Ten spiritual disciplines to grow deeper in faith

Here are ten classic spiritual disciplines or practices for Christian discipleship, drawn from Scripture and centuries of church tradition. There are many more. 1. Sabbath (Rest) A weekly rhythm of ceasing from work to delight in Godโ€™s creation, grace, and sovereignty (e.g., Gen 2:2โ€“3; Ex 20:8โ€“11). Sabbath is a time for rest, play, feasting and celebration, …

The cost of discipleship

When you look at the amount of persecution and martyrdom ofย Christians around the world, the statistics tell a sobering story. According to Open Doorsโ€™ World Watch List,ย 4,476 Christian were killed for faith-related reasons in 2024,ย and some 380 million Christians today suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith.[1] A martyr is literally a …

The test of true discipleship

Romanian Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was a great twentieth-century scholar of religious history and religious experience. He is perhaps best known for his work on seeking to identify universal patterns in human history and experience, and for his theory of hierophanies, or โ€œmanifestations of the sacred.โ€ For Eliade, persons and objects โ€œacquire their reality, their identity, only …

A grain of wheat

John 12:23-24; Luke 9:23 Sprouted shoots of barley and wheat. Walk into almost any church, and you will see one of two realities โ€“ either the predictable machinations of moralistic therapeutic deism and passive consumer religion,ย or the beauty, mystery and enthusiasm of a gathered community of Jesus followers, experimentally living out their faith. One reality …

Come and see

John 1:35-39 If you were a young Christian in the 1990s, you may have seen, or you may even have worn, a wrist band with the letters โ€œWWJD.โ€ Itโ€™s an acronym for the question, โ€œWhat would Jesus do?โ€ For the nerds among us, the phrase is drawn from the subtitle of a novel by Charles …