Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren

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Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary invites us to uncover the sacred in the seemingly mundane moments of everyday life. How ordinary, you ask? Incredibly ordinary! With chapter titles like Waking, Making the Bed, Brushing Teeth, and Losing Keys, this book takes you on a journey through a day so familiar it feels like your own.

But don’t be fooled by the simplicity. Warren masterfully weaves earthy, practical experiences with profound theological insights, reminding us that our extraordinary God is present in the smallest, most ordinary details of our lives.

Through the lens of her life as a mother, wife, friend, Anglican priest, and campus minister, Warren shares wisdom and humor that will open your eyes to the holiness woven into your everyday routine.

Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and comforted as you explore the divine beauty in your ordinary day. Come along and see how the sacred meets the simple!

See below my Kindle highlights.

Notebook for

Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

Warren, Tish Harrison

Citation (APA): Warren, T. H. (2016). Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

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1 Waking: Baptism and Learning to Be Beloved

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Grace is a mystery and the joyful scandal of the universe.

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The psalmist declares, “This is the day that the Lord has made.” This one. We wake not to a vague or general mercy from a far-off God. God, in delight and wisdom, has made, named, and blessed this average day. What I in my weakness see as another monotonous day in a string of days, God has given as a singular gift.

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God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.

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we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.”4

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What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?

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There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth.

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Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”6

2 Making the Bed: Liturgy, Ritual, and What Forms a Life

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The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.

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and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary.

3 Brushing Teeth: Standing, Kneeling, Bowing, and Living in a Body

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So much of life, unavoidably, is just maintenance.

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This is especially true of our bodies.

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Having a body is a lot of work.

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in orthodox Christianity, our bodies matter profoundly.

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the Christianity we find in Scripture values and honors the body.

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When Jesus redeems us, that redemption occurs in our bodies. And when we die, we will not float away to heaven and leave our bodies behind but will experience the resurrection of our bodies.

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Our bodies and souls are inseparable, and therefore what we do with our bodies and what we do with our souls are always entwined.

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Because of Christ’s embodiment, the ways we care for our bodies are not meaningless necessities that keep us well enough to do the real work of worship and discipleship.

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If the church does not teach us what our bodies are for, our culture certainly will.

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we must learn the habit of beholding our bodies as a gift, and learn to delight in the body God has made for us, that God loves, and that God will one day redeem and make whole.

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Because of the embodied work of Jesus, my body is destined for redemption and for eternal worship—for eternal skipping and jumping and twirling and hand raising and kneeling and dancing and singing and chewing and tasting.

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When I brush my teeth I am pushing back, in the smallest of ways, the death and chaos that will inevitably overtake my body.

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I’ll hold on to the truth that my body, in all its brokenness, is beloved, and that one day it will be, like the resurrected body of Christ, glorious.

4 Losing Keys: Confession and the Truth About Ourselves

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This is the roadside ditch of broken things and lost objects, the potholes of gloom and unwanted interruptions. And yet here is where I find myself on an ordinary day, and here, in my petty anger and irritation, is where the Savior deigns to meet me. These moments are an opportunity for formation, for sanctification.

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When the day is lovely and sunny and everything is going according to plan, I can look like a pretty good person. But little things gone wrong and interrupted plans reveal who I really am; my cracks show and I see that I am profoundly in need of grace.

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When suffering is sharp and profound, I expect and believe that God will meet me in its midst. But in the struggles of my average day I somehow feel I have a right to be annoyed.

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The call to contentment is a call amidst the concrete circumstances I find myself in today.

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I’d developed the habit of ignoring God in the midst of the daily grind.

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I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ in these small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, of encountering Christ’s death and resurrection—this big story of brokenness and redemption—in a small, gray, stir-crazy Tuesday morning.

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repentance and faith are the constant, daily rhythms of the Christian life, our breathing out and breathing in.

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Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ.

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The practice of confession and absolution must find its way into the small moments of sinfulness in my day. When it does, the gospel—grace itself—seeps into my day, and these moments are transformed.

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God searches more earnestly for me than I do for my keys. He is zealous to find his people and to make them whole.

5 Eating Leftovers: Word, Sacrament, and Overlooked Nourishment

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Thousands of forgotten meals have brought me to today. They’ve sustained my life. They were my daily bread. We are endlessly in need of nourishment, and nourishment comes, usually, like taco soup. Abundant and overlooked.

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Eugene Peterson calls this quest for spiritual intensity a consumer-driven “market for religious experience in our world.” He says that “there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

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How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread.

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with anonymity and ingratitude comes injustice.

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God has made us not merely to consume but to cultivate, steward, and bless.

6 Fighting with My Husband: Passing the Peace and the Everyday Work of Shalom

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I can get caught up in big ideas of justice and truth and neglect the small opportunities around me to extend kindness, forgiveness, and grace.

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I am increasingly aware that I cannot seek God’s peace and mission in the world without beginning right where I am, in my home, in my neighborhood, in my church, with the real people right around me.

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Ordinary love, anonymous and unnoticed as it is, is the substance of peace on earth, the currency of God’s grace in our daily life.

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Steven reminds me of reality—the world is no tea party.

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I also need to remember that my small sphere, my ordinary day, matters to the mission—that the ordinary and unnoticed passing of the peace each day is part of what God is growing in and through me. It will bring a harvest, in good time.

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We can become far too comfortable with the American status quo, and we need prophetic voices that challenge us to follow our radical, comfort-afflicting Redeemer. But we must also learn to follow Jesus in this workaday world of raising kids, caring for our neighbors, budgeting, doing laundry, and living our days responsibly with stability, generosity, and faithfulness.

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It will cost us something to be about this ministry of reconciliation—even in our kitchens, even in comfy pants.

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We are quarreling people, but God is reforming us to be people who, through our ordinary moments, establish his kingdom of peace.

7 Checking Email: Blessing and Sending

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The work we do together each week in gathered worship transforms and sends us into the work we do in our homes and offices.

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We are people who are blessed and sent; this identity transforms how we embody work and worship in the world, in our week, even in our small day.

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The idea that all good work is holy work was revolutionary. The Reformation toppled a vocational hierarchy that had placed monks, nuns, and priests at the top and everyone else below.

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The Reformers taught that a farmer may worship God by being a good farmer and that a parent changing diapers could be as near to Jesus as the pope. This was a scandal.

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The Christian faith teaches that all work that is not immoral or unethical is part of God’s kingdom mission.

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all work, even a simple, small task, matters eternally.

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Each week when we gather for worship we enact again the reality that we are blessed and sent.

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This kingdom vision—our identity as those blessed and sent—must work itself out in the small routines of our daily work and vocation, as we go to meetings, check our email, make our children dinner, or mow the lawn.

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Christian holiness is not a free-floating goodness removed from the world, a few feet above the ground. It is specific and, in some sense, tailored to who we particularly are. We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can’t be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life.

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Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives.

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We learn the craft of holiness day by day in the living of a particular life.

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Garber says, In the daily rhythms for everyone everywhere, we live our lives in the marketplaces of this world: in homes and neighborhoods, in schools and on farms, in hospitals and businesses, and our vocations are bound up with the ordinary work that ordinary people do. We are not great shots across the bow of history; rather, by simple grace, we are hints of hope.

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We are part of God’s big vision and mission—the redemption of all things—through the earthy craft of living out our vocation, hour by hour, task by task. I want to do the big work of the kingdom, but I have to learn to live it out in the small tasks before me—the missio Dei in the daily grind.

8 Sitting in Traffic: Liturgical Time and an Unhurried God

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In my frenetic life, I forget how to slow down and wait.

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One of my favorite scenes in literature is when the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels think that, because Gulliver keeps checking his clock, it must be his god.

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the reality is that I do not control time. Every day I wait. I wait for help, for healing, for days to come, for rescue and redemption. And like all of us, I’m waiting to die.

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Christians are people who wait. We live in liminal time, in the already and not yet. Christ has come, and he will come again. We dwell in the meantime. We wait.

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How can I live as one who watches and waits for the coming kingdom when I can barely wait for water to boil?

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Patience [is] the basic constituent of Christianity . . . the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one’s own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of the lamb which is led.

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Because of Christ’s work, we wait with expectation. We replace the despair that the passing of time inevitably brings—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”—with faith—“if we have died with him, we shall also live with him.”

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Scripture tells us that when we “hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8:25). We live each ordinary day in the light of a future reality. Our best life is still to come.

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Jan, who had practiced waiting far longer and better than I, knew what it was like to wait patiently, believing that God’s timing is perfect and that, mysteriously, there is more happening while we wait than just waiting.

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Tertullian. The singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient . . . is to live without hope. Patience is grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God’s doing, and its sign is longing, not so much to be released from the ills of the present, but in anticipation of the good to come.

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our patience does not make us passive about the brokenness of the world. We are not blithely waiting to abandon this world for another. Christian faith is never an otherwordly, pie-in-the-sky sentimentality that ignores the injustice and darkness around us. We know that things are not as they should be.

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Christians are marked not only by patience, but also by longing. We are oriented to our future hope, yet we do not try to escape from our present reality, from the real and pressing brokenness and suffering in the world. As Smith puts it, we “will always sit somewhat uneasy in the present, haunted by the brokenness of the ‘now.’ The future we hope for—a future when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream—hangs over our present and gives us a vision of what to work for in the here and now as we continue to pray, ‘Your kingdom come.’”

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The future orientation of Christian time reminds us that we are people on the way. It allows us to live in the present as an alternative people, patiently waiting for what is to come, but never giving up on our telos. We are never quite comfortable. We seek justice, practice mercy, and herald the kingdom to come.

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we are people who live by a different story. And not just by a story, but in a story. God is redeeming all things, and our lives—even our days—are part of that redemption.

9 Calling a Friend: Congregation and Community

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In his Institutes, John Calvin quotes Cyprian’s famous dictum (drawing on Paul’s language in Galatians 4) that “He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”

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our love for the church universal is worked out in the hard pews (or folding chairs) of our particular, local congregation. A local congregation, a parish, is our small, concrete entry into the universal church. It is the basic unit of Christian community and the place where we encounter God in Word and sacrament.

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God loves and delights in the people in the pews around me and dares me to find beauty in them.

10 Drinking Tea: Sanctuary and Savoring

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Workaholism and constant connectivity fight against our ability to be present to the pleasure of the moment.

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Chesterton imagines that God revels in the pleasure of his creation like an enthusiastic child: Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

11 Sleeping: Sabbath, Rest, and the Work of God

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my habits reveal and shape what I love and what I value, whether I care to admit it or not.

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Our need for sleep reveals that we have limits. We are unable to defend ourselves, to keep ourselves safe, to master the world around us. Sleep exposes reality. We are frail and weak. We need a guide and a guard.

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Most of us spend much time and energy trying to avoid the reality that we and those we love will die. But in facing the reality of death, we learn how to live rightly. We learn how to live in light of our limits and the brevity of our lives. And we learn to live in the hope of the resurrection.

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Each night when we yield to sleep, we practice letting go of our reliance on self-effort and abiding in the good grace of our Creator. Thus embracing sleep is not only a confession of our limits; it is also a joyful confession of God’s limitless care for us.

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In our workaholic, image-barraged, overcaffeinated, entertainment-addicted, and supercharged culture, submission to our creatureliness is a necessary and often overlooked part of discipleship.

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God wants to give us not just lives of holiness and prayer but also of sufficient rest.

The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard

 

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Dallas Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines offers a theological basis for the validity and value of the historic Christian disciplines. His premise is simple. Jesus practiced these disciplines. For the one who would answer the call to, "Follow me," who would be Christlike, who would truly apprentice themselves to Jesus, the disciplines, rightly practiced, provide the path to growth in grace and living as Jesus lived.

Below, find my Kindle highlights from this thought-provoking book.

Notebook for

The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

Willard, Dallas

Citation (APA): Willard, D. (2009). The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

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Preface

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The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.

Chapter 1

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A successful performance at a moment of crisis rests largely and essentially upon the depths of a self wisely and rigorously prepared in the totality of its being— mind and body.

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grace does not mean that sufficient strength and insight will be automatically “infused” into our being in the moment of need.

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the secret of the easy yoke:

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To live as Christ lived is to live as he did all his life.

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We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.

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those who say we cannot truly follow Christ turn out to be correct in a sense. We cannot behave “on the spot” as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does.

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True Christlikeness, true companionship with Christ, comes at the point where it is hard not to respond as he would.

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if we wish to follow Christ— and to walk in the easy yoke with him— we will have to accept his overall way of life as our way of life totally.

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Asking ourselves “What would Jesus do?” when suddenly in the face of an important situation simply is not an adequate discipline or preparation to enable one to live as he lived.

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The secret of the easy yoke, then, is to learn from Christ how to live our total lives, how to invest all our time and our energies of mind and body as he did.

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The secret of the easy yoke is simple, actually. It is the intelligent, informed, unyielding resolve to live as Jesus lived in all aspects of his life, not just in the moment of specific choice or action.

Chapter 2

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Practical theology studies the manner in which our actions interact with God to accomplish his ends in human life.

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the church at present has lost any realistic and specific sense of what it means for the individual believer to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” as 2 Peter 3: 18 expresses it.

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spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results.

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True character transformation begins, we are taught to believe, in the pure grace of God and is continually assisted by it. Very well. But action is also indispensable in making the Christian truly a different kind of person—

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“Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven” became a popular bumper sticker. (While correct in the letter, this declaration nullifies serious effort toward spiritual growth.)

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Every Christian must strive to arrive at beliefs about God that faithfully reflect the realities of his or her life and experience, so that each may know how to live effectively before him in his world. That’s theology!

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Full participation in the life of God’s Kingdom and in the vivid companionship of Christ comes to us only through appropriate exercise in the disciplines for life in the spirit.

Chapter 5

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What is it that is missing in our deformed condition? From a biblical perspective, there can be no doubt that it is the appropriate relation to the spiritual Kingdom of God that is the missing “nutriment” in the human system. Without it our life is left mutilated, stunted, weakened, and deformed in various stages of disintegration and corruption.

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But the essence and aim of spirituality is not to correct social and political injustices. That will be its effect—though never exactly in ways we imagine as we come to it with our preexisting political concerns.

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Those who worry that unless we act against authority structures our spirituality will accomplish nothing simply do not understand what spirituality is.

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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 that Kingdom order significantly depends upon the individual’s initiative.

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we also learn by experience that the harmonization of our total self with God will not be done for us. We must act.

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The approach to wholeness is for humankind a process of great length and difficulty that engages all our own powers to their fullest extent over a long course of experience. But we don’t like to hear this.

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The ordinary purification and healing, whether of the body or of the mind, takes place only little by little, by passing from one degree to another with labor and patience.

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The soul that rises from sin to devotion may be compared to the dawning of the day, which at its approach does not expel the darkness instantaneously but only little by little.12

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it is necessary to say that conversion, as understood in Christian circles, is not the same thing as the required transformation of the self. The fact that a long course of experience is needed for the transformation is not set aside when we are touched by the new life from above.

Chapter 6

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Human personality is not separable in our consciousness from the human body. And that fact is expressed by asserting the IDENTITY of the person as his or her body. This fact is what makes it necessary for us to make our bodies, through the disciplines for the spiritual life, our primary focus of effort in our part in the process of redemption.

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The disciplines for the spiritual life, rightly understood, are time-tested activities consciously undertaken by us as new men or women to allow our spirit ever-increasing sway over our embodied selves. They help by assisting the ways of God’s Kingdom to take the place of the habits of sin embedded in our bodies.

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Chapter 7

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there’s nothing left to do but accept this psychological fact about human personality and realize that the rigorous form of life mandatory for excellence is the only way in which we can, as Paul directs, “purge” ourselves into becoming a “vessel unto honor, sanctified, and meet for the Master’s use, prepared unto every good work” (2 Tim. 2:21). We must accept it and submit ourselves to it, knowing that the rigors of discipline certainly lead to the easy yoke and the full joy of Christ.

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Who are the great ones in The Way, what are the significant movements in the history of the church that do not bear the deep and pervasive imprint of the disciplines for the spiritual life? If there are none, 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?

Chapter 8

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the mark of disciplined persons is that they are able to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.

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The preparation for all of life’s actions including the spiritual, essentially involve bodily behaviors.

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whatever is purely mental cannot transform the self.

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One of the greatest deceptions in the practice of the Christian religion is the idea that all that really matters is our internal feelings, ideas, beliefs, and intentions. It is this mistake about the psychology of the human being that more than anything else divorces salvation from life, leaving us a headful of vital truths about God and a body unable to fend off sin.

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Obedience is the natural outflow of the experienced faith and love.

Chapter 9

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Bishop Wilson of the Isle of Man: “Those who deny themselves will be sure to find their strength increased, their affections raised, and their inward peace continually augmented.”

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Of all the disciplines of abstinence, solitude is generally the most fundamental in the beginning of the spiritual life, and it must be returned to again and again as that life develops.

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Locked into interaction with the human beings that make up our fallen world, it is all but impossible to grow in grace as one should.

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we must reemphasize, the “desert” or “closet” is the primary place of strength for the beginner, as it was for Christ and for Paul. They show us by their example what we must do. In stark aloneness it is possible to have silence, to be still, and to know that Jehovah indeed is God (Ps. 46:10), to set the Lord before our minds with sufficient intensity and duration that we stay centered upon him—our hearts fixed, established in trust (Ps. 112:7–8)—even when back in the office, shop, or home.

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As Miguel de Unamuno says, “We need to pay less attention to what people are trying to tell us, and more to what they tell us without trying.”

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Thomas a Kempis remarks: “Whosoever knows best how to suffer will keep the greatest peace. That man is conqueror of himself, and lord of the world, the friend of Christ, and heir of Heaven.”

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Frugality as a settled style of life frees us from indifferent things.

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Sexuality cannot be allowed to permeate our lives if we are to live as children of God and brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.

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God has yet to bless anyone except where they are.

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I believe the discipline of service is even more important for Christians who find themselves in positions of influence, power, and leadership. To live as a servant while fulfilling socially important roles is one of the greatest challenges any disciple ever faces.

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Constant prayer will only “burden” us as wings burden the bird in flight.

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prayer will not be established in our lives as it must be for us to florish, unless we are practicing other disciplines such as solitude and fasting. In many Protestant churches prayer and Bible study are held up as the activities that will make us spiritually rich. But very few people actually succeed in attaining spiritual richness through them and indeed often find them to be intolerably burdensome.

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Christian redemption is not devised to be a solitary thing, though each individual of course has a unique and direct relationship with God, and God alone is his or her Lord and Judge. But The Life is one that requires some regular and profound conjunction with others who share it. It is greatly diminished when that is lacking.

Chapter 10

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The idealization of poverty is one of the most dangerous illusions of Christians in the contemporary world.

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Stewardship—which requires possessions and includes giving—is the true spiritual discipline in relation to wealth.

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While certain individuals may be given a specific call to poverty, in general, being poor is one of the poorest of ways to help the poor.

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If giving is good, having is also good—providing one’s spiritual balance is retained. If giving much is good, having much is also good. If giving more is good, having more is also good.

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the delusions caused by possessions cannot be prevented by having none.

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The percentage of those in bondage to wealth is no greater among the rich than among the poor. It is not money or gain, but the love of it, that is said by Paul to be the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10), and none love it more desperately and unrealistically than those without it.

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Poverty as a general practice cannot solve humankind’s bondage to wealth. Freedom from possessions is not an outward thing as much as an inward one. It is something that can come from the inward vision of faith alone.

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St. Antony left us these beautiful words: Some of those who stop in inns are given beds, while others having no beds stretch themselves on the floor and sleep as soundly as those in beds. In the morning, when night is over, all alike get up and leave the inn, carrying away with them only their own belongings. It is the same with those who tread the path of this life: both those who have lived in modest circumstances, and those who had wealth and fame, leave this life like an inn, taking with them no worldly comforts or riches, but only what they have done in this life, whether it be good or bad.

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The overarching biblical command is to love, and the first act of love is always the giving of attention. Therefore the poor are not to be avoided, forgotten, or allowed to become invisible.

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The most biblical of churches are permeated with favoritism toward the rich and comfortable, the beautiful and famous—or at least toward “our kind of people.” Yet, many will insist, this is necessary for the advancement of the cause of Christ. We cannot sustain our programs, we are told, unless we can attract and hold the right kinds of people. These people seem to have forgotten that the church’s business is to make the right kind of people out of the wrong kind.

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Remember, Jesus did not send help. He came among us. He was victorious under our conditions of existence. That makes all the difference. We continue on his incarnational model when we follow the apostle’s command “to associate with people of low position” by unassumingly walking with them in the path of their daily affairs, not just on special occasions created because of their need.

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We are not speaking of political power as normally understood, but of personal vocation fulfilled in the power of God. Possession and direction of the forces of wealth are as legitimate an expression of the redemptive rule of God in human life as is Bible teaching or a prayer meeting.

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Holy people must stop going into “church work” as their natural course of action and take up holy orders in farming, industry, law, education, banking, and journalism with the same zeal previously given to evangelism or to pastoral and missionary work.

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He, therefore, is the devout man, who lives no longer to his own will, or the way and spirit of the world, but to the sole will of God; who considers God in everything, who serves God in everything, who makes all the parts of his common life parts of piety, by doing everything in the Name of God, and under such rules as are conformable to His glory.

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Our possessions increase the range within which we can reign in life by Christ Jesus and see spiritual power defeat the deadly reign of sin.

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As the tendency to sin in the body is not its natural or necessary condition, so it is with wealth. Wealth is but a part of created reality, pronounced by God as good. But like the body before redemption the wealth of this fallen world usually tends toward evil. This “normal” tendency can and must be removed through possession and purification by us, its owners, who live to see it submitted to God.

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Riches are not holy, riches are not evil. They are creations we are to use for God.

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Here is where Wesley erred, failing to appreciate the aspects of stewardship other than charity. His famous formula, “Get all you can; save all you can; give all you can,” must be supplemented. It should read: get all you can; save all you can; freely use all you can within a properly disciplined spiritual life; and control all you can for the good of humankind and God’s glory. Giving all you can would then naturally be a part of an overall wise stewardship.

Chapter 11

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More often than not, faith has failed, sadly enough, to transform the human character of the masses, because it is usually unaccompanied by discipleship and by an overall discipline of life such as Christ himself practiced.

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nothing is really practical in relation to human aspirations for the world if it does not proceed from deep insight into the realities of the human heart and does not call into question the fundamental forces that move human life and history. And that lack of insight is starkly and constantly revealed by our tendency to ask “Why?” when faced by the evils people do.

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We certainly think it would be wonderful if we and all others would try to make a difference—to do what we should—and we often say so. But we do not want to bother with becoming the sort of people who actually, naturally do that.

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the immediate support of the evils universally deplored lies in the simple readiness of “decent” individuals to harm others or allow harm to come to others when the conditions are “right.” That readiness comes into play whenever it will help us realize our goals of security, ego gratification, or satisfaction of bodily desires. This systematic readiness that pervades the personality of normal, decent human beings is fallen human nature. To understand this is the first level of understanding the “why” of the evil people do.

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Only the common grace of God toward us and the presence in the world of the Holy Spirit and the institutionalized church prevents our daily lives, resting upon the edge of the volcano of readiness, from being unbearably worse.

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Holiness is, fundamentally, otherness or separateness from the ordinary realm of human existence in which we believe we know what we are doing and what is going on. It is the idea of “something else,” in current terminology.

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Almost all evil deeds and intents are begun with the thought that they can be hidden by deceit.

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The highest education, as well as the strictest doctrinal views and religious practice, often leave untouched the heart of darkness from which the demons come to perch upon the lacerated back of humankind.

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We have one realistic hope for dealing with the world’s problems. And that is the person and gospel of Jesus Christ, living here and now, in people who are his by total identification found through the spiritual disciplines.

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Why? This faith and discipline yields a new humanity, one for which “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” or “Our Father who art in heaven” does not express a resolve, a hope, or a commitment, but a vision in whose firm grip Jesus’ people live with abandon. Their vision is one that regards worry about what we will eat or drink or wear as completely pointless. The natural thing for them is to “be careful for nothing,” as Philippians 4:6–7 says, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” People of this new humanity are not afraid “even if the world blows up, and the mountains crumble into the sea” (Ps. 46:2, LB). Living is Christ, dying is gain (Phil. 1:21).

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the whole of humankind can, at the appropriate moment in history, receive the risen and ascended Christ as its effectively reigning Lord. The government shall be upon his shoulders in reality. This is the future event we should keep in mind when learned people tell us that personal virtue is not an answer to social ills. The effect of this saying is to keep people working at changing society without attempting the radical transformation of character. It pleads for a continuation of “life as usual,” which is precisely the source of the problem. Often, those who work in this way like to think of themselves as “radicals.” They fail to go to the root of social order and disorder, though. The only true “radical” is the one who proposes a different character and life for human beings.

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I believe, to the contrary, that the coming rule of God is to be a government by grace and truth mediated through personalities mature in Christ. It will not be by force, but by the power of truth presented in overwhelming love. Our inability to conceive of it other than by force merely testifies to our obsession with human means for controlling other people.

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There is a way of life that, if generally adopted, would eliminate all of the social and political problems from which we suffer. This way of life comes to whole-hearted disciples of Christ who live in the disciplines of the spiritual life and allow grace to bring their bodies into alignment with their redeemed spirits.

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God waits for a fullness of time determined by our capacities to receive what he would give. He calls us to be a part of his efforts. Our part is to understand the way God works with humanity to extend his Kingdom in the affairs of humankind, and to act on the basis of that understanding.

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The key to understanding our part is the realization that God only moves forward with his redemptive plan through people who are prepared to receive freely and cooperate with him in the next step.

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Christ is really out in the world, where we have not yet had the courage to follow him fully. Only “outside” is great enough for him. But still he knocks at our little door and invites us to invite him in.

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the responsibility for the condition of the world in years or centuries to come rests upon the leaders and teachers of the Christian church.

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The people of Christ have never lacked for available power to accomplish the task set for them by their Master. But they have failed to make disciples, in the New Testament sense of the term.

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Ministers pay far too much attention to people who do not come to services.

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The Christian leader has something much more important to do than pursue the godless. The leader’s task is to equip saints until they are like Christ (Eph. 4:12), and history and the God of history waits for him to do this job.

Epilogue

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The spirit of the disciplines—that which moves us to them and moves through them to prevent them from becoming a new bondage and to deepen constantly our union with the heart and mind of God—is this love of Jesus, with its steadfast longing and resolute will to be like him.

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he is teaching that obedience and love go together because love alone stays to find a way to obey.

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We cannot too often center our minds upon his loveliness and kindness, that we might love him more and more.

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God changes lives in response to faith. But just as there is no faith that does not act, so there is no act without some plan. Faith grows from the experience of acting on plans and discovering God to be acting with us.

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It is time to take what you have learned and make your own specific plan for your life with them. This will come down to what you do on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. More importantly, at the outset, it will come down to what you do not do, to how you will manage to step out of the everlasting busyness that curses our lives. Didn’t God give you quite enough time to do what he expects you to do? (Careful how you answer that one!)

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You cannot follow him without a plan to serve as the vessel in which the treasure of his life is received. Your plan will also be the cross on which you die to your old self and meet him in his life beyond death.

Appendix II

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The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plane.