In Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, he divided the disciplines into three categories. 

• Inward Disciplines: meditation, prayer, fasting, and study. 
• Outward Disciplines: simplicity, solitude, submission, and service. 
• Corporate Disciplines: confession, worship, guidance, and celebration.

Foster’s book helps describe what Spiritual disciples are and the right way of practicing them. I want to share the wrong ways to approach the disciplines. What we tend to get wrong about spiritual disciplines.

1. Spiritual discipline is not the goal of spiritual life.

Disciplines are a gift, a means of grace; they are not the goal of the Christian life. The goal is Christ-likeness. The goal of your life with God is not more fasting or solitude but communion with God. Jesus described heaven not marked by fasting or solitude but rather a communal feast. 

Consider the spiritual discipline of fasting. We fast to disrupt our desires and inclination to consume whenever we are lonely, empty, or dissatisfied. Fasting helps remind our soul that God is more satisfying than food, sex, or anything. 

So here’s the thing, the more you find yourself satisfied in God and sustained by his grace, the less you need to fast. 

When Jesus was on earth, people critiqued Jesus’ disciples because they didn’t fast as good Jews would. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus was asked, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” (Mark 2:18). For them, they made this practice their habit. They made this discipline the goal of their spiritual life. Jesus’ response shocked them.

Jesus replied, “How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while He is with them? As long as He is with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day.

Mark 2:19-20

Fasting is only necessary when we are not fully present with Jesus. So in this life, we fast, we pray, we serve, we study the Scriptures, not because those things are the goal of life but because through them we can experience and enjoy God.

2. Spiritual disciplines are not signs of spiritual maturity. 

Practicing spiritual disciplines is not a sign of our strength. We tend to think that the “mature Christians” among us are the ones most devoted to disciplines like prayer, fasting, and solitude. We can think about that way about ourselves. I’m tithing. I’m reading my Bible. I’m serving. God must be extra satisfied with me.

Ironically, practicing Spiritual disciplines is not a sign that you are holy. It’s actually evidence that you are broken, and you acknowledge it. Dallas Willard offers this correction. 

People who think that they are spiritually superior because they make a practice of a discipline such as fasting or silence or frugality are entirely missing the point. The need for extensive practice of a given discipline is an indication of our weakness, not our strength. We can even lay it down as a rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage in 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.

Dallas Willard, The Spirit of Discipline 

Reading the Bible on a daily basis does not make me somehow morally superior to somebody who doesn’t. I read it because my mind is filled with false messages, and grasping God’s story reminds me of what’s really true.

Being generous with my money doesn’t place me in better standing with God. I give because I need a constant reminder that my money doesn’t care about me – God does.

Spiritual disciplines are not ways to show people how good you are. In the first century, the Pharisees would use these practices to show people how good they were. Some people today might use them in the same way, but that’s not what God intends. That’s not what they’re for.

3. Spiritual disciplines are not opposed to grace.

When Jesus came and died on that cross, he did it to offer forgiveness for our sins as a free gift. There’s nothing you need to do to earn it. There’s nothing you’d need to do to deserve it. But just because we cannot save ourselves from our sin does not mean we don’t have a role to play, a practical daily role to play in how we grow. Dallas Willard puts it this way:

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.

Dallas Willard, The Great Omission

The apostle Paul uses agrarian terms to explain it in the New Testament.

For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.

Galatians 6:8

When a farmer puts a seed in the ground, when he plants a seed in the earth, there’s nothing that farmer can do just by determination or willpower to make that seed grow. There’s no incantation. There’s no spell he can say to make it grow, but here’s what he can do. He can make sure the right conditions are in place so that that seed can do what the seed is designed to do. What does the farmer do? He wakes up early. He cultivates the ground. He plants seeds just at the right distance apart from one another, he provides ample water. 

The spiritual disciplines of the Christian life work just like that. They don’t do anything to make a person grow. They simply put a person into a position where God’s grace can grow in us when we become the woman or man God made us to be. 

In other words, keeping a Sabbath every week by itself does nothing for you. Does it make God happier with you? Does it make you holier in his eyes? Keeping a Sabbath creates the right condition, the right soil in your life, so that you can experience the ongoing sufficiency of God’s grace and provision every day.

By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

Praise God something can be done! Something can be done for those habits that run so deep. For those areas of stuckness that you simply cannot shake. When I think about the impatience I feel, the anger that will come out of my heart, the pride, or self-righteousness that I claim to for my security. I so long for a way to experience freedom from that. Thank God for the habits of Grace offered in disciplines.