Does discipline have a place in the Spirit-led life?

As Cheryl and I have been on this multi-month adventure of looking for work and income, one of the dilemmas we keep coming back to is this: At what point do we trust God and wait for His answers, and at what point do we work it out ourselves? And at what point in working it out ourselves does it become a lack of faith and an act of disobedience?

Neither one of us is afraid of work. We work hard and enjoy work.

On the one hand, the Bible seems to say, “Wait for the Lord” (Psalm 5:3; 27:14; 33:20; Isaiah 8:17, for example).

On the other hand, Paul says that he who will not work will not eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

Yesterday we attended service at Sanctuary Church where pastor Craig Bowler brought a wonderful message. You can watch that message here.

By the way, I have great respect for men like Craig who spend much time in research and preparation to bring a word from God to their people. Yes, it was the Holy Spirit speaking through Craig. But also let’s not discount the work he put into it. That’s kind of the point of this post.

Craig’s sermon was part of a series on the seven last words of Christ and this week was on the phrase, “I am thirsty” (John 19:28 NIV).

He brought up a point that Max Lucado makes that the six other last words all seem very God-like, but this one just seems so, well, human.

And that is the point, isn’t it? To never forget that when Jesus was on the earth, He was fully God, yet fully human. He had human needs, human desire, human pain, human despair.

He didn’t just float along the earth like an angel. He walked it. His feet had callouses. He had BO. He got tired. He had to rest. He experienced grief. He experienced betrayal. He was human.

And for me, that represents the dichotomy. We are human with physical bodies and a physical home here on this earth. But we (if we belong to Christ) are also spiritual beings with a spiritual home to go to when our physical bodies give out.

We are saved by grace, through faith—not by anything we can do (Ephesians 2:8). But we are also to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). Our faith without works is dead (James 2:26).

At the same time we wait on the Lord to see what He will do, we do all we can do in the physical world. We need to do all that we know to do. And we need to make sure we aren’t disobeying Him in anything we do.

I think that’s what God blesses. And that’s where discipline comes in for the Spirit-led life.

I’ve decided to have a “power verse” and a “power word” this week. I’m calling it a power verse just because it sounds cooler than “key verse” or “verse of the week.”

My power word this week is SELF-DISCIPLINE and my power verse is 2 Timothy 1:7 NLT:

For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.

During this time of our lives when so much is in the air, when finances are a mess, when emotions are high, when the temptation to worry is rampant, when schedules are all over the place, when we have so many ideas and thoughts and projects and to-do items that we almost feel paralyzed to start . . . we need to have some discipline and order in our lives where we can make it.

We’re working on making some order and structure and discipline, starting in the areas of spiritual growth and physical training. We’re focusing on training ourselves spiritually by making a quiet time a daily priority and training ourselves physically by making exercise a daily priority. We need to feel that there is some element of structure in a life that seems totally out of control.

Maybe you need that too right now. Commit with us to not give in to fear, but to live in the power that lives within us (the same power that rose Jesus from the dead [Romans 8:11]), to live a life of love in a world of short tempers, and to live a life of self-discipline amidst the chaos and everything-goes philosophy of this world.

How will you live out this verse this week?

Photo credit: NA.dir via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND