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April 7, 2020
What then is keeping Christianity from being that guide to life which it alone can be? Christianity can only succeed as a guide for current humanity if it does two things. First, it must take the need for human transformation as seriously as do modern revolutionary movements. The modern negative critique of Christianity arose in the first place because the church was not faithful to its own message—it failed to take human transformation seriously as a real, practical issue to be dealt with in realistic terms. Fortunately, there are today many signs that the church in all its divisions is
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We can become like Christ in character and in power and thus realize our highest ideals of well-being and well-doing.
My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thing—by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself. If we have faith in Christ, we must believe that he knew how to live. We can, through faith and grace, become like Christ by practicing the types of activities he engaged in, by arranging our whole lives around the activities he himself practiced in order to remain constantly at home in the fellowship of his Father.
Today, we think of Christ’s power entering our lives in various ways—through the sense of forgiveness and love for God or through the awareness of truth, through special experiences or the infusion of the Spirit, through the presence of Christ in the inner life or through the power of ritual and liturgy or the preaching of the Word, through the communion of the saints or through a heightened consciousness of the depths and mystery of life. All of these are doubtlessly real and of some good effect. However, neither individually nor collectively do any of these ways reliably produce large
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Our local assemblies must become academies of life as it was meant to be. From such places there can go forth a people equipped in character and power to judge or guide the earth.
The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes—a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low. Holiness and devotion must now come forth from the closet and the chapel to possess the street and the factory, the schoolroom and boardroom, the scientific laboratory and the governmental office. Instead of a select few making religion their life,
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The Spirit of the Disciplines is nothing but the love of Jesus, with its resolute will to be like him whom we love.
The chapters that follow are written to aid you in understanding the absolute necessity of the spiritual disciplines for our faith, and the revolutionary results of practicing these disciplines intelligently and enthusiastically through a full, grace-filled, Christlike life.
The vast, grim “cost of discipleship” is something we hear constantly emphasized. Chesterton’s observation can at least be taken as reflecting the attitude of many serious people toward The Way of Christ.
As Søren Kierkegaard reminds us, “It costs a man just as much or even more to go to hell than to come to heaven. Narrow, exceedingly narrow is the way to perdition!”
To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.
The “cost of discipleship,” though it may take all we have, is small when compared to the lot of those who don’t accept Christ’s invitation to be a part of his company in The Way of life.
there seems to be something about the way we approach them, something about what we think it means to walk with Christ and obey him, that prevents most of us from entering into the reality which they express. The ease, lightness, and power of his Way we rarely enjoy, much less see, as the pervasive and enduring quality of our street-level human existence.
And all of our lack of understanding doesn’t cancel his offer of an easy yoke and a light burden, in which our souls can find rest. That offer, like his call to follow him, is clearly made to us here and now, in the midst of this life where we labor and bear impossible burdens and cry out for rest. It’s true. It’s real. We have only to grasp the secret of entering into that easy yoke.
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.
We forget that being the unique Son of God clearly did not relieve him of the necessity of a life of preparation that was mainly spent out of the public eye.
Then, after receiving baptism at the hands of his cousin, John the Baptist, Jesus was in solitude and fasted for a month and a half. Afterward, as his ministry proceeded, he was alone much of the time, often spending the entire night in solitude and prayer before serving the needs of his disciples and hearers the following day. Out of such preparation, Jesus was able to lead a public life of service through teaching and healing. He was able to love his closest companions to the end—even though they often disappointed him greatly and seemed incapable of entering into his faith and works. And
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And in this truth lies the secret of the easy yoke: the secret involves living as he lived in the entirety of his life—adopting his overall life-style. Following “in his steps” cannot be equated with behaving as he did when he was “on the spot.” To live as Christ lived is to live as he did all his life.
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.
We prefer no social unrest or revolution—as long as our style of life is preserved.
in our efforts to avoid the necessary pains of discipline we miss the easy yoke and light burden. We then fall into the rending frustration of trying to do and be the Christian we know we ought to be without the necessary insight and strength that only discipline can provide. We become unbalanced and are unable to handle our lives.
those who say we cannot truly follow Christ turn out to be correct in a sense. We cannot behave “on the spot” as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does.
So, we should be perfectly clear about one thing: Jesus never expected us simply to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, bless those who persecute us, give unto them that ask, and so forth. These responses, generally and rightly understood to be characteristic of Christlikeness, were set forth by him as illustrative of what might be expected of a new kind of person—one who intelligently and steadfastly seeks, above all else, to live within the rule of God and be possessed by the kind of righteousness that God himself has, as Matthew 6:33 portrays.
Instead, Jesus did invite people to follow him into that sort of life from which behavior such as loving one’s enemies will seem like the only sensible and happy thing to do. For a person living that life, the hard thing to do would be to hate the enemy, to turn the supplicant away, or to curse the curser, just as it was for Christ. True Christlikeness, true companionship with Christ, comes at the point where it is hard not to respond as he would.
no one ever says, “If you want to be a great athlete, go vault eighteen feet, run the mile under four minutes,” or “If you want to be a great musician, play the Beethoven violin concerto.” Instead, we advise the young artist or athlete to enter a certain kind of overall life, one involving deep associations with qualified people as well as rigorously scheduled time, diet, and activity for the mind and body.
But what would we tell someone who aspired to live well in general? If we are wise, we would tell them to approach life with this same general strategy. So, if we wish to follow Christ—and to walk in the easy yoke with him—we will have to accept his overall way of life as our way of life totally. Then, and only then, we may reasonably expect to know by experience how easy is the yoke and how light the burden.
There is no realization that what he did in such cases was, in a large and essential measure, 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.
This book is intended for those who would be a disciple of Jesus in deed.
By focusing on the whole of Christ’s life and the lives of many who have best succeeded in following him, I will outline a psychologically and theologically sound, testable way to meet grace and fully conform to him.
The secret of the easy yoke is simple, actually. It is the intelligent, informed, unyielding resolve to live as Jesus lived in all aspects of his life, not just in the moment of specific choice or action.
Leo Tolstoy comments in The Kingdom of God Is Within You that “all men of the modern world exist in a continual and flagrant antagonism between their consciences and their way of life.”1 There can be little doubt that this continues to be true today and that it is true specifically of modern Christians who live in constant tension between what they know they should be and what they think they can be—as well as what they are.
Either I must intend to stop sinning or not intend to stop. There is no third possibility. I must plan to follow Jesus fully or not plan to follow him.
“I am the light of the world,” he says in John 8:12. “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” To Simon and Andrew fishing, to James and John, to Matthew collecting taxes, he called out: “Follow me!” They obeyed, literally leaving what they were doing to be with him. In this way they learned by observation and direct contact and involvement to do what he did and be as he was. It may have been hard, but a least it was clear-cut and simple.
Today, no less than in Jesus’ day, we Christians deeply and inescapably feel the call to follow the Lord who tells us, “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.” But this is very hard to believe or even to take seriously without Christ’s physical presence here to reassure and guide us.
How can ordinary human beings such as you and I—who must live in circumstances all too commonplace—follow and become like Jesus Christ? How can we be like Christ always—not just on Sundays when we’re on our best behavior, surrounded by others to cheer and sustain us? How can we be like him not as a pose or by a constant and grinding effort, but with the ease and power he had—flowing from the inner depths, acting with quiet force from the innermost mind and soul of the Christ who has become a real part of us? There is no question that we are called to this. It is our vocation as well as our
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Practical theology studies the manner in which our actions interact with God to accomplish his ends in human life.
a thoughtless or uninformed theology grips and guides our life with just as great a force as does a thoughtful and informed one.
Practical theology’s overall task is, in effect, to develop for practical implementation the methods by which women and men interact with God to fulfill the divine intent for human existence. That intent for the church is twofold: the effective proclamation of the Christian gospel to all humanity, making “disciples” from every nation or ethnic group, and the development of those disciples’ character into the character of Christ himself “teaching them to do all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:20). If these are done well, all else desirable will follow.
We can be happy and thankful for the expansion of the church, both geographically and numerically. But our very zeal and success in this area may deflect us from an adequate emphasis upon the understanding and practice of growth in Christlikeness after conversion. Have we done what is necessary to bring the earnest convert into his or her possessions as a child of God, as a brother or sister of Jesus Christ in the new life?
Ask your church, “What is our group’s plan for teaching our people to do everything Christ commanded?” The fact is that our existing churches and denominations do not have active, well-designed, intently pursued plans to accomplish this in their members. Just as you will not find any national leader today who has a plan for paying off the national debt, so you will not find any widely influential element of our church leadership that has a plan—not a vague wish or dream, but a plan—for implementing all phases of the Great Commission.
The American church has overestimated the good that comes from mere scientific progress or doctrinal correctness, or from social progress, missionary work, and evangelism. The church has been shaken to its foundations by ideological, technological, and military movements on a scale never before experienced by humankind, as it has been smothered by mass culture, mindless “prosperity,” insipid education, and pseudo-egalitarianism. And as a result, the church at present has lost any realistic and specific sense of what it means for the individual believer to “grow in the grace and knowledge of
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John Wesley pointed out this trend: It was a common saying among the Christians of the primitive church, “The soul and the body make a man; the spirit and discipline make a Christian:” implying that none could be real Christians without the help of Christian discipline. But if this be so, is it any wonder that we find so few Christians; for where is Christian discipline?2
In the early 1970s, I found myself forced to begin teaching systematically on the disciplines. There seemed no other way to make my hearers understand what life in God’s Kingdom as lived and proclaimed by Jesus and his immediate followers was really like. And there seemed no other way to help them effectively enter into that type of life. Seventeen years of ministerial efforts in a wide range of denominational settings had made it clear to me that what Christians were normally told to do, the standard advice to churchgoers, was not advancing them spiritually. Of course, most Christians had
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Try as I might, I was unable to pass this outcome off as a lack of effort on the Christians’ part. One of the most discouraging features of ordinary church members’ lives is how little confidence in their own abilities for spiritual work, or even church work, they exhibit. Leave the irregular, the half-hearted, and the novices aside for the moment. If the steady, longtime faithful devotees to our ministries are not transformed in the substance of their lives to the full range of Christlikeness, they are being failed by what we are teaching them.
For serious churchgoing Christians, the hindrance to true spiritual growth is not unwillingness. While they are far from perfect, no one who knows such people can fail to appreciate their willingness and goodness of heart. For my part, at least, I could no longer deny the facts. I finally decided their problem was a theological deficiency, a lack in teaching, understanding, and practical direction. And the problem, I also decided, was one that the usual forms of ministry and teaching obviously do not remedy.
By contrast, the secret of the standard, historically proven spiritual disciplines is precisely that they do respect and count on the bodily nature of human personality. They all deeply and essentially involve bodily conditions and activities. Thus they show us effectively how we can “offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable unto God” and how our “spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1) really is inseparable from the offering up of our bodies in specific physical ways. Paul’s teachings, especially when added to his practices, strongly suggest that he understood and practiced something
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Psychologists, in the very nature of their work, are required to face the realities of the Christian soul—all dogmas, professions, and rituals aside—and to propose means of doing something about persons’ problems. But this is exactly what the spiritual overseer of past ages tried to do, and though it was not widely studied in the 1960s or 1970s, there is an ocean of literature that relates such work to the earlier recognized disciplines for the spiritual life.
They could not help but see that spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results.
True character transformation begins, we are taught to believe, in the pure grace of God and is continually assisted by it. Very well. But action is also indispensable in making the Christian truly a different kind of person—one having a new life in which, as 2 Corinthians 5:17 states, “Old things have passed away and, behold, all things become new.” Failure to act in certain definite ways will guarantee that this transformation does not come to pass.
