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Let’s turn next to our reading this morning.
Our sermon text is from Hebrews chapter 12 verses 4 through 11.
You can find that on page 1196 of your pew Bible.
This is God’s word.
From Hebrews chapter 12 starting in verse 4.
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, 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 it yields the peaceful
fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Amen.
Let’s pray.
Father in heaven, Lord God, Lord Jesus, Holy Spirit, we need your help.
We need you to bring your spirit so that these words which you have inspired, which you have
breathed out, which are without error, might also be life to us.
Lord, we ask that you would come by your spirit in the preaching of this word and in the hearing
that it might be blessed to bring you glory and to bring us much good, even eternal life
itself.
We pray this confident in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
You may be seated.
How bad is it?
Are you bleeding?
Are you bleeding?
Are you even bleeding?
How many of you were asked this classic parental question growing up?
Or perhaps you were or still are the parent asking that question.
In some cases the query is a way to determine medical seriousness, but in other cases it’s
an attempt to frame the adolescent injury within a bigger picture.
Are you seriously injured or merely uncomfortable?
As a typical boy I was always more satisfied when I could find blood from an injury.
It helped justify and validate that stubbed toe or smashed finger.
At least it hurt because it was bleeding.
My dad’s common solution offered to me and my siblings who sat crying from a minor injury,
whether bloodless or not, was to facetiously suggest amputation.
A stubbed toe could be remedied by cutting off the foot or even leg.
Sometimes the proposed injury, proposed remedy was to injure an entirely different part of
the body so that it would eclipse or at least distract from the pain of the other part.
I don’t ever recall finding it amusing myself, but it does work for some kids.
But regardless, it did often distract me and my siblings long enough to realize that there
was more to life than the throbbing toe which was already starting to feel better.
But if my dad’s solution didn’t fix the problem, my mother would also be consulted.
My mom’s solution was to provide comfort and kisses which seemed to work just as well, if not better.
Brothers and sisters, let’s be honest for a second.
Nobody woke up here this morning hoping the preacher would talk about suffering.
We’d rather hear about blessing, favor, the good stuff.
But the writer of Hebrews doesn’t give us that option.
He walks right into the room, looks at a group of tired, tempted, wavering believers, looks
them in the eye and basically says, you haven’t bled yet, stop acting like the fight’s over.
That’s where we’re going today in Hebrews 12 verses 4 through 11.
And I warn you up front, this is tough love preaching.
The author of Hebrews isn’t coddling anyone, he’s putting our pain in perspective, our
complaints on mute, and God’s fatherly heart on full display.
We’re going to see three things in our passage.
Number one is tough love.
You and I haven’t resisted sin to the point of shedding our blood, so we haven’t fought
hard enough to quit.
Number two, discipline, not punishment.
The pain you’re feeling right now is not punishment, it is the loving discipline of a perfect father
who refuses to leave his kids immature and unholy.
And number three, God the Father knows best.
Because God is our Father, infinitely wiser, perfectly loving, eternally committed, He
always knows best, even when His training hurts.
The passage is going to confront us, to comfort us, and if we’ll let it change us.
Because here’s the bottom line even before we turn to the text, if you are in Christ,
every ounce of suffering that you will ever face is from the hand of a father who loves
you.
Too much to let you stay the way you are.
The pain that you hate is the love that you need.
So number one, tough love.
The author of Hebrews comes out swinging on our passage, verse four.
In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your
blood.
He’s not playing around and he’s not pulling punches.
You haven’t died yet.
You haven’t been physically maimed, so don’t complain.
Obviously the author has written this letter as we’ve already seen in previous chapters,
to address believers who are wavering in their resolve.
We just saw he just gave them the hall of faith in chapter 11, example after example
of Old Testament saints who hung on to God’s promises even when things looked bleak.
Yet the chapter concludes with a surprising observation that they still don’t possess
fully everything that God has promised because they’re waiting for God to give it to all
of us all together.
And then chapter 12 opens with the urgent call to look to Jesus as not only the prime
example of our faith, but as our source of life and our object of faith.
He endured the greatest suffering in all of history on our behalf and this should fuel
our faith and support a similar willingness to endure hardship in solidarity with him
since we are united with him by faith.
And that was the argument, but it was mostly implied.
And now the writer of Hebrews gets up in his readers faces.
How hard have you actually had to endure?
He just mentioned a few verses earlier in chapter 11, those who were tortured, refusing
to accept release so that they might rise again to a better life.
Others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment.
They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword.
The nature of faith is not that it does not require the shedding of blood.
Clearly others in history have resisted to the point of shedding their blood, but the
original audience had not yet been asked to make this sacrifice.
So the author is putting their pain into perspective.
One preacher from the 4th century named John Chrysanthemum says, what he means is this,
ye have not yet submitted to death.
Your loss has extended to money, to reputation, to being driven from place to place.
Christ, however, shed his blood for you.
While you have not done it for yourselves, he contended for the truth even unto death,
fighting for you, while ye have not yet entered upon dangers that threaten death.
This is something that we, Christians in the United States, share with the original audience.
I don’t know every one of your stories here, but I would guess that most of you like me
have not been required to shed your blood for our faith in Jesus Christ.
But before we go any further, we should also clarify what the author means in verse 4,
by your struggle against sin.
While the term sin is quite general, very likely he has a specific meaning in view.
The author’s chief concern all throughout this epistle has been that his audience not
fall away, turn back, apostatize, or throw away their confidence.
So the specific sin that he has in view would be that of renouncing the faith that you once
held.
And this becomes obvious with his statement that their resistance to sin hasn’t reached
the point of shedding blood.
Because while Jesus, he did command his disciples to gouge out eyes and lop off ears, and lop
off hands and feet if necessary to avoid sin, he was using hyperbole to emphasize the seriousness
which we should fight sin, not literally expecting the majority of Christians to physically maim
themselves.
So we shouldn’t think that the author of Hebrews is referring to any kind of self-mutilation
here.
Instead, it is a resistance to throwing in the towel, to giving up on faith, to renouncing
allegiance to Christ.
Picture fighters in a ring.
Hebrews is saying, don’t give up if your opponent hasn’t even drawn blood.
In fact, don’t give up at all.
Knock your opponent out.
Defeat sin through faith in Christ.
And this has implications for thinking about the resistance we encounter when sharing the
gospel.
I personally have a tendency to think that if telling others about my allegiance to Christ
is awkward or uncomfortable, I maybe shouldn’t do it.
But I think the author of Hebrews would ask me, would it kill you to tell them about what
Jesus has done for you?
Resistance shouldn’t be a surprise, and it shouldn’t be taken as a sign to give up.
I will also say that for myself I have found this verse to be helpful in a secondary sense,
to exhort me in fighting all types of sin.
Even when I’m not facing persecution, I face temptations to sin all the time.
And those temptations can be very strong sometimes.
Maybe you find yourself battling lust, or bitterness, or covetousness, or idolatry.
I’m often tempted to give up after a short fight.
But this verse is like a slap in the face.
In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your
blood.
How hard have you really tried?
Are you really fighting sin to win?
Or are you just doing enough to say you made an effort?
Why does it hurt?
That’s what I’m inclined to ask.
Look at verses 5 and 6.
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.
The pain has been making the original audience reconsider their loyalty to Christ.
Pain is a way of doing that.
When something hurts bad enough and goes on for long enough, it starts making us question
everything.
The author started out by reminding his audience they weren’t dying.
They weren’t even bleeding yet.
But the other way that he puts things into perspective is by reminding them that the
suffering that they’re experiencing is discipline and not punishment.
He quotes from Proverbs chapter 3, verses 11 and 12, which we read earlier in the service.
My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline, or be weary of his reproof.
For the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father, the son in whom he delights.
Discipline comes from a place of love, and its reason for being administered is entirely
beneficial.
That’s why Proverbs says to value, not disregard, the Lord’s discipline because it is given
exclusively to his children.
Which brings us to our second point, that this is discipline and not punishment.
The author of Hebrews reasons backwards to bring out an important implication in verses
7 and 8.
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, then you are illegitimate
children and not sons.
The presence of discipline in the lives of the original audience, he says, should be
comforting, rather than disconcerting.
Because it means that you are truly children of God.
The difficulties they are facing, though not yet physically dangerous, are still uncomfortable
and discouraging.
So the author of Hebrews says, you need to understand, this is not punishment for doing
something wrong.
This is the discipline of the Lord.
This suffering is not a sign of his rejection, but a sign that you belong to him.
You are a real child of God.
The Greek word translated discipline here is paideia, which is closely related to the
word for child, paidareon.
But the word paideia has broader meaning than just discipline.
It centers on the training that must be given to young children, all the way from discipline
to instruction.
Training and instruction are given even when a child has done nothing wrong.
The purpose of training is given for the improvement of the person being trained.
The goal of training is never to leave the person weaker or worse off than they were
before.
Many Christians miss this absolutely crucial distinction between punishment and discipline.
Those who don’t believe in God at all sometimes describe unpleasant happenstances to karma.
Everything from getting a flat tire or a wrong order at a drive-thru must be a result of
something they previously did wrong.
They speak of karma as a kind of cosmic punishment system that due to an impersonal law of cause
and effect mysteriously repays bad deeds and sometimes rewards good ones.
Believers don’t ascribe good or bad things to karma since they believe in a personal
sovereign God who governs everything that happens with perfect power and wisdom.
But there are still some Christians who live under a near constant dread of God’s judgment
and believe he primarily acts in their lives to punish them for their daily sins.
They will sometimes attribute a car breaking down, the loss of a job or a loved one, or
simply difficulty and disappointment in their lives to God’s retribution for their sin.
They might even live with the feeling that if they’re enjoying life too much, if things
are going too well, at any moment God is going to rip the rug out from under them.
This was the mistake that Job’s friends famously made and this is a misunderstanding of the
Gospel.
Romans 8 verse 1 famously says, there is therefore no condemnation or penalty for those who are
in Christ Jesus.
The very heart of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, took the full
penalty due for sin on behalf of those that put their trust in him.
If you are in Christ, he didn’t just pay for some of your sins or even most of your sins.
All of them.
It is an all or nothing deal.
So if you are a child of God, a trustor in Christ, you will never ever be punished for
your horrible, wicked, disgusting sins that deserve the eternal fires of hell.
Jesus took every drop of punishment, every second of God’s white hot wrath against sin
so that there is nothing left for you to experience.
This is crucial to understand and to remember because it means that the suffering that the
children of God experience is never punishment for sin.
God would be unjust to punish you for something that Jesus has already paid for.
Discipline is what God’s children receive but never punishment.
And this is not a distinction without a difference.
Discipline has deep significance for your daily life.
If you are a child of the sovereign God of the universe, there is nothing that can happen
in your life or to you that is outside of his control, including both pleasant and unpleasant,
comfortable and painful.
Of those things that come into your life that are painful, not a single one of them is punishment
for your sin.
Not a single one.
Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, you stand before God fully justified, not only innocent of
your sin but positively righteous before him.
And this means that every bit of suffering that you do experience is exclusively for
your benefit, it is purely training.
There is not one single bit of gratuitous or superfluous or retributive suffering that
you will taste in this life.
The suffering that you experience is from the Lord’s hand and it is entirely directed
to take you deeper into relationship with him.
We see this in verse 10.
The end of verse 10, he disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness.
Some people when they hear the Bible talk about becoming holy think it’s just about
keeping a whole bunch of rules.
Apparently, when I was young, quite young, I sternly asked my younger brother if he would
like to sit in a metal chair and be very, very, very, very, very good.
My brother replied, not that good.
I think many people, many of us would find ourselves responding the same way to the command
for holiness.
We might want God to make us a little better than we are, but maybe not that holy.
Some are inclined to read verse 10 as though the purpose of God’s discipline is merely
to make us behave.
But God’s holiness is not him keeping up with the rules that he made for himself.
His holiness is his absolutely glorious, unmatched, unblemished moral integrity and set apartness.
He’s not constrained by external rules.
He is absolutely free to do all of his holy will.
God’s holiness is what sets him apart from all creation and makes him the rightful object
of greatest desire and satisfaction.
And there is one way to have fellowship with this perfectly glorious and holy God.
You also must be holy.
As I’ve already mentioned, Jesus Christ died to give us peace with God through justification
so that we are declared righteous.
But without holiness, no one will have fellowship with God.
Praise God, Christ’s death does also secure our holiness as well.
We call it sanctification.
But it is not accomplished in an instant like the justification we receive.
Sanctification is a process by which, through suffering, the Holy Spirit conforms.
Not just our behavior, but our heart, our desires, what we love and what we hate into
what God loves and also hates.
The knowledge that God’s discipline is for the purpose of making us share his holiness
should make us marvel in awe and wonder.
The holy, holy, holy God desires so much that you be in fellowship with him,
that he is willing to go to such lengths to make you share his holiness.
He is sharing his holiness with us.
And that leads us to our final point.
Number three, God the Father knows best.
As we think about the purpose of discipline, we have laid out a contrast in our passage
between earthly and heavenly fathers.
The author of Hebrews argues from the lesser to the greater.
Look at verse nine.
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?
As the author of Hebrews seeks to garner trust in his audience in the Lord’s discipline,
he turns to the example of physical fathers.
We have all had fathers, and some of us are fathers, who have exercised discipline.
While I know that many children have not experienced wise and loving discipline from their fathers,
for the sake of his argument, the writer of Hebrews is assuming a wise and loving earthly father.
By God’s grace, there are many here who have experienced this.
The author of Hebrews asks his readers to imagine their own response to discipline from earthly fathers.
Godly fathers possess an unparalleled opportunity in their children’s lives for instruction, for correction, and discipline.
Children have a natural inclination to respect their fathers and trust their judgment,
at least and especially when they are young.
Despite the presence of original sin by God’s grace,
the majority of children are often submissive to loving discipline.
And rightly so, but if the wisest and most loving earthly father deserves respectful submission to his discipline, instruction, and training,
how much more so does God the father?
Now the phrase earthly fathers here literally reads in the Greek, fathers of our flesh,
which parallels with the phrase father of our spirits.
Because while it is possible to translate the phrase in verse 9 as the father of spirits,
a better translation is the father of our spirits.
Because the author is not merely speaking of God being in authority over or dwelling in the realm of spirits in general,
but emphasizing that he is caring for and training more than just our bodies.
He is the father of our spirits.
And then in verse 10 we see another contrast brought out between the earthly and heavenly fathers.
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.
The best earthly fathers do their best to train their children.
But as every parent knows, your window of opportunity is short and your own judgment is far from perfect.
Every good parent knows the pain of having made a bad judgment call in administering discipline.
And hopefully repenting and apologizing when appropriate.
To any parents fearing that apologetic repentance will undermine your authority
and respect from your children, rest assured it will only do the opposite.
The mistake in discipline is often obvious to your children.
So making clear that you understand and desire their forgiveness can do wonders to garner their respect.
But all in all, at the end of the day, earthly fathers have a limited view.
And they have their own sin clouding their best efforts to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
But this is not the case with the father of our spirits.
God the father is not limited by our brief childhoods.
He is our father for all of our lives.
He is also not limited by anything within himself.
He has no sin, no limited perspective, no lack of energy, no lack of wisdom.
He sees the end from the beginning and he knows you better than you know yourself.
This is true all the time.
God never has a single lapse of judgment or a miscalculation.
His purpose is to conform your heart, your will, your desires, your entire self into the image of his son, Jesus Christ.
This is important to remember because as the author reminds us in verse 11, God’s perfect loving discipline often hurts.
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.
Discipline is painful.
Even though as we saw earlier it is not punishment, this does not mean it is painless.
The Lord shapes and molds and trains his children through the difficult tool of suffering.
This suffering takes all shapes and sizes.
It can be both actual and potential loss.
It can be consequences for foolish actions.
It can be inexplicable cruelty from others.
It might be a health trial, the loss of a loved one.
Even simply a tumult of emotions which come seemingly out of nowhere.
As a child of God there is nothing that can come into your life apart from the Lord’s providential hand.
As Joseph famously told his brothers in Genesis chapter 50 verse 20,
As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.
There might be conflicting motivations from others from what comes into our lives,
but the constant that you can rest in is that God means it all for your good.
Your own greatest good, which means your deepest, fullest joy is God’s priority.
Because God is most glorified in you when you are most delighted, most satisfied in him.
And he will stop at nothing to procure your greatest satisfaction in him.
And that includes bringing suffering into your life.
If God is not punishing you for sin, what is he doing, allowing suffering in our lives?
Big picture, he’s conforming you to the image of Jesus.
That means he’s killing idols.
You might have an idol of home, of marriage, of comfort, of career, of children, of health, of status,
of intelligence, of wealth, or many other things.
God wants you to have good things, but idolatry is deadly.
And God loves you way too much to let you make an idol out of anything.
And he will not stop until your heart is completely his, until you share his holiness.
C.S. Lewis puts it this way in Mere Christianity.
Imagine yourself as a living house.
God comes in to rebuild that house.
At first, perhaps, you understand what he is doing.
He’s getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on.
And you knew those jobs needed doing, and so you are not surprised.
But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably.
It does not seem to make any sense.
What on earth is he up to?
The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of.
Throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.
You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage, but he is building a palace.
He intends to come and live in it himself.
The pain that you hate is the love you need.
Every trial that makes you gasp is the chisel of a father who is making you fit for a palace.
He is not punishing a criminal.
He is training a son or a daughter.
He is not venting wrath.
He is sharing his holiness.
And he will not stop because he will not stop loving you.
So stop scanning the horizon for an easier gospel.
There isn’t one.
Stop waiting for a season when following Jesus will feel like a perpetual spring breeze.
It won’t.
The same Jesus who endured the cross for the joy set before him now endures you through the furnace for the joy set before him,
conformed sons and daughters who will one day shine like him.
One day the training will be over.
The pain will cease.
The peaceful fruit of righteousness will ripen forever.
You will look back on every tear, every closed door, every night that you thought you could not go on.
And you will say with wonder, he did it all because he loved me.
He made me holy because he wanted me close.
Until that day endures a beloved child, run as one who has already been declared righteous in Christ,
and fight sin to the point of blood if God ever asks it.
Because your older brother already did, and he’s not ashamed to call you family.
The Lord disciplines the one he loves.
So take heart.
If it hurts, you are loved.
If it is hard, you’re his.
Amen.
Let’s pray.
In heaven, we thank you for this challenging word, but comforting word.
That you desire us to share your holiness.
That you, treating us like sons and daughters, would train us, discipline us for our good.
For Jesus, we ask that you would give us more holiness, more love for you.
We pray this in your own name, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Let’s turn and sing now, hymn 497, More Love to Thee, O Christ.
And let’s stand as we sing in response.
497.