Faith & Spirit Quote by Edwin Louis Cole

Cole’s line is less a pious slogan than a claim about infrastructure: decisions don’t float on good intentions, they rest on what you repeatedly practice when no one is watching. “Discipline” and “daily” do the heavy lifting. He’s not praising flashes of inspiration or a one-time conversion moment; he’s insisting that the real engine of moral and practical choice is routine. “Devotion” is framed not as sentiment but as training. In that framing, prayer, scripture, and obedience function like a stabilizing regimen that shapes reflexes long before temptation or crisis arrives.

“Undergirds” is a telling, almost architectural verb. It implies hidden load-bearing beams: the devotional life isn’t performative or merely expressive; it’s structural. Cole’s intent is pastoral and corrective, aimed at believers who want God’s guidance without the unglamorous maintenance work. The subtext is also a gentle rebuke to spiritual consumerism: if your life is run by urgency, ego, or trend, your choices will show it. If it’s run by formed habits of submission, your choices will also show it.

Context matters. Cole built his reputation in late-20th-century evangelical men’s ministry, where “discipline” signaled a pushback against both cultural drift and private inconsistency. The quote sits comfortably in a tradition that treats character as cultivated, not discovered. It’s also a quiet assertion of authority: decisions are not self-authored; they’re downstream from who or what you’ve enthroned daily.