“The spiritual disciplines can help you, but they cannot save you.”
I love books written on the spiritual disciplines because I understand that my relationship with God is the plumb line to everything in my life. If I’m not regularly spending time with God in prayer, reading Scripture, and engaging in the other disciplines, my compass gets skewed and there’s fall out everywhere else.
Here’s the problem though: most books on spiritual disciplines lack one thing.
That one thing isn’t great stories, solid theology, innovative ways to practice the disciplines, or motivation. That one thing is how the disciplines connect to mission.
In Habits for Our Holiness, my friend and co-teaching pastor, Philip Nation, addresses what’s been lacking in most books on spiritual disciplines in a readable, yet comprehensive way. It’s precisely this,
Discipline leads to mission.
He believes that the central discipline of the Christian life is love, and that “love is what propels habitual holiness and the desire to follow God into the world for His redeeming mission” (25). If you practice the disciplines, while disregarding others and the mission of God, you miss the entire point. The fact is, discipline leads to mission.
While most books on spiritual disciplines relegate mission to just one of the spiritual disciplines–namely, evangelism–Philip finds a way to masterfully weave mission throughout each and every one of the disciplines, as outlined in the table that I created below. You can download the pdf here.
This is how Philip categorizes the disciplines:
- Worship, Bible study, and prayer: These three disciplines form the foundation for our habits for holiness.
- Fasting, fellowship, rest, simplicity, and servanthood: These disciplines cause us to love God more thoroughly and cause him to shape our hearts more missionally.
- Submission, leadership, and disciple-making: These disciplines help us understand where our loyalties lie in relation to God’s sovereignty.
All in all, this is a much needed book and one that I advise all churches to adopt and use as a part of their discipleship process. I give it a 5/5. You can pick up a copy here.
Here is a list of my favorite quotes from this book:
- Love is the central discipline of the Christian life.
- The world should benefit from our spiritual growth.
- The more often we hold up love, the more habitual our holiness will become.
- At the end of the day, we must ask ourselves who we want to become.
- When we worship God, we say to everything else, “You are not God.”
- Our prayers take on different forms at times than my prayers.
- Applying the Bible in community will also help with your spiritual blind spots.
- When we learn together, we grow together, and then we can better serve the world together.
- Grow up so I can reach out. Reach out so I can grow up.
- Prayer, however, is much more than merely rattling off whatever is on the top of our minds or repeating phrases with great passion.
- Prayer should drive us to a sense of God’s work in both us and the world around us.
- Fasting is a beautiful test of what or Who rules our lives.
- The call of God is not to separate from the world but to know how to live in it.
- When you use what you own to bless the city where you live, your passions become tools rather than idols.
- As you serve, you build up the body of Christ because you reflect the heart of Christ.
- We submit because we love Him. He accepts our surrender because He loves us.
- The deeper your love for God, the more effective your leadership for others.
- Leadership without character is tyranny.
- The spiritual disciplines can help you, but they cannot save you.
- Spiritual disciplines are paths on which we walk, not treasures to which we cling.
By the way, here’s a picture of my copy of the book as I was designing the chart 🙂
