Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

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For me, I find that busyness is usually married with distraction: I’m busy, but in those moments where I do have a spare minute I often use it to check in with my Instagram feed rather than my heavenly Father. With submission, Foster is quite frank about bad teaching on submission which leads to self-hatred (p.

If you must (and, really, you don't), read with caution and a discerning heart and mind, Dear Reader. The idea is that daily scripture study and prayer is not to check off a to-do list, but actually change my life and who I am. The inward disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study offer avenues of personal examination and change. Choose a time (put it in your diary) and choose a place – somewhere quiet without distraction – and then have a go!It’s all about making space in our ever-so-busy schedules to sit, slow down and be in front of Jesus. In the Celebration of Discipline chapter on meditation, Richard Foster offers five different routes for starting this journey. While the first few chapters actually taught me a lot, I struggled to to maintain focus through the second half of the book. There will be a blog at the start of the week outlining the discipline (what, why and how we can engage with it) and a video at the end of the week sharing how we have found it.

The final section assesses the Corporate Disciplines which include confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. however, Foster puts too little emphasis on the need to be grounding everything in scripture, and checking everything with scripture. Within this audiobook, you’ll find a fascinating road map to staying emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world. It’s about making time and space to be aware of Jesus and to bring him our heart, exactly as it is, and asking him to touch it. The book is inspiring and is a good reminder of the way I can have a more Christ-centered life through discipline.They need not be practiced perfectly, nor daily, but "practice" is key (and "practice" implies imperfection). Foster displays in this book that in his best moments he can say something obvious and plain; however, most of the time he is simply confused or downright wrong. Confession is a difficult Discipline for us because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. As Christians, we should pray with confidence and we should pray with faith--but we should not assume unanswered prayers are the result of "praying wrongly" or that "something within us needs changing.

No other book apart from the Bible has been so helpful to me in the nurturing of my inward journey of prayer and spiritual growth. Jesus, who had walked in constant communion with the Father, now became so totally identified with humankind that he was the actual embodiment of sin. Even a quick perusal of the lists should indicate that there are overlapping terms for maturing in discipleship.

The outward Disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service help prepare us to make the world a better place. Celebration of Discipline explores the "classic disciplines", or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith. Foster’s division of spiritual disciplines is a trinity of Inward Individual (meditation, prayer, fasting, study), Outward Individual (simplicity, solitude, submission, service), and Corporate (confession, worship, guidance, celebration). I didn’t necessarily agree with all of his ideas and perspectives, but I loved the vast majority of the book.

The role of personal prayer, worship in common, everyday work, and Christian service is treated in simple, almost biblical, words. In his groundbreaking books, teacher, philosopher, and spiritual guide Dallas Willard forever changed the way many Christians experience their faith. The purpose of the Disciplines is liberation from the stifling slaver to self-interest and fear” (p2). Many are having a deep and profound experience of an Emmanuel of the Spirit--God with us; a knowledge that in the power of the Spirit Jesus has come to guide his people himself; an experience of his leading that is as definite and as immediate as the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night.

The corporate disciplines: confession, worship, guidance, and celebration (these last two didn't resonate with me as much, but were still worthwhile). The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. One of Israel's fatal mistakes was their insistence on having a human king rather than resting on the theocratic rule of God over them.