E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
Hughes Disciplines of a Godly Man (Updated Edition)
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6133-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6133-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
R. Kent Hughes (DMin, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is senior pastor emeritus of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and former professor of practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hughes is also a founder of the Charles Simeon Trust, which conducts expository preaching conferences throughout North America and worldwide. He serves as the series editor for the Preaching the Word commentary series and is the author or coauthor of many books. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Spokane, Washington, and have four children and an ever-increasing number of grandchildren.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
1
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. My memories of that summer and the one that followed are of blistering black tennis courts, hot feet, salty sweat, long drafts of delicious rubbery, tepid water from an empty ball can, and the short shadows of midday heading slowly toward the east, followed by the stadium “daylight” of the court’s lights and the ubiquitous eerie night bats dive-bombing our lobs.
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.
Examples
Those who watched Mike Singletary1 “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!2 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.
Matthew Sayed, in his international bestseller Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success, observes that British soccer superstar David Beckham’s trademark free kick—his “bend it like Beckham” trajectory—began when, as a boy, he would go to an East London park and kick his ball from the same spot for hours on end, perfecting the topspin that gave his kick its devastating dip. “My secret is practice. I have always believed that if you want to achieve anything special in life you have to work, work, and then work some more.”3 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.4
We are accustomed to thinking of Ernest Hemingway as a boozy, undisciplined genius who got through a quart of whiskey a day for the last twenty years of his life but nevertheless had the muse upon him. He was indeed an alcoholic driven by complex passions.5 But when it came to writing, he was the quintessence of discipline! His early writing was characterized by obsessive literary perfectionism as he labored to develop his economy of style, spending hours polishing a sentence or searching for the mot juste—the right word. It is a well-known fact that he rewrote the conclusion to his novel A Farewell to Arms seventeen times in an effort to get it right. This is characteristic of great writers. Dylan Thomas made over two hundred handwritten manuscript versions of his poem “Fern Hill.”6 Even toward the end, when Hemingway was reaping the ravages of his lifestyle, while writing at his Finca Vigia in Cuba, he stood before an improvised desk in oversized loafers on yellow tiles from 6:30 a.m. until noon every day, carefully marking his production for the day on a chart. His average was only two pages—five hundred words.7 It was discipline, Hemingway’s massive literary discipline, that transformed the way his fellow Americans, and people throughout the English-speaking world, expressed themselves.
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.8 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.9 Again, the discipline factor!
Closer to our own time, Winston Churchill was rightly proclaimed the speaker of the twentieth century, and few who heard his eloquent speeches would have disagreed. Still fewer would have suspected that he was anything but a “natural.” But the truth is, Churchill had a distracting lisp that made him the butt of many jokes and resulted in his inability to be spontaneous in public speaking. Yet he became famous for his speeches and his seemingly impromptu remarks.
Actually, Churchill wrote everything out and practiced it! He even choreographed his pauses and pretended fumblings for the right phrase. The margins of his manuscripts carried notes anticipating the “cheers,” “hear, hears,” “prolonged cheering,” and even “standing ovation.” This done, he practiced endlessly in front of mirrors, fashioning his retorts and facial expressions. F. E. Smith, a close friend of Churchill, said, “Winston has spent the best years of his life writing impromptu speeches.”10 A natural? Perhaps. A naturally disciplined hard-working man!
And so it goes, whatever the area of life.
Thomas Edison came up with the incandescent light after a thousand failures. Samuel Beckett said,
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.11
Jascha Heifitz, the greatest violinist of the twentieth century, began playing the violin at the age of three and early began to practice four hours a day, a discipline he continued until his death at age seventy-five, when he had long been the greatest in the world—some 102,000 hours of practice. He no doubt gave his own “Hear, hear!” to pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s response to a woman’s fawning remarks about his...
