Ch. 1: The Secret of the Easy Yoke

• Christianity today considers actually doing what Jesus did to be essentially too difficult to expect anyone to do.
• This is in part due to our theology that we are saved by grace alone, we got everything we needed, but is ultimately because we are like kids thinking that to be a great athlete you need to imitate all their moves. No, the athlete is not great because they do their signature moves, the athlete is great because they have a discipline of training their body. So you cannot expect to do the things Jesus did in the moment, without living the life of training that Jesus lived.
• Oswald Chambers noted that the Sermon on the Mount is not a list of things to do, but a description of what someone following Christ looks like (Psychology of Redemption, 34)
• The gospels show us how Jesus lived, but we miss them because of our modern focus. He studied the Scriptures so much that at age 13 the rabbis were impressed with him. He spent 40 days fasting before beginning public ministry. He often sought solitude, and would spend the night praying before major events.
• The secret to the easy yoke is to live like Jesus did, instead of trying to figure out “what would Jesus do” in the moment. Living like Jesus did means we develop the thinking and habits of Jesus, thus preparing us for the moments of decision.

Ch. 2: Making Theology Practical

• We all have a theology, whether we are aware of it or not, and whether it is uninformed or not, and our theology will guide our life. If a Christian said “I plan to ignore the things Jesus said to do and I plan to not do them” people would rightly object. But having no plan to do the things Jesus commanded is functionally the same thing, yet that is the status quo in Protestant churches.
• Protestants have had lots of success in missions, but there is no planning for the second half of the Great Commission, “...teaching them to do everything I have taught you”.
• There is (as of 1988) more interest in spiritual formation that was imaginable twenty years ago. Richard Foster said when he researched Celebration of Discipline in 1978 that he found zero books on fasting published between 1861 and 1954. But the fierce sectarianism of the early century has waned, and since we have the only truth was the defining feature of denominations, now the people see an emptiness.
• Willard reluctantly came to the conclusion that what the Church told people to do (go church, serve, fellowship, read the bible, pray) was not helpful in changing lives. He tried to blame ordinary Christians, but it was obvious that many Christians were eagerly doing what they were told, that they were good-hearted and motivated. So he reluctantly concluded that the theology was incorrect.
• The requirements for being a Christian has become simply believing things about Jesus, not doing what he says. The Bible is claimed to be a high authority, yet its teachings on this are ignored. “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven” bumper stickers are not the biblical expectation, but that is the expectation in the church.
• At least 25% of people in the US claim to be Christian. “A pound of meat would surely be affected by a quarter pound of salt. If this is real Christianity, the ‘salt of the earth', where is the effect of which Jesus spoke?” (William Iverson, Christianity Today, Jun 6, 1980, p. 33)
• By the 1970s, there was a feeling that this Christianity was “too trivial to be true” (Paul Scherer), thus people searching for spiritual formation.
• Some of the Protestant “cheap grace” came from a reaction against medieval excesses where the spiritual disciplines became mechanical and a way to earn favor with God. But it got taken way too far.
• “Such an informed theology [that would helpfully guide our lives, instead of uninformed theology] must eventually be in the service of the ordinary lives of ordinary people, and when it is, it will have a great impact for good. Every Christian must strive to arrive at beliefs about God that faithfully reflect the realities of his or her life experience, so that each may know how to live effectively before him in the his world. That’s theology.” (26)
• The purpose of this book is to establish that “Full participation in the life of God’s Kingdom and in the vivid companionship of Christ comes to us only through appropriate exercise in the disciplines for life in the spirit.” (26, italics in original) (For a practical book, read Foster’s Celebration of Discipline.)

Ch. 3: Salvation Is a Life

• We require disciplines of the body because we are embodied. Our entire lives are physical, and we can effect nothing except physically. Even Jesus learned obedience (Heb 5:8). And “Sacrifice and offering thou hast not desired, but a body you prepared for me” (Heb 10:5). (Since we are in a worse state than Jesus, who was perfect, we might require more disciplines than he did.)
• Part of the problem is that we don’t really believe Jesus had a body. We say it, but we do not act like it. Functionally we are Docetist heretics (Christ only seemed to have a body), because we see the body as a hindrance to spiritual perfection. But with this viewpoint of the body as a hindrance, we can never surrender our body “in such a way that it can serve both [God] and me as a common abode” (as described in John 14:23, 1 Cor 6:15-20, Eph 2:22). Likewise salvation cannot affect our lives, because our lives are physical so to affect our life it must affect our body. Nor can we participate with God except through doing something with our body.
• “Spirituality in human beings is not an extra or ‘superior’ mode of existence. It’s not a hidden stream of separate reality, a separate life running parallel to our bodily existence. It does not consist of special “inward” acts [e.g. conversion] even though it has an inner aspect. It is, rather, a relationship of our embodied selves to God that has the natural and irrepressible effect of making us alive to the Kingdom of God—here and now in the material world.” (31) Thus, this believe condemns the Church to celebrating special events and essentially irrelevant to our material life.
• We see this in action, because even the Church is surprised when someone who evidences this life show up; saints are not the expected result; the expected result is non-saints.
• We don’t hold our religious teachers to the rigorous expectations of thought that we expect bridge engineers and computer programmers to have. In reality, we need to hold them to higher expectations. The idea that Christ’s death merely gives forgiveness has created untold damage. When that happens, then we start thinking in terms of “theories of atonement” and how that is supposed to change our life is completely mysterious. But the early Christian thinking saw what Jesus accomplished as connecting us, who were walking dead, back up with Life. [Athanasius says exactly this, although Willard does not reference him.] Early Christians did not focus on the cross, they focused on the Resurrection, because that demonstrated that Jesus really did bring the Life to us that he demonstrated while previously alive: this Life is indestructible. But slowly this became forgotten and Christ’s work was narrowed down into mere forgiveness, apparently long before the Reformation.
• In the New Testament, “salvation” can be profitably substituted with “life”, while if we substitute it with “forgiveness” things do not make a lot of sense. Col 1:13: we were transferred from darkness into the Kingdom of Jesus; this makes sense if we were transferred from death to living. See also John 10:10, 1 John 5:12, Eph 2:5.
• An example that substituting “salvation” with “forgiveness” is that people have been confused for several centuries over how “works” fit in. But Luther said that faith is a fire, a living force that does the good work before the question can even be asked.
• Kierkegaard said that humanity is always looking for the easy way out, so we saw that Luther said that we are saved by faith, not works, and said, “great, no need for works!”.
• This force-of-life faith is in the New Testament as 1) a power with us that breaks with past, though repentance and forgiveness, and brings forth the new man; 2) both “an immediate but also a developing transformation of the individual character and personality” (40); and 3) a more-than-human power over evil, exercised by both individual people and the church together.
• The spiritual disciplines cannot be divorced from the actions of the body and made into mere assent. But doesn’t the Bible say the body is evil? The body as we see it now is like cars in a junk yard. The body was intended to be “the vehicle of human personality ruling the earth for God and through his power” (42) but it got disconnected from God and died, hence our need for salvation/life.

Ch. 4: Little Less than a God

• Who am I? and Why am I here? are questions we ask when we are not in a strong social group. The secular question is not actually able to come to an answer, because what we are now observing is Man in ruins.
• It is important to know what we were designed for, because “salvation” means different things depending on the purpose. “Saving” an investment, a pet, the life of a drowning man, mean different things.
• We are both physical matter (“dust”), but we also aspire to the heavens (e.g. poetry, large-scale projects, thoughts and ambitions). We can become gloriously good or hideously evil.
• Unlike the rest of Creation in Gen 1:1, the creation of humanity was given a reason: so that we can govern the earth and its creature. Adam named all the creatures, meaning in the ancient sense, to understand their role and purpose. We were also given the image of God in order to be able to fulfill our purpose—the ability to be in right relationship with God and others. (“Adam” is a collective noun, so this still applies to us.)
• The best governors, when they are finished, the people say they did it themselves (Lao Zi)
• This task was probably intended to take a really long time, and it probably would not be completely different from what we do now, except that right now we fight among ourselves, and use the animals to fight for us (until we were able to make machines to replace the animals), and so peace among the animals would require peace among ourselves. We probably would have “spoken”, in some fashion to the animals to govern them. And even now our concern for animals and for the earth shows that the image of God is still there at some level.
• The world is broken, because we do not govern “in loving harmony” without either the world nor ourselves. In some sense animal sacrifices typify this: the animal has its life taken from it to pay for our failure.
• God formed a body for Adam (unlike the rest of Creation where he just spoke) out of earth, and he put his spirit in that formed earth to create Adam. God gave us a certain amount of power independent of him, which we can use to oppose him, or to partner with him, but the ability to be a partner requires some independence. The body is place where our power to affect the world resides.
• When the Bible says “flesh” it means both the physical body and the independent power resident within it.
• Originally we were meant to mesh our relatively little power with God’s unlimited power, to accomplish the task of lovingly governing.

Ch. 5: The Nature of Life

• Jesus’ sayings are just observations of how things work; they don’t even tell us what to do. (“Unless a grain of wheat dies it remain a single grain, but if it dies in the ground, it produces a harvest.”) [I’m unconvinced they don’t tell us what to do; there seems to be an implied lesson here.]
• Life is essentially that which draws from “beyond” to maintain and extend itself. A plant takes up nutrients and grows; a baby crawls to its mother. If it gets the nourishment it seeks, it will ultimately grow up to reproduce itself.
• Compared to plants, animals move about and are also more integrated. Cutting a branch of a plant does not affect it too much, but cutting a limb off an animal seriously limits it.
• Humans add thought and choice, and these are also more integrated, and required for us to get our nourishment.
• John Ruskin described human life as assimilating nourishment from outside of it, and this life converts everything into either food or tools, and although it may listen to others, it retains its own will. He also describes false life, which cedes its decision making to others outside it, so that “we do not do what we have purposed, and speak what we do not mean, and assent to what we do not understand; that life is overlaid by the weight of things external to it, and is moulded by them instead of assimilating them.
• This unique will of humans makes people non-interchangeable. Treating people as interchangeable is dehumanizing, because it ignores the inner core that makes us human.
• Humans use of tools gives us great over creation, and our power builds on itself and increases, which is consonant with our purpose as governors of the earth. “We seem to have the potentiality to tap into the inexhaustible powers of creation.” (61) We do not yet know what our limit is, and the apostle John said that what we are to become is not yet known (except that we will be like Jesus).
• However it is clear that we are missing something necessary (we have the power to destroy the earth but we seem unable to restore it; our relationships with each other so quickly degenerate). Lacking nutrients does not stop life, it just stunts it: a plant without nutrients may not grow as big; an animal missing a leg may not get enough food to eat; a human with a brain disorder may not flourish in society.
• John Needleman says that truth is a special nourishing energy. Our missing spiritual truth, how to relate to the Kingdom of God, affects us socially, emotionally, and physically. Our evil is caused by spiritual starvation. (Which is why Jesus asked the Father to forgive those crucifying him because they did not know what they were doing: it was literally that they had no idea.) Augustine said that depravity comes from a lack, even though the evil that results is a positive evil (that is, not from absence, but from presence).
• “Spirit” is “unembodied person power” (64) Electricity, gravity are embodied. Biblically, “the spiritual” is “an ordered realm of personal power” founded in God (65) The appropriate relationship to the Kingdom is what we are missing, and that is what transforms us, as we assimilate that orderliness. “A ‘spiritual life’ consists in that range of activities in which people cooperatively interact with God—and with the spiritual order deriving from God’s personality and action. ... A person is a ‘spiritual person’ to the degree that his or her life is correctly integrated into and dominated by God’s spiritual Kingdom.” (67)
• It is not a “commitment”, or a “life-style” (although those come out of it). It is not social justice, although that is a fruit. (Worrying that spirituality is useless unless it affects social/political structures just do not understand spirituality. But the social/political structures are always opposed to it, because they cannot control it.)
• The disciplines are the activities that train us to correctly integrate into the Kingdom. We get grace, but God does not do the transformation for us. We need to take initiative to harmonize our habits with God’s will.
• Bible stories incisively describe the human condition, but the Bible (and saints) also describes disciplines that help train us for godliness. When these are well-used, even common sense becomes a reliable spiritual guide.
• The process of transformation takes a long time.
• We look at great spiritual leaders and see that they had an experience with God, so we think the event was what did it, rather than the years of slow transformation.
• Peter is an example of the process. He denied Jesus because the spirit was willing, but the habits of the body for self-preservation took over because he was not trained. (But Peter only ran away a little bit, he did come back to see what would happen, so he was stronger than the rest of the disciples, except maybe John, who was also in the courtyard) However, afterwards, at Pentecost, Peter stood up boldly. And when the persecution came, Acts 8:1 says that the whole church was shaken, but not the apostles. He had become Rock; the New Testament describes him as being unswayed by persecution, and tradition says that he even asked to crucified upside-down, since he did not feel worthy to die in the same way as Jesus.

Ch. 6: Spiritual Life: the Body’s Fulfillment

• Despite it being the common view, spirituality is not opposed to the body, nor is spirituality a “better” mode. The idea that you can only be really spiritual after you are dead is wrong. Spirituality and the body are complementary.
• Maslow observed that a unity between the spiritual and the physical body is essential. The spiritual is our core, and it is joined to the physical.
• True spirituality is being alive to God. It is using the independent powers God gave us for him, rather than for ourselves.
• True spirituality does not reject pleasure, but it puts it in its proper place. (Some people objected to a Christian film depiction of Christ, where he was playing sports, and looked like he was having fun.) In fact, when we reject pleasure and joy, or are not able to fulfill them, that’s when sin looks most attractive.
• We cannot forget our shadow side that wants to neglect God and go do something fun.
• To some extent, we are our bodies.
• The materialist belief that there is only the physical and there is no spiritual is just as incorrect as the spiritual being the only important part. We are a union of the two.
• All our knowledge is embodied: we see the physical things of the world not from any angle but from the one we are currently in. The James/Lang Theory of Emotions even goes so far as to say that our emotions are just sensations from our various body parts.
• Pearl Buck records her mother (a missionary), after the death of Pearl’s infant brother, being almost blindly furious when friends tried to console her that it was only his body that had died—she had created that body, birthed it, and loved it. In fact, you cannot really love someone without loving their body, nor love their body without loving them. Our body is essential to our identity.
• Our bodies do not always cooperate with us.
• There are some aspects of the body that are fairly independent of our spirit, like our heart beating.
• Sometimes the body seems to do things independently of our conscious thoughts, like Peter betraying Jesus.
• Schizophrenia is when a person does not identify with their body (although they know they have one), so they feel unrelated to the world and other people. In a much milder way, dizziness is when our perception of how our body is oriented becomes mildly disconnected.
• From the Christian perspective, the fundamental conflict is between our will and God. We were made to partner with him, and given a certain measure of power independent of God, which we use for our own ends, rather than for God’s ends.
• Biblically, the “flesh” is not “the sinful nature”, and the “flesh” is not inherently bad.
• As George Fox observed, Adam and Eve were flesh, but did not sin. Joel said the spirit would be poured out on all flesh. David says his flesh longs for God. The New Testament suggests that the flesh can put on incorruptibility. And how can we “put off the old man” if the flesh is the sinful nature; in that case we must commit suicide.
• The “flesh” in the Bible simply means the union of the physical body and the spiritual will/human-essence. Only rarely is it used for something purely physical. It is the “world” that is the biblical correspondent of the sinful nature.
• Our bodies are plastic, that is, shaped slowly over time. Over time we build habits, develop skills and abilities, and nurture interests. The spiritual disciplines mold our bodies into the shape of partnering with the Kingdom.

Ch. 7: St. Paul’s Psychology of Redemption—The Example

• Paul’s statements assume the ancient universal expectation that virtue requires discipline. The modern West has no conception this, rejects any sort of asceticism based on past abuses as well as because it contradicts our primary value: feeling good. (This is also why we have a drug abuse and addiction problem.)
• The criterion for a “good” church service is if people feel good afterwards.
• Viewing Paul’s statements without the expectation that virtue requires disciplines makes them confusing theological statements (thus spawning theological debates) because we see no practical purpose. But he is pretty clear that he is talking about discipline, especially with his example of athletic training (running the race).
• The early church certainly viewed Paul’s statements this way, and the fact is that both Paul and many of the early Christians obviously lived their lives out of a different viewpoint than we do. They had a lot of disciplines that they did.
• Solitude:
• “The life alienated from God collapses when deprived of its support from the sin-laden world. But the life in tune with God is actually nurtured by time spent alone.” (101) Thus, solitude enables the life that can withstand external events, even death.
• “Prophets, apostles, preachers, martyrs, pioneers of knowledge, inspired artists in every art, ordinary men and the Man-God, all pay tribute to loneliness, to the life of silence, to the night.” (Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, 48)
• We think that withdrawing from society indicates weakness, so we think that Jesus met the devil in his weakest moment. Instead, God did not allow the devil to tempt Jesus until he was at his strongest, after forty days alone in the wilderness.
• After Paul had his vision on the Damascus road, he fasted for three days. According to John Pollock, he then withdrew to solitude in the Sinai to continue interacting with God for three years, before going to Jerusalem and then returning to his hometown of Tarsus. There, after being beating with 39 lashes by the Jews trying to turn him back from his error and finally cast out, he spent time in “St. Paul’s Cave” (as it had been known), possibly seeing his vision of heaven. It was only 15 years after his initial encounter with Jesus that the Spirit set him and Barnabas apart for missionary work. His solitude, fasting, and prayer was essential for his effectiveness. But he also served others by work to support himself rather than accepting his living from those he served, practicing Jesus’ saying that the greatest in the Kingdom is the servant of all. Paul followed Jesus’ practices.
• Since our modern Christianity has no such expectation (and can see it as harmful), “[w]e take something out of our contemporary grab bag of ideas and assume that is what he is saying.” (107, emphasis in original) “Sometimes we take a perfectly good word from the Bible (such as ‘chastisement,’ ‘suffering,’ ‘submission,’ ‘healing,’ ‘God’s justice'), dive immediately into our pool of ‘I thinks’ and weave them subtly and securely around that word, leaving the impression that all of our ‘I thinks’ about the word were included in the scriptural meaning of the word.” (107, Evelyn Christenson, Lord, Change Me!, 143) So “we have talked our way out of the very practices that alone would enable us to be citizens of another world.” (108)
• Paul talks about things like “I die daily”, “crucifying the flesh”, “submitting our members as instruments of righteousness” not as an attitude, but actual actions he takes (not necessarily literally). He has a concrete plan for self-denial, where as we have an attitude with nothing concrete at all.
• John also: “abiding in Christ” is something John thinks is a daily event.
• Paul wrote as a psychologist, and the early church took him as such.
• We do not see religion as relating to psychology partly because the field has explicitly ignored religious experience (despite most people saying that is an important aspect of human life) to make itself more scientific.
• We also are influenced by works like Milton (Paradise Lost) and Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress) that good vs evil is an allegory, not an action.
• Paul saw redemption “as a progressive sequence of real human and divine actions and events that resulted in the transformation of the body and the mind.” (111)
• Melito of Sardis wrote Concerning the Soul, the Body, and the Mind as psychological work, and Tertullian write De Anima as a Christian psychology to go beyond Plato and Aristotle.
• The study of the human self—what the Bible does—is psychology. We see Paul as a theological, instead of as a psychologist.
• “Paul’s fundamental psycho-theological insight has to do with the nature of the human body as a bearer of active tendencies to evil and to good. In other words, it had to do with spirituality and habit.” (113) We transform our habits through interaction with God, but this interaction has three stages:
1. Baptized into Christ: we must operate from the fuel of Christ, not the fuel of sin. We do this from our “experiential union” [apparently Willard is referring to baptism here] and our communion with Christ. This gives a “new center of orientation for all the natural impulses of our bodily self” (115). The impulses are not sinful, rather sin twisted and disordered them. We now have the ability to not sin, and we see it for the disgusting thing it is.
2. “Reckon"—a new attitude: we “consciously and purposefully regard ourselves as ‘dead to sin an alive to God in the union with Jesus Christ’” (115) and we “disassociate” with the old man, intending that the old man is not what I shall be any longer. “Paul was enough of a psychologist to know that not all of the forces at work in the human self are expressions of our conscious will” (116). This mostly takes the form of not dwelling on thoughts opposed to the Kingdom. Luther: you cannot stop the birds from flying overhead, but you can stop them from making a nest in your hair. Evagrius said that we are not in control of having the thoughts, but we are in control of whether they linger and “set passions in motion”.
3. Submitting our members to righteousness: we need to form concrete habits, so that we serve righteousness “automatically” instead of sin.
• The disciplines are indirect. We practice the piano not to be good at practicing, but to play well. We can make our lips bless someone that we would rather tear down. We can make our arms and legs labor for someone we do not like. We can make ourselves go back to someone we lied to an tell the truth. We can make ourselves pray for someone while we are fasting if all we do is think about food. But if we cannot even do that, that is where the solitude, silence, fasting, study, etc. come in.
• When our physical body is connected to Life, there seems to be a new kind of power in it. Jesus healed numerous times by touch. Paul exhorts Timothy to stir up the gift given by the laying on of hands. There also seems to be a kind of power in the ecclesia together: Ananias and Saphirus, Paul handing Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan to learn not to blaspheme.
• Every denomination thinks that its practices are sufficient to bring about Christian power, but empirically, the fact that no denomination produces any Paul’s with any regularity shows otherwise. (Even the modern people like John Wesley, John Knox, Luther, George Fox are not followed.)
• “Greek philosophy had failed at the point of producing people of practical power and wisdom who could govern and be governed. It simply had no workable answer to the question of how this could be done.” (127) The pressure of real needs produces some virtues (such as the Romans), but when the society overcomes those needs, there is no force to maintain the virtue and the society collapses. Paul provides the answer.

Ch. 8: History and the Meaning of the Disciplines

• “Contemporary Westerners are nurtured on the faith that everyone has a right to do what they want when they want, to pursue happiness in all ways possible, to feel good, and to lead a ‘productive and successful life,’ understood largely in terms of self-contentment and material well-being.” (130, emphasis in original) Failure to be able to exercise our “freedom” and enjoy happiness is assumed to be because we failed or other people treated us wrongly. Needless to say, Jesus’ call to “lose one’s life in order to save it” is ignored.
• The rejection of the spiritual disciplines and “asceticism” is because of historical excesses (which proper ascetics would also have rejected). However, there has not been an attempt to reconcile the asceticism that Jesus and his disciples practiced.
• The persecutions were apparently sufficient to maintain the character of the early church for two or three centuries. Origin in the mid-200s said that holiness was incremental and through disciplines, and syncretized Helenistic, Jewish, and Christian practices. After Constantine legalized Christianity, those wanting a more spiritual experience went into the Syrian and Egyptian deserts to be hermits (or a group of hermits all enclosed by a wall). These rejected the world and hungered for God and purity, and they tended to be very austere and even abusing their bodies. It got softened by Benedict, but starting around the 1100s, monk started flagellating themselves and other disciplines. Luther would go days without food and slept without blankets—he thought he would have killed himself if he had continued for another few years, and thought that his eating habits had ruined his digestion.
• The Hebrew prophets frequently attacked fasting and rituals of worship as useless, although it was because their heart was not right; the outward actions and the internal motivation must both be oriented toward God. But it is easy to see the prophets’ condemnation, particularly in the light of monastic abuses, as condemning the disciplines.
• The Middle Ages introduced the idea of suffering being a spiritual discipline (for example, flagellation being a way to experience Christ’s beatings), although Jesus never did anything like that.
• Plato is not ascetic in the aspect of self-denial for the sake of self-denial (or hatred of the body), but he was ascetic in the sense of giving up things in the pursuit of a desirable end. The Greek noun for ascetic (ascesis) meant disciplined training, like an athlete, musician, or artist.
• The Jews were ascetic in that latter perspective, fasting, “keep the word of the Law on your lips”, etc. John the Baptist was clearly seen as ascetic, and although Jesus was criticized for being indulgent, he did spiritual disciplines, as we have seen.
• Jesus showed us that spiritual strength is measured by how little we need the disciplines to maintain a good spiritual life, instead of how much discipline we have. A good child is not one who gets lots of punishment. [Like someone who can sight-read Beethoven’s piano sonata’s at speed is probably a better pianist than someone who can do scales for eight hours.] The need for spiritual discipline is a weakness.
• Jesus tells the Peter that he is weak (the spirit is willing but the body is weak), and gives a tool for strengthening: watching and praying, which Peter and the others do not do.
• Monasticism demonstrated that one out be out of the world (avoiding sin by avoiding contact, and trying to obtain forgiveness by earning merit) but still be of the world. As a result, it frequently fell into need of reform in the West. Protestants saw the disciplines done incorrectly and rejected the disciplines.
• Calvinists made discipline something done to the church [through enforcers in Geneva]. Luther thought that only two things were necessary: “The church is the assembly of saints, in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments administered rightly.” (Augsburg Confession) Baptists and Pentecostals tend to remove the sacraments, leaving only one thing.
• Involving the body is essential
• Coleridge’s praying not with knees and lips but “compos[ing] his spirit to love, ... and sense of supplication” is what is unhelpful, as C.S. Lewis’ devil Wormwood advises the Coleridge approach for instilling a useless prayer life.
• Dr. William De Vries, first heart surgeon said “The reason you practice so much is so that you will do things automatically the same way every time.” (153)
• The only way your right hand can give without your left hand knowing is if the right hand has such a habit of giving that it is nothing notable and therefore ignored by the mind.
• If we make no plans to avoid sin, how can we expect God’s grace towards us in this area?

Ch. 9: Some Main Disciplines for the Spiritual Life

• “A discipline for the spiritual life is ... nothing but an activity undertaken to bring us into more effective cooperation with Christ and his Kingdom.” (156)  If you do regular weight training, you can start benching 300. Spiritual disciplines are training to enable you to bless those who curse you, or pray without ceasing, or to overcome evil with good.
• There is not a complete list of disciplines, and each individual person may need different sets of disciplines. Some common disciplines that will not be explored here are journaling, vigil (“reject[ing] sleep to concentrate on spiritual matters” (157)), keeping a sabbath, physical labor (especially when accompanied by solitude, fasting, study, and prayer). A practical modern discipline is for wealthier families to do their shopping in the poorer areas, which increase our understanding of and empathy for others.
• An experimental attitude is helpful.
• Disciplines of Abstinance: abstaining to some degree from a normal, legitimate desire (basic drives like food, sleep, bodily activity, companionship, curiosity, sex, and psychological desires like convenience, comfort, material security, reputation/fame, variety) in order to prevent or reduce it from “serving as [a] host of sin in our personality” (159).
• Solitude: interacting with fallen people strongly steers us into patterns of thought and feeling that are opposed to God’s way; solitude helps free us from those. In solitude you cannot rely on the other things to prop up your soul. “We can only survive solitude if we cling to Christ there.” (161) Solitude is most important in the beginning of the spiritual journey, and it is a place of strength, since you can be still and know that God is God. (But, be wise in practicing it, because others may be relying on us to prop up their lives, and while this is not right, it is wise to be sensitive to it and make provision for it.)
• Silence: “Silence goes beyond solitude, and without it solitude has little effect.” (163) Silence reveals the “inward emptiness” of our lives (for example, the person who must always have the radio on). The discipline of silence includes trying to reduce even things like street noise, but also being silent around others: truly listening, instead of speaking. “People who love one another can be silent together.” (Eberhard Arnold) But with others, we try to do impression management. If we must always be speaking when we are in God’s presence, perhaps we are insecure with him. Speaking less also leads to less quarrels and arguments, as per James, and a discipline of silence can help train us not to just spout off a reply without thinking.
• Getting up in the middle of the night for a bit can be helpful for silence and solitude in a family.
• Silence can be a discipline of audible quiet, but also of speaking less and truly listening.
• “A major problem for Christian evangelism is not getting people to talk, but to silence those who through their continuous chatter reveal a loveless heart devoid of confidence in God. As Miguel de Unamuno says, ‘we need to pay less attention to what people are trying to tell us, and more to what they tell us without trying.’” (165)
• Fasting: reveals to us how much we desire food, and it helps us to practice self-control, self-denial (which is something Christ requires) and practice suffering (so that when real suffering arrives we have practice accessing the other food Jesus talks about). Through fasting we learn to find the other food Jesus talks about.
• Since we tend to be focused on the hunger, if we are fasting as a discipline, it is important to do it often enough that we are used to it.
• Frugality: “In frugality we abstain from using money or goods at our disposal in ways that merely gratify our desires or our hunger for status, glamour, or luxury.” (168) We spend what is necessary to live the life God has called us to. James does not condemn rich people for merely being rich, but because they lived in wanton pleasure. O. Hardman claims that luxury is economically bad, “provocative” to the poor as they see it flaunted, and “morally degrading” to those who live it. Frugality frees us from those desires (not repudiates those desires), and makes it possible to focus of the Kingdom and the needs of others. Living free from debt caused by buying things which are not at all necessary, in particular, frees us from the worry about the debt, which helps us to consider the needs of others.
• Related lifestyles are simplicity (focusing on a few priorities) and poverty (rejection of possessions); but see the next chapter for a critique, especially of poverty.
• Chastity: technically this is the result of the discipline. “In exercising the spiritual discipline of chastity, we purposefully turn away from dwelling upon or engaging in the sexual dimension of our relationships to others—even our husbands and wives.” (170) Sexuality can cause great harm to ourselves and others, and chastity helps practice not being governed by our sexual desires and feelings. Within marriage, Paul says chastity helps prayer (1 Cor 7:5) and it also helps ensure that sex is not the center of the marriage. Note that chastity is a not a rejection of sexuality.
• “The suffering that comes from sexuality does come in large part from improper indulgence in sexual thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and relations. But much also comes from improper abstinence.” (171, emphasis in original) “‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes that ‘the essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust but the total orientation of one’s life toward a goal.’ Healthy abstention in chastity can only be supported by loving, positive involvement with members of the opposite sex.” (172)
• “A recent study” showed that fathers that are involved in caring for their children (cleaning, feeding, holding them) from the beginning rarely sexually abuse their children, because they “effectively love” [I think this is in the sense of “effectually love”] them, and you do not hurt those you love.
• Secrecy: abstaining from letting our good deeds or good character be known. This practices humility, love, and keeps our relationship with God independent of what others think of us. We do not need to advertise ourselves. “[I]f it is possible for our faith and works to be hidden [cf. city of light cannot be hid], perhaps that only shows they are of a kind that should be hidden. We might, in that case, think about directing our efforts toward the cultivation of a faith that is impossible to hide.” (173, emphasis in original) If, in a competitive situation, you pray for others to be “more outstanding, more praised, and more used of God than yourself” (174), you are likely to experience a flow of love unlike any you have experienced.
• George Müller ran a “vast ministry”, including several orphanages, without advertising the work or his needs. He did this so that the Church would have an example that God provides for his work. [Similarly, Hudson Taylor, although he did it more as a discipline to prepare to be a missionary.]
• Sacrifice: abstaining from possession (or enjoying) something that is necessary for living. “The cautious faith that never saws off the limb on which it is sitting never learns that unattached limbs may find strange, unaccountable ways of not falling.” (175) For example, Abraham sacrificing Isaac (necessary for the fulfillment of God’s promise), the poor widow (Luke 21), Willard and his wife giving away everything they had left after paying their bills (they found a $20 bill on their steering wheel a week later, and with hamburger at $0.39/lb, they ate well)
• Disciplines of Engagement: these counterbalance the abstinences; abstinece is outbreathing, engagement is inbreathing. Both are required. Abstinence tends to counter sins of commission, and engagement tends to counter sins of omission. “A proper abstinence actually breaks the hold of improper engagements so that the soul can be properly engaged in and by God.” (176)
• Study: this is the counterpart to solitude. “Mystics without study are only spiritual romantics who want relationship without effort.” (Calvin Miller, The Table of Inwardness, 83) We read the Word of God, both as a whole and what is relevant to us now, and we meditate on it (cf silence). As we do this, asking God to meet us, it forms us inwardly. We should also seek out skilled teachers who can lead us into the Word so that we gain these skills. We should also read from all ages and cultures of the Church. Study opens up worship and celebration.
• Worship: “we engage ourselves with, dwell upon, and express the greatness, beauty, and goodness of God through thought and the use of words, rituals, and symbols.” (177) This is done alone and corporately. We may experience God through worship (e.g. Isaiah, Elijah, Ezekiel, and Paul), but it is not a necessary component of worship.
• Celebration: “It is the completion of worship, for it dwells on the greatness of God as shown in his goodness to us. We engage in celebration when we enjoy ourselves, our life, our world, in conjunction with our faith and confidence in God’s greatness, beauty, and goodness. We concentrate on our life and world as God’s work and as God’s gift to us.” (179, emphasis in original) It combats despair and cultivates gratitude. Typically done with others to eat, to dance, and to tell stories of God’s action in the lives of his people. The Israelites were to take a tithe to Jerusalem for a festival, and buy “whatever your soul wants” and eat and drink there (Deut 14:26-27). Verse 23 says that the purpose is to learn to always fear God.
• Service: engaging our time and treasure in “the active promotion of the good of others and the causes of God in our world” (182). Note that we might do an act out of love, which is absolutely good, but that is not the same doing it as a discipline. Service reduces “arrogance, possessiveness, envy, resentment, and covetousness”. It helps those in the “lower” part of the hierarchy prevent resentment. It frees us from fear of man, since we are serving God lowly. The lowly must practice this of necessity (e.g. the janitor), but the uppers have a strong need to practice it as a discipline, because we forget that greatness in the Kingdom is not being high in the hierarchy but being a servant to all. Matt 5:20:25-28 is not a how-to become great, but a description of greatness; living as a servant is one of the most difficult spiritual achievements. It also frees us to be who we are.
• Prayer: as a conversation in service of co-laboring with God (part of a healthy spiritual life!) is different from the discipline of prayer. The discipline of prayer almost requires practicing study, meditation, worship, and maybe solitude and fasting. When our prayer results in a conversation and communion with God, it makes a deep impression in us and we immediately start to work it out. Prayer also develops trust in God as we see him answer prayer. Its most potent form is when we pray without ceasing, having developed the habit of inviting God’s presence in every action. This is a definitely possible, as demonstrated by many over the course of history.
• Those Protestants known for prayer (e.g. David Brainerd, John Fletcher, Charles Finney) are generally not presented with prayer as part of a set of spiritual disciplines.
• Fellowship: worship, study, prayer, celebration, and[/or?] service with other believers. One coal of fire is hot, but many coals get even hotter. The gifts are distributed among the believers; “[t]he unity of the body rightly functioning is thus guaranteed by the people reciprocating in needs and ministries. ... Because of this reciprocal nature within the corporate body of Christ, fellowship is required to allow realization of a joyous and sustained level of life in Christ that is normally impossible to attain by our individual effort, no matter how vigorous and sustained.” (187)
• Confession: a discipline within fellowship, that produces deep fellowship as we are transparent about our failures. This is knowing and being known. Confession is only safe in the context of fellowship. True transparency is an antidote to sin, since it is uncomfortable to remain the same way. If necessary, we must make restitution, which may be painful, but is required to maintain fellowship, and is something our “innate integrity” wants to do. Confession requires experience and wisdom to avoid abuse, for both the person confessing and the leadership.
• The early church appears to have assumed that unconfessed sin hinders the flow of life and thus leads to sickness (see James 5:16)
• Submission: this is the highest level of fellowship, where spiritual elders submit to servanthood—leading the flock as examples—and the younger submit to them as people able to lead them. This is mutual submission.

Ch. 10: Is Poverty Spiritual?

• “The idealization of poverty is one of the most dangerous illusions of Christians in the contemporary world. Stewardship—which requires possessions and includes giving—is the true spiritual discipline in relation to wealth.” (194, emphasis in original)
• Excessive consumption is a misuse of wealth. “Yet too often a burning sense of outrage at social injustice and an elevated sense of ‘spirituality’ keep us from thinking correctly” (194), leading us to to think that poverty is spiritual. Merely possessing riches is not a problem, and even using them can be done well. However trusting in riches (that is, relying on them for security, well-being, or happiness) is a sin. Trusting in money leads us to serve money.
• It is true that the wealthy often misuse money, and often gain it in ways that are exploitative of people and the environment. But “economic” solutions of both the Right (e.g. Nazis) and the Left (e.g. Communism) have eventually turned “economic” considerations into the ruin or death of people. Both kinds of “solutions” have resulted in the deaths of millions of people.
• John Wesley found that when his converts—mostly from the lower classes—applied his teachings, they became industrious and thus wealthy, which then resulted in indulgence, not self-denial. He concluded that riches were inherently corrupting, that if you were rich there was more hope for Judas Iscariot of avoiding Hell than for you. But there is no necessary reason why one cannot possess wealth but not love it. Similarly, having no money has a strong correlation with trusting in it.
• Test of prejudice against wealth: “One sincere, devout Christian is poor; he has just enough money to get by on. Another equally sincere, devout Christian is a successful businessman who exercises his natural business abilities in an honest and faithful way; he maintains significant financial resources and uses them wisely, for godly purposes. Is the poor person a better person and servant of God merely for having only enough money to get by on?” That was Wesley’s view, judging from his journals, and from Willard’s experience posing the question, modern Christians tend to agree the more socially oriented they are.
• Poverty can reduce the opportunities to do evil [and it may provide the motivation to rely on God], but Willard has not found anyone whose poverty made him more spiritual. Furthermore, you cannot give what you do not have.
• Wealth is deceitful, but love of money deceives rich and poor alike. Most rich people do love money, but so do many poor people. It is hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but that is partly because the Church does not reach them well. Avarice is a sin, but so is covetousness.
• The rich young ruler is not generally applicable, it was Jesus dealing with a specific individual. This young man says he has kept all the commandments, so Jesus reveals his love of money by telling him to sell everything and follow him. This passage is universally taken to mean that it is easier for the poor to be saved than the rich, but Jesus did not say that, he only said that it is difficult for the rich to come under the “rule of God”. Now, if you worship money and getting rid of money will solve that, then get rid of money. Otherwise there is no point, and it might even be harmful.
• St. Anthony gave his wealth away and became an influential hermit. St. Francis renounced his inheritance and was instrumental in reviving the Church. Both felt called by God to do so. That does not mean they are general examples. “What the two did was a beautiful thing, and enduring treasure of the church and of Christ. But [in saying poverty itself is spiritual] we are talking about something very different from this sort of poverty. We are discussing poverty as either (1) a condition intrinsically holy in itself, (2) as a generally useful discipline for the spiritual life, or (3) as God’s plan for utilizing the wealth of the world.
• If we give away our money, someone will use it. How can we exercise dominion over the world if we give all the money to the enemies of God? Wise stewardship of money extends the influence of God over the world. Charity and social programs are good and necessary, but they are only part of living.
• St. Francis had in inherent Manichean perspective, that matter is outside the bounds of spirituality. Rather, we need to prepare people to use wealth well.
• True poverty and the monastic vow of poverty are not the same. “The truly poor of the earth know poverty for what it is: it is crushing deprivation and helplessness. The vow of poverty, on the other hand, allows a person to continue to enjoy the security, provision, and care of a religious order—made available through the wealth of others.” (203) Vowed poverty gives up formal possession, while still allowing use of wealth. (Which is not bad, it frees monks and nuns for ministry.) Wesley lauded a minister who died with not even enough possession to cover funeral expenses, and while he probably suffered want, “he did not lack for status within the society or for reliably regular provisions of food and shelter that he did not own.” (204)
• Poverty and simplicity are not the same thing. Real poverty is complex: getting a baby to a doctor without a car is a challenge. Simplicity is an ordered interior.
• Jesus did say “woe to the rich”. But Jesus did not teach by giving a list of rules, or by giving generalized principles that outline the safe area. He taught by revealing the inadequacies of the safe generalizations people used. So he said to take the lowest seat at the table so you will be invited up; he said to invite those who could not repay instead of your friends. You cannot invite exclusively non-friends and still retain friends. The rich were seen as blessed by God and he is shaking that up.
• “Blessed are the poor.” Really? Is not having enough resources to provide for yourself really a blessed condition? Is the rich woman who faithfully uses her wealth to provide for people in the kingdom, is she really cursed? No, and thinking that she is unspiritual just for being rich is like saying you’re going to hell if you wear lipstick or play cards.
• In fact, an essential Kingdom teaching is that neither rich nor poor have an advantage in well-being in this life and the next. (Even St. Anthony makes this point, saying that in an inn, some people sleep in a bed, some on the floor, but they all leave in the morning; this life is the inn.)
• The Bible never suggests abolishing poverty, but it does say that we need to give to ensure that people are properly cared for. [Willard does not draw this conclusion, but this could be seen as an aspect where the parts of the body with money use it to meet the needs of the parts that do not.]
• The poor are equal, so it is important to treat them equally, regardless of whether they do not look as nice and maybe need something from us. The rich are also equal, so it is important to treat them the same way as the poor, regardless of whether they look nice and maybe we want something from them. If the poor are more spiritual than the rich, then that is just another way of treating the rich better, just that what constitutes “riches” changes.
• Poverty in the beatitudes is in inward characteristic, like simplicity. Poor in spirit.
• Seeing poverty as more spiritual steers people away from careers in “secular” industry. But it is just as spiritual to run a company for the Kingdom as to run a church, and we are abandoning the field to those who have no desire to run them for the Kingdom.
• Wealth is a part of the material world, which God created and pronounced good, but like the body, it tends towards evil. Thus, like the body, wealth needs to be redeemed.
• Wesley should have said, "Get all you can, save all you can, freely use all you can within a properly disciplined spiritual life; and control all you can for the good of humankind and God’s glory.” (217) Giving is thus part of stewardship. (Wesley said get ..., save ..., and give all you can.)

Ch. 11: The Disciplines and the Power Structures of This World

• When some big killing happens, like the Holocaust, the Rwanda genocide, or even something smaller close to home, we ask how this could happen, why would people do this. The truth is that it takes relatively little for people’s fear and desire for self-preservation to make them willing to kill. It takes even less for people to think that it might be helpful if someone they oppose were dead.
• “... the immediate support of the evils universally deplored lies in the simple readiness of ‘decent’ individuals to harm others or allow harm to come to others when the conditions are ‘right.’ That readiness comes into play whenever it will help us realize our goals of security, ego gratification, or satisfaction of bodily desires. This systematic readiness that pervades the personality of normal, decent human beings is the fallen human nature.” (225, emphasis in original)
• We also inhabit a system that encourages us to compromise: Wall Street banker is more acceptable to colleagues if does cocaine, actress gets parts by being willing to sleep with male producers, professor needs students so is tempted to grade more easily, etc. These work on our readiness to compromise.
• Evil begins with the lie, or the deceit, that it can be hidden.
• Once the actions start, other people react and a vicious cycle begins, which the righteous cannot stop. But they can stop it before it starts if they are sprinkled through society.
• One would think that the steady stream of events would convince us that we need to do something different, but it does not. Part of why we are so self-delusional as to ignore those tendencies in ourselves is that we want to continue living the way we have been living since Adam. Thinking we can fix the problem by changing “society” is just another way of continuing to live without changing ourselves (although the changes might be beneficial). But without radically changing our values and behaviors, nothing is going to change (witness the fact that we are still consistently leaving a trail of blood behind us.)
• The vision of the Christian—"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want”, “be careful for nothing” (Phil 4:6-7), living is for Christ and dying is gain—allows us to put to death the readiness to harm. Training into this way by means of spiritual disciplines is the only way to the radical transformation required.
• Willard sees the system of judges suggested to Moses by his father-in-law as the organizational solution: put judges (pastors, essentially) over ten families, then judges/pastors above them overseeing five judges [and their families?], and then judges/pastors over two. These pastor-judges offer counsel, care for needs, judge infractions, etc.
• Willard sees Israel’s request for a king as rejecting this State-less system in place of an intermediary between them and God (the king). [Critique: any large-scale organization must be hierarchical, the difference is that the king is well-defined and the head judge (Moses, Samuel, etc.) is raised up by God from the grassroots.]
• Holman Hunt’s painting of Christ knocking at the door is usually used as Christ knocking at the door of the individual’s heart, but Hunt referenced Rev 3:20, so the door is actually the door of the Church!
• Christian leaders are responsible for increasing the rule of Christ in the world, because they are the ones whom millions of Christians—the ones with the potential to put to death the readiness to harm—listen to. But the church has ignored its responsibility to develop people into the character of Christ. Today it looks like concentrating on maintaining the church (people, programs) or their career (growing).
• Willard sees the prophecy that Jesus will bloodily conquer and establish a totalitarian rule (Zechariah?) as obviously not going to happen that way, given Jesus’ character. He sees the prophecy of Zechariah that “in that day” ten foreigners will take hold of one Jew and ask them to tell them how to live, that the Jew is the spiritual descendant of Abraham, the Christian. He sees the Church as going to slowly change the culture by living as Christ did, until the Kingdom is over the earth, and presumably Jesus comes back. [Not an unreasonable interpretation; it took the Church 1800 years to abolish slavery, but it did slowly do it.]