The Prayer of Relinquishment
The world is in great need of God’s children to pray and bring heaven to the earth. Author Richard Foster posits that the key to the heart of God is in prayer. Prayer is our response to the overwhelming love of God and springs from the act of falling in love with God. Love is the syntax of prayer. Foster has subdivided prayer into twenty-one categories and spends a full chapter exploring each type in his book, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home.
Foster’s fifth kind of prayer is the Prayer of Relinquishment. The Prayer of Relinquishment allows the Father’s will to include or absorb our will allowing us to move from the struggle into a settled peace. The believer must learn like Jesus did to say, “Not my will but yours be done.” (Luke 22) We must be willing to let anything and everything go, surrendered into the will of God. The Prayer of Relinquishment flows in series of prayers. The believer begins with a prayer of self-emptying like Christ did upon laying down his deity to become a servant of all. The prayer of surrender allows God’s will to be done regardless of our own will. The prayer of abandonment allows God to specify what he wants the believer to lay at his feet. The believer next prays the prayer of release giving everything into God’s hands. Finally, the believer learns the prayer of resurrection, asking the Lord to bring back what pleases him and can be used to build his kingdom. At this point, the believer can fall into the arms of Jesus, entering his rest in his peace.
Let go of everything and move into the peace of Jesus. Lay down your life at the feet of Jesus and allow his divine wisdom to set you back up and guide you into greater and more amazing pathways.
Foster, Richard J., Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
