We have read our way through Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Donald Whitney these last thirteen weeks. During that time we've discovered that the Christian life is to be a disciplined life. Below you will find links to our discussion of each discipline.
Teamwork makes the dream work
Personal growth isn't a one-man show.
Too many look at life and believe they must go it alone.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
In fact, you need other people in your life to help you. People who will encourage, challenge and correct you along the way.
If you want to grow and reach big goals, you’ll need to assemble a group of warriors to go to battle alongside.
The idea of a warrior is the perfect picture to keep in mind because soldiers don’t go into battle alone. No matter how well trained or tough they may be, they can’t make it on their own. They need a team.
And so do you.
Get busy assembling the group of men and women you want to fight weakness and sin alongside. People you can trust to have your best interests in mind, even if that means telling you things you don’t want to hear.
Work's value
What do you think and how do you feel when you work hard and come up short?
Are you frustrated, upset and feel like it was all a waste of time?
That’s how most people look at things. If they didn’t reach their goal or dream it was all for not.
Reaching goals is nice, but it’s not the whole ball game.
There is value in the work you do.
Even if you don’t fully reach your goal or an outcome you’d prefer, the work you do matters.
Work is good for you and works good within you.
This is especially true when the work you do is disciplined work. When you delay gratification and suffer for the long-term payoff you accomplish far more than you realize.
You build character, strength, and resolve that comes no other way.
It’s easy when you’re at your best and full of life, but that’s not how you grow. Your best days come when you’re not 100% and do it anyway.
Embrace the process and commit to it like nothing else.
It will benefit you like nothing else can, even if that means you come up short on a goal or two.
Why discipline?
You want to be the very best version of yourself you can possibly be. You want to be bigger, stronger, smarter, and tougher than you were yesterday. You want health and happiness to abound in your life. Because you want to know God’s Word so well that it falls from your lips and informs your life without your realizing it. Because you desire strong, deep, and lasting relationships. Because you want to be the very best father you could ever be to your children. Because you want to be the best husband you’re capable of being to your wife.
For all these reasons and a hundred more, you choose discipline.
It’s not an easy path to walk. It involves getting up earlier, working harder and forcing yourself to do things you’d rather skip. But in the end, it’s the only path that’ll get you even close to the most important things in your life. Things that make hardship seem trivial.
Reformation 500
October 31st isn’t just the day little kids dress up in costumes and knock on strangers doors demanding candy. It is a date far more historically meaningful than any ghost, goblin or Disney character. It is also the date that marks the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. That glorious event that reclaimed many of the biblical truths you may take for granted today and reshaped the world in sweeping and dramatic ways.
This October is especially important as it marks the Reformation’s 500-year anniversary.
I have obsessed over the celebration of this momentous event. So much so that my wife is sick of hearing the names Luther, Calvin, and Zwingly. But not everyone is equally enamored with Reformation Day. Many ask the question, “Why does the Reformation matter?”
A great deal has happened in the half millennia since Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel door and you are its beneficiary. But from what have you benefited?
The Reformation is not a date on the calendar or a mere historical event but as something alive and active in your life today. Below are two reasons the Protestant Reformation matters today.
1. The Bible you hold in your hands or keep in your pocket.
Reading the Bible for yourself was not a common or acceptable practice 500 years ago. The church told you what it said, what it meant and what you were to believe. The concept of a commoner with a Bible in their language was so unthinkable that it got John Wycliffe in trouble nearly 200 years before Luther. Wycliffe died before he could finish translated the Scriptures into English, but that didn’t stop authorities from digging up his body, burning it and throwing the ashes into the river. That’s what you call opposition to an idea!
The reformers picked up Wycliffe’s torch and ran with it by translating the Bible into the languages of everyday people. They put the words of God into the hands of men and women to read and learn for themselves.
While facing martyrdom Luther declared, “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason-for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves–I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen.”
If your heart and mind are to be held captive to the Word of God, you have to be able to read and know what it says. Without the tireless efforts of the reformers, you may not have the access and knowledge of exactly what the Bible says.
2. Justification by faith alone.
The reformers reclaimed the very heart of the gospel. The sweet and simple message of the good news of salvation was corrupted by the Roman Catholic Church. A system of penance and religion had replaced the finished work of Christ. Luther led the charge to recover the truths of the gospel—namely that salvation is by faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone.
The Westminister Catechism expresses this clearly in question 70:
Question: What is justification?
Answer: Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sins, accepts and accounts their persons righteous in his sight; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.
Talk about an issue worth standing and ultimately dying for!
Luther was right that justification is, “the article by which the church stands or falls.” It was the case 500 years ago and it remains so in our day. Too many have abandoned the truths of Scripture delivered to us, chief among which is how a man is saved. The church needs to hear the call of the gospel again today and every day.