A Rule of Life Helps Christians Grow Intentionally
Last spring, my kids and I planted a garden. We’re novice gardeners, but we like getting our hands dirty and we aspire to eat more vegetables. So, in great hope, we planted lettuce, kale, squash, and a variety of tomatoes. Then two things happened: Life got very busy, and Texas had an unusually rainy spring. Next thing we knew, we had tomato plants blooming and billowing out over half of our backyard.
As any actual gardener knows, tomatoes need a trellis—a stake or cage—to grow, or they’ll end up turning into a tomato jungle. I knew this, but failed to install a trellis when we planted. Finally in early May, I tried to retroactively stake the tomatoes. The result? Bent cages, broken vines, and a very frustrated gardener. The late staking still helped, but we’d have had happier plants—and more fruit—if they’d grown on structure from the outset.
What’s good for tomatoes is good for people. This is why, throughout the church’s long history, Christians have recognized the benefit of a “rule of life.”
A Rule of Life Provides Spiritual Structure
A rule of life is like a trellis. It’s a standard, offering guidance and encouraging growth in the right direction. It’s a way of living intentionally—of making a commitment to practices that should frame your life.
Unfortunately, when some people hear the word “rule,” they think of legalism—a list of dos and don’ts we must follow to stay out of trouble. Rule connotes bondage, constraint, a lack of freedom. But these connotations are almost exactly wrong. Putting a trellis around your tomato seedlings doesn’t suffocate them but encourages growth.
More precisely, the trellis encourages growth in the right direction. People, like tomatoes, are going to grow whether they have a trellis or not. The question isn’t if we’re growing but toward what end? When I left our tomatoes for over a month without a rule, they weren’t static. They took shape, put down roots, and expanded—but not in ways most conducive to fruitfulness. Their misshapen growth could only be corrected with difficulty and pain. Straightening them back into the right shape meant losing more than a few vines.
We’re growing in a direction too, whether we mean to or not. Our lives are shaped by countless choices, habits formed over days and weeks until they become grooves. Only with difficulty do we divert from the rut we’ve formed. And this is why certain times of our lives feel so weighty. All too quickly, before we even know it, our lives resemble a tangled, chaotic mess—a tomato plant taking over the yard.
How a Rule of Life Shapes Christian Formation
And to be honest, most of this mess starts within. If you’re like me, you know that our problems arise from our disordered desires—we want the wrong things, or want trivial things too much, or don’t want the best things enough. And even when we desire good things, we often fail to follow through. Both our desires and our wills are not what they should be. The apostle Paul knew this all too well. “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do,” he laments to the church in Rome. His confused experience arises, he writes, from remaining “captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Rom. 7:19, 23). Left to our own devices, to our whims and impulses, we find ourselves enslaved.
A Rule of Life Encourages Spiritual Discipline
This is why a rule of life is so helpful. My tradition, the Anglican Church, describes it this way: “A rule of life is a discipline by which I order my worship, work, and leisure as a pleasing sacrifice to God.” Why is this needed? The Anglican Catechism continues: “I need a rule of life because my fallen nature is disordered, distracted, and self-centered. A rule of life helps me to resist sin and establish godly habits, through which the Holy Spirit will increasingly conform me to the image of Christ.”
Paul would have agreed. If our disordered desires hold us captive, then freedom, paradoxically, comes through discipline. It’s another misunderstood word: We think of discipline as a synonym for punishment. Like “rule,” discipline seems to be all about coercion and restraint—things we think keep us from being our authentic selves. Or so we think.
Not Paul. In fact, right after waxing eloquent about his freedom in Christ, he urges the church in Corinth to commit to a life of serious discipline:
Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Cor. 9:25–27)
Just as an elite athlete cares about nutrition, sleep, hydration, exercise, and training, the Christian is called to the same kind of intentionality. And the athlete helps us see that discipline makes us more, not less, free. Who is more free to run a marathon? The runner who structures their life around a training regime, or the person who wakes up on the morning of a race and decides to give it a go? A disciplined life makes us more able to run. When we commit to a life of disciplines, we find ourselves less enslaved to our disordered desires. We’re more able to say yes to the good and no to all that would pull us away.
Why a Rule of Life Leads to Spiritual Freedom
There’s more to say about this countercultural understanding of freedom. But for now, the bottom line is what Paul assumed: The Christian life has a telos, or purpose, and our lives should be ordered toward that end with the same seriousness of an Olympic hopeful.
A Rule of Life Strengthens Faith Hope and Love
The Christian tradition calls this the ascetical life, from the word ascesis, or discipline. Today the word evokes a spartan existence with few possessions. But, in the church, it’s a life of prayer, fasting, and self-denial. All these disciplines aim at strengthening us against the enemies renounced in baptism—the world, the flesh, and the devil—whatever the wording various traditions choose. Each discipline aims at our growth in the virtues of faith, hope, and love. To sum it up, ascesis is about growing in love of God and neighbor.
Following Paul’s exhortation, some early Christians went to radical lengths of ascesis. With the determination and focus of an Olympian, spiritual athletes gave their lives to rigorous discipline. From Anthony the Great, who battled demons in the desert, to Simeon Stylites, who for decades interceded for the world from his perch on top of a pillar, these extraordinary ascetics inspired other Christians to join the race. A movement of Christian monasticism was underway.
Monasticism represented a renewed commitment to follow the teachings of Christ, no matter how demanding. But ascetics, and the communities that formed around them, were not an alternative to the church. They weren’t a conclave of “super Christians” apart from the community of Christians. Instead, monastic life existed for the church. Not everyone became a monastic. But the laity and clergy alike were inspired by ascetics like Anthony who embraced poverty, solitude, and prayer that they might run so as to win the prize.
Excerpt from Practicing Life Together: A Common Rule for Christian Growth by Paul J. Gutacker (© 2025). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.
PAUL GUTACKER is a historian who lives in Waco, Texas. Since 2018, Paul, his wife, Paige, and their four children have been enjoying life with the Brazos Fellows, a community that studies, prays, eats, and discerns together. When he’s not teaching, he loves sharing in favorite pastimes with his kids: cooking, fishing, reading, and rooting on the Buffalo Bills.
