The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

Those disciplines alone can become for average Christians “the conditions upon which the spiritual life is made indubitably real.”

It’s true. And if this point can be made as convincingly as its truth and its importance deserves, the practical effects will be stunning. There will be a life-giving revolution in our personal lives and in our world.

Upon occasion, we exhort Christians to “take Christ into the workplace” or “bring Christ into the home.” But doesn’t this only point to the deadly assumption that Christians normally leave Christ at the church?

More than anyplace else it originates from failure to recognize the part our body plays in our spiritual life—and this is, of course, where the disciplines enter the discussion.

A close look at Jesus’ “great acts” of humility, faith, and compassion recorded in the Gospel narratives finds them to be moments in a life more pervasively and deeply characterized by solitude, fasting, prayer, and service. Surely, then, the lives of his followers must be just as deeply characterized by those same practices.

It would seem only logical to emulate his daily actions since he was a great master of the spiritual life. So isn’t it reasonable then to see in those disciplines the specific factors leading to the easy yoke, the light burden, and the abundance of life and power?

Obedience, even for him, was something to be learned. Certainly we cannot reasonably hope to do his deeds without adopting his form of life.

“Sacrifice and offering thou hast not desired, but a body hast thou prepared for me” (Heb. 10:5, RSV). He shared the human frame, and as for all human beings, his body was the focal point of his life.

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.

inability of the believer to think of Christ himself as really having a body, with all the normal functions attached to our own bodies. In fact, many feel it almost blasphemous to suppose that he was really like us in all the normal bodily details and functions.

Docetism is the ancient heresy that Christ did not in fact have a real body at all but only seemed to have one.

So long as such a view of the body is held, the easy yoke will remain a lovely dream and discipleship a part-time diversion. One of our most important tasks here will be to make clear how and why the use of our body for positive spiritual ends is a large part of our share in the process of redemption.

The incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Christ are bodily events. The broken body and the spilled blood of our Lord are celebrated perpetually in the meetings of his people. The gift of himself to us is inseparable from the presence of his body upon the earth and the giving up of it to death upon the cross.

what is true of the foundations is no less true of the superstructure.

The surrender of myself to him is inseparable from the giving up of my body to him in such a way that it can serve both him and me as a common abode, as John 14:23, 1 Corinthians 6:15–20, and Ephesians 2:22 testify.

salvation is to affect our lives, it can do so only by affecting our bodies. If we are to participate in the reign of God, it can only be by our actions. And our actions are physical—we live only in the processes of our bodies. To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives. Our life is a bodily life, even though that life is one that can be fulfilled solely in union with God.

God is left without a dwelling place through which he could effectively occupy

the world in the manner he intends.

“in whom was life: and the life was the light of men.”

No one is surprised, though we sometimes complain, when faithful church members do not grow to maturity in Christ. With steady regularity we fail to realize the “abundance of life” the gospel clearly promises. We know this to be painfully true. Experience has taught us this, though we may bravely try to ignore it.

They all fail to foster those bodily behaviors of faith that would make concrete human existence vitally complete—taking them as a part of the total life in the Kingdom of God.

separation of our faith from everyday life.

We’ve relegated God’s life in us to special times and places and states of mind. And we’ve become so used to this style of life, we are hardly aware of it. When we think of “taking Christ into the workplace” or “keeping Christ in the home,” we are making our faith into a set of special acts. The “specialness” of such acts just underscores th...

We must, in fact, do nothing less than engage in a radical rethinking of the Christian conception of salvation. What does it mean to be “saved?”

Is it possible that, through historical process and the drift of language use to reflect special theological interests, we’ve lost touch with the root meanings of concepts that would make grace and

human personality fit like hand in glove when it comes to the process of Christian discipleship? I believe that is exactly what’s happened.

restricted the Christian idea of salvation to mere forgiveness of sins. Yet it is so much more. Salvation as conceived today is far removed from what it was in the beginnings of Christianity and only by correcting it can God’s grace in salvation be returned to the concrete, embodied existence of our human personalities walking with Jesus in his easy yoke.

connection between salvation and life—

as the apostle Paul puts it, to understand how, being reconciled to God by the death of his Son, we are then “saved by his life.” (Rom. 5:10) How can we be saved by his life when we believe salvation comes from his death alone?

We have grown so used to the idea that the Crucifixion is the supreme symbol of Christianity that it is a shock to realize how late in the history of Christian art its power is recognized.

The simple fact is that the early church needed converts, and from this point of view the Crucifixion was not an encouraging subject. So, early Christian art is concerned with miracles, healings, and with hopeful aspects of the faith like the Ascension and the Resurrection.1

We are like the grass, which grows the more luxuriantly the oftener it is mown. The blood of Christians is the seed of Christianity. Your philosophers taught men to despise pain and death by words; but how few their converts compared with those of the Christians, who teach by example!

it wasn’t Christ’s death that gave rise to this courageous early church—but his life!

Christ’s transcendent life in the present Kingdom of heaven is what drew the disciples together around Jesus prior to his death. And then resurrection and postresurrection events proved that life to be indestructible.

the force of the higher life was allowed to dissipate as the generations passed by. Eyewitnesses—the people who had seen and felt the transcendent life—were no longer there to convey it and tell of it first hand.

That “hands on” viewpoint was replaced with another. The church’s understanding of salvation then slowly narrowed down to a mere forgiveness of sins, leading to heaven beyond this life.

the point where his life was most fully displayed and triumphant, forever breaking the power of sin over concrete human existence.

the basic structure of the redemptive relationship between us and God came to be pictured in a way radically different from its previous New Testament conception.

narrowly interpreted as mere vicarious suffering and then mistaken for the whole of the redemptive action of God. Christ’s life and teaching were therefore nonessential to the work of redemption and were regarded as just poignant decorations for his cross, since his only saving function was conceived to be that of a blood sacrifice to purchase our forgiveness.

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.

“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.’”

The church of his time could profess to dispense forgiveness but could not command a healing life force.

To be “saved” was to be “delivered from the power of darkness and translated into the Kingdom of his dear Son,” as Colossians 1:13 says.

We who are saved are to have a different order of life from that of the unsaved. We are to live in a different “world.”

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.

The resurrection was a cosmic event only because it validated the reality and the indestructibility of what Jesus had preached and exemplified before his death—the enduring reality and openness of God’s Kingdom.

It meant that the Kingdom, with the communal form his disciples had come to know and hope in, would go on. The “gates of the grave” would not prevail against it, as Matthew 16:18 states. That, and the fact that Jesus was not dead after all—and that when we die, we won’t stay...

the simple and wholly adequate word for salvation in the New Testament

is “life.”

“I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly,” says John 10:10. “He that hath the Son hath life,” says 1 John 5:12. “Even when we were dead through our trespasses, God m...