Sermon Quotes
Spiritual Disciplines
Ruth Haley Barton
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 think that somehow we will fall into transformation by accident.”
Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation
Ruth Haley Barton
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.
Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation
Ruth Haley Barton
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 practices that keep me open and available to God.
Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation
Adele Ahlberg Calhoun
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. Our desires don’t obligate the holy One. God is free to come to us in spiritual disciplines as he wills, not as we demand. But unless we open ourselves to him through spiritual practices, we will miss his coming altogether.
Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us.
Adele Ahlberg Calhoun
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 to keep moving through the seasons. They aren’t magical means to an effortless race. The disciplines simply provide us with exercises that keep us open to God and aware of the limits of our endurance.
Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us.
Adele Ahlberg Calhoun
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, approval and respect, we rob the discipline of its God-given grace.
Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us.
D.A. Carson
No voluntary act of spiritual discipline is ever to become an occasion for self-promotion. Otherwise, any value to the act is utterly vitiated.
D.A. Carson
People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
Oswald Chambers
We can all see God in exceptional things, but it requires the culture of spiritual discipline to see God in every detail.
Mike Cosper
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.
Taken from Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World by Mike Cosper. Copyright (c) 2017, p.24. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Mike Cosper
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.
Taken from Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World by Mike Cosper. Copyright (c) 2017, p.45. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Kevin DeYoung
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 cultivation of holiness, the pattern of piety in the Scripture is more explicitly about our character. We put off sin and put on righteousness. We put to death the deeds of the flesh and put on Christ. To use the older language, we pursue mortification of the old man and the vivification of the new.
Richard J. Foster
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 way into our experience, then we have missed the point of the Disciplines. We are dealing with actions, not merely states of mind.
Richard J. Foster
Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.”
Kent Hughes
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 claim an innate spiritual advantage. None of us are inherently righteous, none of us naturally seek God or are reflexively good. Therefore, as children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything.
Henri Nouwen
Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you’re not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.
Henri Nouwen
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.
Richard Rohr
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 about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what’s always happening right in front of you.
Richard Rohr
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 with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.We won’t have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it’s not a technique at all. It’s precisely the refusal of all technique.
Donald S. Whitney
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.
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, NavPress, 1991, p. 244.
Donald S. Whitney
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.
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, NavPress, 1991,p. 17.
Dallas Willard
When we call men and women to life in Christ Jesus, we are offering them the greatest opportunity of their lives—the opportunity of a vivid companionship with him, in which they will learn to be like him and live as he lived. This is that ‘transforming friendship’ explained by Leslie Weatherhead. We meet and dwell with Jesus and his Father in the disciplines for the spiritual life. As our meeting place, the disciplines are part of the good news of new life.
Dallas Willard
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.”
Dallas Willard
We cannot adopt his form of life without engaging in his disciplines—maybe even more than he did and surely adding others demanded by our much more troubled condition.
Dallas Willard
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.
Dallas Willard
Jesus could not have imposed anything hard upon us.
Dallas Willard
The Spiritual disciplines are wisdom and not righteousness.
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