Thoughts on Discipline

From time to time, I fill in teaching the teen Sunday School class for my friends Stewart and Galadriel, who are the regular teachers. Such was the case last week and I felt to teach about discipline. This is something that God has been dealing with me about for several months, since before the beginning of the year.

As I was thinking about the concept of discipline, it occurred to me how close the word is to "disciple". If we are His disciples, we must live lives of discipline. A disciple is a follower. Paul says in 1 Cor. 11:1 "Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ." We must find leaders who are following Christ and be disciplined in following them. If you look up the word disciple, you find that the root means "student" or "pupil". We must be disciplined to learn from the Great Teacher. How can He teach us if we don't take time to listen?

To help me be more disciplined in my life, I sat down at my computer last Saturday and wrote myself a tentative daily schedule. If I follow it, I will get in all of the important stuff that I ought to be doing and won't burn up so much time with the meaningless time wasters that so easily distract us from what truly matters. This brings to mind an axiom that I've heard that, unfortunately, has often applied to my life:

"Too often we major in the urgent and minor in the important."

I don't want to be guilty of this. There will always be urgent stuff that comes up in my life, but if I am a disciplined person, I will make time for the things that matter, like daily prayer time and Bible study. What could be more important than spending time with the Lord?

I was doing these things before, but not as much, and not with the same regularity. Daniel prayed with his windows open toward Jerusalem three times a day. It seems that we benefit from regularly taking time out to acknowledge our Creator and focus on Him for a few minutes. It recenters us and reminds us of Who is truly important (and it's not us!). We have to take the focus off of ourselves and put it on Him.

Please don't misunderstand me. I don't feel like doing these things will somehow help me to obtain God's grace. I feel like I am called to do these things in response to God's grace. Nothing I can do will obligate God to do anything for me, but He has already done so much for me, it obligates me to do more for Him.

Well, during my first week of striving for greater discipline, I have not stuck to my schedule 100%, but I have done pretty well. I have spent a few minutes every morning in prayer right after waking up, and it just makes such a difference in my outlook every day. I have been reading His word more, and meditating on it more throughout the day. Twice this week I have awakened in the morning from a dream in which I felt the Holy Spirit greatly. This is not something that happens to me often. I am responding to God's grace and He is giving me more, obligating me even further. God's grace truly is amazing.