I find that people who have had a personal experience with an emphasis on the value of spiritual disciplines in their past often emerge with an ambivalence or even an aversion. Rather than appreciating the value of spiritual disciplines, their experience has made them wary of embracing them again. If that is your experience, I would really like to hear about it.

Richard Foster has an article, “The Dan­ger of Spir­i­tu­al Disciplines: Sev­en Pit­falls to Avoid.” I wonder if any of these resonate with your experience or if there are other dynamics at work.

Foster’s third pitfall resonates with me. “The third pit­fall is to view the Dis­ci­plines as vir­tu­ous in them­selves. In and of them­selves, the Dis­ci­plines have absolute­ly no virtue what­so­ev­er. They will not make us right­eous. They will not give us any brown­ie points with God. They do absolute­ly noth­ing except place us before God. This was the cen­tral truth the Phar­isees failed to see.”

Our flesh is so inclined to self righteousness that a practice of spiritual disciplines will easily become a way to feel better about ourselves, depending on how well we are practicing them. Our successful practice of them gives us status in a community that values them and we do believe that they earn us brownie points with God. So the practice of spiritual disciplines is associated with a check the box mentality that takes satisfaction in simply accomplishing the discipline. When we reject the check the box mentality, we then reject the value of spiritual disciplines.

But if we understand that the spiritual disciplines have no virtue in and of themselves, then the fact that we have been able to do them has no value. Doing them only has value if they place us before God or place God before us. If we are able to consistently practice a certain spiritual discipline, but we do not experience that it has brought us any closer to God or made God more real for us, then we should try to practice it differently or abandon it altogether. It is not doing us any good. The criteria for value in a spiritual discipline is the fruit of feeling more connected to God.

So different people will have different practices of spiritual disciplines that work for them. And the disciplines that “work” are not necessarily the ones that come more easily to us. The ones we find easy to practice are more likely to contribute to our bent toward self righteousness and feeling good about just doing them. But are they helping us to be more connected to God? Dallas Willard writes, “We can even lay it down as a rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage a certain discipline, we probably don’t need to practice it. The disciplines we need to practice are precisely the ones we are not “good at” and hence do not enjoy.” I am not sure if I would have this as a rule of thumb but rather a provocative thought that challenges how we normally practice the spiritual disciplines we are relatively good at, if we practice them at all. Again, the criteria of a healthy spiritual discipline practice is not how successful we are at accomplishing it, or how we feel about ourselves, but whether it makes God more real for us or not.

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.