Discipline


Sermon by Derek Thomas on October 15, 2003 Hebrews 12:5-13

Hebrews 12:5-13
Studies on Adoption: Discipline

Now turn with me, if you have a Bible with you, to the twelfth chapter of
Hebrews. We have been studying together over the last number of weeks the
wonderful doctrine of Adoption: that God in His mercy and grace brings
us into union and fellowship with Jesus Christ, justifies us by faith alone in
Christ alone, and constitutes us, His children and members of His household and
family
.

And we’ve been looking at various
aspects of that truth. It’s been a bit like, I hope, looking at a diamond and
watching the light reflect from the various facets of that diamond. We’ve
concentrated our thoughts on what the doctrine of adoption means in terms of God
as our Father, what it means in terms of having Jesus as our elder brother, what
it means to have the Holy Spirit, as Paul refers to Him in Romans 8, as “the
spirit of adoption.”

And now we’re looking at some
other aspects of the truth of adoption, and tonight I want us to consider the
issue of Discipline: that the Father disciplines His children. And there
are various places that we could go to in the New Testament, but nowhere
clearer, I think, than Hebrews chapter 12. And I want us to read together from
verse 1, and we’ll read down to verse 13. Before we do so, let’s ask the Holy
Spirit for His illumination on these words of Scripture. Let’s pray together.

Holy Spirit, we ask of You
this evening again–Comforter, Strengthener, Paraclete, Revealer of the of glory
of Christ, Inspirer of Scripture, the One who regenerates and quickens our
souls, who indwells us, and You have made our hearts Your home and temple.
Cause now this word which we are about to read, a word that You caused to be
inspired, cause it to be made clear to us. Bless us as we read it. Write its
truths upon our hearts. Minister to us, we pray, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Hear the word of God.

“Therefore,
since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay
aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us
run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the
author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross,
despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so
that you may not grow weary and lose heart. You have not yet resisted to the
point of shedding blood in your striving against sin; and you have forgotten the
exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the
Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him; for those whom the Lord loves He
disciplines, and He scourages every son whom He receives.” 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? But if you are without discipline,
of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not
sons. 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?
For they disciplines us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He
disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. 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.
Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and
make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put
out of joint, but rather be healed.”

Amen. May God bless to us the reading of His holy and
inerrant word.

If you still have Hebrews open
before you, and I trust that you do–if you turn to the very final section of
Hebrews, verse 22, you’ll get a glimpse, a little hint, as to what the book of
Hebrews is all about. The writer appeals; he says, “I appeal to you, brothers,
bear with my word of exhortation,” or in some versions, “encouragement.” The
book of Hebrews is a word of exhortation. Many commentators of late have begun
to surmise that the book of Hebrews is actually a sermon. It’s a long sermon
but it’s a sermon, maybe a collection of sermons. Certainly there is a sermonic
character to the way that the writer of Hebrews puts this together and his chief
concern throughout the book of Hebrews is perseverance, endurance,
stick-ability. I think you Americans say, “keeping on going, like Duracell
batteries when all the others have stopped.” Christians keep on going; they
keep on going in the face of trial and in the face of affliction and in the face
of difficulties. Our text seems to have, as it were, its focus in verse 7 when
it exhorts. And in the words, in the rendition of the New International Version
for a second, “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons.”
That’s what it’s about.

On the walls of many a
gymnasium–and you understand I picked this up from somewhere. I do not know this
from first hand experience–but on the walls of many a gymnasium are the words,
“No pain, no gain.” Actually, I didn’t need to go to a gymnasium to learn that
because that very phrase occurs in Charles Hodges’ Systematic Theology.
No pain, no gain. And in a way, it summarizes what the book of Hebrews is
actually saying: that in order to gain you have, first of all, to pass through
and endure pain.

Malcolm Muggeridge, converted as
he was to Christianity in his later life after being an atheist for all of his
life, and one who had given much of his time to writing vehemently against
Christianity, says (he wrote this about ten years ago), “As an old man, looking
back on one’s life, it’s one of the things that strikes me most forcibly, that
the only thing that’s taught one anything is suffering.” Not success, not
happiness, not anything like that–the only thing that really teaches one what
life’s about is suffering, affliction. Well, that’s what the writer of Hebrews
is talking about, he wants to put in a context the issue of suffering and trial
and affliction in the lives of God’s children. Let me make four assertions from
our text tonight.

I. Discipline is necessary.
First of all, that
discipline is necessary, discipline is necessary. The writer of Hebrews is
giving to us an exhortation. “Suffer this word of exhortation,” he says. He’s
telling us that the chief thing that we need to remember is that we need to keep
going; we need to persevere; we need to endure; and we need to endure in the
face of temptations to stop, when all around us we are faced with afflictions
that would call upon us to stop. When life gets hard, when life gets difficult,
when questions arise–the kind of questions that have a reason, perhaps, in your
own life: Why is this happening to me? I’m a child of God. I believe in Jesus
Christ. I attempt to follow Him. I own Him as my Lord and Savior, my Prophet,
Priest, and King but these trials have come into my life; these difficulties
have come into my life. The writer is taking us back to first things, to
elementary things. He says in verse 5, “you have forgotten the exhortation.”
He’s writing to a group of professing believers for whom trial and affliction
was causing a problem. He’s writing to Christians who are beginning to question
what God is doing in their lives, and not only to question what God is doing in
their lives, but to draw inferences about their own standing in relationship to
God because they find themselves in difficulty. So he has to take them back to
the very beginning. He has to remind them of the ABC’s. “You’ve forgotten
something.”

It’s one of the things that you
discover when you turn 50, that you forget things, simple things: names,
addresses, telephone numbers. It’s a distressing part of life. Some of you
know this all too well. But it’s also true in the Christian life. You can
never get tired of the gospel. Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and His
love, because we can never get enough of that. We constantly need to be taken
back to that: to the cross, to the atoning work of Christ, to the ABC’s of
Christianity. “You’ve forgotten something,” the writer is saying.

I still find myself shocked when
God sends certain things into my life. I’m still perplexed as to why He doesn’t
answer some of my prayers. I have a prayer that I’ve prayed for thirty years
and He hasn’t answered it yet, and I am perplexed by it. I will be candid with
you; I will be honest with you tonight. There are times when I begin to think
to myself, “Well, I wouldn’t do that to my children.” What kind of God is He
that He doesn’t hear the cries of His children; He doesn’t answer the prayers of
His children? I wouldn’t deal with my children like that. That’s how sinful
your heart can become and my heart becomes. I still find it troublesome that in
the lives of some of the sweetest saints that I know, terrible, terrible trial
comes; devastating trial comes.

And the writer takes them back,
and do you notice what he does in Hebrews 12? And if you’ve got a version of
Hebrews 12 in which verses 5 and 6, or at least the second half of verse 5 and
verse 6, is indented, you see straight away that what he’s actually doing is
quoting–he’s quoting the Bible; he’s quoting Proverbs chapter 3. Isn’t that
interesting? It’s a fundamental thing, of course. It’s not Einstein. This
isn’t rocket science here. He’s saying to these Christians who are troubled
because they find themselves in affliction: the very fact that they are in
affliction brings them more affliction. It troubles their mind; it troubles
their thoughts about God and about themselves. And what does he do? He takes
them back to the Bible. He takes them back to the word of God. He takes them
back to Proverbs chapter 3, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the
Lord, and do not be weary when reproved by Him; for those whom the Lord loves He
disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” ‘You know this
Scripture!’ he’s saying to them.

Many of these folk addressed in the letter to the
Hebrews were converted Jews: that’s what we think. The vast majority of them
were Judeo-Christians: they had been Jews, and they had been converted into
Christianity, and they knew their Old Testament; they knew the book of
Proverbs. Many of them knew this verse. They had learned it from childhood;
they had heard it quoted often, over and over. “My son, do not regard lightly
the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him, for those
whom the Lord loves He disciplines.” Now, you’ve forgotten that haven’t you?
The writer seems to see something in the background here which on the face of it
seems a little strange to us. He distinguishes between legitimate children and
illegitimate children. And I think it’s difficult for us to enter altogether
into the background that he’s drawing from, but the idea that he’s conveying is
simply this: that a father won’t waste his time on disciplining illegitimate
children because they will never inherit–Not in the first century, they wouldn’t
inherit; they would have been regarded as embarrassing. And the very fact that
the father takes time and trouble to discipline this particular young child is
evidence in itself that this young child is not illegitimate but legitimate.
That’s the background. In other words, that the correction itself is seen as
evidence that they are children.

Now I was reading the other day, John Perkins, from
Jackson Mississippi, his extraordinary book, Let Justice Roll Down. Many
of you, I know, have read it. That book is a biographical, autobiographical
statement about his life growing up. And he talks about the time when his
father as a young teenager–actually maybe he wasn’t even a teenager. I think he
was only eight or nine years old, and his father walks out of the home. And he
was only to see his father, I think, a couple of times after that. And he
describes the day that his father walked out of the home, and he describes how
he ran after him, and how his father turned and came back to him, and in John
Perkins’ word, “whooped him.” His aunt then came and got the little boy and
took him back to the house. And this is what Perkins says, “I cried all the way
back to the house, but I know that even when he punished me for following him
that afternoon, he was admitting we had some sort of relationship.” I shake my
head too. In that severely distorted portrayal of a family, and it is a
severely distorted portrayal of a family, there’s a little glimpse that at least
the father is disciplining this child because he is his child. That’s the
point. Even in that distorted picture there was evidence of paternity.

Now it’s natural, isn’t it, to suppose that
affliction and trial is actually evidence that God doesn’t care? We might
suppose that. It would be a fairly natural thing to assume that the fact that
we find ourselves in trouble is evidence that God doesn’t care. We’re often
tempted to think that. If we’re honest about it tonight we’ve probably thought
that on many an occasion. And the writer of Hebrews is saying, ‘The very fact
that you are being disciplined, the very fact that you find yourselves in
trouble is not evidence that God doesn’t care, but on the contrary it is
evidence that God is your Father and He loves you and He’s concerned about
you.’ He’s writing to a people who were facing persecution from Jewish quarters
because they had become Christians. And many of them were tempted to think that
the smart move would be to go back to Judaism again, to go back to the
synagogue, to throw everything aside. And he’s saying to them, ‘No! Endure this
trial; endure this suffering, because it’s evidence. Do you see that there is a
relationship here between you and your Father? Suffering is to be expected.
Discipline is to be expected. Discipline is necessary in the Christian life; it
is to be valued and prized. Everyone who will live godly in Christ Jesus will
suffer persecution,’ Paul says.


II. Discipline is painful.
Discipline is necessary
but, secondly, discipline is painful. Ah, yes, it’s painful. He says in verse
11, “For the moment all discipline seems”–not to be joyful but–“to be
sorrowful.” That’s right. It’s sorrowful. I dare say if I were to take a
straw pole of the, I don’t know, couple of hundred people that are here tonight,
many of you are just at that point: sorrowful, your hearts are heavy, your knees
are feeble, your hands are hanging down, barely able to put one step in front of
another, weighed down by sorrows and difficulties. If that’s now where you are,
rejoice my friend, because many of your brothers and sisters are just there–that
life is hard and life is difficult. “Endure hardship,” verse 7, in some
translations.

Notice the word that is used in verse 6, “For those
whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges…” Now the word
scourge,
of course, is “to whip.” It’s not suggesting that that’s how we
deal with our children, but that’s, that’s the word that is being used. It’s
painful, extraordinarily painful. Sometimes this discipline comes when we read
the Scriptures. Sometimes when we read our Bibles in the morning or in the
evening, and we read the word of God and it comes across our minds and hearts
and our conscience, and it’s painful. And God shows us for what we are. And
the word has a way of rebuking us, and we feel something of its pain, and we
feel something of the cords cutting into our flesh and blood and bones. Do you
recall, do you recall how Peter would write in his first epistle in chapter 5 in
verse 13, “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”? “Humble
yourselves under the mighty hand of God.” Isn’t that a graphic expression, “the
mighty hand of God”? He’s talking about trials; he’s talking about
afflictions. He’s talking about those sudden providences that can come into our
lives that can take the feet from underneath us. And it’s like, Peter says,
“the mighty hand of God.”

I think Peter was thinking about that time in the
courtyard, you remember, when he denied the Lord; and that marvelous way in
which Luke describes that Jesus saw him, wherever Jesus was as He was being
handed from Annas to Caiaphas, across that courtyard the eyes of Jesus caught
hold of the eyes of Peter, and I think it was like a mighty hand coming down
upon him and pressing him down to the ground so that he would lie prostrate
before his God and Father in heaven.

And I wonder, my friend, if that’s how you feel
tonight, in the providence of God as though His hand was upon you and pressing
you down. Or sickness…pain can be our teacher. Pain can be our teacher. One
of the Puritans said that, “The life of God’s children is like a bell, and the
harder you hit it, the better it sounds.” William Bridge said, “The sins of
God’s people are like bird’s nests, as long as the leaves are in the tree you
don’t see them, but when winter comes and the leaves fall to the ground, the
nests are seen clearly.” That’s true. I have a mockingbird nest in a tree just
outside my house. I never knew it was there until last winter when all the
leaves fell. It had been there all summer. Our cat knew because every time the
cat went out the front door this mockingbird would come and dive bomb just
inches above the cat’s head, as mockingbirds do. But I never knew there was a
nest there, not until all the leaves fell down. George Whitefield once said
that, “God puts burrs or thorns in our bed, lest we should fall asleep like the
disciples at Gethsemane, rather than watch and pray.” Lest we fall asleep…lest
we fall asleep God sends painful, hard trials to keep you awake. He sends a
winter, not this warm, humid air–and some of you are struggling with keeping
your eyes open–but a cold, north wind blowing through the sanctuary of our souls
to keep us awake. Isn’t that the testimony of the Psalmist in Psalm 119,
“Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I keep Your word.” Sometimes to
our shame, sometimes to our shame, we only come to realize the posity of what we
are when trial strikes.

Trials can have…discipline can have a tremendous
effect on your life. I remember I was six years old, that’s a while ago now,
and in primary school. I remember, with two other boys going up to the window
of a classroom. This dear, dear old lady, at least she appeared to be old to me
then–she probably wasn’t, but, you know, as a six year old she appeared to be
very old–and making faces through the window at her. And then, within what
appeared to be a millisecond she had come out of that classroom, and I felt her
hand at the back of my neck. We were dragged into that classroom, and we had to
write on the chalkboard 100 times, “Manners maketh men.” That was 44-45 years
ago, and I remember it as though it were yesterday. I can still see her face of
horror because she had her back turned to us when we made these gestures, you
understand, but she turned and then suddenly I saw her, looking straight at me.
I remember that discipline as though it was yesterday. I still feel the shame
of it. Discipline is painful.

III. Discipline is for our
good.
Thirdly, discipline is
for our good. He says in verse 10, “For they disciplined us for a short time as
seemed best to them,” speaking of earthly fathers, “but He,” that is God,
“disciplines us for our good.” And in verse 11, he talks about the “peaceable
fruit of righteousness” that afterwards it yields. Discipline is for our
good. Yes, all things work together for the good of those that love Him. Isn’t
that what Joseph said to his brothers when they had sold him into slavery and
left him, actually for dead to begin with, then sold him into slavery? And
Joseph had found himself in prison. And then in that extraordinary moment when
he reveals himself to his brothers, many years later, “You meant it for evil,
but God meant it for good.” God meant it for good. And verse 10 informs us
what that good is: “For they,” earthly fathers, “disciplined us for a short time
as seemed best to them, but He,” that is God, “disciplines us for our good that
we may share His holiness.” That’s why God disciplines us: because He wants to
make us holy. He needs to mold us and shape us and fashion us after the image
of Jesus Christ and there are many, many things that need to be cut off. Before
we shine and sparkle like a diamond in glory there needs to be a lot of
polishing first, a lot of polishing. You remember John Newton’s great hymn,
poem, “A Prayer Answered by Crosses”?

I ask’d the Lord, that I
might grow in faith, and love, and ev’ry grace,
Might more of his salvation know, and seek more earnestly his face.

2 ‘Twas he who taught me
thus to pray, and he, I trust has answer’d pray’r;
But it has been in such a way, as almost drove me to despair.

3 I hop’d that in some
favour’d hour, at once he’d answer my request:
And by his love’s constraining pow’r, subdue my sins, and give me rest.

4 Instead of this. he made
me feel the hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry pow’rs of hell assault my soul in ev’ry part.

5 Yea more, with his own
hand he seem’d intent to aggravate my woe;
Cross’d all the fair designs I schem’d, blasted my gourds, and laid me low.

6 Lord, why is this, I
trembling cry’d, wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
“‘Tis in this way,” the Lord reply’d, “I answer pray’r for grace and faith.

7 “These inward trials I
employ, “From self and pride to set thee free;
“And break thy schemes of earthly joy, “That thou mayst seek thy all in me.”

That’s an extraordinary poem, isn’t it? Isn’t that your
testimony? You ask God to draw you nearer to Himself, to make you more holy, to
make you more like Jesus Christ, to be more devoted to Him. And what’s the
answer to that prayer? Trials, problems, difficulties, afflictions.

IV. Discipline can make us lose
heart.
But there’s a fourth
thing I want us to see: that discipline can make us lose heart. Discipline can
make us lose heart. Do you notice how he puts it in verse 5? Quoting from
Proverbs 3, he talks about “fainting when you are reproved by Him.” You see,
that’s, that’s the temptation, isn’t it? That when God sends trial–cancer,
death, you lose your job, your children stray–there is the attendant and it
invariably happens that you lose heart and you faint and you stumble and your
hands hang down and your knees grow weary, the writer of Hebrews says.

So what do you do? What do you do when you find
yourself in that position? Well, look at the opening verses of Hebrews 12. He
talks about, first of all, “the great cloud of witnesses.” Think about the
great cloud of witnesses, that’s the first thing, the men and women who endured
to the very end. On Saturday morning, here in this sanctuary, we buried one who
endured to the very end and passed through enormous affliction at the end. Let
him be an encouragement to you to endure. Whatever trial you are passing
through, he passed through trials at the end too. And let him be an
encouragement. Let him be one of that great cloud of witnesses. Let him be
that gallery of the faithful that you walk down the corridor and you look at
this face and that face and you say, “God enabled them to persevere; He can do
the same in me.”

Look at what else he says in the
opening verses. He says, “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our
faith.” Your knees are feeble; your hands are hanging down; you’re tempted to
faint; then look to Jesus, my friend. The Pioneer of our faith, the Trail
Blazer, the One who goes before His people and leads the way and beacons
us to follow in His train–look to Him; don’t take your eyes off Him. That’s the
problem with some of you: you’re looking to yourselves. You’re looking to your
native powers; you’re looking to your native strength; or you’re looking to your
successes from the past; and that will never save you. Look to Jesus, my
friends.

And notice what else it says,
“Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame,
and has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” Yes, you and I, we
need to take a wider view of things. This trial, this pain, this
affliction–it’s only for a moment. It’s only for a moment. Do you remember
that word of Psalm 30? “Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the
morning.” And when you and I, my friends, have passed through that trial and
affliction, on the other side, there is joy. There is joy: the joy of being in
the undiluted presence of Christ in all of His glory. That’s the joy that lies
beyond this affliction. And the writer of Hebrews is saying, ‘As sons of your
heavenly Father, see the affliction through which you are now passing as the
preparation for the glory that is to come.’ And don’t take your eye off that
glory. May God bless His word to us.

Would you stand with me? And let’s pray, and I’ll
pronounce the benediction. Please stand with me.

Our God
and ever-blessed Father, thank You for this word of Scripture, how it encourages
our hearts. Many of us here tonight find ourselves in affliction–things that we
would long would not be there, things that we plead with You to take away, like
a thorn in our flesh. We pray for grace tonight to be able to say that “it was
good for us to be afflicted,” that we might be conformed more and more and more
to the image of Your Son and our Savior. Have Your way with us, but do not
forsake us. Uphold us and strengthen us every step of the way. And as we bear
that cross, bear it with us, Lord Jesus, we pray, for it is to You that we look
and to none other. Hear us, Lord, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Receive the Lord’s benediction.
Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with
you

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