Spiritual Disciplines Podcast Series

And the effect then of a discipline is that we’re able to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. There are a lot of things that Jesus said for his disciples to do that they couldn’t do on their own. They had to learn how to do those things through a process that included spiritual disciplines. 

Greetings and welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Excellent to have you along. Spiritual disciplines is our topic of conversation here today. Got Isaac Funk on with me and Fred Witzig and welcome both of you to the podcast. 

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Good to be with you. Best both of you to be on this podcast for very specific reasons. Isaac, our listeners know that you’re in this discipleship space thinking deeply about what that looks like and the spiritual disciplines, which is our narrow topic for today, is something that you’ve thought a lot about and have a passion for, and have a really good understanding about, and I want to surface that. And when we start talking about spiritual disciplines, we do go to the past, Fred. And so you are our historian that I would love to tap your expertise on spiritual disciplines as in so far as them being an historic practice of Christianity and understanding that in a really, really balanced way. 

Isaac, um, how should we understand spiritual disciplines? What are they? Let’s talk about the purpose and the objectives of them and how they find themselves in the life of a Christian.  

I’m just going to actually take a step back, Matt, and help color this a little bit more with just any discipline. And so beyond just spiritual disciplines, disciplines are a part of our lives in all areas. And a discipline works through this process of indirection, and so what I mean by that is this idea that we engage with something directly that we can already do, again, so that it enables us to do what we cannot do yet. So, if I wanted to become a great musician, for example, and I wanted to sit down at the piano and be able to play Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, I’m going to have to, I don’t just sit down at the piano and just start playing that, right? 

I’m not there yet, I can’t do it yet, but I want to be able to do that. And so, I need to find intelligent, wise practices that I can engage with directly that will enable me to play that piece beautifully as it’s meant to be played. To hit the notes when they’re meant to be hit at the right tempo, velocity, dynamic, all of that. And so, some of the disciplines that I would have to engage with would be learning my scales, practicing my scales, knowing how to read key signatures, time signatures, tempo markings, dynamic markings, all those things and then putting them into my body, into my hands, into my feet, so that over time, I grow into the type of person who can just sit down at the piano, with hardly having to think about it anymore, and I can play Beethoven. 

So, it’s training myself to do what I cannot yet do. And so that same principle of indirection is applied to our spiritual life. I want to become someone who is a person of peace, someone who is a person of joy. I can’t just decide I’m going to wake up today and just do that. I’m going to have to find ways to enable me to do that. 

It’s more than just… a will that’s involved. Spiritual disciplines in particular are just any activity that we would engage with directly that enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort, because in them we meet with God’s presence, with his grace. It’s to do what we cannot do on our own. So, the effect then of a discipline is that we’re able to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. 

There are a lot of things that Jesus said for his disciples to do that they couldn’t do on their own. They had to learn how to do those things through a process that included spiritual disciplines. So, there is no complete list of spiritual disciplines, although there are some that everybody should at least be familiar with prayer, worship, fellowship, fasting, solitude, and it goes on. But there is no complete list because it really is just kind of bound by your own creativity as to what can you do that will enable you to live a life that is a with God kind of life, one where you are enabled by his power.  

I really love that. I would love to hear just an example in your own life, both of you brothers, of a discipline that perhaps has become muscle memory, something that you’ve been able to do, but it’s come by way of the practice. 

Yeah, I’d be happy to share just a short example in my own life. I, honestly, the practice of solitude and being in quiet before God has been really important and impactful for me. There are a lot of years in my life where I struggled with anxiety, some borderline depression things, and you might not think that getting alone and being by yourself is maybe the cure for that, and it’s not. But when you can do those things and find that you can engage with God in a unique way there, I just found that to make a huge difference in my own life, finding that, oh, I really am never alone, that God always is right there. And I’m just kind of awakening myself to that through this practice of regular but short times of silence and solitude. 

Well, let me push you a little bit on that or not push as much as inspect. Isaac, what did that look like? What did it look like day one? When you’re like, okay, I’m going to try this thing.  

Day one was just like a lot of running in circles in my own mind, trying to figure out how to, what am I supposed to be doing exactly in practicing this the way that I had read or listened to people talk about it as a useful practice. So, yeah, I think this idea of just coming to quiet was really hard for me in my own mind. I have this inner dialogue that’s just running, running, running, running all the time. And that doesn’t serve my nerves well. And, when I get anxious, I get physically ill. It affects me on a pretty deep level. So, learning to come to calm and learning tools to do that in the space of quiet has had a tremendous benefit, but it’s taken a lot of time.  

Can you give us a picture of what that looks like? Bring it into our normal a little bit because I might be thinking too grand about this.  

Yeah. A lot of times people might think about this as like their quiet time in the mornings or something like that and that is for me generally where it will be done is in the morning I have a ritual where I get my coffee ready and take care of my one year old and all that but once he’s settled and eating I can go make my coffee and just in that space focus my mind reciting something like the 23rd Psalm in my head or the Lord’s prayer just to get focused And, then just allowing myself to breathe in the reality of his presence. And so usually I’ll take some deep breaths and just remember that he is with me right here, right now. And not trying to get anything from him, not asking him for anything for the day at that point, but just enjoying his presence and his reality with me.  

That’s really neat. I’ve had a similar experience as well. I’ve learned to take a short nap in the afternoon. I’ll lay down on the floor and set my alarm for 12 minutes. I usually don’t fall asleep right away. So, what am I going to do while I fall asleep? Well, to review some names and prayer and that type of thing has been nice before I drift off into a few moments of slumber, mostly because I’m tired. How do I stay awake in the afternoon hour? How do I be alert and sharp? Right? So that was the real intent. Here’s the surprising part that’s been really, really cool. Because I have made a practice of laying on my back and having a few moments of prayer, now when I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m laying on my back, prayer becomes automatic. I don’t view myself as any sort of example on prayer, but I’m finding myself a few more moments of spontaneous prayer whenever I find myself on my back because of that muscle memory. Is that capturing what we’re after here, Isaac?  

Yeah, well, I think that’s really marvelous. And I actually, I love that idea and I think we’re going to start trying it, but I just want to make one further connection then to what you’re talking about. And you also don’t want to get caught in this idea that I’m going to practice quiet more, or I’m going to practice prayer more or study more just so I can do those things better, but rather so that I can have God’s life in me. And so always treating, I just want to make this as crystal clear as possible. And we talked about spiritual disciplines, and this is where it can go so wrong. And the ditches are huge. If you ever treat a spiritual discipline as the end in itself, and not as the means, then you’ve lost, then you’re stuck in idolatry. 

At that point, if I’m going to be a basketball player, I’m not going to go and practice dribbling the ball just so I can dribble the ball. So, I’m a great dribbler. I’m going to do it so that I can do what needs to be done on the court at the time when it needs to be done. I have that life, those abilities in me. And so, becoming a person of prayer and becoming a person of peace is all about getting God’s life, getting his love to inhabit me in all spaces that I find myself.  

That’s a wonderful objective. Fred, take us back into history. Okay, where do we see spiritual disciplines and provide some of that?  

So, I’d like to just suggest this. If you stand back and take a broad view of the disciplines, they’ve always been there in the Christian life, going all the way back to the Old Testament. You know, think of Moses encounter with God in the wilderness. Think of John the Baptist in the wilderness. Paul indicated in Galatians 1 that he had spent some time by himself, probably in the wilderness of Arabia, just communing with the Lord. 

Jesus, my favorite example of Jesus is in Luke 5 16, it says that Jesus was withdrawing into the wilderness and praying. The Greek wording there indicates that it wasn’t like at this moment, Jesus took off and went by himself and came back. The wording indicates he was withdrawing, like he had a habit of going off by himself and just praying in solitude. 

So, yeah, it goes all the way back into, you know, the Bible itself. Yeah, I love that picture of Jesus modeling the spiritual disciplines for us and the way that he brought other people along with him to do that. And flipped this idea of this rabbi disciple relationship almost where he goes and chooses people who are spiritually poor people, the fishermen, the tax collectors and I guess we don’t know what they all did but he really pulled from those who were not the disciples of other rabbis. They were like top of their class and the synagogue schools and all these things and he just found those who were really messy and not good at any of these things to start with. And, and he brought them along. He’s like, okay, follow me. And they’re going to practice things like prayer together, like worship, like Sabbath together. They’re going to parties together. They’re going to be celebrating together. All of those things is like a lifestyle that Jesus brought them into alongside with him. And in that process, was forming their inner person, was forming them into the type of person that can carry on. One of the questions that the disciples asked him was how do we pray and his response was not oh, no, communication with God is always just spontaneous. He actually took that question seriously and said, well, this is how you pray. 

Not that he was giving a rule or a formula that we had to follow every time, but there can actually be a deliberate, thoughtful process of learning and growing in our walk with Jesus. Absolutely. And if we lose, I think that if we lose that process, if we lose the idea that there even is a process, that’s when people feel stuck in their walk with God. 

When they lose these benchmarks, when they lose this, what do I do now is kind of the question. And I think that’s something we can work to reclaim. Learning to do what we otherwise would not be able to do through the spiritual disciplines. I’m going to cut into a conversation. We’re here today with Isaac and Fred. 

When we return, we’re going to give Fred a bit more air time as he talks about the history. What do we learn from church history and the spiritual disciplines? Hope you can be with us. 

If you stand back and take a broad view of the disciplines, they’ve always been there in the Christian life, going all the way back to the Old Testament. They have been a constant in Christian life, Jewish and Christian life. And that’s because they’re deeply biblical. They’re very, very biblical. 

Welcome back everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. I’m very glad to get back into the conversation with Isaac Funk and Fred Witzig on spiritual disciplines. In particular, we’re going to listen as Fred unpacks history. What does history tell us about the spiritual disciplines? So, Fred, I want you to speak to this a little bit. For those who attach spiritual disciplines to monasticism, can you help untangle maybe the way we typically think about these things and maybe how we should think about it?  

Sure. So, I’m going to talk first just about where monasticism came from, and I’m going to present it in the best light I can because I think the intentions were good. And I think the Protestant critique of monasticism was in many ways right on. But if we go back early enough, we can see, well, okay, so the intent was pretty good in the first few centuries. We often think of the first few centuries of the Christian church as being a time of great persecution, and it’s better to see it as sporadic persecution, depending on what time you lived and where it could be incredibly intense and difficult. 

And other times you would not really be in danger of losing your life, but Christianity was looked on with great suspicion, and there were lots of opportunities in life, business opportunities, political opportunities, social opportunities that you had to engage in pagan practices in order to take advantage of those opportunities. 

So being a Christian meant you had to give things up. You just had to. There’s no way around it. You had to make sacrifices. You had to deny yourself, but people were also very intent on following Jesus. And caring for the poor in prayer and studying the Word and copying the Word and dispensing the Word and preaching the gospel. 

So, there was sort of built into Christian life. These disciplines, I’m not saying that everybody did them well, but I’m just saying that there was, it just, it was almost more natural. You had to sort of devote yourself. If you’re going to do this, it was necessary. If you were to live as a believer and have healthy faith and endure what it was going to ask you, it necessitated the disciplines. 

Exactly. So, this is important background because what happens then in the 300s is Christianity first become in the early 300s, Christianity is made legal. And the intense pressure is off. And then in the mid 300s, it had become popular. And by the end of the century, it was actually officially mandated by law. 

So now what you have is masses of people flooding into the church. And now suddenly you could be a member in good standing in the church. You could be considered a Christian and you didn’t have to sacrifice. You can prosper, live a life of luxury and ease. You could be in, have great political power. You could go to all the great parties and all these things. Other Christians are like, wow, is that really a Christian life? I don’t know. At the bare minimum, it’s really distracting people from really devoting themselves. It’s distracting people from prayer, distracting people from really good fellowship, distracting people, so at its worst it’s outright sin. At its best, it tends to be just distracting and tempting also, right?  

Very, very tempting. So how do you deal with this? Well, you separate yourself and you go off by yourself and you devote yourself to prayer and fasting and everything that you’re supposed to do. Or you form a community, eventually communities form and we’re going to be sort of on our own and we’re going to go back to how Christianity really was supposed to be. 

And we don’t really live in a hostile world, but at least we can keep each other accountable. We can really practice these things and together we can encourage each other and we’ll have like these little monastic communities that are devoted to how everybody really should be living. But like I said before, they begin to turn up the volume intensively. 

And that’s where we get into some excesses and some problems. Well, let’s just take that a little bit further than what was then the correction of the reformation. So, there were several major issues with monasticism. And some of these, by the way, were recognized by monastic leaders themselves. 

And they would periodically try to purge their monasteries from these excesses or these problems. But it’s a fair criticism by the Protestants. It’s a very fair criticism. One was that instead of being a life of devotion, here’s where I think Isaac’s comment earlier was really important. Instead of being the purpose is to really know God and follow him through prayer and study of the Word and meditation, that sort of thing, loving others by serving them selflessly and sacrificially. Instead of those being good ends to truly love and serve Christ, it became a way of sort of achieving merit with God. So, if the more prayer I have, the less time I’ll spend in purgatory, the more likely it will be that I get to heaven. 

And in fact, if I’m really good at this, I can build up merits for other people, like I can actually build up an excess of goodness that then somehow God can sort of assign to other people and it will save other people. That’s a pretty dangerous path to walk down, right? And then another outcome, probably the thing that bothered most people the most, like the average people, the first one, you know, building up merits was something that Protestant theologians really worried about. 

But among the masses, the thing that really irritated people in the Protestant reformation was that one way, if I think of being a monk as a surefire way to get into heaven, Okay. That’s great. But what if I don’t really want to do that? What if I don’t think I have the courage to do it, the constancy to do it. 

Hey, I know when I die, I can leave my massive estate to the monastery and that will count to my credit. That will build up merits for me. Well, you get a lot of people doing this. So pretty soon monasteries end up being massive, wealthy landowners. And average people, if you go back a thousand years, chances are you’re a farmer, and chances are you work on a monastery’s land, and they’re just charging lots of money, a rent, and meanwhile, they’re kind of living in luxury, right? This is a really good deal for them. So, there’s theological problems, there’s very practical, sort of in your face, earthly problems that most people experience. 

And the Protestants want to correct both of those. The problem is, what ends up happening is, their initial intent to be people of prayer and love of God and love of neighbor gets sort of bunched in gets associated with monasteries so that the disciplines like belong in the monastic category and the ideal is that we just sort of take the Christian life more as it comes. Because being disciplined as a monastic thing so we can critique the excesses, unfortunately, it wasn’t just critiquing the excesses. Too often the actual disciplines got dumped out. 

And so, some of what got thrown off during the Reformation was this monastic order as being exalted as deeply spiritual. And by throwing that off for the reasons that you’ve articulated here, in so doing, we’ve somewhat emptied ourselves of the need of spiritual disciplines, or at least having them as a revered mechanism or process by which we access God. 

Yes. One of the things that Protestants also critiqued was this notion that developed in the Middle Ages, that to be a real Christian, you’re a monk, a priest, some, you’re one of these super devoted people. Everybody else just kind of, well, you just can’t expect much out of them. Well, one of the Protestant critiques was, nowhere in the Bible does it say we have two levels of Christians, like the really good Christians, and then kind of the sort of barely Christians. 

We’re all supposed to be living holy lives. You know, Isaac, I’d like you to speak to this notion that there has been kind of spiritual disciplines afresh here. Maybe there’s more books on it now in the last 10 years than maybe there would have been in the last hundred. Is this the 2020 something spiritual bandwagon? 

Yeah, you do want to be careful of the faddishness, I suppose, of certain things that come up. I think that this part of why this conversation is so important is if we’re able to frame it up in its historical context, which I feel like Fred has been able to do really well for us, that can help us understand its proper place. 

But you’re right, like right now, there’s always a new book, a new podcast, a new series out on discipline, just spiritual formation or fasting from technology. Slowing down all of these spiritual discipline-esque sort of ideas. And I think one of the dangers with that now is if those become something that is going to be just individually consumed or practiced only in isolation, which is often how these things are being delivered, then it will surely fizzle out and die, and it will just be a passing thing again, and people are going to say, see, look, it didn’t matter anyway, just another passing fad in the church. But if we can find a way to get these into the life of the local church, where these things are done in the body of Christ, with the people that you’re doing life with, that’s where the life comes from, is doing these sorts of things in community with other people. 

They will die if done in isolation, and they will not have their full effect. And in fact, they’ll probably have a lot of negative effects if done in isolation. But if you can do them in a group, if you can do them with a body of Christ followers, a group of disciples together, then I think a transformative life can be found there. 

I think one of the fears, and I think it’s a legitimate fear, is that sometimes this can come across as sort of the kind of self-actualization thing. Like, I spend time in meditation to get in touch with my inner self and it just has a direction to it. That is just, I think, pretty dangerous. 

This isn’t about self-actualization. This isn’t just about feeling good about me and my life. And if I keep that community aspect, it seems like that’s kind of a guardrail to make sure we don’t go off into that ditch. Am I right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, if you find something like silence and solitude to be really easy for you, and perhaps it’s a really enjoyable thing, because it becomes like me time, right? 

In community, you’re going to find that there’s a whole lot of other disciplines that you’ll need to be engaging with, like fellowship and service. And those things will be probably the more difficult ones for you, but those are the ones you need to spend the more time doing then. So, by the way, what I said does not mean to deny that there aren’t personal benefits to it but agreed. 

Right. I think that’s it’s a huge difference between what we’re talking about and the really faddish sort of secular, secularized, get in touch with yourself movement, right? Yeah, to see the end if we’re treating them as a means to an end, the end of being yourself, a better you, that’s going to be a problem. 

Yeah. Perhaps what the positive thing that we’re identifying is that, well, we can’t just be passive Christians. And I think people are starting to catch on to that again. Like, maybe we kind of tried that, you know. We took, I’m saved by grace through faith, as, I don’t have to do anything now. 

And we’ve misinterpreted certain Scriptures that way. And what we find is that we end up leading really dull, powerless lives. And you end up getting stuck in a lot of really sad addiction things and just sin struggles that could be dealt with. But yeah, this idea of just giving mental assent is just not enough. 

Your salvation is your life. You’re saved, every part of you. That’s good. As I read the Bible, I sense just what you’re saying. Christianity is something more than just staying away from certain sins and going to church now and then and that sort of thing. And I love what it looks like. 

I just love the vision that the New Testament casts. And that is the attraction of the disciplines. Paul and Silas at Philippi, they get beaten up, they get seized, brought before the magistrates, the magistrates tore the clothes off them, gave orders to beat them with rods, they beat them up with rods, threw them into prison, into the inner prison, fasted them in the stocks, and this is a dark, horrible place, and the next verse says, And about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God. 

If we keep it attached to the Gospels, which is a story of the three years they spent in training with Jesus, keeping those connected, they did that because they were trained. I’m gonna throw in a quote from one of my favorite authors on this subject, Dallas Willard. And he has this really famous, probably his most famous quote is that grace is opposed to earning, but it’s not opposed to effort. 

And I think that the spontaneity comes from this idea that if it’s going to be done by grace, it’s going to be done spontaneously. I think that misunderstanding can cause some harm. It’s opposed to earning, but it’s not opposed to effort. So, you actually do something. Jesus said, without me you can do nothing. 

And that is absolutely true. And the flip side of that is if you do nothing, it will be without Jesus. You know, like there’s do something and let it be done with Christ. Yeah. And to our listeners, I hope that you have caught the same hope that I have as well and perhaps many other things from this conversation about spiritual disciplines. 

Are there some ditches? Absolutely. But there is a beautiful path forward when we recognize that the spiritual disciplines are a means to an end and not the end themselves. And the end that they point us towards, and they bring us towards, is to the life of Christ and to a relationship with him and to following him, why they’re very welcome. 

So, thanks for being on.