Reading List: The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard

I wish I could tell you that I read The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard in the last two weeks, but that would simply not be true. It took me the whole fall semester and most of Christmas break to finish this book, but it was truly worth every minute.

Imagine a cross between the apostle Paul in the New Testament and C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity; that’s the vibe that Dallas Willard gives off when he writes. I left every chapter with a completely new perspective on salvation and what it means for me personally.

I honestly expected this book to be a list of the spiritual disciplines with in-depth descriptions . Instead of this more common approach, however, I found that Willard spends the vast majority of his book developing a theology of spiritual discipline – why I should practice the disciplines in the first place and what role they play in my salvation and life as a follower of Jesus.

His whole point is this: “the easy yoke of Christ is inescapably bound up with the disciplines for the spiritual life.” Jesus promises his followers an easy yoke and a light burden in Matthew chapter eleven; Willard argues that the only way for me to actually experience this as a reality is through the spiritual disciplines.

To demonstrate this, Willard took me on a wild ride through church history, basic theology of salvation, what it means to be human, the role of the physical human body, the psychology of salvation, and the history of asceticism and monasticism, only then to embark on a single chapter listing and explaining the spiritual disciplines. His goal? To convince me as his reader that the disciplines are worth instituting in my life as I pursue the Father.

He succeeded in this goal beyond my wildest expectations.

I wish I could sit you down and read the whole book aloud to you in one sitting, but that’s not possible for a lot of reasons. I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite quotes instead…

“We talk about leading a different kind of life, but we also have ready explanations for not being really different. And with those explanations we have talked our way out of the very practices that alone would enable us to be citizens of another world.”

“What leads us to believe that we might be an exception to the rule and might know the power of the Kingdom life without the appropriate disciplines? How could we be justified in doing anything less than practicing and teaching the disciplines Jesus Christ himself and the best of his followers found necessary?”

“Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of the world.”

“Once the individual has through divine initiative become alive to God and his Kingdom, the extent of integration of his or her total being into the Kingdom order significantly depends upon the individual’s initiative.”

“The walk with Christ certainly is one that leaves room for and even calls for individual creativity and an experimental attitude in such matters.”

These few lines hardly do this book justice, but I hope that even this little taste leaves you as captivated by the grandeur of salvation applied directly and attainably to your life as I was. Please go buy this book and read it; it is well worth your money and your time.