Jesus Only Recommends 3 Spiritual Disciplines

In case you missed it, we made a prayer journal, and we’d love to share it with you! We want to help you creatively engage with God every single day and grow in your confidence in hearing his voice.

As I wrote about last week, I am so grateful for the many people in the church today who are discussing spiritual disciplines — prayer, sabbath, solitude, daily offices, and the like.

One of the challenges with the proliferation of resources available on the spiritual disciplines (this email list included, I acknowledge 😀 ) is that we can be hit with a sort of choice paralysis — which discipline do I start with? Are any more important than the others? Should I Sabbath, start a daily office, increase my giving, engage in works of justice, share the gospel, or what?

Again, as I wrote about last week, the practices are only as helpful as they bring us into a relationship with a Person — Jesus Christ via the Holy Spirit. It really is all about relationship.

Still, for anyone with choice fatigue or who needs help figuring out where to start, or who maybe even feels a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information there is in the body of Christ today around spiritual disciplines and practices, I thought I would offer this simple reflection.

Jesus only recommends three spiritual disciplines.

Really! That’s it! Just three.

Of course, this doesn’t negate the value of everything else, and the imitation of aspects of Jesus' life that he doesn’t directly address — that we “ought to walk in the same way as he walked” (1 John 2:6). Being a disciple of Jesus requires a whole-life reorientation around Jesus’ words, ways, and works.

Yet, I think it’s helpful to name that through the course of Jesus’ ministry, he only recommends three specific spiritual disciplines. And you can find them in the Sermon on the Mount.

Here they are:

1. Almsgiving

The first spiritual discipline that Jesus recommends in his entire ministry is almsgiving — giving generously to the poor. More than recommend it, he assumes that we are already practicing it (“when you give alms”).

Of course, Jesus says a lot about finances — perhaps most famously, “you cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). It is significant that in the Sermon on the Mount, his kingdom manifesto about how to live life following him in the kingdom of God, he begins by talking about the practice of loving God through giving generously of our finances.

I would argue that almsgiving is in much need of a revival in the church today. We are constantly being asked to spend our money on a thousand things, but rarely on the poor and vulnerable in our communities.

Jesus also said, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). What we spend money on demonstrates what we love and value. As Jesus implies in this teaching, to live in the kingdom of God means that Jesus is king of our finances — not our desires.

What does it mean to reorient our finances around kingdom values and principles — especially the care for the poor and vulnerable?

2. Prayer

Perhaps you already saw this one coming! Jesus invites his disciples to pray. (He also does this in Luke 10).

And, he invites them to pray in secret — to cultivate a lifestyle of daily intimacy with God, just as he frequently models for his disciples by sneaking away to be with the Father.

In some ways, prayer is as simple as showing up. In other ways, prayer is more complicated because it’s about developing an ongoing, interpersonal, conversational, whole-life relationship with the living God.

And this takes time.

This takes intentionality.

This takes an interior commitment and resolve (“go into your room and shut the door…”) to keep going even when no one else is around you. As Jesus says, it is not rewarding work in the natural, but the reward is God himself.

If we learn how to pray, we get God!

3. Fasting

Of these three practices, it’s entirely possible that fasting is the least liked of the three. At least a sense of virtue or a passion for justice can move us towards almsgiving if we are not already practicing it, and prayer is championed enough that there is usually a sense that one should pray even if one does not, but fasting is in many ways the hardest and most challenging of these three.

Especially the way Jesus tells us to fast — in secret, with no accolades coming from any human person.

But, Jesus tells us the Father sees when we fast!

Fasting is, in many ways, a commitment to say: “God, I am choosing to love you more than I love [blank].”

It’s a commitment to go without something to make space for more of God.

Now, we don’t actually get more of God when we fast — we have as much of him as we could possibly want or need — but, rather, we get out of the way.

When we would rather posture, maneuver, and manipulate our circumstances, fasting helps us to wait and depend on the leadership of the Holy Spirit.

When we would rather look to our religious effort to feel successful in following Jesus, fasting boldly declares that it’s actually when we are weak that we are strong.

And, perhaps most importantly, when our hearts have grown cold and our love for God feels like a flickering flame rather than a burning fire, fasting creates the spaciousness in our soul necessary for God to kindle the fires of love again — for the Father to see in secret and reward us.

I’d love to invite us to pray today:

• Begin to take a few deep breaths. Perhaps as you breathe in, pray “Come,” and as you breathe out, pray “Holy Spirit.”

• Which of these disciplines inspires you?

• Which of these disciplines challenges you?

• Is there any way the Holy Spirit might be inviting you to reorient your life around one of these disciplines?

Best,
Ryan