An Unabashed Call to Men to Exercise Spiritual Effort
A Young Man’s Lesson in Discipline
Sometime in the early summer before entering the seventh grade, I wandered over from the baseball field and picked up a tennis racket for the first time—and I was hooked! It was not long before I became a ten-year-old tennis bum. My passion for the sport became so intense, I would idly hold a tennis ball and just sniff it. The pssst and the rubbery fragrance upon opening a can of new tennis balls became intoxicating. The whop, whop and the lingering ring of a sweetly hit ball, especially in the quietness of early morning, was to me symphonic.
That fall, I determined to become a tennis player. I spent my hoarded savings on one of those old beautifully laminated Davis Imperial tennis rackets—a treasure that I actually took to bed with me. I was disciplined! I played every day after school (except during basketball season) and every weekend. When spring came, I biked to the courts where the local high school team practiced and longingly watched until they finally gave in and let me play with them. The next two summers I took lessons, played some tournaments, and practiced about six to eight hours a day—coming home only when they turned off the lights.
And I became good. I was good enough, in fact, that as a twelve-and-a-half-year-old, 110-pound freshman, I was second man on the varsity tennis team of my large three thousand-student California high school.
Not only did I play at a high level, I learned that personal discipline is the indispensable key for accomplishing anything in this life. I have since come to understand even more that it is, in fact, the mother and handmaiden of what we call genius.
Disciplines of a Godly Man
R. Kent Hughes
This updated edition of a bestselling classic by a seasoned pastor aims to empower men to take seriously the call to godliness and direct their energy toward the things that matter most.
Examples of Greatness Through Discipline
Those who watched Mike Singletary play football and observed his wide-eyed intensity and his churning, crunching samurai hits are usually surprised when they meet him. He is not an imposing hulk. He is barely six feet tall and weighs maybe 220. Whence the greatness? Discipline. Singletary was as disciplined a student of the game as any who have ever played it. In his autobiography, Calling the Shots, he says that in watching game films, he would often run a single play fifty to sixty times, and that it took him three hours to watch half a football game, which is only twenty to thirty plays!1 Because he watched every player, because he knew the opposition’s tendencies—given the down, distance, hash mark, and time remaining—and because he read the opposition’s minds through their stances, he was often moving toward the ball’s preplanned destination before the play developed. Singletary’s legendary success was a testimony to his remarkably disciplined life.
The legendary Jack Nicklaus, the most successful professional golfer of all time, once quipped, “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” Michael Phelps’s eight (yes, you read it correctly—eight!) gold medals at the 2009 Olympics in Beijing were the result of thousands of hours and miles in the pool of disciplined boredom. The glory of a Steph Curry three-point shot that wins a basketball game at the buzzer is the apex of a life of inglorious discipline! It is common knowledge that Curry practices in the offseason for three hours a day, six days a week in the summer. It is also well known that after elaborate preparation he will shoot between six hundred and seven hundred baskets, counting only the ones he makes. On intense shooting days, the number increases to at least a thousand.
Canadian icon Wayne Gretsky, regarded as the greatest ice hockey player ever, became what he was because early on he disciplined both his mind and his body for the rough-and-tumble game. As a boy, he systematically charted the angles of the ricocheting puck so that he came to anticipate what was going to happen on the ice better than any player in the game. The “Great Gretsky” was there when the puck arrived. Listen to how Gretsky describes himself: “I wasn’t naturally gifted in terms of size and speed; everything I did in hockey I worked for.” And then later, “The highest compliment that you can pay me is to say that I worked hard every day. . . . That’s how I came to know where the puck was going before it even got there.2
Michelangelo’s, Leonardo da Vinci’s, and Tintoretto’s multitudes of sketches, the quantitative discipline of their work, prepared the way for the cosmic qualitative value of their work. We wonder at the anatomical perfection of a da Vinci painting. But we forget that da Vinci on one occasion drew a thousand hands.3 In the last century, Henri Matisse explained his own mastery, remarking that the difficulty with many who wanted to be artists was that they spent their time chasing models rather than painting them.4 Again, the discipline factor!
The Essential Nature of Discipline
We will never get anywhere in life without discipline, be it the arts, the trades, business, athletics, or academics. Whatever your particular thing is, whether it is swimming, football, soccer, basketball, tennis, surfing, mountain climbing, bull riding, motocross, chess, math, computer science, the guitar, the sitar, writing, poetry, or painting—whatever it is—you will never get anywhere without discipline.
This is doubly so in spiritual matters. In other areas, we may be able to claim some innate advantage. An athlete may be born with a strong body, a musician with perfect pitch, or an artist with an eye for perspective. But none of us can claim an innate spiritual advantage. In reality, we are all equally disadvantaged. None of us naturally seeks after God, none is inherently righteous, none instinctively does good (read Rom. 3:9–18). Therefore, as children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything—everything!
I repeat: discipline is everything!
We All Need Reminders!
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Spiritual Sweat
This being so, the statement from Paul to Timothy regarding spiritual discipline in 1 Timothy 4:7—“train yourself for godliness”—takes on not only transcending importance, but personal urgency. There are other passages that teach discipline, but this is the great classic text of Scripture. The word train comes from the word gumnos, which means “naked” and is the word from which we derive our English word gymnasium. In traditional Greek athletic contests, the participants competed without clothing so as not to be encumbered. Therefore, the word train originally carried the literal meaning “to exercise naked.”5 By New Testament times, it referred to exercise and training in general. But even then it was, as it remains, a word with the smell of the gym in it—the sweat of a good workout. “Train yourselves, exercise, work out (!) for the purpose of godliness” conveys the feel of what Paul is saying.
In a word, he is calling for some spiritual sweat! Just as the athletes discarded everything and competed gumnos—free from anything that could possibly burden them—so we must get rid of every encumbrance, every association, habit, and tendency that impedes godliness. If we are to excel, we must strip ourselves to a lean, spiritual nakedness. The writer of Hebrews explains it like this: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Heb. 12:1). Men, we will never get anywhere spiritually without a conscious divestment of the things that are holding us back. What things are weighing you down? The call to discipline demands that you throw it off. Are you man enough?
The call to train ourselves for godliness also suggests directing all of our energy toward that goal. Paul pictures this elsewhere: “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control” (1 Cor. 9:25–27). Intense, energetic sweat! We should singularly note that a little after Paul’s command to “train yourself for godliness,” he comments on the command and the intervening words, saying “for to this end we toil and strive” (1 Tim. 4:10). The word toil means “strenuous work,” and strive comes from the Greek word from which we get “agonize.” Toil and agony are called for if one is to be godly.
When one seriously trains, he willingly undergoes hours of discipline and even pain so as to win the prize—running ten thousand miles to run one hundred meters at one’s best. The successful Christian life is a sweaty affair!
No manliness, no maturity! No discipline, no discipleship! No sweat, no sainthood!
We must get rid of every encumbrance, every association, habit, and tendency that impedes godliness.
Where Things Are
The reality is that men are much less spiritually inclined and spiritually disciplined than women. Women are more likely to believe in God, find religion important, attend religious services, pray, and attend Bible studies and prayer meetings.6 Surprisingly, for every Bible sold, it is more likely to be a man purchasing it.7 And yet, men are less likely to read it.8 But it isn’t just the Bible that men are less likely to read. Women overwhelmingly read more than men,9 and buy more Christian books, fiction and nonfiction.10
It is also a fact that far more women are concerned about the spiritual welfare of their mates than vice versa. The magazine Today’s Christian Woman has found that articles focusing on the spiritual development of husbands have garnered the highest readership.11 All this is sustained by hard statistics. A study found that 62 percent of women believed religion can answer today’s problems, while only 52 percent of the men agreed.12 The typical evangelical Protestant church service has 55 percent females versus 45 percent male attenders.13 Furthermore, married women who attend church do so without their husbands 25 percent of the time.14
Why? Certainly the pervasive American male credo of self-sufficiency and individualism contributes. Some of this may also be due to the male avoidance of anything relational (which, of course, Christianity is!). But I do not concede that women are simply more spiritual by nature. The parade of great saints (male and female) down through the centuries, as well as spiritually exemplary men in some of our churches today, clearly refutes this idea. But the fact remains that men today need far more help in building spiritual discipline than women.
Men, what I am going to say comes straight from the heart and my long study of God’s Word—man to man. In writing this, I have imagined my own grown sons sitting across the table, coffee cups in hand, as I try to impart to them what I think about the essential disciplines of godliness. The church needs real men, and we are the men!
Cosmic Call
We cannot overemphasize the importance of this call to spiritual discipline. Listen to Paul again from 1 Timothy 4:7–8: “Train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.”
Whether or not we have disciplined ourselves will make a huge difference in this life. We are all members of one another, and we are each either elevated or depressed by the inner lives of one another. Some of us affect others like a joyous tide, lifting them upward, but some of us are like undertows to the body of Christ. If you are married, the presence or lack of spiritual discipline can serve to sanctify or damn your children and grandchildren. Spiritual discipline, therefore, holds huge promise for this present life.
As for “the life to come,” spiritual discipline builds the enduring architecture of one’s soul on the foundation of Christ—gold, silver, and precious stones that will survive the fires of judgment and remain a monument to Christ for eternity (cf. 1 Cor. 3:10–15). Some may minimize the importance of spiritual discipline now, but no one will then! “Godliness is of value in every way”! The disciplined Christian gives and gets the best of both worlds—the world now and the world to come.
The word discipline may raise the feeling of stultifying constraint in some minds—suggesting a claustrophobic, restricted life. Nothing could be further from the truth! The obsessive discipline of Steph Curry and Wayne Gretzky liberated them to play freely and successfully when it mattered. The billion sketches of the Renaissance greats set Michelangelo free to create the skies of the Sistine Chapel. The disciplined drudgery of the musical greats released their genius. And, brothers in Christ, spiritual discipline frees us from the gravity of this present age and allows us to soar with the saints and angels.
Do we have the sweat in us? Will we enter the gymnasium of divine discipline? Will we strip away the things that hold us back? Will we discipline ourselves through the power of the Holy Spirit?
I invite you into God’s gym in the following chapters—to some sanctifying sweat, and to some pain and great gain.
God is looking for a few good men!
Notes:
- Mike Singletary with Armen Keteyian, Calling the Shots (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1986), 57.
- Quoted in Matthew Sayed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 50.
- Leland Ryken, The Liberated Imagination: Thinking Christianly about the Arts (Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1989), 76.
- Lane T. Dennis, ed., Letters of Francis Schaeffer (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1985), 93, 94.
- Gerhard Kittle, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1968), 775.
- Religious Landscape Study,” Pew Research Center, May 11, 2015, http://www.pewforum .org/religious-landscape-study/.
- “Onward and Upward: Christian Book Titles See Sales Rise Higher and Higher,” Nielsen, August 6, 2015, https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2015/onward-and-upward-christian -book-titles-see-sales-rise-higher.html.
- “Religious Landscape Study,” Pew Research Center.
- Kathryn Zickuhr and Lee Rainie, “A Snapshot of Reading in America in 2013,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/a-snapshot-of-reading-in-america-in-2013/.
- “Onward and Upward,” Nielsen.
- Bill Hendricks, Christian Booksellers Association report, February 28, 1991.
- Hendricks, Christian Booksellers Association report.
- Hendricks, Christian Booksellers Association report.
- “Quick Facts on the Gender Gap,” Church for Men, http://churchformen.com/men-and -church/.
This article is adapted from Disciplines of a Godly Man by R. Kent Hughes.
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