I Am Undisciplined

You get up at 5am, determined to grab that bag and head to the gym. But, the snooze alarm is much more attractive than the elliptical and you hit it and justify why skipping another day won’t matter.

You are packing everyone’s lunches for tomorrow at 11pm. After the day you’ve had, the energy to pack a lunch is almost too much. As you place the lunches in the fridge, you see that chocolate pie staring you in the face. Now that’s the way to end a horrible, no good, very bad day. One piece of pie can’t hurt.

You awake to a full day of activity – car pool to school, volunteering at church, working a full day on the job – and you realize you need to have some quiet time with the Lord but where will that fit? If I get to the gym at 6am, I can’t get up any earlier for a proper quiet time. I’m way too tired in the evening to focus on reading Scripture. Surely praying with the kids each night counts. I’ll spend time with the Lord on the weekends.

Any of these scenarios sound familiar? We all struggle with being undisciplined. It takes many shapes and forms, but it can be summarized the same – we can’t be disciplined in any area of our lives on our own. There are always good intentions, but too many times our flesh wins out over the Holy Spirit in our lives. You aren’t alone. And there was a man in Scripture who struggled with the same thing – Paul.

Romans 7:15 says, “For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate.” That just about sums up our lives in one sentence. Paul learned some lessons in the passage surrounding this verse. First, he learned that knowledge isn’t the answer. “Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life.” (Romans 7:9) Paul felt fine as long as he didn’t understand what the law demanded. When he learned the truth, he knew he was doomed.

Secondly, self-determination doesn’t succeed. We see in verse 15 that Paul found himself sinning in ways that he didn’t even find attractive. The third lesson he learned was becoming a Christian doesn’t stamp out all sin and temptation from a person’s life. Paul understood that becoming a new being takes a moment of faith, but being sanctified into a follower of Christ is a lifelong process. In Paul’s writings he often referred to the Christian life as a marathon, a race for the prize. We have to daily submit to God’s Will and rely on His Holy Spirit in our lives to give us the strength to be disciplined.

Though we’ll never be perfectly disciplined this side of Heaven, we can still work on asking God daily for the power not to succumb to our flesh, but live in obedience to Him.

This is a recap of Week Three from the Angela Thomas’ Bible study, Brave.  The women of NAOBC recently completed this study and recaps from each of the six weeks will be posted.