Embodying Spirituality: A Short Guide to the Spiritual Disciplines
Everything that exists has a cause, a string of “parent” sources that stretches back to the Uncaused Cause. Lambs have sheep for parents. Humans have a man and a woman. Spirits come from Spirit. God is our Father. He is the Father of all spirits. There is no true spirituality that is not in fellowship with Him.
Everything is spiritual whether we realize it or not. Since we are all spiritual creatures, whether or not we claim to be spiritual is irrelevant. Everything we think, say, and do has a spiritual element. We are all embodied spirits and, therefore, must pursue godliness, which is the virtue out of which all true spiritual concepts and practices proceed. Godliness means considering God, seeking Him, building a close relationship with Him, holding His will in the highest regard, and seeking to please Him in everything. Being a genuinely spiritual person means realizing this, embracing it, and acting on it. This used to be called piety, and that good word needs to be restored to our vocabularies.
In summary, spirituality is living in tune with and in reverence towards God’s nature, realistically. Simply saying, “I’m spiritual,” doesn’t make you genuinely spiritual any more than saying, “I’m smart,” makes you smart. Smart is as smart does, and so it is with spirituality.
So, true spirituality recognizes our spiritual nature as sons and daughters of God. True spirituality embraces this nature as our primary identity—all humans, born and unborn, are made in the image of God. We must be trained to think not only in terms of presently visible, physical things but also invisible, transcendent, eternal things. Finally, genuinely spiritual people don’t just talk; they act—they discipline themselves to excel in the spiritual practices revealed by God in His word and embodied in the life of the Son of God. See 1 Timothy 4:7.
These practices have been called The Spiritual Disciplines.
There’s no set list of these, and some people call them by various names, but here is a representative list of spiritual disciplines every person should discipline himself or herself to practice:
• Reading and Studying Scripture
• Praying
• Meditating Thoughtfully
• Attending Christian Assemblies (Church)
• Fasting
• Claiming Time to Be Alone with God to Bow Down in His Presence and Walk with Him Worshipfully
• Simplifying One’s Lifestyle
• Celebration of the Joy of the Spirit
Most of these disciplines have both personal and communal versions. You need both. Christians living during times of the church’s greatest success and happiness have been devoted practitioners of these disciplines in both their private lives and in the context of the church. They enable us to be and feel and more deeply experience our true spiritual selves and, thus, to be right with God, in tune with Nature, and as happy as possible.
Advice Summarized from Various Teachers Who've Influenced Me:
(I've given credit where possible, but I don't remember where some of these thoughts originated, possibly Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster, which is 99% excellence, but definitely other sources too. If any reader recognizes a source for the below, let me know, and I'll gladly give credit.)
1) First, the Bible prescribes both personal and interpersonal spiritual disciplines. There are those spiritual disciplines that we practice alone and those that we practice with other Christians. So, for example, we are to pray alone. That is a personal spiritual discipline. We are also to pray with the church. That is an interpersonal or congregational spiritual discipline.
We must practice both because Jesus practiced both (plenty of examples in Scripture) and because the Bible prescribes both for us. So, we don’t want to think of spirituality and the spiritual disciplines just as something we do by ourselves. We are also to engage others in the practice of the spiritual disciplines.
2) A second characteristic of spiritual disciplines is that they are activities. They are not attitudes. Disciplines are practices. Spiritual disciplines are things you do. They are not character qualities. They are not graces. They are not the fruit of the Spirit. They are things you do.
So, you read the Bible. That is something you do. That is a spiritual discipline. You meditate on Scripture; you pray, fast, worship, serve, learn, and so forth. These are activities. Now, the goal of practicing any given discipline is not about doing as much as it is about being—being like Jesus, being with Jesus. However, the biblical way to grow in being more like Jesus is through the rightly motivated doing of the biblical, spiritual disciplines.
The key verse in all this is 1 Timothy 4:7, which says, “Discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness” (NASB). The goal is godliness, but the biblical means to that is to discipline yourself in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit with the right motivations. We are to discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness. The practical ways of doing that are by the things that you do.
Strictly speaking, joy is not a spiritual discipline. That is the fruit (result) of discipline done as it should be, as an expression of genuine faith in and love for God. This is why being is doing. The spiritual disciplines are about being by doing. You can do them as a Pharisee. You can do them wrongly motivated. However, rightly motivated, they are things that we are to do to be like Jesus and to be with Jesus.
3) A third descriptor of the spiritual disciplines is that we are talking about practices taught or modeled by authoritative examples in the Bible. This matters because, without biblical boundaries, we leave ourselves open to calling anything we want a spiritual discipline. So, someone might say: Gardening is a spiritual discipline for me; exercise is one of my spiritual disciplines, or hunting, fishing, shopping, or any other pleasurable hobby or habit they could call a spiritual discipline.
One problem with that mindset is that it could tempt someone to say, “Maybe meditation on Scripture works for you, but gardening does just as much for my soul as the Bible does for yours” (Laura Jenkins). Any mindset that leaves it to us to determine what will be best for our spiritual health and maturity rather than accepting those things God has revealed in Scripture is just the ongoing expression of Adam and Eve’s rejection of the Tree of Life in favor of gaining their own power in rebellion against God from the Tree of Knowledge.
4) A fourth characteristic of spiritual disciplines is that those found in Scripture are sufficient for knowing and experiencing God and growing in Christlikeness. We are told in 2 Timothy 3:16–17 that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work,” including the good work of pursuing the purpose of godliness, and the good work of growing in Christlikeness. The Scriptures are sufficient for that.
So, whatever else a person might claim regarding the spiritual benefits of some practice that is not in the Bible—something that maybe is promoted by some other spiritual cause or spiritual group or some other kind of “spiritual” leader, that if you will do this or you will do that, you will experience God and it will be very meaningful—well, regardless of whatever benefit someone may claim accrues to them from that practice, at the very least we can say it isn’t necessary. If it were essential for spiritual maturity in godliness and progress in holiness, it would have been found and promoted in the Scriptures.
5) A fifth description of spiritual disciplines is that they are derived from the gospel, not divorced from it. Rightly practiced, the spiritual disciplines take us deeper into the glories of the gospel of Jesus Christ, not away from them as though we have moved on to some “advanced” level of spirituality. “The gospel is the ABCs. Now let’s get into the really deep things of God, the spiritual disciplines.” —No! The spiritual disciplines are derived from the gospel, not divorced from it, and they only take us deeper into an understanding of the gospel.
6) The last characteristic of the spiritual disciplines is that they are means, not ends. The end, that is, the purpose of practicing the disciplines, is godliness. “Discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7, NASB). And so, we aren't godly just because we practice the spiritual disciplines. That was an error of the Pharisees. Many of them felt that "doing" the Law alone made them godly. The disciplines are godly but not godliness; they are means of developing it.
From bro. Evan Kirby:
1 Timothy 4:6-10 sort of touches on this. The word godliness means something like god-mindedness, and that is the key. We will be most concerned with the things that are on our minds. So, we must train our minds to be on God. This is done through spiritual disciplines. We must train our bodies and minds to make godly practices a habit. So here are the disciplines I would recommend:
1. Simplicity - the practice of simplifying life (decluttering possessions and schedule) to focus more on God. Colossians 3:1-4 speaks to this.
2. Solitude - this goes along with simplicity perfectly. Very often, our Lord had to get away from the hustle and bustle and be alone with the Father. If Jesus did this, we ought to as well.
3. Celebration is the discipline of taking the everyday joys of life and redeeming them for God's glory. We get to laugh, rejoice, sleep, eat, be entertained, etc., only because of and through the grace of God. Celebration moves us always to pause to praise God in those graces. "And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Colossians 3:17).
4. Fasting - this is one I've practiced and need to practice more. As Richard Foster says, "Fasting is feasting on God." It is the deliberate abstention of a necessity (or pleasure —JLP) for the purpose of relying solely on God for sustenance. Once again, Jesus practiced this. If the Son of God practiced it, why wouldn't we?
5. The Examen - This is a meditative prayer at the end of the day that forces you to review your day, notice the blessings of God and the fruit of the Spirit, and repent of any sinful attitudes or actions displayed that day. It's one of the best things I've ever done. It is a practical way to obey 2 Corinthians 13:5.
May God bless our practice of the disciplines as we piously seek to grow in godliness!
---JLP
Image by MickeyLIT via Pixabay.
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