August 5th, 2025
by John Thweatt
by John Thweatt
Yesterday I quoted from PT Forsyth. In his book The Soul of Prayer he has several quotes that I want to share and urge you to consider.
I’m tempted to just leave today’s blog with the quotes, but he speaks of prayer as labor and all who have tried to pray know that this is true. The flesh hates prayer because the enemy hates it.
At the end of Paul’s letter to Colossae he speaks of Epaphras and said, he is always “struggling on your behalf in his prayers.” The word “struggling” is used in 1 Corinthians 9 of an athlete who runs to win and in Colossians 1:29 Paul uses the same word when he speaks of toiling and struggling with all his energy that God powerfully works within him. It is the Greek word from which we get our English word agonize.
In Romans 15 Paul uses the word again when he pleads, “I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf…”
The reason so many do not pray is because prayer is work…it is the work and as Forsyth said, it isn’t so much that we pray to live the Christian life…prayer is the Christian life.
“The worst sin is prayerlessness.”
“Not to want to pray, then, is the sin behind sin. And it ends in not being able to pray.”
“Prayer is the assimilation of a holy God’s moral strength. We must work for this living. To feed the soul we must toil at prayer. And what a labor it is!”
“For it is the Christ at prayer who lives in us, and we are conduits of the Eternal Intercession.”
“But at last, it is truer to say that we live the Christian life in order to pray than we pray in order to live the Christian life.”
I’m tempted to just leave today’s blog with the quotes, but he speaks of prayer as labor and all who have tried to pray know that this is true. The flesh hates prayer because the enemy hates it.
At the end of Paul’s letter to Colossae he speaks of Epaphras and said, he is always “struggling on your behalf in his prayers.” The word “struggling” is used in 1 Corinthians 9 of an athlete who runs to win and in Colossians 1:29 Paul uses the same word when he speaks of toiling and struggling with all his energy that God powerfully works within him. It is the Greek word from which we get our English word agonize.
In Romans 15 Paul uses the word again when he pleads, “I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf…”
The reason so many do not pray is because prayer is work…it is the work and as Forsyth said, it isn’t so much that we pray to live the Christian life…prayer is the Christian life.
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