Wrestling Prayer Quotes

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God cannot honor anything, no matter its degree of sincerity, if it is contrary to His Word.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
If you don't pray often, you won't gain a love for praying. Prayer is work, and therefore it is not very appealing to our natural sensibilities. But the simple rule for prayer is this: Begin praying and your taste for prayer will increase. The more you pray, the more you will acquire the desire for prayer, the energy for prayer, and the sense of purpose in prayer.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
We have to pray as the ancients prayed. We are women now, not children, and are expected to pray with maturity. The words most often used to describe urgent, prayerful labor are wrestle, plead, cry, and hunger...In some sense, prayer may be the hardest work we will ever be engaged in, and perhaps it should be.
Patricia T. Holland (A Quiet Heart)
We mustn't claim to stand for our King but then deny Him by living a fleshly existence. Our King's Mighties don't shy away from the blazing searchlight of God's Word, but rather, willingly expose their souls and cry, 'Dear King, if there be anything that stands between You and me, if there be anything that shrouds Your glory, if there be anything that will weaken my sword in battle, purge it, slay it, utterly destroy it!
Eric Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
And the flesh is that reprehensible preference for self that lurks within every one of our hearts. It is that base and selfish instinct to preserve our own interests at the expense of God's interests. It's devious, it's deceitful, it's self-indulgent. It's interested only in selfish comfort and will happily crucify Christ afresh to secure it. God also has another name for it- sin.
Eric Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
God made me a girl. And He did that on purpose. But He asks me to become the kind of girl who is actually useful to His kingdom purposes. I need to become the sort of girl who is unafraid to poke my head into the battle of the ages and cry out, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine who is blaspheming the armies of the living God?” God wants me to wrestle. God wants to stick grit in my girliness. He wants me to be prepared to tangle, to interlock my soul in this eternal combat—- not with other girls, not with sweaty boys, but with Him, and with the otherworldly powers of darkness. He wants me to wrestle in prayer, to grab ahold of His great and precious promises and fight to see them unfurled in living reality on this Earth.
Leslie Ludy
But if there was ever a time for us to go to extremes for our God, it is now. The truth of the gospel is being diluted, dumbed down, and trampled upon by the very ones entrusted to keep it sacred and whole. It may seem 'unnecessary' to get on your knees for multiple hours each and every day, but, may I remind you that unless someone rises up and says, 'Lord, I'm willing to travail,' there are lives, promises, and spiritual realities that will not be born into our day and age. Effectual, fervent prayer is how God changes this world and bestows upon it the beauty, grace and power that He purchased at the cross.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
There is no power like that of prevailing prayer - of Abraham pleading for Sodom, Jacob wrestling in the stillness of the night, Moses standing in the breach, Hannah intoxicated with sorrow, David heartbroken with remorse and grief, Jesus in sweat and blood. Add to this list from the records of the church your personal observation and experience, and always there is cost of passion unto blood. Such prayer prevails. It turns ordinary mortals into men of power. It brings power. It brings fire. It brings rain. It brings life. It brings God.
Samuel Chadwick
The inner throne of man is both what the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of Lucifer are after. And when this throne is yielded to the Almighty God, a man enters upon the sacred path of greatness right then and there...The destiny of a human soul depends entirely on who sits upon the throne of that soul...when the flesh is removed from its position of power, the human soul is made ready to usher in the glory of its true and rightful King
Eric Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
Don’t ever discount the cry of your heart. God may be working in your heart to bring about his sovereign plan.
K. Howard Joslin (Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life)
But lament is different. The practice of lament—the kind that is biblical, honest, and redemptive—is not as natural for us, because every lament is a prayer. A statement of faith. Lament is the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God’s goodness.
Mark Vroegop (Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament)
Ann prayed because of a gut-wrenching, throbbing pain in her soul. She urgently begged the Lord for her life.
K. Howard Joslin (Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life)
It seems to me that we spend most of our spiritual energies trying to explain why the God of Elijah, Samson, David, and Paul seems to have lost His muscle in our modern age. Did He grow tired of performing heroics? Did He wax feeble after all these years of running this whole universal show? Could it be true that God has really lost His muscle? Maybe it would be more accurate to say God lost His men.
Eric Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
I don't believe there is such a thing as unanswered prayer. There is misguided prayers, selfish prayers, and doubting prayers, but true prayer doesn't go unanswered - it is merely abandoned prematurely due to lack of persistence and faithful endurance.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
Shabbat comes with its own holiness; we enter not simply a day, but an atmosphere. My father cites the Zohar: the Sabbath is the name of God. We are within the Sabbath rather than the Sabbath being within us. For my father, the question is how to perceive that holiness: not how much to observe, but how to observe. Strict adherence to the laws regulating Sabbath observance doesn’t suffice; the goal is creating the Sabbath as a foretaste of paradise. The Sabbath is a metaphor for paradise and a testimony to God’s presence; in our prayers, we anticipate a messianic era that will be a Sabbath, and each Shabbat prepares us for that experience: “Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.” It was on the seventh day that God gave the world a soul, and “[the world’s] survival depends upon the holiness of the seventh day.” The task, he writes, becomes how to convert time into eternity, how to fill our time with spirit: “Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.
Abraham Joshua Heschel (The Sabbath)
No matter how outlandishly audacious your prayers might sound in your own ears, they are nothing in light of God's willingness and ability to answer.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
We all wrestle with our innerself. It takes grace to find our soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
DeeDee had to have a firm grasp on reality. Yet she knew God was bigger than a pathology report. So she prayed.
K. Howard Joslin (Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life)
God did not reveal every final detail for a reason. He rarely does. If He did, then we would be justified in simply waiting for the Antichrist to come and get us. We would be entirely justified in digging holes in the ground as secret hideouts to store our survival food. But instead, God desires us to actually wrestle with Him in prayer, not only for our own souls and those of our families, but also for the very nations that we live in and call home.
Joel Richardson (The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth about the Real Nature of the Beast)
By becoming aware of God’s Spirit, by slowing down and paying attention to the tastes and sounds and smells of the food we make and eat, we infuse our meals—and by extension our hearts—with a sense of awe, a depth of prayer that cannot help but transform our mindless eating into moving meditations.
Mary DeTurris Poust (Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God)
All that the saints say is a prayer to God; their whole prayer and supplication a strong wrestling for the pity of God, so that we, who by our own strength and zeal cannot be saved, may be preserved by His mercy.
Jerome (The Complete Works of Saint Jerome (13 Books): Cross-Linked to the Bible)
People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists. “…And yet,” he whispered, “The janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers…” What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks. I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me. “The irony,” he said, “… is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me than it’s ever been before. What’s the line? ‘Was blind but now I see…’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought…said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message… That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.” “I know what you mean,” I said. His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.” “I’m not afraid. It’s more like…” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened. “I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)
We must each of us do our home work. 'My people are destroyed,' said Hosea, 'for lack of knowledge.' We must be wise as serpents; for as the Apostle Paul said, We wrestle against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in high places. We are going through what J. Reuben Clark once termed the greatest propaganda campaign of all time. We cannot believe all we read, and what we can believe is not all of genuine value. We must sift. We must learn by study and prayer. Study the scriptures and study the mortals who have been most consistently accurate about the most important things. When your freedom is at stake, your information best be accurate.
Ezra Taft Benson
If the Letter to the Hebrews treats the entire Passion as a prayer in which Jesus wrestles with God the Father and at the same time with human nature, it also sheds new light on the theological depth of the Mount of Olives prayer. For these cries and pleas are seen as Jesus’ way of exercising his high priesthood. It is through his cries, his tears, and his prayers that Jesus does what the high priest is meant to do: he holds up to God the anguish of human existence.
Pope Benedict XVI (Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection)
We do not forget to eat: we do not forget to take the shop shutters down: we do not forget to be diligent in business: we do not forget to go to our beds to rest: but we often do forget to wrestle with God in prayer, and to spend, as we ought to spend, long periods in consecrated fellowship with our Father and our God.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Specific praying is the key to building faith
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
Whenever your focus is on doing what you want and making yourself feel good, you can be confident that the Spirit of God is not the one leading the way.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
By prayer we wrestle with God. God's power is to perform.
Lailah Gifty Akita
We don’t know the final outcome, or even know how long the battle will last, but we do know the referee.
K. Howard Joslin (Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life)
I have no guarantee that God will choose to heal Ann, but I know he wants me to pray to that end.
K. Howard Joslin (Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life)
Taken slowly, or mindfully, even eating an orange or a bowl of soup, or a small piece of dark chocolate for that matter, can take on the flavor or prayer.
Mary DeTurris Poust (Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God)
Their prayers impacted the outcome of the fight.
K. Howard Joslin (Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life)
It is not that we don't have confidence in our God to save us from hell; we just don't have confidence in Him to do everything else he has promised to do while we are still on Earth.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
The God-always-answers-prayer sophistry leaves the praying man without discipline. By the exercise of this bit of smooth casuistry he ignores the necessity to live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world, and actually takes God's flat refusal to answer his prayer as the very answer itself. Of course such a man will not grow in holiness; he will never learn how to wrestle and wait; he will never know correction; he will not hear the voice of God calling him forward; he will never arrive at the place where he is morally and spiritually fit to have his prayers answered. His wrong philosophy has ruined him.
A.W. Tozer (Man: The Dwelling Place of God)
When we link our eating and our prayer and begin to see food as part of a much bigger picture, rather than the focal point of our entire lives, we reshape the way we think, the way we act, and the way we interact.
Mary DeTurris Poust (Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God)
We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
Stormie Omartian (The 7-Day Prayer Warrior Experience (Free One-Week Devotional))
Prayer is not supposed to be all we do - it's just supposed to undergird all we do. Prayer is not supposed to be just the first thing we do, but the first, second, fourth, seventh, and final thing we do in each circumstance.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
We can’t afford to be complacent about God’s glory. The fact is that putting your Christian life on autopilot is the same thing as “walking in the flesh.” When we become unaware, when we take something so precious for granted, our prayers become tedious, witnessing becomes dry, jobs become lackluster, and relationships sag under the weight of selfishness. What’s worse, our communion with our Savior and best friend turns into a chore. The Lord Himself seems to lose vitality in our estimation; He becomes little more than a wooden icon in our hearts, a mere measuring rod for our behavior—someone who purchased our salvation once upon a time, someone in whom we believe in a general, distracted sort of way.
Joni Eareckson Tada (A Place of Healing: Wrestling with the Mysteries of Suffering, Pain, and God's Sovereignty)
And he saw a youth approaching, Dressed in garments green and yellow, Coming through the purple twilight, Through the splendor of the sunset; Plumes of green bent o'er his forehead, And his hair was soft and golden. Standing at the open doorway, Long he looked at Hiawatha, Looked with pity and compassion On his wasted form and features, And, in accents like the sighing Of the South-Wind in the tree-tops, Said he, "O my Hiawatha! All your prayers are heard in heaven, For you pray not like the others, Not for greater skill in hunting, Not for greater craft in fishing, Not for triumph in the battle, Nor renown among the warriors, But for profit of the people, For advantage of the nations. "From the Master of Life descending, I, the friend of man, Mondamin, Come to warn you and instruct you, How by struggle and by labor You shall gain what you have prayed for. Rise up from your bed of branches, Rise, O youth, and wrestle with me!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (The Song of Hiawatha)
Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.
David Patterson
The power of God has not in the least bit been diminished over the past 2000 years. Our Lord still sits on His great throne and His train still fills the temple. He still walks on the wings of the wind, He still rides on the backs of the mighty cherubim, and He still is the Triumphant Champion from Calvary. All hell still bends to His will, and sin and death have lost their hold on all who rest in the shadow of His presence. And the God who calmed storms, raised up dead men to life, and multiplied fishes and loaves to feed thousands is the same God we have today.
Eric Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
Even if you can’t be totally mindful at every meal, if you can say a blessing, silently if necessary, or offer up a prayer for someone, something beyond yourself and your food, the prayer helps to transform eating into something that affects not only our hunger at that moment but the greater world.
Mary DeTurris Poust (Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God)
For years of mornings, I have woken wanting to die. Life itself twists into nightmare. For years, I have pulled the covers up over my head, dreading to begin another day I’d be bound to just wreck. Years, I lie listening to the taunt of names ringing off my interior walls, ones from the past that never drifted far and away: Loser. Mess. Failure. They are signs nailed overhead, nailed through me, naming me. The stars are blinking out. Funny, this. Yesterday morning, the morning before, all these mornings, I wake to the discontent of life in my skin. I wake to self-hatred. To the wrestle to get it all done, the relentless anxiety that I am failing. Always, the failing. I yell at children, fester with bitterness, forget doctor appointments, lose library books, live selfishly, skip prayer, complain, go to bed too late, neglect cleaning the toilets. I live tired. Afraid. Anxious. Weary. Years, I feel it in the veins, the pulsing of ruptured hopes. Would I ever be enough, find enough, do enough?
Ann Voskamp (One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are)
There is absolutely no excuse to stay where you are at right now. If you are weak, He can make you strong. If you are timid He can make you brave. If you are a pervert, He can make you pure. If you are selfish, He can make you selfless. if you are a shepherd, He can make you a king. If you are mediocre, He can make you a Mighty One of valor.
Eric Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
When we infuse our actions with a focus on God and on the many blessings we receive in even the most mundane moments of our lives, we create sacred rituals that bring a sense of holiness, a sense of wholeness, to what we do and who we are. Like the Eucharistic feast that nourishes our heart and soul, every meal we eat with mindfulness[,] each bite we take with gratitude, has the power to transform us inside and out, for all time.
Mary DeTurris Poust (Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God)
I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God, but he remained a stern taskmaster who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalizingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about “God,” seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean?
Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
Have you ever heard someone pray in whom God had put his own strength? You have probably heard some of us poor puny souls pray, but have you ever heard a person pray that God had made into a giant? If you have, you will say it is a mighty thing to hear a person like that in prayer. I have seen him as if he had grabbed the angel like Jacob and tried to wrestle him to the ground. I have seen him slip now and then while he was wrestling, but, like a giant, he has regained his footing and seemed to throw the angel to the ground. I have seen that person seize the throne of mercy and declare, “Lord, I will not let you go unless you bless me.” I have seen him, when heaven’s gates have apparently been locked and barred, go up to them, and say, “Gates of heaven, open wide in Jesus’ name;” and I have seen the gates fly open before him, as if the man were God himself; because he is armed with God Almighty’s strength. I have seen that man, in prayer, discover some great mountain in his way; and he prayed it down, until it was only a molehill. He has beaten the hills and made them like dust by the power of his strength.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Peace and Purpose in Trial and Suffering)
They were often very turbulent meetings, with half a dozen men declaiming at once, in as many dialects of English; but the speakers were all desperately in earnest, and Jurgis was in earnest too, for he understood that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the time of his disillusionment, Jurgis had sworn to trust no man, except in his own family; but here he discovered that he had brothers in affliction, and allies. Their one chance for life was in union, and so the struggle became a kind of crusade. Jurgis had always been a member of the church, because it was the right thing to be, but the church had never touched him, he left all that for the women. Here, however, was a new religion—one that did touch him, that took hold of every fiber of him; and with all the zeal and fury of a convert he went out as a missionary. There were many nonunion men among the Lithuanians, and with these he would labor and wrestle in prayer, trying to show them the right. Sometimes they would be obstinate and refuse to see it, and Jurgis, alas, was not always patient! He forgot how he himself had been blind, a short time ago—after the fashion of all crusaders since the original ones, who set out to spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force of arms. Chapter
Upton Sinclair (The Jungle)
But at the last the gates of Utumno were broken and the halls unroofed, and Melkor took refuge in the uttermost pit. Then Tulkas stood forth as champion of the Valar and wrestled with him, and cast him upon his face; and he was bound with the chain Angainor that Aulë had wrought, and led captive; and the world had peace for a long age. Nonetheless the Valar did not discover all the mighty vaults and caverns hidden with deceit far under the fortresses of Angband and Utumno. Many evil things still lingered there, and others were dispersed and fled into the dark and roamed in the waste places of the world, awaiting a more evil hour; and Sauron they did not find. But when the Battle was ended and from the ruin of the North great clouds arose and hid the stars, the Valar drew Melkor back to Valinor, bound hand and foot, and blindfold; and he was brought to the Ring of Doom. There he lay upon his face before the feet of Manwë and sued for pardon; but his prayer was denied, and he was cast into prison in the fastness of Mandos, whence none can escape, neither Vala, nor Elf, nor mortal Man. Vast and strong are those halls, and they were built in the west of the land of Aman. There was Melkor doomed to abide for three ages long, before his cause should be tried anew, or he should plead again for pardon.
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Silmarillion)
And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
The rosary is being prayed perfectly when all the members pray it at the same natural and prayerful pace. This gives the rosary a beautiful rhythm, flow, and harmonious timing that match normal breathing patterns. On the other hand, if one member prays too loudly, allowing his voice and pace to dominate the others, everyone automatically begins to focus on his voice and is no longer able to meditate; the vocal aspect becomes a distraction for all the other members. Similarly, if a person places an emphasis on one particular word of the Hail Mary prayer, it breaks the flow and rhythm of the group’s timing. All of the above aspects should be taken seriously, because a group’s failure to pray the rosary well and harmoniously is often the reason why many people do not join in praying the rosary before or after Mass. Very few people are interested in praying a rosary that is chaotic and a verbal wrestling match.
Donald H. Calloway (Champions of the Rosary: The History and Heroes of a Spiritual Weapon)
The Spirit’s Direction, INTERCESSION. This promise carries deep instruction. We dare not suppose we can truly intercede effectively on the sole basis of our perspective or understanding. Since we never really thoroughly know how to pray as we ought, we must exercise the humility and faith to wait on God and let the Holy Spirit direct us. Presumption—supposing we already know how to intercede for others—will not only hinder maximum effectiveness, it will also cause us to miss the thrilling sense of adventure God wants to bless us with as we receive His insight and enablement for intercessory prayer. How do we know without infinite minds whether God wants to move through us with weeping, travailing, wrestling, fasting, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, dreams, visions, mental pictures, impressions, verses of Scripture quickened to us, or silence? Only by waiting on God and giving Him time to move on and through us. Ps. 62:5 teaches this wisdom: “My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him.
Jack W. Hayford (New Spirit-Filled Life Bible: Kingdom Equipping Through the Power of the Word, New King James Version)
EPH6.10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. EPH6.11 Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. EPH6.12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. EPH6.13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. EPH6.14 Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;  EPH6.15 And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;  EPH6.16 Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. EPH6.17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:  EPH6.18 Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; 
Anonymous (KING JAMES BIBLE with VerseSearch)
Put on  h the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against  i the schemes of the devil. 12For  j we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against  k the rulers, against the authorities, against  l the cosmic powers over  m this present darkness, against  n the spiritual forces of evil  o in the heavenly places. 13Therefore  p take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in  q the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. 14Stand therefore,  r having fastened on the belt of truth, and  s having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15and,  t as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. 16In all circumstances take up  u the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all  v the flaming darts of  w the evil one; 17and take  s the helmet of salvation, and  x the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, 18praying  y at all times  z in the Spirit,  a with all prayer and supplication. To that end  b keep alert with all perseverance, making  c supplication for all the saints, 19and  d also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth  e boldly to proclaim  f the mystery of the gospel, 20for which I  g am an ambassador  h in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.
Anonymous (The Holy Bible: English Standard Version)
The Whole Armor of God 10Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. 11Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. 12For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 13Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. 14Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. 16In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; 17and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, 18praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, 19and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, 20for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.
Anonymous (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (without Cross-References))
APRIL 6 Don’t be discouraged at the spiritual war you’re called to fight every day. The Lord almighty is with you and wars on your behalf. Between the “already” and the “not yet,” life is war. It can be exhausting, frustrating, and discouraging. We all go through moments when we wish life could just be easier. We wonder why parenting has to be such a continual spiritual battle. We all wish our marriages could be free of war. We all would love it if there were no conflicts at our jobs or in our churches. But we all wake up to a war-torn world every day. It is the sad legacy of a world that has been broken by sin and is constantly under the attack of the enemy. The way the apostle Paul ends his letter to the Ephesian church is interesting and instructive. Having laid out the truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ and having detailed their implications for our street-level living, he ends by talking about spiritual warfare: Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. (Eph. 6:10–20) When you get to this final part of Paul’s letter, it’s tempting to think that he has entirely changed the subject. No longer, it seems, is he talking about everyday Christianity. But that’s exactly what he’s talking about. He is saying to the Ephesian believers, “You know all that I’ve said about marriage, parenting, communication, anger, the church, and so on—it’s all one big spiritual war.” Paul is reminding you that at street level, practical, daily Christianity is war. There really is moral right and wrong. There really is an enemy. There really is seductive and deceptive temptation. You really are spiritually vulnerable. But he says more. He reminds you that by grace you have been properly armed for the battle. The question is, will you use the implements of battle that the cross of Jesus Christ has provided for you?
Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
One of the greatest revelations I’ve had in recent years is that prayer is hard work. Prayer requires labor, striving, continuance, endurance, wrestling, and faithfulness. I’ve heard people say,“I would pray more, but it’s so hard.” At least they understood the nature of prayer. It is indeed hard work. Sometimes it helps to begin our prayers by confessing we don’t feel like praying—and ask God to help us with our preference to be doing something else. Be honest with God and ask Him to give you a willingness to do the work of prayer.
David Jeremiah (Sanctuary: Finding Moments of Refuge in the Presence of God)
Phillip Henry, father of renowned Bible commentary author Matthew Henry, stated it well. Two of his children were deathly sick, and as he wrestled in prayer for their healing, he wrote: “If the Lord will be pleased to grant me my request this time concerning my children I will not say as the beggars at our door used to do, ‘I’ll never ask anything of him again.’ But on the contrary, He shall hear oftener from me than ever; and I will love God the better, and love prayer the better, as long as I live.”9
Dick Brogden (Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus)
MAY 3 IN MY POWER YOU WILL REBUKE AND BIND THE PRINCES OF DARKNESS BELOVED, MEDITATE ON My statutes, for they will be your delight and counsel when demonic princes sit and speak against you. When they persecute you without a cause, let your heart rejoice in My Word as one who finds great treasure, because My Word will bring great peace to you and My righteous judgments will keep you from stumbling. My Holy Spirit has given you the power to rebuke and bind the princes of darkness. You do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. I am with you, and My power will give you the victory. PSALM 119:23–24, 161–165; MATTHEW 12:28; EPHESIANS 6:12 Prayer Declaration Father, in Your Spirit’s power I will bind the prince of the power of the air. I command all principalities of darkness to fall at the name of Jesus. I rebuke and bind all demonic princes that would speak against me and persecute me. I will rejoice in Your Word and in Your promise of great peace and righteous judgment. I cast out Beelzebub and all his demonic princes, and I rise victorious in Your power.
John Eckhardt (Daily Declarations for Spiritual Warfare: Biblical Principles to Defeat the Devil)
When people misuse a text with "Did God really say...?" to shut down someone's honest wrestling with God, they betray what seems to be their own lack of faith and humility. We ought not to be threatened by someone's searching. We ought not to try to control the outcomes in another's journey. We ought not to resort to using shame or fear or guilt to ensure others share our certainties. God can be trusted to lead those who question and struggle through prayer, his Word, their minds, and their experiences. Let's focus on encouraging one another rather than accusing and condemning one another.
Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter (Generous Spaciousness: Responding to Gay Christians in the Church)
Without doubt this is an important aspect of the fasting prayer. Of course, we must not think of fasting as a hunger strike designed to force God’s hand and get our own way! Prayer, however, is much more complex than simply asking a loving father to supply his child’s need. Prayer is warfare! Prayer is wrestling! There are opposing forces. There are spiritual crosscurrents. When we plead our case in the court of heaven, when we cry to the Judge of all the earth, “Vindicate me against my adversary” (Luke 18:3), that adversary is also represented in court (Job 1:6, 2:1 ; Zech. 3:1). It is not enough that the Judge is willing; there is the opposition that must first be overcome.
Arthur Wallis (God's Chosen Fast)
There was of course that other thing, that power that had been given him of taking hold of an evil situation, wrestling with it, shaking it as a terrier shakes a rat until the evil fell out of it and fastened on himself. Then he carried the evil on his own shoulders to the place of prayer, carried it up a long hill in darkness, but willingly. Each time he felt himself alone, yet each time when the weight became too much for him it was shared, then lifted, as though he had never been alone. Even it there had been no hope of help he would still have been just as willing.
Elizabeth Goudge (The Dean's Watch)
ritual reenactment of how the church comes to know who it is, who God is, and what God calls it to be. How does the church find guidance from God? It prayerfully goes to Scripture and then wrestles with the meaning of what it finds there. Biblical preaching models this way of knowing. Biblical
Thomas G. Long (The Witness of Preaching)
Prayer is not first and foremost talking to God, it's first and foremost listening to God.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
Too many of the men today are mice, not men. Too many of the women of our age are vain, not valiant. We are paranoid of the battle, not productive in it. We are soft where we should be solid, and hard where we should be soft.
Eric Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
Prayer puts God in the position He deserves - that of King, Governor, Benign Controller, Possessor, Lord, and Master.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
Make me little in mind, soft in heart, trusting in soul.
Eric Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
The promises of prayer are extraordinary, but for prayer to work as God promises it to work, it must be purged of self and doubt.
Leslie Ludy (Wrestling Prayer: A Passionate Communion with God)
There is need of a daily struggle and daily wrestling in prayer. I keep my body under, Paul says, and bring it into subjection (1 Corinthians 9:27). I see another law in my members which rebels against the law of my mind, bringing captive unto the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Romans 7:23-24). For those that are of the Christ have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts (Galatians 5:24). Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth (Colossians 3:5).
J.C. Ryle (Holiness: For the Will of God Is Your Sanctification – 1 Thessalonians 4:3 [Annotated, Updated])
Our sole duty is to wrestle in prayer! God's will is to perform according to His perfect plan.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Have you been born again? Are you a new creature? Have you put off the old man and put on the new? Have you ever felt convicted of your sins and repented of them? Are you looking only to Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and eternal life? Do you love Christ? Do you serve Christ? Do you hate your sins and fight against them? Do you long for perfect holiness and strive after it? Have you come out from the world? Do you delight in the Bible? Do you wrestle in prayer? Do you love Christ's people? Do you try to do good to the world? Are you vile in your own eyes and willing to take the lowest place? Do you live like a Christian at work, and on weekdays, and also in the privacy of your own home?
J.C. Ryle (Practical Religion)
If the prayer originates with the Holy Spirit, then the wrestling can be beautiful and wonderful; but if we are the victims of our own overheated desires,
A.W. Tozer (Tozer on the Holy Spirit: A 365-Day Devotional)
That constant biblical call to cross-shaped dependence is why I’ve changed my mind about “baby dedications” in churches. Many of you will not understand what I’m referencing, especially if you come from a Christian communion that baptizes infants. My communion does not; we baptize only those who profess that they believe the gospel and seek to be disciples. As such, I cynically dismissed “baby dedications,” times in a church service when parents would stand with their newborns to dedicate their lives to the Lord, as just a way to do a “dry baptism” for low-church Protestants. As the years have gone by, though, I have seen that these times of dedication fill an urgent need for families and for the church. This is not so much for the children as for their parents, and for the rest of the congregation. The parents crowding around Jesus wanted a word of blessing upon their little ones. In our hyper-naturalistic time, we tend to lose the sense of what a “blessing” is, other than a rote prayer before a meal or spiritual-sounding language that we use to mean “lucky.” The Bible, though, is filled with blessings, blessings that are sometimes wrestled for, sometimes lied about for, sometimes given on a deathbed. A blessing is to commit another to the good purposes of the Lord. Rightly done, a dedication by parents of their children can be a signal that these children do not in fact “belong” to the parents but to the Lord. Moreover, it can be a sign to the rest of the congregation that the rearing of these children is not simply up to the parents on the platform but to all of the gathered body.
Russell D. Moore (The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home)
Now go to sleep, Gayle Tristan Montmorency Windham. I will be here when you waken. I promise.” She wrestled him then into the position she deemed best suited to his slumbers, leaving him lying in her arms, his face resting against her shoulder. She stroked his back in the same easy rhythm he often gave her, and Anna soon heard his breathing even out. I will be here when you waken, she thought, but for how much longer, I do not know. The investigator sent north had precipitated the need the leave, and now, when the duke lay so ill, any temptation to confide in the earl was put to rest. He needed to be looking to his own and not to the troubles brought to him by his housekeeper. Anna wrapped her arms around the future Duke of Moreland and sent up a heartfelt prayer for his happiness and her own safety.
Grace Burrowes (The Heir (Duke's Obsession, #1; Windham, #1))
Children of Jacob cannot live without prayer. They are wrestling Jacobs. They are people in whom the Holy Spirit works in such a way they can no more live without prayer than I can live without breathing. They must pray. If you are living without prayer, you are living without Christ;
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Peace and Purpose in Trial and Suffering)
My strength in prayer these days is scant—I’ll confess that. So for all the concentration I can muster in prayer, I must not dissipate it in seeking physical blessings only. Rather, I must spend a good portion of it seeking spiritual growth and praying for Christ’s kingdom to go forth into this dark world. For such prayers are a way for me to know God and to know Him deeper, higher, richer, wider, and fuller—much fuller than if I comfortably cruised through life in my wheelchair.
Joni Eareckson Tada (A Place of Healing: Wrestling with the Mysteries of Suffering, Pain, and God's Sovereignty)
On November 22nd, 2018, my mother Vernita Lee passed away. I was conflicted about our relationship up until the very end. The truth is, it wasn't until I became successful that my mother started to show more interest in me. I wrestled with the question of how to take care of her - what did I owe the woman who gave me life, The bible says 'honor thy father and mother', but what did that actually mean? I decided one of the ways I could honor her would be to help care for her financially ... but there was never any real connection. I would say that the audience who watched me on television knew me better than my mother did. When her health began to decline a few years ago, I knew I needed to prepare myself for her transition. Just a few days before Thanksgiving my sister Patricia called to tell me she thought it was time. I flew to Milwaukee ... I tried to think of something to say, at one point I even picked up the manual left by the hospice care people. I read their advice thinking the whole time, how sad it was that I, Oprah Winfrey, who had spoken to thousands of people one on one should have to read a hospice manual to figure out what to say to my mother. When it was finally time to leave, something told me it would be the last time I'd ever see her but as I turned to go, the words I needed to say still wouldn't come. All I could muster was 'bye, I'll be seeing you' and I left for, ironically, a speaking engagement. On the flight home the next morning a little voice in my head whispered what I knew in my heart to be true: "you are going to regret this, you haven't finished the work". ... I turned around and went back to Milwaukee. I spent another day in that hot room and still no words came. That night I prayed for help. In the morning I meditated, and as I prepared to leave the bedroom I picked up my phone and noticed the song that was playing - Mahalia Jackson's 'Precious Lord'. If ever there was a sign, this was it. I had no idea how Mahalia Jackson appeared on my playlist. As I listened to the words, Precious Lord, take my hand Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired, I'm weak, I am worn Lead me on to the light, Take my hand, precious Lord And lead me home. I suddenly knew what to do. When I walked into my mothers room I asked if she wanted to hear the song. She nodded, and then I had another idea. I called my friend Wintley Phipps, a preacher and gospel artist, and asked him to sing Precious Lord to my dying mother. Over FaceTime from his kitchen table he sang the song a cappella and then prayed that our family would have no fear, just peace. I could see that my mother was moved. The song and the prayer had created a sort of opening for both of us. I began to talk to her about her life, her dreams, and me. Finally the words were there. I said, "It must have been hard for you, not having an education, not having a skill, not knowing what the future held. When you became pregnant, I'm sure a lot of people told you to get rid of that baby." She nodded. "But you didn't", I said. "And I want to thank you for keeping this baby". I paused, "I know that many times you didn't know what to do. You did the best you knew how to do and that's okay with me. That is okay with me. So you can leave now, knowing that it is well. It is well with my soul. It's been well for a long time." It was a sacred, beautiful moment, one of the proudest of my life. As an adult I'd learned to see my mother through a different lens; not as the mother who didn't care for me, protect me, love me or understand anything about me, but as a young girl still just a child herself; scared, alone, and unequipped to be a loving parent. I had forgiven my mother years earlier for not being the mother I needed, but she didn't know that. And in our last moments together I believe I was able to release her from the shame and the guilt of our past. I came back and I finished the work that needed to be done.
Oprah Winfrey (What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
LORD, Thank you for the gift of my son. He has been created by you, and his life has been planned before the beginning of time. Your love for him is greater than I can comprehend. I know it is your desire that he come to a full knowledge of you. I praise you for all the ways you have revealed yourself to him in his young life. I pray you would complete your work of salvation in my son. Open his eyes fully to the truth of Christ—his perfect life, his complete atonement for our sins on the cross, and his resurrection that gives us the hope of life forever with you. Give him reassurance when he’s doubting your Word. Rescue him from any temptation that might lead him away from following you. Provide wise teachers to instruct him in your ways. Fill him with your Spirit so he may know your voice and power in his life. Thank you for all of your promises for my son. Let him experience your faithfulness—that no matter how far he may wander, you will seek him and bring him home. Show that you can be everything to him as his savior, helper, counselor, father, and friend. Encourage me as his parent when my trust in you is shaken. Let me see my son through your eyes, no matter what sins or spiritual confusion he may wrestle with in his life. Never let me give up hope that he is in your hands. Let me delight in the knowledge of you so my son can see joy and peace in me. Use me as an example of obedience and faith. Make my words full of praise and prayers, declaring your goodness in every situation we find ourselves in. Use me to lead him closer to you each day. Thank you for holding my son so closely. Claim him as your own. May he live in you forever. Amen.
Rob Teigen (Powerful Prayers for Your Son: Praying for Every Part of His Life)
The sun is but a mere handful of minutes from rising on yet another Christmas morning. And I sit here in the early morning light wrestling with a handful of inordinately stubborn words that refuse to submit to any kind of syntax that might express the richness of my thoughts on this morning. But then I realized that the God of Christmas is infinitely too big for words, and His gift surpasses any syntax man could hope to form to explain it. Therefore, my prayer for you is that the God of Christmas will come to you in a manner beyond words and change your life beyond imagination.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
As we read the Bible, we are all the time gathering information, wrestling with the sense of obscure sentences, comparing and analyzing. But this is secondary. The real purpose of Bible study is much more than this—to feed our love for Christ, to kindle our hearts into prayer, and to provide us with guidance in our personal life.
Kallistos Ware (The Orthodox Way)
He comes to you during your long, nightly journeys. He bids you put aside your own trickery and selfish deceptions. Instead, he tells you to wrestle with him in prayer—the way Jacob did. And hear those beautiful promises that light up the darkness of your hardships. Because in Christ… Comfort for the Night “You have fought with God and with men, and you have won” (Gen 32:28).
Steve Kruschel (Graciously Keep Me This Night: Devotions from Scripture's Darkest Hours)
We are the people called into Passiontide, into Gethsemane-tide, into prayer and fasting, into betrayal and suffering, into the ambiguous and agonizing position of wrestling with the purposes of God, into knowing that we might have got it wrong, into wondering in anguish if maybe there’s a different way after all, into being misunderstood by friends and family, into fightings without and fears within. The disciples fell asleep in the garden; we are called to stay awake, to be alert, to see what the issues are and what stand must be taken, to do business with the one Jesus called Abba, Father, even if voices all around us, and even within us, tell us we might be getting it all horribly wrong.
N.T. Wright (The Way of the Lord: Christian Pilgrimage Today)
The practice of lament—the kind that is biblical, honest, and redemptive—is not as natural for us, because every lament is a prayer. A statement of faith. Lament is the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God’s goodness.
Mark Vroegop (Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament)
Whereas most keyboardists back then sat up straight like a squirrel with paws perched on keys as if at prayer, Louis, after first quietly and serenely nodding his head in the direction of the sheet music, veritably threw himself into every gesture as if he was wrestling the very soul of the music out of the organ’s pipes.
Howard Jay Smith (Beethoven In Love; Opus 139: Concerto Quasi Una Fantasia (The Secret Lives of Great Composers))
​Our extreme predicaments are the Lord’s opportunities. Immediately, a sharp sense of danger forces an anxious cry from us, and the ear of Jesus hears it—and with Jesus the ear and heart go together, and His hand responds immediately. We tend to wait until the last moment to appeal to our Master, but his swift hand makes up for our delays by instantaneous, effective action.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (prayer: Wrestling with God in Prayer and Meditation)
Church growth is 60% prayers and 40% methods and principles, according to Dr. Yonggi Cho - the Pastor of the world largest church. There must be deliberate, systematic prayer warfare strategy. We are dealing with well organized, structured enemy with levels and layers of satanic authorities. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph 6:12). The Guerilla Warfare structure headed by Satan is comprised of the following levels - Principalities, Powers, Rulers of Darkness, Spiritual Wickedness in High Places. CITY-TAKING PRAYER STRATEGIES To effectively check mate, confront, preempt and demobilize this satanic structure, the following prayer strategies are recommended. The aim of the strategy outlined below is to uproot the gates of the enemy from every stratum of our community and households and to actually take the battle to the gates of the enemy.
Albert O. Aina (10 Healthy System for Healthy Church Growth)
11. Nothing more moveth me, and burdeneth my soul, than that I could never, in my prosperity, so wrestle in prayer with God, nor be so dead to the world, so hungry and sick of love for Christ, so heavenly-minded, as when ten stone-weight of a heavy cross was upon me.
Samuel Rutherford (The Letters of Samuel Rutherford)
The Lord, when He has given great faith to a person, has been known to test that faith with long delays. He has allowed His servants’ voices to echo back to their own ears, as if they were bouncing off a sky made of solid brass. They have knocked at the golden gate of heaven, but it has remained immovable, as if its hinges were totally rusted. Like Jeremiah, they have cried, “You have covered Yourself with a cloud, so that our prayer cannot pass through.”[72] And so in this way many Christians have continued for a long time in patient waiting, with no reply—it’s not because their prayers were shallow or insincere, or because God did not hear or accept them. Instead, it’s simply because it pleased God, who is in total control over all things, and who gives according to His own perfect will. So, if it is His desire to have us wait, in order to exercise and grow the virtue of patience in us, doesn’t He have the right to do this, since we belong to Him?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (prayer: Wrestling with God in Prayer and Meditation)
​As a Christian, if you have any grace in you at all, but are not actively praying and making intercession for others, that grace must be as small as a grain of mustard seed.[33] Your small amount of grace is just enough to float your own soul out of the quicksand; but you should be seeking after floods of grace, deep enough to carry a joyous boat, full of the heavy cargo of the wants and needs of others, and you would bring back from your Lord, for them, rich blessings that they might not have obtained otherwise, if it wasn’t for your prayers— “Oh, let my hands forget their skill, My tongue be silent, cold, and still, This bounding heart forget to beat, If I forget the mercy-seat!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (prayer: Wrestling with God in Prayer and Meditation)
​So, take a moment to think on this verse: “I love the Lord, because He has heard my voice and my plea.”[41] Wouldn’t you agree that you have good reason to say this in your own life? Just as your prayers have been many, so also have been God’s answers to them.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (prayer: Wrestling with God in Prayer and Meditation)
He has heard you in the day of trouble,[42] has strengthened you, and helped you, even when you may have dishonored Him by trembling in fear, and by doubting while you prayed. Remember this, and let it fill your heart with gratitude to God, who has always graciously heard your poor weak prayers: “Bless the Lord, Oh my soul, and do not forget all His benefits.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (prayer: Wrestling with God in Prayer and Meditation)
It divides the Bible into sections fitted to the days of the year, and compels the Christian to read according to rule. No matter what the Holy Spirit may be trying to say to a man, still he goes on reading where the card tells him, dutifully checking it off each day. Every Spirit-led saint knows that there are times when he is held by an inward pressure to one chapter, or even one verse, for days at a time while he wrestles with God till some truth does its work within him. To leave that present passage to follow a pre-arranged reading schedule is for him wholly impossible. He is in the hand of the free Spirit, and reality is appearing before him to break and humble and lift and liberate and cheer. But only the free soul can know the glory of this. To this the heart bound by system will be forever a stranger. The slave to the file card soon finds that his prayers lose their freedom and become less spontaneous, less effective.
A.W. Tozer (The Best Of A. W. Tozer)
Or, to put it another way, when God piles up a hill of blessings, He Himself shines behind them, and He causes the shadow of prayer to fall upon our spirits, motivating us to pray and allowing us to rest in the knowledge that our prayers are the shadows of God’s mercy that is coming to us in His grace.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (prayer: Wrestling with God in Prayer and Meditation)
you will “understand the dream, and how to interpret it,” when you have sought after God. And like John, you will see the “seven seals” of precious truth opened, after you have “wept greatly” in prayer.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (prayer: Wrestling with God in Prayer and Meditation)
When you come before the King, speak to Him for the suffering members of His body.[31] When you are given the pleasure of drawing very near to His throne, and the King says to you, “Ask, and I will give you what you ask for,”[32] let your petitions be, not for yourself alone, but for the many who need His aid.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (prayer: Wrestling with God in Prayer and Meditation)
Never forget that what may look like God’s insensitivity is nothing of the sort, but rather an invitation to draw closer to Him through persistent praying in faith.
Greg Laurie (Wrestling with God: Prayer That Never Gives Up (LifeChange Books))
Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. — Ephesians 6:10-12
Prayer M. Madueke (Organized Darkness: Spiritual Warfare Prayer Books Prepared for People & Families under Satanic Attacks, Evil Limitations and under Demonic Restrictions ... Breaking Demonic Curses, Cast Out Demons))
Still, prayer itself is an art that only the Holy Spirit can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer. Pray until you can pray. Pray to be helped to pray, and do not give up praying because you cannot pray. It is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes, when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart, all broken and cast down, is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Power in Prayer)
He was very short in prayer when others were present, but every sentence was like a strong bolt shot up to heaven. I have heard him say that he wearied when others were long in prayer; but, being alone, he spent much time in wrestling and prayer.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures To My Students)
Prayer is always hard work, and often an agony. We sometimes have to wrestle even in order to pray. “When those hours of the day come in which we should be having our prayer-sessions with God, it often appears as though everything has entered into a conspiracy to prevent it.” We often wrestle in prayer just to concentrate. “Your thoughts flit back and forth between God and the many pressing duties which await you.”226 While God can and will grant times of peace and tranquility, no Christian outgrows the need to struggle and persevere in prayer.
Timothy J. Keller (Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God)