Chris

“Discipline brings freedom.

The purpose of meditation is to enable us to hear God more clearly. Meditation is listening, sensing, heeding the life and light of Christ. This comes right to the heart of our faith. The life that pleases God is not a set of religious duties; it is to hear His voice and obey His word. Meditation opens the door to this way of living.

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

For those explorers in the frontiers of faith, prayer was no little habit tacked on to the periphery of their lives; it was their lives. It was the most serious work of their most productive years. Prayer – nothing draws us closer to the heart of God.

Fasting must forever centre on God. More than any other Discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us.

The most difficult problem is not finding time but convincing myself that this is important enough to set aside the time.

Disciplines are not the answer; they only lead us to the Answer. We must clearly understand this limitation of the Disciplines if we are to avoid bondage.

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.

Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the Cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother.’

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.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“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.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. 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'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth