Fourteen Quotes from A Praying Life

Some books are forgettable. A Praying Life by Paul Miller isn’t one of those books. It’s the best book I’ve read on how to pray in the mess of daily life. I highly recommend it.

Here are fourteen quotes from A Praying Life that stood out to me:

Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God. Making prayer the center is like making conversation the center of a family mealtime. In prayer, focusing on the conversation is like trying to drive while looking at the windshield instead of through it. It freezes us, making us unsure of where to go. Conversation is only the vehicle through which we experience one another. Consequently, prayer is not the center of this book. Getting to know a person, God, is the center. (Kindle Locations 378-382)

Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart. (Kindle Locations 425-426)

A needy heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer. (Kindle Location 437)

The criteria for coming to Jesus is weariness. Come overwhelmed with life. Come with your wandering mind. Come messy. (Kindle Locations 503-504)

Become like a little child—ask, believe, and, yes, even play. When you stop trying to be an adult and get it right, prayer will just flow because God has done something remarkable. He’s given you a new voice. It is his own. God has replaced your badly damaged prayer antenna with a new one—the Spirit. (Kindle Locations 624-627)

You don’t create intimacy; you make room for it. This is true whether you are talking about your spouse, your friend, or God. You need space to be together. Efficiency, multitasking, and busyness all kill intimacy. In short, you can’t get to know God on the fly. (Kindle Locations 694-696)

If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray. (Kindle Locations 729-732)

You don’t need self-discipline to pray continuously; you just need to be poor in spirit. (Kindle Location 916)

A praying life isn’t simply a morning prayer time; it is about slipping into prayer at odd hours of the day, not because we are disciplined but because we are in touch with our own poverty of spirit, realizing that we can’t even walk through a mall or our neighborhood without the help of the Spirit of Jesus. (Kindle Locations 969-971)

Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life. (Kindle Locations 1555-1556)

Suffering is God’s gift to make us aware of our contingent existence. It creates an environment where we see the true nature of our existence—dependent on the living God. (Kindle Locations 1676-1677)

Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just that you’re in the middle of a story. (Kindle Locations 2627-2628)

If Satan’s basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God’s basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son. (Kindle Locations 3017-3018)

Prayer is where I do my best work as a husband, dad, worker, and friend. I’m aware of the weeds of unbelief in me and the struggles in others’ lives. The Holy Spirit puts his finger on issues that only he can solve. I’m actually managing my life through my daily prayer time. I’m shaping my heart, my work, my family—in fact, everything that is dear to me—through prayer in fellowship with my heavenly Father. I’m doing that because I don’t have control over my heart and life or the hearts and lives of those around me. But God does. (Kindle Locations 3269-3273)