Celebration of Discipline

Richard Foster

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781444719222
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Arguably the most established contemporary spiritual classic by our most profound living religious writer. This timeless classic has helped well over a million people discover a richer spiritual life infused with joy, peace and a deeper understanding of God.The book explores the 'classic disciplines' of Christian faith: the inward disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study; the outward disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission and service and the corporate disciplines of confession, worship, guidance and celebration.

1

The Spiritual Disciplines:
Door to Liberation

I go through life as a transient on his way to eternity, made in the image of God but with that image debased, needing to be taught how to meditate, to worship, to think.

– Donald Coggan

Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.

The classical Disciplinesⁱ of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths. They invite us to explore the inner caverns of the spiritual realm. They urge us to be the answer to a hollow world. John Woolman counsels, ‘It is good for thee to dwell deep, that thou mayest feel and understand the spirits of people.’¹

We must not be led to believe that the Disciplines are only for spiritual giants and hence beyond our reach, or only for contemplatives who devote all their time to prayer and meditation. Far from it. God intends the Disciplines of the spiritual life to be for ordinary human beings: people who have jobs, who care for children, who wash dishes and mow lawns. In fact, the Disciplines are best exercised in the midst of our relationships with our husband or wife, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbours.

Neither should we think of the Spiritual Disciplines as some dull drudgery aimed at exterminating laughter from the face of the earth. Joy is the keynote of all the Disciplines. The purpose of the Disciplines is liberation from the stifling slavery to selfinterest and fear. When the inner spirit is liberated from all that weighs it down, it can hardly be described as dull drudgery. Singing, dancing, even shouting characterise the Disciplines of the spiritual life.

In one important sense, the Spiritual Disciplines are not hard.ⁱⁱ We need not be well advanced in matters of theology to practise the Disciplines. Recent converts – for that matter people who have yet to turn their lives over to Jesus Christ – can and should practise them. The primary requirement is a longing after God. ‘As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the Living God,’ writes the psalmist (Ps. 42:1, 2).

Beginners are welcome. I, too, am a beginner, even and especially after a number of years of practising every Discipline discussed in this book. As Thomas Merton says, ‘We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!’²

Psalm 42:7 reads ‘Deep calls to deep.’ Perhaps somewhere in the subterranean chambers of your life you have heard the call to deeper, fuller living. You have become weary of frothy experiences and shallow teaching. Every now and then you have caught glimpses, hints of something more than you have known. Inwardly you long to launch out into the deep.

Those who have heard the distant call deep within and who desire to explore the world of the Spiritual Disciplines are immediately faced with two difficulties. The first is philosophic. The materialistic base of our age has become so pervasive that it has given people grave doubts about their ability to reach beyond the physical world. Many first-rate scientists have passed beyond such doubts, knowing that we cannot be confined to a spacetime box. But the average person is influenced by popular science, which is a generation behind the times and is prejudiced against the nonmaterial world.

It is hard to overstate how saturated we are with the mentality of popular science. Meditation, for example, if allowed at all, is not thought of as an encounter between a person and God, but as psychological manipulation. Usually people will tolerate a brief dabbling in the ‘inward journey,’ but then it is time to get on with real business in the real world. We need the courage to move beyond the prejudice of our age and affirm with our best scientists that more than the material world exists. In intellectual honesty, we should be willing to study and explore the spiritual life with all the rigour and determination we would give to any field of research.

The second difficulty is a practical one. We simply do not know how to go about exploring the inward life. This has not always been true. In the first century and earlier, it was not necessary to give instruction on how to ‘do’ the Disciplines of the spiritual life. The Bible called people to such Disciplines as fasting, prayer, worship, and celebration but gave almost no instruction about how to do them. The reason for this is easy to see. Those Disciplines were so frequently practised and such a part of the general culture that the ‘how to’ was common knowledge. Fasting, for example, was so common that no one had to ask what to eat before a fast, or how to break a fast, or how to avoid dizziness while fasting – everyone already knew.

This is not true of our generation. Today there is an abysmal ignorance of the most simple and practical aspects of nearly all the classic Spiritual Disciplines. Hence, any book written on the subject must provide practical instruction on precisely how we do the Disciplines. One word of caution, however, must be given at the outset: to know the mechanics does not mean that we are practising the Disciplines. The Spiritual Disciplines are an inward and spiritual reality, and the inner attitude of the heart is far more crucial than the mechanics for coming into the reality of the spiritual life.

In our enthusiasm to practise the Disciplines, we may fail to practise discipline. The life that is pleasing to God is not a series of religious duties. We have only one thing to do, namely, to experience a life of relationship and intimacy with God, ‘the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change’ (James 1:17).

THE SLAVERY OF INGRAINED HABITS

We are accustomed to thinking of sin as individual acts of disobedience to God. This is true enough as far as it goes, but Scripture goes much further.ⁱⁱⁱ In Romans the apostle Paul frequently refers to sin as a condition that plagues the human race (i.e., Rom. 3:9–18). Sin as a condition works its way out through the ‘bodily members,’ that is, the ingrained habits of the body (Rom. 7:5ff.). And there is no slavery that can compare to the slavery of ingrained habits of sin.

Isaiah 57:20 says, ‘The wicked are like the tossing sea; for it cannot rest, and its waters toss up mire and dirt.’ The sea does not need to do anything special to produce mire and dirt; that is the result of its natural motions. This is also true of us when we are under the condition of sin. The natural motions of our lives produce mire and dirt. Sin is part of the internal structure of our lives. No special effort is needed to produce it. No wonder we feel trapped.

Our ordinary method of dealing with ingrained sin is to launch a frontal attack. We rely on our willpower and determination. Whatever may be the issue for us – anger, fear, bitterness, gluttony, pride, lust, substance abuse – we determine never to do it again; we pray against it, fight against it, set our will against it. But the struggle is all in vain, and we find ourselves once again morally bankrupt, or, worse yet, so proud of our external righteousness that ‘whitened sepulchres’ is a mild description of our condition. In his excellent little book entitled Freedom from Sinful Thoughts Heini Arnold writes, ‘We . . . want to make it quite clear that we cannot free and purify our own heart by exerting our own “will”.’³

In Colossians Paul lists some of the outward forms that people use to control sin: ‘touch not, taste not, handle not.’ He then adds that these things ‘have indeed a show of wisdom in will worship’ (Col. 2:20–23, KJV, [italics added]). ‘Will worship’ – what a telling phrase, and how descriptive of so much of our lives! The moment we feel we can succeed and attain victory over sin by the strength of our will alone is the moment we are worshiping the will. Isn’t it ironic that Paul looks at our most strenuous efforts in the spiritual walk and calls them idolatry, ‘will worship’?

Willpower will never succeed in dealing with the deeply ingrained habits of sin. Emmet Fox writes, ‘As soon as you resist mentally any undesirable or unwanted circumstance, you thereby endow it with more power – power which it will use against you, and you will have depleted your own resources to that exact extent.’⁴ Heini Arnold concludes, ‘As long as we think we can save ourselves by our own will power, we will only make the evil in us stronger than ever.’⁵ This same truth has been experienced by all the great writers of the devotional life from St Augustine to St Francis, from John Calvin to John Wesley, from Teresa of Ávila to Julian of Norwich.

‘Will worship’ may produce an outward show of success for a time, but in the cracks and crevices of our lives our deep inner condition will eventually be revealed. Jesus describes this condition when he speaks of the external righteousness of the Pharisees. ‘Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks . . . I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter’ (Matt. 12:34–36, [italics added]). You see, by dint of will people can make a good showing for a time, but sooner or later there will come that unguarded moment when the ‘careless word’ will slip out to reveal the true condition of the heart. If we are full of compassion, it will be revealed; if we are full of bitterness, that also will be revealed.

It is not that we plan to be this way. We have no intention of exploding with anger or of parading a sticky arrogance, but when we are with people, what we are comes out. Though we may try with all our might to hide these things, we are betrayed by our eyes, our tongue, our chin, our hands, our whole body language. Willpower has no defence against the careless word, the unguarded moment. The will has the same deficiency as the law – it can deal only with externals. It is incapable of bringing about the necessary transformation of the inner spirit.

THE SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES OPEN THE DOOR

When we despair of gaining inner transformation through human powers of will and determination, we are open to a wonderful new realisation: inner righteousness is a gift from God to be graciously received. The needed change within us is God’s work, not ours. The demand is for an inside job, and only God can work from the inside. We cannot attain or earn this righteousness of the kingdom of God; it is a grace that is given.

In the book of Romans the apostle Paul goes to great lengths to show that righteousness is a gift of God.^iv He uses the term thirty-five times in this epistle and each time insists that righteousness is unattained and unattainable through human effort. One of the clearest statements is Romans 5:17, ‘. . . those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness [shall] reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ [italics added].’ This teaching, of course, is found not only in Romans but throughout Scripture and stands as one of the cornerstones of the Christian faith.

The moment we grasp this breathtaking insight we are in danger of an error in the opposite direction. We are tempted to believe there is nothing we can do. If all human strivings end in moral bankruptcy (and having tried it, we know it is so), and if righteousness is a gracious gift from God (as the Bible clearly states), then is it not logical to conclude that we must wait for God to come and transform us? Strangely enough, the answer is no. The analysis is correct – human striving is insufficient and righteousness is a gift from God – but the conclusion is faulty. Happily there is something we can do. We do not need to be hung on the horns of the dilemma of either human works or idleness. God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us.

The apostle Paul says, ‘he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption; but he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life’ (Gal. 6:8). Paul’s analogy is instructive. A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain. This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines – they are a way of sowing to the Spirit. The Disciplines are God’s way of getting us into the ground; they put us where he can work within us and transform us. By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they...