Spiritual Discipline

“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.” -Dallas Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines

I’ve been thinking about spiritual disciplines for some time. For much of my past, that concept was associated with guilt more than action, with repeated, vague readings of Richard Foster’s classic and feeling like I ought to be getting up for morning devotions but never being able to do so for more than a few months at a time. It was all too easy to become subsumed by external pressures and internal torpor and distraction. The last decade has been a kind of spiritual renaissance, though, and one anchor during the adjustment to the move has been pressing more into the Word in various ways, which has lately only made me realize how much more I am missing. How much more there is for me. 

That’s the point of spiritual disciplines—they are not for the earning of grace, but the fuller experience of it. They posture us to more fully receive and be transformed by the grace we have already been given. Pastor Ryan Paulson, at a seminar during Mt. Hermon family camp this past summer, said what it feels like to him is drinking from a well he never realized was there, or positioning his sails to catch the wind. 

Disciplines are surely just as much about training as receiving, or maybe receiving through training. We all know we can’t sit down on stage without preparation and play a Chopin ballade—we could sit there and try and try, but we’d fail. What it takes to play in that moment are not attempts while on stage, but hours and years of prior practice: scales, learning parts hands-separately, then hands-together, then slowly, then up-to-tempo, then with dynamics, then with personal expression, then memorizing the score, listening to recordings of other players along the way for context, receiving coaching from a private teacher.

Yet spiritually, we are forever trying but rarely training. We want to know God’s will when faced with a decision, to be able to forgive when hurt, to control an angry impulse when provoked, but we aren’t engaging in practices that help us listen to, know, and experience God and the workings of the Holy Spirit on a consistent basis, during the millions of moments when it doesn’t urgently matter. Wisdom and character are not acquired in a moment. Do I really desire after the best things?

What is so difficult, of course, is how easily we slip back into our old selves and ways of thinking, into the cultural river in which we are all immersed. Wayne Cordeiro, in his book The Divine Mentor, shares the story of Polish pianist Ignace Jan Paderewsky, who when asked to play for government concerts only agreed to if they allowed him to play three hours of scales a day. “If I skip one day of scales,” he explained, “when I play in concert, I notice it. If I skip two days of scales, my coach will notice. And if I skip three days, the world will notice.” It’s the same with our daily devotions, Cordeiro says: skip one day, and we notice. Two days, and our spouse and kids notice. Three days, and the world notices. It’s that easy to slip back into worldly wisdom, into cranky moods, to lose perspective.

Practically, it comes down to experimenting and experiencing, seeing which work, keeping in mind some have more primacy while others may be for certain seasons. The list that Dallas Willard gives includes disciplines of abstinence (silence and solitude, simplicity, fasting, sabbath, secrecy, submission) and engagement (bible reading and memorization, worship, prayer, soul friendship, personal reflection, and service), but there may be many others. I like how Willard says we need to look at Jesus’ whole life, not just his public ministry but the lifestyle and disciplines that prepared him for that—the same could be said of Paul, Daniel, David, Elijah, and many others—those seem like a good place to start.

I’ve been memorizing the book of Ephesians, using Davis’ technique from An Approach to the Extended Memorization of Scripture (which I highly recommend). Most of the time, it feels like working out. I drag myself to it each day, but afterwards, I feel great. Sometimes phrases get repeated to the point where I see something new in it, or in entire chapters in context, that I’d never seen before. Sometimes the very first time I learn a verse it convicts me. Sometimes nothing happens. Either way, there is surely no better way to meditate on scripture: I’ve never experienced anything like it before, this feeling of the word inside me, all the time, popping to mind during moments of temptation or in response to something I see, seeing how the words underlie or enhance other parts of scripture I encounter. In that sense, it really is like tapping into something that was there for me, all the time, but I had never fully taken advantage of. I think of Jesus, how words from the scriptures sprang to his lips at the most stressful times of his life, when tempted, when dying, and this whole venture becomes a glimpse into his interior life and mind. The daily grind seems a small price to pay for that.