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February 25 - April 2, 2025
It is solitude and solitude alone that opens the possibility of a radical relationship to God that can withstand all external events up to and beyond death.
The Spirit, we are told, led him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. Was this not to put Jesus in the weakest possible position before Satan, starving and alone in the wilds? Most to whom I have spoken about this matter are shocked at the suggestion that the “wilderness,” the place of solitude and deprivation, was actually the place of strength and strengthening for our Lord and that the Spirit led him there—as he would lead us there—to ensure that Christ was in the best possible condition for the trial.
So it is in the light of Paul’s practice, the way he lived, that we must interpret the statements he makes about his experience and behavior and about what we are to do.
Now I have given up everything else—I have found it to be the only way to really know Christ and to experience the mighty power that brought him back to life again, and to find out what it means to suffer and die with him. So, whatever it takes, I will be one who lives in the fresh newness of life of those who are alive from the dead (Phil. 3:10–11, LB).
But today we are insulated from such thinking. Our modern religious context assures us that such drastic action as we see in Jesus and Paul is not necessary for our Christianity—may not even be useful, may even be harmful.
But most of us find great difficulty in translating “abiding in Christ and his words abiding in us” into familiar events of our daily lives. Yet this is precisely what must be done. It is the central task for those who would guide us as ministers of the gospel.
But some of the greatest literature in the English language has also contributed to the loss of biblical realism. The great works of writers such as Milton and Bunyan have had the effect of wholly allegorizing the battle between good and evil as well as the Christian’s struggle to follow the Lord. This is true to such an extent that generations of readers have emerged with a head full of images, but no idea of what to do in their own individual “pilgrim’s progress” or “paradise regained.” Worse still, the impression is conveyed that this progress will somehow automatically take place through
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Our age fails to understand that Paul’s teachings about salvation are unavoidably psychological—but none the less theological because of that.
Habits are to be transformed by our interaction with God, of course, and thus by his grace. But exactly what form does this interaction take, and what is our part in it? The answer is given in Romans 6:13: “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.”
To be dead to sin with Christ is not to be lacking in these natural desires, but to have a real alternative to sin and the world’s sin system as the orientation and motivation for our natural impulses.
So, with his doctrine of “reckoning,” Paul has capitalized upon the first effect of “the light of the glorious gospel of Christ” upon our personalities. This effect is that we now vividly see and are gripped by an alternative to sin. With the life imparted by this vision we love what we see and are drawn to it. In this vision and the power it provides lies our freedom to determine who we shall be.
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.
Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.
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.
It is easy to praise the great ones now passed on, because we can in their absence disregard the concrete reality of their practices. When those same practices are brought to life in someone walking next to us, we reach for stones to throw, just as Jesus said in Matthew 23.
Greek philosophy had failed at the point of producing people of practical power and wisdom who could govern and be governed. It simply had no workable answer to the question of how this could be done. The same inability of classical civilization to produce sufficient people capable of serving as the foundation of good government destroyed the Roman Empire. Early in human development, races of people are sufficiently under the duress of real needs to exhalt the virtues that can make them strong. But after they become strong they have no sustaining principle that will allow the further
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Against the crushing social presence of this vision, the call to forsake all and to “hate one’s own life also” (Luke 14:26), which stands at the threshold of discipleship to Christ, is incomprehensible.
Hume’s outlook made it impossible for him to sort out what caused that attitude within the complex phenomena of social and religious history. As a result he could not see that spiritual discipline, informed by Christ’s message and example, is in essence and reality opposed to the evils now historically associated with their abuses. He could not understand that those very evils were themselves attributable, not to the practice of the spiritual disciplines, but to the failure to practice them or to practice them rightly. So how could he see that such discipline rightly practiced is the
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The result is our almost universal inability to understand what the disciplines for the spiritual life are. The biblical passages that exemplify or command “mortification” have had to be ignored, legalized, or spiritualized in one way or another, their practical point turned to suit the inclinations of the particular social group.
Fasting and the rituals of worship, for example, are among the practices most commonly attacked by the Hebrew prophets as useless, or even harmful, exercises in religion (Isa. 58, 59; Matt. 23). We read these accounts and seem to overlook that the attack there is not upon the practices themselves, but upon their abuse.
But more than anything—and most important for our goal of understanding the disciplines for the spiritual life—we must recognize that Jesus was a master of life in the spirit. He showed us that spiritual strength is not manifested by great and extensive practice of the spiritual disciplines, but by little need to practice them and still maintain full spiritual life.
People who think that they are spiritually superior because they make a practice of a discipline such as fasting or silence or frugality are entirely missing the point. The need for extensive practice of a given discipline is an indication of our weakness, not our strength.
To deal with sin the monastic system tried to avoid contact with it in the world. It also tried to merit forgiveness by strenuous efforts of various kinds. It desired to be out of the world to avoid being of the world.
The entire question of discipline, therfore, is how to apply the acts of will at our disposal in such a way that the proper course of action, which cannot always be realized by direct and untrained effort, will nevertheless be carried out when needed.
Of course it is not only a bodily behavior, but the point we are in greatest danger of missing in our contemporary culture is that it also is not purely “spiritual” or “mental,” and that whatever is purely mental cannot transform the self.
In the simplest possible terms, the spiritual disciplines are a matter of taking appropriate measures. To reject them wholesale is to insist that growth in the spirit is something that just happens all by itself.
Perhaps this can be done, and we at least are willing to leave the question open for now. But to be spiritual disciplines, any such activities substituted would have to be activities of mind and body, done to bring our whole selves into cooperation with the divine order, so we can experience more and more a vision and power beyond ourselves.
Kingdom. When we understand that grace (charis) is gift (charisma), we then see that to grow in grace is to grow in what is given to us of God and by God. The disciplines are then, in the clearest sense, a means to that grace and also to those gifts.
One unusual activity that can be an effective spiritual discipline for those who are used to “the better things in life” is to do grocery shopping, banking, and other business in the poorer areas of the city. This has an immense effect on our understanding of and behavior toward our neighbors—both rich and poor—and upon our understanding of what it is to love and care for our fellow human beings.
Disciplines of Abstinence
Abstinence alone can recover for us the real value of what should have been for our help but which has been an occasion of falling…. It is necessary that we should steadily resolve to give up anything that comes between ourselves and God.2
Solitude is choosing to be alone and to dwell on our experience of isolation from other human beings. Solitude frees us, actually. This above all explains its primacy and priority among the disciplines. 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.
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.
As with all disciplines, we should approach the practice of silence in a prayerful, experimental attitude, confident that we shall be led into its right use for us. It is a powerful and essential discipline. Only silence will allow us life-transforming concentration upon God. It allows us to hear the gentle God whose only Son “shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice above the street noise” (Matt. 12:19). It is this God who tells us that “in quietness and trust is your strength” (Isa. 30:15, NAS).
Such practice also helps us to listen and to observe, to pay attention to people. How rarely are we ever truly listened to, and how deep is our need to be heard.
In witnessing, the role of talking is frequently overemphasized. Does that sound strange? It’s true. Silence and especially true listening are often the strongest testimony of our faith.
If nothing else, though, it will certainly demonstrate how powerful and clever our body is in getting its own way against our strongest resolves.
We are discovering that life is so much more than meat (Luke 12:33). Our belly is not our god, as it is for others (Phil. 3:19; Rom. 16:18); rather, it is his joyful servant and ours (1 Cor. 6:13).
“Whosoever knows best how to suffer will keep the greatest peace. That man is conqueror of himself, and lord of the world, the friend of Christ, and heir of Heaven.”
In the midst of all our needs and wants, we experience the contentment of the child that has been weaned from its mother’s breast (Ps.
Luxury in every form is economically bad, it is provocative to the poor who see it flaunted before them, and it is morally degrading to those who indulge in it. The Christian who has the ability to live luxuriously, but fasts from all extravagance, and practices simplicity in his dress, his home, and his whole manner of life, is, therefore, rendering good service to society.
Voluntary abstention helps us appreciate and love our mates as whole persons, of which their sexuality is but one part.
In the full sexual union, the person is known in his or her whole body and knows the other by means of his or her whole body. The depth of involvement is so deep that there can be no such thing as “casual sex.”
If we see needs met because we have ask God alone, our faith in God’s presence and care will be greatly increased. But if we always tell others of the need, we will have little faith in God, and our entire spiritual life will suffer because of it.
Abstinence and engagement are the outbreathing and inbreathing of our spiritual lives, and we require disciplines for both movements.
Calvin Miller well remarks: “Mystics without study are only spiritual romantics who want relationship without effort.”23
But this world is radically unsuited to the heart of the human person, and the suffering and terror of life will not be removed no matter how “spiritual” we become. It is because of this that a healthy faith before God cannot be built and maintained, without heartfelt celebration of his greatness and goodness to us in the midst of our suffering and terror. “There is a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Eccles. 3:4) It is the act and discipline of faith to seize the season and embrace it for what it is, including the season of enjoyment.
Elsewhere Screwtape remarks that when demons are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, they are on the enemy’s ground. We’ve won many a soul through pleasure, he says, “All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.”28
Celebration heartily done makes our deprivations and sorrows seem small, and we find in it great strength to do the will of our God because his goodness becomes so real to us.
But I believe the discipline of service is even more important for Christians who find themselves in positions of influence, power, and leadership.
