Quotes from Richard J. Foster

The Bible is the loving heart of God made visible and plain. And receiving this message of exquisite love is the great privilege of all who long for life with God.

Through prayer and study, worship and service, we regularly digest God's word into the core of our being, where it feeds and transforms us. Continue

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

In his excellent little book entitled Freedom from Sinful Thoughts Heini Arnold writes, "We…want to make it quite clear that we cannot free and purify our own heart by exerting our own 'will.'"3

The primary purpose of prayer is to bring us into such a life of communion with the Father that, by the power of the Spirit, we are increasingly conformed to the image of the Son.

The water was only parted once they had acted in faith and followed God. They could not count on any plans, because God gave them none. He only gave them himself. God was the plan. As

The offering of ourselves can only be the offering of our lived experience, because this alone is who we are. And who we are—not who we want to be—is the only offering we have to give. We give God therefore not just our strengths but also our weaknesses, not just our giftedness but also our brokenness.

Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return.—Thomas Kelly

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship

We too are yoked to One who is trained. Our only task is to keep in step with him. He chooses the direction and leads the way. As we walk step by step with him, we soon discover that we have lost the crushing burden of needing to take care of ourselves and get our own way, and we discover that the burden is indeed light. We come into the joyful, simple life of hearing and obeying.

Jesus did not all of a sudden one day start spouting nice sayings about God. No, when he began his public ministry, he was speaking out of a life that had been tested and tried.

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.

O how abundant is your goodness that you have laid up for those who fear you, and accomplished for those who take refuge in you, in the sight of everyone! In the shelter of your presence you hide them from human plots; you hold them safe under your shelter from contentious tongues.

John Havel, a seventeenth-century English Puritan, noted that the "greatest difficulty in conversion, is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is to keep the heart with God. . .

Superficiality is the curse of our age.

genuinely long for abilities that are beyond yourself in order to face the demands of everyday life patiently and wisely. You—I—we—would love to have the inner resources to replace deep, destructive habits of thought with even deeper, life-giving habits of mind and heart and spirit.

Labor to work yourself up into a temper correspondent with what you read, for that reading is useless which only enlightens the understanding without warming the affections. And therefore intersperse, here and there, earnest aspirations to God for his heat as well as his light." —John Wesley, "Advice for Spiritual Reading"3

In the quiet of those brief hours, listen to the thunder of God's silence.

Simplicity The inward reality of single-hearted focus upon God and his kingdom, which results in an outward lifestyle of modesty, openness, and unpretentiousness and which disciplines our hunger for status, glamour, and luxury

We are learning the obedience of unwearied patience in the midst of pestering children. We are learning the obedience of absolute gentleness with the frustrations and fears and pains of our spouse. We are learning the obedience of settled peace in the expectation of events beyond our control. This is the Covenant of Holy Obedience.

Once we have made generous latitude for individual differences and schedules, we must firmly discipline ourselves to a regular pattern of prayer. We cannot assume that time will somehow magically appear. We will never have time for prayer—we must make time. On this score we have to be ruthless with our rationalizations. We must never, for instance, excuse our prayerlessness under the guise of "always living prayerfully.

As Jesus made clear in our central passage, freedom from anxiety is one of the inward evidences of seeking first the kingdom of God. The inward reality of simplicity involves a life of joyful unconcern for possessions. Neither the greedy nor the miserly know this liberty. It has nothing to so with abundance or possessions or their lack. It is an inward spirit of trust.

train[ing] . . . in godliness" (1 Tim 4:7). This is the purpose of the disciplines of the spiritual life.

He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body. He that to what he sees, adds observation, and to what he reads, reflection, is in the right road to knowledge, provided that in scrutinizing the hearts of others, he neglects not his own. —CALEB COLTON