Philip Yancey Quotes

Christ remains primary in your life only when he enjoys the first place in your mind and heart. Thus you must continuously unite yourself to him in prayer.... Without prayer there can be no joy, no hope, no peace. For prayer is what keeps us in touch with Christ.

Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ("your Father knows what you need before you ask him"). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.

Only in prayer can we learn to love God with all our heart, mind and soul.

It is through our prayers, through our acts of faith that God works in partnership with us.

The purpose of prayer is the alignment of the mind with the thoughts and the will of God.

You might get up in the morning and do your devotions and say a few prayers and there you go. You think you've done your connecting for the day. But you don't know how to wait before the Lord and really stop and hear from the Lord or dig deeper and walk throughout the day with the Lord. It's like sending a quick Tweet or checking your Facebook page real quick. "Hey Lord, what's going on?" But you're missing the intimacy of, "Be still and know that I am God."

There are two principal points of attention necessary for the preservation of this constant spirit of prayer which unites us with God; we must continually seek to cherish it, and we must avoid everything that tends to make us lose it.

If He has said much about prayer, it is because He knows we have much need of it.

It is a tremendously hard thing to pray aright, yea, it is verily the science of all sciences.

Of all the duties enjoined by Christianity none is more essential and yet more neglected than prayer.

For me, in my Christian belief, prayer is not an opportunity to manipulate God into doing what you want him to. Prayer is an opportunity to have a conversation with God to try to get in tune with what his will is.

If you don't hear His voice so let Him hear yours. When prayers go up blessings descend.

Nine times out of ten, declension from God begins in the neglect of private prayer.

The most important lesson we can learn is how to pray. Prayers do not die, prayers live before God, and God's heart is set on them.

All right prayer has good effect, but if you give your whole life to the prayer you multiply its power... No one really knows the full power of prayer. Of course, there is a relationship between prayer and action. Receptive prayer result in an inner receiving, which motivates to right action.

The goal of prayer is the ear of God.

Why God has instituted Prayer:— To communicate to his creatures the dignity of causation.

Prayer must carry on our work as much as preaching; he preacheth not heartily to his people that will not pray for them.

It is not possible to engage in the direct apostolate without being a soul of prayer. We must be aware of oneness with Christ, as he was aware of oneness with his Father. Our activity is truly apostolic only insofar as we permit him to work in us and through us with his power, with his desire, with his love.

The ultimate goal for me in prayer is to draw near to God...to fall in step with him...to discern his will so that my life might be lived accordingly...to discover what burdens are on his heart that I might take them into my own heart, then pray them back to him.

It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting.

I felt very close to God.... My friends say that's because I was always on my knees.

Nothing is more vital than prayer in Christian existence, and few things are more vulnerable to neglect.

Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness.

Are our lives truly filled with the presence of God? How many things take the place of God in my life each day?