The Love of the Father In the Discipline of the Saints

Transcript

Well, good morning Trinity Church. It is a delight to be here, to rejoice in this day that the Lord has made and to rejoice in every other day of our lives. My name is Christian. If you haven’t met me, I want to meet you. So please, bother me, find me after church and I would love to introduce myself to you. I have the privilege of being one of the pastors here to serve the Lord through, alongside the other brothers who serve here as well. So brothers and sisters, without further ado, open your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 12.

We will be reading together from verses 3 through 13. Hebrews chapter 12, verses 3 through 13, page 949 at the Bibles, underneath the chairs in front of you. Hear the word of the Lord.

Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or faint-hearted. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline in which all have participated,

— Hebrews 12

(ESV)

then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them. But he disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness. 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. Therefore, lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees and make straight paths for your feet so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.

— Hebrews 12

(ESV)

Trinity Church, this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let’s pray together. Our Father, I pray that you would give us tender hearts this morning

Consider Jesus

as we think about your fatherly discipline in our lives. I pray that we would see your love for us through the discipline that comes into our lives, that we would see the Son, the Lord Jesus, whom you have given so that we might become your children. And I pray that we would walk away, encourage that you are looking out for us, and that you are working in our lives for our good, and that your people find their joy in you. In Jesus’ name, amen. I like watching the Olympics. I like watching the World Cup, even though most of the year I don’t really watch sports. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that there’s something interesting and engaging about watching a large group of people from all over the world gather together to compete against each other. Here at the Olympics this summer,

years of private practice, of hard work, of blood, sweat, and tears were put on display before the watching world as athletes competed for the prize. And some really memorable moments have stood out over the years of the Olympics taking place. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, we saw Michael Phelps win heaps of gold medals. And that was memorable. If you come from Eastern Europe, if you’re originally from Romania like I am, then Nadia Comaneci in 1976 was the first woman to win a perfect 10 in women’s gymnastics. And that was really memorable. But along these really great success stories at the Olympics, we also find many stories of heartbreak, of unexpected disappointments. At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, an athlete, a British athlete by the name of Derek Redmond

was far and away the expected favorite to win the 400-meter race. And as the runners get on their starting blocks, the gun goes off. Everything goes as planned. Years of practice turn into routine as these athletes are running to win the prize. But 17 seconds into the race, Derek, out of nowhere, reaches for the back of his thigh. And with that reach, he loses the chance to finish the race because of an injury. The unexpected happened even in a 60-second race and after years of preparation. But if we’re honest with ourselves, this reality of the unexpected happens in many areas of our lives. Promising marriages fail. Children walk away from their parents. Jobs end unexpectedly. For most of us, or rather for many of us, some of the saddest moments of our lives have been when friends who started the race of faith, perhaps people that we looked up to,

started the race of faith and running towards Jesus end up leaving the race and walking away and they no longer love Jesus. And that is a sadness. But at the same time, as we reflect on these people in our lives and our similar instances in which we might be tempted away from the faith and to compromise our Christian convictions, how can we think Christianly about this? Namely, maybe you’re defensive in all of this. Maybe you say to yourself, that’s not me and you can give me a million reasons why you would never ever walk away from the faith. Your faith, you think, is Teflon, where the sins, the worries, the anxieties of this life can never stick to you. Or maybe you’re entirely on the other side of the spectrum. You are so tender in your conscience that when you reflect on your sin, you are crushed with doubt and anxiety

that you aren’t measuring up to what exactly a Christian should be. So the question that we arrive at ultimately is, how can we tell if we are walking with God? Or rather, more importantly, how can we tell if God is walking with us? That’s really the question. We could be very easily deceived, but the Lord our God is not. We want to know, we need to know that the God that we encounter on the pages of this book is the same God that is involved in the fog, the chaos, and the busyness of our day-to-day lives. And so the short answer to our dilemma, the way that we can know that God is walking with us, comes to us in one word, and that word is discipline. And I don’t mean the discipline of an athlete. This is not self-discipline. What we are talking about from this passage this morning

is the discipline of a parent. This is the discipline of our Heavenly Father as he brings moments, difficult moments, to guide us in our lives towards his vision that leads to our joy and ultimately to our flourishing. And I admit this is not an easy passage to listen to or to actually preach because it contains some truths that really cut against what we expect God to be like. But before we read too much into the word discipline, it’s helpful to remember something. Discipline is not just correction when we’re wrong. It’s not a momentary reaction like when your kid kicks his sibling for the 20th time and you send him up to his room in a fit of anger. God’s discipline is also not a punishment that you have to endure to sort of offset the bad things that you’ve done in your life so you can finally be accepted back into his good graces.

God is not like us. God does not lose his patience in the moment. God never needs to ask for forgiveness from you. God’s discipline for his people reaches far and wide. The Lord disciplines us through his teaching. The Lord disciplines us through the rebukes that we encounter from our brothers and sisters in the church. The Lord disciplines us through nature and he often works in our lives through suffering to refine us and to make us more like Jesus. So discipline as understood in the Bible is wide. It includes correction, leading, teaching towards this ultimate goal of holiness, of righteousness that we would look more and more like God. And at the heart of our text are two very important truths. The first is that our father disciplines us as his children because we are his children. And often that discipline is not pleasant. And the second is that we need discipline.

The Father’s Love

We desperately need discipline because through it we look more and more like the children of God that we actually are. So I wanna give you a roadmap for our text this morning. This text walks us through four different sections that talk about how God relates to discipline in our lives. So the first in verses three to four is the advice in discipline. Verses five through 10, the father over discipline.

Verses, verse 11, the reason for discipline. And verses 12 through 13, the renewal through discipline. And so I wanna give you a quick recap about who the letter of the Hebrews is written to. The letter of Hebrews, the word Hebrews is really kind of another word for Jewish people. It’s written to a Jewish audience in the ancient world who became Christians a generation or so after the Lord Jesus ascended into heaven. And these Christians have a problem on their hands. On the one hand, they’re really joyous that they’ve become Christians. They’ve seen Jesus, they know who Jesus is. But on the other, becoming Christians has really cost them. It’s cost them social connections. It has cost them family connections. It’s cost them a whole lot. In fact, God’s word in Hebrews 10, verse 32 says as follows, but recall, this is speaking to these Jewish Christians,

but recall the former days when after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. They started out strong, full of zeal, a zeal that I’m so encouraged to see in many of you new Christians. It’s beautiful and wonderful to see. But years later, years later, after time, isolation, loss of property, connections and influence, these things began to chip away at the confidence these Christians had. And so our verses show the advice that the Lord wants to offer these Christians in their circumstances. Read with me verses three to four. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself

so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. He tells these Christians to consider Jesus and specifically Jesus in a time of his life in which he is betrayed by wicked men. He is taken to the cross. He is suspended on the cross between heaven and earth and he’s dying. And all throughout, the Lord Jesus was faithful to the will of his father as he is going to that place. So the advice really boils down to kind of the classic Sunday school answer, Jesus. But the verse says something interesting. It says consider him. But what should they consider about Jesus? Jesus in general? No, Jesus specifically. They should consider that he endured from sinners such hostility against himself. They’re to think long and hard about how Jesus intersects with their lives.

The Lord will use your thoughtful and prayerful meditation of Jesus as a way to sustain you when tough times come into your life. We can often think that Jesus dealt with our sins, which is true, that he was raised from the dead, which is true, that he’s coming again to judge living and the dead, which is true. But often the way that we can relate to him is he’s a bit too high up there in the heavens to sort of care about my wayward children or my difficult marriage or the coworker that you’re dealing with that is really frustrating or your gambling addiction. Don’t be afraid, brothers and sisters, to bring Jesus down to your human-level problems. This is one of the blessings of the Reformation because we don’t need intermediaries to sort of tell Jesus what’s up with our lives. We can reach Jesus directly.

His life has direct applications to ours as well. So that’s what the advice is all about because the more that we understand Jesus’ relevance for our life, the more that we actually honor him. When you think about Jesus, you can more easily spot the ways he sympathizes with you, the ways that he isn’t a far-off savior but a personal savior whose life, death, and resurrection pours into your own life in the moment in massive ways.

The advice to carefully consider Jesus, though, is driving at something really serious, and that is God’s word does not want to let these Christians grow weary or fainthearted or to lose heart. So when you experience the painful discipline of the Lord, if you stop considering Jesus, you will have only yourself and your circumstances to consider, and that can be hopeless and despairing, or it can push you to kick away the faith because often, in the midst of the discipline, the frustration that we feel has to do with knowing that God is holy and we are not and we see that in ourselves. So let’s do a thought experiment for a moment. Imagine that you really struggle with the sin of gossip, right? And the Lord, in his providence, in his kindness to you, is convicting you over your sin of gossip, so much so that it’s really weighty and discouraging

to see yourself as a gossiper, to see how easily it comes to you to speak ill of other people, to malign other people, to demean other people when they’re not around. So if you find yourself in that situation, you’re already at a fork in the road. One road is the path of repentance, of considering Jesus, of turning away from your sin, but the other road, eventually, is to dodge the conviction altogether because you’re so wearied and overwhelmed by how uncomfortable it is to see yourself that something that comes so naturally to you can actually be sinful, that sooner or later you start making excuses for your sin. You start excusing things in ways that make sense to you and you wanna convince others, but ultimately, sooner or later, if your conviction is not checked by repentance, you’re gonna drift away from the Lord. You’re gonna wanna get away from the God

who is convicting you in the first place. But it’s into this space that God’s word speaks. If we grow weary and fainthearted, we see God as distant, as if he’s gone on vacation, as if he doesn’t love us anymore. And whether we admit it or not in times of difficulty, in times of receiving the Lord’s discipline, that can be the primary emotion that we relate to our God with. Look down at verse five as we meet the Father over discipline and have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? Brothers and sisters, what a question. Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as children of God? We are so prone to forget that. I’m glad that this is here. My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves

and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. I love that God’s word here is not minimizing the problems that these people are going through. It’s not telling them, get over it. Chin up, toughen up. It’ll all pan out in the end. The Lord’s word is coming to them to give practical, in the moment, help to them. And that help comes through realizing that the unpleasant discipline that we are undergoing, we are undergoing because we are, first and foremost, the children of God. 1 John 3, verse one says, see what kind of love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are. It is out of the amazing love of the Father for sinners that we are the children of God, and it is through the work of the Lord Jesus

that we are adopted, we are brought in to the family of God. What a reason for thankfulness, brothers and sisters. But as children of God, we are not perfect. David led us this morning through the confession and pardon. We confess our sins every Sunday as we should be confessing our sins every day of our week.

We are so prone to foolishness, to so easily drift away from God, and there’s a whole lot of what is pleasing to God that we either miss altogether because we don’t want to pay attention to, or that we actually know, but we choose to turn away from. So can you begin to see why the Lord disciplines His children, the people that He loves? It’s a hard concept to kind of stomach because we project onto our Heavenly Father the worst traits, characteristics of human parents, especially if we or our friends have had really, really hard upbringings. But I’ve been so encouraged by many of you as I’ve watched you wrestle to be faithful parents, and especially in the area of disciplining your children. It is clear to me, clear as day, that you discipline your children because you love them, and you discipline them towards maturity.

From a loud no when your toddler is about to stick a fork in the electrical socket. I really hope I didn’t give any toddlers any ideas. Sorry in advance if I’ve done that. To hugging your 10-year-old who is crying quite literally over spilled milk. These ways are things that you use to train your children, to discipline your children towards maturity. And I’ve also heard the post-discipline kind of thoughts that some of you have. Was I too harsh?

Was I too overreactive? Should I have said anything at all? Do I need to repent of anything? Do I need to apologize of anything? So brothers and sisters, is it any surprise that our Father in Heaven disciplines us? All of you parents out there, discipline your children as seems best to you. But to some extent, you are misguided. At times, you’re too passive. At times, too nitpicky. But for the most part, your children will hopefully grow up to appreciate the ways that you’ve sought to shape their characters. But our Heavenly Father is not involved in the lives of His children in the way that seems best to Him. He disciplines us through His perfect wisdom because He truly knows fully what is for our good and that’s to share in His holiness, that is to be made like Him. And unlike you parents out there,

the Lord isn’t maturing as more and more spiritual children are adopted into His family. Unlike you, the Lord doesn’t need help. He doesn’t pray for grace. He doesn’t open His Bible to be edified by it. He wrote the Bible. He spoke the Bible. And at the same time, the Lord does not ask you and will not ask you how He can best discipline you. Can you see how this is a huge perspective shift when we go through hard circumstances? Can you see how helpful it is to go through difficulties mindful that we are the children of God? It shatters our unspoken expectations that the children of God are entitled to everything that they ask for in the moment. It puts the emphasis on our Father as responsible for caring for us, for providing for us in every moment of our lives. It cuts us down to size

as people who can see so very little of what our Heavenly Father is up to in our circumstances. And it pushes us to trust our Father even when we cannot feel His overwhelming love and affirmation for us. So brothers and sisters, expect the discipline of the Lord. Receive the fatherly discipline of the Lord through the hardships of your life and accept that discipline as part of the Lord’s love of you.

The Purpose of Discipline

You can be sure of His love for you when the troubles of your life are used to lead you towards holiness, when He gives you the gift of seeing Him more clearly, when you identify with Christ and Him crucified all the more. Look down with me to verse 11, the reason for discipline. For the moment, says God’s Word, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. In one of the harder seasons of my life, a season in which the Lord was disciplining me for my good, I went to our pastor, Ryan Lister, to get some soul care. And towards the end of our conversation, after I pour out my heart to Ryan, Ryan asked me something I will never forget. He asked me, what is the Lord doing through this?

I so appreciated the question because it wasn’t, is the Lord doing something through this? It pushed me to reckon with the fact that God is already doing something in my circumstances. Pushed me to listen, to think what God is doing exactly, how He is refining me, how He is shifting me towards holiness. But brothers and sisters, the Lord is doing this thing of refining His people all over the Bible, but it’s especially noticeable in the story of Israel. So when the people of Israel come out of Egypt, they find themselves in the wilderness. And in the wilderness, you can read this in Exodus 16, in the wilderness, they’re hungry. They get really hungry and they start grumbling. They start grumbling against the Lord. They start grumbling against Moses. And the Lord finally gives them bread from heaven. And after some time, the people get sick and tired

and they start grumbling again after eating so much of this miraculous bread that comes down from heaven. Open your Bibles to Deuteronomy 8, verse 11. I want to read something from there. Deuteronomy 8, verse 11. The Lord says, through Moses, Moses is speaking to a new generation of the people of Israel and he’s telling them about what happened in the past. He’s giving him God’s perspective on things. 8, verse 11.

Look at verse 16. So are you catching that? This whole ordeal, the people going through hunger, the people being so full of this manna that they’re complaining again, that whole ordeal was used by God, by the Lord of Israel to discipline the people of Israel for their good. But what is the good that the Lord was seeking to do to the people of Israel? We don’t have to wonder. Moses actually gives us that. Look up in the same chapter, Deuteronomy 8, verse 2.

40 years in the wilderness that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know. And this is the good that the Lord was doing to them, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Brothers and sisters, all the difficulties of the people of Israel were used to teach them that human beings don’t live by food alone. They live truly, they live fully by the word of God. And so your trials that God allows into your life are intended to shape you, to see him, to live by the word that he gives to you, to live by his teaching and by depending on him. So brothers and sisters, is God’s discipline in your life having its intended effect? Is it shaping your heart slowly, but surely to love God and his ways and to hate sin?

If that’s the case, if the Lord is shaping you in those ways and you are walking faithfully through your difficulties, then praise be to God. But if God’s discipline in your life doesn’t lead you to growing in righteousness, to begin to hate your sins, to turn away from them for love of your Savior, then one of two things is going on. Number one,

you don’t belong to God, in which case the difficulties of your life are not used by the Lord to discipline you and direct you for your good because you are not his child. And so the difficulties of your life are exactly that, just difficulties that everyone in the world goes through, but they are not used by God in your life

as you are his child and he is your father. But I want to tell you something. If you find yourself here, not a Christian, I’m really glad that you’re here because I want you to know the God that we are speaking about this morning, the God that we see through the Bible, the creator that you were made to worship, the creator that you were made to live for. But there’s a problem. Between you and God stands a great chasm, a chasm created by you because you are running away from God in so many ways, in ways that other people can see and in ways that only you can see. And you can never ever, by your own effort, by cleaning up your life, ever have a seat at the table to have peace with God, to be reconciled to God. But I have wonderful news for you this morning.

This morning, if you turn away from your sins, if you run to the Lord Jesus, the Lord will receive you as his child and he will be your father. And I can’t promise you that the circumstances of your life will clear themselves up, that things suddenly become easy because they will not. But I can promise you this, that in the hands of your father, the difficulties of your life will be used for your good and for his glory.

But there is a second option between enduring the discipline of the Lord really well and not being a child of God at all. And that’s the place that I suspect most of us, myself included, find ourselves in difficult circumstances. We get tunnel vision focused on the difficulty in front of us and we turn our eyes away from him either by distraction because our problems are so big and overwhelming or because we don’t think he’s worth much attention in the first place, especially if your life does not go as planned. So that’s what’s happening to these Christians who heard the letter of Hebrews read to them 2,000 years ago. Their endured discouragement, they took their eyes off of Jesus. And the more we stay on this road of discouragement, the more we miss the goodness of our God. We miss seeing how our father son Jesus

has walked the road of obedience all the way to the cross in our place. And as the resurrected king of life, we also miss how he can empathize with you because he’s already been through the human experience and all the difficulties associated with it. And he can offer you strong support from the other side.

Running the Race

To receive the benefits of God’s discipline, we have to repivot how we think in our hearts and our minds towards God. We have to repivot away from a sulky and complaining attitude to one that leans towards the Lord and trust that our circumstances are in the hands of our loving heavenly father. Look at verses 12 through 13 of Hebrews 12. Therefore, lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees and make straight paths for your feet so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. So this is kind of the athletic, the runners imagery again. Runners, spiritual runners get tired. They get fatigued. Your knees get weak. Your arms can’t sway anymore as you’re running. They start giving out. But a fresh perspective of God as our father says God’s word empowers us by his grace to pick ourselves up from our weariness

and to recommit to running the race of faith towards Jesus together again. But pay attention to something brothers and sisters. This verse is not telling the people of God to wait for the Lord to do something so they can finally have enough reason to get through their discouragement. No. This verse is telling them respond to what God has already done in Jesus. So I have four takeaways for us this morning. If you are a Christian, your heavenly father will never discipline you as a way to get back at you for your sins or to make you suffer until you’ve paid for them. Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures. Your sins have been taken by him to the cross. And as tough as your circumstances may get, your father is now out for your revenge. There’s no hint in these verses that these Christians

are somehow, somehow have some hidden sin in their life that God is trying to smoke out and so he’s punishing them. There’s no indication of that. Number two, all Christians endure painful disciplines sooner or later. First Peter 4 says, 4.12 says, beloved do not be surprised. At the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as if something strange were happening to you. Don’t be surprised when it happens because it’s going to happen. It’s coming.

And it’s not helpful for us to try to guess what lesson the Lord wants to teach other people who are undergoing tough circumstances in their lives. Not helpful. It’s not our purpose. It’s for the Lord to know. Number three, the Lord disciplines you to make you the best version of yourself. And the best version of yourself is needy, dependent, holy, running after Jesus and living life to honor him. And number four, this is really practical. Brothers and sisters, when you talk about the tough seasons in your life, choose to talk about them in such a way that you bring God into your language. Choose to say, if you feel so inclined, that you are undergoing the Lord’s discipline when you’re going through a tough season. There’s no stigma, or at least there shouldn’t be to that. Because when we do that, we are grounding what God is already doing,

what God is doing, even when we can’t see it in our lives, to our particular circumstances. We honor our God when we see our circumstances tied to what he is doing in our lives. So when you’re going through a grueling time at work, think and weave into how you talk about these things, the Lord’s discipline, that the Lord is teaching you, that the Lord wants to do good to you through these circumstances. And most of all, pray for open eyes to see what he is doing. The word of the Lord tells us, for this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. So brothers and sisters, however tough your circumstances may get, they are being used powerfully by your heavenly Father to prepare something that you will see in eternity. And we can’t wait until that day. Let’s pray together.

Our Father and our God, we thank you that we have the resounding, giddy joy of belonging to you as your children. Father, you are good. You have redeemed us. You have brought us to yourself from a life of wandering away from you. What a privilege it is to belong to you. And thank you for your son through whom we are brought into your family. Father, help us to love you and to love our brothers and sisters well through the seasons of your discipline in our lives so that ultimately you would be glorified and that the gospel would advance in the city of Portland. We ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.