Heartfelt prayer is the source of peace of heart, whilst insincere, superficial, inattentive prayer wounds the heart.
Transparency
Henri J. M. Nouwen
Maybe we wonder if God can take all that goes on in our mind and heart. Maybe we simply want to hold on to our own pleasurable imaginings, afraid that in showing them to our Lord, we may have to give them up. Thus, we are constantly tempted to fall back…out of fear or out of greed, and to keep from our God what often is the most in need of His healing touch.
Juliana of Norwich
It is very great pleasure to [Christ] when a simple soul comes to him nakedly, plainly and unpretentiously.
Josh McDowell
The fact that God accepts us should be our motivation for accepting ourselves. If we cannot accept ourselves the way we are, with our limitations and assets, weaknesses as well as strengths, shortcomings as well as abilities; then we cannot trust anyone else to accept us the way we are. We will always be putting on a front, building a facade around ourselves, never letting people know what we are really like deep down inside.
Josh McDowell
The fact that God accepts us should be our motivation for accepting ourselves. If we cannot accept ourselves the way we are, with our limitations and assets, weaknesses as well as strengths, shortcomings as well as abilities; then we cannot trust anyone else to accept us the way we are. We will always be putting on a front, building a facade around ourselves, never letting people know what we are really like deep down inside.
Madame Jeanne Guyon
Regarding your spiritual life, be open, simple and like a child. In the depths of your spirit be like a drop of water lost in an ocean, and be no longer conscious of yourself. In this enlarged condition see and enjoy everything from within God. Within yourself there is only darkness, but in God there is only light. Let God be everything to you…. God’s love is like a weight within us, causing us to sink deeper and deeper into God.
Francis Frangipane
Here they are, Lord Jesus, my hidden sins. I bring them out of the secret chamber of my heart. I take them out of the darkness and expose them to Your light. Lord, You have promised You will execute Your word upon the earth, thoroughly and quickly. Oh God, thoroughly cleanse my heart; purify me quickly!
Phillips Brooks
Keep clear of concealment – keep clear of the need of concealment. It is an awful hour when the first necessity of hiding something comes. The whole life is different thenceforth. When there are questions to be feared and eyes to be avoided and subjects which must not be touched, the bloom of life is gone.
Francois Fenelon
If you thus pour out all your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say. You will never exhaust the subject. It is continually being renewed. People who have no secrets from each other never want for subjects of conversation. They do not weigh their words, for there is nothing to be held back; neither do they seek for something to say. They talk out of the abundance of the heart, without consideration they say just what they think. Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved intercourse with God.
Katherine Walden
Give God your all. He doesn’t ask us to give Him only what we would consider perfect. Give Him everything, every scrap, every part of us, everything you’ve kept hidden on the back shelf of your heart. Give him those things that you judge as not good enough. Hand over those areas of your life that appear to be too broken to be used. God can and will transform the good, the bad, what you deem the ugly. Let Him sift and sort things through. You’ll be amazed at what the Master Creator can make out of what you might consider the shambles of your heart.