The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

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 been told by me as by others to attend the services of the church, give of time and money, pray, read the Bible, do good to others, and witness to their faith. And certainly they should do these things. But just as certainly something more was needed. It was painfully clear to me that, with rare and beautiful exceptions, Christians were not able to do even these few necessary things in a way that was really good for them, as things that would be an avenue to life filled and possessed of God. All pleasing and doctrinally sound schemes of Christian education, church growth, and spiritual renewal came around at last to this disappointing result.