Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines

This is the heart of prayer—not getting things from God, but getting God.

…A good instinct to develop on the threshold of significant purchases is to ask what this expenditure reveals about our heart. What desire am I trying to fulfill?

When our life in him is healthy and vibrant, we do not only ache to keep sinking our roots down deep in him, but we also want to stretch out our branches and extend his goodness to others.

Chosen before time. Called with effect. United to Jesus in faith and repentance. Adopted and forgiven. Justified. Sanctified. Glorified. And satisfied forever. This is grace gone wonderfully wild. This is the flood of God’s favor in which we discover the power and practice of the means of grace. Put

But we must see his listening to us in prayer in relation to our listening to him in his word.

Christian meditation is less about the posture of our bodies and more about the posture of our souls.

Nothing shows our hearts like sacrifice. When we are willing not only to give from our excess, but to embrace some personal loss or disadvantage for the sake of showing generosity toward others, we say loudly and clearly…that we have a greater love than ourselves and our comforts.

The waters of good preaching are always running downhill to the stream of Christ, who he is, and how he has loved us.

The grace of God cannot be quarantined to individuals.

It shouldn’t surprise us…to find that prayer is not finally about getting things from God, but getting God.

God designed the church to be a community of lifelong learners under the earthly guidance of leaders who are teachers at heart. The Christian faith is not a finite course of study for the front-end of adulthood. Our mind-set shouldn’t be to first do our learning and then spend the rest of our lives drawing from that original deposit of knowledge. Rather, ongoing health in the Christian life is inextricably linked to ongoing learning.

The Bible is gloriously for us, but it is not mainly about us.

…Take every word as spoken to yourself, with this essential anchor in place: Seek to understand first how God’s words fell on the original hearers, and how they relate to Jesus’ person and work, and then bring them home to yourself.

It is grace to be forgiven of sinful acts, and grace to be supplied the heart for righteous ones.

The battleground is between our ears. What is it that is capturing your idle thoughts? What fear or frustration is filling your spare moments? Will you just listen to yourself, or will you start talking? No, preaching—not letting your concerns shape you, but forming your concerns by the power of the gospel.

To be a “disciple” means literally to be a “learner.” Our Master is the consummate teacher, and the central task of his undershepherds in the local church is teaching

Work out your salvation, because God is at work in you” (see Phil. 2:12–13). God’s work does not make our work unnecessary; it makes it possible. “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10). Grace does not just pardon our failures; it empowers our successes—like successfully enjoying Jesus more than life.

The primary mission of the Spirit—and his people—is to show that Jesus is more glorious than anyone or anything else. It cannot be done by those who find this world more enjoyable than Jesus. They make the world look great. Therefore, the ultimate aim of the Christian life—and the universe—hangs on the people of God enjoying the Son of God.

David is writing a book to help you enjoy Jesus. In doing that, he is not trying to be nice. He’s trying to be nuclear. His way of thinking about enjoying Jesus is explosive. If you enjoy Jesus more than life (Matt. 10:38), you will live with a radical abandon for Jesus that will make the world wonder.

La meditación cristiana no se refiere tanto a la postura de nuestro cuerpo, sino más bien a la postura de nuestra alma.

This is why it is so essential that preaching be preoccupied not with the preacher or the listeners, but with Jesus. Only in perceiving him is there true power for change. Only through him and his gospel is our faith strengthened and renewed. And only in knowing and enjoying him is our soul truly satisfied.

God’s regular channels of grace, as we will see, are his voice, his ear, and his body.

The hands of the clock are ever in the hands of God. It is arrogant to plan without planning for God.

It is the grace of God that frees a soul from selfishness and empowers not just generosity, but sacrifice. And such sacrifice God will not overlook. In faith our giving to meet others’ needs becomes an occasion for more divine grace to flood our souls.

One of the effects of the gospel going deeper into our souls is that it frees our fingers to loosen their grasp on our goods.

For the Christian, the issue is not just that we give, but how. ‘God loves a cheerful giver’ (2 Cor. 9:7). And giving gladly rests on the great why of Christian generosity: that Christ himself—our Savior, Lord, and greatest treasure—demonstrated the ultimate in generosity in coming to buy us back. ‘Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich’ (2 Cor. 8:9). If Jesus is in us, then increasingly such an open-handed tendency will be in us as well.

Good disciplemaking requires both intentionality and relationality. It means being strategic and being social. Most of us are bent one way or the other. We’re naturally relational, but lacking in intentionality. Or we find it easy to be intentional, but not relational. We typically tip (or sometimes lean) one way or the other as we begin the disciplemaking process. But tipping and leaning won’t cover the full picture of what life-on-life disciplemaking requires. It’s not just friend-to-friend, and it’s not just teacher-to-student. It’s both. There is the sharing of ordinary life (relationship) and seeking to initiate and make the most of teachable moments (intentionality). There are the long walks through Galilee and the sermons on the mount. Disciplemaking is both organic and engineered, relational and intentional, with shared context and shared content, quality and quantity time.

Few practices will energize and affect your Christian life as much as sitting attentively under faithful preaching.

In our sin, we’d rather trust in ourselves than another, amass our own righteousness than receive another’s, speak our own mind rather than listen to someone else.

The great purpose of prayer is not getting things from God but getting God.