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October 28 - November 10, 2018
The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.
If you do pray, all bets are off. You can live with holy anticipation because you never know how or when or where God is going to answer, but I promise you this: He will answer. And His answers are not limited by your requests.
God has the ability to answer the prayers we should have prayed but lacked the knowledge or ability to even ask.
Don’t just read the Bible. Start circling the promises. Don’t just make a wish. Write down a list of God-glorifying life goals. Don’t just pray. Keep a prayer journal.
success is living life with such authentic integrity that those who know me best actually respect me most.
Most of us don’t get what we want because we don’t know what we want. Here’s our secondary problem: Most of us don’t get what we want because we quit circling. We give up too easily. We give up too soon. We quit praying right before the miracle happens.
“I feel like I’ve never prayed before.” I felt like he knew God in a way that I didn’t, and it challenged me to get closer to God.
I wonder if that’s how the disciples felt when they asked Jesus to teach them to pray. His prayers were so qualitatively different that they felt like they had never prayed before.
But if you want God to do something new in your life, you can’t do the same old thing. It will involve more sacrifice, but if you are willing to go there, you’ll realize that you didn’t sacrifice anything at all. It will involve more risk, but if you are willing to go there, you’ll realize that you didn’t risk anything at all. Make the sacrifice. Take the risk.
Disappointment is like dream defibrillation. If we respond to it the right way, disappointment can actually restore our prayer rhythm and resurrect our dreams.
even if God doesn’t answer the way you want, you still need to praise through. That is when it’s most difficult to praise God, but that is also when our praise is most pure and most pleasing to God.
The more you pray the bigger your dreams will become. And the bigger your dreams become the more you will have to pray.
work like it depends on us and pray like it depends on God.
we shouldn’t seek answers as much as we should seek God.
If you seek answers you won’t find them, but if you seek God, the answers will find you.
There comes a point after you have prayed through that you need to let go and let God. How? By resisting the temptation to manufacture your own answer to your own prayer.
Sometimes the power of prayer is the power to carry on. It doesn’t always change your circumstances, but it gives you the strength to walk through them.
Is prayer any different? It is a habit to be cultivated. It is a discipline to be developed. It is a skill to be practiced.
What do you do when you feel like God is answering everyone’s prayers but yours?
The hard thing about praying hard is letting God do the heavy lifting. You have to trust the favor of God to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. You have to trust God to change hearts, even the heart of Pharaoh.
part of praying hard is persisting in prayer even when we don’t get the answer we want. It’s choosing to believe that God has a better plan. And He always does!
Because we are surrounded by technologies that make our lives faster and easier, we tend to think about spiritual realities in those terms. But almost all spiritual realities in Scripture are described in longer and harder agricultural terms. We want things to happen at the speed of light instead of the speed of a seed planted in the ground. We want our dreams to become reality overnight. We want our prayers answered immediately, if not sooner. But the key to dreaming big and praying hard is thinking long. Instead of thinking in terms of time, we must think in terms of eternity. Instead of
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One dimension of thinking long is thinking different, and prayer is the key to both. Prayer doesn’t just change circumstances; more important, it changes us. It doesn’t just alter external realities; it alters internal realities so that we see with spiritual eyes. It gives us peripheral vision. It corrects our nearsightedness. It enables us to see beyond our circumstances, beyond ourselves, beyond time.
The book of love is long and boring … It’s full of charts and facts and figures … But I love it when you read to me.
Praying through is long and boring, but it is the price you pay for miracles.
Prayer isn’t something we do with our eyes closed; we pray with our eyes wide-open. Prayer isn’t a sentence that begins with “Dear Jesus” and ends with “Amen.” In fact, the best prayer doesn’t even involve words at all; the best prayer is a life well lived. All of life is meant to be a prayer, just as all of life is meant to be an act of worship.
We try to call Him to mind at least one second of each minute. We do not need to forget other things nor stop our work, but we invite Him to share everything we do or say or think. Hundreds of us have experimented until we have found ways to let Him share every minute of our waking hours.
