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This is day three together of our Look Through Hebrews chapter 12. We're going
to look at verses 5 to 11 today, and these are verses about God's discipline.
But I don't want you to miss, in verse 5 at the very beginning, that this is a
word of encouragement.

So these words about discipline are meant to encourage you. Let me read the
verses and then talk about what that means, verses 5 to 11. Then you are
illegitimate children and not true sons.

Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them
for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live?
Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God
disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it
produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by
it. These are verses that are all about God disciplining our lives.

What does this mean? We know how we discipline our children, but how does God
discipline us? Does he give us a time out?

Does he ground us somehow if we've done something wrong? How does God discipline
us? Well, without a long study of that, let me just mention that sometimes he
allows the natural consequences of sin in our lives.

Sometimes he removes the sense of his presence from our lives. He's still
present, but we no longer sense it. We feel very separated from him, even though
we're not.

That's how he disciplines us. Sometimes these verses tell us he uses the
hardships of life. There is both positive and negative discipline.

There's a lot about negative discipline in these verses. How God, when I have
sinned, when I've strayed from him, he allows things into my life that remind me
I need to follow him, but there's also some about positive discipline in these
verses. There is correction for sin, but there's also the training for
righteousness side of it.

He wants to train you for righteousness. There is the discipline of going to the
weight room and disciplining yourself to gain new strength. God has both kinds
of discipline for our lives.

In these verses, there are four principles of how God disciplines us that every
follower of Jesus needs to be aware of. Four simple principles. Principle number
one is everyone needs to be disciplined.

We simply cannot become everything God intends for us to be without some measure
of discipline in our lives. Now, I'd love to think, I like to think that left to
myself, I'm going to be wonderfully self-disciplined and I'll always do the
right thing, but it's just not true. The hard truth is I'm much too easy on
myself.

I tend to drift towards selfishness and laziness left just to myself. If you put
a donut and an apple in front of me, I'll probably go for the donut if I'm all
alone. If someone else is looking, I might at least consider the apple.

There's something about the discipline of somebody else looking that can change
the direction of my life. Everyone needs to be disciplined to be all that God
wants us to be. Truth number two, principle number two is discipline is painful.

I love God's honesty about this. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but
painful. Something parents love to say to their children, "I know you're not
going to like this.

I know this is painful right now, but you will thank me later," but with God, we
will thank him later, is the very pain of the circumstance that I don't want to
face or the conversation you don't want to have. That's what causes us to
change. We don't change when we see the light, that old phrase.

We don't change when we see the light. We change when we feel the heat, when the
discipline comes into our lives. With children, we know it's going to hurt them
when we take away media privileges or we cut an allowance or we give them a
timeout.

That's why the discipline works for the poor choice that they have made. Trying
to discipline without some discomfort for a child is like for you and I trying
to lose weight without changing our diet or our exercise routine. Growing in
Christ without some measure of pain is impossible.

Why? Why? Because we always feel pain when we change.

We don't like to change. We like the way things are. It's comfortable.

Change takes effort. Change means I have to let go of some things. Change means
I have to let go of my pride, admit I was wrong.

So there is some measure of pain in change, always, always. But that pain, that
pain is so brief compared to what God is doing, compared to the growth that he
is working. So the idea that somehow I can grow in Christ with no pain involved,
no discipline involved, that's a ridiculous idea.

The word discipline and the word disciple are almost the same word. To be a
disciple of Christ means I have to be disciplined to live like Christ lived. Now
there's a third principle about discipline in these verses and that is
discipline is for your good.

Discipline is for God's good in your life. These verses say God disciplines you
for your benefit. Your Father, your Heavenly Father has a long-term plan for
your life and he is using any and every circumstance of life to move you towards
that plan.

He even uses the mistakes that I make, even the sins that I commit in
disciplining me to move me toward his plan for my life. Now that plan is not
just what he has for me to do. That plan is even more importantly who he's
making me to be because that's what's going to last.

He's making you to be like Jesus. Hebrews 12 here draws this clear distinction
between the way human beings discipline and how God disciplines. We discipline
for a short time as we think best.

But God disciplines for all of our lives and he disciplines towards eternity to
bring righteousness and peace and holiness into our lives. So God is doing this
for our good. He's not just saying this is for your good.

He is doing it for our good. And then the fourth principle of discipline in
these verses is discipline is a sign of God's love. Discipline is a sign of
God's love.

At the beginning I asked you to notice that these words were words of
encouragement in verse 5. Why is discipline an encouragement? Because it's a
sign of God's love.

Once you admit that you're far from perfect, that you have a long way to grow,
you can see encouragement in God's discipline. The encouragement that he hasn't
given up on you. The encouragement that he's not going to let you stay just like
you are.

The encouragement that he loves you enough to keep working in your life to grow
you, to have you become all that he wants you to become. Now I know some
believers who struggle with this idea of discipline because they think it's all
about God hating us or not loving us or punishing us. And if you think that,
you've got the wrong idea of discipline.

Discipline is loving. It's loving discipline. It's God expressing his love
towards you by helping you to grow.

And if you can't sense God's love in it, you're not thinking about it correctly.
Because it is a sign of God's love. So what's our role?

What are we supposed to do about this? I mean, God's doing the discipline. What
do we do?

Well, the verses say that we're supposed to submit to God's discipline. This
word submit that's used in the Bible so much is often misunderstood by us today
because we use it in different ways. In the Bible, it had to do with the
willingness to let go of a part of yourself, the prideful part of yourself, in
order to accept what someone else or what God wants to do in our lives.

And there's all kinds of submission in the Bible. It's all over the Bible. So
what does it mean to submit to God's discipline?

It is that moment of letting go of the pride that keeps you caught in a sin,
that keeps you refusing to change. It is hearing his word or accepting the
rebuke of a fellow believer or seeing your circumstances in light of what God is
doing. It's trusting him to keep growing you no matter what.

And all of a sudden, instead of being angry, instead of pushing back, you
accept, you invite in what God is doing. Are you holding God at arm's length
right now? Are you inviting in what God is doing?

You wrap your arms around what God is doing. That's what it means to submit. You
wrap your arms around what God is doing because God wants to wrap his arms
around you in love, in love.

It's the discipline of a father whose only goal is to grow you to be more like
Jesus in the discipline. Our Father, as we pray, this is hard for us to pray,
but we pray and we thank you for your discipline in our lives. We don't like it
because it's painful and we don't like pain in this world.

Lord remind us that the pain is not the pain of someone who does not love us,
someone who is pushing us away. It's the pain of someone who loves us enough to
show us where we're wrong, someone who loves us enough to keep us growing,
someone who loves us enough to keep us on the right track. So thank you for your
love.

Thank you for how your love works in our lives today. Help us to trust in your
love, even your loving discipline. We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen. Tomorrow we're going to look together at five specific ways to discipline
your life for greater power.