Posted in Celebrations | Back to Main Blog Page

The D-word

by Pastor Abby Davidson
Discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. 1 Tim. 4:7
The first time I tried fasting I was a teenager. World Vision was running a 30-hour famine and my youth group decided to participate. About twenty of us gathered at the church on Friday night and planned to spend the next 30 hours together. All I remember is that it was a lot of fun. We had bible study, prayed, played hide-and-seek, and tried not to think about food. I didn’t know it at the time but that was my introduction to spiritual discipline. In those 30 hours we spent together, God was molding our community and drawing us closer to himself and to each other.
Fast-forward a few years and my leadership class was challenged to take up a discipline for six months and write about our experience in a journal. I chose silence. It is probably one of the more difficult practices to do while living in a busy city, but I was able to find the space and time and came to enjoy these pockets of silence. Practicing spiritual disciplines became central in the formation of my spirituality.
Adding discipline to any area of your life can be daunting. There’s always a reason I didn’t go jogging (it’s too cold… or too hot), had to eat out (two burgers for the price of one!) or binge-watched Netflix (you never know when they’ll take the show off). Whatever the reasons are, we can’t ignore the fact that discipline is a part of caring for ourselves and we are called to be disciplined in caring for our souls.
It’s not a coincidence that ‘disciple’ and ‘discipline’ are so similar.
Just as an athlete disciplines her physical body when training for a marathon, we are called to discipline ourselves in order to be more like Christ. In Lauren Winner’s book Mudhouse Sabbath, she describes spiritual disciplines as practices that “refine our Christianity; they make the inheritance Christ gave us on the cross more fully our own”. These practices become rhythms that centre our actions, thoughts and words around Christ.
There are several spiritual disciplines outlined in the Bible. These disciplines can be divided into 2 categories – disciplines of engagement and disciplines of abstinence. Disciplines of engagement are practices like Bible reading, prayer and acts of kindness whereas disciplines of abstinence are practices like fasting, silence and frugality. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about different spiritual disciplines and I encourage you to choose one and commit to it for the next six months.
For further reading on the spiritual disciplines you can read Richard Foster’s A Celebration of Discipline, Ruth Hailey Barton’s Sacred Rhythms, or Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath.
Let’s embrace the D-word for all it’s worth. Here’s to a year of discipline.