I closed yesterday’s blog with the phrase: drudgery, discipline, delight, and when I looked to find where I had blogged about that, I discovered that I haven’t! So here it is.

You have probably experienced this common progression: drudgery, discipline, delight. And the progression is strongly linked to this principle:

You will not want to do something unless you first did it when you didn’t want to!

Exercise, for example. If you’re not now exercising, you could answer test questions about the value of exercise. But you won’t want to exercise until you’ve done it and begin to experience the benefits for yourself.

When you start, you’re likely to be sore the first few times. Soon, however, you’ll notice you have more energy than you did before. You’ll feel better when you exercise and worse when you don’t. You’ve progressed from drudgery to discipline. You value the discipline of it. Soon, if you keep doing it, you don’t want to miss a day! Drudgery…discipline…delight. And you’ll exercise, not because you have to but because you want to.

A man named Steve once asked me to mentor him, and at our first meeting, we talked about daily time with God as I often do here. At our next meeting, he confessed that he wasn’t doing so well on his time with God habit so we discussed what time he would have to go to bed in order to get up early enough to spend, maybe, 15 minutes with God before his day got going. He began to form the habit.

Two years later, I was sharing “drudgery, discipline, delight” at a meeting of men, and Steve was there. He stood up and told his story. He ended with, “It’s taken two years, but I can honestly say that I’m in the delight phase. I wouldn’t miss it.”

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12.11, ESV, emphasis mine)