Prayer is always essential, but thought is essential, too, because prayer can be just an escape mechanism, almost at times a cry in the dark by people who are desperate and defeated. Prayer must be intelligent, and it is only to those who realize that their bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost that the answer will be given and the power will come.Spiritual Depression (173)
If you could be brought once to love secret prayer, and to converse feelingly with God in his word, your heaven will begin on earth; you will enjoy more pleasure than in all manner of riches.
God ordains our prayers as means of receiving what he plans to give, all to enrich our relationship to him. As the perfect Father of his children, he reserves the right to answer the requests we should have made rather than those we actually made when we have asked for the wrong thing; but he will take action one way or another in every situation of need that we bring before him. Systematic Theology A Lecture
A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.
What is the reason that many professors are no more holy and humble, but waspish and peevish and harsh, and of a rugged disposition, but because they have not studied the gospel more
Do you pray? One of the things that happens in your prayer life is if you think that you gotta earn the favor of God you'll never be a prayer. If you understand the favour of God was granted you in Jesus Christ you'll have a tendency to run to Christ and not from him.Rezweek 2010 Night 1
the Sabbath day is our market day, and then after we have bought our market on the Sabbath, we should roast it by meditation on the week. We do not go to the market on the market day to buy meat into the house only for the market day but for all the time until the market day comes about again. Indeed, Solomon says of the sluggard that he is so sluggish and slothful that "he doth not roast what he hath taken in hunting." The Sabbath day is the hunting day for souls wherein the venison is taken; on the weekday we are to roast it and to live upon it by meditation and otherwise. And what is the reason that many do not live upon their venison that they have taken on the Lord's Day? But because they do not roast it by meditation on the weekday.
As a body without a soul, much wood without fire, a bullet in a gun without powder, so are words in prayer without spirit.Commentary on Old/New Testaments 5 - 334
If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.Disciplines of a Godly man
When a man's mind is empty, as in temptation and want of comfort, it is empty of Christ and full of fear. Then it grinds itself, as in a quern or mill when empty of corn, one stone grinds another. The more full a man's mind is, the more free from temptations and fears. Now Scripture matter is the most filling matter.
Prayer is the arrow and faith is the bow by which our requests go up to heaven. A faithless prayer is a fruitless prayer: The father of the child cried out and said with tears, "Lord, I believe." When his tear dropped to the earth, his faith reached heaven.