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If we are silent when we should speak, we are not living the Discipline of silence. If we speak when we should be silent, we again miss the mark.

Richard J. Foster

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Richard J. Foster
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When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame?
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Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important
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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.
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God's heart is the most sensitive and tender of all. No act goes unnoticed, no matter how insignificant or small.
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Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth but from falling in love.
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To pray is to change. This is a great grace. How good of God to provide a path whereby our lives can be taken over by love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control.
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He is inviting you - and me - to come home, to come home to where we belong, to come home to that for which we were created. His arms are stretched out wide to receive us. His heart is enlarged to take us in.
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Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem.
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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.
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Simplicity enables us to live lives of integrity in the face of the terrible realities of our global village.
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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.
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Spiritual direction involves a process through which one person helps another person understand what God is doing and saying.
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Absolute freedom is absolute nonsense! We gain freedom in anything through commitment, discipline, and fixed habit.
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In intellectual honesty, we should be willing to study and explore the spiritual life with all the rigor and determination we would give to any field of research.
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Worship is our response to the overtures of love from the heart of the Father.
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The Spiritual Disciplines are things that we do. We must never lose sight of this fact. It is one thing to talk piously about 'the solitude of the heart,' but if that does not somehow work its way into our experience, then we have missed the point of the Disciplines. We are dealing with actions, not merely states of mind.
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We must understand the connection between inner solitude and inner silence they are inseparable. All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.
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In the spiritual life only one thing produces genuine joy and that is obedience.
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