Christian Discipline

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Real wealth requires real solutions. Connect to a wealth advisor today at Corrient .com. Welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report.
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I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the president and founder of Striving for Eternity Ministries and the
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Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member. If you haven't checked out the
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Christian Podcast Community, we got over 50 podcasts, produce about 40 hours of content a week.
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I am sure you'll find something you like out there and can listen to.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Maybe we can get some stories about when John was young. We'll see. But Pastor Scott Harris was second up in the rotation.
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So, Pastor Scott, welcome to The Wrap Report. Thank you. Very good to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
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Now, your topic was on the subject of—well, all the topics were overcoming evil when we were dealing with men.
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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
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Christian life. We don't hear about that so much anymore. But before we get into the topic itself,
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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
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Jonathan and the other boys? Well, I'm 65.
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I was born in San Fernando, California, and I was saved at six years old. My parents were
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Christians and taught my brothers and I in the middle of three sons well who
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Jesus Christ was. And even at six, you can't understand the gospel, certainly not the intricacies, but you can understand that Jesus is
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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.
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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
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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.
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So I grew up there. My degree is in agricultural biology with a minor in plant pathology.
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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.
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Agricultural biology is a mixture of agronomy, pest control, entomology, plant pathology, anything related to agriculture and how you can reduce pest problems.
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Now, have you found that very helpful in the pastorate? I actually have. I do teach entomology to homeschoolers, and I still have my collection.
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In fact, my office is also called the bug room because, well, I have about a thousand insects up on the walls.
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I usually joke that the Lord called me, instead of chasing down six -legged pests,
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I'm now chasing down two -legged ones. So it actually has been helpful.
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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
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I'm understanding what's actually there. I'm not reading into things, but what's actually there. So actually,
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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's the pastor.
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And then I was there when it transferred and became the Master Seminary, which was a very interesting time.
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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?
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So you may have known my first pastor because he was in the first graduating class of Master's Seminary, J .B.
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Chadwick. I don't know if you know that name. I don't recall it, but I took all my classes kind of backwards.
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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.
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And I was single. I didn't have a girlfriend, and the seminary was only a mile from me. So that was very convenient.
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And so I started with the classes that interested me the most, plus Greek. I won't say that interested me the most, but I know it was required.
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Yeah, Greek was not easy for me. Eventually figured that out. So my first year
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I was in with, you know, third -year students, and I took five years to do it. And my last year
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I was in with first -year students because I was taking the classes I needed for a degree because I figured
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I'd been with 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?
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You know, they did give me one answer. I did want Dr. Robert Thomas, and he was going to come the next year.
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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.
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I even got to travel to Australia with him doing seminars, and that was a wonderful time.
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And I 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
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Word of God and not from the musings of men, which I think tragically is what we see so often.
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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.
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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.
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Before we get into discussing discipline, where do you pastor at now? Catch us up with where you're at now. How long have you been at that congregation?
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I am now in New York, so I'm a Southern California boy who has learned how to snowplow, not skiing.
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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.
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Jonathan was born in Los Angeles. David, well, he started life in Los Angeles, but he was born in Poughkeepsie.
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The youngest one, Jimmy, was born in Poughkeepsie as well, so three sons. They're about two years apart.
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They're now 34, 32, and 30. There was some joke going around about you being introduced where your own seminary is by your son.
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Well, I'm going to have to give another story. If you're raising boys, they want to be like dad.
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Sometimes they say, I'm going to be as strong as you, dad. I'm going to be as strong as you. Jonathan and I would arm wrestle.
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He was about, I don't know, 11, 12, somewhere in there. We were arm wrestling. For the first time, there was some resistance there.
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I thought, yeah, he's getting there. I played with him a little bit, and I finally put him down.
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He said, dad, someday I'm going to beat you. I came over on the couch where he was sitting, and I said, well, son, do you know what
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I'm going to do when you do that? He said, no, what, dad? I put my arm around him and said, that's my son.
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I think if you're a godly man, there's no greater pleasure than seeing your son surpass you.
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I want them to stand on my shoulders and go far beyond me. I believe that has happened, and God has answered the prayers of Diane and I.
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We've been married 36 years. We are so grateful for them. The story you're referring to is, we're at the
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Shepherds Conference, and Jonathan had been invited by Phil Johnson to come out.
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That's my alma mater. Jonathan was introducing to all the people who recognized him, you're
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John Harris, right? I'm like, well, it's Jonathan. Well, it's John Harris. Like, well, this is my dad.
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This is my dad. Well, I couldn't be more happy. Yeah, and that's where we first met, was at Shepherds Conference.
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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
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Overcoming Evil Conference, with TruthScript. That's something that both your boys, John and David, are running, and so...
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President. Yep. Looking forward to next year's conference, by the way. Just in case anyone wants to save the date,
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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.
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It'll be sometime in fall 2024. 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.
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It's a primary thing we have to focus on. Why is it that discipline is so important, especially for men in this generation?
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Well, I actually started the whole seminar lecture, and it was a sermon, with just the problem of evil itself.
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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.
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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.
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Jeremiah says our hearts are deceitful, Jeremiah 17, 9, and it says, it calls it desperately sick, can't understand it.
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The New King James translated it as desperately wicked. In Psalm 51, 5, David wrote,
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Behold, I was brought forth iniquity and sin my mother received me. He's not suggesting anything against his mother.
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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.
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And of course, Jesus points out in several places how the heart overcomes evil thoughts and the actions that arise from that kind of stuff.
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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.
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You know, you may be able to curtail certain actions. You know, psychologists can get people to stop one vice, and then they usually go to another vice.
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You know, the people like going to AA, we had some people who got saved out of that, and they had been going to AA, and they said, you can't, it's hard to get in the door, out the door, because it's chain smokers out there with a whole cloud of, you know, there's tobacco, they go to some other, something else is addictive.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Having just done two funerals in the last, well, one was Wednesday, one was Sunday.
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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.
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That's born again. You were dead. And that's going to be necessary for the discipline that we need to actually be effective.
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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.
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I think Paul describes that in Romans 8. To do good, which we didn't have before, now we do.
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And there is going to be a tug of war. We have old habits. We live in these physical bodies.
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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.
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If you got saved being older, you've had a lot of habits you developed as well. Those aren't easy.
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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
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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.
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Well, that also requires discipline. But that discipline really should...it's not the kind of discipline
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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.
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You want to do this. It's not a toil and pain. It's a desire, even if it's hard work.
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I think you could relate that to an athlete. An athlete who loves to run, loves to run.
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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.
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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
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Word of God to understand what God has said, but that becomes a joy. I long for that.
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What becomes frustrating is not having enough time. In my own story,
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I went to seminary in order to learn to be able to study the Word of God for myself.
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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
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Word of God, you want to jump at the chance. It didn't matter to me how much you learned to be content.
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We have food and shelter at least we should be content. The first job I took as an associate pastor, they actually asked me, what's the minimum you can live on?
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I should have thought about that question a little differently than I did because I tried to calculate it out. Of course,
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I missed a few things, so we lived on less than we could live on. I wouldn't trade that for anything.
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God demonstrated the truth of His Word. If we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, He provided for my wife and I.
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I'll relate this one to Jonathan. Jonathan was born. When he was born, my wife had been a nurse.
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She'd been injured. The COBRA plan was going to run out right at the time of his birth.
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We're going to be under, I think at that time, the Good Samaritan health plan. It was supposed to start up when the other one ended.
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Jonathan was born right at that time. There's this question of we don't know how much we owe because we don't know what plan we're in.
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We know whatever plan it is, there is a big copay, period. We don't know.
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Is it going to be $1 ,000? Is it going to be $3 ,000, $4 ,000? We don't know. We get a bill in the mail.
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We owe $7 ,000. Kids were cheaper back then. $7 ,000 in 1989.
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A little more value to $7 ,000 then. I'd call the hospital and say, which is the right bill that you should contact the insurance companies?
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Well, not yet, Mr. Harris. We're still working on that. That happened seven months in a row.
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I get a bill. I call them. They say, well, we don't know yet. Then on the eighth month,
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I got another bill in the mail. It was stamped in red, paid in full. I have no idea how.
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I know I owed something. I was trying to think, I think I can pay you $25 a month.
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I'll be paying in it when he has grandkids, but I got to get started on this. We just saw
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God meeting the needs that we always had. I would say the first maybe 15 years of ministry, whatever
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I was paid from the church did not meet my actual expenses. Yet, God always met it from some other way.
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We never borrowed money. We never went in debt, period. God had always met our needs.
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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?
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That's part of discipline. Because it's a lot easier from the human standpoint to say, well,
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I got to find a job to pay for everything. That's my responsibility. My responsibility, first and foremost, is to serve the
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Lord the best of my ability with whatever gifts he's given me. God's blessed me with a wonderful wife who supports me with that.
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It was rough on her. She had been a charge nurse at Cedar Sinai, a world -class hospital. She married me and was now injured and couldn't work.
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Went from lots of extra cash available to, well, nothing.
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I think it's all part of discipline. You make a really good point, even with the example you use of running. I'm a long -distance runner.
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Yeah, I know. But when I first started running, it wasn't something
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I enjoyed at first. It took some training. I built up to where I run like a half a marathon a day.
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I was running up until about a week ago, a quarter to a half a marathon a day.
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Now, I say that because I got a bone spur. My doctor said I can't run for two weeks.
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But see, back to your illustration now, I am actually counting down the days to when
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I can get back on a treadmill and start running because I'm having withdrawals. That's the thing of discipline.
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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.
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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
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Christian life? Well, the word discipline, both the Hebrew and the Greek have some variation.
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Actually, there's quite a few Greek words that are translated that way. The Hebrew, yasar, it can be used with a sense of discipline as in correction, a way of corrective punishment.
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It can 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.
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That's really what discipline is. So, we'll test the examples. Proverbs 12 .1, whoever loves discipline loves knowledge.
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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.
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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 gives a little bit more of a nuance concerning it.
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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.
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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
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Lord. That's paideia. That's a common word that's used. That's training, instruction. 1
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Corinthians 9 .27, but I discipline my body and make it my slave. Kupotaiso, and that's the
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LSB on that. I picked the versions that used to translate it as discipline, just to bring it out, the idea.
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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, and that's taxes.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 some that's going to be outward.
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We're seeking someone else to help us. We want mentors. We want some disciples. Some of it's from internal.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The overall theme of the conference was the idea of overcoming evil, which in our day and age is getting clearer and clearer.
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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.
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And so, I want to ask you this after this break. I want to ask you, how does discipline help us in overcoming evil?
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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, we are sponsored by MyPillow. It is one of my favorite pillows. Well, actually, it's my only pillow.
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I do travel with it, but they do have a lot of other great products.
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They have towels. I had someone that was just moving into their new home and we bought them a complete towel set from MyPillow.
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They have robes, they have pajamas even, but I'm wearing the slippers right now.
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So back to Pastor Scott, how does the idea of discipline help us in overcoming evil?
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I'm going to have to say something about your sponsor first. Okay. Is that okay? Go for it.
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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.
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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.
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We've had it now for almost three years and it certainly is good.
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I recommend it highly. It's some discipline to make sure you don't spend money unwisely and spend $3 ,000, $4 ,000, $2 ,000, $3 ,000, $4 ,000 on a new mattress when you can get a topper.
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That's good discipline. I'm sorry. I just had to add that in. No, it did change my sleep.
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I mean, I don't sleep much, but man, I got a much better sleep when we got that mattress topper.
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It's great. I agree with you. So how does someone, you know, believer, how does discipline help in overcoming evil?
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It puts you on the path to be able to develop the godliness you should have in your life.
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First Peter lays out that we already have all the promises of God, or second Peter rather.
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They're there. We have all this magnificent promises and it's sufficient for everything pertaining to life and godliness.
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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.
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And that discipline is going to help us learn the habits as well as setting our...
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Well, it actually is 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.
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And then as I step forward to obey it, which is going to take some discipline. You have to learn to trust
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God, take faith, step out, and you have to do that for a while so it becomes a habit.
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And you start seeing that God changes your life and your perspective that you don't want to go back the way.
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And we use some of that already. I would say I'll use the one with learning discipline with finances.
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There's a lot of things in Proverbs, especially tells us about how to use finances, but that's going to take discipline.
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I do a lot of pre -marital counseling and marriage counseling too, and often it ends up around finances.
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There's an aspect of this. And I start talking about budgets and people like budget.
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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?
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So here we're talking about finances. So I have so much money. What is the best use of it?
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So instead of being waylaid by some good salesman who convinces you, this would just make your life so much wonderful.
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And 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.
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As soon as you walk in the door and you're like, well, now where am I going to put this thing? And 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.
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But 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,
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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.
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Am I going to trust God or am I going to find something else to do what I want to do? And instead,
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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.
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Because the reality is, when it comes to finances, we're only stewards. I own nothing.
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God owns it all. I'm simply a steward what he's entrusted to me to use for the few short years of my life.
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Well, so finances is one area, but now think about the rest of the aspects of your life.
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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?
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Well, without discipline, that time is going to end up squandered so quickly in so many different areas.
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And my wife likes to say, Facebook proves that everybody has time to read the Bible. Maybe that's more my generation or something.
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I understand that kids don't like Facebook. I don't like it, so I don't use it, so... Well, I used to upset some people, and I think
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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.
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If you haven't shared the good news, stop watching Fox News, you know, things like that every day. That's excellent.
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And you could tell who is 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
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Bible every day. I said, then you wouldn't be this angry that I'm posting this. That's exactly right.
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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.
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And that's the gospel changes our mind. And then we have to be resistant. Paul puts it that way in Romans 12, you know, do not be conformed, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
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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
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I would think about it or anybody else, and then step forward to actually follow that. And so time management is a big one.
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And I admit, as a pastor, my most often repeated prayer, not just once a day, throughout the day,
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Lord, help me be efficient and effective with my time, because there's so many things that are constantly coming in that, you know, tyranny of the urgent, well, this has to be done, that has to be done.
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My desk is a constant mess. While I was gone into DR earlier this year, my wife went through and cleaned up my whole office, and I don't know where things are anymore, because the piles have been shifted.
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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
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I was. I can't get to things. There's too many things coming in. So I've had to think through this.
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Well, what's the most important? And that becomes a constant prayer. What's the most important thing for the kingdom of God, right?
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Because that's really what you'll be looking at, righteousness in my own life and pursuing the kingdom of God. What's most important?
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There's a lot of things that come in, you know, in the end, they don't really matter. They shouldn't take up my time.
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I need the discipline to make sure those things that are actually most important are the things that are done.
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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.
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It's good to do good things, but you want to do then the better thing, not just the good thing.
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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.
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What Peter says in 1 Peter 1 .5, for this very reason, also applying all diligence in your faith, supply moral excellence.
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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.
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If these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. He who lacks these qualities is blind or short -sighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins.
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So he goes on in that vein, but that's really, it's all about discipline. What am I really pursuing in life?
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What's important in my life? I think it's tragic that so many people, they get, you know, they get older and they have all these things,
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I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that, and they've wasted so much of their life and things that were worthless.
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Yeah, I wonder how many people are going to get to heaven and realize all the sports stats that they know aren't needed.
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But the way they could have been spending that time memorizing all the sports and watching their favorite teams, nothing wrong with watching sports, but you do have the people who watch it and just, they know everything about it, or they have to, like, they got to research, oh, who's the pitcher, who's doing, to learn more about it.
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That's something that's not going to last. Actually, it won't even last past the season most of the time, right?
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And yet we don't spend the time studying the Word of God, which has an eternal value to it.
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I think when we put it in a perspective like that, it helps us to recognize why it's important to have discipline.
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Yeah, that's a good illustration. We actually have a guy in our church, when he first came, he'd only been saved maybe a year, moved to our area, and his love was softball.
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He'd play three or four times a week and leave his wife and his one -year -old daughter who was at home, and he was off playing softball.
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That was his thing. And as he got involved with the church, eventually he got involved in a hermeneutics class
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I teach. And when he found out he could actually study the Bible for himself, that became his new interest.
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And so softball, it wasn't overnight, it became less and less important, until the point where people would say, can you please play?
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We really need another player. It's like, all right, I'll play this one night. But if he got home, he wanted to hit the books, and he started massing in the library and everything else.
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But what had changed was his mindset towards what actually was important. And out of that came the discipline to pursue what was actually more important.
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And he still loves sports and tell, well, he's not as young as he used to be, and it hurts to play softball, so he doesn't do it anymore.
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Well, so let me ask you this. When we talk about discipline, let's make it a little practical.
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I know you've kind of touched on this in a lot of different ways, but for the person who's listening, how can someone, especially someone who maybe isn't so disciplined in their life with maybe even basic things, reading the
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Word of God or whatnot, how can discipline be incorporated into our daily life?
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Well, it's going to start with the Scripture itself, because you have to have your mind change. And you're not going to have your mind change without the
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Holy Spirit taking the Scriptures and letting you know what is important and what's not important. So it starts with the
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Bible. Without that, it's not going to happen. How did the
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Psalm 119, how can a young man keep his way pure? Well, by keeping it according to the
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Word. How will you know his Word if you won't know what that is if you don't know the Word, right? And so the psalmist went on, so with all my heart
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I have sought thee, do not let me stray from thy commandments. That means he knows what they are. Then it's thy
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Word I've hid in my heart that I might not send against you. So it's going to start with the Scripture. So it means developing some habits where you're going to have some daily input of actual
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Scripture with some meat on it. Yeah, you may want to start with something like a daily bread or something just to get in the habit of spending at least a few minutes, but hopefully you're not going to stay there.
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You're going to start graduating to, you know, something with some substance to it to challenge you. What does the Scripture say?
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I advocate that people read through the whole Bible, and that's going to take some discipline, and there are aids out there.
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Daily Walk has an excellent aid for that. It gives you some background with the passage about, but you could actually read through the
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Bible through in a year. But what if it takes you two years? Okay, get in the habit where you're daily in it so you know what's there.
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God will then start taking and using that. So you start there, and then you're going to start learning to do
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Bible study itself, digging in deeper. Take a course in hermeneutics. Take something that will help you understand it.
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Because if you're actually reading it, you're going to start having a lot of questions. What does this mean? What does that mean? Well, I don't know what that word is.
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You need some help with learning how to do that. That starts helping you gain a proper perspective of it, the grammatical and historical context of the passage.
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And you start learning this is what we're really after. This is what I want. And then you'll want to go to memorizing
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Scripture. You use the sport analogy. I'm amazed how many guys know all the stats of their favorite team, and then they say they can't memorize
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Scripture. You run into that? Yeah, all the time. It's an amazing thing. I can't memorize.
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I'm too old. And they rattle off all these stats on miniscule things. I don't even know what they're talking about.
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And then you're doing all that. So I'm reading. I'm hearing the Word of God. Well, let me go back to reading.
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We have a lot of commuters in our church. We're about 70 miles north of Manhattan. And that's difficult.
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These guys get up really early. They're getting back late. And if they're driving, it's like, well, get one of these audio
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Bibles. You know, listen to it. We had a guy, instead of reading through the Bible once, he listened to it three times in about six months.
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And he started seeing it was changing because he started understanding it because he kept hearing it over and over again.
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But you want that going into it. And then you want to be able to meditate on it. And let me say with that, they have dramatized audio
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Bibles as well. So if you want, I mean, because I used to have a long commute, that's what
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I would do. I'm dating myself now, but I had them on CDs for people who nowadays, people don't even know what a
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CD is anymore. But I'd have them on a CD. And I had several different versions of the
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Bible. I had ones that were more dramatized, but different people reading the Bible helps because you're not just hearing the same voice over and over.
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So you could do things like that as well. Use the time wisely.
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The dramatized version is really helpful because then you can, because it's a different voice, you can distinguish who's supposed to be speaking.
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Alexander Scorby has that voice every pastor wishes they had. Okay. But you get confused like, okay, in the narrative, who's speaking?
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I'm getting lost in it. Dramatized version is easy, but you want to have that input because the goal is to meditate on it.
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Not Eastern mysticism meditation, but the idea of biblical meditation is it comes from chewing the cud.
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You're trying to get every aspect of nutrition out of what's there. You want to think through what does it mean, as well as how do
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I apply that? If this is true, then how does this change my life? How should I respond?
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You know, even for the most simple things, John 17, 17, thy word is truth.
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What's truth? Well, God's word is true, actual reality.
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So there's a lot of things that are false. If it disagrees with the scripture, then it's false. If his word is true, then how that changed my life.
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What should I do? If this is this truth and the other stuff is false, you meditate on it. I want to make all the application.
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So that gives you the knowledge you need to properly, but you also need, I think, discipline and prayer.
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And that's a difficult one for people who are busy. And I think it's even harder for people who tend to be goal oriented.
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We want to see something done. I'm goal oriented. I want to see tangible stuff. But when you start recognizing that God is the one in control of this stuff, and I'm only a vessel for God to use.
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And so I need to make sure I'm in good communication with him. We're told to be in prayer continually.
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So there's two aspects of it. There's the prayer of the constant prayer that God is with you all the time.
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I think I used at the camp, the analogy of, you know, if your wife is next to you, you can just talk with her back and forth, right?
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And we should do that with our wives. In fact, if you're not, you're probably in trouble. She needs to talk and we need to pay attention, but we can talk to her, whatever's going on.
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But you also need those times where you set aside specific time that is going to be devoted just on her.
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Okay. You sit on the couch, you look in her eyes. How are you really doing? What's going on today?
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What do you think about this? How are you feeling about that? And we need that with God as well. We need specific times are set aside.
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So there's no distractions. We're really concentrating it, but that takes discipline too. I have to develop a habit where I'm going to do that.
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And that goes back to the time thing. What's actually important in my time? There's always things you're going to try and take your time.
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If I'm not disciplined though, I'm going to lose that time. I'm going to lose the things that actually were not that important.
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You know, one of the things, one of our sponsors here is Logus Bible Software, and that's a thing, a lot of what you're saying, it's going to help.
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When you talk about getting into the Word of God, just doing a read the Bible in a year, that seems overwhelming to folks until you realize that's three chapters a day roughly.
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And you can put in Logos, right at the beginning, you can set up, hey, here's my reading plan.
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And you can set it up and open it up each day and read through it and just click it off. Okay, I'm done.
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And when you get through, at the beginning, it seems like a mountain. But as you do little by little by little, you get toward the midway point, three quarters of the way through a year, and all of a sudden, it's like, oh, wow, this isn't so hard.
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And that's a thing to do. So if anyone is interested in Logos, just go to logos .com
44:02
slash sfe for Striving for Eternity. That gets you, not only if you're upgrading, that gets you not only an upgrade, but five free books from Striving for Eternity.
44:12
Let me ask you one last question regarding the idea of discipline. We're seeing how important it is.
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But what are some of the common challenges that people face when trying to maintain discipline? And how can we overcome that?
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Wow, there's always a lot of challenges. The tyranny of the urchin is one. So there's the time element, getting off track on what actually is important is another one.
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Having, well, another thing I talked about is proper fellowship. We want people around us who are going to encourage us toward righteousness.
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And if we're not careful, we're going to end up with, you know, wasting time, wasting our lives with people who are going to be detrimental to helping us go where we actually want to go.
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You know, that's, I think, a big one. True fellowship, it's not church punching cookies.
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You know, people often think always around food. Well, food can be part of it. But the real
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Christian fellowship is your gifts, whatever they are, and their gifts, whatever they are, interacting together so the whole body matures.
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So that's a challenge because that's probably one of the things that probably moves us off very easily.
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Who are our friends? Do we have friends that are encouraging us toward righteousness or we have friends that are, well, they could either be moving us toward evil or they could just be taking up our time with things that just really are not that important.
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And that would include that. Now I would go on social media. Be careful with social media. There's some good stuff out there.
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Well, there's the rap report. Okay. You can listen to that.
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You can listen to John Harris's podcast. There's some good stuff out there. But even that good stuff, if it's blocking you from where you really need to go, you need to be careful.
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There's also a lot of bad stuff out there too. People get so caught up in, let's say, news, they forget what we're really here for.
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Most news has, it's information about things you can do nothing about, absolutely nothing.
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And then the things right around the corner you're not even aware of because you're too busy looking at extraneous stuff.
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We need to be involved with people. So fellowship is certainly, you know, who your friends are, who's encouraging is certainly,
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I think, quite a challenge. I think another is, and they can probably go hand in hand, what's your worship really like?
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You know, is your worship toward actually yielding yourself to God, or is it,
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I'm going someplace and I want to be entertained and feel like I have an experience with God. So I walk out feeling good.
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And you're not really drawing closer to God. You just have an emotional experience of something that lasts for a little while and then something on the way home, someone cuts you off and you just lost your whole experience.
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You know, that's not good. I think if we're really worshiping God, it affects everything in our life, everything.
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And if I'm not worshiping God, then I think I'm yielding to many things that can move me away from a proper discipline to God's goodness.
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And really that was what my topic was. It's not just discipline, it was discipline, or developing discipline for the purpose of God's goodness.
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And that's really what we should be. My goal here is to conform to the image of Christ. And if I can keep that in mind,
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I will do a whole lot better in including the stuff that I face in life, the difficulties of life that come up.
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If I recognize from James 1, 2 through 4 and Romans 5, verses 3 through 11, that the trials of life, the tribulations of life are actually going to be used by God to help me become more like Christ, then
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I actually can count it as joy. Instead of having circumstances shift me away from those disciplines.
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Yeah, I think that's really the key of it, is what your perspective is. If you're focused on Christ and eternity, that's the whole idea behind our ministry,
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Striving for Eternity, it's the idea of if our minds are fixed on eternity, what's going to last?
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Then the things of this world are, well, like the hymnist says, grow strangely dim, right?
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And where our heart is, right, that's what's going to affect what we treasure.
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And if our heart is in heaven and valuing that when we're with God, well, then we're going to have different ways of viewing the things of this world.
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Well, let me ask you, from the retreat itself, it was my first time, your second time, but what do you enjoy most about the retreat this year?
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And then a follow -up, what are you looking forward to for next year? Well, since one of the men
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I discipled is one of the chefs up there, I really enjoy catching up with Nicholas.
49:17
And now, okay, let me just stop you there. The food? Okay, your son,
49:23
John, and folks, when we mentioned his son, John Harris, you've heard me mention him here and on my
49:28
Apologetics Live podcast, Conversations That Matter, a great podcast to be listening to. So go check that one out.
49:35
If you're not following Conversations That Matter, you should. But John told me the food there was going to be good.
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And I'm like, okay, I'm expecting good camp food, but I still thought it was camp food. And that first dinner
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I went, oh, wait, no, no, no, no, this is not camp food. Parmesan crusted chicken.
49:54
Oh, it was good. So Nicholas is a graduate of the
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Culinary Institute of America, and we've got quite a few of their students that come to our church.
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So there are people up there, and there's another student that's up there as well that I enjoy catching up with them.
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I do enjoy food, unfortunately too much. There's an area I need a little more discipline.
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Me too. A little less calories, a little more exercise. So that's part of it.
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But sitting around the table and talking with people, I like to meet new people. And so I try to sit someplace where I get to interact.
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In fact, the first meal I didn't know I was sitting with another church group, a whole different group, and with the leader of it.
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So, well, I talked to him for a while too. So I enjoy that. And then there's a lot of activities out there.
50:48
It's Camp of the Woods, because when it was founded, it was actually camping. Now it should be Retreat in the
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Woods or something, or Retreat on the Lake and the Woods. They've got everything there. But I go up with more of a pastor's mindset.
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I know I have an opportunity to talk with men in a different setting. They're more relaxed and see if I can minister to them.
51:09
And I actually did a lot of that this last retreat. You know, yeah, I was amazed with that. Not only seeing, because I got to see you do that, but I know
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Pastor Tom Rush and I ended up talking to one young man for a while. There was a lot that even in the evening, just sitting around that fire, they'd have the big fire pit.
51:28
And there was one night where I just walked out, and because I'd always kind of be talking to folks,
51:34
I came late and just was kind of on the outside just watching. And it was neat just seeing discipleship everywhere, all around, just different conversations.
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Instead of me being engaged in one conversation, I just kind of walked around to hear some of the conversations and the discipleship that was going on.
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And I said, I really realized that's, I think, the value of that. Yeah, I observed the same thing.
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And even some of the men from the church that went out there and coming back as their own reports, it just was a very encouraging time to be able to talk with men.
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And, you know, some of them would, well, they got to know each other well enough, they became vulnerable to each other. You know, of course, for us, that's a little different, because these men know each other already, and they can develop the relationship.
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But even those that, you know, kind of knew, for example, you and I went on that kayak around the lake.
52:27
We didn't make it to the island. Well, we made it to the island and just not around the island.
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You know, I got to know you and your background and some of the things and your character. And you have to be away from all the stuff of the world.
52:45
So, yeah, the men's retreat is excellent. And I tend to agree with John, Jonathan.
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He's my son. He's Jonathan. There is something because it is a smaller setting.
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It's not thousands of people or something like some of these huge conferences. You actually can talk to the same person and actually have a very good conversation with them.
53:10
I know they went hiking, there's basketball and there's a gymnasium with everything. Yeah, I'll tell you,
53:16
I was amazed with the facilities, not just the food, but the amount of activities they had was really good.
53:22
I admit, I'm looking forward to next year. I mean, I didn't know what to expect. I'm amazed they keep the price down as low as they do for what they're offering.
53:31
Yeah, yeah. And it's - And also even the housing. This year, we were in the cabins down by the lake.
53:39
And so it was depending on who you're with and they can adjust some of the costs. Well, you were. You had the nice lake view housing.
53:48
I was somewhere else where I was viewing the cabin in front of me that had the lake view.
53:54
Oh, okay. Well, sorry. Register early. Or you might want to put a word in with whoever's going to end up doing the assignment.
54:04
Yeah, I got to find - Of course, it's special because I was with my two boys, my two sons.
54:10
And so I really enjoyed that. But the next cabin over was for the men of our church.
54:16
And one guy is actually fairly new to the church. So they really got to know him. And I really got to know a guy who's going to be,
54:24
I guess, maybe now he is a Mark. Yeah, Mark Artis. Yeah, he was great.
54:30
So as we wrap up, if folks have more questions, they're saying, you know, Pastor Scott, I've been -
54:36
I want to be more disciplined in my life. I'm kind of struggling. How could folks get ahold of you to get -
54:42
I mean, they should go to their pastor and ask this of their pastor. Maybe they can't for whatever reason.
54:49
If folks wanted to get ahold of you, how could folks get ahold of you and learn more about a disciplined Christian is probably just go to our website.
54:56
It's gracebibleny .org. And on most pages, there's a link to contact me.
55:07
And it usually sends out to pastor at gracebibleny .org. That's probably the easiest way.
55:13
If you try and call me on the phone, I find the phone is nearly worthless because I get so much spam stuff on it.
55:20
I don't answer the phone until I know who's calling. And I'm in and out of the office a lot.
55:27
We have a part -time minister of evangelism. And other than that, well, it's me.
55:34
Been that way for 32 years. We've had associate pastors a couple of times, but we're in an area that's very transitional.
55:42
People move in and they move out. Email's the best way. Pastor at gracebibleny .org.
55:50
Yeah. Or just check our website out. There's a lot of stuff there. But yeah, start with your own pastor.
55:55
If you don't have one, give me a call. We'll give you some ideas. If you're in a large church, then pastor's too busy for that.
56:04
Worm your way into the life of the godliest man you can find. Or godliest woman you can find.
56:09
Or move to upstate New York by you and make you their pastor. But we thank you for coming on.
56:16
I really did appreciate the talk you had. There were a lot of good points, just helpful reminders and things to get our minds set to be disciplined.
56:27
So I appreciated your talk, appreciate you coming on, and look forward to hearing what you're going to say next year. Thank you very much.
56:33
Enjoyed getting to know you very much. Yeah, it was— Looking forward to seeing you and many more people. Yeah, it was a lot of fun kayaking with you.
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Wherever we have it. So with that, folks, that's a wrap. This podcast is part of the
56:46
Striving for Eternity Ministries. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.