Christian Discipline

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The discipline actually is arising out of something you've already decided, so your mind has to be changed first. Paul puts it that way in Romans 12, you know, do not be conformed, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

I have to learn what the Word of God says about things, and then I have to believe what God says is better than what I would think about it or anybody else, and I step forward to actually.

Follow that. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host,.

Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the president and founder of Striving for Eternity Ministries and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member.

If you haven't checked out the Christian Podcast Community, we get over 50 podcasts, produce about 40 hours of content a week. I am sure you will find something you like out there and can listen to. Go to christianpodcastcommunity .org, and you'll be able to look at the shows, and you can sort them by what your interests are—apologetics, homeschooling, whatever it may be.

This episode, what we're going to do is continue what we have been doing, which is to go into looking at the overcoming evil men's retreat. This does not mean, ladies, that doesn't mean you don't have to listen.

You can still listen, even though you weren't allowed to attend the retreat. But this time what I'm going to do is have the previous episode you heard from John Harris, and today we have—oh, this is going to be trouble—his father.

Maybe we can get some stories about when John was young. We'll see. But Pastor Scott Harris was second up in the rotation. So, Pastor Scott, welcome to The Wrap Report.

Thank you. Very good to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Now, your topic was on the subject of—well, all the topics were overcoming evil when we were dealing with men. Yours was dealing with discipline. That's a word we don't really hear as much, at least not in a positive way, like disciplines for the Christian life.

We don't hear about that so much anymore. But before we get into the topic itself, I want to have you introduce yourself to the audience here, let folks know a little bit about you, where you pastor, and what was it like raising Jonathan and the other boys?

Well, I'm 65. I was born in San Fernando, California, and I was saved at six years old. My parents were Christians and taught my brothers and I in the middle of three sons well who Jesus Christ was. And even at six, you can't understand the gospel, certainly not the intricacies, but you can understand that Jesus is God, that he does not have a human father, that God is his father, because I certainly didn't understand at six what a virgin birth was, but I did understand that he didn't have a human dad, understood that he lived a sinless life, understood that he died to pay for my sins, because I deserved death for my sin, that he rose from the dead, and that he ascended to heaven, and one day he'd be returning to take all those that believe in him to heaven with him.

So even at six, I can understand that. The particular morning, the pastor had said that we had all sinned before we got to church, and I thought, he must have talked to my mom, and I knew what my younger brother and I had done that morning, which we did most every Sunday morning.

She dressed us up real nice, and we'd look terrible by the time we get to the car. We'd be fighting and all the rest of it. So I grew up there. My degree is in agricultural biology with a minor in plant pathology.

Don't switch majors when you get to college. You'll end up, instead of four years, you'll end up there nearly six, going full-time, but I found that's been very good for me. Agricultural biology is a mixture of agronomy, pest control, entomology, plant pathology, anything related to agriculture and how you can reduce pest problems.

Now, have you found that very helpful in the pastorate?

Actually, I have. I do teach entomology to homeschoolers, and I still have my collection. In fact, my office is also called the bug room because, well, I have about a thousand insects up on the walls.

I usually joke that the Lord called me, instead of chasing down six-legged pests, I'm now chasing down two-legged ones. So it actually has been helpful. I would say the biggest thing it helped me in is training me to think in a very logical manner and dissect things, both literally and in a literary manner, to make sure I'm understanding what's actually there.

I'm not reading into things, but what's actually there. So actually, I would say it was very good training for that. Good preparation for seminary. Started at Talbot Seminary Extension, which was located at Grace Community Church where MacArthur is the pastor.

And then I was there when it transferred and became the Master Seminary, which was a very interesting time.

Well, and you know, I meant to ask you this when you first told me that. What year did you graduate then at Master's? So you may have known my first pastor because he was in the first graduating class of Master's Seminary, J .B. Chadwick.

I don't know if you know that name.

I don't recall it, but I took all my classes kind of backwards. I never expected to graduate, and I went to seminary because I simply wanted to have the skills to be able to study the scriptures for myself.

And I was single. I didn't have a girlfriend, and the seminary was only a mile from me. So that was very convenient. And so I started with the classes that interest me the most, plus Greek. I won't say that interest me the most, but I know it was required.

Yeah, Greek was not easy for me. Eventually figured that out. So my first year I was in with, you know, third-year students, and I took five years to do it. And my last year I was in with first-year students because I was taking the classes I needed for a degree because I figured I'd been there that long, I might as well finish.

So yeah, I'm sure he is in the picture of the first group that met, and where they were introducing the seminary, what they were going to do, and trying to answer questions they couldn't answer, like, well, who would the professors be in the future?

You know, they did give me one answer. I did want Dr. Robert Thomas, and he was going to come the next year. So I was able to take a couple classes with him, and I was very grateful for that. My lowest grades are with him, but I probably learned the most with him.

I even got to travel to Australia with him doing seminars, and that was a wonderful time. And we had really good professors, including the adjunct professors who were pastors that came in. Excellent training for me, and teach me to dig into the scriptures to make sure my convictions are coming from the Word of God and not from the musings of men, which I think tragically is what we see so often in the pulpit, is guys just repeating what they've heard somewhere else instead of digging in and having a confidence what the text itself says.

Maybe that's why Jonathan wanted me to talk about discipline, because it takes more discipline to do that. Yeah. Well, you have to sit in your seat and keep working. Before we get into discussing.

Pastor Scott Harris’s Background and Ministry

Discipline, where do you pastor at now? Catch us up with where you're at now. How long have you.

Been at that congregation? I am now in New York, so I'm a Southern California boy who has learned how to snowplow, not skiing. I use a snowplow to move snow off the parking lot. I've been here since 1991, so that's actually 32 and a half years.

And Jonathan was born in Los Angeles. David, well, he started life in Los Angeles, but he was born in Poughkeepsie. And then the youngest one, Jimmy, was born in Poughkeepsie as well. So three sons, they're about two years apart.

They're now 34, 32, and 30. And you, there was some joke going around about you being introduced where your school, your own seminary is by your son.

Well, I'm going to have to, I got to give another story. So, you know, if you're raising boys, they want to be like Dad, and then sometimes they say, I'm going to be as strong as you, Dad, I'm going to be as strong as you.

And Jonathan and I would arm wrestle, and he was about, I don't know, 11, 12, somewhere in there. And we were arm wrestling. And, you know, for the first time, you know, there was some resistance there.

I thought, yeah, he's getting there. And so, you know, I played with him a little bit. And I finally put him down and he said, Dad, someday I'm going to beat you. And I came over on the couch where he was sitting.

And I said, well, son, do you know what I'm going to do when you do that? And he said, no, what, what, what, Dad? I said, I put my arm around him and said, that's my son. There's, I think if you're a godly man, there's no greater pleasure than seeing your son surpass you.

I want them to stand on my shoulders and go far beyond me. And I believe that has happened. And God has answered the prayers of Diane and I. We've been married 36 years. We are so grateful for them. So, the story you're referring to is we're at the Shepherds Conference and Jonathan had been invited by Phil Johnson to come out.

So, that's my alma mater. And as we're going places, no, it became, you know, Jonathan was introducing to all the people who recognized him. You're John Harris, right? I'm like, well, it's Jonathan. Well, it's John Harris.

Like, well, this is my dad. This is my dad. Well, I couldn't be more happy. Yeah, and that's where we first met was at Shepherds.

Conference. John introduced me to you as we were sitting there having breakfast one day. So, it was the first time we met. And so, the next time we met was at the conference, the Overcoming Evil conference with, you know, TruthScript.

That's something that both your boys, John and David, are running. And so, looking forward to next year's conference, by the way. Just in case anyone wants to save the date, I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it's coming.

We're working on it.

We actually had a meeting already and dividing that's some responsibility, so it's not all on Jonathan. And now we're looking forward to it. Do some time in the fall 2024.

Why Discipline Matters in Overcoming Evil

So, we were talking about overcoming evil. And when we think about overcoming evil, discipline isn't something that most people would think of in the whole idea of overcoming evil. But you really made a good point that, yeah, this is important.

It's a primary thing we have to focus on. Why is it that discipline is so important, especially for men in this generation?

Well, I actually started the whole seminar lecture, it was a sermon, with just the problem of evil itself. If we're going to overcome evil, we need to understand how bad it is. And I spent a little bit of time trying to develop that.

We tend to think of just sin. But sin is missing the mark of God's perfect will. So, I missed the mark, but we're in a lot worse condition than that. Jeremiah says, our hearts are deceitful, Jeremiah 17 .9.

And it says, it calls it desperately sick, can't understand it. The New King James translate is desperately wicked. In Psalm 51 .5, David wrote, behold, I was brought forth iniquity, and sin my mother received me.

He's not suggesting anything against his mother, he was referring to himself, his own guilt as sin began before he was physically born. Solomon points out that insanity is in the heart of man. And of course, Jesus points out in several places, out of the heart comes evil thoughts and the actions that arise from that kind of stuff.

And I pointed that out is because you can't overcome evil by any means of discipline, internal or external, if your heart is wicked. You may be able to curtail certain actions. Psychologists can get people to stop one vice, and then they usually go to another vice.

The people like going to AA, we had some people who got saved out of that and they're having going to AA and they said, you can't, it's hard to get in the door or out the door because it's chain smokers out there with a whole cloud of, you know, they just go to tobacco, they go to some other, something else is addictive.

You have to have a change of heart, that's first. Otherwise, no amount of discipline is really going to make any difference other than you may be cleaned up on the outside and be a nicer person outwardly, but the heart's wicked.

And that's why the gospel is so important to us. It's got to have a change of mind because the soul has been changed. We have to be born again. And I know the gospel is very much on your heart. A lot of your ministry is focused just on that, is getting people to understand you're wicked and you need to be radically changed.

And to be born again is a radical change. You know, some of these things in the Christian community, we use the terms a lot, we tend to forget how radical that is. Having just done two funerals in the last, well, one was Wednesday, one was Sunday.

So it's as radical as the coffin is there, the body's laid out, and they just get up and jump out of the coffin and come dancing down the aisle. That's born again. You were dead. And that's going to be necessary for the discipline that we need to actually be effective.

So you kind of have to start there. It's just the wretched heart that we have. And even as Christians, there is a conversion. There's a change of desire. I think Paul describes that in Romans 8, to do good, which we didn't have before.

Now we do. And there is going to be a tug of war. We have old habits. We live in these physical bodies. And I do believe as long as we're in these physical bodies, we're going to struggle with that stuff.

We're going to struggle with the desires, the flesh, the lust, the eyes, and the boast and pride of life. If you got saved, you had a lot of habits you developed as well. Those aren't easy. And that's why I think throughout scripture, you have so many challenges to us that Paul's correcting in his epistles, as well as the other apostles in the general epistles, calling Christians to a better way of life, to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, to put off the old man, put on the new.

Well, that all requires discipline. But that discipline really is not the kind of discipline I think people tend to think of. They think that you're gritting your teeth or something. It really should be something that's easy because now it's actually matching your desires.

You want to do this. It's not a toil and pain. It's a desire, even if it's hard work. I think you could relate that to an athlete. An athlete who loves to run loves to run. It's not discipline for him to do that.

There is a discipline to it. He has to learn how and he may want to push himself to get a faster time or something, but he has a joy in running. I think that's true there, but I think it's even more true for us as Christians.

It takes discipline to develop the habit where I spend time in the Word of God to understand what God has said. But that becomes a joy. I long for that. What becomes frustrating is not having enough time.

In my own story, I went to seminary in order to learn to be able to study the Word of God for myself. When opportunities then came up to actually get paid enough money to feed myself and my family and at least use some of that time for studying the Word of God, you want to jump at the chance.

It didn't matter to me how much you learned to be content. We have food and shelter. We should be content. So the first job I took as an associate pastor, they actually asked me, what's the minimum you can live on?

I should have thought about that question a little differently than I did because I tried to calculate it out. And of course, I missed a few things. So we lived on less than we could live on. I wouldn't trade that for anything.

God demonstrated the truth of his Word. If we seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, he provided for my wife and I. And I'll relate this one to Jonathan. So Jonathan was born. And when he was born, my wife had been a nurse.

She'd been injured. And the COBRA plan was going to run out right at the time of his birth. And we're going to be under, I think that time, the Good Samaritan health plan. And it was supposed to start up when the other one ended.

But Jonathan was born right at that time. And so there's this question of, we don't know how much we owe because we don't know what plan we're in. And we know whatever plan it is, there is a big copay, period.

And we don't know. Is it going to be $1 ,000? Is it going to be $3 ,000, $4 ,000? We don't know. So we get a bill in the mail. We owe $7 ,000. Kids were cheaper back then. $7 ,000 in 1989. So a little more value to 7 ,000.

And I'd call the hospital and say, which is the right bill that you should contact the insurance companies? Oh, well, not yet, Mr. Harris. We're still working on that. That happened seven months in a row.

I get a bill. I call them. They say, well, we don't know yet. And then on the eighth month, I got another bill in the mail. It was stamped in red, paid in full. I have no idea how. I know I owed something.

I was trying to think, I think I can pay you $25 a month. I'll be paying in it when he has grandkids. But I got to get started on this. And we just saw God meeting the needs that we always had. And I would say the first maybe 15 years of ministry, whatever I paid from the church did not meet my actual expenses.

And yet God always met it from some other way. And we never borrowed money. We never went in debt, period. And God had always met our needs. Now, that actually is part of discipline. Do I believe God enough to actually step out in what he says to watch him at work?

That's part of discipline. Because it's a lot easier from the human standpoint to say, well, I got to find a job to pay for everything. That's my responsibility. But my responsibility, first and foremost, is to serve the Lord the best of my ability with whatever gifts he's given me.

And God's blessed me with a wonderful wife who supports me with that. And it was rough on her. She had been a charge nurse at Cedars-Sinai, a world-class hospital. She married me and was now injured and couldn't work and went from lots of extra cash available to, well, nothing.

I think it's all part of discipline.

Discipline as Training, Correction, and Godliness

You make a really good point, even with the example you use of running. So I'm a long-distance runner. Yeah, I know. But when I first started running, it wasn't something I enjoyed at first. It took some training.

And yeah, I built up to where I run like a half marathon a day. But I was running up until about a week ago, a quarter to a half a marathon a day. Now, I say that because I got a bone spur. My doctor said I can't run for two weeks.

But see, back to your illustration now, I am actually counting down the days to when I can get back on a treadmill and start running because I'm like having withdrawals. And that's the thing of discipline.

You get used to it. It's not easy in the beginning training part, but year after year of doing it, and you kind of don't want to go without it. So a lot of your talk was on this issue of discipline. I mean, what does the term discipline mean, especially in the context of the Christian life?

Well, the word discipline, both the Hebrew and the Greek have some variation. Actually, there's quite a few Greek words that are translated that way. The Hebrew, yasar, it can be used for the sense of discipline as in correction, a corrective punishment.

It does have that. Jeremiah 46 .28 has that. I will discipline you with justice and by no means leave you unpunished. So it can have that. But in cultivating godly discipline, we're actually referring to actions that bring about instruction, training, godliness, which results in righteous living.

That's really what discipline is. So we'll test the examples. Proverbs 12 .1, whoever loves discipline loves knowledge. He who hates reproofs is senseless. So you can see both aspects there. There's a pursuit, and that pursuit includes a desire to be corrected if you're wrong.

That's gaining wisdom. When it comes to Greek words in it, there's a bunch of different words that are used, and each one gets a little bit more of a nuance concerning it. Let me run through some of these.

2 Timothy 1 .7, for God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power, love, and self -discipline. Sophronismos, then the LSB. Ephesians 6 .4, fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

That's paideia. That's a common word that's used. That's training, instruction. 1 Corinthians 9 .27, but I discipline my body and make it my slave. Kupotaiso, and that's the LSB on that. I picked the versions that used to translate it as discipline, just to bring it out the idea.

Colossians 2 .5, for even though I'm absent in body, nevertheless, I am with you in spirit. Rejoice to see your good discipline, stability of your faith in Christ. That's taxus. 1 Timothy 4 .7, but have nothing to do with worldly fables, fit only for old women.

On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. Gamazo. So a lot of different Greek words. Each one adds a little bit aspect, but overall, the general idea is going to be it's those things that will end up helping us develop the Christian virtues that we should have in our life as we obey what the Word of God says.

Some of it's going to be corrective. Some of it's going to be training. Some of it's going to be instruction. All of those things come into it, but there's something that's going to be outward. We're seeking someone else to help us.

We want mentors. We want some disciples. Some of it's from internal. It's an internal thing like when you're running and you may have gotten help in training initially, but now there's a self-discipline and that becomes something you desire to do.

So you learn to go running as you did through training and then practicing it until you actually learn to enjoy it and no one has to tell you to go run anymore. Like you said, you're counting down the days when you get back on the.

Treadmill. And most people think that's crazy when you're doing as many miles as I do on a treadmill. The overall theme of the conference was the idea of overcoming evil, which in our day and age is getting clearer and clearer.

I mean, even since the conference, we've seen so much worse going on in the world just since the conference, which was not that long ago. And so I want to ask you this break. I want to ask you, how does discipline help us in overcoming evil?

So I'll let you think about that and just give a word to our sponsors. And I encourage you folks, if you get value out of this show, supporting us, one way you could do that is to support our sponsors because that gets them to continue supporting us.

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So back to Pastor Scott, how does the idea of.

Discipline help us in overcoming evil? I'm going to have to say something about your sponsor first.

Okay. Is that okay? Go for it. Can I promote your sponsor?

First, I didn't like your pillow. I have a feather pillow, but my wife and I are using the same bed when we first got married. So we've had the same bed for 36 years. And the only reason we can do it is we do have that same mattress topper.

We've had it now for almost three years and it certainly is good. I recommend it highly. It's some discipline to make sure you don't spend money unwisely and spend three, four thousand, you know, two, three, four thousand dollars on a new mattress when you can get a topper.

That's.

Good discipline. Yeah. No, it did change my sleep. I mean, I don't sleep much, but man, I got a much better sleep when we got that mattress topper. It's great. So how does someone, you know, believer, how does discipline help in overcoming evil?

It puts you on the path to be able to develop the godliness you should have in your life. First Peter lays out that we already have all the promises of God or second Peter rather. They're there. We have all this magnificent promises and it's sufficient for everything pertaining to life in God.

It's there. But then Peter goes on and tells that we have to have a discipline, which is really what it is on our part. And that discipline is going to help us learn the habits as well as setting, well, it's actually going to work this way.

I'm going to learn to think correctly. My mind is going to be conformed to the image or to my mind renewed as I learn the word of God. And then as I step forward to obey it, which is going to take some discipline, you have to learn to trust God, take faith, step out.

And you have to do that for a while. So it becomes a habit and you start seeing that God changes your life and your perspective that you don't want to go back the way. And we use some of that already.

I would say I'll use the one with learning discipline with finances. There's a lot of things in Proverbs, especially tells us about how to use finances, but that's going to take discipline. I do a lot of, you know, premarital counseling and marriage counseling too, and often it ends up around finances.

There's an aspect of this. And I start talking about budgets and people, you know, like budget, I don't want to live on a budget. It sounds so restrictive and they don't understand the freedom that comes when you've already decided beforehand, what is the best use of what's been given to you?

So here we're talking about finances. So I have so much money. What is the best use of it? So instead of being waylaid by some good salesman who convinces you, this would just make your life so much wonderful.

And they, they get the money in their pocket. It's out of your pocket. And you get this thing, you get it home and you have buyer's remorse. As soon as you walk in the door and you're like, well, now where am I going to put this thing?

So it goes up in the attic with all the other stuff you got sold that you never really wanted, but it looked like a good idea at the time. But a budget says, I already have decided this is what's important in my life.

And I'm going to have to have the discipline to say, I'm not going to yield to the temptations that are there. And sometimes they actually are temptations. Sometimes there will be real tests of faith.

Am I going to trust God or am I going to find something else to do what I want to do? And instead I'm going to follow what I've decided before God is the best use of my funds so that I can glorify him with what he's entrusted to me.

Because the reality is, when it comes to finances, we're only stewards. I own nothing. God owns it all. I'm not simply a steward what he's entrusted to me to use for the few short years of my life. Well, so finances is one area, but now think about the rest of the aspects of your life.

There's something we all have, and we all have an equal amount of it, and it's called time. What's the best use of your time? Well, without discipline, that time is going to end up squandered so quickly in so many different areas.

And my wife likes to say, Facebook proves that everybody has time to read the Bible. Maybe that's more my generation or something. I understand that kids don't like Facebook.

Yeah.

I don't like it, so I don't use it.

Well, I used to upset some people, and I think I upset the people that weren't in their Bible, because there was a period where every day I'd post something like, if you haven't been on your face before God and in God's book, don't be on Facebook.

If you haven't shared the good news, stop watching Fox News, you know, things like that every day.

That's excellent.

And you could tell who was really, like, most people liked it, and I still remember we had one guy that just, he was trying to justify that he's in the Bible every day. I said, then you wouldn't be this angry that I'm posting this.

That's exactly right. But see, that takes some discipline, but the discipline actually is arising out of something you've already decided, so your mind has to be changed first. And that's, the gospel changes our mind, and then we have to be resistant.

Paul puts it that way in Romans 12, do not be conformed, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. I have to learn what the Word of God says about things, and then I have to believe what God says is better than what I would think about it or anybody else, and then step forward to actually follow that.

And so time management is a big one, and I admit as a pastor, my most often repeated prayer, not just once a day, throughout the day, Lord, help me be efficient and effective with my time, because there's so many things that are constantly coming in that, you know, the tyranny of the urgent, well, this has to be done, that has to be done.

My desk is a constant mess. While I was gone into DR earlier this year, my wife went through and cleaned out my whole office, and I don't know where things are anymore because the piles have been shifted, but I couldn't find things in the piles anyway, so I can't complain about that.

The room looks nicer. I'm the same boat I was. I can't get to things. There's too many things coming in. So I've had to think through what's the most important, and that becomes a constant prayer. What's the most important thing for the kingdom of God, right?

Because that's really what you should be looking at, righteousness in my own life and pursuing the kingdom of God. What's most important? So a lot of things that come in, you know, in the end, they don't really matter.

They don't shouldn't take up my time. I need the discipline to make sure those things that are actually the most important are the things that are done. That's part of discipline. It starts with a belief of what is the best to do, not, you know, the good, better, and best thing.

It's good to do good things, but you want to do then the better thing, not just the good thing, and then you want to be looking to do the best thing, not just the better thing, and that is all comes out from discipline.

What Peter says in First or Second Peter 1 .5, for this very reason also applying all diligence in your faith supply moral excellence. Your moral excellence, knowledge, and your knowledge, self-control, your self-control, perseverance, and your perseverance, godliness, your godliness, brotherly kindness, your brotherly kindness, love.