Self-Discipline pt. 2
Why do you need self-discipline?
If you haven’t read pt. 1, please go back and read that first.
1. Without it you can never live a meaningful life
I mentioned in pt. 1 that some people will try and avoid doing difficult things by never setting any goals. Just like Fred, they go through life doing only the bare minimum and trying desperately to avoid discomfort. They think that by not making a decision about what they want to work toward, they can avoid losing their childhood potential. But the seconds of their life will go by whether they decide to use them or not. And eventually they will find themselves in exactly the same place they started only ten years older.
But still, why is that wrong? Why shouldn’t we live our lives only ever doing things that we want to do? Who cares if we get old doing nothing? At least we will be enjoying ourselves. Well, let’s say you do choose to live that way. Let’s say you sleep in till noon every day, you eat only what tastes best, you spend your time only doing the easiest and most comfortable activities, you stay up as late as you want, and you generally avoid any and all responsibility. What would your life look like? Would you be happy? I doubt it, but again, let’s say for the purposes of argument that you are happy. Or at least you’re constantly trying to make yourself happy. Which is really what we are talking about anyway because everyone will be unhappy at some point. By living this way, you are putting your own happiness at the top of your priority list. You are making your own happiness the ultimate goal of your life. And maybe you are able to achieve happiness 90% of the time. Which I think if doubtful because life has lots of painful and unhappy things. But even if you are happy 90% of the time, you won’t be fulfilled. Making happiness the ultimate goal is selling yourself short. Human beings are capable of so much more than our own happiness and to make that our goal is like asking a nuclear physicist to work as a part-time fry cook. It won’t be fulfilling even if we are successful.
To feel fulfillment in life people, need to know that their lives have meaning. For your life to have meaning you need to do something meaningful. in other words, you need to take on some responsibility. The more responsibility you take on, the more difficult, and the more fulfilling, your life becomes. Human beings have a deep psychological need for responsibility. We need to feel like we are part of something more important than ourselves.*
Try this, sit down and think about the moments of your daily life that you find the most fulfilling. I bet they are the moments that are moving you towards your goals. If you can’t think of any, it is probably because you don’t have a clear goal for your life. You need to know what you are aiming at before you can begin working towards it.
We need self-discipline because without it we cannot move toward our goals. We need goals because without them we will descend into nihilism, and once we become nihilistic we are not far from becoming malevolent.
2. Christians are called to take up our cross daily
“And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
- Luke 9:23
God doesn’t call us to passivity. He calls us to be active followers of Christ.
“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it”
- 1 Corinthians 9:24
Jesus Tells us to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him. Not to sit on the couch passively waiting for his return. Paul compares following after Christ to running a race. He tells us to run. Not to wait around for God to move your feet for you. You have to make an effort to move yourself foreword. God will help you. He will remove obstacles and guide you in the right direction so long as you are making him your goal. But you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
I want to be very clear that I am not talking about earning your salvation, trying to earn more love from God, trying to pay him back for the cross, or any of the other ridiculous ideas that Christians sometimes get into their heads. What I am talking about is actively and intentionally pursuing Christ in your life. God created you as a unique individual, which means that your relationship with him will be different from anyone else’s, not because they know a different God, but because you are different from anyone else. We should be actively pursuing Christ, not because we are trying to earn salvation, but because we love him, and he loves us. You could never be so good that God would love you more, and you could never be so bad that he would love you less. You already have all of his love.
Denying yourself isn’t easy, it takes self-discipline. Sometimes we will lose our focus and mess up. Luckily, God will never run out of Grace and Mercy. Every single time your mess up God is there to help you get back on track. But like a child learning to walk, he knows that we will never be able to run if he never lets us fall. He still carries us when we need it, but he lets us walk as much as we are able. So that we can run after him no matter where he leads us.
Something Walter and I like to talk about on our podcast “Talking with Intention” is an analogy between our lives and paddling a canoe. Life is like drifting downriver in a canoe, the only way to steer it is to be paddling foreword. Sitting still won’t help you. It can feel like your life is moving forward because the current is pulling you along, but unless you start paddling, you will have no control over where we end up and we are likely to drift over a waterfall. And unless you have a goal, you won’t know which way to paddle. The goal is Christ, the paddle is self-discipline, and the river of time keeps moving forward.
3. It leads to Success
If you are going to succeed, you must have self-discipline. You are free to define success however you like; Money, status, fame, friends, health, etc. Success means different things to different people. Hopefully, if you are a Christian, your idea of success is something along the lines of “helping to bring about the Kingdom of God.” But it doesn’t matter how you want to define success, if you are going to achieve it, you need self-discipline. Your idea of success is going to take some amount of effort to achieve. You are going to have to work for it and as I said in pt. 1: “Our ability to get things done is equal to the amount of discipline we have.”
I’m not saying that you will never fail, you will. But if you have enough self-discipline to keep getting back up, eventually you will succeed. You’ve heard this before I’m sure. If you scroll through social media for ten minutes you will see someone saying something about “never giving up”. But just because everyone has heard it before doesn’t mean they know it. As much as we like to say “never give up” most people don’t live that way. No one gives up when it’s easy, and the hard parts are almost always worse than you think they will be. You have to keep your focus on the overall goal and not how much you dislike the current moment. But now we are getting into how you can build self-discipline, which I will talk about in pt. 3.
Before I end, I want to say that changing your goals, or your idea of success, is not the same as giving up. People change, if you suddenly realize one day that the thing you have been working toward for the last 5 years isn’t what you want anymore, then stop working toward it and find a new goal. It doesn’t mean you failed because you changed your mind about what was important to you. Working toward a goal you no longer want to achieve is almost the same thing as wasting time doing nothing.
*Some people have claimed that religion was created to fill this need. I think that they are mistaken, but that isn’t the issue I want to discuss right now. I only bring it up to say this: the need for God is entirely different from our need for responsibility. Even Christians, who have found their identity and fulfillment in Christ, need to take on responsibility, and for that, they need self-discipline.
