Prayer of Gratitude

GOD who so fills all things that they only dimly veil Thy presence; we adore Thee in the beauty of the world, in the goodness of human hearts and in Thy thought within the mind. We praise Thee for the channels through which Thy grace can come to us; sickness and health, joy and pain, freedom and necessity, sunshine and rain, life and death.

We thank Thee for all the gentle and healing ministries of life; the gladness of the morning, the freedom of the wind, the music of the rain, the joy of the sunshine and the deep calm of the night; for trees, and flowers, and clouds, and skies; for the tender ministries of human love, the unselfishness of parents, the love that binds man and woman, the confidence of little children; for the patience of teachers and the encouragement of friends.

We bless Thee for the stirring ministry of the past, for the story of noble deeds, the memory of holy men, the printed book, the painter’s art, the poet’s craft; most of all for the ministry of the Son of Man who taught us the eternal beauty of earthly things, who by His life set us free from fear, and by His death won us from our sins to Thee; for His cradle. His cross, and His crown.

May His Spirit live within us, conquer all the selfishness of man, and take away the sin of the world. Amen.

– W. E. Orchard, D.D.
The Temple: A Book of Prayers

Turning to God

THE river finds its way, however slowly, to the sea.
The birds of the heaven know their appointed seasons,
but how slow our feet to turn to Thee.

When we turn to seek Thee, it is often late,
so late; our feet failing, the storm driving us,
and only when we have tried all other ways,
drunk of every broken cistern, consulted
many physicians and found ourselves nothing
better but rather worse, do we turn to Thee.
O the mercy that Thou receivest us even then.

Yet some of us must travel farther ere we turn again,
Not yet are we sure that some fruit of pleasure,
some drug of sin, may not be the medicine we need.
We have not yet lost all hope in ourselves.
In all our folly do not Thou forget us, nor release
the hidden thread that binds us to our home.

But some of us want to come while the day
is young and life is full; to come, not because
we must, but because we may; to choose Thee
with all the kingdoms of the world in sight;
to count Thee better than all the treasures
of knowledge or the pleasures of sin.
Give us the grace to come even now.
Amen.

– W. E. Orchard
The Temple: A Book of Prayers

Out of the Depths

OUT of the depths have we cried unto Thee,
O God ; O God hear our prayer. Our desperate need
of Thee is mocked by our faint and feeble petitions.
Hearken not to the words of our lips disciplined by
such fatal habit to conceal ourselves, but consider
our travail of soul and listen to the groanings
that cannot be uttered.

When we have dared to descend within,
fathomless deeps make us afraid, and we dread to
know ourselves; passions sleep within which any
wandering breeze might stir to storm, and we be
overwhelmed beneath its waves. Surely this
cannot be ourselves, for of this we are afraid.

Deep within we have caught a glimpse of
smiling seas which mirror the beauty of the
sky, while they themselves are dark and foul;
strange self-deceptions make us crave for comfort,
while we sing of sacrifice; we pretend to love Thee,
but love better still ambition, praise, the hollow word.
If this should be ourselves, all hope for us is gone.
Thou canst not love what we can only hate.

Yet, deeper still, O God, lies hunger for Thyself,
and this must be of Thee, yet we fear this most of all.
If this should pass our power to bear, we might be
swept beyond our studied selfishness, our calculating
prudence, and never be the same again.

Out of such depths we cry unto Thee, O God.
Amen.

– W. E. Orchard
The Temple: A Book of Prayers

[God desires] not that He may say… “Look how mighty I am, and go down upon your knees and worship,”–for power alone was never yet worthy of prayer; but that He may say thus: “Look, my children, you will never be strong but with my strength. I have no other to give you. And that you can get only by trusting in me. I can not give it you any other way. There is no other way.”

– George MacDonald (1824-1905),
Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

GOD LISTENS

Prayer is a focus upon God whereby all things come into focus. By centering attention on God the center, all things become centered. Life is not indiscriminate bits and pieces, mingled treasure and rubble. It is coherent…

The world is a mob in which everyone is talking at once and no one is willing or able to listen. But God listens. He not only speaks to us, he listens to us. His listening to us is an even greater marvel than his speaking to us. It is rare to find anyone who lis­tens carefully and thoroughly. It is rare to find our stammering understood, our clumsy speech deciphered, our garbled syntax unravelled, sorted out and heard – every syllable attended to, every nuance comprehended. Our minds are taken seriously. Our feel­ings are taken seriously. When it happens we know that what we say and feel are immensely important. We acquire dignity.

–Eugene Peterson
Reversed Thunder

Listening to God

Our spiritual hearing will improve only as we obey the truth we hear. Disobedience to the truth deafens. More than deafening us, disobedience renders us dumb. The word absurd comes from the Latin surd, which means deaf. Obedient comes from the Latin audire, which means listening. In Scripture, to hear is indeed to obey…

The absurdly disobedient lives rampant in our society result from spiritual deafness. Henri Nouwen comments, “A spiritual discipline is necessary in order to move slowly from an absurd to an obedient life, from a life filled with noisy worries to a life in which there is some free inner space where we can listen to our God and follow his guidance.”

–Tim Dearborn
Taste & See

A Steadfast Hope

We pray for God to be merciful in our distress.
We weep with those who weep.
We suffer with those who are suffering.
We use wisdom and take necessary precautions.
But we also lift up our heads in confidence.
We have a hope that neither death nor life,
nor viruses nor sagging economies can touch.
We are not promised that we will survive
the coronavirus, but we are promised that
we will survive something far worse, the curse
that falls on those who don’t know God.
And we can’t look into the future and predict
what will happen next on the world stage.
Still, we as Christians have an anchor.
Our God is a mighty fortress.

– Tom Schreiner

A Prayer Saturated Life

Don’t seek to develop a prayer life — seek a praying life. A “prayer life” is a segmented time for prayer. You’ll end feeling guilty that you don’t spend more time in prayer. Eventually you’ll probably feel defeated and give up. A “praying life” is a life that is saturated with prayerfulness — you seek to do all that you do with the Lord.

– Dallas Willard

The Gracious Mystery

Prayer . . . is either the primary fact or the worst delusion. If God is not, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, prayer is the veriest self-deceit. If God is, yet is known only in vague rumor and dark coercion, prayer is whimpering folly: it were nobler to die. But if God is in some deep and eternal sense like Jesus, friendship with Him is our first concern, worthiest art, best resource, and sublimest joy.

Such prayer could brood over our modern disorder, as the Spirit once brooded over the void, to summon a new world. Prayer would not then dispel the Mystery: worship requires Mystery. . . . But the Mystery then would be a gracious Mystery, inviting and needing the friendship of our humanity, granting us light for life here and “authentic tidings” of life hereafter.

— George A. Buttrick,
Prayer

Living In God

Nothing in all nature is so lovely and so vigorous, so perfectly at home in its environment, as a fish in the sea. Its surroundings give to it a beauty, quality, and power which are not its own. We take it out, and at once a poor, limp dull thing, fit for nothing, is gasping away its life. So the soul, sunk in God, living the life of prayer, is supported, filled, transformed in beauty by a vitality and a power which are not its own.

– Evelyn Underhill

Leaning Back on God

Prayer is not a way of making use of God; prayer is a way of offering ourselves to God in order that He should be able to make use of us. It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God’s voice to us; we linger in His presence for His peace and His power to flow over us and around us; we lean back in His everlasting arms and feel the serenity of perfect security in Him.

–William Barclay,
The Plain Man’s Book of Prayers

We Need a Bucket

There is no lack in us of the impulse to pray. And there is no scarcity of requests to pray. Desire and demand keep the matter of prayer before us constantly. So why are so many lives prayerless? Simply because “the well is deep and you have nothing to draw with.” We need a bucket. We need a container suited to lowering desires and demands into the deep Jacob’s Well of God’s presence and word and bringing them to the surface again. The Psalms are such a bucket.

–Eugene Peterson

Surprised by Wonder

Lord, catch me off guard today.
Surprise me with some moment
of beauty or pain
So that at least for the moment
I may be startled into seeing that you
are here in all your splendor,
Always and everywhere,
Barely hidden,
Beneath.
Beyond,
Within this life I breathe.

–Frederick Buechner

A Prayer for God Seekers

O Lord our God,
grant us grace to desire thee
with our whole heart; that,
so desiring, we may seek,
and seeking find thee;
and so finding thee
may love thee; and loving thee,
may hate those sins from
which thou has redeemed.
Amen.
–Anselm of Canterbury,
(1033-1109)

Deliver Us

From the cowardice that
shrinks from new truth.
From the laziness that
is content with half-truths.
From the arrogance that
thinks it knows all truths:
O God of Truth, deliver us.

–Ancient prayer

The heart that we need

Give me O Lord, a steadfast heart,
which no unworthy affection
will drag downwards.
Give me an unconquered heart,
which no tribulation can wear out.
Give me an upright heart,
which no unworthy purpose
may tempt aside.

–Thomas Aquinas

Challenging the system

Prayer: a subversive activity
[that] involves a more or less
open act of defiance
against any claim
by the current regime.

–Eugene Peterson

He can’t get closer

No prayer can ever
bring God any closer.
Already, without any effort
on your part,
God patiently dwells
within the tender recesses
of your own heart.

–Mike Yaconelli 

A prayer for the journey

Give me, O Lord, a steadfast heart which no unworthy thought can drag downwards; an unconquered heart which no tribulation can wear out; an upright heart which no unworthy purpose may tempt aside. Bestow upon me also, O Lord my God, understanding to know you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you, and a faithfulness that may finally embrace you; through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

–Thomas Aquinas
(1225–1274)

Image: hossein.zarei3

A strong suspicion

I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers make, and all the people those little prayers were destined to affect, and all the consequences of those prayers down through the centuries, we would be so paralyzed with awe at the power of prayer that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives.

–Peter Kreeft
Angels and Demons

What next?

If you are weary of some sleepy form of devotion, probably God is as weary of it as you are.

All during the day, in the chinks of time between the things we find ourselves obliged to do, there are the moments when our minds ask: ‘What next?’ In these chinks of time, ask Him: ‘Lord, think Your thoughts in my mind. What is on Your mind for me to do now?’ When we ask Christ, ‘What next?’ we tune in and give Him a chance to pour His ideas through our enkindled imagination. If we persist, it becomes a habit.

The trouble with nearly everybody who prays is that he says “Amen” and runs away before God has a chance to reply. Listening to God is far more important than giving Him your ideas.

–Frank C. Laubach
(1884 – 1970)

Misguided requests

We are forever asking God to do things that He either has already done or cannot do because of our unbelief. We plead for Him to speak when He has already spoken and is at that very moment speaking. We ask Him to come when He is already present and waiting for us to recognize Him. We beg the Holy Spirit to fill us while all the time we are preventing Him by our doubts.

–A. W. Tozer

Artwork: Leonid Afremov

Opening our hearts

Prayer is opening our hearts to the One who is the source of all love. Prayer is like lying in a field of falling snow. Silent. In wonder. Waiting until you hear the One who is closer than your own breathing whisper what your heart has always known to be true: that you are loved.

–Mike Yaconelli

Salt, umbrellas and prayer

“Praying for particular things,” said I, “always seems to me like advising God how to run the world. Wouldn’t it be wiser to assume that He knows best?”

“On the same principle,” said he, “I suppose you never ask a man next to you to pass the salt, because God knows best whether you ought to have salt or not. And I suppose you never take an umbrella, because God knows best whether you ought to be wet or dry.”

“That’s quite different,” I protested.

“I don’t see why,” said he. “The odd thing is that He should let us influence the course of events at all. But since He lets us do it in one way I don’t see why He shouldn’t let us do it in the other.”

–C. S. Lewis
God in the Dock

Photo: Robin Halioua

The gift of joy

Yes, joy is God’s gift, but we must stretch out our hands to split the kindling of prayer, carry the logs of good deeds, lay the fire of faith, and strike the match of the Spirit. If we do our part, the Lord will not fail to build a cheerful roaring fire in our hearts.

–Mike Mason
Champagne for the Soul

Following Jesus

Following Jesus is the yes that comes after the no. We have renounced self-initiative for Jesus obedience. We have renounced clamoring assertion and replaced them with quiet listening. We watch Jesus work. We listen to Jesus speak. We accompany Jesus into new relationships, odd places, odd people. We pray our prayers in Jesus’ name. Keeping company with Jesus, observing what he does, and listening to what he says develops into a life of answering God, a life of responding to God, which is a life of prayer.

Following Jesus is not a robotic lockstep, marching in a straight line after Jesus. The following gets inside of us, becomes internalized, gets into our muscles and nerves. It’s much more like a ramble, and it becomes prayer.

Prayer is what develops in us after we step out of the center and begin responding to the center, to Jesus.

–Eugene Peterson
Living the Resurrection

Stretches of darkness

If anyone tells you that the life of prayer is one uninterrupted experience of being happy with Jesus, do not follow him. He is not a safe guide. Those who follow the Lamb know that there are stretches of darkness and loneliness and perplexity along the way, and they know that Jesus himself went that way.

–Lesslie Newbigin
(1909-1998)

Turning to Reality

Prayer means turning to Reality, taking our part, however humble, tentative and half-understood, in the continual conversation, the communion, of our spirits with the Eternal Spirit; the acknowledg-ment of our entire dependence . . . For Prayer is really our whole life toward God: our longing for Him, our “incurable God-sickness,” as Barth calls it, our whole drive towards Him. It is the humble correspondence of the human spirit with the Sum of all Perfection, the Fountain of Life. No narrower definition than this is truly satisfactory, or covers all the ground.

–Evelyn Underhill
(1875-1941)

Expect change

Prayer does not
change God,
but it changes him
who prays.

–Søren Kierkegaard

Overcoming sin

He who does not give up prayer
cannot possibly continue
to offend God habitually.
Either he will give up prayer,
or he will stop sinning.

-St. Alphonsus Ligouri
(1696 – 1787)