Learning and Leading in Ministry: Chapter Twenty-Three

Discipline Thyself

Learn self-discipline

Is there anything left to be said about self-discipline? Probably not, but maybe a different perspective will help us get a new handle on it. I know this: you will not shame yourself into it, you cannot strain your body and brain for more will-power to make it happen or you cannot synthesize a burst of energy out of nowhere and morph into a human dynamo. No. The reason you lack self-discipline in the first place is because your emotions militate against it. Emotional resistance will not succumb to equal but opposite emotional pressure. You need to stop and think about it. As expressed on www.everything2.com,

“A thousand times a day, at least, we choose to do things that are not the result of conscious reasoning. Plenty of those times, there are better choices. When confronted with this fact, we often defend ourselves. What we are defending is a lack of thought, and it ought to have no defense. The hollow confidence behind such expressions of the ego tends to contribute to the tearing down of self-discipline.”

First, failure to discipline yourself does not represent an inability to choose. No one has stripped from you the right to determine your own behavior. No self discipline means you are making the wrong choice. Lying in bed when you should get up is simply choosing one behavior over another. Do not say to yourself, “I can’t get up.” Say, “I can get up but I choose to lay here in bed and accomplish nothing.” When you do not write the report that you should write, when you do not make the phone call you should make, when you do not exercise your body when you should, you exercise this same privilege of choice. Your choice of inaction means that you could just as easily have chosen to act. Telling yourself otherwise is self deception.

Second, self discipline deserves loving, not loathing. It cuts out the fat that has glommed on to your soul. It releases the vibrancy of life locked up within your bones. It gathers up all the potential power wasting away in your being and sets it afire. Self discipline is a huge bolt cutter that chomps through the steel chains wrapped around your arms and legs, setting you free to do what you were created to do. It is an emancipator, not an executioner; a redeemer, not a captor. Self discipline can write the check for your costliest dreams. Until you see it as an ally, you will never fully submit to its demands.

Finally, the unfortunate connotation about self discipline is that no one can help you. Not true. You need the input from friends, relatives, teachers, coaches, mentors and advisors, especially in the formative years, in order to remain securely engaged in self discipline. Blessed are those whose parents imposed strong discipline upon them as children. In my personal conviction, discipline is not something a parent does to a child; it is something a parent does for a child. The youth who emerges from childhood with self discipline firmly in hand is fortunate indeed.

Think of the difference between a disciplined and an undisciplined life as the difference between a power grid crackling with thousands of volts of generated electricity versus a bolt of raw lightning flashing across the sky. The one is methodical, the other spectacular. The harnessed electricity in the grid, however, powers thousands of homes. The lightening creates a great commotion, and then it’s gone. Self discipline does not suppress, it compresses your effectiveness into a concentrated form.

“In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves…self-discipline with all of them came first.” –Harry S. Truman