Douglas Hickey

Brothers and sisters,

Most of us like to see ourselves as being disciplined. I know I do. And especially at this time of year, it seems like everybody is trying to cultivate a little more discipline, reining in appetites, building better habits. 

Some of us are taking up new disciplines for 2025, learning a long-deferred instrument or craft. And even though we recognize these undertakings are challenging, sometimes even grueling, we accept that, on balance, being disciplined is a pretty good thing. 

By which I mean self-discipline.

When we’re being disciplined by someone else, we’re generally less okay with this. I know I am. Thinking back on a time where I was the recipient of some corrective instruction…

[Pro-tip: When driving in Las Vegas, 1) don’t back into a parking spot, and 2) make sure there’s not a parking meter associated with the spot you just backed into]

…if anybody had told me that I was “being disciplined,” it would have been too much. “I’ll pay your little fine, but you don’t get to discipline me.”

But of course they do. 

The words discipline and disciple both derive from the Latin disciplina meaning to instruct. To be disciplined is to be trained in and ordered toward a pattern of being. Which leads to an uncomfortable truth: however distasteful we might find the idea of submitting to someone else’s discipline, 1000 invisible hands, material and spiritual, are subtly molding each of us into the pattern and image of something every day. Sometimes we gripe about this. Mostly, we don’t give it any thought at all.

And then there’s God’s discipline:

And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. —Heb. 12: 5-7, ESV.

Unlike parking enforcement agents’, God’s authority is perfect. And yet I don’t typically feel any more receptive to God’s discipline than I do to anyone else’s. When I’m not running from it, it’s because it’s not on my radar. 

It should be. 

May God help us all to seek His discipline and rejoice in it. So we can decrease. So Christ can increase.

Under the Lamb,

—Douglas