The Spirit of the Disciplines

The conflict between flesh and spirit is the experience of all who begin the spiritual life by the influx of God’s life-giving word. Sometimes the conflict is long, sometimes short. This is where the spiritual disciplines come in. 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.

Sometimes, as it did for Simon Peter, it often appears as if the body has a life of its own capable of action to some degree independent of, or in conflict with, our conscious thoughts and intentions.

Whatever further qualifications and explanations must be added, you cannot in the final analysis love another person in the normal human sense and not also love his or her body; and you cannot love or really care about that body and not love the person also.

It is clear from all of this that nothing we can recognize as human experience and personality is separable from the meanings and orientations and habits embedded in the flesh of a particular human body.

For instance, we do not have any knowledge or experience that is totally free from involvement with our bodies. Our experience of others and of ourselves is always directed in part toward an embodied condition.

such Christians are everywhere, and what they are missing is the wholesome liveliness springing from a balanced vitality within the freedom of God’s loving rule.

Such failure to attain a deeply satisfying life always has the effect of making sinful actions seem good. Here lies the strength of temptation. This is no less true if the failure is caused by our efforts to be what we regard as “spiritual.” Normally, our success in overcoming temptation will be easier if we are basically happy in our lives. To cut off the joys and pleasures associated with our bodily and social existence as “unspiritual,” then, can actually have the effect of weakening us in our efforts to do what is right. It makes it impossible for us to see and draw strength from the goodness of rightness.

Christians who fail in the area of sex and love are among the more “colorful” sinners commonly encountered. It has become almost proverbial how the minister may fall in love with the church organist or other associate and leave an offended community and a floundering church group behind to wonder why.

A dead leaf cannot remain where a new bud is springing, nor can worldliness remain where the blessings of the Spirit are flowing.4

We cannot be normal physically, mentally or spiritually if we neglect this vital factor in human life. God has provided that our joy shall be full.

cal energy. Overemphasis on negatives, Chafer points out, leaves the impression that spirituality is contrary to pleasure, liberty, and spontaneous expression.

This view, however, is not only opposed to scriptural teaching, but is a device of Satan to make the blessed life in God distasteful to young people overflowing with physi

or the matters at issue, that means that we human beings must lead our lives before God in an open, adventurous, and reflective manner. Only then shall we find what is actually possible for us as physical organisms.