C. S. Lewis Quotes About Prayer
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Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones they forget.
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I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.
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All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.
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We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.
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If you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
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When the opposite of your prayer occurs, your prayer hasn't been ignored; it's been considered & refused for your ultimate good.
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Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers.
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For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.
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Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
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In worship, God imparts himself to us.
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At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget[...]that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
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For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
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Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.
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What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
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They tell me, Lord, that when I seem To be in speech with you. Since but one voice is heard, it
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The prayer preceding all prayers is 'May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.'
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Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.
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Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
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The world was made partly that there may be prayer; partly that our prayers might be answered.
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Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.
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Prayer does not change God; it changes me.
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To forgive the incessant provocations of daily life - to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son - how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says.
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Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.
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If God had granted all the silly prayers I've made in my life, where should I be now?
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If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
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A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
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It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
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I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.
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