Discipline:
or What Pete Told Me to Say

Introduction

Last Tuesday night I hobbled over to Holtwick lounge around 9:30 just to talk with anyone who wanted to talk.  I always enjoy these evenings.  Last week the group was small so I asked how everyone’s studies were going.  My friend Pete…are you here today Pete?….told me things weren’t too bad but he had a speech on Monday.  I asked about his and then said I also had a speech on Monday…this one I’m giving right now!  I said I didn’t really know at that time what I’d talk about except I wanted to talk about a “virtue” meaning some specific quality of character, instead of just “character in general.”  When I talked to you in January I had talked about the virtue of “courage.”  So I asked Pete what he suggested.  He said three things.  First he said, talk about “discipline” since at this time of the year with examinations looming, that’s the virtue most of us wish we had more of!  Second, he said tell us something personal.  Third….no I’ll wait till the end to tell you the third thing he said.  So my topic today is, “Discipline” or “What Pete Told Me to Talk About.”

Prayer

Will you bow your heads with me for prayer please?
"May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.”

Examinations

It’s exam time!  My daughter called an hour ago asking Ellen and me to pray for her.  She’s a second year law student and taking the first of her finals as I speak.  It was the fall of 1969 and I was a junior in college. Exam time for me was never easy.  In high school in Brasil, our exams had always been cumulative 3-hour affairs, two each day for 3 days in a row.  I was always a nervous wreck preparing and thought they’d never end.  It was during high school I first learned to say to myself, “Remember Jim, no matter how painful and interminable they may seem, these next 3 days will take no take longer to pass than any other 3 days!”  Somehow that helped.  

But now in college it seemed the pressure was just too much.  I had already been awake without sleep for more than 48 hours, literally studying the entire time.  I felt like a failure since the more I studied the more convinced I was that I didn’t know anything at all!  I was sure I would fail the exams.  I’d felt that way at virtually ever other exam in college before, but this time I knew it was going to be true!

The war in Vietnam was at a climax.  The previous spring semester, all of our classes had to be made “Pass/Fail” because massive student demonstrations had shut down the major universities, blocked major highways, and for several days, paralyzed the very city of Boston itself.  This added pressure because most of us were in school on “student deferments.”  Failing exams meant a mandatory trip to Southeast Asia almost immediately.  

And it most certainly didn’t help the pressure that just the month before, our sister dormitory across the street had lived up to it’s reputation once again.  East Campus, as that dorm was called, had only single rooms, and housed the brightest and also the loneliest, most eccentric of my fellow students at M.I.T.  It also had the highest suicide rate of any dorm; on a campus with the highest suicide rate in the nation.  This time they had only thought to break into his room because of the smell.  That memory was fresh so the pressure was almost unbearable.

When I dragged myself to the exam hall, I couldn’t help but recall that only a few weeks before it had been “taken over” by the Weathermen, a militant student branch of the SDS, and used for civil disobedience training.  It was a huge National Guard Armory, with 75-foot ceilings and glaring arena lights.  Our individual exam tables were each about three-feet square, and spaced precisely around the floor, in endless rows, for hundreds of students in our physics course.  

As we nervously awaited instructions and the question sheets, one student came in almost too late, running down the row of tables, echoing across the hardwood floors in the nearly quiet hall.  In his hand was a 6-pack of beer.  Within minutes the hall was deathly quiet except the rustle of papers.  We soon realized that the questions were so difficult it seemed they could only have been written by a demon.  Ten minutes into the exam, the latecomer, popped a beer can open, and we heard him guzzle.  Ten minutes later, he opened and consumed another.  One after another, we were all counting…like bullets in a revolver.  Half an hour or so after the last can had been consumed, our “friend” screamed at the top of his lungs, “I just can’t take it anymore!!!,” rose, and ran noisily out of the hall.   How we ever finished that exam I will never know!  But I think it had something to do with discipline.  And that’s what I’d like to talk to you about today.   By the way, you may be happy to know, that it turned out later our “friend” was actually not in our class at all, but a senior, who somehow got past the proctors and the system, and into the exam for the sole purpose of unnerving the rest of us.  He sure did a good job!

Definitions Of Discipline

It is one of our goals at Greenville College to transform students for lives of character.  Excellence of character requires the deliberate intentional cultivation of virtues, including that of discipline.

So what is discipline?  The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes the noun and the verb. In other words, discipline can be both something you have and something you do; an example of the distinction we make here at Greenville between being and doing when we talk about character and service.  Like most cases of being and doing they are really inseparable. 

To have discipline is to have knowledge or skill or instruction that conforms to an order or controlled system.  Drs. Huston, Ross, and Dunkley, for example, have disciplines.  Their knowledge, as well as their methods of thinking and research embody the disciplines of history, communication, and microbiology.  You are each beginning to have a discipline; it’s your major.  Your knowledge of facts and methods in one area are conforming to an order; for example of music, psychology, or philosophy. The same could be said for our track and cross country team or Tom Landry’s old Cowboy football team.  I’m told the genius of his “flex” defense was that they had a disciplined orderly set of controlled behaviors.

On the other hand, to perform discipline is to “to instruct, educate, train; more especially, to train to habits of order and subordination; to bring under control.”  So the GC faculty and coaches, like old coach Landry, also perform discipline when they work to bring their students or their players under their disciplines.  Parents do this all the time too, disciplining their children.  And of course you can also perform discipline on yourself—self-discipline—when you train yourself and bring yourself under control in some area of thought or behavior.

When I searched Amazon.com for ‘discipline’ as a keyword, it showed 32,000 books!  Barnes and Noble shows 2686 books with the word ‘discipline’ in the actual title!  One such book my wife and I used in raising our children was by Dr. James Dobson, entitled, “Dare to Discipline.”  I haven’t seen it recently so maybe our kids threw it out.  

Two other books have shaped my thinking about about spiritual disciplines, an area we may sometimes not connect with the idea of discipline at all.  One is Spirit of the Disciplines, by Dallas Willard, and another is Celebration of Disciplines, by Willard’s disciple, Richard Foster.  Obviously even the word “disciple,” from the same roots as “discipline,” suggests how one person works to conform their life to the pattern and order of another’s life.  In Spirit of the Disciplines, Willard says that disciplines are behaviors we practice, to put ourselves after a time in a place where God can do in or through us what we could not have done on our own otherwise.  In other words, from a spiritual perspective, discipline is not an end in itself, something to our eternal credit, something that earns our salvation, but merely a tool that allows God to work in us and through us more effectively.  I pray that many of you practice the spiritual disciplines of private prayer, reading the Bible, silence, and others.

So when we say a person of character has the virtue of discipline, what do they look like?  They are people who have learned that if they want to excel, they must concentrate their freedom in one area by being willing to constrain their freedoms in other areas.  

“Lanny Bassham, Olympic gold-medalist in small-bore rifle competition, tells what concentration does for his marksmanship: "Our sport is controlled nonmovement. We are shooting from 50 meters--over half a football field--at a bull's eye three- quarters the size of a dime. If the angle of error at the point of the barrel is more than five one-thousandths of an inch, you drop into the next circle and lose a point. So we have to learn how to make everything stop. I stop my breathing. I stop my digestion by not eating for 12 hours before the competition. I train by running to keep my pulse around 60, so I have a full second between beats--I have gotten it lower, but found that the stroke-volume increased so much that each beat really jolted me. You do all of this and you have the technical control. But you have to have some years of experience in reading conditions: the wind, the mirage. Then you have the other 80% of the problems--the mind. Without strenuous discipline, winning the Olympic gold in small bore rifle competition would be impossible.” 

It is tempting these days to suppose that true freedom comes from maximizing our ability to “do what we please.”  That could not be further from the truth.  The reality is that real freedom comes from concentration and constraint.  My father was a preacher and used to tell about the goldfish who objected to the constraints of the fishbowl, bemoaning its limits and yearning for freedom.  How much better life would be without these obvious walls.  As he grew he struggled to escape and finally in a lucky leap jumped out only to discover of course that the constraints of the bowl were the very secret of his freedom.   

Ellen and I used to read a similar story to our children; the story of “Tootle the Train.”  Like the goldfish, Tootle, dreamed of wandering “freely” in the meadows full of flowers and butterflies.  But when he escaped the constraints of the tracks, he found his ability to move severely limited.  Those apparently limiting constraints had in fact been the secret of his ability to concentrate or maximize his efforts, and move as he was designed to move, quickly and effectively.   

These are simple almost laughable stories, but the principle is sound.  Discipline means constraining or limiting our efforts in one area so we can concentrate them more effectively.  So, paradoxically, constraint actually brings freedom.  You knew there had to be paradox in my comments today right?!  

You athletes among us are perhaps the ones most able to understand this. You concentrate your attention, limiting or constraining your freedom to eat, to party, to sleep in, to socialize and so on, in order to submit to the order or training that actually frees you up to perform more effectively on the field.  That’s why you can be examples to the rest of us about discipline.  But this lesson, this paradox of discipline, applies to just about everything; to studies, to relationships, to eating, to sexuality, and of course to our life with Christ.  

Of course discipline is not the only virtue we need to be people of good character.  If we constrain ourselves or allow others to constrain us to the wrong path, we may become disciplined in bad ways.  We become masters of pain and cruelty, monsters in marriage or business for example. So naturally, the choice of which constraints we follow is crucial. Choose carefully the constraints you adopt.  As a disciple, choose carefully the person you follow.

Patience And Persistence

A person of discipline is then someone who has learned to constrain their freedom so they can concentrate their ability.  But there are at least two other virtues that go along with discipline, so closely they are like its shadows.  

The first is patience.  A disciplined person is also almost always patient.  Another way of putting this is to say the disciplined person has learned to delay gratification.  They are willing to sacrifice now in order to gain later.  They recognize that in the “bank of life” one must make deposits before you can make withdrawals.  It is perhaps one of the greatest fears I have for us all, that in a day when credit card offers come in the mail almost daily, when we prefer “microwavable” food and scratch off instant jackpot lotteries, and when our attitude is “buy now, pay later,” we have lost the ability to be patient, to delay gratification and with it, our ability to be disciplined.  The result of course is that we do not constrain ourselves, and consequently do not reap the benefits of concentration and excellence in our lives. I’m reminded of the Fram oil filter commercials urging people to invest a little more now in their higher quality oil filters in order to save a lot more later on repairs.  The mechanic says, “Pay me now, or pay me later.”  How are you with delayed gratification?  Do you study first and play later?  Can you wait until the weekend to spend time with friends?  

A second virtue tied closely to discipline is persistence.  Discipline cannot be learned quickly.  It requires “years and years of practice.”  And as many long-distance runners realize, it is often lonely.  In January I spoke to you about courage and said it means “going on in spite of fear.”  In one sense, discipline is just plain “going on;” no matter what.  

In the summer of 1979, I participated in Innoculum, the Westmont College version of Walkabout.  With 8 freshmen students, I hiked for 10 days in the mountainous backcountry of Yosemite National Park.  It was complete with technical rope work, glacial terrain, and a frightening solo experience.  Near the end of the trip we tackled a 100-foot vertical cliff with the plan to rappel back down. One by one we would free climb the cliff, then thrill at bouncing our way back down on rope belay.  That was the plan.  I will never forget the sensation of climbing hard for 30 minutes only to find myself in a position where it seemed I could neither go up or down.  I was exhausted, panicky, and of course too well aware of my students below holding my rope, and shouting encouragement to me.  It crossed my mind that I had no business clinging to the face of a rock cliff holding on with my fingernails to nubbins of rock no larger than tiny pebbles.  I would never have made it without that encouragement from below, but because of it, I somehow found the strength to persist; to just keep going on.  It’s hard to describe the “high” I felt in reaching the top.  The sheer exhilaration and self-confidence was amazing.  Discipline certainly requires persistence.  

In the last semester of my senior year of college, I worked in my laboratory or my single dorm room, to finish a senior thesis.  Because my schedule included only one class and the lab work could only be done at night, I rarely saw anyone else. I remember one night panicking after weeks of trying to write my results.  My mind felt like mush.  My thoughts were confused and jumbled from too much effort.  Like that moment on the cliff many years later, it seemed I could go on no further.  I remember leaving my desk, stepping back to my bed in the tiny room.   Sitting on the bed I literally squeezed my head hard between my hands, trying to physically force the ideas from my brain as I struggled to organize and think my way through the problem I was writing about.  It was a breakthrough moment in that semester and even in my life.  I stretched myself and saw I was capable of much more than I had imagined.

Fortunately, such moments requiring sheer mental or physical persistence don’t occur that often, because they are incredibly draining.  But to this day when I find myself exhausted and at my wits end, it still helps me to remember that excellence at almost anything, usually only comes at the cost of discipline that is doggedly persistent.  Sometimes that means just showing up and continuing to show up.  Woody Allen is reported to have said that “Showing up is 80% of success.”  I’ve heard others say showing up is 50% of the battle, 90% of helping, 80% of customer satisfaction, and according to Avis Miller, a Jewish writer, showing up is 90% of life!  

Scripture

There are of course many many places where the Bible speaks of discipline.  In I Corinthians 9:24, we read about the discipline of the athlete who avoids “sloppy living.”  The Message paraphrase puts it this way, 

24You've all been to the stadium and seen the athletes race. Everyone runs; one wins. Run to win. 25All good athletes train hard. They do it for a gold medal that tarnishes and fades. You're after one that's gold eternally. 26I don't know about you, but I'm running hard for the finish line. I'm giving it everything I've got. No sloppy living for me! 27I'm staying alert and in top condition. I'm not going to get caught napping, telling everyone else all about it and then missing out myself.

In equally blunt language, Proverbs 12 says, 

1 Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid. 

Hebrews 12 connects discipline to the athlete but also to our relationship with our heavenly Father.  

My dear child, don't shrug off God's discipline, but don't be crushed by it either. 6It's the child he loves that he disciplines; the child he embraces, he also corrects. 7God is educating you; that's why you must never drop out. He's treating you as dear children. This trouble you're in isn't punishment; it's training, 8the normal experience of children. Only irresponsible parents leave children to fend for themselves. Would you prefer an irresponsible God? 9We respect our own parents for training and not spoiling us, so why not embrace God's training so we can truly live? 10While we were children, our parents did what seemed best to them. But God is doing what is best for us, training us to live God's holy best. 11At the time, discipline isn't much fun. It always feels like it's going against the grain. Later, of course, it pays off handsomely, for it's the well-trained who find themselves mature in their relationship with God. 12So don't sit around on your hands! No more dragging your feet! 13Clear the path for long-distance runners so no one will trip and fall, so no one will step in a hole and sprain an ankle. Help each other out. And run for it!

In 2 Timothy 1 Paul reminds his student Timothy, 

6For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. 7For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.

Discipline of the Tongue

Perhaps the most interesting reference to discipline in Scripture came to my attention in an odd way.  The Oxford English Dictionary provides quotations for each word in the English language.  They trace the word to its earliest known printed use.  I was surprised to learn that the earliest printed use of the word ‘discipline’ is from 1382, when John Wycliffe, father of the English reformation, and some say of English literature in general, translated the Bible into English for the first time.  Wycliffe Bible Translators carry his name even today!  Until then the Bible was available only in Latin and only to priests.  The Oxford Dictionary cites as the earliest printed use of this word, it’s use by Wycliffe in the epistle of James 3:13: 

Who is wise and disciplined among you?  Show it by deeds of humility coming from wisdom.

What I find interesting about this passage, is how the author uses it to illustrate discipline.  He makes the point that discipline is required if faith is to show itself in our deeds.  Remember, James tells us faith without deeds is not even real faith.  In particular, James believes that one part of our life is the hardest of all to discipline.  It is the tongue.  Using ancient analogies, he likens it to the rudder of a ship that is tiny yet turns the entire vessel in the face of the fiercest winds.  He likens it also to the bit in the mouth of a horse.  With only small movements it moves that large animal in one direction or another.  Finally he likens the tongue to a spark of fire.  In some of the strongest language possible James warns us that the tongue when left undisciplined, can through the smallest word, set a forest ablaze, ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell.

In closing, I would like to read this passage from the book of James. It suggests that discipline, especially of the tongue, is central to Christian virtue.  I read it to you as students of Greenville College.  I read it especially to my colleagues the faculty at Greenville College during recent difficult days of disagreements on campus.  I read it to us all as disciples of Christ, seeking by His Spirit to discipline our lives into conformity with the image of Jesus Christ.  Ye who have ears, let him hear!

1Don't be in any rush to become a teacher, my friends. Teaching is highly responsible work. Teachers are held to the strictest standards. 2And none of us is perfectly qualified. We get it wrong nearly every time we open our mouths. If you could find someone whose speech was perfectly true, you'd have a perfect person, in perfect control of life.  3A bit in the mouth of a horse controls the whole horse. 4A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds. 5A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything--or destroy it!  It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. 6A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell. 7This is scary: You can tame a tiger, 8but you can't tame a tongue--it's never been done. The tongue runs wild, a wanton killer. 9With our tongues we bless God our Father; with the same tongues we curse the very men and women he made in his image. 10Curses and blessings out of the same mouth! My friends, this can't go on. 11A spring doesn't gush fresh water one day and brackish the next, does it? 12Apple trees don't bear strawberries, do they? Raspberry bushes don't bear apples, do they? You're not going to dip into a polluted mud hole and get a cup of clear, cool water, are you? 

13Do you want to be counted wise, to build a reputation for [DISCIPLINE?] wisdom? Here's what you do: Live well, live wisely, live humbly. It's the way you live, not the way you talk, that counts. 14Mean-spirited ambition isn't wisdom. Boasting that you are wise isn't wisdom. Twisting the truth to make yourselves sound wise isn't wisdom. 15It's the furthest thing from wisdom--it's animal cunning, devilish conniving. 16Whenever you're trying to look better than others or get the better of others, things fall apart and everyone ends up at the others' throats.  17Real wisdom, God's wisdom, begins with a holy life and is characterized by getting along with others. It is gentle and reasonable, overflowing with mercy and blessings, not hot one day and cold the next, not two-faced. 18You can develop a healthy, robust community that lives right with God and enjoy its results only if you do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other with dignity and honor. (James 3:1-17)

Again I say, “Ye who have ears, let him hear!"

When I began this morning, I told you Pete suggested I do three things: 1. Talk to you about discipline, 2. Include a personal story or two, and I promised to tell you the third thing.  He said, “They will love you if you let them out half an hour early.”  Pete, I’ve tried my best.  But I confess I’ve failed on the last one.  Maybe two out of three isn’t too bad?!

Let us pray!

Dr. Jim Mannoia