Jill Briscoe - Spiritual Arts: Mastering the Disciplines for a Rich Spiritual Life

spiritual arts

spiritual arts

MASTERING THE DISCIPLINES
FOR A RICH SPIRITUAL LIFE

JILL BRISCOE

I dedicate this book to all the people in prison
and in chains for Christ and his cause.

I pray that you will find the joy and exuberance
of the liberating power of the Holy Spirit,
so that your chains are no chains at all
but rather chains of blessing.

I salute you, marvel at you, and pray for you with Pauls words:

[I am] confident of this,
that he who began a good work in you
will carry it on to completion
until the day of Christ Jesus.
Philippians 1:6

ZONDERVAN

Spiritual Arts

Copyright 2007 by Jill Briscoe

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

ePub Edition January 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-54206-3

Requests for information should be addressed to:

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Briscoe, Jill.

Spiritual arts : mastering the disciplines for a rich spiritual life / Jill Briscoe.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27324-0

1. Spiritual life Christianity. I. Title.

BV4501.3.B7545 2007

248.4 dc22

2007000444

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Scripture references marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible, Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture references marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture references marked Phillips are from the New Testament in Modern English, a paraphrase by J. B. Phillips.

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contents

I like to think of the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of men and women as art. Spiritual art. There are martial arts, culinary arts, dramatic arts, musical arts, fine arts and spiritual arts.

Spiritual art refers to the Holy Spirits work in our lives in character, gift, and blessing. There are the spiritual arts of intimacy, humility, serenity, harmony, and maturity. There is the art of spiritual tenacity too. There is Gods part in this program, and there is our part. As the Holy Spirit does his transforming work within us, we must cooperate. We must give way to the Spirits prompting, give in to his plans for our lives, and embrace the work he has for us to do. We need to work out what he is working in. There is just as much spiritual discipline needed on my part as the self-discipline needed for the rest of the arts. Just as I need to study the art of music and practice it, so I must study the art of humility and practice it.

I began to study and practice the spiritual arts at the age of eighteen, which is the age many of us are attending colleges or universities. Actually, I happened to be in both Cambridge University and the Holy Spirits arts school at the same time. I soon discovered I would be in this spiritual schooling all my life, long after I had hung my Homerton College teachers diploma on the wall in my office. This spirituality is a lifetime course, and you never graduate on this side of heaven itself.

When I was eighteen, I was into the dramatic arts, the entertainment arts, and the recreational arts. I wasnt much for the vocational arts I was having too much fun. I was far too selfish to think about a career that helped anyone else, and I thought that the religious arts Id heard about were weird and boring. I didnt know that religious arts arent a bit the same as spiritual arts. Thats because you need the Spirit to be spiritual, but you can be religious all on your own.

I was doing very well in all the arts I was taking, and above all the art of being totally selfish. But a totally self-centered life was not bringing me happiness. Fleeting pleasure, yes, but I couldnt master the art of being happy all the time, or even most of the time, no matter how hard I tried. I didnt know that contentment and joy are the Spirits art, and are quite different from happiness, which usually depends on us getting our happenings happening the right way and stopping all trouble that troubles us. Seeing that we are not God, this is an exhausting and fruitless exercise. After all, it takes the Spirit of God to make it possible for us to be content and full of joy whether our happenings are behaving or not!

I had never heard of the spiritual arts, but then I had never heard of the Holy Spirit. I had, however, heard of the Holy Ghost. This was because we used to say the Apostles Creed the old-fashioned way in school every morning. At the age of six, I had an experience in an air-raid shelter at the height of World War II that was the start of my journey home to God.

I didnt go to church, but I did know the creed from my school recitations. One night I prayed desperately to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost to stop the bombs. God didnt stop the bombs from falling. But as I prayed a six-year-olds desperate prayer in that dark underground hole, God answered in a different way altogether. He calmed the raging fear inside, wrapping my panicked heart in a peaceful blanket as surely as my mother wrapped me up in an earthly blanket as she cradled her frightened child in her arms.

It took twelve more years until I arrived at Homerton College to understand what happened in that air-raid shelter all those years ago. Twelve more years to hear about the university of faith and spiritual art and discipline, and about the Principal of that heavenly school, who was the Holy Spirit.