Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines

by David Mathis

Enjoyment of Jesus is not like icing on the cake; it’s like powder in the shell.

the means of grace, fleshed out in our various habits of grace, are to be for us means of joy in God, and thus means of his glory.

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.

I can flip a switch, but I don’t provide the electricity. I can turn on a faucet, but I don’t make the water flow. There will be no light and no liquid refreshment without someone else providing it. And so it is for the Christian with the ongoing grace of God. His grace is essential for our spiritual lives, but we don’t control the supply. We can’t make the favor of God flow, but he has given us circuits to connect and pipes to open expectantly. There are paths along which he has promised his favor.

We cannot earn God’s grace or make it flow apart from his free gift. But we can position ourselves to go on getting as he keeps on giving.

hearing God’s voice, having his ear, and belonging to his body. Or simply: word, prayer, and

Discipline yourself for growth. 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.

And Paul says in Romans 15:18, “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me.” Jesus’s grace, in this instance, didn’t mean accomplishing his purpose despite Paul, or apart from him, but through him.

If he gives the gift of effort, we receive that gift by expending the effort.

“Think of the Spiritual Disciplines,” says Donald S. Whitney, “as ways we can place ourselves in the path of God’s grace and seek him as Bartimaeus and Zacchaeus placed themselves in Jesus’s path and sought

John Frame says, is “his powerful, authoritative self-expression.”1 Just as the words of a friend are central in revealing his person to us, so it is with God.

The most frequent use of word in the New Testament is in reference to the message of the gospel—the word evangelical we might call it, or the gospel word—the message about Jesus, “the word of Christ” (Col. 3:16). For Paul, the phrases “preach Christ” and “proclaim Christ” and “speak the word” are synonymous (Phil. 1:14–17).

The fundamental means of God’s ongoing grace, through his Spirit, in the life of the Christian and the life of the church is God’s self-expression in his Word, in the gospel, perfectly kept for us and on display in all its textures, riches, and hues in the external written word of the Scriptures.

Bible reading is like watching the film in real time. Study is like going through a clip frame by frame. Meditation, then, along with Scripture memory (chap. 5), is for lingering over particular frames and pressing the significance to our hearts and into our lives.

It takes about seventy hours to read the Bible from cover to cover.

In no more than fifteen minutes a day you can read through the Bible in less than a year’s time.”

Every book worth reading beckons with the words, “Think over what I say.” . . . When my sons complain that a book is too hard to read, I say, “Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find

The biblical name for this art is meditation, which Donald S. Whitney defines as “deep thinking on the truths and spiritual realities revealed in Scripture for the purposes of understanding, application, and prayer.”

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.

Whitney catalogs several prominent Puritans to the effect that meditation is “the missing link between Bible intake and prayer,” and in doing so, he moves us into some practical counsel for Christian meditation:2

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

meditation bridges the gap between hearing from God and speaking to him.

As we’re freshly captivated by the grandeur of our God and his gospel, we become what we behold: “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor.

The Bible is gloriously for us, but it is not mainly about us. We come most deeply because of whom we will see, not for what we must do.

When Bible reading first aims at astonishment (meditation and worship), it works first on our hearts and changes our person, which then prepares us for application. And application of God’s words to our lives prepares us for God’s blessing of our souls: “Your way [will be] prosperous, and then you will have good success.” So applying God’s words to our lives is not only an effect of his grace to us, but also a means to more grace.

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.

Bible memory not only prepares us for the someday-maybes when we might use a memorized verse in counseling or witnessing or fighting sin, but it contributes powerfully in the present to making us the kind of person who walks in the Spirit today. It contributes right now to your being “renewed in the spirit of your minds” (Eph. 4:23) and being “transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2).

When we pursue Scripture memory with meditation, we’re not just storing up for transformation later, but enjoying food for our soul today and experiencing transformation now.

We cannot know the mind of God exhaustively, but we can make real progress in degrees. And few ways, if any, imprint the mind of God on our minds like memorization, with meditation, of what he has so plainly said in the Scriptures.

Few things cultivate humility of mind like submitting our minds to the words of God by memorizing them. And so we become people ready to Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (Phil. 2:3–4)

Learning the text “by heart” is secondary; taking the text to heart is primary.

When you memorize a “gospel verse,” and keep it warm, you have hidden in your heart a divinely inspired and inerrant expression, in human language, of the very point of the whole Bible and all of history. You carry with you the sword of the Spirit in its strongest alloy. One-sentence encapsulations of the Bible’s central message strengthen our spiritual backbone and solidify our core, rooting us deep down in the bedrock of God’s heart and the nature of the world he made, and sending us into confident combat with unbelief, whether our own or someone’s else. Gospel verses are invaluable in both evangelism and discipleship.

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

The center of lifelong learning for the Christian is this: knowing and enjoying God himself in Christ through the gospel word and the written word of the Scriptures—in the hearing and reading and study and meditation and memorization of the Bible.

a lifelong learner will want to take care that most of life’s spare moments are not cannibalized by mere mindless entertainment.

Prayer doesn’t begin with our needs, but with his bounty.

prayer is not finally about getting things from God, but getting God.

He is holy, and so we worship (adoration). He is merciful, and so we repent (confession). He is gracious, and so we express appreciation (thanksgiving). He is loving and caring, and so we petition him for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our world (supplication).

many of us have learned, with George Mueller, to start with the Scriptures. Mueller says that for ten years, he began each day with an immediate attempt at fervent and extended prayer, only to eventually learn how much richer and focused his prayers were when they came in response to God’s word. From then on, Mueller began with a brief prayer for God’s help as he read, then he went first to the Bible and would open his ear to God in his word by meditating on the Scriptures, then transition, through the discipline of meditation (chap. 3), into his season of daily private

Martin Luther recommended praying through the form of the Lord’s Prayer with fresh wording each day.

“Everywhere God is, prayer is,” Tim Keller writes. “Since God is everywhere and infinitely great, prayer must be all-pervasive in our lives.”

A shared joy is a doubled joy, and as we’ve seen, God means for us not only to pray in our closets, and “without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17) as we move through life in a spirit of dependence, but to pray with company.

When we share the joy of prayer, we double our joy. When we make the regular practice of praying together with fellow believers, we avail ourselves of a channel of joy we otherwise would be neglecting. And by praying with others, we not only add to our joy, but also to theirs. And when we work with others for their joy in God (2 Cor. 1:24), we again increase our own.

The dangers of asceticism are great—surpassed only by those of overindulgence.

Fasting is as basic to Christianity as asking from God and giving to others. The key here is that Jesus doesn’t say “if you fast,” but “when you fast.”

Journaling is an opportunity to grow into tomorrow.

let your journal be your laboratory of learning.

Our heads and hearts carry around so many unfinished thoughts and emotions we’re only able to finish as we write them down.

Writing doesn’t merely capture what’s already inside us, but in the very act of writing, we enable our heads and hearts to take the next step, then two, then three. It has a crystallizing effect. Good writing is not just the expression of what we’re already experiencing, but the deepening of it.

The best of lifelong journals are “incomplete” in that they can’t possibly hold everything of significance, or even close—and if their keepers thought they must, then they would have given up long ago.