4 Quotes About Prayer

Our church is praying together with 5 other churches throughout Central Florida for 28 days. The unified focus on praying through the Psalms has been so refreshing, like the living water described in Isaiah 12:3: “with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” Below are 4 quotes on prayer that I have read in 2024 and I pray they encourage and convict you like they have me.

Charles Spurgeon from Lecture 3: The Preacher's Private Prayer in Lectures to My Students

A certain preacher, whose sermons converted men by scores, received a revelation from heaven that not one of the conversions was owing to his talents or eloquence, but all to the prayers of an illiterate lay-brother, who sat on the pulpit steps, pleading all the time for the success of the sermon. It may in the all-revealing day be so with us. We may discover, after having labored long and wearily in preaching, that all the honor belongs to another builder, whose prayers were gold, silver, and precious stones, while our sermonizings being apart from prayer, were but hay and stubble.

Eugene Peterson from Working the Angles

Prayer means that we deal first with God and then with the world. Or, that we experience the world first not as a problem to be solved but as a reality in which God is acting.

Paul E. Miller from A Praying Church

Prayer isn’t just another ministry; it is the ministry that sparks the rule of the Spirit of Jesus in all ministries.

Eugene Peterson from Working the Angles

The implication of this for pastoral work is plain: it begins in prayer. Anything creative, anything powerful, anything biblical, insofar as we are participants in it, originates in prayer. Pastors who imitate the preaching and moral action of the prophets without also imitating the prophets’ deep praying and worship so evident in the Psalms are an embarrassment to the faith and an encumbrance to the church.