Prayer Quotes

“To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Prayer turns theology into experience.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“C. S. Lewis argues that it takes a community of people to get to know an individual person. Reflecting on his own friendships, he observed that some aspects of one of his friend’s personality were brought out only through interaction with a second friend. That meant if he lost the second friend, he lost the part of his first friend that was otherwise invisible. “By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”221 If it takes a community to know an ordinary human being, how much more necessary would it be to get to know Jesus alongside others? By praying with friends, you will be able to hear and see facets of Jesus that you have not yet perceived.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“God will either give us what we ask for in prayer, or give us what we would have asked for if we knew everything he knows.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“If we can’t say “thy will be done” from the bottom of our hearts, we will never know any peace. We will feel compelled to try to control people and control our environment and make things the way we believe they ought to be.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle—yet the way to reality. There is nothing more important, or harder, or richer, or more life-altering. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule—it is a failure to treat God as God.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“If we give priority to the outer life, our inner life will be dark and scary. We will not know what to do with solitude. We will be deeply uncomfortable with self-examination, and we will have an increasingly short attention span for any kind of reflection. Even more seriously, our lives will lack integrity. Outwardly, we will need to project confidence, spiritual and emotional health and wholeness, while inwardly we may be filled with self-doubts, anxieties, self-pity, and old grudges.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking, when nothing is forcing you to think about anything in particular.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“We should not decide how to pray based on the experiences and feelings we want. Instead, we should do everything possible to behold our God as he is, and prayer will follow.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“All [true] prayer, pursued far enough, becomes praise. Any prayer, no matter how desperate its origin, no matter how angry and fearful the experiences it traverses, ends up in praise.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“If, as we are meditating or praying, “an abundance of good thoughts comes to us, we ought to disregard the other petitions, make room for such thoughts, listen in silence, and under no circumstances obstruct them. The Holy Spirit himself preaches here, and one word of his sermon is better than a thousand of our prayers. Many times I have learned more from one prayer than I might have learned from much reading and speculation.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Eugene Peterson reminds us that “because we learned language so early in our lives we have no memory of the process” and would therefore imagine that it was we who took the initiative to learn how to speak. However, that is not the case. “Language is spoken into us; we learn language only as we are spoken to. We are plunged at birth into a sea of language. . . . Then slowly syllable by syllable we acquire the capacity to answer: mama, papa, bottle, blanket, yes, no. Not one of these words was a first word. . . . All speech is answering speech. We were all spoken to before we spoke.”109 In the years since Peterson wrote, studies have shown that children’s ability to understand and communicate is profoundly affected by the number of words and the breadth of vocabulary to which they are exposed as infants and toddlers. We speak only to the degree we are spoken to. It is therefore essential to the practice of prayer to recognize what Peterson calls the “overwhelming previousness of God’s speech to our prayers.”110 This theological principle has practical consequences. It means that our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture. We should “plunge ourselves into the sea” of God’s language, the Bible. We should listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the Scriptures until there is an answering response in our hearts and minds. It may be one of shame or of joy or of confusion or of appeal—but that response to God’s speech is then truly prayer and should be given to God. If the goal of prayer is a real, personal connection with God, then it is only by immersion in the language of the Bible that we will learn to pray, perhaps just as slowly as a child learns to speak.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“We are never as thankful as we should be. When good things come to us, we do everything possible to tell ourselves we accomplished that or at least deserve it. We take the credit. And when our lives simply are going along pretty smoothly, without a lot of difficulties, we don’t live in quiet, amazed, thankful consciousness of it. In the end, we not only rob God of the glory due him, but the assumption that we are keeping our lives going robs us of the joy and relief that constant gratitude to an all-powerful God brings.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“We are as strictly and solemnly commanded to pray as in the others . . . not to kill, not to steal, etc.”165 We must pray whether we feel like it or not.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“First, I took several months to go through the Psalms, summarizing each one. That enabled me to begin praying through the Psalms regularly, getting through all of them several times a year.27 The second thing I did was always to put in a time of meditation as a transitional discipline between my Bible reading and my time of prayer. Third, I did all I could to pray morning and evening rather than only in the morning. Fourth, I began praying with greater expectation.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“God has always had within himself a perfect friendship. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are adoring one another, giving glorifying love to one another, and delighting in one another. We know of no joy higher than being loved and loving in return, but a triune God would know that love and joy in unimaginable, infinite dimensions. God is, therefore, infinitely, profoundly happy, filled with perfect joy—not some abstract tranquility but the fierce happiness of dynamic loving relationships. Knowing this God is not to get beyond emotions or thoughts but to be filled with glorious love and joy. If God did not need to create other beings in order to know love and happiness, then why did he do so? Jonathan Edwards argues, in A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, that the only reason God would have had for creating us was not to get the cosmic love and joy of relationship (because he already had that) but to share it.138 Edwards shows how it is completely consistent for a triune God—who is “other-oriented” in his very core, who seeks glory only to give it to others—to communicate happiness and delight in his own divine perfections and beauty to others.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“The choice is ours. If we want to be sure to experience this vision by sight hereafter, we must know it by faith now. If we want freedom from being driven by fear, ambition, greed, lust, addictions, and inner emptiness, we must learn how to meditate on Christ until his glory breaks in upon our souls.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“we cannot truly know God better without coming at the same time to know ourselves better. It also works the other way around. If I am in denial about my own weakness and sin, there will be a concomitant blindness to the greatness and glory of God. There is no greater example of this than Isaiah, who when he was given a vision in the temple of the holiness of God, said immediately in response, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Is 6:5). It was because he’d seen the king in a new way that he saw himself in a new way. They must go together. If we are not open to the recognition of our smallness and sinfulness, we will never take in his greatness and holiness.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Jonathan Edwards wrote a sermon with the following outline:342 Our bad things will turn out for good (Rom 8:28), Our good things can never be taken away from us (Ps 4:6–7), and The best things are yet to come (1 Cor 2:9). If,”
― Timothy J. Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God.131”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“It is remarkable that in all of his writings Paul’s prayers for his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“meditate on the passage: Write down answers to the following questions: What does this text show me about God for which I should praise or thank him? What does the text show me about my sin that I should confess and repent of? What false attitudes, behavior, emotions, or idols come alive in me whenever I forget this truth? What does the text show me about a need that I have? What do I need to do or become in light of this? How shall I petition God for it? How is Jesus Christ or the grace that I have in him crucial to helping me overcome the sin I have confessed or to answering the need I have? Finally: How would this change my life if I took it seriously—if this truth were fully alive and effective in my inward being? Also, why might God be showing this to me now? What is going on in my life that he would be bringing this to my attention today?”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“We must not decide how to pray based on what types of prayer are the most effective for producing the experiences and feelings we want.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Even more seriously, our lives will lack integrity. Outwardly, we will need to project confidence, spiritual and emotional health and wholeness, while inwardly we may be filled with self-doubts, anxieties, self-pity, and old grudges. Yet we won’t know how to go into the inner rooms of the heart, see clearly what is there, and deal with it. In short, unless we put a priority on the inner life, we turn ourselves into hypocrites.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“If we can’t say “thy will be done” from the bottom of our hearts, we will never know any peace. We will feel compelled to try to control people and control our environment and make things the way we believe they ought to be. Yet to control life like this is beyond our abilities, and we will just dash ourselves upon the rocks. This is why Calvin adds that to pray “thy will be done” is to submit not only our wills to God but even our feelings, so that we do not become despondent, bitter, and hardened by the things that befall us.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“There are many ways to cover up our sin. We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and other people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God