A Quote by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.
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Often the answer to our prayer does not come while we’re on our knees but while we’re on our feet serving the Lord and serving those around us. Selfless acts of service and consecration refine our spirits remove the scales from our spiritual eyes and open the windows of heaven. By becoming the answer to someone’s prayer we often find the answer to our own.
There is no true prayer without confession. As long as we have unconfessed sin in our soul, we are not going to have power with God in prayer. He says if we regard iniquity in our hearts, He will not hear us, much less answer. As long as we are living in any known sin, we have no power in prayer. God is not going to hear it.
It can happen that when we are at prayer some brothers come to see us. Then we have to choose either to interrupt our prayer or to sadden our brother by refusing to answer him. But love is greater than prayer. Prayer is one virtue among others, whereas love contains them all.
Prayer adds an element of surprise to your life that is more fun than a surprise party or surprise gift or surprise romance. In fact, prayer turns life into a party, into a gift, into a romance.
A spiritual prayer is a humble prayer. Prayer is the asking of an alms, which requires humility... The lower the heart descends, the higher the prayer ascends.
If we pray only because we want answers, we will become irritated and angry with God. We receive an answer every time we pray, but it does not always come in the way we expect, and our spiritual irritation shows our refusal to identify ourselves truly with our Lord in prayer. We are not here to prove that God answers prayer, but to be living trophies of God’s grace.
Undoubtedly, prayer requires a living faith in God. Successful satyagraha is inconceivable without that faith.
Prayer brings a good spirit in our homes. For God hears prayer. Heaven itself would come down to our homes. And even though we who constitute the home all have our imperfections and our failings, our home would, through God's answer to prayer, become a little paradise.
What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
Spiritual lust--'I must have it at once'--causes me to demand an answer from God, instead of seeking God himself who gives the answer. Is today 'the third day' and He has still not done what I expected? Whenever we insist that God should give us an answer to prayer we are off track. The purpose of prayer is that we get a hold of God, not of the answer.
By becoming the answer to someone's prayer, we often find the answer to our own.
Prayer is God's answer to our poverty, not a power we exercise to obtain an answer.
The prayer of the feeblest saint who lives in the Spirit and keeps right with God is a terror to Satan. The very powers of darkness are paralyzed by prayer; no spiritualistic seance can succeed in the presence of a humble praying saint. No wonder Satan tries to keep our minds fussy in active work till we cannot think in prayer.
It is not enough to begin to pray, nor to pray aright; nor is it enough to continue for a time to pray; but we must patiently, believingly, continue in prayer until we obtain an answer; and further we have not only to continue in prayer unto the end, but we have also to believe that God does hear us, and will answer our prayers. Most frequently we fail in not continuing in prayer until the blessing is obtained, and in not expecting the blessing.
I have gained and sustained my optimism as a humble student of our living universe, our living Earth, which clearly shows us the way out of our adolescent crisis into a mature global future. The sooner we create our vision of all we desire, set our intention to implement it together, and put our individual capacities into collective action, the greater our chances of success.
We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.
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