Train Yourself to be Godly : Self-Discipline in the Christian Life Rick Ostrander, Provost Cornerstone University chapel address, October 2014 Our theme for the semester is the spiritual disciplines. I started our preparing a talk on that subject, but somehow it changed into a talk about self-discipline instead. More specifically, this is a talk about what sports can teach us about growing in the Christian life. Since we have about three hundred student athletes here at Cornerstone, this talk is especially appropriate for you. It s also for another three hundred of you who wish you were playing college sports and live out your dreams on the intramural field. Actually, it s relevant to anyone who has devoted time and effort to mastering a skill, and who wants to grow as a Christian which hopefully is all of us. So to begin with, let me establish my credentials on the topic by recapping my own modest career as an athlete. I started playing basketball on my fourth grade basketball team we were the Winnebago Elementary School Indians, though they ve probably changed their name since then. I continued playing through junior high, high school, and college. I continued playing occasionally until two summers ago, when I decided to guard my younger, faster, more athletic twenty-two year old son in a pickup game. Things were going well until I planted my left foot to leap forward and heard a loud pop, which was my Achilles tendon snapping in two. So ended an illustrious basketball career. Fortunately, about ten years ago, I had taken up another sport that is easier on the body cycling. When we lived in Arkansas, I would bike over six thousand miles every year. And since I do a lot of travel with my job, I have been able to bike in many places around the world. Here in Michigan I ve had to adapt my biking routine to the climate, but I still ride about four thousand miles a year. So when I ruptured my Achilles, I did what any sensible cyclist would do and bungie-corded my cast to a pedal in order to continue riding. All that s to say, while I m not exactly Olympic material, sports have been an important part of my life and I know something about what it means to be dedicated to a sport. So this morning I d like to connect our chapel theme the spiritual disciplines to this important part of our culture and, for many of us, of our lives. Fortunately I m not alone in connecting these two subjects. The Apostle Paul had much to say about how athletic competition resembles the Christian life. In his letters to the early church, he uses the metaphors of boxing and running to express his point about disciplining ourselves as Christians. The passage that I would like to focus on is I Timothy 4:7-8: Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, both for the present life and for the life to come. 1
The term godliness is not a common one in use today. For many Christians, godliness is thought of primarily as a matter of the heart: We know we re spiritual when we reach an emotional state of being totally committed to following Christ. Back when I was in Bible college, if someone was really spiritual, we would say that person was sold out for Christ, or say that he s on fire for Jesus. For me, attending summer camp every year was a way to generate a spiritual high that was supposed to sustain my Christian walk throughout the coming year. That generally lasted until the second week of school. Godliness is also thought of as a matter of the head. We connect the notion of godliness to correct thoughts and beliefs. Mature Christians are marked by the amount of biblical and theological knowledge that they have and that they believe the right things. After all, if our thoughts govern our actions, then we should make sure we think correctly as Christians. Now it s true that spiritual growth requires that we know the Bible and Christian doctrines. It s also true that growing in Christ involves cultivating our feelings so that we love the right things. We re commanded to love God and others, and love clearly involves the emotions. But it s interesting that Paul uses the word training in relation to godliness. We don t train our feelings or our thoughts. Rather, as anyone who has played a sport, or mastered a musical instrument can attest, training is aimed at your body, not your head or your heart. You train your hands and feet to act in a certain way; and to act that way instinctively. In fact, the whole purpose of training is to condition your body to do things naturally so that when you re in the game, you don t have to waste precious time thinking through what you re supposed to do. You just react. So here s my main argument: I would suggest that godliness, like playing a sport, is a skill to be learned through disciplined training and practice, not an emotional state that is acquired through a sudden experience. That s what Paul s instructions would seem to imply. Hopefully by now you ve heard of the Virtue Project at Cornerstone our effort as a university community to grow in Christ by becoming more and more characterized by nine key virtues. Now the interesting thing about the virtues is that they display themselves primarily in our actions, not our thoughts or feelings. Even the virtue of gratitude, which sounds like a feeling, displays itself in particular actions. How do I know whether you are a grateful person, or whether you are hospitable or just? By what you do. In other words, as Christians we practice the virtues, in both senses of that word. Recently at Cornerstone we had our monthly faculty meeting. For the first five minutes of the meeting, several professors practiced gratitude by verbally, publically expressing thanks to a professor from another division. That s how the Christian virtues are supposed to work: like playing a sport, they are meant to be embodied in particular learned practices, not just thoughts or feelings. 2
In fact, I would go further and suggest that one way that we generate virtuous feelings is to begin by practicing them. Our usual notion of education is that our thoughts and feelings generate our actions. But it works the other way as well: Repeated, intentional actions can help to educate our thoughts and feelings. As anyone who has played a sport for countless hours knows, the practice itself increases your love for the game, because your body comes to expect and enjoy the steady rhythm of a morning run, or the feeling of hitting a tennis ball on the sweet spot. As C.S. Lewis once said, the best way to love someone that you find unloveable is to start by acting like you love them. So why is growing in godliness primarily a matter of training, not just letting go and letting God? Because like sports, most of life consists of reacting to situations, not detailed planning. One of my all-time favorite memories as a boy growing up in Chicago was watching Michael Jordan make the game-winning shot against the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 1989 NBA playoffs with Craig Ehlo hanging all over him. How did Michael Jordan prepare for this particular moment? He had no way of knowing before the game that he would be required to make an eighteen-foot hanging jump shot at the top of the key while drifting to his left. Rather, he spent two decades and thousands of hours practicing the skills of basketball, so when this particular moment came, his brain and body instantly sized up the situation and he acted. In other words, these five seconds of brilliance were the product of twenty years of playing basketball. That s how training works: we spend hundreds of hours preparing our bodies so that they do the right thing automatically when the game is on the line. Like sports, the Christian virtues manifest themselves mainly in our reactions to events as they arise, not by detailed planning. As with sports, the key moments in our lives that test our virtue often come up unexpectedly. Life is mainly an endless series of pop quizzes, not a final exam. That s why we train ourselves to act virtuously when the moment arises, without having to think about it. Here s a real-life equivalent to game five of the NBA playoffs: The film Quiz Show is based on the real story of a game show of the 1950s in which two contestants in sound-proof booths were asked questions. Actually, the game was rigged and some contestants were fed answers in advance, but not all of the contestants knew it. One such contestant was Charles Van Doren, an Ivy League professor, played by Ralph Fiennes in the film. Before the contest, VanDoren is approached by a Quiz Show staffer, who happens to mention to him that George Halleck was the Civil War general who fired Ulysses S. Grant in 1862. The key moment of the film then comes when Charles VanDoren, who up until now thinks that the show is legitimate, enters the soundproof booth. When the game show host asks him a question about the Civil War, VanDoren suddenly realizes that he s been fed the final answer. He must instantly decide whether to maintain his integrity and lose the game or go along with the lie. After pondering the alternatives for thirty excruciating seconds, VanDoren gives the correct answer, thereby winning the game but ensuring his eventual downfall. 3
As with Michael Jordan, Van Doren s crucial moment came unexpectedly. The virtues of courage and integrity were instantly put to the test, and he had no way of knowing that his decision in that sound-proof booth would largely determine the rest of his life. Unlike Jordan, VanDoren failed the pop quiz: he was not conditioned to respond with integrity, and the rest of his life was a slow, sad outworking of that sudden decision made in a soundproof booth in NBC Studios. It may not be as dramatic as Quiz Show, but much of our daily Christian walk consists of on-the-spot reactions to events that we don t plan for. You re taking an insanely difficult World Civilization exam for Dr. Spence, and you notice that the person sitting next to you has her exam open to the same page. Do you let your eyes linger over her answer sheet, or have your eyes been trained to instinctively turn away? Someone makes a cutting remark in the dining room. Do you lash back emotionally, or have you trained yourself to take a deep breath and think through your response before answering? Like the shortstop who reacts automatically to the ground ball to his left with men on first and second, we live out the virtues through instinctive actions developed through years of training. So if godliness is largely a matter of training, let me conclude by drawing three lessons from athletics that apply to our Christian lives. First, like sports, godliness is a group activity. As we all know, sports are highly communal. Even in an individual sport like running, you have a coach and other runners who push you and keep you accountable for training. The Christian virtues too are formed in community with other believers. It s impossible to practice hospitality, or love, without relationship to other people. In fact, I would go further and suggest that the Christianity of the New Testament is always portrayed a team sport. Let s say I told you I was a basketball player, and you ask me what team I m on, and I replied, I don t play on a team, but I shoot free throws for an hour a day. You d probably conclude that I m not really a basketball player. The fact is, the sport of basketball cannot truly be played apart from being on a team. The same is true of the Christian life. If you look at any description of Christians in the New Testament, they are Christians not only because of their belief in Christ but their participation in the body of Christ, the church. We train ourselves for godliness by participating together in living out the virtues. That s why we refer to Cornerstone as a Christian learning community, and we all learn godliness together. If you haven t developed the habit of participation in a church body, of life together with other Christians, then you re not really playing the game of Christianity as it s described in the Bible. My second observation is this: Godliness takes time. As we all know, the bodies of athletes slowly evolve to adapt to the sport that they train for. Soccer players develop large calf muscles and quadriceps from all of the quick bursts on the field. You can usually tell just by looking whether a tennis player is right-handed or lefthanded because of the size of his arm. Cyclists are one of the more extreme examples, with muscular legs and 4
spindly little arms. But those physiological changes don t happen overnight. As any runner knows, there s no one-week cram session that will prepare you to run a marathon. The body adapts slowly through conditioning, nutrition, and rest. There are no short-cuts. As much as we may wish it were otherwise, godliness also takes time. We may become Christians instantly, but like our bodies, our character is slowly formed to become like Christ through consistent habits and ongoing participation in community. Or to put it another way: The godly feelings may come instantly; but the habitual actions are formed slowly. Have you ever wondered why college lasts for four years? Why don t we just put our courses online, have you cram twenty-five hours of online classes into your brain each semester, and get you out of here in two years? It s because true discipleship takes time. Our purpose as a university isn t simply to give you a ticket to a job but to help you become follower of Christ who practices the virtues of Christ. That process takes time and requires ongoing participation in community. And of course, it will continue long after you leave Cornerstone as well. My last point is really just a way of summarizing what I ve been trying to say all along: In large part, growing in godliness comes down to one of our nine key virtues: self-discipline. If we re serious about becoming like Christ, that will require discipline. There s no such thing as an elite athlete who s not disciplined. That s because mastering a sport is a matter of training the body to do what it wouldn t do naturally. Athletes develop disciplined and consistent habits that condition their bodies to master a certain activity. The successful crosscountry runner doesn t just run a race every week; she develops a consistent routine of proper eating, sleeping, and of course, working out. In fact, once the routine is established, to not follow it would feel unnatural. Growing in godliness works largely the same way. As unglamorous as it may sound, we become like Christ by forming consistent habits and structures in our lives that orient us toward living out the virtues. As in sports, we form our habits, and then our habits form us. So if you re serious about growing in godliness, I would suggest that you begin with the basics: Go to bed on time and get adequate sleep. Read the bible and pray every morning. Eat well. Practice daily acts of gratitude. Find a mentor. Go to church on Sunday. Study for class. Then study more. Join a Bible study group. Don t stay up playing video games, and don t waste your time watching dumb movies. Get off of Facebook and interact with real people. Read good books. This may sound like legalism, but it s not. We don t develop these kinds of habits in order to please God; we do it because that s how our character is formed. Everything you do consistently is helping to form your character in one direction or another. If a basketball player takes five hundred shots a day, we don t call that legalism; we call it discipline and dedication. He does it because that s how you improve your jump shot. It s why Michael Jordan was able to make the game-winning shot against the Cavs. 5
In the same way, developing disciplined habits in our lives is not legalism; it s simply being aware that everything we do is forming us in one way or another. As Don Whitney said recently in chapel, discipline without purpose is drudgery. We discipline our lives not out of legalism, but because disciplined training is what produces godliness. Being on fire for Jesus may come instantly, but acting like Jesus, and doing that instinctively, requires disciplined habits, practiced in community, that form us over time. So while I wish I had some big new exciting things to say to make you a better Christian, my best advice is to learn from athletes, and from Paul, and stick to the training plan. May we be a community of learners who discipline ourselves to develop the habits that produce godly lives. 6