Covenant Prayer Quotes

I am no longer my own, but Thine. Put me to what Thou wilt, rank me with whom Thou wilt; put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for Thee or laid aside for Thee, exalted for Thee or brought low for Thee; let me be full, let me be empty; let me have all things, let me have nothing; I freely and heartily yield all things to Thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Thou art mine, and I am Thine. So be it. And the covenant, which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen. ~ Methodist Church

It was surprisingly difficult to find prayers of thanks - the least represented of any type of prayer. ~ Marie Noël

A fair vision had welcomed him in this land of disease. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

[Prayer] will not protect you. It will help your soul. It's for while you're alive. ~ Phil Klay

Today I offer a prayer of forgiveness:
forgive the pettiness of my ingratitude ...
the absence of profound thankfulness. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

If you find your life of prayer to be always so short, and so easy, and so spiritual, as to be without cost and strain and sweat to you, you may depend upon it, you have not yet begun to pray. ~ Alexander Whyte

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT."
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany ~ John Irving

Prayer finds its source in God's holiness and it is at the same time our response to this holiness. ~ Pope John Paul II

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide to contemplative prayer. "Be willing to be blind, and give up all longing to know the why and how, for knowing will be more of a hindrance than a help." This 1912 edition was edited by Evelyn Underhill, and contains her introduction. ~ Geerhardus Vos

Writing is how I process the cacophony of each day. Prayer is how God makes sense out of my scribbles. ~ Donna Pyle

Lord I submit my body to You. Help me to be disciplined in the way I care for it. Help me to choose health-filled and life-giving foods and be able to resist eating what I should not have. Enable me to make the right choices with regard to what I eat. ~ Stormie O'martian

Are we praying?"

"If you have to ask, you probably aren't. ~ Allan Dare Pearce

The endorphin high of birth will fade, but its trace remains with you forever, its fingerprints indelible proof of love's presence and daily grandeur. You have offered up your prayer. You have vowed service to a new world and laid a bedrock of earthly faith. You have chosen your sword, your shield, and where you will fall. Whatever the morrow brings, these things, these people, will be with you always. The power of choice, of a life, a lover, a place to stand, will be there to be called upon and make fresh sense of your tangled history. More important, it will also be there when you waver, when you're lost, providing you with the elements of a new compass, encased within your heart. ~ Bruce Springsteen

In essence, there is only one thing God asks of us - that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough. That is the root of peace. We have that peace when the gracious God is all we seek. When we start seeking something besides Him, we lose it. As Merton said in the last public address before his death, That is his call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced. ~ Brennan Manning

It is impossible to pray for someone without loving him, and impossible to go on praying for him without discovering that our love for him grows and matures. ~ John Stott

The contemplative seeks to be drawn ever more deeply into the circle of divine being, consciousness, and bliss, the circle of God knowing and delighting in the infinity of his own essence. The practice of contemplative prayer, therefore, is among the highest expressions of rationality possible, a science of consciousness and of its relation to the being of all things, requiring the most intense devotion of mind and will to a clear perception of being and consciousness in their unity. ~ David Bentley Hart

Southerners don't gossip; Southerners pray for one other. Of course, you have to know the details of the sinner's sins to get any good praying done, then you have to recruit others to pray, and they need the details too. It's called Prayer Circle. ~ Gretchen Archer

God in His answers to prayer often says "Yes." Sometimes He says "Wait." Often He says "No." In any case, His will is done, and true faith is to believe that what happened has happened for the best. If one does not take that attitude, he is setting his personal desire against the wisdom of God. Oftentimes we confuse with faith merely that which we desire. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

The Lord sustained me. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A Prayer
Refuse to fall down
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you from lifting your heart
toward heaven
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Helplessness is the real secret and the impelling power of prayer. ~ Ole Hallesby

Marriage is not mainly about prospering economically; it is mainly about displaying the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his church. Knowing Christ is more important than making a living. Treasuring Christ is more important than bearing children. Being united to Christ by faith is a greater source of marital success than perfect sex and double-income prosperity. ~ John Piper

The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so I suppose we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman ... ~ Graham Greene

The seeker's silence is the loudest form of prayer. ~ Swami Vivekananda

I should as soon expect a farmer to prosper in business who contented himself with sowing his fields and never looking at them till harvest, as expect a believer to attain much holiness who was not diligent about his Bible reading, his prayers, and the use of his Sundays. ~ J.C. Ryle

I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of mutely and hidden from others reaching myself. When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul - and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides that, nothing. But the emptiness has the value and appearance of plenty. One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking and only believing that the silence I believe to be inside me is the answer to my - to my mystery. ~ Clarice Lispector

The most dangerous thing I've ever encountered was a run-in with Boko Haram around 2007 in a small town in Nigeria. I got caught along with the photographer I was working with, the same one I worked with on the Afghanistan book, Seamus Murphy. We were caught in an attack by a mob after Friday prayers. And the level of violence was so extreme. It was more violent than any other mob violence I have ever seen. ~ Eliza Griswold

Helplessness is your best prayer. It calls from your heart to the heart of God with greater effect than all your uttered pleas. ~ Ole Hallesby

But the Esquire passage I found most poignant and revealing was this one: Mister Rogers' visit to a teenage boy severely afflicted with cerebral palsy and terrible anger. One of the boys' few consolations in life, Junod wrote, was watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

'At first, the boy was made very nervous by the thought that Mister Rogers was visiting him. He was so nervous, in fact, that when Mister Rogers did visit, he got mad at himself and began hating himself and hitting himself, and his mother had to take him to another room and talk to him. Mister Rogers didn't leave, though. He wanted something from the boy, and Mister Rogers never leaves when he wants something from somebody. He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. He said, 'I would like you to do something for me. Would you do something for me?' On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said: I would like you to pray for me. Will you pray for me?' And now the boy didn't know how to respond. He was thunderstruck... because nobody had ever asked him for something like that, ever. The boy had always been prayed for. The boy had always been the object of prayer, and now he was being asked to pray for Mister Rogers, and although at first he didn't know how to do it, he said he would, he said he'd try, and ever since then he keeps Mister Rogers in his prayers and does ~ Tim Madigan

My prayer is that God would continue to love me enough to refuse to answer the prayers I'm praying that I shouldn't be praying. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The best remedy for a sick church is to put it on a missionary diet. ~ David Livingstone

I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you into my heart. I have come to bring out the beauty you never knew you had, and lift you like a prayer to the sky. ~ Rumi

You said their prayer - is this the religion you believe in, then?"
"I believe in them all."
Vin frowned. "None of them contradict each other?"
Sazed smiled. "Oh, often and frequently they do. But, I respect the truths behind them all. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Prayer is the only means of bringing about orderliness and peace and repose in our daily acts. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Things happen which would not happen without prayer. Let us not forget that. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

We are fit for the work of God only when we have wept over it, prayed about it, and then we are enabled by Him to tackle the job that needs to be done. ~ Alan Redpath