Category: 2023 – Foster’s Celebration of Discipline

For 2023, I’m focusing on Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline.  For our first four months, we focused on the Inner Disciplines of Meditation; Prayer; Fasting; and Study. 

Now, we turn to the first of four Outward Disciplines: Simplicity.  In Ecclesiastes 7:30, King Solomon wrote, “God made man simple; man’s complex problems are of his own devising.”

The Christian Discipline of simplicity is an inward reality that results in an outward life-style. Both the inward and the outward aspects of simplicity are essential.

Simplicity begins in inward focus and unity. Consider living simply as noted by these two great Christian authors:

• Thomas Kelly talks of “The Divine Center” as a path to simplicity.
• Søren Kierkegaard captured the nucleus of Christian simplicity well in the profound title of his book, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.

Experiencing the inward reality liberates us outwardly.

Click here to learn more from Richard Foster on the Discipline of Simplicity

19^th Century English cleric and author Charles Caleb Colton went on to say, “He that to what he sees, adds observation, and to what he reads, reflection, is in the right road to knowledge, provided that in scrutinizing the hearts of others, he neglects not his own.”

Jesus made it unmistakably clear that the knowledge of the truth will set us free. As He put it in John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Good feelings will not free us. Ecstatic experiences will not free us. Getting “high on Jesus” will not free us. Without a knowledge of the truth, we will not be free.

Study is a specific kind of experience in which through careful attention to reality the mind is enabled to move in a certain direction. Remember, the mind will always take on an order conforming to the order upon which it concentrates.

Click here to learn more from Richard Foster on the Discipline of Study