Formation Prayer
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.
Formation Prayer is Foster’s sixth kind of inward prayer. The life of prayer demands a willingness to change. Prayer changes things, and prayer changes us. As a believer, follows the Holy Spirit’s inward witness every day, the Spirit teaches us, and we change from the inside out. Formation prayer must combine with spiritual disciplines and endurance to achieve the change the Holy Spirit longs to bring. Foster describes the process of spiritual formation as God molding us more and more into the image and likeness of Christ. We pursue God, but at the same time, God is pursuing us. “We all need a deeper musing upon our perennial knack for disobedience and God’s unbounded habit of forgiving. We all need a richer contemplation upon that life, which shows us the way so we may follow ‘in his steps.’ We all need a fuller meditation upon that death, which sets us free. We all need a more profound experience of that resurrection, which empowers us to obey Christ in all things” (p. 60). Formation Prayer requires several spiritual disciplines. Humility will show us the truth and allow us to live as close to the truth as possible. Solitude enables a spiritual life to allow God to free us from bondage to people and our own inner darkness. Docility allows us to be completely yielded to anything God desires. Transformation comes from this yielding to God’s desires with humility, discipline, and endurance.
Yield to the divine will and purpose today. Embrace the truth in the love that God offers to you. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He longs to set each one of us free and transform us into the best version of ourselves.
Foster, Richard J., Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home. New York: Harper Collins, 1992
