©1999 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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2/28/99
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Divine Discipline
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Hebrews 12:6-11
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2/28/99 Divine Discipline
I told you last week
that we're going to take this morning
to talk about the topic of Divine Discipline -
the discipline of God in the Christian's
life.
When I began to prepare for this morning
I remembered that
at sometime in the distant past
I taught on this subject once before.
So I dug out my old sermon notes
and discovered that
in the fall of 1994 I taught
what ended up being a 7 week series
on the nature and the role
of God's discipline
in the life of the Christian.
Even I was amazed that I could have taught seven
weeks on the subject
until I reread the notes.
And then I remembered...
I remembered the kind of questions
and confusion
and anxiety that topic brought up
the last time we studied it.
Most of those seven weeks
were spent either laying a foundation for the topic
or else clearing up questions and
misconceptions that resulted from the study.
We are not spending another seven weeks
on divine discipline.
In fact, we're only going to spend one day on it.
But, given where our study has taken us
during the past few weeks
we do need to spend this day.
We are actually studying the New Testament Book
of Philippians.
Our study of that book
has brought us to Phil. 4:4
in which Paul says,
Phil. 4:4 ¶ Rejoice in the Lord always;
again I will say, rejoice!
In that verse we have seen Paul telling us
that if we begin by looking at our circumstances
and then attempt to understand
who our God is
on the basis of those circumstances
we'll always get ourselves muddled
and confused.
But if we begin by looking first
at our God
and what He has revealed to us
about Himself through Christ,
our circumstances
will loose their power
to twist or distort
our faith in our God and His love for
us.
But in that discussion
it is impossible to avoid the question
about why bad things happen to us,
why evil touches our lives,
and what God's role in that whole
thing is.
And we spent last week
chewing on some of those questions.
Then, just at the end of our time together last week
I mentioned that no discussion about
the Christian
and God
and pain was complete
without saying something about
the discipline of God
in the life of the Christian.
There are times when God
will bring pain into a Christian's life
for the purpose of reshaping our moral
character .
And I want to spend a few minutes
building a setting for this
so that we keep it in perspective.
Some of you here this morning are hurting.
I am aware of at least 4 distinctly different causes
for the presence of pain
in the life of the Christian.
Some of you are hurting because you are
the victim of the sins of others.
Their actions have wounded you.
You had no part in their actions,
and no way of avoiding their consequences in
your life.
If you allow your Lord to lead you through the
healing process He has for you
the time will come when your voice
will be added to God's great choir
that proclaims to a pain-filled world,
"My God has made me whole again,
and His love has made me free.
He truly does heal all our wounds
and wipe away every tear."
When our Lord returns to this earth
He will bring with Him individuals
who have been touched by every form of evil
this world has ever known,
individuals who will proclaim,
"My Lord Jesus Christ was adequate for my
need
and my healing. To Him be the glory."
Some of you are hurting
because you have made right choices
in a messed-up world
and those choices have brought pain into
your life.
Peter talks about that kind of pain in I Peter.
In that short letter
he tells us that it is at those times that we
most closely mirror our Lord Jesus Christ
who also suffered wrong for doing right,
and he tells us that at such times
we can confidently entrust ourselves
into the care of God
knowing that He will bring good into our lives
and our world
because of what we are going through.
Some of you who hurt here this morning
are doing so because you have made wrong
choices,
you have willfully stepped outside of God's
protective moral framework,
and it has brought painful consequences
into your life.
Amazingly
that type of pain is a prime candidate
for God's healing work as well.
He assures us that He has the ability to work all
things together for our good,
including our sins.
If we actively place them into His hands
He has the power to even take evil
and transform it into good in our lives,
just as He took the ultimate evil
of the brutal, bloody murder
of His own Son
and turned it to the greatest good of all time.
But some of you who are hurting right now
are hurting because you are experiencing the
disciplinary hand of God in your life.
It is to you that the Bible's comments about God's
discipline are addressed.
You are living in bondage right now.
You may be investing great amounts of energy
into justifying
and rationalizing your actions,
but inside you know
you are anything but free,
and you feel driven by forces
you honestly do not know how to stop.
It is at those points where we find ourselves
helpless to make the changes within us
that we know must be made
that God in His perfect wisdom
will at times introduce His discipline into our
lives.
And before I say anything else
let me emphasize that God's discipline
is not a punishment for the sin,
or in any way a payment for it.
There is nothing we can ever offer
in the form of penance,
or pain,
or suffering,
or promised faithfulness,
or good deeds offered,
or anything else of any kind
that can ever atone for our moral offenses
against our Creator.
The only thing that can ever atone for our sins
is the blood of God Himself
through Jesus Christ.
And once that payment has been made
the debt is paid in full forever.
Therefore, having been justified by faith
with have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ.
There is therefore now no condemnation for
those who are in Christ Jesus.
I Cor 5:[21] He made Him who knew no sin
to be sin on our behalf, that we might
become the righteousness of God in Him.
And on and on and on.
That = the good news.
Some of you are so conditioned to anticipating the
slap across the face
whenever you do something wrong
that it is very hard for you to break free
from that anticipation in your walk with your God.
Please hear me -
it is not there.
He does not get ticked
and knock you around because you stepped out
of line.
He does not exact payment from His Son,
and then turn around and squeeze a little more
out of you.
If you have trusted the death of Christ
as payment for your sins,
YOUR DEBT IS PAID IN FULL
FOREVER.
This discipline thing has nothing to do
with any type of payment
or penance,
or collection of a debt owed.
Now, with that background,
let me take us to the key passage on God's
discipline in Scripture.
It's found in Hebrews.
The passage actually begins
with Hebrews 12:1
and runs through verse 11,
but we don't have the time
to go through the whole passage
so we'll pick it up in verse 6.
And rather than reading the entire passage
and then going back over it again to study it,
I think we'll just take it
a few verses at a time
and I'll make comments
about what's going on as we read it.
OK, the first 3 verses of the passage
make a single statement:
Heb. 12:6 For those whom the Lord loves
He disciplines, And He scourges every son
whom He receives. "
Heb. 12:7 It is for discipline that you
endure; God deals with you as with sons;
for what son is there whom his father does
not discipline?
Heb. 12:8 But if you are without
discipline, of which all have become
partakers, then you are illegitimate
children and not sons.
In those verses
the author of Hebrews tells us
that the discipline of the Lord
is proof of our sonship
and proof of God's love for us.
God does not discipline nonchristians.
There is a natural law of cause and effect,
reaping and sowing
within the moral framework of God.
All human beings participate in that process.
All sin is ultimately destructive
and brings destructive consequences
into the lives of everyone affected by it.
That is not what we're talking about here.
The discipline of God
is not simply cause-and-effect,
it is God Himself directly intervening
into the life of the Christian
in a way that makes it easier
for us to choose righteousness in
the future.
And He does this
because He loves us,
He loves us far too much to allow us to
remain chained in bondage to our sin.
Then the author goes on
to make a comparison
and a sharp distinction
between a human father's discipline
and the discipline of our Lord.
Heb. 12:9 Furthermore, we had earthly
fathers to discipline us, and we respected
them; shall we not much rather be subject to
the Father of spirits, and live?
Heb. 12:10 For they disciplined us for a
short time as seemed best to them, but He
disciplines us for our good, so that we may
share His holiness.
In some respects these two verses
are the most crucial verses in this whole section
on discipline.
You see,
once he brings up our human fathers
he runs the risk of loosing us completely
depending upon what happened between us
and our father as a child.
Some of you had fathers who genuinely longed to
know
how best to prepare you for life.
They didn't do it perfectly,
but they longed to,
and they poured themselves into you
and your development
the best way they knew how.
But some of you had dads who, quite honestly,
blew the whole thing.
To judge by their actions
they couldn't have cared less about you.
If they disciplined at all
it was discipline driven by their own anger or
selfishness,
with no real understanding of who you were
or what you needed
or what you had done or not done.
And, of course, there are dads in the whole
spectrum in between.
But for some of you
what happened between you and your dad
has been a major hinderance in your own
pursuit of God because
unless we go through
the painful process of rethinking
and relearning,
we just naturally begin our perspective on God
by believing that God is pretty much like dad
only a whole lot bigger.
Now I want you to listen carefully
to what the author is saying here,
so that the power of it doesn't get lost
in all of the memories of your own childhood.
What he's saying is this:
"Hold it! I am not saying that God's discipline
is like your dad's discipline was. At best your dad
disciplined you out of flawed knowledge and
selfish motives.
He did what seemed best to him at the time.
He might have been right.
He might have been very, very wrong.
But that isn't the way God disciplines you.
He doesn't discipline you for His good,
He discipline you for your good.
He knows you perfectly
because He created you.
He knows how to go about making the changes in
you
that will really free you to be
the person you were designed to be.
He longs for you to share His holiness,
because He knows that only through that
holiness
can you ever be truly free.
Don't be afraid of Him.
He is on your side as no one ever has been
before,
and what He does He does because
He truly does love you."
He disciplines us for our good, so that we
may share His holiness.
Simply stated,
God disciplines us at those points in our lives
where we find ourselves powerless
to choose righteousness
apart from His direct disciplinary intervention
in our lives.
Do you know what God's discipline does?
It rebuilds our protection
against immorality
in those areas where we have
destroyed that protection
through wrong choices in the past.
EX. Each of us enter this world
with a natural protective resistance
against sin built into us by God.
Scripture calls that protection our conscience.
We might be able to understand
the conscience best
by picturing it as a three foot high
brick wall built around us.
We can easily see over it,
and climb over it,
but it does provide us with some measure of
protection.
But there is one other crucial element
we need to understand
about this wall - there is no mortar
between the bricks.
They're just stacked there
with nothing holding them together.
Now,
prior to our submission to Christ
our natural distrust of God
and our desire to run our own lives
and our assumption that
He really hasn't provided us
with what we truly need in
order to be happy
all go together to motivate us
to crawl over that brick wall at times,
to lunge out after something
our conscience tells us is wrong,
but we believe we just have to
have.
But every time we do that
in the process we knock a brick or two off,
so that the wall is a little lower than it was
before,
and a little easier to climb over at that spot.
It isn't long before,
where once there was a wall,
now there is a doorway.
Now, we all come to Christ
with a lot of scattered bricks
and dips in our walls,
places where we have destroyed
our inner protective guard
against certain types of
immorality.
Satan's strategy in these areas of the Christian's life
is simple:
he finds those areas
where we have kicked holes in our wall.
He then takes some human need
(love, security, etc.)
and parades it in front of that hole,
telling us that the need can only be met
by jumping through that hole.
Result: the weakened wall, combined w/ the
dangled need
brings a strong emotional response within us,
making us FEEL like we really must disobey
our Lord at this point.
Q. How does God's discipline help?
All discipline for the moment seems not to
be joyful, but sorrowful;
It hurts.
What I see God doing is this:
He knows that left to ourselves
we have lost our ability to resist
that kind of a satanic set-up.
So,
He carefully arranges things so that
when we step through that wall
rather than feeling good,
rather than being what we expect,
it hurts,
and hurts in a way that records onto our
emotional memory
a whole different attitude
toward that gap in the wall
than we had prior to the discipline.
Simply put,
He sets us up for emotional pain
that will retrain our responses
to those temptations we are in bondage
to.
Q. Am I saying, then,
that all emotional pain
is the discipline of God? NO! NO! NO! NO!
The truth is,
most of it is not.
That's why we began by looking
at the many reasons why we sometimes
hurt.
Q. Then how can we tell
when the pain
is the discipline of God.
I'm glad you asked,
and this is where we'll bring this to rest.
There are three characteristics of the true Discipline
of God.
1. If, when the situation occurs,
someone were to ask you,
"What issue in your life is God dealing with?"
you would know exactly what that issue was.
2. What God has done
truly does make it easier
to choose righteousness in the future.
Heb. 12:11 All discipline for the moment
seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet
to those who have been trained by it,
afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of
righteousness.
3. We come away from the experience
knowing our God loves us
and thankful that we matter enough
for Him to help us be good
where we were powerless to be
good on our own.