Prayer is not about pressing on and persevering and twisting God's arm and just asking and asking. The focus of prayer is not on technique or choice of words or it's contents but it is on who God is. He is the God of how much more. He is the God that desires to bless His children over and above what we ask or imagine.
"Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance; it is laying hold of His highest willingness".
- Richard C. Trench
"Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance; it is believing in a God who hears, answers and even exceeds our prayers".
- Edmund Chan
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"Prayer does not equip us for greater works...prayer is the greater work"
- Oswald Chambers
"Prayer is theologically significant not for what it can do for us, but for what it can bring us back to! Prayer brings us back toa dependence on God."
- Edmund Chan
"Prayer refines our carnal appertites and replaces them with a deeper love for the highest good found in God alone. Prayer is about growing deep in God."
- Edmund Chan
When Jesus said 'the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few', He did not follow up by saying 'so go out as labourers' but rather 'beseech the Lord of the Harvest to send out workers'.
"Jesus prayed because He was totally God-centered in His life and ministry. His entire ministry flowed from this God-consciousness and God-centeredness. For his godly ministry was an outflow of His godly life."
- Edmund Chan
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"All sin is a punishment for the primal sin of not knowing God."
- Thomas Merton
"When we reject religious experiences because they do not fit neatly in our theological paradigms, we have beccome subjectively prejudiced. We shun religious experiences with an evangelical smugness and look upon emotions with disdain, forgetting that Jesus Himself wept and that it was God who created us as emotional beings with emotional faculties."
- Edmund Chan
"We fail to recognise that while God is not contradictory to the Scriptures, He is bigger than our interpretations of it. We cannot put God in a neat theological box nor create God in the image of man."
- Edmund Chan
"We are unaware of the extent to which our thinking has been compromised and shaped by a secular mindset. We accept as a norm the profound lack of willingness, or ability, to think deeply and consistently about the truth. We are lulled into a passive mode of thinking. Instead of countering the fallacy of secular philosophy with rich biblical and theological truths, and a deep life congruent with those truths, we live in a generation where a sound theological foundation is ignored, or worse, even disdained."
- Edmund Chan
"In the revolution of ideas, what engages the Christian mind is no longer 'What's true', but rather 'what works'."
- Edmund Chan
"We focus on the sacrifices we make, the duties we perform, the commitments we have. Prayer becomes more about us than about God."
- Edmund Chan
"What will finally destroy us is not communism nor facism, but man acting like God."
- Malcolm Muggeridge
"Many Christians view God as the accuser. Their theology is that of a God who is impossible to please. But God is the advocate - not the accuser!"
- Edmund Chan
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To put on the armour of God is not by prayer or declaration (though it must be put on prayerfully). To put on the armour of God is via a growing commitment to know the truth, live out the truth, advance the truth, believe the truth and hold past to the truth.
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"Many people hurry through prayer, but reflect little on it. They see, but do not perceive. They observe, but do not understand. They hurry through prayer as if the destination is more important than the journey. They are compulsively driven to complete a task rather than to enjoy the presence of God. they pray driven prayers rather than devout prayers."
- Edmund Chan
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"We cannot make up in prayer what we lost through disobedience."
- Edmund Chan
"The greatest hindrance to prayer is unbelief. At the heart of unbelief is our ignorance of God."
- Edmund Chan
"Whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the power and authority of the flesh over the Spirit, that to you is sin, no matter how good it seems."
- Susanna Wesley
"You do not find time to pray, you make time to pray! It is the disposition of the soul rather than the availability of time that is the crucial issue."
- Edmund Chan
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"You Christians have in your keeping a document with enough dynamite in it to blow the whole of civilisation to bits, to turn society upside down, to bring peace to this war-torn world. But you read it as if it were just good literature, and nothing else."
- Mahatma Gandhi
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"There is a time to pray and there is a time to act upon what we pray. The principle is basic but important: 'Faith, if it has no works, is dead'."
- Edmund Chan
"We must surrender our unholy dependence on our own resources in order to pray well, and pray victoriously. Our chariots and our horses must be burned and hamstrung. we must die to our own resources and our dependence upon them as if they were the answer."
- Edmund Chan
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Threefold prayer of Jehoshaphat, 'Lord, are You not?', 'Lord, did You not?' and 'Lord, will You not?'.
We may be powerless in the face of life's battles, but we fix our eyes on Jesus, we trust Him because the battle is not ours but God's.
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"If knowing God is the key to prayer, then surrender is the key to knowing God."
- Edmund Chan
"It is not enough to be a converted people - we must be a counter-cutural people. Everything in our culture that is against the teachings of God must be challenged and rejected. But it is not enough just to be a counter-cultural people - we must be a consecrated people!"
- Edmund Chan
"The committed life emphasies what we must do for Christ; the surrendered life realises we can do nothing apart from Christ."
- Edmund Chan
"The more we are ushered into the depths of intimacy with God, the more unbearable our unsurrenderedness becomes, and the sweeter our oasis of surrender."
- Edmund Chan
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"Crucial as they may be, listening and surrendering are not the highest virtues in our intimacy with God. They are but the starting points. What draws us deeper in God is the awakening response of our soul's deepest faculties of delighting in God and loving Him...Even our surrender and obedience to God are valued in the light of our delight in and love for Him!"
- Edmund Chan
"Loving God is an action-word that involves six things: following God, fearing Him, keeping His commandements, listening to His voice, serving Him and clinging to Him."
- Edmund Chan
"We find ourselves busily caught up working for God rather than being with Him. Depth with God is lost, and the soul becomes impoverishhed. Like Easu, we have exhcanged our birthright for a bowl of pottage."
- Edmund Chan
The Shema Confession of Deuteronomy 6:4-5 is God's fundamental agenda for us as individuals as well as the agenda for the disciples of Christ as a whole.
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might."
Four inner struggles corrupting the love for God:
The primal wounds of the heart
The cynicism of the mind
The paralysis of the will
The overcrowding of the soul
The primal wounds of the heart include even those long gone which no longer are in the surface but inevitably has shaped the way we view life.
It is not enough to find time for God, we must make time for God, and even then it is not enough. God must not be related to as one of our many commitments, one of the many important priorities, but rather the only relaitonship on which all other things in our lives should be centered.
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To simplify our lives, we need to let our pace be steady, our purpose be true, our priorities be clear and our possessions be useful.
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When Moses met God at the burning bush, God asked him 'What is that in your hand?'. It was a mere staff, a desert stick, nothing more. Yet it became the staff with which Moses performed signs and wonders. We must not overlook what we already have in our hands and be amazed by what God can do with what little we have.
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