Five Days to a Healthier Spiritual LifeSýnishorn

A Process of Becoming

Becoming a healthy Christian is a lifelong process of change, day by day.

Our spiritual disciplines make up the nature of our discipleship to Jesus. It is the continual surrender of all of life to God’s good design for identity, belonging, and purpose. Paul calls this “your true worship” (Rom. 12:1), and Jesus likens it to branches finding life on the vine (John 15). He is the vine, and we are the branches; the branch only thrives connected to the vine. Our act of worship and our connection to the vine are daily habits of reliance on God. Jesus tells us that to love Him is to follow His design for life (John 15:10), and Paul calls this keeping “in step with the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25).

While we need daily reminders to depend on God, Christ loves without a sticky note. Our union with Christ invites us to receive love rather than fight for God’s attention. Habits of discipline in the Christian life are an intentional returning to God’s reality until it is our predominant way of being. I say predominant because, on this side of glory, we are never fully free from the presence and power of sin, but we are no longer slaves to it. The Holy Spirit is working out what God has worked into us through Christ. Our part is to abide, return, and remain in a trusting relationship with Him. In this, we are progressively renewed from the inside out.

This renewal takes place through our working out of our stories, seeing where God has been present at every turn. As we use spiritual disciplines to direct our attention, engage our emotions, and embrace creaturely limits in specific, repeated ways, we’ll find that we’re actually participating in life with God instead of living our spiritual lives on the sidelines.

We’ll find we’re training for life with God and that we are loved and kept by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We’ll find that we’re increasingly hearing His voice, seeing His hand at work, and trusting His heart over our own through the power of the Spirit, who helps us live out who we are truly becoming in Christ.

Eventually, as we keep at it, we’ll also realize that at some point along the way, we started doing these disciplines not out of duty but joy, for we’ve come to discover that God is who He says He is and that a whole life regularly offered up to Him is indeed the good life.

Ultimately, we’ll find that we’ve become more like Him too.

Thank you for reading!

Thank you for reading this plan, which is based on A Short Guide to Spiritual Disciplines: How to Become a Healthy Christian (B&H Publishing, 2023). Click here to find out more information about the book.