The Resurgence of Spiritual Discipline

Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).

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This episode answers a question from a regular listener asking about the call for recovery of the ‘spiritual disciplines’ – things such as contemplative prayer, solitude, fasting, sabbath-keeping, and so on. He writes:

What is the history of ‘spiritual discipline’ and, we could add, ascetic practices, within Christianity and evangelicalism? How do we integrate the different strands of biblical teaching and biblical examples on this topic (e.g. Mat  5:16-18; Luke 6:12; Col 2:15-23; Acts 14:23)?

The audio is a wide-ranging talk about this question, an edited summary of which appears below.

The next episode is Keeping Sabbaths and Preparing for Ministry. The previous episode is The Ten Commandments for Today.

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THE RESURGENCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE

Tony Payne: Phillip, I remember ‘spiritual disciplines’ being all the rage in the 80s when I was a young Christian. The very popular book that promoted it was called Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. Do you remember it? 

Phillip Jensen: I remember having to read it in order to help young people cope with its teaching, because it was quite dreadful. 

TP: Well, that’s somewhat telegraphing our attitude to this subject and Richard’s question! Why was it dreadful?

PJ: Because it taught that prayer was a matter of technique—of adopting a certain physical posture with your hands on your knees face upwards (if I recall), and then centring down your consciousness on your hands, and so on. 

But when Jesus was asked by his disciples how to pray, he didn’t say put your hands this way or that way or any other way. He said, ‘Say this: Our Father in heaven …’. Because ‘prayer’ just means ‘asking’, and the way you ask is through the Lord Jesus Christ and on the basis of his death. 

TP: In that sense, it’s a very, very old question, and not just within evangelicalism. It’s really about how you are going to relate to, and pray to, and become close to, the invisible God. 

PJ: Yes, you think of the Egyptian monks of the early centuries who not only fasted but sat on top of poles for years, and wore goat’s hair, and thrashed themselves with whips, and so on—all in an attempt to subdue the body and be right with God or experience him. 

TP: But that’s not how the God of the Bible is to be related to. God has no physical form, such that you might make an image of him—in fact, to do so is to blaspheme him because any image you make is a travesty of who God is. In Deuteronomy 4, Moses says to the people: Remember the thunder and lightning and fire on Mt Sinai? Remember how you heard the very voice of God speaking out of the fire? But you saw no form—just a voice. 

And the implication in Deuteronomy is: don’t make images or idols! 

PJ: Yes, God is personal, and he relates to us by speaking—by revealing himself to us in his words, his promises, his covenants, and by calling on us to respond to him (which we also do in words). 

TP: So the first thing I want to say to Richard is that the history of seeking to relate to God, to get closer to God, to experience the divine in some way apart from a personal relationship of revelation and response, is as old as time. 

I guess what we’re particularly talking about is mysticism. That’s the idea that God is a divine being or essence or force, someone or something mysterious and beyond words, so that the only way to reach him and commune with him is to rise above the everyday consciousness of our lives. Mysticism in all its forms is an attempt to alter our consciousness and rise up the mundane level of thinking and experience to a higher plane, to the non-verbal, non-material plane where God is. 

PJ: Yes, and that too has a long history, because it’s the nature of human religion. If you don’t believe in revelation—in a God who speaks and reveals himself in history, and ultimately through the Lord Jesus Christ—it’s likely that you will, all the same, believe that there is more to life, that there is some ‘god’ or divinity somewhere. The natural human response is to think that perhaps I can get to where that divinity is, and experience it by somehow escaping the confines of the physical world and our physical bodies and sense, and rise above to a spiritual plane. 

TP: But the relationship with God that the Bible speaks of couldn’t me more different from that. It’s about what God has done to come to us, rather than us trying find some technique to rise up to him, or to experience him. 

I remember our dear friend Dave Andrew, who went to be with the Lord a long time ago now. He was an entertainer, and fronted in a 50s tribute band that was very popular. He was a very funny and caustic man, and one day after he’d been to visit a prominent Pentecostal church, he said to me, ‘You know, Tony—the problem with these people is that they just need to go to a good show’. 

In other words, the feeling that the Pentecostal church was seeking to generate in its meetings was exactly the same as the feeling people got when they came to his shows—the joy and exhilaration and euphoria that came with lights and sound and music and the power of percussion and the throb of the bass. Nothing wrong with that! It’s part of the joy of human life and experience. But just don’t confuse it with spirituality or God. It’s a confusion of categories. 

PJ: Where would you go in the New Testament to address this? 

TP: Well if there’s one passage in the New Testament that kind of blows a raspberry—Dave Andrew style—at mysticism in all its forms, it’s Colossians 2. 

Paul reminds them that through the gospel they have received Jesus Christ, and that in Christ the ‘whole fullness of deity dwells bodily’. So if you’ve got Christ, you’ve got everything! You’ve got God in all his fullness, so why would you let yourself be dragged off and distracted by the kinds of alternatives that were obviously around in Colossae, that are promising some kind of exalted experience or pathway to holiness? 

PJ: How about I read it? 

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations—“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. (Colossians 2:16-23)

I wonder how you’d feel reading that Scripture sitting on top of a pole? You might have second thoughts about your choices. 

TP: It’s also important to remember that they received Jesus Christ by putting their faith in the gospel, the ‘word of truth’ that came to them through the preaching Epaphras (in chapter 1). Through Jesus, they have reconciled to God. And now, because they have died and risen with Christ, they are ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (3:1-4). They are already as close to God as they could ever be. 

So why get captivated by this third-rate, sub-par alternatives that are of no use, especially when you already have everything? 

PJ: OK, but what about the Bible verses that teach fasting? 

TP: Good question—let’s start with the Old Testament. Where is fasting in the Old Testament? 

PJ: Well there’s not all that much of it. 

TP: No, there isn’t. I went looking, and I could find very little. There’s the compulsory fast on the Day of Atonement but not much else. 

PJ: In a sense, fasting is just part of life. It’s something you do at certain times—when you’re sick or grieving or horrified or in severe stress. There’s a psalm like that—I was so overwhelmed by sin that I couldn’t eat. 

But the passage that comes to my mind on fasting in the Old Testament is Isaiah 58: 

⁴ Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicked fist.

Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high.

⁵ Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a person to humble himself?

Is it to bow down his head like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?

Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the LORD?

⁶ “Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

⁷ Is it not to share your bread with the hungry

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover him,

and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? (Isaiah 58:4-7)

The Old Testament, like the new, is about reality not symbolism. It’s not about the virtue signalling of fasting. If you really want to fast, he says, fast from sin! Share what you have with poor—that would be a good reason to do without food, so that you could share it with others. Humble yourself before the Lord. 

That’s the reality. It’s the same in Isaiah 66 where he contrasts their religious rituals and sacrifices with the reality that God seeks—the person who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at his word. 

TP: It seems that in Old Testament Israel, although there were very few fasts prescribed in the Law, fasting had become a common way to express devotion, or perhaps to remove distraction (and time and effort) in order to fulfil godly responsibilities. 

And in Jesus’ time, of course, you see him critiquing this common practice in the way that the Pharisees and scribes pursued it—that is, in order to be seen, to make a show of their sacrifice and religiosity. 

PJ: Yes, when fasting pops up Jesus neither affirms it or criticises it. He just says that if you’re going to do it, do it like this—sincerely, not for show, not to seek to impress others or even impress God. 

So there’s nothing wrong with fasting, and nothing right with it. If you want to cook meals, but then give them to the poor and not eat yourself, good on you. If you want to have more time to devote to prayer by not bothering to cook and eat, then good on you. But don’t think you get extra credit, or that somehow your prayers are more powerful or likely to be heard. 

TP: As Jesus says, we’re not heard for our many words. In fact, praying for a great long time or with many words, thinking that this makes it more likely that God will hear and answer—well that’s pagan prayer. 

PJ: Yes, I remember the stories of the Korean revivals, and people saying that it was because people were going up into the mountains every morning and praying for five hours or whatever it was. 

But I asked a Korean pastor about this and he laughed and said, ‘Oh no, the reason that they had those long prayer sessions is because many of them had only recently come out of Buddhism, and they hadn’t understood that you don’t need to do that to be heard by God.’ 

TP: You’re not heard for your many words. God knows what we need before we ask. 

The point is—it’s not about technique, and that’s the point to bear in mind with these ‘spiritual disciplines’. There are all kinds of helpful ways that people find to pray: writing down prayers, praying slowly over a psalm, walking while praying, praying out loud rather than just in your head, and so on. 

None of these methods makes your prayers more effective or likely to be heard or puts you into communion with God in a different way. But we’re created beings, and various things can help us in our createdness to keep on praying. 

PJ: It’s like there are ‘disciplines of reality’. 

TP: So do you think there’s a place for habit, for disciplining ourselves to stick with prayer by getting into a certain routine, and so on? I suppose what I’m alluding to is that the biblical idea of ‘character’ is that we become a certain kind of person by regularly choosing and acting in a certain way, and thus fostering within ourselves a disposition to keep acting in that way. 

PJ: Well it’s a truth of life that repetition and reinforcement and practice does improve our outcomes. But there’s a personality factor in it as well. There are some people who, by nature, are very ordered and disciplined. And there are other people who, by nature, are much more spontaneous and intuitive and freewheeling. And we are all somewhere on that spectrum. 

TP: We need to find patterns of prayer and devotion that fit with the kind of person we are, but also the kind of stage of life we’re in. 

PJ: Yes, I don’t want to make the rules of one person’s discipline the rule for all. ‘No Bible, no breakfast’ is a great old idea. But there are some people, and some circumstances in life, where that’s not realistic or helpful. I don’t to sanctify one kind of personality. 

I think I prefer the discipline of ‘wisdom’—to live under self-control, the control of wisdom. You don’t make your choices by your passions by wisdom. 

TP: It’s a theological wisdom based on revelation, but it also understands ourselves in that light—that understands our weaknesses and strengths. Wisdom might mean limiting our weaknesses and playing to our strengths. 

Thanks again, Richard, for the question, and sorry that it’s taken so long to get to it. 

PJ: In other words, the problem is your lack of discipline. 

TP: Amen.

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