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Christian Network

The classic disciplines of the Christian life, practices like fasting, silence, watching, solitude and sacrifice, continue to get short shrift in contemporary Evangelicalism. This remains true despite the efforts of many to re-introduce the concept of discipline into the church during the past two decades. This is unfortunate because there is much to recommend the idea that the weakness of contemporary Christian living has rendered us unrecognizable as a people in the world, but not of it, and consequently weakened our witness to that world.

Spiritual laziness has become a problem today due to our tendency to constantly drill into people the idea that any kind of "work" is wrongheaded. The message is that grace saves us and receiving Christ, as Savior, is the be-all and end-all of being a Christian. These kinds of statements are theologically true, of course. The problem is that they often become a false justification for living out a weak and ineffective form of Christianity because they are constantly preached to the exclusion, and even the condemnation, of spiritual discipline. However it is one thing to be saved and quite another to walk in the fullness of Jesus Christ and attain to our full potential as His disciples. To do that we must embrace discipline.

Grace is indeed the motive power in our transformation into the image of God’s Son. Apart from it attempts at discipline truly are worthless because discipline divorced from saving and sustaining grace is not of any value. The Pharisees, for instance, were a highly disciplined bunch but their pride-driven efforts were offensive to the very God they claimed to serve so much purely than everyone else. Practicing self-denial in its various forms can also become unhealthy when the motivation for self-denial is tied to compulsion and fear. Rigid asceticism that paints all pleasure as somehow inherently wrong is another false distortion of biblical discipline. Unfortunately these kinds of bad motivation have sometimes given the practice of any spiritual discipline an undeserved bad name.

The only right motivation for fasting, silence, watching, solitude, sacrifice, et al is a desire to become more like Jesus Christ because we passionately love Him. The Son of man practiced all of these disciplines and more. He knew that doing so was integral to His relationship with His Father and so it also is with us. While the reproduction of the Savior’s character in his people is enabled by God’s grace it is realized by their personal application of the disciplines He modeled. If we want to fully realize our faith in the day-in, day-out routine of our lives we cannot simply brush-off biblical discipline by declaring it "legalistic."

Once it is realized that a life of discipline is necessary to an authentically powerful Christian walk there are a multitude of sources, both ancient and contemporary, that will teach us how to practice it. Because of the availability of such sources today God’s people cannot use a lack of knowledge or example as a reason to shun the mandate to walk in the way of Christ in this aspect of the Faith.

The good news in all this is the fact that this yoke is not only not burdensome but that it actually enables us to continue to walk in the joy and peace we first experienced upon our salvation. Its harvest is a pleasing one for those who are trained by it. There is no downside to properly motivated and practiced spiritual discipline. The ability to live in this way is God-provided and our decision to do so in spirit and in truth is always God-blessed.