The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

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.

But history keeps a heavy hand upon our present thoughts and feelings. Such a faith as just described is strongly opposed today by powerful tendencies around us. Faith today is treated as something that only should make us different, not that actually does or can make us different. In reality we vainly struggle against the evils of this world, waiting to die and go to heaven. Somehow we’ve gotten the idea that the essence of faith is entirely a mental and inward thing.

What we need is a deeper insight into our practical relationship with God in redemption. We need an understanding that can guide us into constant interaction with the Kingdom of God as a real part of our daily lives, an ongoing spiritual presence that is at the same time a psychological reality. In other words, we must develop a psychologically sound theology of the spiritual life and of its disciplines to guide us.

my ultimate aim is to change our practice radically. This book is a plea for the Christian community to place the disciplines for the spiritual life at the heart of the gospel.

The Spirit of the Disciplines is nothing but the love of Jesus, with its resolute will to be like him whom we love.

2). 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.

“Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and left untried.”

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.

A baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body is no more ridiculous than the Christian who hopes to be able to act in the manner of Christ when put to the test without the appropriate exercise in godly living.

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.

The “on the spot” episodes are not the place where we can, even by the grace of God, redirect unchristlike but ingrained tendencies of action toward sudden Christlikeness. Our efforts to take control at that moment will fail so uniformly and so ingloriously that the whole project of following Christ will appear ridiculous to the watching world. We’ve all seen this happen.

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.

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.

Practical theology studies the manner in which our actions interact with God to accomplish his ends in human life.

“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.

Where is our Christ, who is alive and lives in power? In the preaching of our churches, he has become a beautiful ideal. He has been turned into a myth, embodying a theological concept.

By modest estimate, more than a quarter of the entire population of the United States have professed an evangelical conversion experience. 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?”8

Now one can even have an unsuccessful “revival,” which once you stop to think about it, makes as little sense as the unsuccessful raising of a dead person—that is, no raising at all.

what is needed, then, is a theology of the disciplines for the spiritual life.

a thoughtless theology guides our lives with just as much force as a thoughtful and informed one.

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.

Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God? We’re encouraged somehow today to remove the essence of faith from the particulars of daily human life and relocate it in special times, places, and states of mind.

The human body is the focal point of human existence. Jesus had one. We have one. Without the body in its proper place, the pieces of the puzzle of new life in Christ do not realistically fit together, and the idea of really following him and becoming like him remains a practical impossibility.

The vitality and power of Christianity is lost when we fail to integrate our bodies into its practice by intelligent, conscious choice and steadfast intent. It is with our bodies we receive the new life that comes as we enter his Kingdom.

The old leaf automatically falls from the branch as the new leaf emerges.

We are finite, limited to our bodies. So the disciplines cannot be carried out except as our body and its parts are surrendered in precise ways and definite actions to God.

Without an understanding of our nature and purpose, we cannot have a proper understanding of redemption.

This original job description for humanity hints at a power far beyond what it now possesses independently of God’s Kingdom order. I believe men and women were designed by God, in the very constitution of their human personalities, to carry out his rule by meshing the relatively little power resident in their own bodies with the power inherent in the infinite Rule or Kingdom of God.

We are a little less than a god only because our life is of such a nature that it can draw upon the infinite resources of God.

The evil that we do in our present condition is a reflection of a weakness caused by spiritual starvation.

St. Augustine so clearly saw, the deranged condition of humankind is not, at bottom, a positive fact, but a deprivation. It is one that results in vast positive evils, of course, yet depravity is no less a horror because it stems from a deficiency, and people are no less responsible for it and its consequences.

The light bulb is dead when disconnected from the electrical current, even though it still exists. But when connected to the current, it radiates and affects its surroundings with a power and substance that is in it but not of it.

A new overall quality of human existence with corresponding new powers.

Spirituality is a matter of another reality. It is absolutely indispensible to keep before us the fact that it is not a “commitment” and it is not a “life-style,” even though a commitment and a life-style will come from it.

The disciplines are activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is, strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself, as we “yield ourselves to God, as those that are alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God,”

we can undertake, in cooperation with grace, to raise the level of our lives toward godliness.

We are somewhat misled by the reports of experiences by many great spiritual leaders, and we assign their greatness to these great moments they were given, neglecting the years of slow progress they endured before them. Francis de Sales wisely counsels us not to expect transformation in a moment, though it is possible for God to give it.

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.

The wise words of Archbishop William Temple are: “We only know what matter is when spirit dwells in it; we only know what man is when God dwells in him.”

To cut off the joys and pleasures associated with our bodily and social existence as “unspiritual,” then, can actually have the effect of weakening us in our efforts to do what is right. It makes it impossible for us to see and draw strength from the goodness of rightness.

This is where the spiritual disciplines come in. The disciplines for the spiritual life, rightly understood, are time-tested activities consciously undertaken by us as new men or women to allow our spirit ever-increasing sway over our embodied selves. They help by assisting the ways of God’s Kingdom to take the place of the habits of sin embedded in our bodies.

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.

All great works are prepared in the desert, including the redemption of the world.

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.

A “head trip” of mental assent to doctrine and the enjoyment of pleasant imagery and imagination is quietly substituted for a rigorous practice of discipleship that would bring a true transformation of character.

As Oswald Chambers writes, “We cannot grow into holiness, but we must grow in it.”10

When we so think, then his life enables us to live independently of the world’s values. We can be dead to them.