O soul! Worship is not the introduction to additional rewards, but the result of previous bounties. Yes, we have received our wage and are accordingly charged with the duties of service and worship. For since the All-Glorious Creator, Who clothed you in existence, O soul!, which is pure good, has given you a stomach and appetite, through His name of Provider He has placed before you all foods on a table of bounties. Then, since He has given you a life decked out with senses, life too requires sustenance like a stomach; all your senses like eyes and ears are like hands before which He has placed a table of bounties as broad as the earth. Then, because He has given you humanity, which requires many immaterial foods and bounties, He has laid out before that stomach of humanity, in so far as the hand of the mind can reach, an extensive table of bounties as broad as the worlds of both the inner and outer dimensions of things. Then, since He has given you Islam and belief, which require infinite bounties and are nourished through countless fruits of mercy and are supreme humanity, He has opened up before you a table of bounties, pleasure, and happiness which includes the sphere of contingency together with the sphere of His sacred names and attributes. Then, by giving you love, which is a light of belief, He has bestowed on you an endless table of bounties, happiness, and pleasure. That is to say, with regard to your corporeality you are an insignificant, weak, helpless, lowly, restricted, limited particular, but through His favour you have as though risen from being an insignificant particular to being a universal, luminous whole. For by giving you life, He has raised you from particularity to a sort of universality; and by giving you humanity, to true universality; and by bestowing Islam on you, to an exalted, luminous universality; and by giving you knowledge and love of Him, He has elevated you to an all-encompassing light.

O soul! You have received this wage and you are charged with the pleasurable, bountiful, easy, and light duty of worship. But you are lazy in this too. If you perform it half-heartedly, it is as though the former wages are insufficient for you and you are overbearingly wanting greater things. Also, you are complaining: “Why was my prayer not accepted?” But your right is not complaint, it is supplication. Out of His pure grace and munificence, Almighty God bestows Paradise and eternal happiness. So constantly seek refuge in His mercy and munificence. Trust in Him and heed this decree:

Say: “In the bounty of God, and His mercy – in that let them rejoice;” that is better than the [wealth] they hoard.(10:58)

From the Twenty-Fourth Word from the Risale-i Nur Collection
(http://istanbul.sozler.com.tr/the-words/the-twenty-fourth-word/8057/28/350/384#380_3)