How to Pray Quotes

“The best bit of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“But I am learning to understand that I may never fully understand. I am learning to be a bit more okay with not being okay. Life sometimes hurts, but I’ve discovered that deleting God from the equation doesn’t actually help. It merely removes all meaning and morality from the mess and all real hope from the future. And so I’m sort of stuck with God, even when I don’t understand him. Even when I don’t completely like him. Turns out he is all I’ve got. And maybe this is where hallowing actually begins.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Prayer is more than a lighted candle,’ insists the theologian George A. Buttrick. ‘It is the contagion of health. It is the pulse of Life.’23 A real relationship with God means walking with him daily, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It means talking with him intimately, like Moses with whom ‘The Lord would speak … face to face, as one speaks to a friend.’24 And it means listening attentively to his voice because, as Jesus said, ‘My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.’25”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them. MATTHEW”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own personal agenda. To stop talking at God long enough to focus on the wonder of who he actually is. To ‘be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him’.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Miracle is just a word we use for the things The Powers have deluded us into thinking that God is unable to do. (Walter Wink)”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything but the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If God wants it to, my life will be useful through my word and witness. If he wants it to, my life will bear fruit through my prayers and sacrifices. But the usefulness of my life is his concern, not mine. It would be indecent of me to worry about that.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“A Christian who prays only when they feel like it may survive but they will never thrive. Their vast, innate potential will be stunted because grace needs a little space to take root between the cracks of a person’s life.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton says: ‘God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Archbishop Justin Welby says, the Lord’s Prayer is ‘simple enough to be memorised by small children, and yet profound enough to sustain a whole lifetime of prayer’.6”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“The best bit of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up. You’ve got to keep it simple so that the most natural thing in the world doesn’t become complicated, weird and intense. You’ve got to keep it real because when life hurts like hell you’re going to be tempted to pretend you’re fine. And then at other times, when you make a mess of things, you’re going to be tempted to hide from God (which never really works) and end up hiding from yourself (which works quite well). And you’ve got to keep it up because life is tough, the battle is fierce, and God is not an algorithm. The journey of faith demands a certain bloody-mindedness of us all, not least in the realm of prayer.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“(See Toolshed: How to Fast.)”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Several years after the war, Corrie ten Boom was speaking about her experiences in Munich, when one of her former S.S. guards approached her at the end of the church service. ‘“How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,” he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. ‘Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? “Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.” I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. “Jesus,” I prayed, “I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.” As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Life sometimes hurts like hell but I’ve discovered that deleting God from the equation doesn’t actually help. It merely removes all meaning and morality from the mess, and all real hope from the future”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“remember to P.R.A.Y.! More than anything else, this simple acronym is the thing that will help you grow in prayer. ‘Pause’. Remember that crazed greyhound pursued by the bistro chair? Try to ‘be still and know’ God (Ps. 46:10). ‘Rejoice … always’ (Phil. 4:4). Remember my son Daniel’s scribbled prayers? Your Father in heaven loves you, knows you, and interprets your heart perfectly. Give him thanks! ‘Ask and it will be given to you’ (Matt. 7:7). Remember George Müller praying for daily bread? Ask the Father for everything from peace in the Middle East to parking spaces. ‘Yield’. Offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness’ (Rom. 6:13). Remember those Thai boys trapped in the cave? Wait and trust for the light and hope to come.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“He is slow: we are swift and precipitate. It is because we are but for a time, and He has been from eternity. Thus grace for the most part acts slowly. . . . He works by little and by little. . . . There is something greatly overawing in the extreme slowness of God. Let it overshadow our souls, but let it not disquiet them. . . . We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and the lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and He will come.[”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Like an eagle soaring, a horse galloping, or a salmon leaping, worship is the thing God designed you to do.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“One of the main differences between you and God is that God doesn’t think he’s you!”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Sit in thy cell and thy cell will teach thee all. ABBA MOSES”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. BLAISE PASCAL”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. . . . By means of our intercessions we veritably cast fire upon the earth and trumpet the future into being. WALTER WINK, THE POWERS THAT BE”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Oswald Chambers says, “The real business of your life as a saved soul is intercessory prayer. . . . Prayer does not fit us for the greater works; prayer is the greater work.”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.’9”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“ourselves to the will of God, not just when it makes”
― Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People