If God can bring blessing from the broken body of Jesus and glory from something that's obscene as the cross, He can bring blessing from my problems and my pain and my unanswered prayer.

The devil resists serious, focused prayer because he's defeated by it. And so the devil will try to attack our concentration in prayer; he will try to confuse or contradict the content of our prayers; he will do his best to distract and/or divert us in prayer so that we're crippled by inconsistency.

If you feel far from God right now, guess who moved? You’re only a decision away from reconnecting.

The ultimate goal for me in prayer is to draw near to God...to fall in step with him...to discern his will so that my life might be lived accordingly...to discover what burdens are on his heart that I might take them into my own heart, then pray them back to him.

Abraham wasn't perfect. He failed, made mistakes. But, he would go back, get right with God, and then just keep moving forward. He didn't quit when things got hard. He just kept on going. And everywhere he went, God was there. God was with him.

When I put my faith in Jesus Christ as my savior, and I asked him to forgive and to come into my life, and He does - from that moment forward I have established a personal relationship with God that I have to develop, you know, through Bible reading and prayer, and living my life for him.

When life is good and we have no problems, we can almost let ourselves believe we have no need for God. But in my experience, sometimes the richest blessings come through pain and hard things.