The Five Essentials of Cultivating: Discipleship

Well, we're wrapping up the last "cultivating essential" on the Cultivate blog today and we deal with the issue of discipleship, which, admittedly, is a pretty broad and general term. Basically, today, what I'm hitting on is the essential of finding a spiritual discipline(s) in your life to use as you connect with God and grow closer to him. What might surprise you, though, is that I believe spiritual disciplines go well beyond prayer and Bible study, like I was always taught (though those are two great ones). And, unlike I always believed growing up, you're not a spiritual failure if you don't do all of them for x amount of hours a day. In fact, quite the opposite is the case.

Now, I think an important disclaimer needs to be made here about spiritual disciplines... not all of them are for everybody, and you can't base the depth of your relationship with God upon how many you do, how often you do them, which disciplines you use, etc. There's no legalistic hierarchy of disciplines or anything like that. For some, reading the Bible might not be a real gift or passion, but doing acts of service is. Well, then, maybe your spiritual discipline is acts of service. That doesn't mean that you never read your Bible; it just means that maybe you won't do that as much as someone else because that's not how you dialogue and grow with God, and that's okay. On the flip side, maybe you're a businessperson who travels out of town a lot. Well, you probably won't be able to get involved with a ton of service projects, but you can read your Bible, journal, and/or pray on the plane to your next destination.

To me, a spiritual discipline is simply something that allows you to dialogue with God. Disciplines are highly personal. Finding the way that you and God can converse is absolutely key. I'm convinced that the more time we spend with God, whether that's praying, doing acts of service, giving to the poor, playing on a worship team, or a whole variety of other things, the better followers of Jesus we become. And that's the whole point... God wants us to grow in our relationship with him. So whatever your spiritual discipline is, do it! Chances are it will really help you become a better disciple of the God we serve.