Prayer is always essential, but thought is essential, too, because prayer can be just an escape mechanism, almost at times a cry in the dark by people who are desperate and defeated. Prayer must be intelligent, and it is only to those who realize that their bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost that the answer will be given and the power will come.Spiritual Depression (173)
If you could be brought once to love secret prayer, and to converse feelingly with God in his word, your heaven will begin on earth; you will enjoy more pleasure than in all manner of riches.
God ordains our prayers as means of receiving what he plans to give, all to enrich our relationship to him. As the perfect Father of his children, he reserves the right to answer the requests we should have made rather than those we actually made when we have asked for the wrong thing; but he will take action one way or another in every situation of need that we bring before him. Systematic Theology A Lecture
A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.
Do you pray? One of the things that happens in your prayer life is if you think that you gotta earn the favor of God you'll never be a prayer. If you understand the favour of God was granted you in Jesus Christ you'll have a tendency to run to Christ and not from him.Rezweek 2010 Night 1
As a body without a soul, much wood without fire, a bullet in a gun without powder, so are words in prayer without spirit.Commentary on Old/New Testaments 5 - 334
If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.Disciplines of a Godly man
Why has God appointed that we should pray? The vast
majority of people would reply, In order that we may obtain from
God the things which we need. While this is one of the purposes of prayer it is by no means the chief one. Moreover, it considers prayer only from the human side, and prayer sadly needs to be viewed from the Divine side.https://www.monergism.com/sovereignty-god-unabridged
In the great majority of the books written and in the
sermons preached upon prayer the human element fills the scene
almost entirely: it is the conditions which we must meet, the
promises we must "claim," the things we must do in order to get our requests granted; and God's claims, God's rights, God's glory are disregarded.https://www.monergism.com/sovereignty-god-unabridged
The fig-tree, olive, and vine, would not leave their sweetness, fatness, and cheerfulness, to be kings over other trees, Judges ix. 11-13. They that know what it is to enjoy God in secret, would not leave it or lose it to be kings or commanders over the whole world.