Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines

by David Mathis

“Spiritual” does not mean religious, or mystical, or new-age-like. It means: caused and shaped by God’s Spirit.

hearing God’s voice (his word), having his ear (prayer), and belonging to his body (fellowship).

The means of grace are not about earning God’s favor, twisting his arm, or controlling his blessing, but readying ourselves for consistent saturation in the roll of his tides.

Grace is too strong to leave us passive, too potent to let us wallow in the mire of our sins and weaknesses.

And the grace of God inspires and empowers the various habits and practices by which we avail ourselves of God’s means.

God is lavish in his grace; he is free to liberally dispense his goodness without even the least bit of cooperation and preparation on our part, and often he does. But he also has his regular channels. And we can routinely avail ourselves of these revealed paths of blessing—or neglect them to our detriment.

While there’s no final and complete list of such practices, the long tally of helpful habits can be clustered underneath three main principles: hearing God’s voice, having his ear, and belonging to his body. Or simply: word, prayer, and fellowship.

Yes, it is grace, and yes, we expend effort.

Take regular action to get more of God in your mind and your heart, and echo his ways in your life—which will make you increasingly like him (“godliness”). It’s a gift, and we receive it as we become it.

The way to receive the gift of God’s empowering our actions is to do the actions. If he gives the gift of effort, we receive that gift by expending the effort.

We cannot force Jesus’s hand, but we can put ourselves along the paths of grace where we can be expectant of his blessing. God’s regular channels of grace, as we will see, are his voice, his ear, and his body.

When all is said and done, our hope is not to be a skilled Bible reader, practiced pray-er, and faithful churchman, but to be the one who “understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth”

The means of grace, and their many good expressions, will serve to make us more like him, but only as our focus returns continually to Christ himself, not our own Christlikeness.

Without the Bible, we will soon lose the genuine gospel and the real Jesus and the true God. For now, if we are to saturate our lives with the words of life, we must be people of the Book.

It will not adequately strengthen our soul, in the long run, just to hear the same canned gospel repeated over and over. Neither will it sustain our spiritual lives to merely take in information without seeing it in light of Jesus, and pressing it into our hearts.

he’s learned that so much of good Bible reading is an art. It’s a skill learned in engaging the task, not mainly sitting under formal instruction. And those who have read their Bibles most are the ones who have learned the craft best.

At the end of the day, there is simply no replacement for finding a regular time and place, blocking out distractions, putting your nose in the text, and letting your mind and heart be led and captured and thrilled by God himself communicating to us in his objective written words. If you feel uncomfortable in the Scriptures and inadequate in the art of Bible reading, the single most important thing you can do is make a regular habit of reading the Bible for yourself. There is no substitute for a few focused minutes each day in the text. You may be surprised how much the little bits add up over the long haul.

But the habit of daily Bible reading can be a marvelous means of God’s grace. Why miss this bounty and blessing?

The habit of reading just a few minutes a day can get us a long way in a relatively short time. But when we slow down and study, we soon find out we have more than a life’s work ahead of us. Study is hard work.

As we aim to feed ourselves daily from the inexhaustible pantry, we need a diet of both breadth and depth. There’s a place for reading whole Bible books in one sitting and a place for going deep in half a verse. It takes both an increasing sense of the big picture of Jesus’s rescue of sinners as well as a growing depth in the little pieces that make up that big picture for us to stay fresh in applying the gospel to our lives.

The Bible is no magic book, but a strange, enigmatic power stirs when we reach for the Scriptures. Something influential, though invisible, is happening as we hear God’s words read or spoken, and when we read or study. Something supernatural, but unseen, transpires as we see the text in front of us and take it into our souls. Someone unseen moves. He is a personal force, fully divine and full of mystery—more a person than you or me, and yet no less an indomitable and ultimately irresistible power. He makes the seemingly simple into something supernatural, as reading the Bible takes us beyond the realm of our control. He loves to strengthen human souls in obvious and subtle ways as they encounter God’s word—whether that Word is the incarnate Christ, the gospel word of salvation for sinners, or the written word in the Scriptures.

When we get alone with the Bible, we are not alone. God has not left us to ourselves to understand his words and feed our own souls. No matter how thin your training, no matter how spotty your routine, the Helper stands ready. Take up the text in confidence that God is primed to bless your being with his very breath.

We were made to meditate. God designed us with the capacity to pause and ponder. He means for us to not just hear him, not only to read quickly over what he says, but to reflect on what he says and knead it into our hearts.

God means not for Joshua to be merely familiar with the Book, or that he read through sections of it quickly in the morning, or even just that he go deep in it in study, but that he be captivated by it and build his life on its truths. His spare thoughts should go there, his idle mind gravitate there. God’s words of instruction are to saturate his life, give him direction, shape his mind, form his patterns, fuel his affections, and inspire his actions.

“The reason we come away so cold from reading the word is, because we do not warm ourselves at the fire of meditation.”

Meditation, then, for the Christian, is a discipline that has a certain function related to the other disciplines. It doesn’t stand alone, hermetically sealed from God’s revelation of himself in the Bible and our reverential response to him in prayer. Rather, meditation bridges the gap between hearing from God and speaking to him.

In meditation, we pause and reflect over his words, which we have read, heard, or studied. We roll them over in our minds and let them ignite our hearts—we “warm ourselves at the fire of meditation.” We go deep in God’s revelation, take it into our very souls, and as we are being changed by his truth, we respond to him in prayer. As Matthew Henry says, “As meditation is the best preparation for prayer, so prayer is the best issue of meditation.”

In our restless and stressed-out society, it very well may strengthen our brain and lower our blood pressure to practice the art of Christian meditation. But even more significant will be the good that it does for our souls.

I remind myself over and over that it’s not about checking boxes but communing with God in his word through meditation and into prayer.

Take every word as spoken to yourselves. When the word thunders against sin, think thus: “God means my sins;” when it presseth any duty, “God intends me in this.” Many put off Scripture from themselves, as if it only concerned those who lived in the time when it was written; but if you intend to profit by the word, bring it home to yourselves: a medicine will do no good, unless it be applied.28 Yes, take every word as spoken to yourself, with this essential anchor in place: Seek to understand first how God’s words fell on the original hearers, and how they relate to Jesus’s person and work, and then bring them home to yourself.

He asks not that God give us simple obedience to a clear to-do list of commands, but that he give us wisdom to discern his will as we encounter life’s many choices coming at us without pause.

The kind of application most important to pursue in encountering God’s word is such astonishment. Press the Scriptures to your soul. Pray for the awakening of your affections. Bring the Bible home to your heart.

be careful not to let the drive for specific actions alter the focus of our devotions from astonishment and seeking to have your soul happy in the Lord. Coming to the Scriptures to see and feel makes for a drastically different approach than primarily coming to do.

When we bring God’s words home to our hearts, and then apply them to our lives through an amazed and changed heart, it is a great means of his grace to us. He loves to bless the true application of his word to our lives.

When we learn the Scriptures by heart, we’re not just memorizing ancient, enduringly relevant texts, but we’re listening to and learning the voice of our Creator and Redeemer himself. When we memorize lines from the Bible, we are shaping our minds in the moment to mimic the structure and mind-set of the mind of God.

we must flood the process of memorization with the habit of grace and lost art we discussed in chapter 3: meditation.

mere memorization does us little good; meditation does much good. When we take meditation seriously, we seek not only to understand what we are memorizing, but also to linger over it, and feel it, and even begin to apply it as we memorize.

when the focus is more on feeding and shaping, then constant review is less important. Once-memorized, now-forgotten texts aren’t a tragedy, but an opportunity to meditate again freshly and mold your mind even more.

As we not only read and study the Scriptures, but understand them, and then meditate on and memorize them, we increasingly “have the mind of Christ” as we are conformed to his image.

Resist the urge to see simple memory as the goal. Learning the text “by heart” is secondary; taking the text to heart is primary.

Personal and corporate prayer times are a great time to exercise what you’re memorizing, and see and feel it from a fresh angle as you turn it godward and express its significance for others.

Mere truth won’t sustain our souls. We desperately need the gospel. “The grace of God in truth” (Col. 1:6) is the shock that brings a dead soul to life and the charge that keeps it living.

For Christians in particular, the stakes are even higher for cultivating holy curiosity and the mind-set of a lifelong learner. Teaching and learning are at the heart of our faith. To be a “disciple” means literally to be a “learner.” Our Master is the consummate teacher, and the central task of his undershepherds in the local church is teaching (Matt. 28:20; 1 Tim. 3:2; 5:17; Titus 1:9; Heb. 13:7). God designed the church to be a community of lifelong learners under the earthly guidance of leaders who are teachers at heart.

ongoing health in the Christian life is inextricably linked to ongoing learning.

When we say “learners,” we don’t mean of mere facts, information, and head knowledge. We mean all that and more. We don’t just learn facts, but we learn a Face. We’re not just learners of principles, but of a Person.

one of the chief ways we know his person more is by learning more about his work for us. Not only are we “rooted and grounded” in Christ’s love for us at Calvary, but we press on “to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God”

The heart of lifelong learning that is truly Christian is not merely digging deeper in the seemingly bottomless store of information there is to learn about the world and humanity and history, but plunging into the infinite flood of Christ’s love, and how it all comes back to this, in its boundless breadth and length and height and depth, and seeing everything else in its light.

The center of lifelong learning for the Christian is this: knowing and enjoying God himself in Christ through the gospel word and ...

Learn from personal conversations, read books, take classes, watch educational videos, and (perhaps most underrated) listen to recorded audio. Diversify your sources of teaching.

There’s a place for mental rest and recreation, for ball games and television and pop tunes and motion pictures, but a lifelong learner will want to take care that most of life’s spare moments are not cannibalized by mere mindless entertainment.