The illustrations below come from 1001 Great Stories & Quotes, by R. Kent Hughes, Tyndale House Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois (1998). The complete book is available for purchase online or can be ordered through your local bookstore. In addition to these illustrations and quotes, also consider using the Scriptures highlighted in the “Why Pray?” And “How to Pray?” sections and the country profiles on our website.

Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than one can understand. It will be a wonderful moment for some of us when we stand before God and find that the prayers we clamoured for in early days and imagined were never answered, have been answered in the most amazing way, and that God’s silence has been the sign of the answer.

Oswald Chambers

Listen, my friend! Your helplessness is your best prayer. It calls from your heart to the heart of God with greater effect than all your uttered pleas. He hears it from the very moment that you are seized with helplessness, and He becomes actively engaged at once in hearing and answering the prayer of your helplessness. He hears today as He heard the helpless and wordless prayer of the many sick with plasy.

O Hallesby

Prayer is one of the means God has etched into the cosmos for the advancement of His purposes.

Carl F. H. Henry

In prayer the soul opens up every avenue to the Holy Spirit. God then gently breathes into it that it may become a living soul. He who has ceased to breathe in prayer is spiritually dead.

Sadhu Sunder Singh

You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.

John Bunyan

The Family Bible Andrea Wolfe, on staff with The CoMission office in Raleigh, North Carolina, included the following story in one of her Christmas newsletters:

In the 1930s Stalin ordered a purge of all Bibles and all believers. In Stavropol, Russia, this order was carried out with a vengeance. Thousands of Bibles were confiscated, and multitudes of believers were sent to the gulags-prison camps-where most died for being “enemies of the State.”

The CoMission once sent a team to Stavropol. The city’s history wasn’t known at that time. But when the teams was having difficulty getting Bibles shipped from Moscow, someone mentioned the existence of a warehouse outside of town where these confiscated Bibles had been stored since Stalin’ s day.

After much prayer by the team, one member finally got up the courage to go to the warehouse and ask the officials if the Bibles were still there. Sure enough, they were. Then the CoMissioners asked if the Bibles could be removed and distributed again to the people of Stavropol. The answer was, “Yes!”

The next day the CoMission team returned with a truck and several Russian people to help load the Bibles. One helper was a young man-a skeptical, hostile, agnostic collegian who had come only for the day’s wages. As they were loading Bibles, one team member noticed that the young man had disappeared. Eventually they found him in a corner of the warehouse, weeping.

He had slipped away, hoping to quietly take a Bible for himself. What he found shook him to the core.

The inside page of the Bible he picked up had the handwritten signature of his own grandmother. It had been her personal Bible. Out of the thousands of Bibles still left in that warehouse, he stole the one belonging to his grandmother-a woman persecuted for her faith all her life.

No wonder he was weeping-God was real. His grandmother had no doubt prayed for him and her city. His discovery of this Bible was only a glimpse into the spiritual realm-and this young man was in the process of being transformed by the very Bible that his grandmother found so dear.

Andrea Wolf, The CoMission, Raleigh, North Carolina

The Pattern of Suffering The experience of many East European Christians who lived under Communism portray a patter of suffering transformed to opportunity and blessing. We need to remember how it was for them.

The experience of Volodia, a Russian believer, illustrates such a divine paradox. In his last year of medical school, when school officials discovered he was a Christian, Volodia was threatened with expulsion from school. “You choose-either God or diploma,” the Communist authorities demanded.

Volodia’s mentors tried to ensure that Volodia, the best student in his class, would choose to graduate. For several months they conduced indoctrination sessions intended to force the student to renounce his faith.

One day, unannounced, a Communist Party official visited Volodia ‘s class and declared, “Strange things have been happening in our university. There is a rumor that some students are trying to believe in God. We want to find out if this is true. I am going to ask Volodia to come forward and clarify this rumor,” the official concluded.

Struck by the shock of being summoned, Volodia understood. He was being offered a final chance to renounce his faith. “For twenty minutes I had the opportunity of my lifetime to tell my fellow students about Christ,” Volodia, who was soon expelled from university, later told Christians in the West.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

C.S. Lewis

Christ’s cross is such a burden as sails are to a ship or wings to a bird.

Samuel Rutherford, writing from prison

Discipleship means allegiance to the suffering Christ, and it is therefore not at all surprising that Christians should be called upon to suffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Every person alive fits somewhere onto a scale of suffering that ranges from little to much. However much suffering we have to endure, there are always those below us who suffer less, and those above us who suffer more. The problem is, we usually like to compare ourselves only with those who suffer less. That way we can pity ourselves and pretend we’re at the top of the scale. But when we face reality and stand beside those who suffer more, our purple hearts medals don’t shine so brightly.

Joni Eareckson Tada

Suppose you eliminated suffering, what a dreadful place the world would be. I would almost rather eliminate happiness. The world would be the most ghastly place because everything that corrects the tendency of this unspeakable little creature, man, to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He’s bad enough now, but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered.

Malcolm Muggeridge

The soul would have no rainbow if the eye had no tears.

John Piper

He [Christ] did not come to suffer as little as He could; He did not turn away His face from the suffering; He confronted it, or, as I may say, He breasted it, that every particular portion of it might make its due impression on Him.

John Henry Cardinal Newman

To choose to suffer means that there is something wrong; to choose God’s will even if it means suffering is a very different thing. No healthy saint ever chooses suffering; he chooses God’s will, as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not.

Oswald Chambers