E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
Hughes Disciplines of a Godly Young Man
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2605-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2605-3
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.
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CHAPTER ONE
DISCIPLINE IS EVERYTHING!
Those who watched Mike Singletary (perennial All-Pro, two-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, member of the Super Bowl XX Dream Team, and former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers) “play”—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 6 feet tall and weighs maybe 220 pounds. Why the greatness? The answer is: intense, purposeful discipline! Mike Singletary is as disciplined a student of the game as any who have ever played it.
In his autobiography, Calling the Shots, Coach Singletary 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 mentally knew the opposition’s tendency—given the down, distance, hash mark, and time remaining, because he read the opposition’s mind through their stances, he was often moving toward the ball’s preplanned destination before the play developed. Mike Singletary’s legendary success is testimony to his remarkably disciplined life.
INGLORIOUS DISCIPLINE
Discipline is the difference in the sports world. Tiger Woods (prior to his moral failure) was, by all estimates, the greatest golfer of the last decade—and those who have watched clips of him juggling a golf ball on the head of a driver and then driving the ball from midair straight down the fairway for 200 yards are in awed agreement. But this playful stunt was only the tip of a massive iceberg of lifelong discipline which began at the age of three—the discipline of a man so focused that he once refused to leave a practice hole until a dozen of his drives rested on a white towel on the distant green. The legendary Jack Nicklaus, the most successful 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 Kobe Bryant three-point shot that wins a basketball game at the buzzer is the apex of a life of inglorious discipline!
Matthew Sayed, in his international bestseller Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success, observes that British superstar David Beckham’s trademark free kick—his “bend it like Beckham” trajectory—began when, as a boy, he would take his soccer ball to an East London park and kick the 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.”2 Canadian icon Wayne Gretsky, regarded as the greatest ice hockey player ever, became what he is 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.”3
You may have read in school that the famous writer Ernest Hemingway was a boozy, undisciplined genius who downed a quart of whiskey a day for the last twenty years of his life but, nevertheless, had the literary “gift.” He was indeed an alcoholic driven by complex passions.4 But when it came to his gift for writing, he was the essence of discipline! His early writing was characterized by obsessive perfectionism as he labored to develop his compact style, spending hours polishing a sentence or searching for just the right word. It is a well-known fact that he rewrote the conclusion to A Farewell to Arms seventeen times in an effort to get it right.5 Even toward the end, when Hemingway was reaping the ravages of his lifestyle, he daily stood before an improvised desk 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.6 It was discipline, Ernest Hemingway’s massive literary discipline, his painstaking economy of words, that transformed the way people throughout the English-speaking world expressed themselves.
Michelangelo’s, da Vinci’s, and Tintoretto’s multitudes of sketches, the quantitative discipline of their work, prepared the way for the astonishing quality of their work. We wonder at the anatomical perfection of a da Vinci painting, but we forget that Leonardo da Vinci on occasion drew a thousand hands.7 Michelangelo said it for all: “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery it would not seem so wonderful at all.”8 In the last century, Matisse explained his own mastery, remarking that the difficulty with many who wanted to be artists is that they spent their time chasing models rather than painting them.9 Again the discipline factor!
Winston Churchill was rightly proclaimed the speaker of the century, and few who have heard his eloquent speeches would disagree. Still fewer would suspect he was anything but a “natural.” But the truth is that Churchill had a distracting lisp which 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 the pauses and pretended the fumblings for the right phrase. The margins of his manuscripts carried notes anticipating the “cheers,” “hear, hears,” prolonged cheering, and even standing ovations. This done, he practiced endlessly in front of mirrors, fashioning his retorts and facial expressions. F. E. Smith 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.
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Mozart chocked up thirty-five hundred hours of practice before his sixth birthday. He had practiced ten thousand hours by his teens. A prodigy? Not at all! Mozart’s brief thirty-five years of life reveal him to be among the hardest-working composers in history.11 Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violinist of the twentieth century, began playing the violin at the age of three and soon began to practice four hours a day until his death at age seventy-five—when he had long been the greatest in the world—having accumulated some one hundred two thousand hours of practice.
We will never get anywhere in life without discipline, be it in the arts, trades, business, athletics, or academics. Whatever your particular thing is, whether it is swimming or football or soccer or basketball or tennis or surfing or mountain climbing or bull riding or motocross or chess or math or computer science or the guitar or the sitar or writing or poetry or painting—whatever it is—you will never get anywhere without inglorious discipline.
This is doubly so in spiritual matters. In other areas we may be able to claim some natural 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 a natural spiritual advantage. In reality, we are all equally disadvantaged. None of us naturally seeks after God.
As the apostle Paul said, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:10–12). Therefore, as children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything—everything! We repeat: discipline is everything in the Christian life.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
This Food for Thought heading will appear at the end of each chapter of this book, and under it we will list several thought-provoking questions to further your thinking and discussion. But here, at the end of the first chapter, we have decided not to include such questions but, rather, to ask you to do two things that will help you to benefit from the strong teaching that follows. First, take some time at the end of this section to pray that God will use each of these hard-hitting chapters in your life. If you are using this book for a study group, take some time to pray for each other. God delights to hear men pray such prayers—and delights to answer them.
Second, commit yourself to memorizing the saying of 1 Timothy 4:7–9, which is the greatest text in the Bible on spiritual discipline, “Train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is...
