disciplines on Idolatry

A Practice of Silent Prayer Recently, I’ve restarted my daily practice of silent prayer. Like many who try this practice, I feel an immense amount of resistance arising within me against my intention...

Disciplines done for the wrong reasons actually sabotage transformation and numb us toward God and the truth. When we use spiritual practices to gain secondary things like spiritual cachet, success, a...

Preaching Commentary Ancient lighting took  Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The ...

We keep company with Jesus by making space for him through a spiritual discipline. Our part is to offer ourselves lovingly and obediently to God. God then works within us doing what he alone can do. O...

We can all see God in exceptional things, but it requires the culture of spiritual discipline to see God in every detail.

Christians often equate holiness with activism and spiritual disciplines. And while it's true that activism is often the outgrowth of holiness and spiritual disciplines are necessary for the culti...

Ancient lighting took  Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The structure was completel...

There is so much more to sabbath than what we stop doing, but for the purposes of disciplining power, simply stopping matters a great deal.

How do you define what it means to “make a sacrifice?” We say we sacrifice for our family, or sacrifice for our careers. We speak of Jesus sacrificing himself so that we can experience eternal life. A...

Dolce far niente—“the sweetness of doing nothing.” One of the most powerful soul-training exercises I have ever done is a practice called holy leisure. In simple terms, holy leisure is “doing nothi...

There was once a sculptor who worked hard with hammer and chisel on a large block of marble. A little child who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stone falling away left...

Christian spiritual discipline is a repeated bodily practice, done over and over again in dependence on the Holy Spirit and under the direction of Jesus and other wise teachers in his Way, to enable o...

God’s primary assessment of our lives is not going to be measured by the number of journal entries…The real issue is what kind of people we are becoming. Practices such as reading Scripture and prayin...

The soul’s infinite capacity to desire is the mirror image of God’s infinite capacity to give. . . . The unlimited need of the soul matches the unlimited grace of God.

The interplay between listening and obedience expresses itself in our lives all the time. Sound has the ability to “command” us, to summon a response in us, forcing us to take notice.  Unlike visual ...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith provides an important analogy about the importance of spiritually preparing ourselves for the adversity and challenges that come with su...

While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically, these disciplines an...

Several times during the day, but especially in the morning and evening, ask yourself for a moment if you have your soul in your hands or if some passion or fit of anxiety has robbed you of it…. If yo...

Without a balanced approach to spiritual disciplines, we run the risk of cultivating a one-sided spirituality that will disintegrate under pressure from the part of us we have left undeveloped.

We can learn a thing or two about discipleship and the discipline required of a disciple from our fourth-century monastic brothers and sisters. Like them, we do basic, ordinary activities every day. W...

A spiritual discipline or practice is a way of creating some open and free space in which God can move an speak. For example, the discipline of solitude helps us spend time with God alone and so becom...

My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thing—by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself.

If our starting place with God is the radical grace extended through Jesus, then the spiritual disciplines are invitations, not obligations—ways of being with God, not appeasing him.

What is the relationship between spiritual diciplines and grace? Does participation in the spiritual disciplines mean that we are not resting in God’s grace? Dallas Willard shares the analogy of a bas...

The life of Christian faith is the practice of many practices

No voluntary act of spiritual discipline is ever to become an occasion for self-promotion. Otherwise, any value to the act is utterly vitiated.

A piano sits in a room, gathering dust. It is full of the music of the masters, but in order for such strains to flow from it, fingers must strike the keys… trained fingers, representing endless hours...

Solitude is the most radical of the disciplines for life in the spirit. In penal institutions, solitary confinement is used to break the strongest of wills. It is capable of this because it excludes i...

What activities did Jesus practice? Such things as solitude and silence, prayer, simple and sacrificial living, intense study and meditation upon God’s work and God’s ways, and service to others.” . R...

Prayer is the reaching out after God and the unseen; fasting, the letting go of all that is of the seen and temporal.