The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

There was generally a hunger for order and a somewhat fearful sense that at the foundation of our personal and social life lay forces that, if not carefully channeled, could swallow us up in boredom or in chaos and violence.

We now have developed robots that move about their work area until their batteries run low. Then they internally sense their need for more power and go plug themselves into an electrical outlet and recharge their batteries. Similarly, so long as men and women remained in touch and harmony with God, they could tap the resources of God’s power to carry out the vast, impossible function assigned to them.

Ever wonder why we love the frankness, the audacity of the little child? It’s because a child presents life in an unblushing directness that permits no mistake about its originality and therefore its individuality. It’s the same reason we delight in the frolics of a puppy or the lollings about of a panda. These are so utterly gratuitous that they could, we think, only be evidences of an inward life completely unrestrained. And we love them for it.

The necessity for such disciplines comes from the very nature of the self in the image of God, discussed earlier. Once the individual has through divine initiative become alive to God and his Kingdom, the extent of integration of his or her total being into that Kingdom order significantly depends upon the individual’s initiative.

Evelyn Christenson remarks on this mind-set: Sometimes we take a perfectly good word from the Bible (such as “chastisement,” “suffering,” “submission,” “healing,” “God’s justice”), dive immediately into our pool of “I thinks” and weave them subtly and securely around that word, leaving the impression that all of our “I thinks” about the word were included in the scriptural meaning of the word.”

We talk about leading a different kind of life, but we also have ready explanations for not being really different. And with those explanations we have talked our way out of the very practices that alone would enable us to be citizens of another world.

Our most serious failure today is the inability to provide effective practical guidance as to how to live the life of Jesus. And I believe that is due to this very real loss of biblical realism for our lives.

Worse still, the impression is conveyed that this progress will somehow automatically take place through the normal course of life, if only the pilgrim holds on to certain beliefs.

In this sense we are free from sin even if not yet free of it. Doing what is good and right becomes increasingly easy, sweet, and sensible to us as grace grows in us.

I may be overly dependent upon food and unable not to eat, because when I try not to eat, food is all I think about. But perhaps I can train myself to pray for a specific person or circumstance whenever I am hungry or restless and thus escape from my obsession with food.

Baseball player Pete Rose, when asked to explain his phenomenal success as an athlete, said: “I practice what I’m not good at. Most folks practice what they’re good at.” The same is true for our success in our spiritual living.

But to obtain these gifts, you need more than faith; you must also work hard to be good, and even that is not enough. For then you must learn to know God better and discover what he wants you to do. Next, learn to put aside your own desires so that you will become patient and godly, gladly letting God have his way with you. This will make possible the next step, which is for you to enjoy other people and to like them, and finally you will grow to love them deeply. The more you go on in this way, the more you will grow strong spiritually and become faithful and useful to our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 PETER 1:5–8, LB

Disciplines of Abstinence solitude silence fasting frugality chastity secrecy sacrifice

Disciplines of Engagement study worship celebration service prayer fellowship confession submission

More often than not, faith has failed, sadly enough, to transform the human character of the masses, because it is usually unaccompanied by discipleship and by an overall discipline of life such as Christ himself practiced. As a result, when faced with the real issues of justice, peace, and prosperity, what is called faith in Christ has often proved of little help other than the comfort of a personal hope for what lies beyond this life.

The worldy system of understanding tries to produce justice, peace, and prosperity directly in people’s lives by placing restraints upon what would harm them. But the effort, besides being ineffective, also proves impractical. The gospel of Christ, by contrast, comes to create a new person pervaded by the positive realities of faith, hope, and love—toward God primarily and therefore toward all men and women and creatures. From this positive transformation of the self, justice, peace, and prosperity can result as God’s rule is fulfilled in human life.

Christianity has not only been “found difficult and left untried,” it has rarely been closely enough approached by people even to be found difficult.

As a response to this world’s problems, the gospel of the Kingdom will never make sense except as it is incarnated—we say “fleshed out”—in ordinary human beings in all ordinary conditions of human life. But it will make sense when janitors and storekeepers, carpenters and secretaries, businessmen and university professors, bankers and government officials brim with the degree of holiness and power formerly thought appropriate only to apostles and martyrs.

But now is the time for decision and especially for planning. God changes lives in response to faith. But just as there is no faith that does not act, so there is no act without some plan. Faith grows from the experience of acting on plans and discovering God to be acting with us.