Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

Memorization Supplies Spiritual Power When Scripture is stored in your mind, it is available for the Holy Spirit to bring to your attention when you need it most.

That means when you serve the Lord in a local church or in any type of ministry, it will often be hard. Like Paul, sometimes your service will also be agonizing and exhausting. It will take your time. It will often prove more stressful or less enjoyable than other ways you could invest your life. And if for no other reason, serving God is hard work

When we pray we speak to God. Now prayer, in order to be continued for any length of time in any other than a formal manner, requires, generally speaking, a measure of strength or godly desire, and the season therefore when this exercise of the soul can be most effectually performed is after the inner man has been nourished by meditation on the Wor

Will you fast as the Holy Spirit directs? Are you willing to obey God when He prompts you to fast? Because Jesus expected that His followers would fast, I believe it is very likely that from time to time His Spirit will direct you to fast. Will you determine in advance to obey Him?

One of the most underrated benefits of memorizing Scripture is that it provides fuel for meditation. When you have memorized a verse of Scripture, you can meditate on it anywhere at any time during the day or night. If you love God’s Word enough to memorize it, you can become like the writer of Psalm 119:97, who exclaimed, “Oh how I love your law!

This means too little time, too many responsibilities, too many kids, too much work, too little desire, too little experience, and so on are not excuses that exempt us from the expectation to pray. God gives us seasons of life where priorities change as well as the time available for them;[1] nevertheless, in every season God expects every Christia

Martyn Lloyd-Jones affirms the acceptability of this wider definition of fasting: To make the matter complete, we would add that fasting, if we conceive of it truly, must not only be confined to the question of food and drink; fasting should really be made to include abstinence from anything which is legitimate in and of itself for the sake of some

In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges concurs: A major temptation in the self-discipline approach to holiness, however, is to rely on a regiment of spiritual disciplines instead of on the Holy Spirit. I believe in spiritual disciplines. I seek to practice them. . . . But those disciplines are not the source of our spiritual strength. The Lord J

Imagine a mom or dad seeing her or his child graduating from high school or college, or getting married to a godly spouse, or watching that child do something that makes his or her eyes moist with tears of joy. You say to that mom or dad, “Hey, think of all the sleepless nights you had with that child, all the dirty diapers, the tens of thousands o