daily thots on prayer - March 1-7

Rebecca at Rebecca Writes has declared March a month to focus on prayer at her blog. Kim at The Upward Call will also be posting on that subject. I would like to make it a Canadian threesome.

I own a wonderful book called Prayer Powerpoints - a collection of quotes on prayer. Every day this month, I will post a new quote on prayer from that book.

• March 7

Prayer is like any other work; we may not feel like working, but once we have been at it for a bit, we begin to feel like working.

- Richard Foster (The Celebration of Discipline, 1978)

• March 6

Why cannot an omniopotent God, knowing our needs, supply them without waiting for our prayers? He could, of course, but that is not His plan for His children on earth. Instead He has dared to arrange it so that He is actually dependent upon us in the sense of prayers being necessary and all-important to the carrying out of His will on earth.

- Catherine Marshall (The Helper , 1978)

• March 5

I am often praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.

-- C. S. Lewis (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 1963)

• March 4

We're under instructions to change the world. Once you have been rescued from it, you'll need power to become a threat to it. The world which contained you in its grasp until now will not release its hold on others without a fight. Power is the key to victory, and prayer is the pathway to power.

- Jack Hayford (from Prayer is Invading the Impossible)

• March 3

"Intercession is truly universal work for the Christian. No place is closed to intercessory prayer. No continent -- no nation--no organization--no city--no office. There is no power on earth that can keep intercession out."

-Richard Halverson ("Intercessors for America Newsletter," 1986)

• March 2:
  

Get out your atlas and your National Geographic and a good newspaper and start praying for the basic needs of people so much more desperate than most of us. Let your heart be broken for a world in need. Stretch yourself to reach out beyond your own requirements. And make sure that you are ready to help meet needs when God wants to use you. For prayer is never meant to be a substitute for action and action always needs the stabilizing influence of prayer.

- Bryan Jeffrey Leech (from an unpublished article "The Lord’s Prayer," 1992)

• March 1:
  

It’s so easy to promise to pray for people or just plan to pray for people, and forget. So many afflictions, so many tragedies or desperate hopes that cry out for intercession. Only an instant of my time, only a few minutes, a thought – and who knows? It may be the only word of prayer that person will get."

– Marjorie Holmes (How Can I Find God?, 1975)