186 Quotes by Richard J. Foster

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

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.

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.

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.

I want to mention one other reason why we shy away from commitment. It is, very simply, the fear that we will not be able to fulfill our covenant. We may have made commitments in the past that we were not able to fulfill – perhaps a marriage vow or a promise to our children. Or it could have been something far more simple – a pledge to be diligent in devotional reading, for example.

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

The twentieth-century Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when asked why he meditated, replied, “Because I am a Christian.

Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different.

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.