Quotes about Discipline

Self denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.

At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed Him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are put into the shadow of God's hand until we learn to hear Him.

The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.

Take yourself by the scruff of the neck and shake off your incarnate laziness.

You cannot have a moral holiday and remain moral, nor can you have a spiritual holiday and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely his, and this means that you have to watch to keep yourself fit. It takes a tremendous amount of time. Some of us expect to "clear the numberless ascensions"* in about two minutes.

Get into the habit of saying, "Speak, Lord," and life will become a romance. Every time circumstances press, say, "Speak, Lord," and make time to listen. Chastening is more than a means of discipline, it is meant to get me to the place of saying, "Speak, Lord.

God's grace produces men and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, not pampered, spoiled weaklings. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to live the worthy and excellent life of a disciple of Jesus in the realities of life. And it is always necessary for us to make an effort to live a life of worth and excellence.

We have to get into the habit of carefully listening to God about everything, forming the habit of finding out what He says and heeding it. If, when a crisis comes, we instinctively turn to God, we will know that the habit has been formed in us. We have to take the initiative where we are, not where we have not yet been.

There are not three stages in spiritual life—worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God's idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was unhasting and unresting. It is a discipline, we cannot get into it all at once.

We have to WORK OUT in the mechanical [physical] realm what Gods WORKS IN [us] in the mysterious [spiritual] realm. Beware of any spiritual emotion that you do not work out mechanically...

Jesus is saying that the greatest concern of life is to place our relationship with God first, and everything else second. It is one of the most difficult, yet critical, disciplines of the Christian life to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us into absolute harmony with the teaching of Jesus in these verses.

Tis because I am ordinary, / Thy ways so often look ordinary to me. It is through the discipline of obedience that I get to the place where Abraham was and I see who God is.