Richard J. Foster Quotes

As worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. Holy obedience saves worship from becoming an opiate, an escape from the pressing needs of modern life.

Our ordinary method of dealing with ingrained sin is to launch a frontal attack. We rely on our willpower and determination. Whatever may be the issue for us--anger, fear, bitterness, gluttony, pride, lust, substance abuse--we determine never to do it again; we pray against it, fight against it, set our will against it. But the struggle is all in vain, and we find ourselves once again morally bankrupt or, worse yet, so proud of our external righteousness that "whitened sepulchers" is a mild description of our condition.

It is important when we have a need to go to God in prayer. I know, whenever I have prayed earnestly, that I have been heard and have obtained more than I prayed for. God sometimes delays, but He always comes." - Martin Luther, "What a Great Gift We Have in Prayer"9

You see, we need instruction on how to possess money without being possessed by money. We need help to learn how to own things without treasuring them. We need the discipline that will allow us to live simply while managing great wealth and power.

Today, O Lord, I yield myself to you. May your will be my delight today. May your way have perfect sway in me. May your love be the pattern of my living. - Richard J. Foster, Prayers from the Heart12

Just as worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. If worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship.

In the same way that a small child cannot draw a bad picture so a child of God cannot offer a bad prayer.

Law will take over because law always carries with it a sense of security and manipulative power.

Simplicity, then, is getting in touch with the divine center

Do we see a college education, for example, as a ticket to privilege or as a training for service to the needy? What do we teach our teenagers in this matter? Do we urge them to enter college because it will better equip them to serve? Or do we try to bribe them with promises of future status and salary increases? No wonder they graduate more deeply concerned about their standard of living than about suffering humanity. As

Catherine Marshall writes, "Resignation is barren of faith in the love of God ... . Resignation lies down quietly in the dust of a universe from which God seems to have fled, and the door of Hope swings shut."2

We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening well, for we become more anxious to give the correct answer than to hear.

No hard figures are available on how much was actually paid out or how many Friends complied with the request of their Yearly Meeting. For those who did pay their slaves, it was common to use the yearly wage of the day. We do know that one Mr. F. Buxton, in an appeal before the British House of Commons to abolish slavery, said that it had cost North Carolina Friends fifty thousand pounds to release their slaves.14 For some southern Friends emancipation of their slaves meant financial bankruptcy; for many, if not most, it meant eventual migration to the North.

If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this leads us to prayer.

Go another step. Try to live one entire day without words at all. Do it not as a law, but as an experiment. Note your feelings of helplessness and excessive dependence upon words to communicate. Try to find new ways to relate to tohers that are not dependent upon words. Enjoy, savor the day. Learn from it.

As Foster writes, "We will never have pure enough motives, or be good enough, or know enough in order to pray rightly. We simply must set all these things aside and begin praying. In fact, it is in the very act of prayer itself - the intimate, ongoing interaction with God - that these matters are cared for in due time."1

I said that every Discipline has its corresponding freedom. What freedom corresponds to submission? It is the ability to lay down the terrible burden of always needing to get our own way. The obsession to demand that things go the way we want them to go is one of the greatest bondages in human society today.

May God give you - and me- the courage, the wisdom, the strength always to hold the kingdom of God as the number one priority of our lives. To do so is to live in simplicity.

What is urgently needed is a bold new move from a consumer economy to a conserver economy in all of the developed countries, and particularly in the United States.

He knew that "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," which is precisely why he commanded his followers: "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth" (Matt. 6:21, 19). He is not saying that the heart should or should not be where the treasure is. He is stating the plain fact that wherever you find the treasure, you will find the heart.

Discipline is to present us before grace, it does not produce grace to make sense.

Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes. If what we have we receive as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety. This is the inward reality of simplicity. However, if what we have we believe we have gotten, and if what we have we believe we must hold onto, and if what we have is not available to others, then we will live in anxiety. Such persons will never know simplicity regardless of the outward contortions they may put themselves through in order to live the simple life.

Spiritual disciplines answer the shallow world.

We read every verse of Scripture lovingly and attentively, because every verse is a potential summons from God.

I am not posing these questions only to the world at large. I query us who own Christ as our life. Can God be pleased by the vast and increasing inequities among us? Is he not grieved by our arrogant accumulation, while Christian brothers and sisters elsewhere languish and die? Is it not obligatory upon us to see beyond the nose of our own national interest, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream? Is there not an obligation upon us to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God is we want to live in his wonderful peace?

There is no place where God is not, wherever I go, there God is. Now and always he upholds me with his power and keeps me safe in his love. - Anonymous

Let's discipline ourselves so that our words are few and full.

As we see in Ezra's life, committed study of Scripture can bring about much more than merely head knowledge. It can bring God himself into all the recesses of our being, for "the word of God is living and active" (Heb 4:12). Take

The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives - altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter.

The spiritual discipline of simplicity is not a lost dream, but a recurrent version throughout history. It can be recaptured today. It must be.

The truly Christian imagination never lets Jesus Christ out of her sight.

However brightly the light may shine, it can be seen only by those who are spiritually prepared to receive it. 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.'" - A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy 8

The inner attitude of the heart is far more crucial than the mechanics for coming into the reality of the spiritual life.

Our world is hungry for genuinely changed people. Leo Tolstoy observes, "Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself."6

Silence frees us from the need to control others. One reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that it makes us feel so helpless. We are accustomed to relying upon words to manage and control others. A frantic stream of words flows from us in an attempt to straighten others out. We want so desperately for them to agree with us, to see things our way. We evaluate people, judge people, condemn people. We devour people with our words. Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on that.
When we become quiet enough to let go of people, we learn compassion for them.

It is an occupational hazard of devout folk to become stuffy bores. This should not be. Of all people, we should be the most free, alive, interesting.

Four times a year withdraw for three to four hours for the purpose of reorienting your life goals

Shekinah means the glory or the radiance of God dwelling in the midst of his people. It denotes the immediate Presence of God as opposed to a God who is abstract or aloof.

To be effective pray-ers, we need to be effective lovers.

Important insights ought never to be limited to the group from which may arise.

Worship may produce an outward change, but our inner condition will eventually be revealed

People need the truth. It does them no good to remain ignorant. They need the freedom that comes through the grace of simplicity. And if we are to bring the whole counsel of God, we must give attention to these issues that enslave people so savagely.

Your prayer must be turned inwards, not towards a God of Heaven nor towards a God far off, but towards God who is closer to you than you are aware.

If we are to progress in the spiritual walk so that the Disciplines are a blessing and not a curse, we must come to the place in our lives where we can lay down the everlasting burden of always needing to manage others.

We who have turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much he longs to eat with us, to commune with us. He desires a perpetual Eucharistic feast in the inner sanctuary of the heart.

The purpose of the Disciplines is freedom. Our aim is the freedom, not the Discipline. The moment we make the Discipline our central focus we will turn it into law and lose the corresponding freedom ... Let us forever center on Christ and view the Spiritual Disciplines as a way of drawing us closer to His heart.

Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics. That puts us in the "on-top" position, where we are competent and in control. But when praying, we come "underneath," where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent.

Giving with glad and generous hearts has a way of routing out the tough old miser within us. Even the poor need to know that they can give. Just the very act of letting go of money, or some other treasure, does something within us. It destroys the demon greed.

You will never have time for prayer; you must make time.

Graciousness, courtesy, compassion-this is hesed. Hesed is a quality that extends even to the animals and the land. The sabbath rest principle of Hebrew law included the needs of the livestock (Exod. 23:12). After seven years of planting and harvesting, the land itself needed "a year of complete rest" (Lev. 25:5). Even the soil of the vineyards was not to be overtaxed by planting other crops between the rows (Deut. 22:9). The oxen that trod out the grain were not to be muzzled so that they could eat while they worked (Deut. 25:4). And so on.

If we are a people rich in social relationships, we are rich indeed. Whenever we develop significant friendships with those who are not like us culturally, we become broader, wiser persons.

Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem.

PRAYER IS THE serious business of the Church, the first and best business it renders for the world.

Submission reaches the end of its tether when it becomes destructive.

Worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience.

Our prayer is to be like a reflex action to God's prior initiative upon the heart.

If you are too busy to read, you are too busy.

The Prayer of Examine produces within us the priceless grace of self-knowledge. I wish I could adequately explain to you how great a grace this truly is. Unfortunately, contemporary men and women simply do not value self-knowledge in the same way that all preceding generations have. For us technocratic knowledge reigns supreme. Even when we pursue self-knowledge, we all too often reduce it to a hedonistic search for personal peace and prosperity. How poor we are! Even the pagan philosophers were wiser than this generation. They knew that an unexamined life was not worth living.

Inward solitude has outward manifestations. There is the freedom to be alone, not in order to be away from people but in order to hear the divine Whisper better.

We must understand the connection between inner solitude and inner silence; they are inseparable. All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.

Countless people pray far more than they know. Often they have such a "stained-glass" image of prayer that they fail to recognize what they are experiencing as prayer and so condemn themselves for not praying.

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification.

Simplicity is freedom.

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.

At the heart of God is the desire to give and to forgive. Because of this, he set into motion the entire redemptive process that culminated in the cross and was confirmed in the resurrection. The usual notion of what Jesus did on the cross was something like this: people were so bad and so mean and God was so angry with them that he could not forgive them unless somebody big enough took the rap for the whole lot of them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it. This is why Jesus refused the customary painkiller when it was offered him. He wanted to be completely alert for this greatest work of redemption. In a deep and mysterious way he was preparing to take on the collective sin of the human race. Since Jesus lives in the eternal now, this work was not just for those around him, but he took in all the violence, all the fear, all the sin of all the past, all the present, and all the future. This was his highest and most holy work, the work that makes confession and the forgiveness of sins possible…Some seem to think that when Jesus shouted "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" it was a moment of weakness (Mark 15:34). Not at all. This was his moment of greatest triumph. Jesus, who had walked in constant communion wit

Whenever the Christian idea of meditation is taken seriously, there are those who assume it is synonymous with the concept of meditation centered in Eastern religions. In reality, the two ideas stand worlds apart. Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different.

It is in the everyday and the commonplace that we learn patience, acceptance, and contentment.

Corporate "confession of guilt." "The church," he declared, "confesses that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the

If we think we will have joy only by praying and singing psalms, we will be disillusioned. But if we fill our lives with simple good things and constantly thank God for them, we will be joyful, that is, full of joy. And what about our problems? When we determine to dwell on the good and excellent things in life, we will be so full of those things that they will tend to swallow our problems.

The mind will always take on an order conforming to that upon which it concentrates.

In intellectual honesty, we should be willing to study and explore the spiritual life with all the rigor and determination we would give to any field of research.

If we are silent when we should speak, we are not living the Discipline of silence. If we speak when we should be silent, we again miss the mark.

The message from all quarters is the same: our undisciplined consumption must end. If we continue to gobble up our resources without any regard to stewardship and to spew out our deadly wastes over land, sea, and air, we may well be drawing down the final curtain upon ourselves.

Meditation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.

Our God is not made of stone. His heart is the most sensitive and tender of all. No act goes unnoticed, no matter how insignificant or small. A cup of cold water is enough to put tears in the eyes of God. God celebrates our feeble expressions of gratitude.

Our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in "muchness" and "manyness," he will rest satisfied.

We should all without shame enrol in the school of contemplative prayer.

Restriction often enhances clarity.

Prayer is - a means of uniting us unto Himself.

Goals are discovered, not made.

If we watch the interactions between human beings, we will receive a graduate-level education.

Father, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures - I wish no more than this, O Lord."6

rejoice and make a fool of yourself for God the way lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love." - Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words

In a world of limited resources, our wealth is at the expense of the poor. To put it simply, if we have it, others cannot.

In the spiritual life only one thing produces genuine joy and that is obedience.

The tithe simply is not a sufficiently radical concept to embody the carefree unconcern for possessions that marks life in the Kingdom of God ...
It is quite possible to tithe and at the same time oppress the poor and needy ...
The tithe is not necessarily evil' it simply cannot provide a sufficient base for Jesus' call to carefree unconcern over provision ...
Perhaps the tithe can be a beginning way to acknowledge God as the owner of all things, but it is only a beginning and not an ending.

Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth but from falling in love.

Stop trying to impress people with your clothes and impress them with your life.

Forms and rituals do not produce worship, nor does the disuse of forms and rituals. We can use all the right techniques and methods, we can have the best possible liturgy, but we have not worshiped the Lord until Spirit touches spirit.

Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service, we must experience the many little death of going beyond ourselves. Service banishes us to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial

Spiritual Disciplines involve doing what we can do to receive from God the power to do what we cannot.

The Good News must be backed by integrity in our lives. We cannot proclaim His love if we close our hearts to the hungry. We cannot proclaim His salvation if we have not been saved from our own greed. Flamboyant, prosperous Christians are an offense to third world peoples by their insensitivity to the poverty and human deprivation, whether they come as traveling evangelists or sight-seeing vacationers.

There is an old proverb to the effect that 'all those who open their mouths, close their eyes!' The purpose of silence and solitude is to be able to see and hear. Control rather than no noise is the key to silence. James saw clearly that the person who could control his tounge is perfect (James 3:1-12). Under the Discipline of silence and solitude we learn when to speak and when to refrain from speaking.

Thomas Merton writes that if we have meditated on the events of the Passion but have not meditated on Dachau and Auschwitz, our perception of God at work in present times is incomplete.

Freedom in the Gospel does not mean license. It means opportunity.

The truth is that there are no "masters" in the spiritual life. Mature and wise teachers, yes. But fundamentally we are all beginners receiving and giving on our knees before God and with open hands before one another. In this business no one "lords it over" another. Pay

In submission we are at last free to value other people. Their dreams and plans become important to us. We have entered into a new, wonderful, glorious freedom, the freedom to give up our own rights for the good of others. For the first time we can love people unconditionally. We have given up the right for them to return our love. No longer do we feel we have to be treated in a certain way. We can rejoice with their successes. We feel genuine sorrow at their failures. It is of little consequence that our plans are frustrated, if their plans succeed. We discover that it is far better to serve our neighbor than to have our own way.

Cause every task of your day to be a sacred ministry to the Lord. however mundane your duties, for you they are a sacrament.

Absolute freedom is absolute nonsense! We gain freedom in anything through commitment, discipline, and fixed habit.

Nothing disciplines the inordinate desires of the flesh like service, and nothing transforms the desires of the flesh like serving in hiddenness. The flesh whines against service but screams against hidden service. It strains and pulls for honour and recognition. It will devise subtle, religiously acceptable means to call attention to the service rendered. If we stoutly refuse to give in to this lust of the flesh, we crucify it. Every time we crucify the flesh, we crucify our pride and arrogance.