As faithful as I have tried to be to my spiritual habits, personal prayer has often eluded me and felt dry and mechanical. I could fill this post with plenty of more quotes, but I’ll just say this book was an excellent resource and I know I’ll be coming back to it in the coming years. The author peppers the entire book with personal stories of trials, doubts, struggles, and wonderful answers to prayer, especially regarding his autistic daughter, Kim. It was formerly a print journal operated by RTSF/UCCF in the UK, and it became a digital journal operated by The Gospel Coalition in 2008.

Maybe it was simply the right book for the right time in my life, but Paul Miller's insights into having a praying life are profound. His goal is to get his readers to view God as a good and loving Father, and to boost their confidence in coming to God with their spiritual and physical needs. In many cases, I found myself puzzling over whether the powerful and striking claims were warranted (e. Miller’s down-to-earth approach and practical nature will help you see that your relationship with God can grow and your communication with Him can get better. While I can't speak to all of the reasons those other books might have come up short for you, I can recommend a new book that has the potential revolutionize your prayer life.

Well, recently my best friend got this for me and there were so many excellent pieces of wisdom, I had to share this one with y’all! It even covers a 'new' method which I've found helpful - using filing cards to hold your prayer list, rather than a scrap of paper or notebook.

Cynicism's ironic stance is a weak attempt to maintain a lighthearted equilibrium in a world gone mad. Yet at the same time, while I need practicality, I also need to understand the foundational reasons why prayer sometimes malfunctions in my life. If you read any of Paul’s writing, you’ll quickly see that he loves to tell stories—most of which start with his own failures and mishaps and end with God’s faithfulness. This seems to me to directly conflict with the tone of the book’s first half, that we will find ourselves “slipping into continuous prayer,” but I’m glad for the inconsistency.This book increased my desire to pray and helped explain to me why prayer is often something I am tempted to abandon. James reminds us of two aspects of prayer to help us remember Jesus’s example of not only asking but abiding or surrendering to God’s will in prayers that reflect his character so the “real” us will encounter the “real” God. The focus of that book, however, was on our personal prayer lives, so I’m excited to see Miller take those insights and show us how to integrate them into the corporate body.

There are times when we may be able to see what God is doing in another person’s life but telling that person would crush his or her spirit. Paul Miller's gift in this book is to bring prayer into the realm of a real person's real life by lifting the burden of legalism and formulas and the notion that there's a right way to pray and a wrong way to pray. Even on especially hard days, I began to notice him everywhere, setting a table before me in the presence of my enemies, pursuing me with his love. Jesus does not say, “Come to me, all you who have learned how to concentrate in prayer, whose mind no longer wander, and I will you rest. To me, the book gets stronger as it goes on, and it is in the final section, which is the most practical, that Miller is at his most compelling.We know that to become a Christian we shouldn’t try to fix ourselves up, but when it comes to praying we completely forget that. Sure enough, my friend who’d been reading the book on Kindle discovered that half the world had underlined this quote. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.