Today the Lord spoke to my heart again concerning the matter of prayer.  When I think of prayer I think: what a great privilege!  Then I think…what a great failure!  My greatest opportunity is my greatest neglect.

Today’s chapel speaker at Crown College, Pastor Steve Kilpatrick, said something that helped me to see my lack of prayer as God sees it.  “Prayerlessness is the pinnacle of pride.  When we fail to pray we essentially say to God, I can handle this on my own.”  So convicting.

As I wrote this quote in my Bible, I was reminded of so many prayer truths that I have heard through the years.  God has used them again and again to stir me to pray.

• “All of our failures are prayer failures.”  – John R. Rice
• “If I could hear Jesus praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a thousand enemies.  Yet the distance makes no difference.  He is praying for me.”  – Robert Murray McCheyne
• “If ever there was a time to pray, it is when you don’t feel like praying.”
• “You can go anywhere in the world from your home…in prayer.”  Clarence Sexton
• “Prayer is not getting man’s will done on earth; it is getting God’s will done in heaven.”
• “Where we have a tent, God must have an altar.”  – Matthew Henry
• “You can do more than pray after you’ve prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”  – John Bunyan
• “Those who have left the deepest impression on this sin-cursed earth have been men and women of prayer.”  – D.L. Moody

It is not hard to find great quotes on prayer.  Read E.M. Bounds.  Read Leonard Ravenhill.  It is hard to live those truths.  May God raise up an army of true pray-ers in our generation.  May God help me to be one of them.

In the end, my favorite prayer quote comes straight from the mind and mouth of God, “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” (Jeremiah 33:3).  It doesn’t get any better than that!  A divine principle and a divine promise.  Let’s do more than quote it.  Let’s live it.