Richard Foster (theologian) - Prayer Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

View all Richard Foster Quotes
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.

Richard Foster
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.

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

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

Richard Foster
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.

Richard Foster
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.

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

Richard Foster
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.

Richard Foster
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.

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

Richard Foster