godliness untouched

Recently I listened again to a sermon which was first preached when I was a freshman in college. The scripture verse was 1 Tim 4 if I remember correctly. The topic was discipline, namely train/discipilne yourselves for godliness. It was a formative sermon for me even though when I talk to my friend (who preached it) about it, he says it was really not one of his better sermons (just goes to show the power of the spirit of God I guess.) The sermon was this, very simply:

godliness is achieved through discipline.

That blew my mind. Godliness is achieved, it is worked for. It is not a fruit or product of time alone, we don’t get it through osmosis, or by some sort of law of maturity through age, it takes work!

Unfortunately this generation of young men and women don’t know what it means to be disciplined. In fact, we are the opposite. We are just plain lazy. Like dogs lying on the porch, who won’t fetch the ball when the master throws it, we lie around on the proverbial couch unwilling to do anything too difficult (or too glorious).

Just walk into your regular classroom lecture halfway through the quarter. I remember hearing someone say “no way, you’ve never missed class?” Isn’t that funny? I mean, when you think about it, just going to class, is the bare minimum. It’s like saying, “No way! you’ve done the bare minimum?!” We should feel ashamed. And the people who say this stuff fill up our fellowships. They are people like you and me. And we expect the Lord to be glorified in our school work?! We pray that we would study and do school to the glory of God. Are you kidding me! we have grown so lazy that even the bare minimum seems impossible! I think God is dishonored don’t you? Or maybe, you are saying, “wait, sometimes it’s not worth it to go to class.” Really? What if going to class was your way of representing the faithfulness of your Lord. Let me tell you, if I were an unbeliever, and you were a Christian who never attended your classes, never studied hard, always played and wasted time, I would think you were a hypocrite to identify yourself with the One who said “let your light shine before men.” I would say, that your light is pretty pathetic. You bear the testimony of One who is infinitely important. Most of us are dragging the name of God through the dirt by how we live because we can’t get it into our head that salvation means more than just heaven.

all this talk about disicpline and we haven’t even gotten to disciplining ourselves for godliness, that is simply and sadly too far away for us.

let’s take it a step at a time shall we?

first, why don’t we all just go to class.