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April 5 - December 16, 2024
What activities did Jesus practice? Such things as solitude and silence, prayer, simple and sacrificial living, intense study and meditation upon God’s Word and God’s ways, and service to others.
“Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and left untried.”
all his natural talents and best efforts will go down in defeat to others who have disciplined themselves in preparation for game time.
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.
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 natural outflow of the life he lived when not on the spot.
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.
By modest estimate, more than a quarter of the entire population of the United States have professed an evangelical conversion experience. William Iverson wryly observes that “A pound of meat would surely be affected by a quarter pound of salt. If this is real Christianity, the ‘salt of the earth,’ where is the effect of which Jesus spoke?”
Every Christian must strive to arrive at beliefs about God that faithfully reflect the realities of his or her life and experience, so that each may know how to live effectively before him in his world. That’s theology!
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.
“the conditions upon which the spiritual life is made indubitably real.”
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.
They all fail to foster those bodily behaviors of faith that would make concrete human existence vitally complete—taking them as a part of the total life in the Kingdom of God.
SALVATION IS NOT JUST FORGIVENESS, BUT A NEW ORDER OF LIFE
it wasn’t Christ’s death that gave rise to this courageous early church—but his life!
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.
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.
The two sides of the great human contradiction, dust and divinity, then, are set in place.
Spirituality is a matter of another reality. It is absolutely indispensible to keep before us the fact that it is not a “commitment” and it is not a “life-style,” even though a commitment and a life-style will come from it.
it continues to play the decisive role it does in human history and culture and why it is fitted to be the perpetual instrument of the Spirit of God for human transformation, as 2 Timothy 3:16–17 indicates.
not to expect transformation in a moment, though it is possible for God to give it.
God is not opposed to natural life with all of its pleasures and pains and is even very favorably disposed toward it.
If he sows seed in the field of his lower nature, he will reap from it a harvest of corruption, but if he sows in the field of the Spirit, the Spirit will bring him a harvest of eternal life. So let us never tire
no one, not even God himself, will do it for us. That is the meaning of our freedom and of our responsibility. Then
Because just as with the physical, there is a specific round of activities we must do to establish, maintain, and enhance our spiritual powers. 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.
It’s an illusion created in part by our own conviction that our unrestrained natural impulse is in itself a good thing and that we have an unquestionable right to fulfill our natural impulses so long as “no one gets hurt.”
Our communities and our churches are thickly populated with people who are neurotic or paralyzed by their devotion and willing bondage to how they feel. Drug dependence and addiction is epidemic because of the cultural imperative to “feel good.”
History of the Church from Christ to Constantine,
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.
All great works are prepared in the desert, including the redemption of the world. The precursors, the followers, the Master Himself, all obeyed or have to obey one and the same law. Prophets, apostles, preachers, martyrs, pioneers of knowledge, inspired artists in every art, ordinary men and the Man-God, all pay tribute to loneliness, to the life of silence, to the night.
Jesus at the height of his strength. The desert was his fortress, his place of power. Throughout his life he sought the solitary place as an indirect submission of his own physical body to righteousness (e.g., Mark 1:35, 3:13, 6:31, 46). That is, he sought it not as an activity done for its own sake, but one done to give him power for good. All of those who followed Jesus knew of his practice of solitude, and it was greatly imitated in the centuries after his death.
redemption as a progressive sequence of real human and divine actions and events that resulted in the transformation of the body and the mind. For him these were actions—events—real experiences we humans have, real parts of our lives, so real we cannot ignore them.
Tertullian wrote his De Anima,
Whether these thoughts disturb the soul or not does not depend on us; but whether they linger in us or not and set passions in motion or not—does depend on us.11
Luther is reported to have said that you cannot stop the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair. The Pauline doctrine of reckoning reminds us we have the power to identify and dismiss wrong thoughts, to separate them from our “selves,” and thus by grace to escape them.
If 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, but He cannot make us walk according to His will.13
The Training of the Twelve
a matter of a meeting of external and internal conditions; that is, outward manifestation and inward motivation must both be right.
the activities constituting the disciplines have no value in themselves. The aim and substance of spiritual life is not fasting, prayer, hymn singing, frugal living, and so forth. Rather, it is the effective and full enjoyment of active love of God and humankind in all the daily rounds of normal existence where we are placed. The spiritually advanced person is not the one who engages in lots and lots of disciplines, any more than the good child is the one who receives lots and lots of instruction or punishment.
rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage in a certain discipline, we probably don’t need to practice it. The disciplines we need to practice are precisely the ones we are not “good at” and hence do not enjoy.
The preparation for all of life’s actions including the spiritual, essentially involve bodily behaviors.
One of the greatest deceptions in the practice of the Christian religion is the idea that all that really matters is our internal feelings, ideas, beliefs, and intentions. It is this mistake about the psychology of the human being that more than anything else divorces salvation from life, leaving us a headful of vital truths about God and a body unable to fend off sin.
they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
It is a widespread fallacy that careful and thorough preparation precludes freedom, spontaneity, and personal interaction. In fact the very person best prepared for any situation is the one who experiences the greatest freedom and spontaneity in it. The spiritual life is a life of interaction with a personal God, and it is pure delusion to suppose that it can be carried on sloppily. The will to do his will can only be carried into reality as we take measures to be ready and able to meet and draw upon him in our actions.
Only the right hand’s habit of doing good can indirectly prepare it to act unconsciously.
Although the goodness of God, and His rich mercies in Christ Jesus, are a sufficient assurance to us, that He will be merciful to our unavoidable weaknesses and infirmities, that is to such failings as are the effects of ignorance or surprise; yet we have no reason to expect the same mercy towards those sins which we have lived in, through a want of intention to avoid them.
Disciplines of Abstinence solitude silence fasting frugality chastity secrecy sacrifice Disciplines of Engagement study worship celebration service prayer fellowship confession submission THE DISCIPLINES OF ABSTINENCE “Abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul” (1 Peter 2:11).
If we feel that any habit or pursuit, harmless in itself, is keeping us from God and sinking us deeper in the things of earth; if we find that things which others can do with impunity are for us the occasion of falling, then abstinence is our only course.
we must reemphasize, the “desert” or “closet” is the primary place of strength for the beginner, as it was for Christ and for Paul. They show us by their example what we must do. In stark aloneness it is possible to have silence, to be still, and to know that Jehovah indeed is God (Ps. 46:10), to set the Lord before our minds with sufficient intensity and duration that we stay centered upon him—our hearts fixed, established in trust (Ps. 112:7–8)—even when back in the office, shop, or home.
Leave vain things to the vain…. Shut thy door upon thee and call to thee Jesu thy love: dwell with him in thy cell for thou shalt not find elsewhere so great peace.8
