Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home - Softcover

Foster, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340979275 ISBN 13: 9780340979273

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008

Synopsis

In the ten years since its publication, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home has helped hundreds of thousands of seekers discover a richer prayer life.

Widely considered the best modern work on Christian prayer, this life-changing book explores the three "movements" of this central spiritual practice, offering a sensitive, warm, and compelling primer that helps us understand, experience, and follow its many forms—from the simple prayer of beginning again to unceasing prayer. Foster clarifies the prayer process, answers common misconceptions, and shows the way into prayers of contemplation, healing, blessing, forgiveness, and rest.

This accessible, rich, and reliable guide shows how each of the various forms of payer can move us inward into personal transformation, upward toward intimacy with God, and outward to minister to others. Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home has won numerous honors including Christianity Today's Book of the Year and the Evangelical Christian Publishers' Association Gold Medallion Award.

Read by Terence Aselford

About this title

Review:

There are hundreds of books on prayer, and much of the advice they contain is likely to be the same. So what distinguishes these books? Call it a kind of wisdom, a sense that here's someone who knows something of God's heart. A good example can be found in this fine book by the Quaker writer and teacher Richard Foster. The author of the bestselling Celebration of Discipline explores various aspects of prayer, which he defines in one place as "the human response to the perpetual outpouring of love by which God lays siege to every soul." Beginning with the simplest forms of prayer--what he calls "ordinary people bringing ... ordinary concerns to a loving and compassionate Father"--he then explores the deeper places where prayer becomes not simply petition but a way of life. He writes of prayer of adoration and rest, sacramental prayer, meditation, and contemplation, and in the final section of the book moves outward into ministry, where prayer meets the needs of the world. In each chapter Foster defines, describes, and gives helpful examples. Above all he writes with grace--in both the artistic and spiritual senses. --Doug Thorpe

From the Inside Flap:

"The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives--altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. But what I have come to see is that God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture. We do not have to be bright, or pure, or filled with faith, or anything. That is what grace means, and not only are we saved by grace, we live by it as well. And we pray by it."--Richard J. Foster, from Prayer: Finding the Hearts True Home.

Bestselling author Richard J. Foster offers a warm, compelling, and sensitive primer on prayer, helping us to understand, experience, and practice it in its many forms--from the simple prayer of beginning again to unceasing prayer. He clarifies the prayer process, answers common misconceptions, and shows the way into prayers of contemplation, healing, blessing, forgiveness, and rest.

Coming to prayer is like coming home, Foster says. "Nothing feels more right, more like what we are created to be and to do. Yet at the same time we are confronted with great mysteries. Who hasn't struggled with the puzzle of unanswered prayer? Who hasn't wondered how a finite person can commune with the infinite Creator of the universe? Who hasn't questioned whether prayer isn't merely psychological manipulation after all? We do our best, of course, to answer these knotty questions but when all is said and done, there is a sense in which these mysteries remain unanswered and unanswerable... At such times we must learn to become comfortable with the mystery."

Foster shows how prayer can move us inward into personal transformation, upward toward intimacy with God, and outward to minister to others. He leads us beyond questions to a deeper understanding and practice of prayer, bringing us closer to God, to ourselves, and to our community.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0340979275
• ISBN 13: 9780340979273
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320