SO THAT’S HOW GOD WORKS!
Hebrews 12:5-13
John Tung, 5-15-05
I. Introduction
Dr. John Townsend, one of the two authors of the book, How People Grow, describes a particular woman in one of his chapters.
“A young woman named Kara came to my office to talk about her home life. ‘Here is my problem,’ she said. ‘I tend to be a flake. I have a hard time getting organized, I’m terrible with money, and I’m late for everything. It never bothered me until I got married and had small kids. Now it’s really bothering me.’
‘Any idea on how things got this way for you?’ I asked.
‘Well, my parents loved me as a child, but they did everything for me. I never learned how to handle schedules and money, or even how to keep my room clean. Now I’m married to this loving, supportive guy, and I really like my marriage and my life, but try as I might, I can’t keep it together. I have a to-do list for parenting, cleaning, and errands, and so much of it just doesn’t get done. The house is always a total mess, and the errands don’t get done. And it’s not like my kids are that demanding or the tasks are that unrealistic. I have friends in my situation who pull it off. I will get bored or get on the phone with a friend, and nothing gets done.’
‘So a flake is a person who has trouble being organized, disciplined and focused?’
‘Yes. And I really hate the disappointment I see on my husband’s face when he gets home after work. He’s not a controlling person or a perfectionist or anything. He helps out a lot. All he wants is a little order in our life. But I can hardly get any of my list done. I feel like I’m not ready for the grownup world.’
‘What have you done to try to deal with this?’
‘Well, I was tested for ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder], and the results were negative. I pray a lot, and make resolutions and commitments to God. They help me for a while, but not for long.’
‘If you told your toddler to try really hard to make dinner, what would happen?
Kara looked confused, then said, ‘He would fail.’
‘Right. Why?’
‘Because he doesn’t have the ability.’
‘So how does he get the ability?’
‘I suppose he has to work on it over a long period of time.’ She paused. ‘Are you saying that’s what I have to do?’
‘In a way. I’m saying you don’t have the ability to be self-disciplined. It’s not inside you. So when self-discipline is found wanting, we need other-discipline from outside of us so that we can take it in and develop it.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘Well, at this point it doesn’t seem to me as if you have some unknown resistance to being organized, or are sabotaging yourself, so I would suggest you ask some friends, including your husband, to check in with you at certain times during the day to encourage you and to see how your to-do list is going. This will break the day up into manageable pieces and will also keep you aware that you’ll be answering to someone soon, not in a parental way, but in a friendly way. Try that for a while.’
‘If, however, you are still not able to pull off the tasks,’ I continued, ‘I would move to an arrangement in which you have to lose something if you don’t get the tasks done. Maybe you have to shine your friends’ shoes or drive to their house with an ice cream.’
‘That sounds like how I’m raising my kids.’
‘It is, because you are somewhat like your kids inside. The only difference is, you are initiating this approach rather than someone doing it to you.’”
Townsend concludes by saying:
“Kara went to work. One of the things I loved about her was that she had no problem submitting to her friends and being honest about her ‘flakiness.’ She cared more about growing up than looking good or self-righteous. And God always honors that attitude, as in the story of the tax collector and the Pharisee (Lk. 18:9-14). So I wasn’t surprised when she called me a while later and said things were much better. She had to do more shoe shining than she had expected, but she was seeing more of an ability to stay on task in her life” (249-51).
What is the point of this story?
It is to show that we need discipline in our lives. We are born without much boundaries or discipline. Babies are born to cry, to want others to take care of them, and they don’t much care how that affects others. Babies have no self-control. But as we grow older, one of the most important things that we need to learn and to have our parents and others teach us is to set up some sort of order and structure in our lives. Otherwise, like the woman described here, we grow older age-wise, but we still have infant-life characteristics in us.
And this has a lot of consequence because if we are infant-like, in this negative sense, then that can also affect our school work, our work work, our marriage relationship, our parenting, and because we have been preaching on spiritual growth, a lack of discipline also seriously affects our spiritual life.
And the way that God brings order and structure into our life is called discipline.
John Townsend gives us an excellent definition of discipline by saying that “in the broadest sense of the word, discipline is training for a person to learn self-control in some area of life” (How People Grow, 251).
If you have some area of your life that is relatively under self-control, it is likely because someone has taught you that. Some people have very strong work ethics: they’re very responsible, very on time. How did they get that? Most likely it is from their parents who had strong work ethics. And if you have an area of your life that is relatively not under self-control, it is very likely that you have not been taught to be disciplined in that area of life.
God is deeply concerned about discipline or lack of it in our life. His Word addresses this in many different ways and many different places. One of those passages is in Heb. 12:5-13, the passage we just read responsively, but I’d like to read that to you again, in light of this introduction. Maybe you will see it in a different light now. Let me read this, and hopefully you can also follow along in your Bibles. Heb. 12:5-13. [Read.]
II. How Does God Discipline His Children?
God is a heavenly Father, and he wants to bring discipline and structure into the life of his children, so they can enjoy life fully.
But people resist discipline. Kids naturally resist it and therefore it has to be lovingly repeated. And as people grow older, part of the problem they may still resist discipline is because they experienced some bad examples of discipline.
Sometimes we were punished unfairly, or we were disciplined too harshly by our parents, and we therefore have built up a resistance to anyone trying to bring further discipline and order into our life, even if it is from God. We don’t want to be hurt again.
So there is this resistance due to bad past experiences. And if that has happened to us, then when we come to verses such as this, we might also shrink from it because in this passage in Heb. it uses the words “rebuke,” “punishes,” “painful,” words which can reinforce some of our negative ideas of discipline.
So how do we understand this passage? What is it saying?
What this passage is saying is that God treats us in some ways that are like our parents, but in other ways, not like our parents.
In some ways he is like our parents because his discipline shows that we are his children.
Vss. 7-9 says, “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), 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 should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!”
So when you were young, even though you did not like it when your parents disciplined you, yet you received it because you were their child. And unless you are close to another person not in your family, you won’t receive their discipline because you are not part of their family.
But there is also a part of discipline where God’s discipline is not like our parents’ discipline.
Vs. 10 says, “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.”
Ah, interesting.
If you read between the lines you can almost hear the writer of Hebrews saying, “Our human fathers tried their best to discipline us, but they still made mistakes. They sometimes over-disciplined us, or they sometimes disciplined us out of their own selfishness, and not really because it was for our good. But God is different. He always disciplines us for our good so that we are more like him, who is perfect. His motive is never selfish or misguided, but always good. God’s discipline is to help us escape sin, not to receive sin.”
And how can we believe this about God so that we let his discipline into our life? Well, the author of Hebrews supports this by giving his readers specific examples of God’s parenting skills.
Chapter 12 comes right after Heb. chapter 11. And chapter 11 is the famous chapter on people having faith in God. But faith in God is possible only because God has shown himself to be good. If a person has not experienced something good, it’s very hard for them to have faith.
And chapter 11 is a long list of God’s children, who were disciplined and trained lovingly by God to develop structure and self-control in their life so that they became righteous, strong, wise people, people whom you would love to have as your friends and spiritual guides and people whom you can also become.
Specifically, how did God discipline those wonderful people?
Let me pick out three of these OT characters and show you what God typically uses to bring that discipline into his children’s life.
A. By using time
The first person is Noah. This is in Heb. 11:7. [Read.]
Noah shows us that God uses time to discipline us.
Of course we all know that Noah is most famous for building the ark, the large which saved his family from the Flood. But there is another thing in Noah’s life which really stands out from other bible characters and that is time. In Noah’s life, everything took so much time.
Noah was 500 years old when he became a father. That’s right. In Gen. 5:32, it says that Noah became a father when he was 500 years old. And we thought Abraham was old when he became a father at 100 years old (Gen. 21:5)! I wonder how old Noah’s wife was that she could still have children!
Not only that, but Noah was 600 years old when he finally entered into the ark that he built. Imagine that, Noah was doing heavy construction work when he was between 500-600 years old. He definitely didn’t hear about retirement and going to Palms Springs to play golf all the time when he got old. He was fully active and following the Lord all of his life.
And besides that, after the Flood came in the 600th year of his life, he lived another 350 years. This man was 950 years old when he died.
Now, we do know that people back then lived a much longer life. After all, Adam and Eve, if they didn’t sin, would have lived an eternal life.
Today, we don’t live as long as they did back then, but we can still live a long time and make our life count for God.
And what I want to point out is that during the hardest period of his life, when there was tremendous sin in the world, Noah may have spent up to 100 years to build the ark.
During that time, God was patient. God did not wipe all the people out even though they were rebelling against God. God was patient and he instructed Noah to build this ship with his sons, a ship large enough to contain two of every kind of animals to begin a new world.
And imagine how Noah must have felt during this long period of waiting. He was called a preacher of righteousness in the NT. And there is nothing more a preacher of righteousness would like to see than righteousness in the world.
So, Noah must have been very uncomfortable on many a day, in his natural feelings, when he saw the sin people committed all around him, and yet he didn’t see God doing anything to bring about righteousness.
But God was discipling him with time. Time allowed Noah to preach repentance, whether people repented or not, even though he was hoping people would repent. Time allowed Noah to understand God’s mercy and forbearance.
I understand forbearance because as I have researched about college loans for my kids, I keep coming across that term from lenders. If your child cannot pay for the loans in the future for whatever reason, there is a period of forbearance, which means the lender will not come after you for the loan even though it could. It will hold if off because of some special hardship in your life. And that’s good to know there is such an option, if ever someone needed it.
So, if we understand that human beings can extend forbearance in some situations to others, then why can’t God do the same? Why can’t God, who is the master lender of everything to us, including our life, for special reasons decide to forbear with our default and chose instead to give us more time? That is his right. And that is good for us.
But Noah was probably not too happy about it because he was a good and faithful re-payer of his loan from God and he wished others would do the same thing.
But he had to be patient because he learned that God was patient. That was the lesson God was teaching him. It’s the same lesson Jonah would learn later on when he preached against the Assyrians.
And God is teaching us the same lesson when he uses time to discipline us.
It may take us a long time to do something, but we learn patience from it. For example, it takes the average person now 16-20 years of education to get a pretty good job, depending on if you graduate with a college degree or a more advanced degree. In the whole scheme of our life, that is about 20% of our whole life. It took Noah about that percentage of his life to build the ark.
It might take us about 10 years of our life to become a really good worker. It might take us about 10 years or more of our married life before we understand what it really takes to make a marriage work. It might take us about 10 years of raising our kids to understand what good parenting is really about. It might take us 15-20 years or more of our life to learn what being a responsible child is about. In other words, it takes a lot of time for us to grow and to understand our responsibilities and how things really work. It just doesn’t happen that quickly.
Maybe that’s another reason why God gave Noah so much time to build the ark. Noah was a farmer, a man of the soil, he was not a shipbuilder, in fact, he did not live anywhere close to the ocean. So maybe he needed that much time to figure out how to build this huge container ship.
And we should thank God for that, that he gives us time to figure things out, to learn from our mistakes, and to make improvements. If we only had a short period of time to become a good worker, to become a good marriage partner or a parent, we would be fired, divorced, or kicked out already. But thankfully God gives us time, time to learn discipline.
So, don’t hate time. Time can serve a greater purpose. Use time to make improvements in your life.
Now, time can become an excuse for not changing or doing anything. And that’s not a good use of the gift of time. And I am not saying use time to stall or delay or avoid what you need to do.
But when we understand that time has a positive, corrective and growing purpose, then we can see that time is God’s tool to bring discipline to our life. So, that’s the lesson Noah learned.
B. By using people
Another person who learned that God has other ways to discipline his children is Abraham.
Abraham is called a “friend of God.” What did God use to teach his friend about discipline?
God taught him discipline by using people.
Abraham learned a lot about discipline through his interactions with people. All this is in all recorded in Gen., chapters 13-22.
First, there was his wife, Sarah.
She taught him that women see the world differently than man.
When Sarah couldn’t have a child, she told Abraham to sleep with her maidservant so that Sarah can have a family through the maidservant.
But then when he slept with the maidservant and she became pregnant, Sarah then got angry at him and said, “Why did you sleep with her?”
Abraham didn’t know what to do. He got yelled at for doing what his wife told him to do. First lesson for husbands: we don’t really understand our wives. She is a mystery. Sometimes she is a contradiction. I think Adam also learned the same lesson from his wife Eve when she asked him after he sinned, “Why did you eat the fruit I gave you to eat?” “But, that’s what you told me to do!”
Abraham learned about forgiving those closest to us, because they can make mistakes in judgment as well as we can. Abraham also learned that it is those who are closest to us who are going to journey with us the furthest. So we should stick together.
He also learned something about children from his relationship with his sons Ishmael and Isaac. When God told Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, and to let Ishmael go, he learned what it means to release our children to God and that God will take care of them.
Abraham also learned lessons from other people: his nephew Lot and how we need to look out for each other in this world. And Abraham learned from his meetings with the Pharaoh of Egypt and King Abimelech that he still had a lot of fears and worries, even though he already knew God.
Abraham grew in his life as a result of these and other encounters with people and with God. Or we can say that God used many people to discipline Abraham so that he can learn better what to do in a particular situation, and what not to do.
He was bearing the fruit of the Spirit through these ways of discipline from God. And we can too.
C. By using unfavorable circumstances
The third person we want to look at is Moses.
Last week we looked at Moses’ mother as an example of a desperate, but ultimately God-believing, mother.
Moses, in his own life, learned discipline from time, yes, from people, yes, but in his case, more than that of Noah or Abraham, Moses learned discipline from unfavorable circumstances.
Let’s read Heb. 11:24-28. [Read.]
Besides being born a Jewish boy in a Jewish boy-hating culture, besides being born to a slave in a slave culture, besides being born into an idol worshipping culture, Moses also encountered other unfavorable circumstances.
He chose to embrace his true culture and identity in this environment.
He could have continued to pretend that he wasn’t Jewish, that he didn’t worship the one true God, he could have continued to enjoy the privileges of his newly acquired wealth, but he chose not to.
He chose instead to embrace who God had made him. He chose to be a child of God instead of a child of the world. He chose the more difficult path. He chose the narrow gate.
But in this, he was only foreshadowing what Jesus Christ would do later, who gave up the privileges of his heavenly birth in order to become a man of our world to save us.
In Heb. 11:26, it says about Moses that “He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.”
And how can a person do this: how can a person give up what looks so good in the world for something else?
The only way that can happen is if the person can see or envision something that is better than what he is giving up.
And in Moses’ case, he saw the true God, the God who revealed himself to him, the God of his fathers and mother, who sustained them their whole life, and who would sustain all of his people in the years to come.
So, because he saw God, that was his reward that he looked forward to and that gave him the courage and discipline to leave behind his earthly benefits and face unfavorable circumstances.
And the application is that when we see God, when we understand what God has called us to be, then we are not afraid of our unfavorable circumstances. Yes, they are there, yes, we have to face them, as Moses had to face them, but we also have God to help us in all of our unfavorable circumstances. And he will reward us.
III. Conclusion
I need to conclude.
And I want to conclude by asking a couple of questions:
How disciplined are we when it comes to our spiritual life?
Do we know that we need discipline in our spiritual life?
Actually, discipline in our spiritual life may be the most important area to have discipline. The apostle Paul says in 1 Tim 4:8, “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.”
And also 2 Tim. 3:16, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
People fall away from God for lack of discipline. It takes discipline to read the Bible or bring our Bibles to church, to make offerings, to do devotions regularly, to pray or come to a prayer meeting, to attend a SS class, or to come on time to worship.
If you are disciplined in some areas of your spiritual life - great - then use that discipline to help others gain more discipline.
But if you are not that disciplined in your spiritual life, then take some actions. There are steps you can take to work on that: you can leave home earlier to come to worship, you can learn to do devotions and then start doing them, you can set up a plan and schedule time for spiritual activities in your day.
Sometimes I watch the ABC TV show, Supernanny. In fact, I recommend this show to parents with small kids, say kids under 10. The show is about how to raise and discipline kids.
From this show, I’ve come to see that one of the recurring problems in families whose kids run wild and drives parents crazy and need help from the Supernanny is because the parents don’t have the discipline of a schedule for their kids. Parents just let things happen, and parenting becomes reactive instead of proactive.
To have happy kids and have happy parents and happy people, including happy spiritual people, we must begin with a structure and a plan that includes spiritual growth into our daily life. That’s the only way growth will happen.
But when you do intentionally include it, you will be happier, and others around you will also become happier.
Discipline, in the end, is not meant to bring pain as a reward, but to bring pleasure. And you can get that holy, peaceful, and good pleasure when you practice discipline in your spiritual life. That is what the author of Hebrews meant by the “harvest of righteousness and peace” for those who have been trained by discipline.
Therefore, let me paraphrase Heb. 12:12-13, as we conclude, “strengthen your feeble spirits and weak hearts through spiritual discipline, so that you may not be disabled in this area of your life, but rather healed.” That’s how God works to help us grow. And I pray for your spiritual healing through godly discipline. Let us pray.
