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Celebration of Discipline: The path to Spiritual Growth

Amazon.com Price:  $13.88 (as of 01/05/2019 10:56 PST- Details)

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Hailed by many as the best modern book on Christian spirituality, Celebration of Discipline has helped more than one million seekers discover a richer spiritual life infused with joy, peace, and a deeper understanding of God. Celebration of Discipline explores the ‘classic disciplines,’ or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith. Along the way, Foster shows that it is only by and through these practices that the true path to spiritual growth can be found. Dividing the disciplines into three movements of the Spirit, Foster shows how each of these areas contribute to a more balanced spiritual life. The inward disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study offer avenues of personal examination and change. The outward disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service help prepare us to make the world a better place. The corporate disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration bring us nearer to one another and to God. Foster provides a wealth of examples demonstrating how these disciplines can become part of our daily activities–and how they are able to help us shed our superficial habits and ‘bring the abundance of God into our lives.’ He offers crucial new insights on simplicity, demonstrating how the biblical view of simplicity, properly understood and applied, brings joy and balance to our inward and outward lives and ‘sets us free to enjoy the provision of God as a gift that can be shared with others.’ The discussion of celebration, continuously the most neglected of the disciplines, shows its critical importance, for it stands at the heart of the way to Christ. Celebration of discipline will help motivate Christians in every single place to embark on a journey of prayer and spiritual growth.
When Richard Foster began writing Celebration of Discipline more than 20 years ago, an older creator gave him a bit of advice: “Be sure that every chapter forces the reader into the next chapter.” Foster took the advice to heart; as a result, his book presents one of the vital compelling and readable visions of Christian spirituality published in the past few decades. After beginning with a simple statement–“Superficiality is the curse of our age…. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people”–Foster’s book moves to give an explanation for the disciplines people must cultivate in order to achieve spiritual depth. In succinct, urgent, and every so often humorous chapters, Foster defines a broad range of classic spiritual disciplines in terms that are lucid without being too limiting and offers advice that’s practical without being overly prescriptive. For instance, after describing meditation as a combination of “intense intimacy and awful reverence,” he settles into such down-to-earth topics as how to make a choice a place and a posture in which to meditate.

Perhaps most interesting and useful is Foster’s chapter on the controversial Christian discipline of submission. According to Foster, submission does not demand self-hatred or loss of identity. Instead, it simply means growing safe in the conviction that “our happiness is not dependent on getting what we want” but on the fulfillment that naturally flows from love of one’s neighbors. Such wise and encouraging suggestions have helped many readers to discard the idea that discipline is an onerous duty and to move toward a liberating and simpler idea of discipline–whose defining character, as Foster never forgets, is joy. –Michael Joseph Gross

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