Over my vacation, I re-read Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline for the umpteenth time. In fact, my particular copy was given to me by a buddy from Crosby, TX, on the night before my wedding. It was his copy. And he bought it used. It’s well worn, dependable, and soft around the edges, like any good friend. I re-read it every year as a centering process in my life to remind me what I’ve learned, what I’ve forgotten, and how much we are all beginners in this journey. Thomas Merton once said, “Let us be convinced that we will never be anything else but beginners all our life.” As I read through it last week, several things jarred my memory. And several jumped out at me for the first time. 

 For instance, I am sure the title alone is a joke to many around us. Superficiality and instant gratification are the curses of our age. IMO, we have a desperate need, not for a greater number of intelligent or gifted people, but for deep people. Thus, we see the need for (and the current groundswelling return to) the classical disciplines of the Christian life. Disciplines like meditation. Prayer. Fasting. Simplicity. Solitude. Submission. Service. Confession. Worship. And Celebration.

 So what’s the point? The disciplines free us from the ingrained habits of sin. We have the tendency to think of sin as individual acts of disobedience to God. While this is true enough, Scripture goes much further. Romans 3:9-18 refers to sin as a condition that plagues the human race. It works its way out through the ‘bodily members’—the ingrained habits we drag around in our bodies (Romans 7:5 ff). Talk about slavery…!

And what’s our normal way of dealing with sin? Probably relying on our willpower and determination to overcome it. Whatever the issue is—pride, lust, gluttony, anger, selfishness—we resolve never to do it again. We pray against it. Fight against it. Set our will against it. But we struggle in vain and find ourselves once again failing. (Or worse, so proud of our external righteousness that ‘whitewashed tombs’ is a mild description of our rotting spiritual state and exalted willpower. As Heini Arnold says, “As long as we think we can save ourselves by our own power, we will only make the evil in us stronger.”

Righteousness is a gift of God. (Paul, in Romans, goes to great lengths to show us this, though it’s found throughout scripture…) The disciplines allow us to place ourselves in the position of receiving his transforming grace (Gal.6:8). We become like the farmer, trying to provide the right conditions for the crop to grow, but depending on God for the harvest. The disciplines, says Foster, are God’s way of getting us into the ground. They don’t do anything in particular; they only get us to the place where something can be done. Inner righteousness is not something that is poured on your head

 Over the next few weeks, I’ll be nailing my thoughts and experiences to the door of tomcottar(dot)org with one plea and one caution. The plea: please share your experiences and thoughts with us. I am a beginner in this and would love your input, no matter how trivial it may seem. Subscribe to my blog and join the conversation.

 Our world is hungry for genuinely changed people. As Leo Tolstoy says, “Everybody thinks of changing humanity but no one thinks of changing himself.”

May we be among the truly changed.