^{If weak in prayer,
we are weak everywhere.
~ Leonard Ravenhill}

Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond

All I did was pray to God, every day. In prison camp, the main prayer was, “Get me home alive, God, and I’ll seek you and serve you.” I came home, got wrapped up in the celebration, and forgot about the hundreds of promises I’d made to God.
~ Louis Zamperini, 1917-2014, distance runner, evangelist

Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn’t act the way we want God to, and why I don’t act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.
~ Philip Yancey, 1949- , American author

Matthew 6:5-15

We all have a tendency to use prayer to dictate to God.
~ Jen Pollock Michel, author and contributor to Christianity Today

What this means is that prayer can be learned only in the vocabulary and grammar of personal relationship: Father! Friend! It can never be a matter of getting the right words in the right order. It can never be a matter of good behavior or proper disposition or skillful manipulation. It can ever be a matter of acquiring some information about God or getting in touch with myself. It is a relationship, exclusively and unendingly personal. And so it is imperative that we watch our language gauge, for the personal is constantly and increasingly in danger of suppression by the arrogant and blasphemous claims of technology, the very apotheosis of the impersonal.
~ Eugene Peterson, 1932-2018, minister and author, Tell it Slant

We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties. … See that you do not use the trick of prayer to cover up what you know you ought to do.
~ Oswald Chambers, 1874-1917, teacher & evangelist

Study your prayers, a great part of my time is spent getting in tune for prayer.
~ Robert McCheyne, 1813-1843, Scottish minister

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
~ Søren Kierkegaard, 1813-1855, Danish philosopher, theologian

This Sunday’s bulletin coming soon.

^{The invincible weapon against
all our enemies is humility.
~ Theophan the Recluse}

Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
~ Abraham Lincoln

Jesus does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.
~ Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

Anger always thinks it has power beyond its power.
~ Publilius Syrus, 85-43 BC, Sententiae

Matthew 5:38-48

For some, faith begins with a hard shell, a rigid set of answers and platitudes that keep them safe but eventually prevent them from growing into who they could be. The system that was initially protecting them now traps them.
~ Luke Norsworthy, pastor & author

Bold love is courageously setting aside our personal agenda to move humbly into the world of others with their well-being in view, willing to risk further pain in our souls, in order to be an aroma of life to some and the aroma of death to others.
~ Dan Allender, psychologist and author, Director of the Allender Center

I think Jesus meant something different when He said “enemies.” He meant we should love the people we don’t understand. The ones we disagree with. The ones who are flat wrong about more than a couple of things. I have plenty of those people in my life, and my bet is you do too. In fact, I might be one of those people sometimes.
~ Bob Goff, 1959- , author, Everybody, Always: Becoming Love

Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work. ‘The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared’ (Luther).
~ Dietrich Bonhöffer, from Life Together