How Discipline Produces Growth

The link between what you’re doing and who you’re becoming

Richard J. Foster wrote a book about the spiritual disciplines called Celebration of Discipline and early on in the book he draws a picture using agriculture that seems simple, yet profound.

“A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain.”

He argues that it is the same with spiritual discipline. Those disciplines don’t do the growing, but they put us in the right place for God to grow us.

So it is with every type of growth. The habits and disciplines that are a regular part of what you do are going to ultimately shape who you are.

As a strength coach, I can’t help but see the parallel to the weight room as well. Lifting weights doesn’t grow us. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Lifting weights tears us down in a way that allows for the natural design of our body to take over and rebuild us stronger than before.

This can be frustrating for athletes and coaches alike because we can’t use the power of our will to compel growth to happen. We can’t force it to happen. All we can do is practice the appropriate disciplines and trust that it will happen.

Don’t get discouraged. Remember the Stonecutter’s Creed from Jacob Riis:

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

So the path the growth is really the same in all areas of your life. Pound the rock. Practice discipline. Get in the weight room. Do the work. Hydrate well. Eat good food. Get proper sleep.

Not because those things do the work, but because they put you in a place where God’s good design can do its thing. Justin Whitmel Earley puts it this way, “You form your habits and your habits form you.”

Want to impact who you’re becoming?

Take control of what you’re consistently doing.