by Narelle Harker
“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.
Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”
Hebrews 12:11 reminds us that discipline is a painful experience because we have to retrain or teach our body and mind to behave and work in an ordered way. For some people, the discipline that it takes to hand assignments in on time is a painful process and for yet others the discipline needed to train as an elite athlete can be quite painful. The results of this painful retraining or teaching of our bodies and minds will most often not be seen in the short term, but in the long term. Life is a race to be run in the long term, not a sprint for the short term. Being a consistent, disciplined athlete may just one day earn you an Olympic Gold Medal. Handing your assignments in on time will not only stop you from losing marks for lateness but just may teach you time management skills and goal setting skills.
After an Olympic Gold Medallist has stood on the dais and heard their country’s national anthem playing for them, they would not be regretting a moment of the training, commitment or sacrifice that they have made. All that the medallist sacrificed would be regarded as worth the result. When we achieve a goal that we have disciplined ourselves and sacrificed a lot for, then we too will feel that the end result was worth the retraining of our mind and body. I yearn for the “peaceable fruit of righteousness”, so that my sacrifice will “result in right living and right standing with God” (Amplified Bible), so to achieve what I yearn for, I will need to discipline myself, retrain my body and my mind, so that I can achieve all that God has for me to do.
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