The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

solitude, like all of the disciplines of the spirit, carries its risks. In solitude, we confront our own soul with its obscure forces and conflicts that escape our attention when we are interacting with others. Thus, “Solitude is a terrible trial, for it serves to crack open and burst apart the shell of our superficial securities. It opens out to us the unknown abyss that we all carry within us…[and] discloses the fact that these abysses are haunted.”6 We can only survive solitude if we cling to Christ there. And yet what we find of him in that solitude enables us to return to society as free persons.

Of all the disciplines of abstinence, solitude is generally the most fundamental in the beginning of the spiritual life, and it must be returned to again and again as that life develops. This factual priority of solitude is, I believe, a sound element in monastic asceticism. Locked into interaction with the human beings that make up our fallen world, it is all but impossible to grow in grace as one should. Just try fasting, prayer, service, giving, or even celebration without the preparation accomplished in withdrawal, and you will soon be thrown into despair by your efforts, very likely abandoning your attempt altogether.

On the other hand, 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.

Henry David Thoreau saw how even our secular existence withers from lack of a hidden life. Conversation degenerates into mere gossip and those we meet can only talk of what they heard from someone else. The only difference between us and our neighbor is that he has seen the news and we have not. Thoreau put it well. As our inward quiet life fails, “we go more constantly and desperately to the post office,” but “the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while…. Read not The Times,” he concludes, “read The Eternities!”9

Silence goes beyond solitude, and without it solitude has little effect. Henri Nouwen observes that “silence is the way to make solitude a reality.”10 But silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life. It reminds us of death, which will cut us off from this world and leave only us and God. And in that quiet, what if there turns out to be very little to “just us and God”? Think what it says about the inward emptiness of our lives if we must always turn on the tape player or radio to make sure something is happening around us.

Silence and solitude do go hand in hand, usually. Just as silence is vital to make solitude real, so is solitude needed to make the discipline of silence complete.

many have learned to rise for a time in the middle of the night—to break the night’s sleep in half in order to experience such silence. In doing so, they find a rich silence that aids their prayer and study without imposing on others.

Why do we ask why?

We want to escape the consequences without changing who we are.

The only true radical...

But there is a prevailing problem. The people of Christ have never lacked for available power to accomplish the task set for them by their Master. But they have failed to make disciples, in the New Testament sense of the term. And naturally following upon this, they have failed even to intend to teach people to do all that Christ would have us do. Certainly this was, more often than not, because they thought it impossible. But in any case they have failed to seek his power to the ends he specified, and they have not developed the character needed to bear his power safely throughout the social order, or even within the church itself.

At this point in history, every leader among those who identify with Christ as Lord must ask himself or herself: “How can I justify not leading my people into the practice of disciplines for the spiritual life that would enable them to reign in their lives by Christ Jesus? How can I fail to give them this opportunity? How can I justify not giving myself to those practices until I am a spiritual powerhouse, the angels of God evidently ascending and descending upon me in my place?”

There is a special evangelistic work to be done, of course, and there are special callings to it. But if those in the churches really are enjoying fullness of life, evangelism will be unstoppable and largely automatic. The local assembly, for its part, can then become an academy where people throng from the surrounding community to learn how to live. It will be a school of life (for a disciple is but a pupil, a student) where all aspects of that life seen in the New Testament records are practiced and mastered under those who have themselves mastered them through practice. Only by taking this as our immediate goal can we intend to carry out the Great Commission.

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.

Do not be surprised if you are led in a way which others do not go. Be surprised if you are not!

This book... Sheesh!

You cannot follow him without a plan to serve as the vessel in which the treasure of his life is received. Your plan will also be the cross on which you die to your old self and meet him in his life beyond death.