disciplines on Self-Improvement

A life of prayer, fasting, and spiritual disciplines can easily be a life of empty religious effort if the goal isn’t communion with God. We don’t need self-improvement; we need to come home.

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

Self-discipline is not self-punishment. It is instead an attempt to do what, prompted by the Spirit, you actually want in your heart to do.

Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We thi...

In my own pastoral and personal Christian experience, I can say that I’ve never known a man or woman who came to spiritual maturity except through discipline. Godliness comes through discipline.

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...

I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual transformation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual ...

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...

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...

Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...

The purpose of the Disciplines is freedom. Our aim is the freedom, not the Discipline. The moment we make the Discipline our central focus, we will turn it into law and lose the corresponding freedom....

The caterpillar must yield up the life it knows and submit to the mystery of interior transformation. It emerges from the process transfigured, with wings that give it freedom to fly. . .. A rule of lif...

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...

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...

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.

Brother Lawrence, a 16th-century Carmelite monk, spent his days scrubbing pots and mending shoes. Largely uneducated, he filled his free time writing letters and notes that, after his death, friends g...

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...

Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life - prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows - are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is...

It is an immutable fact that we will never get anywhere in life without discipline – especially in spiritual matters. There are some who have innate athletic or musical advantages. But none of us can ...

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 transition into my 40’s came with the obligatory hip surgery. The only way to stop the cycle of hip pain was to literally carve out some bone. Those parts had to be removed. But recovering my funct...

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...

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.

The Spiritual Disciplines are things that we do. We must never lose sight of this fact. It is one thing to talk piously about 'the solitude of the heart,' but if that does not somehow work its...

The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored...

Because we are sinful by nature, we have developed sinful patterns, which we call habits. Discipline is required to break any habit. If a boy has developed the wrong style of swinging a baseball bat, ...

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...

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.

Spiritual practices don’t justify us. They don’t save us. Rather, they refine our Christianity; they make the inheritance Christ gives us on the Cross more fully our own.

The spiritual journey is a marathon of seasons. Sometimes you can hold your own. Sometimes your side aches, you're hot and you can't get your breath. Spiritual disciplines are intentional ways...