone until we are one with Him, because Jesus has prayed that we may be.”
“A Christian’s duty is not to himself or to others, but to Christ. We think of prayer as a preparation for work, or a calm after having done work, whereas prayer is the essential work. It is the supreme activity of everything that is noblest in our personality.”
“As long as we get from God everything we ask for, we never get to know Him, we look upon Him as a blessing-machine, that has nothing to do with God’s character or with our characters. … Then why pray? To get to know the Father.”
“All other fields have the glorious but risky snare of publicity; prayer has not.”
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
Symphonizing In Prayer
Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. (Matthew 18:19)
We need to know this simple, direct truth about praying in public. It is perilously easy to make public prayer the mere fringe of devotion to what we are pleased to think of as the real center of the meeting. Agreement in purpose on earth must not be taken to mean a predetermination to agree together to storm God’s fort doggedly till He yields. It is far from right to agree beforehand over what we want, and then go to God and wait, not until He gives us His mind about the matter, but until we extort from Him permission to do what we had made up our minds to do before we prayed; we should rather agree to ask God to convey His mind and meaning to us in regard to the matter.
Agreement in purpose on earth is not a public presentation of persistent begging which knows no limit, but a prayer which is conscious that it is limited through the moral nature of the Holy Spirit. It is really “symphonizing” on earth with our Father Who is in Heaven.
From Christian Disciplines
When Jesus taught us to pray He said we should say, “Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” God has a perfect plan in mind, and He wants us to be a part of that plan. So before we make up our mind to pray a certain way, and rally others around us to “agree in prayer” with us, we need to find out what God’s mind is on the matter. Our agreement needs to be with God, not with others.
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
Our Father
Think for one minute, have you behaved today as though God were your Father or have you to hang your head in absolute shame before Him for the miserable, mean, unworthy thoughts you have had about your life?
It all springs from one thing, you have lost hold of the idea that God is your Father. Some of us are such fussy, busy people, refusing to look up and realize the tremendous revelation in Jesus Christ’s words—“Your heavenly Father knows what you need….”
From He Shall Glorify Me
What an amazing thought that when Jesus taught us to pray, He said we could address Almighty God with the affectionate title of “Our Father.” In his book Who Do You Think You Are?, Mark Driscoll points out:
“In the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, God is referred to only as Father roughly fourteen times—and each time it’s impersonally, in reference to the nation of Israel, not to individuals. Everything radically changed with Jesus. He spoke of God as Father more than sixty times in the New Testament.”
Your heavenly Father loves you more than you can possibly imagine! Let that truth sink in. Don’t give in to the thoughts that your life is not very valuable, or even that God doesn’t like you very much.
God loves you as if you were the only person on earth to love! And He sent Jesus to earth to make it possible for you to be adopted into His family, to call Him Father. Even more than that, to call Him “Daddy God” (see Romans 8:15-17).
Live in your heavenly Father’s love today.
The dictionary defines contentment as—
Satisfied with what one is or has; not wanting more or anything else.
Does that describe you? Sadly, it’s describing fewer and fewer of us today. But saddest of all: Very few Christians describe themselves as being content!
The Bible says, “But godliness with contentment is great gain. … If we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.” (1 Timothy 6:6, 8)
Both godliness and contentment are choices we must make.
I choose to be godly, and I choose to be content.
The default—the natural course for us—is selfishness. The pull toward my gain and my pleasure is strong. So I must exert great energy to pursue godliness; I must make the conscious decision to be content.
Give us this day our daily bread should be the prayer request in the morning (Matthew 6:11).
Thank You, God, for providing food and clothing for today should be the prayer of thanks in the evening.
Today if you have more than food and clothing, how much more blessed you are!
Choose godliness. Choose contentment. And watch and see how God provides great gain for you!
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In probably the best-known prayer, the one Jesus taught us to pray, there is a line I have breezed past way too many times without thinking more about it. It says, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13).
This prayer is addressed to our Heavenly Father, the One Who is all-loving and all-powerful. God loves us and He gives us His power. Even power to defeat temptation.
Sometimes we have to battle the same temptation again and again and again. Perhaps we have seen that we are overcoming that temptation more times than we’re being overcome by it; perhaps not. Sometimes it’s a totally new temptation that sneaks up on us each time. In either case, God knows what temptation we are going to face.
This line of the prayer is really saying, “God, please don’t bring me into battle with a temptation I’m not ready to face. Help me to be ready to overcome that temptation when it comes” (see 1 Corinthians 10:13; James 1:13-17).
NEWS FLASH—Instead of waiting to pray for help until I’m facing a temptation (a reactive prayer), I can pray for God’s help before I even face the temptation (a proactive prayer).
In my mind, proactive is way better than reactive!
Check out what John Bunyan learned about this—
“…I did not, when I was delivered from the temptation that went before, still pray to God to keep me from the temptations that were to come; for though, as I can say in truth, my soul was much in prayer before this trial seized me, yet then I prayed only, or at the most principally, for the removal of present troubles, and for fresh discoveries of His love in Christ, which I saw afterwards was not enough to do; I also should have prayed that the great God would keep me from the evil that was to come. … This I had not done, and therefore was thus suffered to sin and fall, according to what is written, Pray that ye enter not into temptation. And truly this very thing is to this day of such weight and awe upon me, that I dare not, when I come before the Lord, go off my knees, until I entreat Him for help and mercy against the temptations that are to come; and I do beseech thee, reader, that thou learn to beware of my negligence, by the afflictions, that for this thing I did for days, and months, and years, with sorrow undergo.”
What would happen if the next time you are facing a temptation you could say, “Hello, temptation! I’ve already prayed about you, and my Heavenly Father has already given me strength to defeat you”? Don’t you think you would be much more successful? I do!
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In our current series on prayer, we’re using the prayer that Jesus taught as our pattern. Yesterday we looked at this part of the pattern:
Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
This is all about trust. It’s about acknowledging to God that He is in control and He knows what’s best. It’s not about me coming into His presence and telling Him how things should work. I love the quote from C.S. Lewis:
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God “Thy will be done” and those to whom God says, “All right then, have it your way.”
When we come into God’s presence in prayer, we say, “Before I ask You for what I need, I want You to know that I trust You. No matter what.” In essence, we sign a blank check and trust God to fill in the amount.
And, by the way, the verb for “Your kingdom come” in this model prayer is an imperfect verb. That means that we have to keep on signing those blank checks, as we keep on submitting to His will and His kingdom.
Are you willing to sign a blank check to God?
We just wrapped up a great week of prayer, and tomorrow we dive into part two of our 2011 inaugural series of the new year: The Perfect Prayer.
I can’t think of a better way to set the pace for the year than to pray!
Hope to see you tomorrow for some great worship and a helpful study on The Perfect Prayer (location, service times, and other details are here).
I seldom turn on religious TV shows, because when I do I typically hear the same two messages: (1) God wants you to be rich; (2) God wants you to be healthy. I believe God is good all the time, but that doesn’t mean those who follow Him always get wealth and health.
Consider this:
After Rehoboam’s position as king was established and he had become strong, he and all of Israel with him abandoned the law of the Lord.
Notice: When Rehoboam was healthy and wealthy, he abandoned God. When things looked bleak—when the future for Rehoboam was very much in doubt—Rehoboam was “walking in the ways of David and Solomon” (2 Chronicles 11:17). When the Egyptians attacked, Rehoboam and his court officials “humbled themselves before God” (12:6).
Maybe a better prayer than “Bless me” would be “Build Your character in me.” Or as it says in Proverbs:
Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown You and say “Who is the Lord?” Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.
The prayer that Jesus taught us to pray is perfect: Give us today our daily bread—no more, no less. That keeps me focused on my Heavenly Father.
Yeah, yeah… you know about the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe you know it by heart. Maybe you pray this prayer every week at your church, or maybe even every day in your home. But do you really know the Lord’s Prayer? R.T. Kendall is about to take you on a journey of discovery that will energize this prayer like never before.
The Lord’s Prayer leads you through this powerful prayer phrase by phrase, petition by petition. Dr. Kendall calls this “the perfect prayer,” and after reading his insights, I think you will agree with him.
I know that anything I do or say time and time again can lose some of its meaning. The Lord’s Prayer is so well known that many of us can rattle it off from rote memory, almost in one breath, and never really comprehend what we’re actually praying. Dr. Kendall brings out such a depth of understanding in each phrase of this prayer, that I don’t think I will ever pray it the same way again.
For instance, I never realized the significance of even the order of the prayer. Jesus put the first thing first and then puts each following phrase in its perfect place as well. The way Dr. Kendall explains it brings out such a richness of understanding.
I could imagine this book being the perfect tool to help your personal prayer life go deeper. I can also see this book being used by a church’s prayer team to help energize their prayer times together. Whether personally or corporately, your prayer life will be greatly benefitted by this book.
I am a Chosen Books book reviewer.
Craig T. Owens 