The Spirit of the Disciplines

Full participation in the life of God’s Kingdom and in the vivid companionship of Christ comes to us only through appropriate exercise in the disciplines for life in the spirit.

Leave the irregular, the half-hearted, and the novices aside for the moment. If the steady, longtime faithful devotees to our ministries are not transformed in the substance of their lives to the full range of Christlikeness, they are being failed by what we are teaching them.

The “cost of discipleship,” though it may take all we have, is small when compared to the lot of those who don’t accept Christ’s invitation to be a part of his company in The Way of life.

We are saved by grace, of course, and by it alone, and not because we deserve it. That is the basis of God’s acceptance of us. But grace does not mean that sufficient strength and insight will be automatically “infused” into our being in the moment of need. Abundant evidence for this claim is available precisely in the experience of any Christian.

no one ever says, “If you want to be a great athlete, go vault eighteen feet, run the mile under four minutes,” or “If you want to be a great musician, play the Beethoven violin concerto.” Instead, we advise the young artist or athlete to enter a certain kind of overall life, one involving deep associations with qualified people as well as rigorously scheduled time, diet, and activity for the mind and body.

It is part of the misguided and whimsical condition of humankind that we so devoutly believe in the power of effort-at-the-moment-of-action alone to accomplish what we want and completely ignore the need for character change in our lives as a whole.

Yet there is a life higher than natural thought and feeling for which the “living being” in human nature was made. It is the spiritual. Disruption of that higher life wrecks our thinking and valuation, thereby corrupting our entire history and being, down to the most physical of levels. It is this pervasive distortion and disruption of human existence from the top down that the Bible refers to as sin (not sins)—the general posture of fallen humankind. Humans are not only wrong, they are also wrung, twisted out of proper shape and proportion.

Governance by a person, whether over other people or animals, is at its best when the outcome is harmony, understanding, and love, and at its best then the governed experience that “rule” as merely doing what they would want to do anyway.

Christ’s transcendent life in the present Kingdom of heaven is what drew the disciples together around Jesus prior to his death. And then resurrection and postresurrection events proved that life to be indestructible. They verified that all of Jesus’ teachings about life in the Kingdom were true.

What is it that is missing in our deformed condition? From a biblical perspective, there can be no doubt that it is the appropriate relation to the spiritual Kingdom of God that is the missing “nutriment” in the human system. Without it our life is left mutilated, stunted, weakened, and deformed in various stages of disintegration and corruption.

The human body was made to be the vehicle of human personality ruling the earth for God and through his power. Withdrawn from that function by loss of its connection with God, the body is caught in the inevitable state of corruption in which we find it now.

What we find here is true of any human endeavor capable of giving significance to our lives. We are touching upon a general principle of human life. It’s true for the public speaker or the musician, the teacher or the surgeon. A successful performance at a moment of crisis rests largely and essentially upon the depths of a self wisely and rigorously prepared in the totality of its being—mind and body.

To undertake the disciplines was to take our activities—our lives—seriously and to suppose that the following of Christ was at least as big a challenge as playing the violin or jogging.

For instance, by his unaided energies a man can leap a barrier about his own height, if he is in good physical condition; but with practice and the right kind of pole he can vault triple that height or more. Unaided he can swim a broad river, but in the right social and technological setting he can effortlessly cross oceans or fly above the highest mountains. Without the assistance of appropriate tools he may find it difficult to number a flock of sheep, but with his computers he can plot the trajectory of a rocket to other planets and beyond or analyze unimaginably complex economic data.

The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting his way with us.”

True Christlikeness, true companionship with Christ, comes at the point where it is hard not to respond as he would.

The belief that people cannot live in constant union with the spiritual God throughout their daily life shall one day appear as odd as the belief that metal bodies cannot float on water or fly through the air.

And in this truth lies the secret of the easy yoke: the secret involves living as he lived in the entirety of his life—adopting his overall life-style. Following “in his steps” cannot be equated with behaving as he did when he was “on the spot.” To live as Christ lived is to live as he did all his life.

The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.

The secret of the easy yoke, then, is to learn from Christ how to live our total lives, how to invest all our time and our energies of mind and body as he did. We must learn how to follow his preparations, the disciplines for life in God’s rule that enabled him to receive his Father’s constant and effective support while doing his will. We have to discover how to enter into his disciplines from where we stand today—and no doubt, how to extend and amplify them to suit our needy cases.

If the missing element in the present human order is that of the spirit, what then is spirit? Very simply, spirit is unembodied personal power. Ultimately it is God, who is Spirit (John 4:24). Electricity, magnetism, and gravity, by contrast, are embodied nonpersonal powers.

what leads us to believe that we might be an exception to the rule and might know the power of the Kingdom life without the appropriate disciplines? How could we be justified in doing anything less than practicing and teaching the disciplines Jesus Christ himself and the best of his followers found necessary?

So, wherever early Christians looked they saw examples of the practice of solitude, fasting, prayer, private study, communal study, worship, and sacrificial service and giving—to mention only some of the more obvious disciplines for spiritual life.

But now is the time for decision and especially for planning. God changes lives in response to faith. But just as there is no faith that does not act, so there is no act without some plan. Faith grows from the experience of acting on plans and discovering God to be acting with us.

get all you can; save all you can; freely use all you can within a properly disciplined spiritual life; and control all you can for the good of humankind and God’s glory.

God will not do it for me any more than he did it for Moses or Elijah, for his son Jesus or his apostle Paul. And if I do not submit my actions through the disciplines that fit my personality, I will not enter into the powerful, virtuous new life in a psychologically real way.

Few people understand that they need help to prosper, for they have not yet cleared their hearts and minds of the world’s perspective on well-being.

Eberhard Arnold observes: “People who love one another can be silent together.”12 But when we’re with those we feel less than secure with, we use words to “adjust” our appearance and elicit their approval.

We are drawn to evil, excited by it. Yet, interestingly enough, we seem surprised when it becomes reality.

As a response to this world’s problems, the gospel of the Kingdom will never make sense except as it is incarnated—we say “fleshed out”—in ordinary human beings in all ordinary conditions of human life. But it will make sense when janitors and storekeepers, carpenters and secretaries, businessmen and university professors, bankers and government officials brim with the degree of holiness and power formerly thought appropriate only to apostles and martyrs.

Holy people must stop going into “church work” as their natural course of action and take up holy orders in farming, industry, law, education, banking, and journalism with the same zeal previously given to evangelism or to pastoral and missionary work.

Somehow, we think that virtue should come easily. Experience teaches, to the contrary, that almost everything worth doing in human life is very difficult in its early stages and the good we are aiming at is never available at first, to strengthen us when we seem to need it most.

Service to others in the spirit of Jesus allows us the freedom of a humility that carries no burdens of “appearance.” It lets us be what we are—simply a particularly lively piece of clay who, as servant of God, happens to be here now with the ability to do this good and needful thing for that other bit of clay there.

we refuse to practice, it is not God’s grace that fails when a crisis comes, but our own nature. When the crisis comes, we ask God to help us, but He cannot if we have not made our nature our ally. The practicing is ours, not God’s. God regenerates us and puts us in contact with all His divine resources,

Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well. The

Abstinence and engagement are the outbreathing and inbreathing of our spiritual lives, and we require disciplines for both movements.

The Christian leader has something much more important to do than pursue the godless. The leader’s task is to equip saints until they are like Christ (Eph. 4:12), and history and the God of history waits for him to do this job.

it is as great and as difficult a spiritual calling to run the factories and the mines, the banks and the department stores, the schools and government agencies for the Kingdom of God as it is to pastor a church or serve as an evangelist.

Practicing frugality means we stay within the bounds of what general good judgment would designate as necessary for the kind of life to which God has led us.

The fire of God kindles higher as the brands are heaped together and each is warmed by the other’s flame.

In solitude we find the psychic distance, the perspective from which we can see, in the light of eternity, the created things that trap, worry, and oppress us.

God has all along intended that we walk with him on a personal basis, be pleased by the right things, and then do what is right in our own eyes. This is why we were made and what constitutes our individuality.

Here as always—whether in our natural life or in our spiritual life—the mark of disciplined persons is that they are able to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.

When the crisis comes, we ask God to help us, but He cannot if we have not made our nature our ally. The practicing is ours, not God’s.

Habitual reliance upon God as we dedicate our bodies to righteous behavior and to all reasonable preparation for righteous behavior makes sin dispensable, even uninteresting and revolting—just as righteousness was revolting to us when our behavior was locked into the sin system. Our desires and delights are changed because our actions and attitude are based upon the reality of God’s Kingdom.

Baseball player Pete Rose, when asked to explain his phenomenal success as an athlete, said: “I practice what I’m not good at. Most folks practice what they’re good at.” The same is true for our success in our spiritual living.

Holiness is, fundamentally, otherness or separateness from the ordinary realm of human existence in which we believe we know what we are doing and what is going on.

We talk about leading a different kind of life, but we also have ready explanations for not being really different. And with those explanations we have talked our way out of the very practices that alone would enable us to be citizens of another world.

others. Paul’s admonition, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another” (Rom. 13:8) is therefore good spiritual advice as well as wise financial counsel.

The normal course of day-to-day human interactions locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of a freedom from the ingrained behaviors that hinder our integration into God’s order.

When through spiritual disciplines I become able heartily to bless those who curse me, pray without ceasing, to be at peace when not given credit for good deeds I’ve done, or to master the evil that comes my way, it is because my disciplinary activities have inwardly poised me for more and more interaction with the powers of the living God and his Kingdom. Such is the potential we tap into when we use the disciplines.