When God is about to give His people the expected good, He pours out a Spirit of prayer, and it is a good sign that He is coming towards them in mercy.
The help of God does not come to us when we are indifferent. It comes to the man who is depending on God in the thick of the fight. It comes to the one who tarries for the vision in faith. It comes to the one who believes that he who waits upon the Lord shall never be confounded. It comes to the one who rests upon the promises of the Word. It comes to the man who lives by faith as if in the actual possession of the answer to his prayer, although the enemy is still around him. It is faith which turns distress into singing.
The people in Louisiana must know that all across our country there's a lot of prayer - prayer for those whose lives have been turned upside down. And I'm one of them.
Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poeticyouth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.
"Americans do not presume to equate God's purposes with any purpose of our own...."[Prayer] teaches us to trust, to accept that God's plan unfolds in his time, not our own.
A Time For Prayer "In times of war and not before, God and the soldier we adore. But in times of peace and all things righted, God is forgotten and the soldier slighted." -Rudyard Kipling
A heart-felt prayer is not recitation with the lips. It is a yearning from within which expresses itself in every word, every act, nay every thought of people.