Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
A Rule of Life
To order the whole of ordinary life — work, money, speech, leisure — toward God by a deliberate rule, so that everything is done with intention rather than only at set acts of worship.
Decide that your whole ordinary life — work, money, speech, leisure — is to be lived as given to God, not religion saved for set hours. Build a simple rule: rise early, keep one or two fixed prayer-times, bring your common business under the same intention. Keep something fixed and something free. Review it daily; renew it gently.
What it is
The organising idea of A Serious Call is that devotion is not a set of religious acts squeezed into a worldly life, but a whole life given a single direction. Law’s famous opening defines it plainly: “Devotion signifies a life given, or devoted, to God.” The practice that follows from this is the adoption of a rule of life — a deliberate ordering of one’s ordinary hours, work, money, speech, and recreation so that the whole of it is intended for God rather than left to drift.
It treats daily life as the real field of religion. As a practice it leans on effort cooperating with grace (The Inner Creates the Outer) and on the whole of a life being shaped toward its purpose (It's All Play).
The Method
Law’s argument moves from definition to a concrete rule for the day. The steps, drawn from the book:
- Settle the intention first. Decide that the aim is a life devoted to God in its ordinary substance, not only in church. Law’s premise: “he is the devout man. who considers God in everything, who serves God in everything, who makes all the parts of his common life parts of piety, by doing everything in the name of God, and under such rules as are conformable to His glory.”
- Order your common business by it. Bring trade, employment, spending, and dealings with others under the same intention — Law insists religion governs “the ordinary actions of our life,” not a reserved compartment of it.
- Anchor the day with fixed prayer. A rule needs structure; Law builds his around set hours of prayer (see the companion practice). He notes the power of small, regular acts: “a little time regularly and constantly employed to any one use or end will do great things and produce mighty effects.”
- Rise early as the first act of the rule. He makes early rising the threshold discipline — small in itself but proof of seriousness: “It is so small a one that if you cannot comply with it, you have no reason to think yourself capable of any other.”
- Keep something fixed and something free. At the stated hours, “it will be of great benefit to you to have something fixed and something at liberty in your devotions” — a stable form that still breathes.
- Review and renew. A rule is kept by daily examination (see the self-examination practice) and periodic renewal, not by being written once and forgotten. (Sourcing: quotations are from the public-domain text of A Serious Call, chs. I–II and ch. XIV. Short quotes only; consult the full work for context.)
Source & Lineage
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729) is Law’s classic of English devotion. Its insistence that ordinary work and money are the matter of religion places it in the long Christian tradition of the regula (rule of life) running from the monastic Rules through Thomas à Kempis, and it directly shaped the early Methodists’ method of ordered, examined living.
Common refinements
Making the rule a cage. Law pairs fixed form with liberty; an over-rigid rule defeats its own purpose.
- Confining religion to the prayer-times. The whole point is the common life — if the rule never touches work and money, it has missed Law’s argument.
- Starting too large. Begin with the small threshold disciplines (early rising, one or two fixed hours) before extending the rule.
- Keeping it in your head. Write the rule down and review it; an unexamined rule quietly dissolves.