Inspirational Quotes by Richard J. Foster

“The aim of the sermon—forcefully indicated by its concluding verses—is to help people come to hopeful and realistic terms with their lives here on earth by clarifying, in concrete terms, the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited by Jesus’ call: “Repent, for life in the kingdom of the heavens is now one of your options.” The separate parts of the discourse are to be interpreted in the light of this single purpose. They are not to be read as one disconnected statement after another. One must discern the overall plan of life within which the separate parts of the discourse make sense. So far from being additional laws to crush us or show us we can’t make it on our own (of course we can’t!), the separate parts are distinct perspectives on the sweet life of love and power, of truth and grace, that those who count on Jesus can even now lead in his kingdom. “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus the Anointed” (John 1:17). His teachings illustrate how those alive in the kingdom can live, through the days and hours of their ordinary existence, on their way to the full world of God.”

“The obviously well kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows.”

“The most constant “whim,” historically, has been the disastrous idea just mentioned: that Jesus is here giving laws. For if that is all he is doing, they will certainly be laws that are impossible to keep. The keeping of law turns out to be an inherently self-refuting aim; rather, the inner self must be changed. Trying merely to keep the law is not wholly unlike trying to make an apple tree bear peaches by tying peaches to its branches.”

“In every concrete situation we have to ask ourselves, not “Did I do the specific things in Jesus’ illustrations?” but “Am I being the kind of person Jesus’ illustrations are illustrations of?”

“Thus, we should not think of ourselves as destined to be celestial bureaucrats, involved eternally in celestial “administrivia.” That would be only slightly better than being caught in an everlasting church service. No, we should think of our destiny as being absorbed in a tremendously creative team effort, with unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast plane of activity, with ever more comprehensive cycles of productivity and enjoyment. This is the “eye hath not seen, neither ear heard” that lies before us in the prophetic vision (Isa. 64:4).”

“the intention points the way, and then habituated thought and desire must be redirected to support the intention in the moments of action.”

“the really good news here is that the power of habit can be broken. Habits can be changed. And God will help us to change them—though he will not do it for us—because he has a vital interest in who we become. If, for example, you have decided not to let anger or lusting govern you, you can train yourself (and certainly you can do so given the help of experienced disciple trainers) to use the very “cues” that until now have served to activate habits of anger and lusting to activate thoughts, feelings, and actions that will rule them out. Multitudes have found this to be so.”

“In charting one’s course in life, it is important never to forget that many things that cannot be called wrong or evil are nevertheless not good for us.”

“Standing in the kingdom, we make responsible decisions in love, with assurance that how things turn out for us does not really matter that much because, in any case, we are in the kingdom of the heavens. In that kingdom nothing that can happen to us is “the end of the world.”

“When I go to New York City, I do not have to think about not going to London or Atlanta. People do not meet me at the airport or station and exclaim over what a great thing I did in not going somewhere else. I took the steps to go to New York City, and that took care of everything. Likewise, when I treasure those around me and see them as God’s creatures designed for his eternal purposes, I do not make an additional point of not hating them or calling them twerps or fools. Not doing those things is simply a part of the package. “He that loves has fulfilled the law,” Paul said (Rom. 13:8). Really. On the other hand, not going to London or Atlanta is a poor plan for going to New York. And not being wrongly angry and so on is a poor plan for treating people with love. It will not work. And, of course, Jesus never intended it to be such a plan. For all their necessity, goodness, and beauty, laws that deal only with actions, such as the Ten Commandments, simply cannot reach the human heart, the source of actions. “If a law had been given capable of bringing people to life,” Paul said, “then righteousness would have come from that law” (Gal. 3:21). But law, for all its magnificence, cannot do that. Graceful relationship sustained with the masterful Christ certainly can.”

“Thus by proclaiming blessed those who in the human order are thought hopeless, and by pronouncing woes over those human beings regarded as well off, Jesus opens the kingdom of the heavens to everyone.”

“We will never have the easy, unhesitating love of God that makes obedience to Jesus our natural response unless we are absolutely sure that it is good for us to be, and to be who we are. This means we must have no doubt that the path appointed for us by when and where and to whom we were born is good, and that nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God’s full world.”

“we can be sure that heaven in the sense of our afterlife is just our future in this universe. There is not another universe besides this one. God created the heavens and the earth. That’s it. And much of the difficulty in having a believable picture of heaven and hell today comes from the centuries-long tendency to “locate” them in “another reality” outside the created universe.”

“Thus, if we hear only the word water or see it written down somewhere, we do not know whether it is a verb or a noun. Hence we cannot know what it refers to or what it is about. If the remainder of a sentence is given, however, it may be either one: as in “Water my plants while I’m away,” where it is a verb, or “Water is essential to life on this planet,” where it is a noun. Events in a human life are like that, and so is a human life as a whole, as well as human life itself. They resemble the opening words in an unfinished sentence, paragraph, chapter, or book. In a sense we can identify them and grasp them, but we cannot know what they mean and really are until we know what comes later. Thus we are always seeking the meaning of events we live through and of our lives themselves. We wonder about the meaning of historical events and personages, or even of human history itself. And it is always true that meaning is found, when it is found, in some larger context. From Jesus we learn of the ultimate context, God and his kingdom. In the future phases of that kingdom lies the meaning of our lives and, indeed, of the history of the earth of which we are a part. Jesus insisted, as we have seen, upon the present reality of the “kingdom of the heavens” and made that the basis of his gospel. But he also recognized that there was a future fullness to the kingdom, as well as an everlasting enjoyment of life in God far transcending the earth and life on it.”

“The purpose of God with human history is nothing less than to bring out of it—small and insignificant as it seems from the biological and naturalistic point of view—an eternal community of those who were once thought to be just “ordinary human beings.”8 Because of God’s purposes for it, this community will, in its way, pervade the entire created realm and share in the government of it. God’s precreation intention to have that community as a special dwelling place or home will be realized. He will be its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. But why? What is the point of it? The purpose is to meet what can only be described as a need of God’s nature as totally competent love. It is the same purpose that manifests itself in his creation of the world. Only in the light of such a creation and such a redeemed community is it possible for God to be known in his deepest nature. They make it possible for God to be known. And love unknown is love unfulfilled. Moreover, the welfare of every conscious being in existence depends upon their possession of this knowledge of God.”

“How can one in a leadership position not be haunted by what the Lord said to his prophet Ezekiel: Everyone is talking about you all the time. They say, “Come and let’s hear what the word is from the Lord.” And they sit before you as my people, and they hear your words, but they do not do them. For their mouths talk devotion but their hearts seek wicked gains. Why, you are just like one who sings about love with a beautiful voice and a well-played instrument. They hear what you are saying, but do not do it. (Ezek. 33:31–32)”

“Anger indulged, instead of simply waved off, always has in it an element of self-righteousness and vanity. Find a person who has embraced anger, and you find a person with a wounded ego.”

“The material universe is both an essential display of the greatness and goodness of God and the arena of the eternal life of finite spirits, including the human.”

“And they shall live with His face in view, and that they belong to Him will show on their faces. Darkness will no longer be. They will have no need of lamps or sunlight because God the Lord will be radiant in their midst. And they will reign through the ages of ages. REV. 22:4–5”

“This struggle with the translation reflects our intense need to find in the condition referred to something good, something God supposedly desires or even requires, that then can serve as a “reasonable” basis for the blessedness he bestows. But that precisely misses the point that the very formulation of the Beatitudes should bring to our attention. Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit because they are poor in spirit.” He did not think, “What a fine thing it is to be destitute of every spiritual attainment or quality. It makes people worthy of the kingdom.” And we steal away the much more profound meaning of his teaching about the availability of the kingdom by replacing the state of spiritual impoverishment—in no way good in itself—with some supposedly praiseworthy state of mind or attitude that “qualifies” us for the kingdom.4 In so doing we merely substitute another banal legalism for the ecstatic pronouncement of the gospel. Those poor in spirit are called “blessed” by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ.”