The Spiritual Disciplines Are Not About Earning God's Love

The Misunderstanding That Ruins the Practices

Ask most Christians why they fast or observe silence or practice simplicity, and you will hear one of two answers. Either: "I do not really do those things" — the response of people who find spiritual disciplines either irrelevant or too demanding. Or: "I am trying to be more disciplined" — which, while earnest, already contains the problem.

The word "trying" gives it away. Trying implies that the discipline itself is the goal, and the goal is to achieve a spiritual standard. Practice long enough, rigorously enough, and perhaps God will be more pleased with you. Fail at the discipline, and you have failed spiritually.

This is not how the disciplines work. It is, in fact, precisely the misunderstanding they are meant to correct.

Training, Not Trying

Dallas Willard, in The Spirit of the Disciplines (HarperOne, 1988), draws a distinction that cuts through most of the confusion. Spiritual disciplines are not "trying harder" to be Christlike. They are training to become the kind of person who naturally acts as Christ would act. The difference is the difference between a sprinter willing herself to run faster during a race and that same sprinter doing months of carefully structured training so that speed becomes native to her.

"Grace is not opposed to effort," Willard wrote in The Great Omission (HarperOne, 2006). "It is opposed to earning." This single sentence resolves the apparent contradiction between grace and discipline. The disciplines are not the mechanism by which we secure God's favor. They are the gymnasium in which God's freely given grace reshapes us.

Fasting does not make God love you more. It weakens the grip of appetites that prevent you from receiving what God is already offering. Silence does not impress God. It quiets the noise that makes it difficult to hear the One who is already speaking. Simplicity does not secure divine approval. It loosens the attachments that compete with love of God and neighbor.

What the Disciplines Actually Do

The practices do not change God's disposition toward us. They change our capacity to receive and live in what God has already freely given.

Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline (HarperOne, 1978) identifies classical spiritual practices and notes they share a common shape: they are means, not ends. No one is meant to be a faster as an identity. No one is meant to be a practitioner of silence as an achievement. The disciplines are scaffolding, erected so that something else — the actual building of Christlike character — can take shape within the person.

This matters because without this framing, the disciplines become either a burden (for those who attempt them with a works-righteousness motivation) or an irrelevancy (for those who rightly reject earning God's love but wrongly conclude that no intentional practice is therefore necessary). Both errors leave a person unchanged.

Starting Where You Are

Willard was characteristically direct: you do not have to be spiritually mature to begin. You begin precisely because you are not. The disciplines are for people who recognize they are not yet the kind of person they want to be — not for those who have already arrived.

This reframes the starting point. You are not beginning because you are disciplined. You are beginning because you are not, and you want to be shaped into someone who can freely give and receive the life Jesus described.

Helper

A simple thirty-day starting practice:

1. Choose one discipline — fasting one meal per week, fifteen minutes of silence each morning, or a week of deliberate simplicity in spending.
2. Before you begin, write down what you hope to receive, not what you hope to achieve.
3. When you miss a day, note it without shame and continue the next day.
4. At the end of thirty days, ask: Was my capacity to be present — to God, to others, to my own interior life — any different? Look for small movements, not dramatic transformation.
5. Share what you noticed with one other person.