Discipline: The Glad Surrender

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19–20

Discipline is not a fashionable word, and Elisabeth Elliot knew it. She used it anyway, and she gave it a subtitle that changed its colour: The Glad Surrender. Her book of that name, published in 1982, sets out what she believed the disciplined Christian life looks like in practice. It is one of the most concrete things she wrote, and one of the most searching. It is also, for all its demands, a book about joy, because she believed that discipline rightly understood is not the grim effort of a person trying to improve himself, but the glad response of a person who has been called by God and wants to answer.

Called, then disciplined

The order of the book matters. Before it says anything about how a Christian should manage the body, the mind or the clock, it sets out who the Christian is. We are created by God, cared for by Him and called by Him. Discipline is the answer to that call. It is not the way we earn God’s favour; it is the way we respond to it. The book speaks of the Christian as under orders, and the picture fits: a soldier does not obey in order to become a soldier. He obeys because he already is one.

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. ISAIAH 6:8

This saves her teaching from moralism. The disciplines she describes are not techniques for self-improvement. They are acts of surrender to a Master. And because the Master is good, the surrender can be glad.

The body and the mind

She began, characteristically, with the body. She had no time for a piety that despised the body or ignored it. The body is God’s gift and the Spirit’s temple, and it is to be cared for, kept in order and brought under control. She wrote plainly about eating, sleeping, exercise and the ordinary self-indulgences that slowly master us. The apostle kept his body under, lest he should be a castaway; and Christians who cannot say no to their appetites will find it hard to say yes to God.

But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. 1 CORINTHIANS 9:27

From the body she moved to the mind. She believed that what we allow into our minds shapes what we become, and that the Christian is responsible for her thoughts as well as her deeds. That meant choosing what to read, what to watch and what to dwell on, and it meant taking every thought captive to Christ rather than letting the mind wander wherever it liked.

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 2 CORINTHIANS 10:5

She went on to four disciplines that are less often discussed. The discipline of place is the acceptance of where God has put us — the town, the house, the station in life — rather than a restless longing to be somewhere else. She had lived in a jungle clearing, a Waorani settlement, a New England village and a house by the sea, and she believed that contentment is learned, as Paul said he had learned it, in whatever state we find ourselves.

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. PHILIPPIANS 4:11

The discipline of time is the stewardship of the hours God gives. She was famously orderly in her own use of time, and she believed that most people who say they have no time for prayer or Scripture have plenty of time for other things. The discipline of possessions is the refusal to let things own us, and the willingness to give, to do without, and to hold everything loosely. The discipline of work is the doing of whatever we are given to do, paid or unpaid, as service to God — the same conviction that lay behind her watchword, do the next thing.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. PSALM 90:12

The discipline of feelings

The last discipline she discussed is in some ways the hardest, and the most characteristic of her teaching. She believed that feelings, though real and God-given, are not to rule us. We cannot always choose what we feel, but we can choose what we do with what we feel. We can refuse to let a mood dictate our actions, decline to nurse a resentment, and act in love towards someone when we do not feel loving. Over time, she believed, the feelings often follow the obedience. But even when they do not, the obedience stands.

This was, for her, not repression but order. The heart is to be kept, as Proverbs says, with all diligence, because out of it are the issues of life. A Christian who is governed by her feelings is at the mercy of every change in her health, her sleep and her circumstances. A Christian who has brought her feelings under the lordship of Christ is free to love, serve and obey whatever the weather inside.

Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. PROVERBS 4:23

The book ends where it began, with the call. The whole of the disciplined life, in her teaching, is simply the giving of one’s life to the One who gave His for us. Frances Ridley Havergal put the same surrender into a hymn that generations of Christians have sung: “Take my will, and make it Thine; / It shall be no longer mine.”

Weighing it

Her teaching on discipline is thoroughly biblical in substance, and it is a needed corrective in an age that often treats self-control as unhealthy and self-expression as a virtue. Two cautions are worth adding.

The first concerns temperament. She was by nature orderly, energetic and self-controlled, and some of her readers are not. A person who struggles with chronic illness, depression or a chaotic household may read her and feel only condemnation. That was not her intention, and Scripture does not lay the same burdens on every back. The disciplines are meant to be received as an invitation into freedom, not as a standard to beat oneself with.

The second concerns the feelings. Her teaching that feelings must not rule us is right, but it can be heard as teaching that feelings do not matter. They do. The Psalms are full of them, and the Lord Himself was troubled, grieved and moved with compassion. The aim of the discipline of feelings is not to silence them but to bring them, honestly expressed, under the rule of Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Of the disciplines she names — body, mind, place, time, possessions, work and feelings — which do you find hardest? Choose one to work on this month.

2. Read 1 Corinthians 9:24–27, and ask what in your daily habits is mastering you rather than being mastered.

3. Keep a simple record of how you spend your time for three days. Compare it with what you say your priorities are.

4. Give away one possession this week that you would rather keep, as an act of loosening your grip.

5. Next time you are ruled by a feeling, stop, name it honestly before God, and then do the next right thing regardless.

A PRAYER

Lord, You created me, You care for me, and You have called me. I am not my own; I have been bought with a price.

I give You my body, my mind, my place, my time, my possessions, my work and my feelings. Take them, and bring them into order under Your hand.

Where I have been mastered by my appetites or my moods, set me free. Where I have been careless with what You have given, forgive me.

Make my surrender glad and not grudging, and let my whole life glorify You, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.