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.
Interpretation
Prayer transforms lives by connecting us to divine virtues.
This quote by Richard J. Foster emphasizes that prayer has the power to bring about personal transformation, aligning our lives with positive virtues such as love, joy, and kindness. It reflects the belief that through prayer, one can experience grace and the guidance of God, leading to the development of a more virtuous and fulfilling life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a church sermon to illustrate the transformative power of prayer.
Go another step. Try to live one entire day without words at all. Do it not as a law, but as an experiment. Note your feelings of helplessness and excessive dependence upon words to communicate. Try to find new ways to relate to tohers that are not dependent upon words. Enjoy, savor the day. Learn from it.
Jesus Christ and all the writers of the New Testament call us to break free of mammon lust and live in joyous trust...They point us toward a way of living in which everything we have we receive as a gift, and everything we have is cared for by God, and everything we have is available to others when it is right and good. This reality frames the heart of Christian simplicity. It is the means of liberation and power to do what is right and to overcome the forces of fear and avarice.
Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it.
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.
When we determine to dwell on the good and excellent things in life, we will be so full of those things that they will tend to swallow our problems.
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.
Everything starts with God in my career, and it will finish with God.
Just as you did not come to Christ on your own, neither will you remain in Christ on your own.
In this Year of Faith, we pray to the Lord that the Church may always be a true family that brings God’s love to everyone.
Do not be afraid! Our Father is patient, he loves us, he gives us Jesus to guide us on the way which leads to the promised land. Jesus is the light who brightens the darkness. He is our peace.
Sometimes God lets you be in a situation that only He can fix so that you can see that He is the One who fixes it. Rest. He's got it.
When our whole life is one faith, hope, love, prayer and silence, a consecrated life always bound up in the Eucharist, then the 'urge' towards God springs.
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