Quotes About Discipline

At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed Him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are put into the shadow of God's hand until we learn to hear Him.

The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.

Take yourself by the scruff of the neck and shake off your incarnate laziness.

You cannot have a moral holiday and remain moral, nor can you have a spiritual holiday and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely his, and this means that you have to watch to keep yourself fit. It takes a tremendous amount of time. Some of us expect to "clear the numberless ascensions"* in about two minutes.

Get into the habit of saying, "Speak, Lord," and life will become a romance. Every time circumstances press, say, "Speak, Lord," and make time to listen. Chastening is more than a means of discipline, it is meant to get me to the place of saying, "Speak, Lord.

God's grace produces men and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, not pampered, spoiled weaklings. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to live the worthy and excellent life of a disciple of Jesus in the realities of life. And it is always necessary for us to make an effort to live a life of worth and excellence.

There are not three stages in spiritual life—worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God's idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was unhasting and unresting. It is a discipline, we cannot get into it all at once.

We have to WORK OUT in the mechanical [physical] realm what Gods WORKS IN [us] in the mysterious [spiritual] realm. Beware of any spiritual emotion that you do not work out mechanically...

Jesus is saying that the greatest concern of life is to place our relationship with God first, and everything else second. It is one of the most difficult, yet critical, disciplines of the Christian life to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us into absolute harmony with the teaching of Jesus in these verses.

Tis because I am ordinary, / Thy ways so often look ordinary to me. It is through the discipline of obedience that I get to the place where Abraham was and I see who God is.

Never try to help God fulfill His word. Abram went through thirteen years of silence, but in those years all of his self-sufficiency was destroyed. He grew past the point of relying on his own common sense. Those years of silence were a time of discipline, not a period of God's displeasure.

If, during a prayer meeting, God shows you something to do, don't say, "I'll do it"—just do it! Pick yourself up by the back of the neck and shake off your fleshly laziness. Laziness can always be seen in our cravings for a mountaintop experience; all we talk about is our planning for our time on the mountain. We must learn to live in the ordinary "gray" day according to what we saw on the mountain.

If we do not sacrifice the natural to the spiritual, the natural life will resist and defy the life of the Son of God in us and will produce continual turmoil. This is always the result of an undisciplined spiritual nature. We go wrong because we stubbornly refuse to discipline ourselves physically, morally, or mentally.

We say, "But this is so strict. Surely He does not require that of me." Our Lord is strict, and He does require that of us.

It is impossible to carry on your life as a disciple without definite times of secret prayer.

Love is spontaneous, but it has to be maintained through discipline.

Prayer is an effort of the will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot seem to get our minds into good working order, and the first thing we have to fight is wandering thoughts. The great battle in private prayer is overcoming this problem of our idle and wandering thinking. We have to learn to discipline our minds and concentrate on willful, deliberate prayer.

True earnestness is found in obeying God, not in the inclination to serve Him that is born of undisciplined human nature. It is inconceivable, but true nevertheless, that saints are not bringing every project into captivity, but are doing work for God at the instigation of their own human nature which has not been spiritualised by determined discipline.

All the great successes of statesmanlike art and clever popular instincts were the result of cool contemplation, long silence and waiting, hard self-control and, above all, a fundamental renunciation of intoxication and and spectacles.

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!

The danger of insanity is always present in those who try to penetrate the discipline of logic and pure knowledge.

Idleness ruins the constitution

Nothing is stronger than habit.

Don't just plan to write—write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.