Spiritual Disciplines

Having established what life, and spiritual life is about, Willard ventures to define “spiritual disciplines.” There’s a lot of suspicion in some circles today, about the term. Many connect it with the asceticism of the Middle Ages or with the techniques of modern mysticism. Neither agrees with the sense in which Willard uses it.

He defines spiritual disciplines as “activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself, as we ‘yield ourselves to God, as those that are alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God’ as Romans 6:13 puts it” (The Spirit of the Disciplines, 68).

Spiritual disciplines are first of all “activities of mind and body”. They include such things as meditating, reading, praying, fasting, serving. These are all distinct human activities which, in the case of nurturing spiritual life, are nevertheless “purposefully undertaken.” That is to say, they are undertaken deliberately and intentionally for the purpose of bringing us into “effective cooperation with the divine order.” I might choose to forgo eating for a day or two for medicinal purposes. When I do that, the “fasting” involved is not a spiritual discipline but a medical remedy. However, when I purposefully forgo eating to allow deepened concentration upon God, and for the development of a greater awareness of dependence upon him, it becomes an activity that is “purposefully” undertaken to help bring me into alignment with God’s kingdom. It becomes a “discipline” that I consciously engage in to orientate my whole personality toward the spiritual realm. That’s what a spiritual discipline is.

The extent of our integration into the spiritual kingdom of God, Willard argues, depends largely on our use of disciplines that enable us to interact with it. “Once the individual has through divine initiative become alive to God and his kingdom,” he writes, “the extent of integration of his or her total being into that Kingdom order significantly depends upon the individual’s initiative” (ibid, 68). God is the one who graciously awakens us and leads us into his kingdom. But once “born from above” and brought into his family, our life and growth in his kingdom depend to a large degree on our actions. These disciplines cannot produce the spiritual blessing that comes from God alone, but they dispose us to it, or position us where we can receive it. In that sense they are integral to a life of active, cooperative interaction with the kingdom of God.