Richard J. Foster Quotes

“reject anything that is producing an addiction in you.”

“If worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change.”

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

“True service is a lifestyle. It acts from the ingrained patterns of living. It springs spontaneously to meet human need.”

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

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

“Discipline brings freedom.”

“The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”

“Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.”

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

“To use good things to our own ends is always a false religion”

“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.’ ...It is time to awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.”

“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.”

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

“A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.”

“Humility, as we all know, is one of those virtues that is never gained by seeking it. The more we pursue it the more distant it becomes. To think we have it is sure evidence that we don’t.”

“Spiritual disciplines can do nothing. They can only get us to the place where something can be done.”

“To pray is to change. All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives.”

“Where are the people today who will respond to the call of Christ? Have we become so accustomed to “cheap grace” that we instinctively shy away from more demanding calls to obedience? “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross.”4 Why has the giving of money, for example, been unquestionably recognized as an element in Christian devotion and fasting so disputed? Certainly we have as much, if not more, evidence from the Bible for fasting as we have for giving. Perhaps in our affluent society fasting involves a far larger sacrifice than the giving of money.”

“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.”