The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

Once we forsake or cloud this meaning of “salvation” (or “redemption” or “regeneration”) and substitute for it mere atonement or mere forgiveness of sins, we’ll never be able to achi...

But the idea of redemption as the impartation of a life provides a totally different framework of understanding.

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.

“Holiness…[as love of God and humankind] is considered, not as a means, but as a part, a distinguished part; or rather as the very central point in which all the means of grace, and all the ordinances of religion,

terminate.”

[Faith] is a living well-founded confidence in the grace of God, so perfectly certain that it would die a thousand times rather than surrender its conviction. Such confidence and personal knowledge of divine grace makes its possessor joyful, bold, and full of warm affection toward God and all created things—all of which the Holy Spirit works in faith.

Hence, such a man becomes without constraint willing and eager to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer all manner of ills, in order to please and glorify God, who has shown toward him such grace.7

He noted how there is always a certain worldliness that desires to seem Christian, but as cheaply as possible.

“We are free from all works. Long live Luther! ‘Who loves not women, wine, and song remains a fool his whole life long!’ This is the significance of the life of Luther, this man of God who, suited to the times, reformed Christianity.”8

faith is the powerful life force described by Luther, we can then recognize it as it displays itself on the pages of the New Testament in three major dimensions:

The presence of a new power within the individual, erupting into a break with the past

reality of the easy yoke with the practice of the spiritual disciplines.

We are finite, limited to our bodies.

New Testament knows nothing of such a purely mental “faith.” The faith of the New Testament is a distinctive life force that originates in the impact of God’s word upon the soul, as we see in Romans 10:17, and then exercises a determinating influence upon all aspects of our existence, including the body and its social and political environment.

This idea is the most convincing line of interpretation of faith and life in Christ’s companionship as pictured in the New Testament.

It is also one that opens the door to the use of the New Testament as a practical guide to Christi...

However, I must admit that even those who find it convincing may still feel an overwhelming impression that the body just could not be more than a hindrance to our redemption. Our actual experience with the human body, especially our own, may reinforce the idea that the most we can ever hope for is to reach a standoff with it, barely managing by the grace of God to keep it from spiritually defeating us until we are rid of it.

It’s true that our bodies can overwhelm us with their impulses and terrify us with their vulnerability.

But still, I must insist that it was not made to be what we find it to be in its alienation from God.

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. Withdrawn from that function by loss of its connection with God, the body is caught in the ...

To readjust our view of the possibilities of our body and the spiritual life the body can experience, the next three chapters are devoted to an explanation, from the biblical vie...

The only way to overcome this alienation from their sort of life is by entering into the actual practices of Jesus and Paul as something essential to our life in Christ.

Paul’s points out that there is a precisely parallel phenomenon in the spiritual realm and draws upon that parallelism in his statement. And it’s a very workable analogy. 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.

It’s an illusion created in part by our own conviction that our unrestrained natural impulse is in itself a good thing and that we have an unquestionable right to fulfill our natural impulses so long as “no one gets hurt.”

But thoughtful and religiously devout people of the classical and Hellenistic world, from the Ganges to the Tiber, knew that the mind

Where have we gotten this idea about “doing what feels good”? The unrestrained hedonism of our own day comes historically from the 18th-century idealization of happiness and is filtered through the 19th-century English ideology of pleasure as the good for people. Finally it emerges in the form of our present “feel good” society—tragically pandered to by the popular culture and much of popular religion as well.

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.”

consider how Jesus and his initial followers made extensive use of solitude.

As will be seen in a later chapter, solitude is the most radical of the disciplines for life in the spirit.

It is capable of this because it excludes interactions with others upon which fallen human per...

The life alienated from God collapses when deprived of its support from the sin-laden world. But the life in tune with God is ac...

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.

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.

In that desert solitude, Jesus fasted for more than a month. Then, and not before, Satan was allowed to approach him with his glittering proposals of bread, notoriety, and power. Only then was Jesus at the height of his strength.

The desert was his fortress, his place of power. Throughout his life he sought the solitary place as an indirect submission of his own physical body to righteousness (e.g., Mark 1:35, 3:13, 6:31, 46).

Paul’s encounter with Christ. Immediately after the Damascus road event, he prayed and fasted, neither eating nor drinking for three days (Acts 9:9, 11). A short while later, he fled to the Arabian desert for a lengthy period of time, not “consulting with flesh and blood.”

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

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.

And when we do so there is no doubt that he is directing us to undertake the standard activities for training the natural desires toward godliness, ones that are readily recognized by anyone at all familiar with the history of religion.

these activities are solitude, fasting, “watching,” silence, routines of prayer and study, the g...

and goods in various kinds of service, worship, frugality, submission to the spiritual fellowship a...

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.

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.

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.

So we pass off Paul’s intensely practical directions and example as being only about attitude. Or possibly we see in them some fine theological point regarding God’s attitude toward us. In some cultural contexts Paul’s writings are read as telling us not to enjoy secular entertainments or bodily pleasures—or as commanding us to embrace whatever the current prudishness is. We take something out of our contemporary grab bag of ideas and assume that that is what he is saying. However, no sane, practical course of action that results in progress toward pervasive Christlikeness ever seems to emerge from such thinking.