Celebration of Discipline Book Summary-Abbreviated
Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster
The disciplines are:
- marked by joy
- characterized by liberation and greater freedom and not bondage
- essential in order to be a disciple
The primary requirement for a disciple is a longing after God.
A new realization: inner righteousness is a gift from God to be graciously received. It is God's work, not ours. Righteousness is unattained and unattainable through human effort. However, God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform and bless us.
As we walk, we see the inner change. We no longer have to work hard at being good and kind; we are good and kind.
However, law-bound Disciplines breathe death. We must avoid a focus on external righteousness. As we practice, there will always be danger of turning our particular form of discipline into laws.
The Inward Disciplines
- Meditation: Christian meditation is the ability to hear God's voice and obey his word. The purpose of meditation is to "grow in a familiar friendship with Jesus." In meditation "we create the emotional and spiritual space which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary in our heart." The aim is to then bring this reality into all of life.
- Prayer: In real prayer, we begin to think God's thoughts after him: to desire the things he desires, to love the things he loves, to will the things he wills. Prayer does make an objective difference. A closed universe is not consistent with the Bible. Real prayer is something we learn.
- Fasting: Fasting must be God-initiated and God-ordained. The normal means of fasting involves abstaining from all food, solid or liquid, but not from water.
- Study: Study is a specific kind of experience in which through careful attention to reality the mind is enabled to move in a certain direction. When this is done with concentration, perception, and repetition, ingrained habits of thought are formed.
The Outward Disciplines
- Simplicity: Simplicity is an inner freedom from anxiety characterized by three inner attitudes: 1) what we have we receive as a gift and 2) what have is to be cared for by God and 3) what we have is available to others. This inner freedom results in outward change.
- Solitude: Solitude is, whether alone or among people, carrying with one a portable sanctuary of the heart. It is a recreating stillness.
- Submission: Submission is self-denial: the ability to lay down the terrible burden of always needing to get our own way. In submission we are at last free to value (consider fully and respect) other people.
- Service: Service to become a servant like Christ, to experience the many little deaths of going beyond ourselves, to banish ourselves to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial.
The Corporate Disciplines
- Confession: Confession (corporate) is to bring concrete sins, both outward and sins of the heart, with another and to receive the absolution for that sin. It involves 1) an examination of conscience, 2) sorrow, and 3) a determination to avoid sin.
- Worship: Worship is the human response to the divine initiative. It is kindled within us only when the Spirt of God touches our human spirit. Forms and rituals do not produce it. We worship the Lord because of who he is and also because of what he has done.
- Guidance: Guidance (corporate) is the assurance that when a people are gathered in his name that his will can be discerned.
- Celebration: Celebration is a joyful spirit of festivity, the motor that keeps the other disciplines going. Joy produces energy and makes us strong. Joy is produced through obedience. We begin by setting our mind on the higher things of life, good and excellent things.
Explanation of how the disciplines relate:
"Meditation heightens our spiritual sensitivity which, in turn, leads us into prayer. Very soon we discover that prayer involves fasting as an accompanying means. Informed by these three Disciplines, we can effectively move into study which gives us discernment about ourselves and the world in which we live.
Through simplicity we live with others in integrity. Solitude allows us to be genuinely present to people when we are with them. Through submission we live with others without manipulation, and through service we are a blessing to them.
Confession frees us from ourselves and releases us to worship. Worship opens the door to guidance. All the Disciplines freely exercised bring forth the doxology of celebration."