The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

The trivialization of the denominational distinctives left a huge void where little or nothing of specific religious practice was seen to be a matter of life or death.

The only absolute requirement for being a Christian was that one believe the proper things about Jesus.

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?”

But at that point in our national history there emerged a widespread awareness that this brand of religion, whether of the Right or the Left and regardless of the power in its past, could not be counted on regularly to produce the kind of people we knew in our hearts it should produce. It was not producing the kind of people that we knew life demanded and that we ourselves longed to be.

This is the setting from which we began to reach out to the disciplines, because we somehow realized they had a ring of authenticity about them. They suggested how, through concrete steps, we might “redeem the time” relentlessly flowing past and how by strenuous engagement we might “be redeemed from fire by fire.” The disciplines promised to give our lives a form that would serve as a receptacle for the substance of the Christ-life in God’s present Kingdom. To undertake the disciplines was to take our activities—our lives—seriously and to suppose that the following of Christ was at least as big a challenge as playing the violin or jogging.

But an important problem remains. Our tangible need and hunger for the spiritual disciplines do not by themselves make clear why we need them and how they fit into God’s creative and redemptive action upon and within human life. And above all, they do not show how the practice of the disciplines is to be integrated with the great truth recovered with Protestantism—that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works or merit. It is precisely obscurity and confusion here that led to the abuses of the disciplines history reveals and ultimately to today’s exclusion of them from the mainstream of Protestant religious life.

I believe that the misunderstanding of the spiritual disciplines’ place in life has been responsible for Protestantism’s adopting “cheap grace” as the dominant mode of its recent existence.

We must understand why the disciplines are integral to meaningful life in Christ. We must be clear about the essential part they play in the full and effective presentation of the gospel and the truth about life in God’s Kingdom. The chapters that follow are an attempt to make such a theology accessible to every Christian.

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 effect of this shift is incalculably vast and profound for the history of the church and for the realities of the Christian’s walk. They are well-illustrated in a story—probably apocryphal—that is told about one of the great thinkers of the Roman Catholic church, St. Thomas Aquinas. The story goes that, while walking amid the splendors of Rome, a friend said to St. Thomas, “We Christians certainly no longer have to say to the world, ‘Silver and gold have we none.’” To this St. Thomas replied: “But neither can we say to the lame man, ‘In the name of Jesus of Nazareth rise up and walk.’” As the shift settled in, the power diminished, just as St. Thomas Aquinas saw it. The church of his time could profess to dispense forgiveness but could not command a healing life force.

the resurrection had the meaning it did to those early believers just because it proved that the new life that had already been present among them in the person of Jesus could not be quenched by killing the body.

God’s seminal redemptive act toward us is the communication of a new kind of life, as the seed—one of our Lord’s most favored symbols—carries a new life into the enfolding soil. Turning from old ways with faith and hope in Christ stands forth as the natural first expression of the new life imparted.5 That life will be poised to become a life of the same quality as Christ’s, because it indeed is Christ’s. He really does live on in us. The incarnation continues.

The body’s sad condition is a sure indication that it does not now exist in its true element. We would not judge the possibilities of automobiles merely by a survey of those we find in the junk yard or the possibilities of plant life by considering only plants that have been starved of necessary nutrients. The human body was made to be the vehicle of human personality ruling the earth for God and through his power.

The ordinary purification and healing, whether of the body or of the mind, takes place only little by little, by passing from one degree to another with labor and patience. The angels upon Jacob’s ladder had wings; yet they flew not, but ascended and descended in order from one step to another. The soul that rises from sin to devotion may be compared to the dawning of the day, which at its approach does not expel the darkness instantaneously but only little by little.

it soon became clear that at this point the Spirit had more control of his legs than of his mouth.

All his most sincere and good intentions, even though specifically alerted by Jesus’ prediction and warning of a few hours earlier, were not able to withstand the automatic tendencies ingrained in his flesh and activated by the circumstances.

That old hand that automatically reached for the sword to kill, the legs that spontaneously took flight, the detestable tongue that forgot its inspired confession of the Messiah and, as with a life of its own, denied all relationship to Jesus, cursing God to “prove it!”—now all were of an entirely different character.

Was “exercise unto godliness” just a lofty concept with no definite meaning in Paul’s mouth? Or does it indicate a precise course of action he understood in definite terms, carefully followed himself, and called others to share?

Stewart’s remarkable book on Paul, A Man in Christ, makes it clear that the heart of Paul and of his message lies in one area—in the continuous appropriation of the “real presence” of Christ himself within the experiential life of the believer. Stewart’s book, as helpful as it is, though, shares a basic omission with all of the major discussions of Paul in recent centuries. It is an omission that leaves Paul’s experiences of the Christ-life, so well described in its substance and effect by Stewart, largely inaccessible in practice to those who wish to follow Paul as he followed Christ, as 1 Corinthians 4:16 and 11:1 indicate.

We are somehow blind to the information that should guide us. It’s invisible and just does not fall within our mental horizons. This peculiar blindness causes us to reject from our lives what Jesus and Paul actually did, what they chose to live through or experience. “Reject” is not too strong a term, but it is not quite accurate. To reject something, one must first consider or analyze it. But the details of Jesus’ and Paul’s daily lives, as opposed to their commands or instructions, we don’t even seem to consider, so we don’t feel called upon to accept or reject them. Such details somehow are irrelevent to any actual choices we have to make. So we say, “What does the long period of fasting and solitude that Jesus entered after his baptism have to do with us? We aren’t Jesus, are we? And Paul’s forceful subjugation of his body may have been necessary for his work, but I am doing quite well without it, you see.” What happens, then, is that all talk of following Jesus—or of Paul’s example of following him—is emptied of practical meaning. It does not express an actual strategy of living our day-to-day existence but at most concerns only certain special moments or articles of faith. This in turn makes it impossible for us to share their experiences and consistently carry through with behavior like theirs. That behavior rested, after all, upon their experiences. And the experiences in turn resulted from how they arranged their lives. Since we do not share their behaviors, we ar...

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.

thoughtful and religiously devout people of the classical and Hellenistic world, from the Ganges to the Tiber, knew that the mind and body of the human being had to be rigorously disciplined to achieve a decent individual and social existence. This is not something St. Paul had to prove or even explicitly state to his readers—but it also was not something that he overlooked, leaving it to be thought up by crazed monks in the Dark Ages. It is, rather, a wisdom gleaned from millennia of collective human experience. There is nothing especially religious about it, though every religion of historical significance has accepted and inculcated it in one way or another.

The preeminence of the “feel good” mentality in our world is what makes it impossible for many people now even to imagine what Paul and his contemporaries accepted as a fact of life. 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.”

These early Christians really did arrange their lives very differently from their non-Christian neighbors, as well as from the vast majority of those of us called Christians today. We are speaking of their overall style of life, not just what they did under pressure, which frequently was also astonishingly different.

In penal institutions, solitary confinement is used to break the strongest of wills. It is capable of this because it excludes interactions with others upon which fallen human personality completely depends. The life alienated from God collapses when deprived of its support from the sin-laden world. But the life in tune with God is actually nurtured by time spent alone. John the Baptist,

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.

Retirement is the laboratory of the spirit; interior solitude and silence are its two wings. 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.

Today, sustained withdrawal from society into solitude seems to indicate weakness, suffering, flight, or failure rather than great strength, joy, and effectiveness. Believing that, we, for instance, thoroughly misunderstand the context of Jesus’ temptations after his baptism (Matt. 4). 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.

The desert was his fortress, his place of power.

Paul’s effectiveness is simply inconceivable without its extensive use of fasting, solitude, and prayer.

Those who would follow Paul as Paul followed Christ should see in how he actually lived precisely what he meant when he said “I beat my body and make it my slave” (1 Cor. 9:27, NIV). They will then also know how, exactly, they are to do as he did in this respect.

His whole life was to be the servant of all, just like Jesus, and that is why such great work was trusted to him and not to others.

When he elsewhere directs us to “mortify” the deeds of the body through the spirit (Rom. 6:13) or to mortify our members that are upon the earth (Col. 3:5), we are to interpret his words in the light of his acts.

Paul says to us, “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1, NIV). He says, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you” (Phil. 4:9, NIV). We then, within our modern view of life, busily set to work explaining how, of course, we are following him as he follows his Lord. Don’t we believe and say the same things he did? But our lives are not like his life at all. We do not do the things he did. Yet it is surely Paul’s practice that alone explains his marvelously victorious life in the easy yoke of Christ, for he in faith adopted his Lord’s overall style of life. And as he did, he experienced the upholding of God’s grace in it. This is the key to the understanding of Paul’s life, teachings, and effect on history.

The key to understanding Paul is to know that, with all his “weaknesses” and failures and personality deficiencies, he gave himself solely to being like his Lord. He lived and practiced daily the things his Lord taught and practiced. He lived a life of abandonment; and it was his confidence in this path, and in the power that derived from the rich union with Christ it created, that enabled him to call others to do the same. His actions, his character, his motivations—and the astonishing world-changing power derived from his lowly life-style—can only be understood by keeping this fact in mind: Paul followed Jesus by living as he lived. And how did he do that? Through activities and ways of living that would train his whole personality to depend upon the risen Christ as Christ trained himself to depend upon the Father.

In other words, Paul and his Lord were people of immense power, who saw clearly the wayward ways the world considered natural. With calm premeditation and clear vision of a deeper order, they took their stand always among those “last who shall be first” mentioned repeatedly in the Gospels. With their feet planted in the deeper order of God, they lived lives of utter self-sacrifice and abandonment, seeing in such a life the highest possible personal attainment. And through that way of living God gave them “the power of an indestructible life” (Heb. 7:16) to accomplish the work of their appointed ministry and to raise them above the power of death. During their lives, they both were men of lowly and plain origin and manner, when compared with the glittering and glamorous ones who dominated the world’s attention. So most of their powerful contemporaries could not possibly have seen either of them for who they were. Nor can we, until we have begun in faith actually to live as they lived.

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.

His often quoted words, “I die daily,” for example, have been turned into an expression of an attitude or spirit of self-sacrifice and humility. The context of this phrase, however, makes it amply clear that for him this wasn’t an attitude but a daily fact of life—one in which he daily stared death in the face and accepted it for that day, as we can see in 1 Corinthians 15:30–32.

When Paul describes his life or the life of the Christian disciple he always uses language realistically, though of course not always literally. When he says, for example, that “those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24, RSV), he does not mean that the flesh is literally fastened to a cross. But he does refer to a real and definite action or type of action by believers through which the claims of normal feelings and desires are suspended and removed from control of their lives. It is the same as what Jesus calls the denial of one’s self and the taking up of the cross.

His crucifixion of the flesh, and ours, is accomplished through those activities such as solitude, fasting, frugality, service, and so forth, which constitute the curriculum in the school of self-denial and place us on the front line of spiritual combat, as we read in Mark 8:34–36 and Luke 17:33.

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.

Oswald Chambers puts it so well. He states that if we’ve experienced regeneration, we must not only talk about it, but exercise it, working out what God has worked in. We must show it “in our fingertips, in our tongue, and in our bodily contact with other people, and as we obey God we’ll find we have a wealth of power on the inside.” It becomes a natural part of us, and practice is the key: The question of forming habits on the basis of the grace of God is a very vital one. To ignore it is to fall into the snare of the Pharisee—the grace of God is praised, Jesus Christ is praised, the Redemption is praised, but the practical everyday life evades working it out. 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

He goes on to stress that when we obey the Spirit and practice through our physical life all that God has put in our hearts, then when crisis comes we will find we have not only God’s grace to stand by us, “but our own nature also.” The crisis passes without disaster, and our souls, instead of being devastated, can actually acquire a stronger attitude toward God.

The Methodists were, of course, originally so called because they believed in methodical “godly exercise” as the sure route to spiritual maturity. John Wesley’s writings and life spell out the “method” of the Methodists in detail. But almost nothing of it remains in current practice, and in this denomination we have one of the clearest illustrations of the tendency, noted at the end of the last chapter, to admire a great Christian leader in words, but never to think of simply doing what he or she did in order to do the work of the Kingdom of God.

The order is important

In solitude, we purposefully abstain from interaction with other human beings, denying ourselves companionship and all that comes from our conscious interaction with others.

This is not just rest or refreshment from nature, though that too can contribute to our spiritual well-being. 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.

Western men and women, especially, talk a great deal about being individuals. But our conformity to social pattern is hardly less remarkable than that of the mice—and just as deadly!

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.