At the Center of It All

When we’re growing up as a young Christ-follower, one of the things that we learn is to begin building spiritual disciplines into our lives. It’s where the word disciple comes from. Scripture includes many of these disciplines, and I’ve read more books and articles and heard more sermons on it than I can count.

So here I am adding once again to the volume. Why do people need to keep hearing it over and over, though? Because it takes work, and we want things to be easy.

The problem is that our lives have been designed so that it takes effort to get results. Certainly God gives us gifts, but he expects us to use them. Even secular writers recognize the need for effort in order to accomplish something. Seth Godin, a popular business writer, talked about this recently. He advocates deleting two hours of “spare time” each day which you currently devote to unproductive activities, and instead spending them doing things like exercise, learning new things, and writing thank you notes. He suggests spending one day a week just being with people you love, and for one year spending money only on things you absolutely need.

He is of course talking about discipline. The discipline to focus relentlessly, to use his word, on things that matter, things that will make a difference and move us towards success.

The Christ-follower must do the same thing, but look at it through the lens of God’s plan and purpose for us. Every choice we make, everything we decide to do with our gifts (among which are our time and resources), should somehow further God’s kingdom. We need to discipline ourselves, at least for a while, to assiduously reflect on everything we do. If it doesn’t further God’s kingdom in some way, change it or eliminate it. This doesn’t mean there’s no down time. If we are renewing and refreshing ourselves, then it’s productive time. Recreation can and should be re-creation. But we have to be absolutely transparent with ourselves about whether our activities are productive or if we’re justifying something worthless in the name of “relaxation”.

There are so many things that I wish I had more time to do. The only way I can make them happen is to eliminate the waste in my day and start doing them. Easier said than done, of course, or it would already be happening. But that’s what discipline is about. Plan the week, stick to the plan, and reflect on how to make the plan better for next week. And when I fail, don’t quit, but learn from it and keep trying. And when I fail again, get back up and learn some more. And when I fail the third time, find the new lesson in the failure. And again, and again.

Sherman Finesilver once said, “Keep these concepts in mind: You’ve failed many times, although you
don’t remember. You fell down the first time you tried to walk. You almost drowned the first time you tried to swim…. R. H. Macy failed 7 times before his store in New York caught on. Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times. Don’t worry about failure. My suggestion to each of you: Worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.” I know I will fall if I try. It’s a guarantee. My prayer is simply this: that at the end of my life I will have arisen one time more than I fell.