The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

If we have faith in Christ, we must believe that he knew how to live.

Faith today is treated as something that only should make us different, not that actually does or can make us different.

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

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.

As Donald E. Miller recently wrote, “The inner reserves of liberal Christianity are largely depleted, drained by too much secular theology and too many radical theologies, and not enough nourishment at the fount of religious experience.”5 But this is not really a new problem for liberal Christianity, which has found it difficult to maintain a rich and rewarding religious experience all along.

Regardless of how high a view was professed about the Bible, it was no longer functionally authoritative over life on a wide scale. That is to say, it did not in actuality have the effect of bringing the life of the faithful into obvious Christlikeness, whatever the conservatives thought.

Now one can even have an unsuccessful “revival,” which once you stop to think about it, makes as little sense as the unsuccessful raising of a dead person—that is, no raising at all.

This is the setting from which we began to reach out to the disciplines, because we somehow realized they had a ring of authenticity about them. They suggested how, through concrete steps, we might “redeem the time” relentlessly flowing past and how by strenuous engagement we might “be redeemed from fire by fire.”

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.

We need a foundation, a practical, workable theology of them. We must understand why the disciplines are integral to meaningful life in Christ. We must be clear about the essential part they play in the full and effective presentation of the gospel and the truth about life in God’s Kingdom.

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

Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God? We’re encouraged somehow today to remove the essence of faith from the particulars of daily human life and relocate it in special times, places, and states of mind.

Once salvation is relegated to mere forgiveness of sin, though, the discussions of salvation’s nature are limited to debates about the death of Christ, about which arrangements involving Christ’s death make forgiveness possible and actual. Such debates yield “theories of the atonement.” And yet through these theories the connection between salvation and life—both his life and ours—becomes unintelligible.

The resurrection was a cosmic event only because it validated the reality and the indestructibility of what Jesus had preached and exemplified before his death—the enduring reality and openness of God’s Kingdom.

Here we find the positive role of the body in the process of redemption, as we choose those uses of our body that advance the spiritual life. Only as we correctly appreciate that role can we understand the New Testament view of salvation as a life, for a life is, of course, something we live, and we live only in the actions and dispositions of our body.

Some of us may find relief from the Angst through identifying with sports teams, rock stars, or social movements of one kind or another. Some may resort to the dogmatisms of politics, science, or religion. Our bumper stickers and T-shirts may bear symbols and slogans intended to inform others as well as ourselves that we are very sure, thank you, of who we are and what we are doing and how we feel about the whole idea of being on this planet. But it’s all empty bravado, a nervous whistling in the dark of our ignorance and uncertainty about our real nature and our real task in life.

An indication of our greatness, for all our dustiness, is found precisely in the fact that God pays attention to us, meets us, and gives us work to do.

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.

That body is our primary area of power, freedom, and—therefore—responsibility.

In Eden, one of those specifically human powers was the power to interact, not only with the organic, the other living beings such as the creatures of the air, earth, and water, or even with the inorganic, the nonliving matter, but also with God and his powers. But the death that befell Adam and Eve in the moment of their initial sin was also the death of this interactive relationship with God, the loss of this central closeness as a constant factor in their experience (Gen. 3). And with this loss came the loss of the power required to fulfill their role as God’s rulers over the earth.

Their rule was indeed their rule—their understanding, their desire, their choice—but it was exercised by means of a power greater than their own bodies could muster, a power conveyed through a personal relation with the Creator of all things.

Life is always and everywhere an inner power to relate to other things in certain specific ways.

In such cases we see life—whatever its ultimate metaphysical nature and explanation—to be the ability to contact and selectively take in from the surroundings whatever supports its own survival, extension, and enhancement.

The astonishing human power to use what is beyond ourselves is one of the main clues to who and what we are.

It is the amazing extent of our ability to utilize power outside ourselves that we must consider when we ask what the human being is.

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.

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.

The biblical worldview also regards the spiritual as a realm fundamental to the existence and behavior of all natural or physical reality (see especially John 1:1–14; Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:2; 11:3).

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.

When Eve through mistrust of God (3:6) took the fatal step, she and Adam did not cease to be “living beings.” But they nevertheless died, as God said they would. They ceased to relate to and function in harmony with that spiritual reality that is at the foundation of all things and of whose glory the universe is an expression. They were dead to God.

But the essence and aim of spirituality is not to correct social and political injustices. That will be its effect—though never exactly in ways we imagine as we come to it with our preexisting political concerns. That is not its use, and all thought of using it violates its nature. Those who worry that unless we act against authority structures our spirituality will accomplish nothing simply do not understand what spirituality is. On the other hand, the authorities will always find the spirituality of Jesus and his followers impossible to deal with, for it stands beyond their manipulation and control.

How do such Bible stories help? Upon a realistic, critical, adult reading, by those prepared to be honest with their experience, the Bible incisively lays bare the depths and obscurities of the human heart.

But the Bible also informs us that there are certain practices—solitude, prayer, fasting, celebration, and so forth—we can undertake, in cooperation with grace, to raise the level of our lives toward godliness.

Thus it is necessary to say that conversion, as understood in Christian circles, is not the same thing as the required transformation of the self.

He now understood that he and the church were to exercise a transcendent power that did not depend upon having a kingdom or government in any human sense, for it was literally a “God government” in which they were participants (Acts 1:6–8).

It is in Peter and his kind that we begin to get a glimpse of what is really possible for human life. We can see what the grand restoration of human life to its proper center in the spiritual life could mean for humankinds’ divine calling to have dominion over the glorious earth for its good and for the pleasure and glory of God.

We here explicitly disown and condemn any suggestion to the contrary, because it is the spiritual life alone that makes possible fulfillment of bodily existence—and hence human existence. How does this fulfillment take place? It comes through interaction of our powers as bodily beings with God and his Kingdom—an interaction for which our bodies were specifically designed.

Such failure to attain a deeply satisfying life always has the effect of making sinful actions seem good. Here lies the strength of temptation. This is no less true if the failure is caused by our efforts to be what we regard as “spiritual.” Normally, our success in overcoming temptation will be easier if we are basically happy in our lives. To cut off the joys and pleasures associated with our bodily and social existence as “unspiritual,” then, can actually have the effect of weakening us in our efforts to do what is right. It makes it impossible for us to see and draw strength from the goodness of rightness.

Human personality is not separable in our consciousness from the human body. And that fact is expressed by asserting the IDENTITY of the person as his or her body. This fact is what makes it necessary for us to make our bodies, through the disciplines for the spiritual life, our primary focus of effort in our part in the process of redemption.

Upon conversion, however, we have peace with God (Rom. 5:1). But the problem of reconciliation then shifts to the self and to those two components the New Testament refers to as “the flesh” and “the spirit.” How? After conversion our will and conscious intent are for God or “the spiritual,” as we’ve seen with Simon Peter. But the layer upon layer of life experience that is embedded in our bodies, as living organisms born and bred in a world set against or without God, doesn’t directly and immediately follow the shift of our conscious will. It largely retains the tendencies in which it has so long lived.

The conflict between flesh and spirit is the experience of all who begin the spiritual life by the influx of God’s life-giving word. Sometimes the conflict is long, sometimes short. This is where the spiritual disciplines come in. The disciplines for the spiritual life, rightly understood, are time-tested activities consciously undertaken by us as new men or women to allow our spirit ever-increasing sway over our embodied selves. They help by assisting the ways of God’s Kingdom to take the place of the habits of sin embedded in our bodies.

This lower nature, when it occupies its proper place in the hierarchy of the universe, is not in itself evil, for it belongs to the divine world. It is only when it usurps the place of something higher that it becomes untrue to itself and an evil.

The choice is a very grave one in its outcome, and we must be as careful as possible in understanding what the alternatives mean. It is my aim in these pages to help us see that our choices concern specific life processes of spiritual growth or decay and that we will not be exempted from the law of those processes by God’s actions on our behalf.

Otherwise we will despise our bodies and not take them to be the resource for the spiritual life that God made them to be.

There is some latitude within which our character is formed by ourselves. Through the instrumentality of his life-giving word, God in regeneration renews our original capacity for divine interaction. But our body’s substance is only to be transformed totally by actions and events in which we choose to participate from day to day.

We are to take this task with the utmost seriousness and in the most literal of senses, since no one, not even God himself, will do it for us.

Was “exercise unto godliness” just a lofty concept with no definite meaning in Paul’s mouth? Or does it indicate a precise course of action he understood in definite terms, carefully followed himself, and called others to share?

What happens, then, is that all talk of following Jesus—or of Paul’s example of following him—is emptied of practical meaning. It does not express an actual strategy of living our day-to-day existence but at most concerns only certain special moments or articles of faith.

One must train as well as try. An athlete may have all the enthusiasm in the world; he may “talk a good game.” But talk will not win the race. Zeal without knowledge or without appropriate practice is never enough. Plus, one must train wisely as well as intensely for spiritual attainment.

Where have we gotten this idea about “doing what feels good”? The unrestrained hedonism of our own day comes historically from the 18th-century idealization of happiness and is filtered through the 19th-century English ideology of pleasure as the good for people. Finally it emerges in the form of our present “feel good” society—tragically pandered to by the popular culture and much of popular religion as well. Think about it. Isn’t the most generally applied standard of success for a religious service whether or not people feel good in it and after it? The preeminence of the “feel good” mentality in our world is what makes it impossible for many people now even to imagine what Paul and his contemporaries accepted as a fact of life.