In addition, my five fold division of the arts is careful to situate various forms of artistry in time and place, their historical traditions, so that we can avoid modernism’s totalizing fallacy. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

1. Athletics, games and sports
2. Common and domestic arts
3. Professions and trades
4. Fine and performing arts
5. The liberal arts of language and number

The important takeaway here is the need to train students in embodied and culturally situated skills, rather than reducing the liberal arts, for instance, to general studies. Students should be able to produce something in the world because of their training in artistry, not just know random facts.

This led me to propose a pedagogy or training method for artistry, drawing primarily from John Amos Comenius, the famous Reformation educator. We distilled from Comenius a set of basic steps that all arts have in common:

1. Students are given a general acquaintance with the works produced, the end-products of the art.
2. Students respond with a natural desire to imitate through producing works of their own.
3. The master provides the students with the proper tools and models their use, showing them examples of the techniques.
4. The master corrects the students through both examples and advice, sharing the theories and precepts while correcting students.

These steps follow the classical principle of mimesis or imitation that the CiRCE Institute has popularized among classical educators. In many cases, however, the focus among CiRCE folk sometimes edges toward knowledge to be learned or understood rather than a complex skill to be mastered. Aristotle’s terminology helps us to make a crisper distinction between these two teaching tasks. Knowing a truth is different from know-how. Artistry, for Aristotle, is clearly know-how, while nous, or intuition, would correspond with the understanding of ideas or first principles. 

To be sure, the student must understand several things in order to develop in artistry: the purpose of the art he is learning, how to use the tools, how to avoid common mistakes, etc. So a student of an art does develop a certain intuition about quality artistry through an art, but that is not the primary goal. His understanding serves his practice and not the other way around. (Were the budding artist to shift gears and become a critic of the art, as retired football players sometimes become sportscasters or former politicians become political commentators, then the artist’s developed intuition would come to the fore as the intellectual virtue on which he would depend for his new rhetorical product.)

Developing a Lesson in Craft

The basic process outlined above can serve as the springboard for a more fully articulated lesson in artistry. In other contexts, I have advocated for a Narration-Trivium lesson structure aimed at training students in the Trivium arts, while teaching them the sciences, what we might call general content knowledge in various areas. In laying out an alternative lesson structure for training a student in the arts, I am not abandoning this earlier approach, but adding a very necessary complement to it. Let me explain.

One way of viewing the nature of good teaching is to isolate the main goal that such an act of teaching has, as in its own way Bloom’s Taxonomy is careful to do. John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching highlights the act of teaching as one of conveying knowledge or some truth. This sees teaching as primarily focused on content that a student absorbs into herself and makes her own. On the other hand, Gregory is careful to note in his introduction that there is another branch of the educational art, which he calls training and describes as “the systematic development and cultivation of the powers of mind and body” (10). Gregory even goes so far as to say, 

These two great branches of educational art–training and teaching–though separable in thought, are not separable in practice. We can only train by teaching, and we teach best when we train best. Training implies the exercise of the powers to be trained; but the proper exercise of the intellectual powers is found in the acquisition, the elaboration, and the application of knowledge. (11)

Gregory’s insight here is profound, but it does not quite make up for the fact that he has neglected the art of training by centering his whole work on the act of teaching.

In my view, the problem with Gregory’s attempt to merge training and teaching is one and the same with the totalizing impulse of modernism (in which Gregory participated). At some times, we are focused on training students in a skill, while at others we are endeavoring to teach them content knowledge. To operate as teachers with only one type of lesson, despite the differences between the intellectual virtues we are aiming to cultivate, is to court disaster at worst, and to confuse the issue at best. 

Thoughtful teachers do, in fact, operate very differently when they are training vs teaching. Aristotle’s distinctions between the intellectual virtues of artistry and scientific knowledge, intuition or prudence would have kept us more in line with common sense, if we had retained them. In Gregory’s favor I do think that we can maximize our content-based lessons, by also affording our students with practice in the trivium arts (see Narration-Trivium Lesson). In the same way, I believe that the Apprenticeship Lesson that I am proposing now can and should help students gain general knowledge. But I believe it is more helpful to teachers to set a primary goal for a lesson, and then allow subsidiary goals to fall in line to support. The Apprenticeship Lesson recognizes the development of artistry or skill as the primary goal, thus avoiding the knowledge-transfer default of much modern education.

The Apprenticeship Movement (I-We-You)

In his book Teach Like a Champion 2.0 Doug Lemov coined the phrase I-We-You to convey the movement in a practice-based lesson from modeling a new skill or process, to involving students together in the process, before releasing students to work on their own. In his most recent update (3.0) he uses the terms Direct Instruction/Knowledge Assimilation, Guided Practice/Guided Questioning, and Independent Practice (241-245). We can see the dichotomy even here between a focus on content and skills. ‘Practice’ seems to accord better with training in skills, while ‘instruction,’ ‘knowledge’ and ‘questioning’ gesture toward teaching content.

(Wondering how Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion can be appropriated by classical Christian educators? Check out Kolby Atchison’s free eBook, “The Craft of Teaching for Classical Educators.”)

In any case, the movement from modeling with examples (I), to holding the hands of students as they work (We), to releasing them to accountable independent practice (You) provides a handy application of Comenius’ steps. Its flexibility for artistic skills as different as proper form when shooting a basket or solving an algebraic equation make it a promising foundation for our Apprenticeship Lesson format. 

Do Now is another valuable teaching technique for an Apprenticeship Lesson that is described by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion (see 3.0 p. 187ff.). The reason for this is the importance of immediately engaging students in productive activity when we are training them in an art. A key danger for trainers is to hinder a student’s progress by over-explanation of rules and precepts, when action should be the name of the game. As Comenius says in his Analytical Didactic, 

Doing cannot be learned except by doing. Hence the saying, ‘We create by creating.’ One becomes a writer by writing, a painter by painting, a singer by singing, a speaker by speaking; and so it is with all external acts. (155)

Therefore he goes on to express it as a principle that “in every art there should be more practice than theory” (157). 

Lemov describes the cultural rationale that supports starting a lesson with a “quality task” that students can practice independently:

We want students to engage in productive and high-quality work that interests and challenges them right away, and over time we want to make a habit of this, so they expect to be actively and meaningfully engaged any time they enter our classrooms. We want them to know we are prepared and value their learning. They will not be passive; there will be very little downtime. (187)

We can imagine starting an Apprenticeship Lesson in a sport with a consistent drill that rehearses a set of core or fundamental skills; in a musical instrument, with scales or warm up exercises; in liberal art, with practice problems, exercises or a short writing task. The Do Now step of an Apprenticeship Lesson may not be strictly required, based on classical principles, but it remains a valuable default to be departed from only with good reason. 

Lastly, Lemov also articulates the value of checking for understanding (see ch. 3 of 3.0, pp. 75ff.; see also Kolby’s article on the topic). I have placed this as a step following guided practice (We) in the Apprenticeship Lesson, because of the danger of setting students’ free to independent practice too soon. Classical educators have long recognized the need to hasten slowly (festina lente) by ensuring the foundation is well laid, before building upon it. Comenius reflects on this fact for a pedagogy of artistry in The Great Didactic through the classical example of Timotheus the musician:

For this reason Timotheus the musician used to demand twice as large a fee from those pupils who had learned the rudiments of their art elsewhere, saying that his labour was twofold, as he had first to get them out of the bad habits that they had acquired, and then to teach them correctly. Those, therefore, who are learning any art should take care to make themselves masters of the rudiments by imitating their copies accurately. This difficulty once overcome, the rest follows of itself, just as a city lies at the mercy of foes when its gates are broken in. All haste should be avoided, lest we proceed to advanced work before the elementary stages have been mastered. He goes fast enough who never quits the road, and a delay which is caused by obtaining a thorough grip of first principles is really no delay, but an advance toward mastering what follows with ease, speed, and accuracy. (200)

Therefore it is prudent for the trainer of an art to check for students’ understanding before letting them practice independently, and then during independent practice, to circulate and actively correct students’ errors, as Comenius also states in his 9th canon, “Errors must be corrected by the master on the spot; but precepts, that is to say the rules, and the exceptions to the rules, must be given at the same time.” (200)

The Inspirational Coach

The various pieces of the puzzle for an Apprenticeship Lesson are almost interlocked. One final contribution comes from Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, which we have drawn from before to discuss the role of myelin (the white fatty substance that wraps around neural networks to increase speed and accuracy of firing) in the development of complex skill. Drawing from the research of Anders Ericsson, who coined the terms deliberate and purposeful practice, Coyle has painted a stunning picture of the “coaches” behind the training of world class athletes and performers. 

Aside from the core skill-set of providing the targeted feedback day in and day out, “like farmers: careful, deliberate cultivators of myelin” (Coyle, The Talent Code, 165), these Talent Whisperers, as Coyle calls them, are actually coaching their students to love the art. As he explains, 

They succeed because they are tapping into the second element of the talent code: ignition. They are creating and sustaining motivation; they are teaching love. As Bloom’s study [of world class performers’ first teachers] summed up, ‘The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.’ (175)

There must be a place for joy and inspiration, meaningfully conveyed from the coach to the artist-in-training. That is why I have placed an Inspirational Idea as a step in the Apprenticeship Lesson, even if this feature might not always be very long or strictly necessary. Speaking warmly about the beauty of the end product or the value of discipline, even for only 30 seconds, can help the average teacher pause long enough to consider the cultivation of her students’ motivation and love for the art, as opposed to just getting down to work and possibly losing them in drudgery.

The Apprenticeship Lesson

At this point I would invite you to visit a new webpage on Educational Renaissance that offers the Apprenticeship Lesson as a free downloadable resource. By sharing your email, you’ll receive our weekly blog in your inbox. If you haven’t already, I’d also encourage you to access my free resource on “Charlotte Mason and the Trivium” that details how to plan lessons with the Narration-Trivium Lesson structure. 

These two types of lessons complement one another by focusing either on training in artistry or skill (Apprenticeship) or on teaching new content knowledge (Narration-Trivium). In other words, the primary aim of the teacher is either for the student to acquire particular content knowledge in an inspirational subject area (Bible, history, literature, etc.), or the primary aim is for the student to acquire and hone particular skills in a discipline (writing, grammar, art, music, etc.). Actual lessons fall on a spectrum, with some focus placed on new knowledge and some focus placed on the students’ performance of a complex activity or creation of some product. The question of which lesson structure to use depends not on the subject, but the focus of this particular lesson within a broader unit plan. Is the main purpose of this lesson for students to assimilate content or develop and hone new skills?

When you download the Apprenticeship Lesson, you’ll be able to copy and paste a template with instructions that you can then use for planning lessons that train students in an art. Between the Apprenticeship Lesson and the Narration-Trivium Lesson, you should have all that you need to plan lessons that embody a classical pedagogy in any subject, with only minor modifications. I believe the process of lesson planning should be inspiring and enriching because of how it assists teachers in embodying classical principles in their teaching. In addition to preparing the teacher with the knowledge and materials necessary to help students learn most effectively, lesson planning should contribute to teachers’ long-term development.

Please reach out to me with questions as you try out the Apprenticeship Lesson, so that I can continue to refine and improve it for teachers!

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

3. Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science

4. When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education

5. What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

10. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

Later articles in this series:

12. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

13. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

14. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

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Along the way, I was impressed by the unity of thought among the Educational Renaissance writers, as well as the presence of quite a few memorable maxims in the midst of all that dense (or playful) educational theory and practice.

A maxim is usually defined as a short pithy statement that expresses a general truth or rule of conduct. Since many of you have joined the Educational Renaissance community in late 2019, I thought a review of some of the most memorable maxims of 2019 might inspire you to read through old articles to find something of value for your educational work as you enter 2020. Now admittedly, some of these “maxims” are pithier than others, and I had a lot of high quality contenders with 29 articles to date, so it was very hard to decide on the best ones. I’ve put them in order of the sequence in which they were published.

But before our list of maxims we have a few announcements to share with the community as we close out the year.

End of 2019 Announcements

As a team we reviewed our work since August in a meeting last week and one of the things we were most proud of was keeping our commitment to produce a quality new article every week. With the demands of teaching and administration and our standards for quality, this was no easy feat, even with the three of us now laboring away together. Our goal has been to publish every Saturday morning to give you a consistent source of inspiration every weekend to prepare you for the next week of educational work. If you aren’t receiving our weekly updates, be sure to sign up for that through our pop up form.

For 2020 we’ve got a lot of exciting plots and plans for promoting a rebirth of ancient wisdom about education in the modern era. For instance, Patrick is working on a new eBook on implementing habit training in the classroom. This will be a great pairing with Jason’s very successful eBook on implementing narration. Likewise, Jason plans on turning his Flow of Thought series into an eBook and continuing to write and share more on narration through other venues, and either through revising the narration eBook or turning it into a full length treatment of the practice. Kolby’s still thinking through options for a longer work and connecting with venues. Lastly, earlier this month we had our first podcast recording session and had a blast recording together a long discussion on the idea of an educational renaissance and a short discussion of Aristotle on excellence. We don’t plan to launch the podcast for some time, but stay tuned for more announcements about that in the coming months.

Please let us know of any exciting ideas or suggestions you have for Educational Renaissance as a community member. We’d love to work toward building more of a community around our unique message of ancient wisdom for the modern era. If you haven’t followed our page on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, take a moment to do that, and share articles and resources you really like through social media; it really helps us get the word out. And now without further ado…

20 Memorable Maxims from 2019

1. Like “the air we breathe” the culture and curriculum of a school can either endorse the beauty and dignity of self-mastery, or subtly undercut it through neglect and cynicism.

-From Educating for Self-Control, Part 1: A Lost Christian Virtue

2. The classical tradition made virtue the main goal of education and let the chips fall where they may on less important matters.

-From Educating for Self-Control, Part 2: The Link Between Attention and Willpower

3. We want a sense of satisfaction and great mastery to propel students to see that hard work can be meaningful and satisfying rather than an obstacle to a trivial reward.

-From Overcoming Procrastination

4. Freedom and obedience are not dichotomous, but flow from each other.

-From Authority and Obedience in the Classroom: Reading Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy of Education

5. The customs and culture of a school or home are not a neutral factor in a child’s education, if moral excellence is our goal.

-From Excellence Comes by Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue

6. Knowledge of God is not just first in sequence, but first in rank of importance.

-From Easier Than You Think, Yet Harder Than You Think: Teaching the Bible to Children

7. The training of the mind through the classical liberal arts and sciences is thus the antidote to the natural disorder of the mind.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake

8. Starting a new chapter is an excellent time to take stock of your core principles.

-From New to School: 5 Principles for Starting the Year Well

9. Only after developing due reverence for a child’s existence-as-person, can we then properly ascertain methods for her education.

-From Educating Future Culture Makers

10. A strong pedagogy trains students to become independent learners as they engage in deliberate practice rather than simply fact-crammers for an upcoming test. 

-From Strategic Instruction: Optimizing Classroom Instruction for Small and Large Classes

11. Too many classroom “learning activities” focus too much on what the teacher is doing as entertainer, while students sit back passively.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 3: Narration as Flow

12. There is no standardized test for faithfulness. Faithfulness is a quality that is measured in time spent being obedient to a calling.

-From Liberating Education from the Success Syndrome

13. Of course, the highest intellectual motive is that of curiosity, which should be aroused and cultivated in any way possible.

-From Attention, Then and Now: The Science of Focus Before and After Charlotte Mason’s Time

14. But we must not forget, as Luther cautions us here, that the greatest asset of any society is not its physical infrastructures or technological developments, but the minds, hearts, and souls of its members.

-From Why Luther Believed Christians Should Study the Liberal Arts

15. Habit training as a spiritual exercise enables us to live in Christ, to have Christ as our habitude.

-From Christ Our Habitation: A Consideration of Spiritual Habit Training in Education

16. Thinking along the lines of the liberal arts is more like a mental game than a utilitarian bid for power, money or success.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 4: The Liberal Arts as Mental Games

17. When we apply ourselves to deep and meaningful work, getting in the flow and cultivating valuable skills along the way, a certain lasting joy and fulfillment is the result throughout the process.

-From In Search of Happiness, Part 1: The Road of Virtue

18. Meaningful, complex and important work requires the kind of attention that can cut through distraction.

-From Habit Formation: You, Your Plastic Mind, and Your Internet

19. The move of turning conversation into a learnable skill puts it back in the realm of education, where it ought to have stayed.

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 5: The Play of Words

20. The behaviorist can with consistency treat children as mere animals to be poked and prodded with carrots and sticks, but the Christian must lead souls and inspire hearts.

-From Marketing, Manipulations, and True Classroom Leadership

Hope you enjoyed these memorable maxims! Let us know which is your favorite in the comments, and be sure to share quotes and articles with your friends and colleagues.

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The greatest liability of education is an undue focus on the intellect. One of the chief concerns teachers have when they plan their lessons is the conveyance of knowledge. This is indeed an important aspect of teaching. But this is not the only aspect of teaching and perhaps actually not the most important, despite the fact that the intellect or mind would seem to be the chief organ we’re concerned with in education. This misunderstanding of our educational aims has the potential to misalign our goals and strategies as educators.

In previous posts, I have shown how a focus on intellectual knowledge has been the chief concern of educational thinkers and policy makers over the past several decades, who boil down the intellect to standards of intellectual achievement measured by standardized testing. Don’t get me wrong, the intellect needs to be trained and it is a lofty goal for educators to train the minds of our young ones.

The point I will make here, though, is that there is so much more to a person than just their intellect, and that it is essential for educators to consider the whole person if we are to properly align our goals and strategies. If the mind is not the only organ of learning, then we do our students a disservice by only training that organ. As we explore what it means to educate the whole person, we will draw upon the wisdom of ancient and modern thinkers as they express the power of habit training.

“With All Your Heart, Soul, Mind and Strength”

When we speak about the whole person, what do we mean? Let us consider the human person from a biblical perspective. Human beings are embodied souls. The concept of imago Dei in Genesis 1:26-27 means there is a spark of divinity that resides within each individual person. The embodiment of this divine spark means, however, that we are physical creatures, existing temporally, regulated by the laws of our natural universe. The imago Dei connects us to our creator such that our soul’s greatest desire is to relate to God. The Hebrew Bible expresses this in terms of a law:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deut. 6:5)

This tripartite expression of our personhood considers three organs: heart, soul, and body. This tripartite division, though, is not as cut and dried as we might want. Ancient thinkers as well as Christian theologians have noted the will, conscience, intuition, reason, imagination, emotion and, yes, the intellect as other constituent parts of our being. Grappling with what we are and what we are made of is not a straightforward exercise. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 in Mark 12:30 and includes an interesting word:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The mind has now been added to the list. Matthew and Luke condense the list back down to three – soul, mind and strength – combining heart and mind as synonyms for the same organ. The biblical testimony is that we are complex creatures, multifaceted, resonant with our Creator, and fit with diverse organs that operate a wide array of human functions.

In his book You Are What You Love, James K. A. Smith connects our multifaceted nature to learning. He writes:

Every approach to discipleship and Christian formation assumes an implicit model of what human beings are. While these assumption usually remain unarticulated, we nonetheless work with some fundamental (though unstated) assumptions about what sorts of creatures we are—and therefore what sorts of learners we are. If being a disciple is being a learner and follower of Jesus, then a lot hinges on what you think ‘learning’ is. And what you think learning is hinges on what you think human beings are. In other words, your understanding of discipleship will reflect a set of working assumptions about the very nature of human beings, even if you’ve never asked yourself such questions.

Smith, You Are What You Love, 2-3

What Smith enables us to see is that our model of learning and discipleship hinges on our model of human nature. If we fundamentally think of human beings as physical creatures, our model of teaching will be like training. If we fundamentally think of human beings as intellectual, our model for teaching becomes knowledge transfer. Smith challenges the latter of these understandings of human beings, noting that an intellectual model of “assumes that learning (and hence discipleship) is primarily a matter of depositing ideas and beliefs into mind-containers” (3). One might expect Smith to draw upon James for support (“I will show you my faith by my works”), but he actually turns to Paul, quoting his prayer in Philippians 9-11. The key phrase for him is “that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.” We can note along with Smith that the order is not that knowledge may abound, although the mind is not far behind. Instead it is that love may abound.

There is a very different model of the human person at work here. Instead of the rationalist, intellectualist model that implies, “You are what you think,” Paul’s prayer hints at a very different conviction:

“You are what you love.” | What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers?”

Smith, You Are What You Love, 7

For Smith, the heart better models the seat of learning and discipleship than the mind. This shift in models for learning means that education is not merely knowledge work, but the cultivation of affections. In order to cultivate the whole person in this fuller understanding of what it means to be a human being, habit training becomes an essential tool for learning.

Common Grace Habits

Training the heart comes by instilling habits. This concept, though, has often raised questions in the minds of Christian parents and educators. We can only love because he first loved us. The work of justification and sanctification comes through the work of the Holy Spirit. Isn’t habit training a circumvention of God’s work in our lives?

Jason has written previously on habit training, connecting the dots between moral virtues as expressed by Plato and Aristotle and the Christian doctrine of common grace. His point was so well made that it deserves rearticulation here. He makes the point that even though human beings are born fallen, depraved and sinful,

“human society would completely fly off the rails if God did not also grant the grace of moral virtue, distributed generally (i.e. in common) to people, regardless of their spiritual condition.”

Jason goes on to distinguish the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which we would say are “imparted by the Holy Spirit as a result of true repentance,” and the cardinal virtues (such as courage, temperance and prudence), which are cultivated by habit or practice. We hear similar refrains from Aristotle and from the wisdom tradition in the Old Testament. In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes, “The virtues (αἱ ἀρεταί) on the other hand we acquire by first having actually practised them (ἐνεργήσαντες).” (Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25; trans. H. Rackham).

A similar refrain echoes in Psalm 111:10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding.” Or consider Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The wise and virtuous person acquires good habits through training or practice.

Returning to our theme, it is noteworthy that virtue and wisdom are acquired through a process that is fairly physical in nature. Constant repetition, like a gymnast practicing a routine or a baseball player repeatedly swinging a bat, is the impression these passages leave us with. This is far more effective than a mere appeal to the intellect by way of a lecture.

Christ Our Habitude

Building on Jason’s work regarding the connection between habit training and common grace, I would like to make the case for habit training as likewise essential to our understanding of saving grace. It is a common misunderstanding of the doctrine of justification by faith apart from works to think that human effort has no place in God’s salvific work. One might call upon James to make this point (“I will show you my faith by my works”), but we can find this point made repeatedly in Paul.

In 1 Timothy 4, Paul exhorts Timothy to train disciples in the faith, “being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed.” We might tend to focus on Paul’s injunction in 4:11, “Command and teach these things.” This is quickly followed by Paul telling Timothy to devote himself to “the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.” Here is the appeal to the intellect, right? However, we should examine the advice Paul gives Timothy leading up to this command.

Paul says in 4:7, “train yourself for godliness” equating this to bodily training in 4:8, noting that training in godliness is of greater importance to bodily training. Paul notes that we toil and strive in this pursuit of godliness, secure in the “hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.” (4:10). So it is not actually an appeal to the intellect that Paul advises, but that Timothy should command and teach this very physical pursuit of godliness. Timothy himself should be an example in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity, laying out the pathway his disciples should follow in their pursuit of godliness. This is a very active faith.

Paul’s advice to Timothy resonates with what he writes to the Philippians. Here we can clarify the uselessness of works or effort as it relates to merit. Paul writes in Philippians 3:9 that he is “found in him, not having a righteousness of [his] own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.” Human works are worthless in terms of meriting salvation. God saves based on the work of Christ, which is appropriated through faith, not by works.

However, Paul goes on to describe a faith that is very active. “I press on,” he writes in 3:12, “to make it my own.” Paul is making a habitation in Christ. When a person is justified, they now live “in Christ.” We take on the habits that are consistent with Christ, training out the bad habits and training in the good habits so that our lives become more and more conformed to the image of Christ Jesus.

Christian discipleship according to Paul is a putting on of Christ Jesus. This is what it means to take up our cross daily. We become habituated through regularly reconnecting with the cross of Christ. Habit training as a spiritual exercise enable us to live in Christ, to have Christ as our habitude.

Daily Spiritual Habits

Education is not merely about training the intellect. Our exploration of theological concepts has assisted us in conceptualizing how habit training permeates the entirety of God’s grace in our lives. Education deals with the heart and soul as much as it deals with the mind. To that end I would like to briefly consider a number of daily habits worthy of consideration.

Pray always. That’s a tall order. How many of us faced with the immensity of constant prayer wind up never praying, even though we are intellectually committed to the benefits of prayer. Establishing a daily habit of prayer takes some planning. If you would like to grow in consistency of prayer, attach prayer to an already established habit. If you make coffee for yourself every morning, add prayer to that routine. Maybe brushing your teeth every evening is a solid habit. Build another habit on top of it by spending some time in prayer afterwards.

To form habits, one must be able to accomplish something regularly and consistently. So don’t set yourself a goal of an hour in prayer every day if you haven’t done five minutes consistently. Instead, set a small goal – like five minutes – that you know you can do automatically every time. You are likely to do more, but your small goal means you are more likely to follow through each time.

Gratitude has become a catchphrase in positive psychology these days. Yet Scripture calls us to give thanks regularly. For instance, steadfast prayer is coupled with thanksgiving in Colossians 4:2. In the rush of our daily routines, it can be difficult to pause and reflect on the good God has accomplished in our lives each and every day. Just like prayer, we can add a moment of thanksgiving into our daily routines.

There are many practices faithful Christians have found meaningful for their lives. Perhaps there’s a practice you feel called to make a regular part of your life. Personal habit training can be a means to a deeper walk with God in Christ.

If you would like to learn more about habit training, download my free eBook A Guide to Implementing Habit Training.

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