Understanding Financial Discipline

On the long list of words that don’t sound like much fun, discipline is certainly included. But is that really fair? Without discipline, chaos and destruction would reign. We all need it, especially with our finances.

If discipline doesn’t seem like fun, it certainly provides many other positive things to make your life better, peace of mind not the least among them. When you have discipline to follow God’s financial principles, for example, you worry a lot less about creditors calling you for bills you can’t pay. Instead, you’re putting money aside for emergencies and investing for the future. You can’t put a price tag on the peace of mind that comes from that.

The word discipline has developed a negative connotation over time. You might think of “disciplinary action,” which is punishment for wrongdoing.

That’s only one connotation, however. The verb disciple means “to teach.” The noun, a disciple, is a student. Jesus taught His disciples how to spread the Gospel. They certainly weren’t being punished.

These days, besides being thought of as a punishment, discipline is often considered to be restrictive, that it limits our ability to do what we want. That kind of thinking also makes self-discipline so difficult. Given a choice, we’d rather not limit ourselves.

If discipline limits the number of some options, it also expands the number of other choices we could make. We have to train or discipline ourselves to live on a budget, to save, and be generous, as laid out in God’s financial principles. We don’t want to do those things naturally. We’d rather spend our money on whatever we want, whenever we want.

Those who’ve mastered self-discipline understand that it doesn’t really limit those options. Over time, practicing self- discipline actually adds to your choices, to your freedom, because you’re not in debt and you have money in the bank.

As we acquire wealth, we also acquire more freedom, not to spend foolishly, but to live an appropriate, comfortable lifestyle, and to serve God more fully. That’s true freedom, and it only comes from discipline.

Also consider that if discipline has developed an unfair negative meaning, freedom has developed an undeserved positive connotation. You might think it means you get to have anything you want, a better car, a bigger house, or an expensive vacation with all the frills.

True freedom requires discipline or it leads to disaster. Freedom without virtue becomes license, from which we get the word, “licentious,” which means having a complete disregard for rules or morality.

Our Founding Fathers knew this. They gave us more freedom than any people have ever enjoyed in history, but they also knew that our nation could only survive if the people remained virtuous. To paraphrase many of them, without virtue, or discipline, there is no liberty.

A woman stopped Benjamin Franklin as he was leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. She asked, “What kind of government have you given us?” Franklin replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

Ol’ Ben probably would have fainted if someone told him his new country would someday have a national debt of $31 trillion. We need to remember that discipline is a good thing, and that freedom can be dangerous.

The truth is that without discipline there can be no real freedom. Hebrews 12:11 reads, “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.”