Raise your hand if you aren’t as consistent in spiritual disciplines as you feel like you ought to be.
Most of us can identify opportunities to grow in our pursuit of Christlikeness. For those who didn’t raise their hands, there’s a book on confession and another on repentance in the list below.
As an elder in my local church, I’m on the lookout for good, concise resources that can catalyze spiritual formation for new or seasoned believers. Most of these books are short. They’re also doctrinally sound and very readable. These are the sorts of resources churches should have on hand to give to people who need a little encouragement in their Christian life. Or they might be useful for a small-group study for church members longing to dig deeper.
The first five of these books were written for a general audience. The last three are the initial installments of the Disciplines of Devotion series, written by women and for women. (I still learned a lot by reading them.) The next three titles in that series will release in April, with an emphasis on evangelism, worship, and Bible study.
Prayer
Courtney Reissig
In Prayer, Courtney Reissig explains the rich blessings of communicating with God. Helping busy women find strength through dependence on the Savior, she offers advice on praying the Scriptures, waiting on the Lord, and praying with others. Brief, biblically rich, and highly practical, this booklet is ideal for individual or small-group study.
1. Aimee Joseph, Look, Listen, Live: Cultivating Attention in a Distracted Culture (Christian Focus, 2025) (Amazon | TGC Store)
This brief volume is less about one particular spiritual discipline than about the underlying problem that often thwarts our attempts to succeed in our spiritual disciplines. Nothing trips us up from prayer, fasting, or Bible reading like distraction—not just from our phones but from the million other attention grabbers our world offers.
Joseph reminds us that God is attentive to us, his children. She also outlines a biblical and theological basis for us to be attentive to God, his Word, and each other. Amid her rich reflection on this topic, she highlights actionable steps to become more attentive when surrounded by distraction.
2. Harrison Perkins, A Penitent People: The Doctrine of Repentance (Christian Focus, 2025) (Amazon)
Few evangelicals would deny that repentance is a vital part of the Christian life. Yet sometimes we focus so much on the settled fact of our deliverance from sin that we fail to recognize the way sin damages our ongoing relationship with God.
Perkins reminds us that repentance is “about increasingly knowing reprieve from sin’s grip and tyranny as we mature in the Christian life.” In a little over a hundred pages, this book offers both a thorough doctrinal foundation for ongoing repentance and practical advice for how to make that spiritual discipline part of our personal devotional life and the life of our church.
3. Phil A. Newton, Unburdening the Soul: Personal and Corporate Confession of Sin (Courier, 2025) (Amazon)
Personal and corporate confession of sin is an often neglected spiritual discipline. Our prayers tend to default to specific requests and general platitudes about our sin. There’s no doubt that admitting our general sinfulness is a good start, but we often fail to see our sin as God sees it.
Newton argues for a deeper, more regular practice of confession that reminds us how dark our sin is in light of God’s righteousness, but also how great our freedom from guilt is in light of Christ’s sacrifice. Unburdening the Soul offers six concise answers to questions about confession and 52 weekly devotionals that can help us practice confession faithfully.
4. Kenneth Berding, The Bible by Heart: The Bible’s Own Method for Scripture Memory (Christian Focus, 2026) (Amazon | TGC Store)
I’ve had Christians tell me that Scripture memorization is an outdated spiritual discipline now that we all have Bibles in our pockets. However, easy access to electronic forms of God’s Word doesn’t negate the psalmist’s prayer to God: “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. . . . I will not forget your word” (Ps. 119:11, 16). We may be able to do a keyword search quickly to verify facts, but memorizing Scripture is more about formation than information.
Berding’s concise volume reminds us of the benefits of Scripture memory. He also points us toward traditional, analog ways of learning Scripture like singing Scripture songs, listening to the Bible (aided, perhaps, by an audio Bible on repeat), or writing it out. He offers a complementary approach to Scripture memory to those recommended by Andy Davis in How to Memorize Scripture for Life or Glenna Marshall in Memorizing Scripture.
5. David Mathis, A Little Theology of Exercise: Enjoying Christ in Body and Soul (Crossway, 2025) (Amazon | TGC Store)
Our culture tends to oscillate between extremes on the issue of exercise. It’s popular to get into a fitness frenzy and go all in on diets and workouts. It’s more common for people to stick with the “couch” portion of the Couch to 5K plan. I’ve seen Paul’s admonition that “bodily training is of some value” used to justify both extremes (1 Tim. 4:8).
Yet Mathis reminds us that stewarding our bodies is part of our overall responsibility to God. His short book emphasizes the physical, mental, and spiritual benefits of exercise without encouraging obsession with outward appearances or worldly metrics. This is a good resource for people who need encouragement to pursue physical fitness for the glory of God.
6. Courtney Reissig, Prayer (Crossway, 2026) (Amazon | TGC Store)
Every Christian knows he or she should pray more, but we have to confess that it isn’t easy. Even Jesus’s disciples, having observed their Master praying regularly, still asked to be taught to pray (Luke 11:1).
Reissig’s booklet, primarily geared toward women, is a great starting place for new believers or Christians who need a little boost in their prayer lives. She reminds us what prayer is, why it’s important, and how we can learn to pray more regularly as individuals, in our families, and with other believers.
7. Cassie Achermann, Fasting (Crossway, 2026) (Amazon | TGC Store)
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get cranky between meals. Though I’ve practiced fasting before, it’s one of the spiritual disciplines that has less appeal to me than others. I like being comfortable.
But Achermann shows that fasting can help us draw near to God because “our famished souls learn that there’s no one more satisfying than him.” The purpose of fasting isn’t to lose weight or gain merit before God but to better focus on prayer and dependence on Christ. This handy booklet lays out the biblical basis for fasting as a spiritual discipline as it encourages women to lean on Christ for every need, including our daily bread.
8. Megan Hill, Sabbath Rest (Crossway, 2026) (Amazon | TGC Store)
My grandparents wouldn’t allow me to mow the lawn on Sunday. That sort of rule, or the story of Eric Liddell refusing to race on Sunday, may be your primary exposure to the idea of Sabbath rest. But in our distracted age, productivity gurus are rediscovering the need for regular rest. The world is trying to reinvent the Sabbath because the always-on culture wears everyone to a frazzle.
In this booklet, written for women, Hill makes a biblical case that Christians ought to practice Sabbath rest—not in a legalistic manner but as a means of building community, delighting in worship, and remembering God’s mercy toward us. After all, Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). It helps to know how to practice Sabbath well.
