The contractor arrived at Bello’s gate in Lugbe on the Saturday before Christmas, a little after four in the afternoon. He came in a black SUV with a driver, and the driver carried a large hamper wrapped in red cellophane: rice, groundnut oil, a bottle of wine, tins of biscuits and a frozen turkey. The contractor himself carried a brown envelope. He smiled broadly as Bello came out to meet him.
“Oga Bello, compliments of the season! It is nothing. Just something small for the children’s Christmas.”
Bello was a senior procurement officer in a federal agency in Abuja. In three weeks his committee would evaluate the bids for a large road maintenance contract, and this man’s company was one of the bidders. Everybody in the street could see the SUV. Bello’s two sons had come to the window. The envelope was thick, and from the way the contractor held it, Bello guessed it contained foreign currency.
It was a moment that had broken better men. Bello had watched it happen. In his first year at the agency, his own director, a warm and generous man who had taken him under his wing, had been dismissed and later prosecuted after an investigation into contract kickbacks. Bello had sat in the corridor outside the director’s office on the day he packed his things, and he remembered the man saying, half to himself, “It started with small things. Hampers. Envelopes. By the time I noticed, I could not get out.”
That evening, eleven years earlier, Bello had taken his new diary and written on the inside cover: I will not receive what I cannot declare. Every January since then, he had copied the same sentence onto the first page of the new diary. Every morning he opened that diary to plan his day, and every morning his eyes passed over that line.
So when the contractor held out the envelope at the gate, Bello did not need to work out what to do. He found, to his own surprise, that he was not even tempted in the way he had feared. He told me later, “I did not decide at the gate. I decided eleven years ago, and I had been deciding it again every morning since.”
Bello had run the four hundred metres for his secondary school in Zaria, and his old coach used to tell the team, “Race day is too late to get fit.” The same is true of doing right. The decisive moment usually arrives without warning, under pressure, with people watching or no one watching at all. If we wait until then to decide who we are, we will often find that the decision has already been made for us by our habits.
Decided before the moment
Scripture is full of people who settled a matter before the crisis arrived. Job said, “I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?” (Job 31:1). Job did not wait until he was face to face with temptation to work out his response. He made an agreement with himself, before God, about where his eyes would and would not go.
When Daniel was taken to Babylon as a young man and offered the royal food, the text says, “But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat” (Daniel 1:8). The word purposed means to set, to place, to fix. Daniel fixed the matter in his heart, and only then did he approach the official with a respectful request.
And when the time came for Jesus to go to the cross, Luke tells us that “he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Isaiah had prophesied the same resolve centuries before: “therefore have I set my face like a flint” (Isaiah 50:7). The decision had been made long before the soldiers came.
The clearest contrast is in Gethsemane. On the night of His arrest, Jesus prayed in agony while His disciples slept. He woke them and said, “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). An hour later the soldiers arrived. Jesus, who had prayed, stood calm before them and gave Himself up. The disciples, who had slept, fled into the darkness. The difference had been settled in the garden before the torches appeared.
PunchlineThat is the heart of this teaching. Doing right is often less about heroic strength in the moment and more about decisions made, prayed through and practised beforehand.
Exercise thyself unto godliness
Paul wrote to Timothy, a young pastor in Ephesus facing false teachers and heavy responsibility, and gave him an instruction drawn from the world of athletics:
But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness. For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation. For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.
“Exercise thyself rather unto godliness.” The verb is the Greek gumnazo, the word from which we get gymnasium. It means to train, to work out, to put yourself through regular exercise. Timothy lived in a culture that took physical training seriously. Young men spent hours in the gymnasium preparing for the games. Paul takes that familiar picture and applies it to the spiritual life. Godliness, too, involves training.
He does not despise physical exercise. “Bodily exercise profiteth little,” he says, and the phrase can mean that it profits for a little while or to a limited degree. It has real value, but its value is temporary. Godliness “is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.” Spiritual training brings benefits both now and in eternity.
Notice what Paul sets this training against: “profane and old wives’ fables.” Timothy was surrounded by speculative teaching that kept people busy with myths and endless discussions. Paul says, in effect, “Leave the empty talk and get into training.” Many believers know a great deal of religious information and have very little practised obedience. They can argue about prophecy for hours and cannot keep a promise to their spouse.
Then look carefully at verse 10, because it guards the whole passage: “For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.” Paul’s training rests on trust. He labours because he trusts the living God, the Saviour. The training does not produce the salvation. The Saviour has already done that. The training is what a saved person does in response to a living God he trusts.
A few verses later Paul adds, “Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all” (1 Timothy 4:15). The word profiting describes progress, the steady advance of someone moving forward. Growth in godliness is meant to be visible over time, the way an athlete’s fitness becomes visible over a season.
Grace that trains its children
Paul uses a related idea when he writes to Titus. “For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:11-12).
The word translated teaching is the Greek paideuo. It comes from pais, a child, and it describes the whole process of raising a child: instruction, correction, training and discipline. The same family of words is used in Hebrews 12 for the way a father trains his sons. Paul is saying that grace does more than forgive us and then leave us alone. Grace raises us. It takes the people it has saved and brings them up like children in a household.
Look at the order in that sentence. First, grace “bringeth salvation.” Then grace trains. Nobody is trained into the family. The child is already a son or a daughter before the training begins. A wise father does not say to his child, “If you learn to make your bed properly, I will adopt you.” He says, “You are mine, and because you are mine, I will teach you how we live in this house.”
This is why discipline in the Christian life must never become a way of purchasing God’s acceptance. You do not pray at five in the morning to persuade God to love you. You do not fast to raise your standing with Him. Your acceptance rests entirely on the finished work of Christ. Discipline is grace’s training of a child who is already received.
And notice what grace trains us to do: “denying ungodliness and worldly lusts.” Part of the training is learning to say no. Children do not naturally know how to wait, how to refuse what is harmful or how to choose the harder good. They have to learn. Grace teaches believers the same skill, gently and persistently, through the Word, through the Spirit’s prompting and through the consequences of our choices. Every time Bello opened his diary and read that sentence, grace was rehearsing a no with him so that, when the moment came at the gate, the word was already in his mouth.
NuggetGrace does not train us into God’s family. It trains the children who are already in it, and part of that training is learning to say no before the moment of pressure comes.
Senses exercised by use
The writer to the Hebrews was frustrated with his readers. They had been believers long enough to be teaching others, but they had stalled:
For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
Just before this passage, he tells them, “ye are dull of hearing” (Hebrews 5:11). Their minds were capable enough. They had simply stopped growing. They were still drinking milk when they should have been eating solid food.
Then he describes what maturity looks like: “strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” Three words in that sentence deserve attention.
Use translates the Greek hexis, which means a habit, a settled condition produced by practice. Senses translates a word for the faculties of perception, the inner capacities by which we notice and judge. And exercised is the same athletic word Paul used with Timothy, gumnazo. The mature believer has trained his perception through repeated practice until he can recognise good and evil almost instinctively.
This is very practical. A new believer may not notice that a business arrangement is dishonest until someone points it out. A mature believer feels the wrongness of it immediately, before he has worked out a single argument. His senses have been trained. The same is true of a manipulative conversation, a flirtation that is going somewhere it should not, or a financial offer that is too good to be true. Practised discernment sees the danger early, while it is still easy to step away.
Notice also that maturity here is measured by discernment and practice more than by information. The Hebrews knew a great deal. What they lacked was the trained capacity that comes from using what they knew. Knowledge that is never put into practice leaves us dull. Knowledge that is exercised again and again shapes how we see.
That is why Bello’s sentence mattered so much. Its power lay in eleven years of daily use. By the time the contractor came, Bello’s senses had been exercised. He saw the envelope for what it was.
Running with purpose
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, who lived in a city that hosted the Isthmian Games every two years, one of the great athletic festivals of the Greek world. They knew exactly what athletic training involved:
Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: 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.
“Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things.” The athletes preparing for the games followed strict training for months. They watched their diet, their sleep and their exercise. They said no to many good things in order to say yes to one goal. And Paul points out what they were training for: “a corruptible crown.” The winners of the Isthmian Games received a wreath, often made of pine or withered celery, that would wilt within days. If athletes would discipline themselves so thoroughly for a crown that faded, how much more should believers train for “an incorruptible” one?
Then Paul describes his own approach: “I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air.” His discipline has a direction, like a boxer who means to land his blows. And it reaches his body: “But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection.” Paul does not let his appetites, his tiredness or his comforts decide what he will do. He trains them to follow.
The final phrase, “lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway,” has been understood in different ways by sincere believers. The word castaway translates adokimos, a word used of something that fails a test and is rejected as unfit. Many read Paul here as concerned with disqualification from the prize of faithful service. Others see a more serious warning. Whichever view you hold, the passage is set in the context of Paul’s ministry and his concern to live what he preached. He takes his own conduct seriously because he knows how much damage a preacher can do when his life contradicts his message.
There is something freeing about running with purpose. Discipline without direction feels like punishment. Discipline toward a goal you love feels like preparation. Bello’s sentence was the training plan for a race he wanted to finish well.
As he did aforetime
Decades after Daniel purposed in his heart as a young man in Babylon, he faced a far more dangerous decision. His enemies, unable to find any fault in his work, persuaded King Darius to sign a decree that for thirty days no one could pray to any god or man except the king. The penalty was the lions’ den. Watch what Daniel did:
Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.
The phrase at the end carries the whole story: “as he did aforetime.” Daniel did not invent a new act of courage that day. He simply did what he had always done. Three times a day, for years, he had knelt by that open window facing Jerusalem. The decree changed the cost, but it did not change the habit. His habit had been formed in the quiet years, and it held in the dangerous one.
That is how repeated obedience works. It builds a groove in which the soul runs naturally when pressure arrives. Luke tells us that Jesus Himself went to the synagogue on the Sabbath “as his custom was” (Luke 4:16). The Son of God had customs. He had patterns of worship and prayer that shaped His days.
The psalmist describes one of the most important of these habits:
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word. With my whole heart have I sought thee: O let me not wander from thy commandments. Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.
“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” Hiding the Word in the heart is a kind of advance preparation. You store it up when life is calm so that it is available when life is not. When temptation arrives, there is often no time to look anything up. What you have hidden is what you will have.
This is one of the simplest and most powerful disciplines available to any believer. Choose a passage that speaks to the area where you are most tested and learn it by heart. Repeat it in the morning and at night. Say it when you are walking, waiting in traffic or standing in the queue at the bank. You are training your senses, as the writer to the Hebrews put it, and preparing the word you will need when the gate bell rings.
Sowing to the Spirit
Paul gives the Galatians a principle drawn from farming:
Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.
“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Every farmer knows that the harvest does not come from a single act. It comes from many small acts of sowing, repeated over a season. Character works the same way. Every choice sows something. Small choices to tell the truth, to keep a commitment, to refuse a bribe or to pray when you would rather sleep are seeds sown to the Spirit. Small choices to cut corners, indulge resentment or neglect prayer are seeds sown to the flesh. Neither harvest appears overnight. Both appear eventually.
Paul is careful here. He is writing to the Galatians, a church he has warned in the strongest terms against trying to be justified by the law. Sowing to the Spirit is the way the Spirit’s life, already given, grows and bears fruit in us. The farmer does not make the seed grow. He plants, waters and waits, and the life within the seed does the rest.
Then comes the encouragement: “let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” Discipline can be tiring, especially when nothing seems to change. Bello told me that there were years when the sentence in his diary felt like an empty ritual. He wrote it anyway. Then, on the Saturday before Christmas, he reaped the harvest of eleven years of sowing in about thirty seconds at his gate.
Training that never purchases
There are two ways to get discipline wrong, and both are common.
The first is to treat discipline as payment. Some believers measure their standing with God by their spiritual performance. If they have prayed for an hour and read three chapters, they feel accepted. If they have missed their quiet time for a week, they feel rejected. This turns grace into a wage and God into an employer who might withhold His love if the hours are not logged. It is exhausting, and it is false. Paul’s testimony is a good corrective: “by the grace of God I am what I am... I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). Grace was both the source of his labour and the explanation of his fruit.
The second error is to treat grace as a reason for no discipline at all. Some believers hear that God accepts them fully in Christ and conclude that training does not matter. But grace itself is a trainer, as we have seen. A child who is fully loved still needs to learn to walk, speak and work. Love is the reason for the training, not an excuse to skip it.
PunchlineBetween these errors lies the path of joyful, grace-sustained discipline. Here are some practical ways to walk it.
Make your decisions in advance. Identify the moments where you are most likely to fail: the envelope, the late-night phone, the angry conversation, the dishonest shortcut. Decide now, in prayer, what you will do. Write it down if that helps, as Bello did.
Start small and repeat. A short daily habit kept faithfully will shape you far more than a dramatic resolution abandoned after a week. Ten minutes in the Word every morning for a year will do more than a three-day fast followed by eleven months of neglect.
Arrange your life to support your decisions. Paul told the Romans to “make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Romans 13:14). If you know where you are weak, do not make it easy to fall. Bello made it a rule never to receive contractors at home alone. Simple boundaries like that do much of the work before the will has to.
Find people who will train with you. Athletes rarely train alone. A friend, a mentor or a small group can encourage you, ask honest questions and pick you up when you fall.
And when you fail, return to grace immediately. Do not punish yourself with weeks of distance from God. Confess, receive His forgiveness and take the next step of training. The Father who trains you is raising you, and He has no intention of letting you go.
Bello did not take the envelope. He thanked the contractor warmly for thinking of his family, wished him a happy Christmas, and told him quite simply that his position would not allow him to receive gifts from bidders. The contractor laughed and insisted. “It is only for the children.” Bello smiled and said again, “My brother, I cannot. But I wish you well in the evaluation.” The hamper went back into the SUV with the envelope.
On Monday morning Bello wrote a short note to the chair of his evaluation committee, recording the visit and the offer, as the agency’s ethics policy required. Some of his colleagues thought he was making unnecessary trouble. One of them told him he was “too righteous for this system.” Bello only shrugged.
His eldest son, who had watched the whole thing from the window, asked him about it that evening. Bello took out his diary and showed him the sentence on the inside cover. “This was not decided at the gate,” he told the boy. “It was decided long ago, and then every morning after that.”
That is the discipline of doing what is right. It is grace training God’s children, quietly, day after day, so that when the moment comes, the decision has already been made. Begin your training today. The gate bell may ring sooner than you think.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Where in your life is the “race day” likely to come: a moment of pressure where you will have to choose quickly between right and wrong?
- What decisions could you make now, in advance, about how you will respond in that moment?
- How does the word paideuo, grace training a child already in the family, change the way you think about spiritual discipline?
- Which of your current habits are sowing to the Spirit, and which are sowing to the flesh?
- Do you tend more toward treating discipline as payment, or treating grace as a reason for no discipline? What would the healthy middle path look like for you?
This Week
Write one sentence that expresses a decision you need to make in advance, as Bello did. Make it short and specific, such as “I will not receive what I cannot declare” or “I will not reply to an angry message until the next morning.” Write it somewhere you will see it every day this week, and read it aloud each morning with a short prayer asking the Holy Spirit to strengthen you in it. Alongside it, choose one verse that supports it and learn it by heart before Sunday.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that Your grace brought me salvation and now trains me as Your child. I confess that I have often waited until the moment of pressure to decide who I would be, and I have failed there. Teach me to settle my decisions in Your presence before the crisis comes. Exercise my senses to discern good and evil. Help me to hide Your word in my heart, to sow to the Spirit, and not to grow weary in well doing. Keep me from treating discipline as a way to earn Your love, and keep me from treating Your love as an excuse to neglect discipline. Raise me up in Your ways. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.