"Sensing the carelessness and one-sidedness of our prayers, we start to feel guilty about praying. Guilt leads to faint-heartedness and that in turn leads to prayerlessness."

"If Christ's followers aren't growing, it is because they are not making a habit of evaluating their lives. They don't step back and ask, "What's working and what's not working?""

"I soon began writing out my whole prayer and reading it back to God. Previously I'd get no further than "Dear God" and I'd already be thinking of the person I was going to meet for lunch or the board meeting agenda or what my family members and I would be doing later that evening. But when I began to move pen across paper, it became much easier to remain focused."

"The Lord's Prayer is an excellent model, but it was never intended to be a magical incantation to get God's attention. Jesus gave this prayer as a pattern to suggest the variety of elements that should be included when we pray."

"The key is to practice praying - and to practice praying regularly, privately, sincerely and specifically."

"Don't let your prayers turn into a wish list for Santa Claus. Worship God and praise him when you come to him in prayer."

"I can write about prayer, you can read about prayer...but sooner or later you have to fall to your knees and just plain pray. Then, and only then, will you begin to operate in the vein of God's miracle-working ways."

"Confession is probably the most neglected area of personal prayer."

"God-honoring prayers are not simply shopping lists. They are more than cries for help, strength, mercy and miracles. Authentic prayer should include worship, submission, requests, and confessions."

"People who are serious about something always make room for it in their schedules. If prayer is important to you, then you'll find time to do it."

"God doesn't want us to pile up impressive phrases. He doesn't want us to use words without thinking about their meaning. He wants us to talk to him as to a friend or father - authentically, reverently, personally, earnestly."

"When we make a habit of prayer, we stay constantly tuned to God's presence and open to receive his blessings."

"Don't ask God to bless junk food and miraculously transform it so that it has nutritional value. That's not how God works."

"God isn't interested in stock phrases. Talk to him. Talk to the Father sincerely."

"Our spirits, like our bodies, have requirements for health and growth. Some people don't want to pay the price of developing good spiritual habits."

"Busyness is the unrivaled archenemy of spiritual authenticity."

"A key ingredient in authentic Christianity is time. Not leftover time, not throwaway time, but quality time. Time for contemplation, meditation and reflection. Unhurried, uninterrupted time."

"Authentic Christians are persons who stand apart from others. Their character seems deeper, their ideas fresher, their spirit softer, their courage greater, their leadership stronger, their concerns wider, their compassion more genuine and their convictions more concrete."

"If your life is rushing in many directions at once, you are incapable of the kind of deep, unhurried prayer that is vital to the Christian walk."

"Most of us are far too busy for our own spiritual good."

"Authentic Christianity is a supernatural walk with a living, dynamic, communicating God."

"The heart and soul of the Christian life is learning to hear God's voice and then developing the courage to do what he asks us to do."

"Creating planets didn't seem to be much of a problem for God. Neither was raising the dead. Nothing is too difficult for God to handle, but we won't see much proof of this until we actually ask him to handle it."

"Never forget that if you are God's child through Jesus Christ, you are praying to a Father who couldn't love you more than he already does."

"When I lump all my sins together and confess them en masse, I neglect to feel the pain or embarrassment or shame that should be elicited in me."

"The reality is that our God is good. It's in his nature to be good; it's who he is--a giving God, a blessing God, an encouraging God, a nurturing God, an empowering God, a loving God. This is the God who willingly waits for your call."

"Keep on praying because the Father does listen. He loves our company, he wants us to endure in prayerfulness and he is eager to do whatever is best for us."

"If you really want to be a rebel get a job, cut your grass, read your bible, and shut up. Because no one is doing that."

"A pacifist has a lot of difficulty reconciling pacifism with scripture."

"Everyone is sinning, so it's no longer rebellious to sin. You're just a conformist if you're drunk; and naked; driving around in a loud motorcycle; smoking cigarrettes; breaking commandments; getting pregnant out of wedlock. Everyone's done that. That's so tired!"

"I'll preach anywhere. If it's a round trip ticket to preach in hell, I'll take it—as long as it's round trip."

"I study the Bible all week, pray to the Lord, and then I speak from my heart. It's all about brutal honesty."

"…the truths of Christianity are constant, unchanging, and meant for all people, times, and places. But the methods by which truth is articulated and practiced must be culturally appropriated, and therefore constantly translated …if doctrine is constant and practice is constantly changing, the result is living orthodoxy."

"You have been told that God is a loving, gracious, merciful, kind, compassionate, wonderful, and good sky fairy who runs a day care in the sky and has a bucket of suckers for everyone because we're all good people. That is a lie... God looks down and says 'I hate you, you are my enemy, and I will crush you,' and we say that is deserved, right and just, and then God says 'Because of Jesus I will love you and forgive you.' This is a miracle."

"Ultimately I think the difference between reading the Bible and studying it is making the connections between who Jesus is and what he's done."

"It is imperative that Christians be like Jesus, by living freely within the culture as missionaries who are as faithful to the Father and His gospel as Jesus was in His own time and place."

"Our communion with Christ is not on a level of our common humanity, but we rise in it; we scale the heavens where He sitteth at the right hand of God; we send our longings up and ask to have attachments knit to Him; to be set in deepest, holiest, and most practical affinity with Him; and so to live a life that is hid with Christ in God. In such a life, we become partakers of His holiness, and, in the separating grace of that, partakers also of His power."

"As long as we abide in Christ, our action is from Him, not from our own corrupt and broken nature."

"The reason why those who are converted to Christ often make so poor a work of rectifying their old habits, is that they lay down their work in the very places where it needs to be prosecuted most carefully, that is, in their common employments. They do not live to God in that which is least."

"We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there."

"Be an observer of providence; for God is showing you ever, by the way in which He leads you, whither He means to lead. Study your trials, your talents, the world's wants, and stand ready to serve God now, in whatever He brings to your hand."

"We shall never recover the true apostolic energy, and be endued with power from on high, as the first disciples were, 'till we recover the lost faith."

"However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud, in that pure empyrean where God dwells, to irradiate every darkness of this world; light enough to clear every difficult question, remove every ground of obscurity, conquer every atheistic suspicion, silence every hard judgment, light enough to satisfy, nay, to ravish the mind forever."

"We come, in our trust, unto God, and the moment we so embrace Him, by committing our total being and eternity to Him, we find every thing is transformed. There is life in us from God; a kind of Christ-consciousness is opened in us, testifying with the apostle,— Christ liveth in me."

"If you could once get away, my friends, from that sense of mediocrity and nothingness to which you are shut up, under the stupor of your self-seeking and your sin, how easy would it be for you to believe! Nay, if but some faintest suspicion could steal into you of what your soul is, and the tremendous evils working in it, nothing but the mystery of Christ's death and passion would be sufficient for you."

"O, if we could tear aside the vail, and see for but one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be!"

"Faith is the act of trust by which one being, a sinner, commits himself to another being, a Saviour."