Spiritual Disciplines and the Means of Grace

When God told Israel to love Him wholeheartedly, He followed up that command with the command to create routines and rituals that would remind, reinforce, and reflect that commandment at every corner of an Israelite’s life.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 6:5–9).

While Israel over-literalized His words and created physical boxes containing Scripture to wear on the forehead or stick on the doorpost, God’s command was simpler and simultaneously more demanding: create structures in your life that will teach and enable love for God, make these structures prominent, conspicuous, repetitive, and natural, and develop routines, habits, rituals, and ways of life that direct the wandering heart back to loving God. In other words, nurture love for God through discipline.

This is the purpose of the spiritual disciplines. Spiritual disciplines are the structures that nurture communion with God. The disciplines are not communion with God in themselves, but they are means to that communion. Many disciplines have been suggested: private prayer, meditation on the Word, memorization of the Word, wider reading of devotional or theological writers, journaling, corporate worship, giving, service of others, evangelism, and others. Most of these come from either Scriptural example or direct command. So, in many ways, spiritual disciplines are a matter of plain obedience, or a better part of wisdom. But they are much more than that. The disciplines provide the greenhouse in which desire for God thrives.

Five Ways Spiritual Disciplines Help Desire for God Grow

1. Disciplines create opportunity for communion with God

Spiritual disciplines, rightly used, are the moments when we can give clearest attention to communing with God. It is no wonder that some have mistaken these means as the end itself, for they provide the stage upon which communion often takes place.

Exercising is not always the experience of enjoying good health, though it may be, and it certainly contributes toward that experience. Likewise, spiritual disciplines are not always communion itself, but few other times and places provide us with as concentrated an experience of communion.

2. Disciplines unite inward beliefs with outward actions

Like many tasks that require us to coordinate several actions at once, we need practice. We are clumsy when we first ride a bicycle, or try to ice-skate, or drive a car. We are too conscious of the separate actions, and we fumble, fall, or stall. As we keep practicing, something marvelous happens as we combine these actions more and more seamlessly, until we can do them by muscle memory. Since our souls are united to bodies, spiritual disciplines enable us to unite our thoughts with our actions.

3. Disciplines develop abilities, attitudes, and actions for communion

Discipline orders what is chaotic. Communion with God often requires habits such as sustained attention, reflective thought, and a perceptive eye; and these abilities are strengthened through use. Communion requires using the religious imagination, saying or writing words of praise, gratitude, admiration, or adoration to God. These abilities lie dormant or defective until regular use begins to carve, shape, and polish them into abilities fit for communion.

4. Disciplines shape the rhythms and sensibilities of life

For the Israelite, daily routine involved reciting the Shema morning and evening. Meals, clothing, work, money, and home life were structured by God’s commands. Weekly Sabbath rest, daily offerings, monthly observances, and annual feasts placed God at the center of life. The repetition of actions, structured patterns of obedience, and limits on our actions shape attitudes and feelings about reality, while they reinforce the value of the disciplines. So it is with New Testament disciplines.

5. Disciplines sharpen discernment and judgment

Ordinate affection is loving what God loves and hating what He hates. We can only do this if we judge rightly. Discernment comes through use: “But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). The disciplines of the Christian life afford the believer the opportunity to develop discernment.

The Gospel and Discipline

Christian discipline is death and resurrection. To cultivate communion with God, the chaotic nature of our spirits must be subordinated so that the orderliness of God’s beauty can be known. No one makes spiritual progress unless the body is brought into submission (1 Corinthians 9:27), temperance is exercised, our time carefully measured and used, and the soul trained in godliness. Unless we are careful stewards of our time, sleep, and physical and emotional states, communion with God will usually be crowded out.

The gospel teaches that healthy spiritual life is preceded by death. Discipline involves death. Inclinations toward laziness, waste, procrastination, self-indulgence, perpetual ease, unearned rest, sloppiness, and questionable shortcuts must be mortified. Every time a disciplined person denies his inclinations that would ruin his desired goal, he practices a kind of death so as to find another kind of life. Every denial, abstention, embraced hardship, accepted limitation, or chosen deprivation is a chosen death to some desires, to make way for something else that is desired.

“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain” (John 12:24).

Christians who embrace spiritual disciplines have the opportunity to re-enact the gospel: dying to our own life to save it, enduring the cross for the joy set before us, always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.

However, discipline is not Christian merely because it involves self-control, or we would have to call all human discipline a re-enactment of the gospel. Discipline is explicitly Christian when its hard choices are motivated and empowered by the death and resurrection of Christ. In fact, discipline lapses immediately into what Colossians 2:23 calls self-imposed religion when the gospel is removed as the motive and means.

Two Ditches to Avoid

We can fall into opposite ditches. One says all discipline that does not come from spontaneous desire is dead formalism and legalism. Adherents of this view often wait for desires to ignite in the green wood of immature souls. This denies that both death and resurrection are part of discipline.

The other says bodily discipline is a sweetness of its own, and if we ignore our wayward desires and commit to rigid discipline, we will enter a state of disciplined bliss. Some devotional writers have made discipline an end in itself. This is the error in much of the contemporary contemplative movement, promoting a quasi-mysticism where union with God is achieved through severity. The discipline functions almost sacramentally. Devotees of this way often veer into rebellion or pride, as will-worship forbids worship of the true kind (Colossians 2:23). This denies that we have already died and risen in Christ and are to become what we already are, not seek to become something we are not through self-effort.

Dependent Obedience, Motivated by Love

Instead of these approaches, Christian discipline is dependent obedience motivated by love for the Lord. Some spiritual sweat will be needed, but sweat is not its own reward. Our desire for communion, combined with the awareness that much in us still wars against that desire, will lead us to combine self-denial and seeking. Ask any disciplined man his secret, and he will tell you that necessity and desire married to produce the child of discipline.

The Holy Spirit works in us to will and to do (Philippians 2:13), and His motivating and enabling are deeply related to our struggle to desire and do His will (Colossians 1:29). Whatever Spirit-prompted flames of desire are present need to be fanned into flame by disciplined, dependent obedience.

The organic life of abiding in the Vine also needs a trellis to grow on, and discipline provides such a trellis. We must believe we have died and risen in Christ, and dependently deny what destroys communion with God, while also dependently seeking and submitting to practices that nurture communion. This is how the gospel provides the pattern and power for discipline.