What Spiritual Disciplines Are Missing

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.

I am so grateful for the contemporary conversation around the spiritual disciplines happening in so many churches today.

Ever since Richard Foster published The Celebration of Discipline in 1978, all the way to the recent phenomenon of John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way, many evangelical background believers have rediscovered ancient pathways within the Christian tradition. Many have learned what faith looks like beyond mental categories, and for many, the gap between head knowledge, heart belief, and practice has been shortened.

Yet, many much smarter than I am have rightly criticized the movement for being too individualistic — is transformation possible outside of a life lived in community?

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on my personal journey into spiritual practices. By all accounts, my faith in Jesus has been sustained by practices like silence, Sabbath, and liturgical prayer. In one of the hardest seasons of my life, the simplicity of spiritual disciplines helped me navigate life when emotions just weren’t cutting it, and the shallow parts of the charismatic spirituality that I had inherited simply weren’t enough to navigate real-life pain and relational breakdown.

While I firmly believe that spiritual disciplines are essential in the life of the believer — after all, faith has to look like something in practice — that same charismatic spiritual inheritance has led me to become convinced of another criticism of the spiritual disciplines movement. The criticism is this: by and large, the contemporary literature on spiritual disciplines lacks any convincing or deep pneumatology — an understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in the spiritual disciplines. In other words, are we transformed by doing things alone? Or might there be something (or Someone) else at work?

Dallas Willard convincingly argues in his 1999 classic Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God that “people are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to” (p. 21). He writes:

• “The Spirit who inhabits us is not mute, restricting himself to an occasional nudge, a hot flash, a brilliant image or a case of goose bumps” (p. 25).

• “God walks and talks in our midst as part of how the kingdom of God is in our midst” (Lk 17:21).

• He quotes theologian William Herman as saying: “We hold a man to be really a Christian when we believe we have ample evidence that God has revealed himself to him in Jesus Christ, and that now the man’s inner life is taking on a new character through his communion with the God who is thus manifest.” Willard comments: “Spiritual formation into Christlikeness—true change of character—comes from living in relationship with God” (p. 29).

Can true transformation happen in any other way than ongoing dialogue with the living God? The goal of spiritual disciplines has to be engagement with the living God — the indwelling Holy Spirit. Anything else might be good, but it will not be true discipleship to Jesus.

Following Jesus requires a dynamic, interactive relationship with the Person we are following, otherwise it risks becoming an imitation of ideas and moral platitudes — and perhaps this is what we are seeing in so many circles of the church today.

I remember an eighth-grade Summer camp when I decided to follow Jesus, the speaker boldly declared that “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship.”

While I have scoffed at this phrase over the years and have been dissatisfied with its lack of theological depth and historicity, I must confess that some of the cynicism that I have adopted into my faith over the years is melting back into the simple truth — we really were saved into a relationship — into a living, dynamic, conversational relationship with the Living God.

I remember hearing the speaker confidently proclaim this, and being so in awe that this could be the reality of this new group of people that I’d stepped into. I think with fondness back to my newfound faith in Jesus, the way that verses in the Bible began to jump out at me, the way that I sensed God’s presence in worship and at different moments and in prayer, and how I began to feel the Holy Spirit’s conviction about sin and about the direction that I needed to go in my life. All of these small moments began to coalesce over time to a sense that, quite without anyone teaching me how, God was talking to me. I was living in a relationship, not a religion. The axiom might be cheesy, but it became my reality.

These were the precious beginnings of what Willard calls the “ongoing relationship with God that will involve conversation, communion, and consummation” — something he argues is essential for all believers and is even the primary evidence of someone’s salvation. (What a claim!)

I am so grateful for my history with God. As the years have gone on, I have added a whole range of tools to my “toolbelt” to help me hear the voice of my Lord — prophetic training, more advanced biblical understanding, countless books and podcasts and mentors, and the sheer hard knocks of hearing and missing it (or hearing and getting it right!). I can even claim with shocking audacity that I have heard the voice of God telling my family to move across the country twice, first from California to Atlanta and now from Atlanta to Boston.

But I never want to lose the simplicity of those beginnings — the simplicity of learning how to hear God before anyone told me how to do it.

In Song of Songs, the Bride sits under an apple tree when the Bridegroom first begins to romance her (2:3). At the end of their journey of growing in love, the Bridegroom reminds the Bride of the early days of their romance: “under the apple tree I awakened you” (8:5).

The beginning, middle, and end of our relationship with God is our relationship with God. We can talk to him and he talks back. We can know him intimately, personally, like a Bride knows her Bridegroom.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the Jewish people have used Song of Songs liturgically during the Passover season to remind the Jews that salvation is not just a historical event, they were saved at Passover into an ongoing relationship with Yahweh (for more on this, see Chapter 1 of Eugene Peterson’s Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work).

Our salvation is not just a historic event; we were saved into an ongoing dialogical relationship with God. As I wrote in my post announcing the launch of our first prayer journal, “Jesus died for this — it’s time to live in it!”

How is your conversation with God today?

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.”

• Start by simply thanking the Holy Spirit for the access that you have to God, and the conversation you have been saved into.

• If you feel confident in your ability to hear God’s voice, ask if there is anything the Father wants to speak to you today.

• If you do not feel confident in your ability to hear God’s voice, ask for the gift of confidence and clarity.

Best,
Ryan

P.S. I so believe in the centrality of hearing God’s voice in the life of a disciple of Jesus that I wrote the Prayer Journal Volume 1: Hearing God’s Voice. We hope it helps you to hear God more clearly and to engage with God creatively every single day.