Prayer is the human response to the perpetual outpouring of love by which God lays siege to every soul.
Interpretation
Prayer is a way for humans to connect and respond to God's unending love.
This quote by Richard J. Foster emphasizes the concept that prayer serves as a human response to God's continuous and overwhelming love for each individual. It suggests that God's love is so profound and persistent that it calls upon each soul, and prayer becomes a vital means for people to engage with and reciprocate that love.
In practice
In a sermon about devotion, one might say, 'As Richard J. Foster expresses, prayer is our human response to the unending love of God.'
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.
Learn that urgency in prayer does not so much consist in vehement pleading, as in vehement believing. He that believes most the love and power of Jesus will obtain the most in prayer.
You must know how to translate the indications of the word into daily witness, allowing yourselves to be formed by the word which, like seed sown in good soil, brings abundant fruit. Thus you will remain docile to the Spirit and grow in union with God, you will cultivate fraternal communion among yourselves and be ready to serve your brethren generously, especially those most in need.
Prayer is speaking to God - but sometimes He uses our times of prayerful silence to speak to us in return.
In these days there is no time to pray; but without time, and a lot of it, we shall never learn to pray.
Faith and prayer are the vitamins of the soul; man cannot live in health without them.
The crisis of our prayer life is that our minds may be filled with ideas of God while our hearts remain far from him.
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