Three Indispensable Disciplines of a Champion

Photo Credit: Richard Wayne Photography Flickr via Compfight cc

The GOAT

Have you heard of the GOAT? What makes the GOAT the GOAT? What sets the GOAT apart from the rest? The key that makes someone a GOAT are the disciplines they practice. By the way, GOAT is Greatest Of All Time!

Spiritual disciplines are essential to practice in order to follow Jesus. There are disciplines that will help you grow strong. Disciplines will speed your maturity and add stability to your life.

Discipline is not a word we like. It may conjure up images of corporal punishment or deprivation. It may remind us of physical and emotional pain. But, when I think of discipline, I like to think of elite athletes who use extreme discipline to become the best at what they do – the GOAT!

Great athletes follow a strict diet, often spend much more time at rest than most people, and, of course, spend countless hours in physical training and drills. There is pain and deprivation in discipline but the glory of being the best at what they do, the feeling of achieving a championship far outweighs all the sacrifice they made to get there!

Followers of Jesus want to be strong and mature in their faith. They want to be confident and sure in their daily life. Like elite athletes, mature followers of Jesus have a disciplined routine of things they do to remain firm. Here are the disciplines that are essential to spiritual health, growth and stability.

Disciplines for Every Follower

The discipline of prayer. Spending much time in prayer is primary. We must be taking the time daily for one on one time with God every day. Our Father wants to share his heart with us and he wants us to share our hearts with him. Our prayer time is an opportunity for us to communicate with God. Many books have been written about prayer. You can read more about prayer here.

The discipline of Bible reading. Most followers of Jesus read their Bibles and pray during a personal time with God each day. We should read God’s Word to hear his voice. We need to be systematic as we read the Bible. Remember, that all of the Bible is God’s Word, so we need to find a way to read the whole thing. More counsel on how to read the Bible can be found here.

The discipline of corporate worship. Worship is one of the central activities of heaven. We need to worship God and when we worship with other followers of Jesus, we experience God’s presence in a special way. Psalm 22:3 tells us that God is enthroned on the praise of his people! There is no earthly experience to compare to experiencing the presence of God in worship. God’s presence is reassuring, empowering and healing!

What About You?

For me, these are the three most important spiritual disciplines. I have found them to be indispensable for my own spiritual growth. There are many other disciplines that I use regularly: silence, solitude, fasting, small group study, writing, simplicity, service, spiritual reading and confession are some of them.

The foundation of the three disciplines here will allow you to open yourself to more leadership from God, which will help you add other disciplines to accelerate your growth to becoming more like Jesus.

I would love to hear from you about your practice of spiritual disciplines. What helps you? What do your struggle with?