11-10-13 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.

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 lose 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 done battle with every form of evil

this world has ever known,

individuals who will proclaim,

“My Lord Jesus Christ was adequate for my need

bringing me through the battle one day at a time

until He carried me into His presence forever.

To Him be the glory.”

You want to hear it directly from the mouth of your King?

Listen to this - the final two verses of the book of Jude.

Jud 1:24 Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy,

Jud 1:25 to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

It’s what He does, folks.

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 his first letter.

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

that 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 more

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 we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Rom 5:1

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Rom 8:1

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 IS 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 Father-child relationship with God

and proof of God’s love for us.

God does not discipline non-Christians.

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 losing 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 hindrance 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.

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.

The result is that the weakened wall, combined with the dangled need

brings a strong emotional response within us,

making us FEEL as if we really must disobey our Lord at this point.

So 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 it 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.

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 this morning by looking

at the many reasons why we sometimes hurt.

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.