Quotes from Richard J. Foster

Begin now to obey Him in every way you can. Start right where you are, in the midst of all the tasks that press in upon you. Do not wait for some future time when you will have more time or be more perfect in knowledge.

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.

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.

Silence is one of the deepest disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let God be our justifier. We don't need to straighten others out.

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

We are not trying to manipulate God and tell Him what to do. Rather, we are asking Him to tell us what to do.

In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in "muchness" and "manyness," he will rest satisfied. Psychiatrist Carl Jung once remarked, "Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil."1

obedience has a way of strengthening rather than depleting our resources. If we obey in one small corner, we will have power to obey elsewhere. Obedience begets obedience.

Leo Tolstoy observes, "Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.

Simple Prayer involves ordinary people bringing ordinary concerns to a loving and compassionate Father. There is no pretense in Simple Prayer. We do not pretend to be more holy, more pure, or more saintly than we actually are. We do not try to conceal our conflicting and contradictory motives from God—or ourselves. And in this posture we pour out our heart to the God who is greater than our heart and who knows all things (1 John 3:20).

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

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.

And so the test of whether or not we have really gotten the point of the Bible would then be the quality of love that we show.

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

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.

frequently we hold on so tightly to the good that we do know that we cannot receive the greater good that we do not know.

God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us.

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.

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

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.

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

Thomas Merton says, "We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!"2

Our lifestyle is not our private affair. We dare not allow each person to do what is right in his or her own eyes. The Gospel demands more of us: it is obligatory upon us to help one another hammer out the shape of Christian simplicity in the midst of modern affluence.

Try to live one entire day in utter thanksgiving. Balance every complaint with ten gratitudes, every criticism with ten compliments.