Completed

William Barclay, the famed commentator of the Scriptures, used his pen powerfully to illustrate the danger of neglecting discipline using Samuel Taylor Coleridge as his example. He wrote:

"Nothing was ever achieved without discipline; and many an athlete and many a man has been ruined because he abandoned discipline and let himself grow slack. Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little. He left Cambridge University to join the army; but he left the army because, in spite of all his erudition, he could not rub down a horse; he returned to Oxford and left without a degree. He began a paper called The Watchman which lived for ten numbers and then died. It has been said of him: “He lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one—the gift of sustained and concentrated effort.” In his head and in his mind he had all kinds of books, as he said himself, “completed save for transcription.” “I am on the eve,” he says, “of sending to the press two octavo volumes.” But the books were never composed outside Coleridge’s mind, because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out. No one ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached it ever maintained it, without discipline."

Coleridge eventually died an opium addict. All of his work being undone because he lacked the discipline to complete it.

That’s the case with many a Christian today. There seems to be a lack of interest in the things of God. We are searching long and hard for that “one thing” that will make us happy. However, we seem to be looking in all the wrong places. Some may be looking at the end of a liquor bottle while others are looking at the end of an anti-depressant bottle. Some may be looking for love by being sexually promiscuous while others are wrapped up in the throes of pornography. Some feel like entertainment and comedy is what we really need to see us through the darkest days of our culture and society. Some are looking to find themselves and their self-worth. They are trying to find their true identity.

So why don’t we turn to the One who has created us? For what reasons do we not look to His Word to find that our identity is new in the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ? Our homes would look a lot different if we focused our homes on the Lord Jesus. Our work would have a new flare if only we were working as unto the Lord Jesus. Our children would see a difference in the way that their parents were handling the daily stresses of life if only the focus was upon the Lord Jesus. We need to realize that God’s plan for us is to be like the Lord Jesus.

Read how the Apostle John said it:

Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure (1 John 3:1-3).

It takes discipline to purify ourselves so that we might be like Him. It takes discipline to understand that our lives are completed in Him. In reality, He is the One who completes us and causes us to complete all that He desires to be completed in our lives—to be like the Lord Jesus Christ.