It is so easy to make a Christian feel guilty. Most
Ministers are masters of the art. We so often go
into a church service happy and come out unhappy, thinking along
these lines: "I should pray more. I should read my
Bible more. I should evangelise more.
Above all, I should be more disciplined in my spiritual
life."
Let us say this right at the beginning: discipline can be very
helpful. But all too often it acts as a substitute,
and replaces the relationship it is supposed to
strengthen. It is a tool, and like all tools, its
value lies in how it is used. To use discipline
rightly requires a great degree of wisdom and maturity.
The Use of Discipline
When you ride a bicycle, what do you concentrate on? You think
about where you are going, perhaps about the route to take; you
think about the other road users, and about keeping a safe
distance from the cars; you think about what you will find when
you arrive, and what you intend to do there. You do
not think about balancing on the bicycle, or about pushing the
pedals around in a circle: they are simply things you have to do
in order to get anywhere on the bicycle. If you
think about balancing, you will probably fall off.
Discipline is like that: it is a by-product of your need to get
somewhere, not something to concentrate upon.
Very often, people object to this view. "The Bible
tells me to be disciplined," they say. Oh yes?
Where in the Bible are we told to be disciplined? When Paul
said 'I pummel my body' he was not saying Christians should
pretend to be Spartans, nor that we should regard bodily
discomfort or punishment as desirable. He was
telling us to keep things in perspective: the body
is a good servant but a bad master, and it needs to do
what I want, whether that is enjoyable or not. He
was not talking about physical discipline any more than he was
talking about early Christian aerobics.
Discipline and Love
When David said 'early in the morning I will praise you,' he
was not talking about the discipline of early morning Quiet
Times; he was talking about love, and about a relationship that
continued to enthral and entrance him.
Discipline is not an end, but a means to an end. If
you want to win a race, you need sufficient discipline to
practice for it. If you want to know God, you need
sufficient discipline to pray, read the Bible, have fellowship,
pursue justice, and do all the other things that help us to know
Him. The important thing is not the discipline but
the desire to know Him better. If you have the
desire, the discipline will always be there; without the desire,
the discipline will always be empty and legalistic.
What of the Christian who says,"I want to love God
more"?
Surely we can say to them: read your Bible and pray
more. No! Legalism cannot produce love,
any more than writing romantic fiction can provide you with the
perfect partner. If you want to love God more, you
already love Him and know He loves you: enjoy that
love. Only love can produce love. Enjoy
the relationship. Delight in His love as He delights
in yours.
Because I love Him, I want to know Him better, to know what He
likes, to understand how He wants me to live. This
desire drives me back to the Bible, to study it, to understand
the message more and more deeply. I want to
understand how people in the past related to God and what they
discovered of Him, so I am forced to go back and examine the
context and culture in which their relationship was based, and
the language and grammar in which it was expressed.
All these things bring death if pursued as academic studies, but
bring life if the desire and intention is to know and love the
Author more.
Discipline and God
'Self Discipline' so often means little more than Christian
legalism, a form of sin that we approve of in the Church because
it produces behaviour we like, even if the fruit is
deadly. Highly disciplined Christians are
predictable and safe. The God we worship is neither
'safe' nor 'predictable', and those who worship and follow Him
will soon be neither.
We like to think how wonderful it would have been to be a
disciple, to walk with Jesus. We forget how horribly
embarrassing it was to be around Him, how often He ignored
people's conventional expectations and avoided normal
behaviour. He was spontaneous and unpredictable, and
almost totally unlike the highly disciplined Christians who
flock to our Churches today and claim to follow Him.