Quotes on Praying for Others

If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this will lead us to prayer.

Richard Foster, Prayer, p. 191

We do not know enough, and our desires are not perfect enough for us safely to be given everything we want and ask for. It is as simple as that.

Dallas Willard, Divine Conspiracy, p. 239

Prayer is never just asking, nor is it merely a matter of asking for what I want. God is not a cosmic butler or fix-it man, and the aim of the universe is not to fulfill my desires and needs. On the other hand, I am to pray for what concerns me, and many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of.

Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about “good things” that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.

Willard, p. 242

. . . the most adequate description of prayer is simply, “Talking to God about what we are doing together.”

Only a vivid assurance of God’s greatness and goodness can lay a foundation for the life of prayer, and such an assurance will certainly express itself in praise.

Thanksgiving too is an inevitable accompaniment of vital prayer. The purpose is not to manipulate God into thinking we are grateful and that he should therefore give us more.

Willard, p. 243

Now what we see here (Exodus 32:10-14; 2 Kings 19:8-37) is a God who can be prevailed upon by those who faithfully stand before him. . . There is no silver bullet in prayer. Requests may be granted. Or they may not. Either way, it will be for a good reason. That is how relationships between persons are, or should be.

God is great enough that he can conduct his affairs in this way. His nature, identity, and overarching purposes are no doubt unchanging. But his intentions with regard to many particular matters that concern individual human beings are not. This does not diminish him. Far from it. He would be a lesser God if he could not change his intentions when he thinks it is appropriate. And if he chooses to deal with humanity in such a way that he will occasionally think it appropriate, that is just fine.

Willard, p. 246

Sometimes we wait for God to do as we ask because the answer involves changes in other people, or even ourselves, and that kind of change always takes time.

Willard, p. 251

There is no greater intimacy with another than that which is built through holding him or her up in prayer.

. . . Before we begin to pray, we may know that the love of the One who is actively concerned in awakening each life to its true center is already lapping at the shores of that life. We do not do it at all.

Such prayer is only cooperation with God’s active love in besieging the life or new areas of the life of another, or of a situation. If you pray for something other than what is in keeping with that cooperation, you go against the grain, and if you remain in prayer and are sensitive, you will realize this and be drawn to revise it. As in all petitional prayer, the one who really prays must be ready to yield.

Douglas Steere in Devotional Classics edited
by Richard Foster & James Bryan Smith, p.
88-89.

Praying men are the one commanding need of this day, as of all other days, in which God is to have or make a showing. Men who pray are, in reality, the only religious men, and it takes a full-measured man to pray. Men of prayer are the only men who do or can represent God in this world. No cold, irreligious, prayerless man can claim this right. They misrepresent God in all His work and all His plans. Praying men are the only men who have influence with God, the only kind of men to whom God commits Himself and His gospel. Praying men are the only men in which the Holy Spirit dwells, for the Holy Spirit and prayer go hand-in-hand. The Holy Spirit never descends upon prayerless men. He never fills them, He never empowers them. There is nothing whatever in common between the Spirit of God and men who do not pray. The Spirit dwells only in a prayer atmosphere.

In doing God’s work there is no substitute for praying. The men of prayer cannot be displaced with other kinds of men. Men of financial skill, men of education, men of worldly influence – none of these can possibly be put in substitution for the men of prayer. The life, the vigor, the motive power of God’s work is formed by praying men. A vitally diseased heart is not a more fearful symptom of approaching death than non-praying men are of spiritual atrophy.

Jesus was the divinely appointed leader of God’s people, and no one thing in His life proves His eminent fitness for that office so fully as His habit of prayer. Nothing is more suggestive of thought than Christ’s continual praying, and nothing is more conspicuous about Him than prayer. His campaigns were arranged, His victories gained, in the struggles and communion of His all-night praying. His praying rent the heavens. Moses and Elijah and the transfiguration glory waited on His praying. His miracles and His teaching had their force from the same source. Gethsemane’s praying crimsoned Calvary with serenity and glory. His prayer makes the history and hastens the triumphs of His church. What an inspiration and command to prayer is Christ’s life! What a comment on its worth! How He shames our lives by His praying!

Like all of His followers who have drawn God nearer to the world and lifted the world nearer to God, Jesus was the man of prayer, made of God a leader and commander to His people. His leadership was one of prayer. A great leader He was, because He was great in prayer. All great leaders for God have fashioned their leadership in the wrestlings of their closets. Many great men have led and molded the church who have not been great in prayer, but they were great only in their plans, great for their opinions, great for their organization, great by natural gifts, by the force of genius or of character. However, they were not great for God. But Jesus Christ was a great leader for God. His was the great leadership of great praying. God was in His leadership greatly because prayer was in it greatly. We might just well express the wish that we be taught by Him to pray, and to pray more and more.

E.M. Bounds in The Best of E.M. Bounds
on Prayer, p. 147-149