Developing Discipline

By Brian Tome

We are starting a series called "New Year, New Me," and today we are talking about discipline. I heard recently that 90% of all Americans make New Year’s resolutions. However, between 80 and 90% of those people never fulfill their resolutions. A lot of you have already dropped the ball on some of your resolutions. You’ve missed a trip to the gym. You’ve had too many candy bars. You haven’t put part of your first new year’s paycheck into a charity. You are still using profanity.

There exist entire industries geared toward motivating us to do something different that will benefit us — and more importantly, benefit the financial bottom line of the company that is promoting it. Every time I see a Bally’s commercial I get motivated to workout, and then I realize they’ve given me that motivation, not to help me, but to help their profits.

There are entire industries that help us keep some of the commitments we’ve generated. A classic example is the store Successories. You’ve seen some of their products like their motivational plaques, calendars, and pictures. These things are designed to inspire us. When we read these motivational things, we start thinking, "I can be somebody! I can make it happen! Yes, I will take my destiny!"

The problem is that nothing has been created inside of you. These motivational products may reinforce something you already feel, but they won’t lead you to success unless there is something deep inside that is burning for that thing. One Succesories product contains this quote from Vince Lombardi.

I don’t know about you, but I love this kind of stuff. It motivates me. However, there is a fundamental problem here. If you know anything about the life of Vince Lombardi, you know that his life was one-dimensional. He was all about football and pretty close to a total failure in every other area of his life. He abused his body with excessive smoking and drinking. He didn’t get enough exercise or rest. He also emotionally abused his family.

An early biographer was once granted total access to Lombardi’s life. He followed Lombardi everywhere for the better part of a year. At the conclusion of the project, this biographer wasn’t sure what to title his soon-to-be-published book. When he asked his co-workers for input, they came up with the idea of titling the book Shut up Marie because Lombardi said it so often to his wife.

Lombardi didn’t intentionally tear down his family, but he didn’t intentionally build them up either. For all of his talk about discipline on the football field, he didn’t translate that same discipline into any other field of his life.

There is also no evidence that he did anything to build himself spiritually beyond regularly attending church. I’m not saying Lombardi was a bad guy, and I certainly don’t mean to dishonor any Packers fans. I’m merely pointing out that just because you are successful in one area of your life doesn’t mean you live a life of significance and value.

At the beginning of a new year we have the opportunity to reexamine what a life of ultimate value looks like. I can work toward seeing a new me come into being. That is why we are doing this series.

Probably everyone in this room is having success in an area of life. Maybe your career is going great, and you’re making a lot of money. You may be seeing your children develop into mature and healthy people. Your golf game might be improving. You may see your relationships being elevated to a higher level of quality. None of these things have just happened. You had to put in effort for a while before you saw any of these things come into reality.

That effort you put in is called discipline. You went to school to prepare yourself to excel at your job. School is a discipline. You use discipline every time you evaluate different parenting styles or when you do the hard work of reprimanding your children. Every time you go to the driving range or read Golf Digest, it’s a discipline to help you in your ultimate goal.

Also, you don’t just have good relationships. You have worked at having good relationships. You used discipline when you evaluated a conversation you had to figure out what you could have said differently.

You probably never thought of some of these things as disciplines. But make no mistake about it; you are really good at something because you understand the role of discipline. You have leveraged discipline in your life. Vince Lombardi was great at football because he leveraged discipline on the field. He was lacking in other areas of his life because he did not leverage the same principles of discipline elsewhere.

Someone half jokingly said to me a while ago, "Brian you are always using sports analogies. How about using some other illustrations that connect with the rest of us, like shopping mall illustrations." I do admit that I use sports analogies, but there is a reason for this. It isn’t because I’m trying to be a stereotypical male. Using sports illustrations to portray spiritual truths actually started in the Bible.

This verse likens life to an athletic event. Who enters an athletic event? Those who want to. Discipline exists to help people achieve things. Someone was telling me recently about how their church has "days of obligation" where people have to show up. Wow! That’s exciting. Sign me up for that plan. I’m being sarcastic, but my point is that you have to want something badly enough on the inside to discipline yourself to get it.

Discipline isn’t obligation. Let me tell you something, no one grows into a new person out of obligation. If you’re doing something out of obligation, you won’t grow from the experience. Also, you’re not likely to be motivated enough to continue if your main motivation is obligation.

For example, many of us have exercise goals. Let’s say you want to lose twenty pounds. You decide to cut down on your calories and increase your sit-ups. However, after diligently working this plan for a short while you don’t see any results. You decide to quit. Guess what, you don’t see the benefit of discipline for a long time. You also don’t see the ramifications of not following through on a discipline like exercise for a long time either. Saying to yourself, "I will workout three times a week for forty-five minutes" will not do it. That is obligation. It won’t bring you any satisfaction and you won’t stick with it.

People go into strict training for races, not because they want the discipline of the training, but because they want the victory the race will bring. Don’t try to incorporate disciplines into your life unless you have an internal desire for what the discipline will bring. Discipline isn't the goal. Something else must be burning inside you that will then lead you to find a discipline to bring your goals into reality.

Several months ago there was a guy on one of our ministry teams who had lost some weight. We started talking, and he said that what happened was that a year ago I did a message on physical fitness, and he chose to follow through. Why did he choose to follow through and get in better shape after that message? Because a co-worker of his, who was about the same age, had died suddenly from a heart attack. He now had a new passion for honoring the body God had blessed him with. He didn’t lose weight and become healthier because he felt obligated. Instead he had a new passion for physical fitness because he saw that a lack of exercise and healthy eating habits could cause him serious harm. He was motivated deep inside to change.

We understand the concept of training versus trying in athletics, but that principle is exactly the same in every area of life. I’m going to spend the rest of our time telling you about what I’ve found to be the path of discipline.

The Path of Discipline:

1) Present yourself.

You must decide to what you are willing to present yourself. All of us serve something, and all of us have an ultimate objective in life. It might be that we are presenting ourselves to the ideal of a life of notoriety. Or we are presenting ourselves to our company saying, "Use my life so that I can get ahead." Or we are presenting ourselves to the fashion police saying, "I will live my life so that you approve." All of us are presenting ourselves to some ultimate ideal. Let me give you a verse that describes to what I have chosen to present myself.

This verse says what I’ve done. I’ve chosen to present myself to God. A discipline is just an action that helps bring about a future reality. A lot of the disciplines in my life are simply actions meant to cement something in my mind. One discipline I use regularly to help me present myself to God is the action of putting my hands up. As I put my hands up I say, "God, I surrender to you. I present myself to you for your service. My life isn’t about me; it is about you. I present myself to you today to be a living sacrifice."

2) Picture the future.

You have presented yourself to something whether you realize it or not. If you can’t think of a single overriding objective, then you have presented yourself to the general pattern of the world.

The world will take you someplace and conform you into a way of life. When we get into the midst of a situation, most of us want to determine what is the truth. That is not a time to decide what is true. Remember, discipline isn’t an obligation. There are a lot of patterns in our world everyone else is following, but that doesn’t mean we should be following them. Some of the patterns are mundane. Some of the patterns are healthy. But there are other patterns that are evil.

For example, the pattern of Christmas cards. I’m under no obligation to get Christmas cards sent out to people. So this year our family didn’t send them. For some of you, that is a discipline. For us it isn’t. It is optional. By the way, for all of you who get your Christmas cards out by Thanksgiving, I hope you’re exercising that same discipline in other areas of your life.

If you don’t know who or what you have presented yourself to, and if you don’t have a picture in your mind of what you are hoping to become, then discipline will never happen with you. It will be another thing on your to-do list. It will be like doing Christmas cards year round. Ugh. That’s drudgery.

If you think our band member, Todd Henry is good on guitar, you haven’t heard anything until you’ve heard him on piano. Long before he ever came on staff I asked him how he got to be so good. He said he saw the movie Great Balls of Fire and wanted to play like Jerry Lee Lewis.

No one who practices an instrument does it without knowing the direction and future he or she has pictured in his or her mind. Obligation and drudgery won’t produce a great musician. At some point you have to say "I want to be good, and therefore I must look forward to the discipline of practice."

You see, so few of us have a picture of what we are trying to become. Therefore, we fall into the patterns of this world. Ad campaigns create our values. Or we are influenced by the way others live their lives, and we think that is how we need to live. No. These are just patterns others are living. They likely fell into patterns without presenting themselves to God and picturing what the future would look like if lived by His pattern.

3) Prescribe your actions.

Describing our actions is when we talk about what has happened. Prescribing our actions is when we plan what we hope to later describe. We describe something once it has already happened. We prescribe something prior to it happening. Everything you do starts in your mind. That’s why at Crossroads we say, "You don’t have to check your brain at the door." We say that because that is what God says in the Bible. If we read a little more in Romans 12 verse 2 we find…

We need to put the right things in our minds so that not only does our mind grow and expand, but it also starts thinking like God thinks. You don’t just suddenly have a mind that thinks properly. In order to overcome some of our destructive mental patterns, we need to get into a prescription of mental development. The renewing of the mind is an ongoing process that helps your mind grow and overcome the patterns of the world.

One of the things I like to read is the Best Buy advertising insert in the Sunday Enquirer. I especially like the television section. My old 27-inch Magnavox seems to be wearing out, and that doesn’t really bother me because I’m thinking about upgrading. Can you say DVD? Can you say HDTV wide screen TV? You know what? I can say DVD and HDTV, but I can’t pay for them. That’s because one of the disciplines Lib and I practice is tithing — giving ten percent of our income to the work of the church. Having presented ourselves to God and then renewed our minds has lead us to this place.

We, like many of you, make above-and-beyond-sacrificial commitments to pay for this place. You only do something like that if you have truly presented yourself to God, and you fill your mind with what God thinks. If you aren’t renewing your mind, you’re going to be filling it with what Best Buy, Spiegel, and LL Bean want it to be filled with. Those are the kind of patterns into which people mindlessly fall.

Discipline isn’t painful. Let me give you an example. When I present myself to God for His use, I have to pre-decide to get onto His truth plan. This means I read and believe the Bible, and I try to do what it says. I’m not telling you that you have to do this. I’m telling you that you should start the process of reading the Bible and exploring its truths. I have done enough exploring, and the Bible doesn’t have to prove itself to me anymore. If it says it, I believe it, and then I try to live it.

In the very first verses of the Bible it talks about God creating the world. Do you know it took Him six days to do that? Some theologians believe this was six literal twenty-four-hour days. Others believe that this was a poetic use of speech in which each day represented a very long period of time. That debate aside, God could have done it in one day if He chose to, but He didn’t. He did it over six — which demonstrates that He values process.

And do you know what He did on the seventh day? Nothing. He rested. This is why one of the Ten Commandments is that "You should keep the Sabbath Holy." This means that one day in seven should be reserved for rest. This is a prescribed action that God is giving us. It aligns with His truth. And people who present themselves to God will live by this truth.

During the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that something inside of me wasn’t right. I was a bit more aggravated than normal, and it was getting harder for me to focus during my times of study and preparation. One of the disciplines I participate in is daily prayer. I don’t do this out of obligation as a follower of Christ. I pray daily because I want to have the quality of life that Jesus had. I want to connect with my Heavenly Father. I can’t do that without regular times of prayer. Prayer isn’t the goal, connecting with God is the goal. Prayer is the discipline that is going to make that connection with God a reality.

In my normal time of prayer I do an exercise called "palms up", that I led everyone through at this past week’s Next Level Service on Wednesday night. What I did this day, as I continued in prayer, was to put my palms down and say, "God I want to now empty myself of things in my life that shouldn’t be there. Speak to me."

As I sat in prayerful silence I remembered things I had done that were wrong and asked forgiveness. With my palms down symbolically, I emptied myself of those things. As I was sitting in extended silence, I waited to see if something else came to my mind that God was putting there. The word "Pride" kept coming to mind. I didn’t know why because I hadn’t thought that pride was an issue in my life. However, I prayed and said, "God, any pride that’s in me, I empty it right now and ask Your forgiveness for it."

Then I turned my palms upward and said, "God if there is something You want to give me, I’m ready to receive. Please bless me and give me something." The word "rest" came immediately to mind — the kind of rest that comes from keeping a Sabbath. But I knew it wasn’t a day of rest I needed. I was in need of more time than that. And then I thought to myself, "I can’t take time off right now. We just moved into a new building. My leadership is really needed now more than ever, and that means I’m going to have to get someone else to speak."

And then I realized it. Pride! That is why it was on my mind. Those thoughts were pride-driven and they were keeping me from the blessing of rest that God wanted me to have.

Let’s revisit Romans again.

What is the key word here? "Then you will be able." Once you present yourself and picture your future and prescribe your actions… then you will be able.

I was able to see what was God’s good and perfect will for my life at that moment. Rest. And I would have never seen it if I hadn’t been following a prescribed discipline. It’s a discipline that fits into my pictured future. And it’s a picture that God wants me to have when I present myself to Him.

To make discipline work, first you have to figure out where your life is going and then add disciplines to your life to make it go there. Discipline isn’t about getting an immediate benefit. It is about pursuing a passion through regimented training activities. We never get to test and approve and have a life that God approves of unless we go through the path that is prescribed here.

Let me challenge some of you in regards to the Next Level Services that we have on Wednesday nights. No one is going to grow closer to God without putting disciplines in his or her life. For a lot of you, the Weekend Service is challenging you to grow to the next level. For others, you feel you are ready for more. You need to prescribe to your schedule that you will be available on Wednesday nights from 7:00 to 8:15 for our Next Level Service.

You may not feel the benefit immediately, but no discipline brings an immediate benefit. Growth and becoming a new you doesn’t just happen suddenly. It happens in the future because you have been disciplining yourself for success. Going to the Next Level Service is a sacrifice, but it isn’t painful. Having time in prayer is a sacrifice because I could be doing other things, but it isn’t painful.

Let me end with a word of caution. A lot of you are saying, "Oh, yeah, I want to do that!" You know what? Discipline starts one building block at a time. There’s probably one discipline that you need to put in you life right now. You presented yourself to something, you pictured your future, and you are prescribing the action. Start there. If you say that you are going to put these five disciplines in your life you will be overwhelmed. It is one building block at a time.

You probably have that one thing in your mind right now. Realize the one thing you need to do.

Do that thing this week. Just see the blessing of discipline. Then you will be able to build from there. This new year, we can all have the kind of new us that we want to have and that God wants us to have — if we take the path of discipline.