Speaking of Spiritual Disciplines
It’s still winter in Minnesota — who are we kidding? There’s still snow on the ground and more yet to come, but at the same time the days are getting a little longer … the birds are chirping in the morning … and baseball’s Spring Training is underway (in fact, the first official Cactus League game is this afternoon at Surprise Stadium in Surprise, Arizona — anybody want to go?!)
Winter is still here for now, but it won’t always be here, I promise. There are little clues all around us that suggest a new and better season is on its way, and the goal of this new season is to conform you more into the image of Jesus. Because that’s the ultimate goal of every season.
Seasons come and go to declare the glory of God, for us to delight in that glory and thus be changed by that glory into glory. Into looking more like Jesus (see 2 Corinthians 3:18).
The arrival of new seasons is also an invitation into new rhythms, and it’s always been that way — which is why we still adjust time in time for springtime, called Daylight Savings Time
The whole idea is meant to reflect the fresh patterns of life that come with longer days.
And among these fresh patterns, there are all kinds of new, wonderful, spiritual patterns offered to us. This spring, and with Ash Wednesday next week, what spiritual disciplines might you dust off and put to use? What spiritual disciplines might you hone in on and sharpen?
How should we even think about spiritual disciplines?
The go-to book here, of course, and with perhaps a little bias, is Pastor David’s Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines.
An older book on the topic, sort of like a classic on spiritual disciplines, is Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. I’ve been rereading Willard’s classic off and on over the last several weeks, and recently I ran across a section I found so helpful for how we frame the disciplines.
My hunch is that we’re prone to think that our practice of the spiritual disciplines is a sign of our strength. We tend to imagine that the “best Christians” among us are the ones most devoted to spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, and solitude. But Willard offers this correction:
The aim and substance of spiritual life is not fasting, prayer, hymn singing, frugal living, and so forth. Rather, it is the effective and full enjoyment of active love of God and humankind in all the daily rounds of normal existence where we are placed. The spiritually advanced person is not the one who engages in lots and lots of disciplines, any more than the good child is the one who receives lots and lots of instruction or punishment.
People who think that they are spiritually superior because they make a practice of a discipline such as fasting or silence or frugality are entirely missing the point. The need for extensive practice of a given discipline is an indication of our weakness, not our strength. We can even lay it down as a rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage in a certain discipline, we probably don’t need to practice it. The disciplines we need to practice are precisely the ones we are not “good at” and hence do not enjoy. (The Spirit of the Disciplines, 138).
In other words, it’s important to create a habit for prayer because I’m not good at prayer. It’s important to carve out time early in the morning where I can be alone with God because I’m so terrible at pausing throughout the day to set my mind on him. Discipline, habit, being intentional about growing in grace — they’re because we’re not strong enough to grow otherwise.
What practical steps (as an admission of weakness!) might you take to grow this Lenten season?
