The Purpose of Spiritual Disciplines

When Melissa asked me to speak, she said I could take as long or as short as I wanted to. I was like, did you forget what my last name is? Jake goes, “Why don’t they ever give me those parameters?” The thought behind this was a personal testimony with the spiritual disciplines intertwined. A lot of you have been here for a lot of this, so there’s going to be some stuff that you already know, but hopefully the intertwining is helpful.

First, we’re going to talk about the purpose of spiritual disciplines. The purpose is mature Christlikeness. As Smed already pointed out, discipline must have an aim. You don’t work out just for the sole purpose of working out; otherwise you’re just going through the motions, and you’re not adding weight, and you’re not gaining muscle and strength. It’s the same thing in the spiritual disciplines. We have to have an aim, and that’s mature Christlikeness.

Every believer is called not merely to begin the Christian life but to grow in the maturity for which God saved us. God sanctifies all those He saves, and He does so through means. Many of those means are spiritual disciplines. That maturity is what Paul aimed at in his preaching.

“Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.”

That is Colossians 1:28. It is also what God aims at in our trials.

“For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

In James 1, the word translated “perfect” can also be translated mature. I am not a Greek scholar, but thanks to living with Jacob, I know enough to tell you the word is teleios. So when you hear “perfect” and “mature,” think in those terms. James is talking about maturity and completeness in Christ.

Sanctification involves significant human effort, empowered by the Spirit. Philippians 2 says it is God who works in us, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. At the same time, 1 Timothy 4:7 tells us to discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness. God sanctifies us through means of grace, and spiritual disciplines are central among those means.

Don Whitney makes an observation that rings true: he had never known a man or woman who came to spiritual maturity except through discipline. Godliness comes through discipline. We all know that perseverance in discipline is not easy. Starting a diet or exercise plan is one thing; staying with it day after day, week after week, year after year, is something else. Consistency is hard. Spiritual discipline is even harder; in fact, it is impossible apart from the Spirit.

Just as exercise, learning an instrument, or keeping a home requires steady effort, spiritual disciplines aimed at Christlike maturity require consistency. Jake often says that you cannot microwave spiritual growth. Growth requires a long pattern of fighting sin, pursuing holiness, and living to please God. Over a lifetime, that is what leads to maturity.

Our discipline must have a goal, and that goal must be Christlikeness. God, the author of our faith and the One who brings us to maturity, puts exactly what we need in front of us at exactly the right time as the context in which we must be faithful. It does not matter what season we are in. When things are going just as we planned, when there’s no last-minute change to our schedule or demands on our time, we must be disciplined. We must be disciplined on vacation. And we must be consistent in spiritual discipline in the hardest of trials.

Normal life, vacation life, trials of life—they all have to be the arena in which we pursue Christlike maturity through the practice of spiritual disciplines. Most of my testimony is about the way God used these disciplines to sustain us, but He does not only use them to sustain us. He uses them to make us more like Jesus. My path and some of my challenges have been unique to me, but we all have the same God, and He has the same intention for our lives: Christlikeness.

Daily Practices That Lead to Maturity

I grew up in Mexico as a missionary kid and later a pastor’s kid. In our home, daily Bible reading, prayer, service, evangelism, and small-group life were just part of the rhythm. When I moved to Arizona and came to our church, those disciplines remained central. The same questions that we ask in small group 24 years later are the same ones we asked 24 years ago. This is like verbatim from the original “why we do small groups” on our website. Sometimes it’s worded differently in different groups, but it’s the same idea.

The point of each of the core questions is to direct our life’s aims at Christlike maturity and to give a test for looking at what God is using to accomplish that goal in us. The first question is: What is God teaching you from His Word, and how is your life changing as a result? The second is: How have you seen God answering prayer, and what prayers are you currently asking God to answer? Third: How is God using you in the process of evangelism to draw people to Himself? And fourth: What sins has God revealed so that you may repent and return to Him in light of the gospel? What does your repentance toward God look like?

The point of the core questions is simple: spiritual maturity will not come apart from doing what mature Christians do. We practice the spiritual disciplines because that is how God ordinarily forms mature believers. Smed talked about imitation of mature believers through the books we read, and that is very much the same principle. We learn from the patterns of mature believers and imitate them as we pursue Christ.

Back in college, our small group—some of you, I think two of you, Cameron and Christa, were probably there—spent what felt like years in the book of James. As we sat in James 1, I remember confessing to my small group that I was afraid I would not be faithful when trials came. My life had been fairly easy. There had not yet been any great crisis, but James made it clear that trials were not hypothetical. They were certain. I knew I needed to prepare for suffering, but at that point I did not yet understand what sustaining grace really meant. God would teach me that later.

Trials, Truth Stored Up, and Sustaining Grace

Life confirmed very quickly that trials would come. In 2002, our church went through a painful season. In 2005, my dad died unexpectedly when I was twenty-three. In 2008, after seven years of infertility, I had a threatened miscarriage while pregnant with Eliana, who is seventeen now. During that pregnancy I was on extended bed rest.

In 2013, our son David was diagnosed with cancer. He was seventeen months old at the time. That opened the door to years of very hard trials: toxic chemotherapy, walking cancer for years and years, a stroke, and being told he would likely never walk again and definitely never speak again. He lost sight in his right eye. More recently, he has gone into kidney failure, has undergone dialysis, and is now awaiting a kidney transplant.

In 2018 and 2019, my husband Jacob walked through cancer. In 2023, he was diagnosed with a different cancer. And from 2020 to 2025, our church has also gone through a season that has been intense, difficult, and deeply shepherding.

When I think about distress, I think of Psalm 3. David is fleeing from Absalom, his own son, and he cries out:

“O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of my soul, ‘There is no salvation for him in God.’ But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head. I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill. I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around. Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God! For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked. Salvation belongs to the Lord; your blessing be on your people. Selah.”

There are many psalms in which David calls out to the Lord in distress, but what stands out is that he cries with confidence because he already knows God’s character and God’s promises. He is not trying to figure out who God is in the middle of the crisis. He is drawing on truth stored up beforehand. He’s surrounded by enemies. In this case, his son was leading a coup against him.

That has been true for us as well. Through all these trials, life did not stop. Children were being born, raised, and discipled. Homeschool still had to happen. I worked off and on as a nurse. Jake was studying, working full-time, and serving in the church. Body life continued. He became an elder. Through it all, God’s sustaining grace persisted.

How did that happen? Not because we were strong, but because God’s steadfast love sustained us through each storm. Like David, we were able to recall truth that had already been planted in our hearts. But you cannot call truth to mind in suffering if it has never been planted there in the first place. That is one reason spiritual disciplines matter so much.

“But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

You cannot call those truths to mind if they are not already there. So establish spiritual disciplines now. Prepare yourself before the crisis comes. When suffering hits, you want the truth of God already in your mind and heart, and you want the disciplines to have already become a habit in your life.

James 1 reminds us that trials aim at Christlike maturity. That’s what we want most. None of us enjoys trials, but even suffering becomes a place for discipline and a means of maturity. Hebrews 12 says the same thing:

“For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”

Along with the spiritual disciplines, trials are one of God’s means of maturity.

This is where sustaining grace became more precious to me. One of my favorite authors, and one of Jake’s favorites, is John Piper. He wrote a poem describing sustaining grace this way: not grace to bar what is not bliss, nor flight from all distress, but this—the grace that orders our trouble and pain and then in the darkness is there to sustain.

Spiritual maturity does not mean we finally become strong enough to endure trials on our own. It means our faith becomes strong enough to depend fully on God and on His sustaining grace. Christ did not remove Paul’s thorn in the flesh because that weakness made Paul dependent on Him.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Paul’s response was, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weakness, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” That is also what he meant in Philippians 4:13, the likely most misquoted verse in the Bible: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Paul was saying that God brought him to a point where he couldn’t endure on his own strength so that God’s power would be demonstrated in Paul’s dependence.

Spiritual disciplines are a day-to-day demonstration of dependence. For the Christian, dependence is not immaturity; it is a mark of maturity. Every ounce of endurance, obedience, faithfulness, and perseverance in the disciplines must reveal not our strength but God’s strength at work in us. That is how God is glorified in our faithfulness. Our discipline, our sanctification, and our perseverance are not ultimately about us. They are about God at work in us.

That is why our core questions are framed the way they are: What is God revealing in His Word? How is God answering prayer? How is God using you in evangelism? What sins is God exposing? When we are faithful, He gets the glory. When our weakness is exposed, we turn to Him in dependent faith.

In Psalm 3, David could say, “You, O Lord, are a shield about me,” because he knew God deeply before the storm hit. He could trust God to sustain him because he had already learned to depend on Him. That is what the disciplines cultivate.

Prioritizing the Important, Not Just the Urgent

That raises a practical question: how do we persevere in the disciplines day after day? How do we stop saying, “I’m too busy to read my Bible, to pray, or to pursue fellowship”? I have heard those excuses, and I have made them. The answer is simple: you do not find time; you prioritize what matters.

Early in our marriage, something that helped us tremendously was CJ Mahaney’s little resource Biblical Productivity. It started as a blog and became a little booklet, and it’s available as a PDF. Spiritual disciplines are woven all through it. One of his warnings is that the urgent can displace the important. Left to itself, any day will be dominated by the loudest requests rather than the most important responsibilities. Urgent items multiply faster than time. So if we do not plan with intentionality, the day, the week, the month, and even the years will be lost. His book has continued to produce right thinking in us.

His first practical step is to define your present God-given roles. Ask: Where has God placed me? Where am I positioned to serve others? Your roles may include being a disciple, a wife, a roommate, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, an employee, or a church member. Planning should not begin with the urgent; it should begin with those roles, so they receive priority before the interruptions arrive.

Some roles are non-negotiable and some are negotiable. If you are a wife, a mother, a daughter, or a church member, those are not optional. If you are an employee, you can choose where you work. Being an athlete is negotiable—unless you’re committed to something, then finish the commitment. But the question is whether urgent demands are crowding out important tasks that belong to your faithful fulfillment of the roles God has actually assigned you.

If you have been in Wellspring, this framework will sound familiar: discipline one is your heart, discipline two is your home, and discipline three is your ministry. We organize life in that order. Start by identifying your roles. Then determine a specific, theologically informed goal for those roles. It is helpful to run those goals by the people in your life—your husband, your roommate, your small group, your siblings—because we often have blind spots.

Then transfer those goals into your actual schedule before the week or month gets swallowed by the tyranny of the urgent. That is how you protect what truly matters. As an example, your first role should be disciple. If your goal is to memorize Scripture, then become specific: one verse a week, or one chapter a month. Janet was talking about making it a goal this year to notice where the Bible talks about prayer and just take note of that. If your role is parent and your goal is to shepherd your child’s heart, then schedule time in Scripture together. If your role is church member and your goal is to serve the body in a meaningful way, then put that service on the calendar—coffee table once a month, greeting once a month, or NGM—instead of leaving it to the margins.

One point from that booklet especially convicts me: it is possible to be simultaneously busy and lazy. Busyness does not mean I am diligent. Busyness does not mean I am faithful. Busyness does not mean I am fruitful. Truly diligent, faithful, and fruitful people often are busy, but the question is what their busyness is accomplishing. What does your calendar reveal about what you’re prioritizing? Is it a whole bunch of busyness, or is it fruitfulness?

True productivity is not measured by activity alone, and fruitfulness is not the same as task completion. Fruitfulness is Christlike character formed through dependence on Christ. Ask yourself: Did my activities today grow me in Christlike maturity through dependent faith, or did they merely fill my schedule?

Often the time pressures that make us feel unable to do what matters are actually produced by unfaithfulness. Staying up too late, frivolously scrolling, not keeping up with laundry, not finishing homework before the deadline, or staying up late reading fun books that aren’t fruitful all create avoidable urgency. And when plans do unravel, we still need to accept our limitations and receive interruptions as part of God’s agenda. Ask what Christlike response He is forming in you right now, and then resume faithfulness the next hour or the next day.

Practical Ways to Build the Disciplines Into Daily Life

Let me make this very practical. When Smed mentioned the people who worked so hard to translate Scripture, it reminded me of growing up around a tribal group in Mexico that had only the New Testament in their language for many years. SIL translators had gone many years before my parents went to Mexico. They learned the language, developed the language, wrote the language—they were illiterate—and then they translated the New Testament and left. Now there are at least 12,000 believers in that tribe, I think, and they’ve been working on translating the Old Testament.

One of the pastors told us that a shaman had once taken a group of their Bibles and burned them. Jake said, “So what happened?” And he said, “Well, he died.” We were like, “What? He died?” And he said, “Yeah, he burned God’s Word.” It was just such a valuable thing to him. That story has stayed with me. We can become so complacent because we have Bibles everywhere—on our shelves, on our phones, in our pockets—that we stop valuing them. We need to treat God’s Word as a treasure.

No spiritual discipline is more important than intake of the Word of God, however that happens. Sitting in a comfy chair with a cappuccino and 68-degree weather is ideal. Not going to happen in Arizona very often. So make do with the time God has given you, and prioritize the Word within the life you actually have.

In our family, we use a simple acronym before reading Scripture: LUBOT. It’s dumb and weird, and there’s a robot associated with it, but it helps. We pray for listening, understanding, belief, obedience, and trust. If you do not listen, how will you understand? If you do not understand, how will you believe? And if you do not believe, how will you obey and trust?

After reading, we ask a few simple questions: What did the text say? What did this text teach me about God? How must this text affect me? If you walk away from the Bible and cannot remember what it said, you’re not going to change. These questions help slow us down and turn reading into meaningful intake.

There is also a student ministries bookmark built around a one-chapter-a-day plan connected to McCheyne’s reading plan. It is not meant to limit Bible intake, but it can be a very helpful starting place for someone trying to establish the habit of daily reading. A chapter a day is manageable. In our home, everyone reads independently, and then we gather and talk about the chapter together. If you are trying to begin this discipline with your children, you may be surprised by how much they can understand and by how much their questions will teach you.

Scripture memory is another practical discipline. The Desiring God Fighter Verses app has been helpful to me. They’re called Fighter Verses because they help you fight sin. It builds in review and little quizzes, and it makes memorization easier to sustain. Some people use index cards. We are more of an app family. The method is less important than the habit. Find a way to keep the Word of God in your mind. I also try to listen again to the chapter I read earlier in the day while I am doing ordinary tasks, whether that is laundry or setting up dialysis. There are ways to keep putting the Word before your mind in the middle of daily life.

Prayer also needs practical habits. If you did not get to Janice’s session, listen to it. She made a helpful distinction between obedience and method. The command to pray is non-negotiable, but the methods can vary. You need habits that help you obey. I keep a running note in my phone that functions something like a prayer journal, and I pray for those things every day. Others set alarms. Prayers from The Valley of Vision can also be a useful aid.

What matters is learning to pray continually and not only for immediate needs. That’s what we get hung up on a lot at our house. Sometimes I pray directly through the Scripture I read that morning. If the text taught me something about God, then I can worship Him for that truth and ask Him to make it real in my life. Again, the point is to build habits that make prayer part of the normal rhythm of dependence.

Service is another discipline that often brings joy. Last year at the women’s retreat, I talked about getting medical texts. It fuels joy in my life. I love it. Find a meaningful way to serve in the church rather than leaving service as something peripheral you do only if you happen to have time. Church life, fellowship, and service often go hand in hand. Commit yourself in a concrete way.

Worship can also be cultivated intentionally. One of my favorite things Jake has done is create playlists for hard seasons. He made an Apple playlist—I don’t know if you can do those not on iPhones—and he titled one “Songs for My Weary Soul.” There are moments in suffering when your mind feels too exhausted to read or even to pray clearly, and faithful songs can help lead your heart back into worship. I also have some that are just instrumental, because that helps me. We like to play the songs for Sunday ahead of time so that by the time we gather with the church, our hearts are more prepared to sing together.

Fellowship looks different in different seasons. There have been seasons when we could not gather normally, seasons when we were out of state, and seasons when fellowship felt awkward or limited. But you still find ways to pursue it. Prioritize corporate worship. Think ahead about Saturday night and Sunday morning. When our kids were little, I’d lay out their clothes so I didn’t have to think about it. Get everyone to bed so you can be at equipping hour or at Sunday service. Then think about Sunday night and Monday morning too. Could we push back starting school till 10:00 a.m.? Could I come into work late? Sometimes you can shift the schedule to make room for being with God’s people. And when you have gone through a season in which you could not gather, you realize how precious it really is. I remember the first time after a long period of chemo with David, the first time I came back, I was like, “Everything feels so much cooler.”

Evangelism may look different in each life, but it belongs in the same framework. For me, trials have opened unusual opportunities. I have been able to share the gospel with people from Australia, India, parents of children with cancer, physicians, nurses, and other healthcare workers who have asked, “How do you do it?” and I’m like, “Well, here’s how.” But evangelism is not only for extraordinary moments. For many of us, our children are the primary place for evangelism. Instead of simply demanding outward obedience, we can slow down, open the Scriptures, and share the gospel with you over your sin. That may make us late to whatever, but it may also be exactly the important priority God has put in front of us.

Questions for Reflection and a Final Exhortation

I know that is a lot in a short amount of time, but we do know this: God has given His children everything we need for life and godliness. So take time to reflect prayerfully, and talk with your small group, your friends, and your spouse about what it looks like to pursue the disciplines in your actual life. Smed called it taking inventory.

Ask yourself questions like these: Does my daily schedule reflect a genuine priority to grow in Christ? What does my weekly schedule reveal about my real priorities—Sunday evenings, bedtime, wake up, free time? What do my entertainment choices and hobbies reveal about my desire for Christlike maturity? Do I take joy in trials, or is my first response grumbling? What does that reveal about my aims and about my faith in God?

Ask also: How intentional am I in meaningful Christian fellowship? Am I quick to see interruptions as opportunities for spiritual fruit? Which of my God-given roles most needs intentional spiritual nurture this month? Do any need to be deprecated? Where am I mistaking activity for genuine spiritual fruitfulness? How could I strengthen perseverance in the daily disciplines?

Spiritual disciplines are more than emergency rations for the storms of life. They are God’s daily pathway to Christlikeness. Trials will come, and when they do, the cultivation of daily discipline and dependence now will anchor you in sustaining grace. But even on ordinary days, those same practices are shaping you toward what you should want most: to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. Romans 8:29.

So cultivate time in the Word, prayer, fellowship, worship, and service—not merely to survive crisis, but to become like Jesus. Build your life on these things. Whether the sun is shining or the winds are howling, you will be held fast by the grace God uses both to transform and to sustain us. Let’s pray.

Closing Prayer

God, thank you. Thank you for your Word. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for your sustaining grace. God, I pray for these women as we talk about the disciplines, that they will be encouraged by your perseverance of us and your faithfulness in our lives. God, I pray as they think about ways they can change their schedules and their focus, that You will enable them to be dependent on You and not be overwhelmed by the prospect of all of these ideas, that they will be hope-filled. God, I pray for the rest of our time together today, that it will be honoring to You and that genuine fellowship will happen because of Your grace. In Jesus’ name, amen.