The Spiritual Disciplines are things that we do. We must never lose sight of this fact. It is one thing to talk piously about 'the solitude of the heart,' but if that does not somehow work its way into our experience, then we have missed the point of the Disciplines. We are dealing with actions, not merely states of mind.
Interpretation
Spiritual disciplines require action rather than just thought.
Richard J. Foster emphasizes that spiritual disciplines are practical actions that need to be embraced and practiced in daily life. Merely discussing abstract concepts without incorporating them into our experiences leads to a superficial understanding and a failure to appreciate the true purpose of those disciplines.
In practice
In a discussion on personal growth, one might say, 'As Richard J. Foster suggests, we must engage in spiritual disciplines rather than simply discuss them.'
Go another step. Try to live one entire day without words at all. Do it not as a law, but as an experiment. Note your feelings of helplessness and excessive dependence upon words to communicate. Try to find new ways to relate to tohers that are not dependent upon words. Enjoy, savor the day. Learn from it.
Jesus Christ and all the writers of the New Testament call us to break free of mammon lust and live in joyous trust...They point us toward a way of living in which everything we have we receive as a gift, and everything we have is cared for by God, and everything we have is available to others when it is right and good. This reality frames the heart of Christian simplicity. It is the means of liberation and power to do what is right and to overcome the forces of fear and avarice.
Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it.
Humility, as we all know, is one of those virtues that is never gained by seeking it. The more we pursue it the more distant it becomes. To think we have it is sure evidence that we don't.
When we determine to dwell on the good and excellent things in life, we will be so full of those things that they will tend to swallow our problems.
Each activity of daily life in which we stretch ourselves on behalf of others is a prayer in action.
The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.
What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up, And be discharged, and straight wound up anew? No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets: May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.
...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.
So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.
The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.