LIFE CHANGING PRAYER compiled by Debra Maffett

fall; if He directs us not, we wander. His guidance is not only perfect
freedom, but perfect safety.
Our greatest danger begins from the moment we imagine we are able
to go alone. He who does not believe this fundamental truth, "the
helplessness of man," on which the other doctrines of the Bible are
built — or he who nominally professes to assent to it as a doctrine of
Scripture, yet if he does not experimentally acknowledge it — if he
does not feel it in the convictions of his own awakened conscience, in
his discovery of the evil workings of his own heart, and the wrong
propensities of his own nature, all bearing their testimony to its
truth — such a one will not pray earnestly for its cure — will not pray
with that feeling of his own helplessness, with that sense of
dependence on Divine assistance — which alone makes prayer
efficacious.
Nothing will make us truly humble, nothing will make us constantly
vigilant, nothing will entirely lead us to have recourse to prayer, so
fervently or so frequently as this ever-abiding sense of our corrupt
and helpless nature, as our not being able to ascribe any disposition
in ourselves to anything that is good; or any power to avoid, by our
own strength, anything that is evil.
Prayer is right in itself, as the most powerful means of resisting sin
and advancing in holiness. It is above all right, as everything is
which has the authority of Scripture, the command of God, and the
example of Christ. There is perfect consistency in all the ordinances
of God — a perfect congruity in the whole scheme of his
dispensations.
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