05.14.10
Personal Discipleship and Small Groups
Time alone with God is what makes a community of believers all she is suppose to be. When individuals spend time with God they not only grow personally in their view of Him, their journey with Him, and their connection to Him, they are better prepared to meet the spiritual needs of one another. Small group members involving themselves in personal discipleship is essential if a group is going to guide one another toward a disciple’s lifestyle.
Personal discipleship demands that each of us be involved consistently in the spiritual disciplines.
The Reader’s Room @ the Water’s Edge gives us these insights from Richard Foster and Dallas Willard… Richard Foster, in his classic book, Celebration of Discipline, uses two metaphors to illustrate the purpose of disciplines: a field and a path.
A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain. This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines--they are a way of sowing to the Spirit.
The spiritual disciplines are, "a means of receiving God's grace. …[They] allow us to place ourselves before God so he can transform us." He goes on to say, that the spiritual disciplines are like a narrow ridge with a sheer drop-off on either side: there is the abyss of trust in works on one side and the abyss of faith without deeds on the other.
On the ridge there is a path, the disciplines of the spiritual life. …We must always remember that the path does not produce change; it only places us where the change can occur.
The task for us, then is to cultivate our daily lives into fertile ground in which God can bring growth and change. This is what the spiritual disciplines are all about.
Dallas Willard defines a discipline as, "any activity within our power that we engage in to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort."
You may be wondering what would be considered a spiritual discipline. In Richard Foster’s, Celebration of Discipline he lists the following:
Inner Disciplines
The Discipline of Meditation
The Discipline of Prayer
The Discipline of Fasting
The Discipline of Study
Outer Disciplines
The Discipline of Simplicity
The Discipline of Solitude
The Discipline of Submission
a valuable but often-abused discipline.
The Discipline of Service
Corporate Disciplines
The Discipline of Confession
The Discipline of Worship
The Discipline of Guidance
The Discipline of Celebration
A great starting point for your group members will be to have a “Quiet Time.” That is a time set aside each day to read and study the Bible, pray, and journal. Suggest that your group members do these things.:
- Choose a place that they will go to each day for their quiet time
- Go to that place at the same time each day
- Purchase a journal for writing down their thoughts, chronicling when God has answered prayer and been at work in their lives, and writing down prayer requests. Suggest that they check the prayer request off when God answers it.
- During their quiet time:
- Spend time praying. Pray about those things that they are passionate about and they should ask God to teach them as they study the bible.
- Spend time reading the Bible and studying it
- Write down your thoughts, struggles, and revelations so that you can look back and see how God has responded and look back and see the growth that has taken place.
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