- A changed world begins with us … and a changed us begins when we pray.
- In order to be effective, prayer has to be the first thing we do, not the last.
- No need for hurry if you’re confident in who you are in God.
- Pastors must pay attention to God and then lead others to pay attention to God.
- Prayer and poetry are the closest of kin. In poetry we say it; in prayer we become what we say.
- Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.
- Prayer is never the first word; it is always the second word. God has the first word.
- Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.
- Prayer is the way we work our way out of the comfortable but cramped world of self and into the spacious world of God.
- Prayer: ‘a subversive activity [that] involves a more or less open act of defiance against any claim by the current regime.
- Praying most often doesn’t get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests.
- Talk in prayer is essential but it is also partial. Silence is essential.
- The cure of souls is Scripture directed and prayer shaped.
- The goal of reading the Word is to listen for the voice of the God who speaks.
- The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.
- The reason why our prayers so often fall flat or come out “stale” is because they have been “uprooted from the soil of the word of God.
- The task is not to get God to do something I think needs done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can participate in it.
- Waiting in prayer is a disciplined refusal to act before God acts.
- The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world.
- How can I lead people into the quiet place beside still waters if I am in constant motion?
– Eugene PetersonFor more wisdom from Eugene Peterson, check out some of these books: