Discipline (Daily Devotional)

Greetings and welcome to Living Supernaturally. Thank you once again for giving us this opportunity to spend a few moments in God’s word and prayer. This week, we will be talking about few qualities of leadership. Today, we will look at discipline. Proverbs chapter 12, verse 1, ‘Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but whoever hates correction is stupid.’ Discipline means training. In other passages of scripture, this is referred to as a father training his children in righteousness or God training His children. Without this essential quality, all other gifts remain as dwarves and cannot grow. Hence today, discipline is first on our list. Before we conquer the world, we must learn and develop the discipline of conquering self. Discipline is what we choose to do and what we must do when the world or the flesh tells us to do something else. Discipline is not an optional side virtue for us as a Christian. It is by discipline that we take hold of the means of grace God has provided for our spiritual flourishing. The disciplined man or woman of God opens the word of God daily, fights for the times of secret prayer and doesn’t forsake the fellowship of the saints. When Paul writes to Titus about selecting elders, he exalts him to look for men and women who are disciplined. According to Titus chapter 1, verses 5 through 9, ‘mature Christians are not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination or drunkards or quick tempered. Instead, they are self- controlled, upright, holy and disciplined.’ These are marks of qualified elders precisely because these are marks of Christian maturity. An undisciplined believer is an immature believer. We need discipline if we want to see consistent results in every area of our life, spiritual or otherwise. We need self-discipline because temptation is everywhere. We live in a world full of temptation. Not all of them are overly sinful, but if left unchecked can turn into an unhealthy indulgence and even an addiction. There is always an easier path that the world wants us to lead but discipline helps us to say yes to the harder path and no to the easier or the sinful path. We need discipline if we must resist temptation and rise above the water line and be the mature and productive Christian that God wants us to be. Thankfully, God has given us the source of discipline by giving us the Holy Spirit. Self-control of all is a fruit of the Spirit. Every believer is indwelled by the Holy Spirit and He causes to produce these virtuous fruits to flourish in our lives. This means not only has Christ called us to self-discipline, He has given us the power to actually be disciplined. We need to make every effort to cultivate these virtues for ourselves. Let’s pray, Father, we thank you for teaching us today about discipline and even as we go about doing everything that you have commanded us to do, we pray that we will develop discipline in every area of our lives, that we will be fruitful and be able to multiply everything that you have blessed us with, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Daily devotions to strengthen your faith each day. Daily Devotional for Spirit filled living. Each daily devotion is about five minutes in duration. These daily devotionals are centered around a weekly theme. So there are seven daily devotions that focus on the theme and bring you insight, understanding and revelation from the Bible. Each week’s theme is listed as a series. So you can listen to the current week’s devotions or go to any previous theme/series that speaks to your present need (https://apcwo.org/resources/daily-devotions ). Also available free sermons (https://apcwo.org/sermons), and free Christian books (https://apcwo.org/books) to nourish and strengthen your faith.