Last Christmas, there was an extra gift under the Christmas tree for Grammy as a result of being the 5000 visitor to my blog. Now we are coming up on 10,000 visitors, having averaged about 1000 visitors each month since Christmas. We should cross that 10,000 visitor threshold in the next seven days so just like before, when my sitemeter alerts me of the 10,000th visitor, I will get in touch with the lucky person to send them a gift. Thanks for reading my blog and for all the emails commenting and conversing about the things I share here. This is, for me, a personal journal chronicling my faith which is being bound into book form for my girls when they are older. I'm grateful for all of you what are sharing this journey with me.
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Because of the influence of grace, we’ve often overlooked the critical part our own involvement plays in transformation. Spiritual formation is a grace of God, but it does not come into our lives to change us into the image of Jesus Christ without our own involvement and effort in the process.
That is why the whole discussion of the spiritual disciplines has become more mainstream in the last twenty-five years. With Richard Foster’s landmark writing The Celebration of Discipline, a fresh awareness of the role of the spiritual disciplines in spiritual formation has been gained.
What is meant by “spiritual discipline”? Foster categorizes the spiritual disciplines this way: The Inward Disciplines – meditation, prayer, fasting and study; The Outward Disciplines – simplicity, solitude, submission and service; The Corporate Disciplines – confession, worship, guidance and celebration. Dallas Willard categorizes the spiritual disciplines with a little different slant: Disciplines of Abstinence – solitude, silence, fasting, frugality, chastity, secrecy and sacrifice; Disciplines of Engagement – study, worship, celebration, service, prayer, fellowship, confession and submission.
The critical piece regarding the disciplines is to remember these are not avenues to “earn” redemption but that they are things we do because we are redeemed.
For the next few days, I’m going to share some of the fruit of my personal study on the spiritual disciplines in the hopes that it will provide some fresh motivation for your walk with Jesus; that the disciplines can serve as a means to the formation of Christ in the heart, mind, body and soul of His people.
