The Spirit of the Disciplines
Understanding How God Changes Lives
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Average rating3.7
How to Live as Jesus Lived
Dallas Willard, one of today's most brilliant Christian thinkers and author of The Divine Conspiracy (Christianity Today's 1999 Book of the Year), presents a way of living that enables ordinary men and women to enjoy the fruit of the Christian life. He reveals how the key to self-transformation resides in the practice of the spiritual disciplines, and how their practice affirms human life to the fullest. The Spirit of the Disciplines is for everyone who strives to be a disciple of Jesus in thought and action as well as intention.
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If you're into spiritual growth, philosophical musings, and rambling sentences, this is your jam!
If I was only rating Willard's message about the importance of the spiritual disciplines, this would be 5 stars. If I was only rating the prose, it would be 2 stars. So that evens out to 3.
Willard makes a great case for the importance of spiritual disciplines to any Christian's life, but he spends way too much time making it. It's more than 150 pages before he even gets to examples of disciplines that we can practice. The rest is trying to convince me and, since I bought the book, I was already convinced and didn't need that.
There are some great nuggets here, but also a lot of superfluous commentary, and it takes him a lot of time to make a point. He is anything but concise. Anyone who has read Dallas Willard knows to expect that, though.
If you want to know about the spiritual disciplines, why they're important, and what life is like with and without them, this is a great resource. If you want to just cut to the chase to get to how you can start practicing the disciplines, there are likely better books for that.
Another great book from Dallas Willard on how to get serious about your faith and how adding the practices of solitude, fasting, service and similar can help transform your heart and, therefore, your life as you grow in love toward others and God.
