Richard J. Foster Quotes about Prayer

Prayer involves transformed passions. In prayer, real prayer, we begin to think God's thoughts after Him: to desire the things He desires, to love the things He loves, to will the things He wills.

Prayer frees us to be controlled by God. To pray is to change. There is no greater liberating force in the Christian life than prayer. To enter the gaze of the Holy is never to be the same. To bathe in the Light in quiet wonder and glad surrender is to be slowly, permanently transformed. There is a richer inward orientation, a deep hunger for communion. We feel as if we are being taken over by a new control Center, and so we are.

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

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

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. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture.

Each activity of daily life in which we stretch ourselves on behalf of others is a prayer in action.

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

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

Prayer is - loving conversation with the One who has invited us into His embrace.

Prayer is more than thoughts and feelings expressed in words. It is the opening of mind and heart - our whole being to God our Abba Father. It is Divine Union.

Prayer is simply saying "thank you, bless you, praise you."

Prayer is the human response to the perpetual outpouring of love by which God lays siege to every soul.

Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics. But when praying, we come "underneath," where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent.

And so I urge you: carry on an ongoing conversation with God about the daily stuff of life, a little like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. For now, do not worry about "proper" praying, just talk to God.

Jesus reminds us that prayer is a little like children coming to their parents. Our children come to us with the craziest requests at times! Often we are grieved by the meanness and selfishness in their requests, but we would be all the more grieved if they never came to us even with their meanness and selfishness. We are simply glad that they do come--mixed motives and all.

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.

Prayer is - listening for the still small voice of God. Listening with the "ear of our hearts."

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.

..the true test of spirituality [is] in the freedom to live among people compassionately....Prayer frees us to be controlled by God.

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

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.

Prayer is seeing His greatness to the extent we can receive it.

Prayer is - a means of uniting us unto Himself.