This is going to be about discipline and the fundamentals. As Vince Lombardi would start his half-time talks when his team was down, “Gentleman, this is a football.” Sometimes we need to get back to basics. The Alliance has been responsible for a lot of growth in my life. Four years ago I would not have been able to imagine that I would ever get to a point in my life where I was not masturbating to porn on a daily basis, that I could be in a long-term relationship, let alone get married.
Koop has gone before us, as we’ve read in his story. Koop gives us tools in the Alliance that have worked for him in his struggles, that have aided his growth. There are a lot of them, and we’ve discarded some and kept others, and that’s okay.
Ecclesiastes 11:6
Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that,
or whether both will do equally well.
We’ve got to try all the tools, and find what works. I’m going to talk about the best tool for me out of them all – the vow.
This last Saturday Ricky Bell talked about believing the lies of your mind or believing God’s truth for your life. The vow contains God’s truth. You are the man that the vow says you are. And if you aren’t now, you can be – the vow can get you there. Are you going to beat yourself up over every failure, and call yourself a loser, or are you going to be to large for worry, too noble for anger? Are you going to allow problems to steal your joy? When you practice the vow daily, you allow God to do a work in you.
Corinthians 15:37-38
When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.
I was shorted on discipline in my upbringing. I came of age in California in the 70’s and early 80’s. I was loved unconditionally by my parents, but I was also allowed to get away with way too much. I wasn’t made to practice my piano lessons every day. I didn’t have weekly chores. I was allowed to get out of doing things I didn’t like because my parents would back down. So my struggle now is to be disciplined, to get discipline and correction that I didn’t get as a child.
Sometimes we practice the daily disciplines (reading the word, praying, the vow) and have a few successes in life, and consequently get lazy and stop doing the basics. Well, that’s not God’s plan for us. We need to be diligent in the small things so that God can bless us in the big things.
Here’s a parable for you from my experience: I’ve recently been growing tomato plants. Now I know you can go to whole foods and buy a seedling and put it in the ground, but I wanted to grow my plants from seed. So I read up on how to do that and it’s been working – but here’s the main point: When I planted the seeds in dirt and began to water them, I always thought a sprout would appear and push it’s way out of the ground, and the seed gets pushed further down into the dirt as the foundation of the roots. But guess what? The root doesn’t drive the seed down, it lifts the seed up. The tomato sprout that came out of the ground was lifting the seed up into the light. As the plant grows, the seed is not left behind in the dirt, but lifted up into the light, and the first two leaves on the plant come from the seed. Even now, when my plant is already a foot tall, the seed can still be seen at the tip of the first leaf. My point is this – don’t forget the basics, the fundamentals. Don’t fool yourself that you’ve mastered the vow. You have to bring the vow with you as you grow. Bring it out of the ground (the past) and into the light (the present) so it can continue to support your growth.
So whichever tools worked for you before, bring them out of the dirt and into the light. Are you doing the accountability questions with your partner? Are you up-to-date with the Bible reading? Are you praying daily by yourself with your significant other? Let me challenge you to copy the vow off of our blog and print it out. Paste it on your bathroom mirror or the mirror you get dressed in front of. Say it aloud every morning for 21 days, and see if things don’t turn around.
And as we do all this, we must remember that the original seed is Christ.
Galatians 3:16
The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say "and to seeds," meaning many people, but "and to your seed,"[a] meaning one person, who is Christ.
We can’t do the Alliance disciplines, the fundamentals, the “seeds of growth,” without Christ. So our daily discipline should also be spending daily time in God’s word, as we’ve been assigned, and prayer. That’s why it’s the first accountability question.
So if things aren’t working out for you right now, if you’re struggling, get back to basics. Do the daily disciplines. Practice the fundamentals.
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