spiritual disciplines on Receiving Grace

A man who was fishing one day noticed that the fisherman next to him threw the big fish he caught back into the water, while keeping the small ones. This went on all day until the first man couldn’t h...

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...

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.

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.

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...

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.

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 ...

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...

John Ortberg likens the transformative path of Christ to sailing. Sailors can't make the wind show up; the wind has a mind of its own. But that doesn't mean there is nothing for them to do. Sa...

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...

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...

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

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...

A Digital Silent Retreat This spiritual exercise is from Laura Murray, ordained pastor, spiritual director, and TPW contributor. Laura is sharing a "Digital Silent Retreat" with us. We en...

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...

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

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....

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...

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 ...

Sorrow and anxiety cannot eat: joy celebrates its feasts with eating and drinking… We are creatures of the senses: our mind is helped by what comes to us embodied in concrete form; fasting helps to ex...

It is precisely in times of spiritual dryness that we must hold on to our spiritual discipline so that we can grow into new intimacy with God.

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...

An Unhurried Practice: Reading Scripture Slowly One of the disciplines that has been an important part of my spiritual journey over the years is reading and reflecting on Scripture.  In recent years,...

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 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...