I quit piano lessons when I was in third grade. It wasn’t ‘cool’ when all my friends were into football.
I took up the piano again in seventh or eighth grade, motivated by a girl who had caught my fancy. I was starting to show promise, and then the teacher quit.
I never again pursued this with any seriousness, so that today I can play a butchered ‘Whinnie the Pooh’, most of Chicago’s ‘Color My World’, and a smattering of this and that.
And I so wish I could return to third grade and take up where I left off.
It’s a strange truth, but the greatest freedom belongs to those who for a time bound themselves to the taskmaster discipline. Those who play music with the greatest freedom are those who at some time in the past applied themselves to the discipline of practice when more obviously enjoyable things beckoned.
So, too, in the Christian life, the spiritual disciplines of bible reading and prayer and worship all seem to be so confining. They seem to demand a joyless labor which runs counter to the freedom we proclaim in the gospel.
And yet, there is to those who are trained by such discipline the eventual blossoming of freedom and delight. The disciplines of the Christian life put us in the way of God’s grace, in the place where he blesses. And as we battle off the lethargy of the flesh to put ourselves in worship or in the Scriptures or in prayer, we put ourselves in the places where perhaps slowly at first but more richly in time God reveals himself to us.
There are books that put this all so much more eloquently and practically than I. Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline
But the encouragement here is to step up the discipline in your spiritual life just a notch. The mistake we all make is this time of year trying to correct every fault through a resolution or two that are so unreasonable that we cannot possibly keep them. Make little commitments and keep them rather than big ones which defeat us.
Such steps will bear good fruit. Over time. If we don’t quit.
The Domestic Intellectual
Another good "beginner" book on disciplines that is very easy to read and still fruitful and deep is Charles Swindoll's Intimacy with the Almighty. I got it as a gift for my 18th birthday and have read it at least 8 times. At only 80 pages, it is a quick read while still giving you a lot to chew on.