Please turn in your Bibles to the book of Hebrews, chapter 12. And while you're turning, let me say that Cindy and I wanted to express our love to you all on Thanksgiving. We are so thankful to be a part of Trinity and your love for us and your TLC have been astounding and just what the doctor ordered. So we wanted you to know we didn't take you all for granted and thank you very much. These two messages, this morning and this evening, were part of me saying thank you. It's a series I did at my church previously. I'll be giving this series when I go up to Wisconsin later in the week. And to encourage the saints, because you all mean a lot to us. Is there anybody here who's over-encouraged? Is there anybody who's just too encouraged and needs someone to kind of slatten down and make their life more miserable? Okay. Most of us are not overly encouraged. And so these messages are very encouraging to me. and I wanted to pass it along to you. That should have given you enough time to find Hebrews 12. Let's read together what the Word of God says. 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 scourges 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 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. 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. Pursue peace with all men and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord." I'll stop here. This morning I spoke on God's strange minister of hard circumstances, and this evening I'm talking about God's strange minister of chastening. Why does God chasten his children? Now, this may be more obvious than some of the others, because we know as parents that if we don't discipline our children, good things don't happen. And so we need to be faithful parents and love them to death and thump them when they need it. But I don't think it is always clear to us that God as a father disciplines his children and to see discipline in a mature way as a blessing rather than a bad thing. Rarely do your children, maybe there's one story in this whole congregation, but I doubt if there's any child who's ever come back to the parents and said, you know, thank you for that really wicked spanking I got yesterday. You know, I needed that so much, and I'm thankful that I have parents who do things like this, and I want to grow up to be a mature adult. And then you fall over, and you have to be, have to use the defilibrator on you to revive you. I mean, you'd be so shocked to hear your child come back to you, because what does he say here? No discipline at the time seems joyful. And if there were children here, they'd all say, Amen, brother. But afterwards, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. I want to look at four things tonight. First of all, let's review some of God's ways in suffering. What are God's purposes in suffering? Number two, there's a ministry of chastening. When God chastens us, there's a ministry that he has purposely in mind. Third, what is the manner of his chastening? The ministry of chastening and then the manner. How does he go about chastening us? And finally, the message of chasing what what we need to hear. So let's jump into these four things. First of all, let's review God's ways and suffering. If we don't teach our children, if we don't remind ourselves that we live on a fallen planet on a sin marred planet on a contaminated planet, you know, the country is starting to raise awareness of the fact that there's this Ebola virus. And the media half hopes it becomes a big deal so they have something to report, but then they don't want it to be a big deal because they don't want to die. But they're trumpeting this Ebola thing, and people are afraid of what might happen. But everybody in the world is tested positive for sin. And not just positive, but positive plus plus plus, and we all have a bad case of it. And this is a world of suffering. If we don't teach our children, if we don't have a mindset that suffering is the norm on a fallen planet. I know we live in the richest nation in the history of the world. We live in nice houses and nice places. We purposely moved there because we didn't want to suffer living in a crummy part of the area. And so we've tried to limit as much suffering as possible. That's rational and fine. But to think when we live in a world that there shouldn't be suffering and suffering is abnormal, suffering is just a really out of left field kind of thing, that's not reality. And we're not helping our kids get ready for reality. Peter, for example, had to warn first century Christians not to be surprised by the suffering that they were undergoing. He said, you shouldn't be surprised by suffering. Well, why did he have to warn them? Well, apparently they'd come to some kind of notion that, well, maybe now that I'm a Christian, all the bad things will happen and I won't suffer. I know R.C. Sproul wrote a book in the 90s called Surprised by Suffering, and it begins with him sitting on a railroad track, and the front of the train he was on had plunged into the bay at Mobile Bay, because a barge had knocked out one of the support columns of the trestle, and he takes the train rather than fly, because he's scared of flying and dying. So he's on a train, and the train goes off the bridge into the Mobile Bay, and he's one of the few cars that doesn't. and three in the morning he's sitting on the tracks thinking about his life and surprised by suffering. I've done everything I can to avoid suffering and here I am out in the middle of nowhere. But he said so many Christians he knew were totally shocked that they would ever have to suffer. It's un-American, I tell you. It's un-American. We need to write our congressman. We shouldn't have to suffer. In fact, in 1986 I was in Nigeria ministering and sitting in this mosquito-plagued airport waiting for a flight out on an evening Man sitting next to me was a Nigerian national doctor, and he was on his way to Sweden for a doctor's convention, and talking to me, it was evident he'd been all over the world for doctor's conventions. And I said, what's your favorite place you've ever visited in the whole world? New York, Paris, London. Where? He goes, Disney World. I go, Disney World? He goes, well think about it, there's no crime, there's no disease, bad things don't happen, everybody's nice to you. That's the best place in the whole world. He wanted to live in a place where he would be surprised by suffering, because he was tired of what he'd seen in Nigeria. And he knew that Disney World was a place where you wouldn't see much of that. The Old Testament writer Asaph, in Psalm 73, is tired of suffering and looks at his non-Christian neighbors and wishes that he could live like them. He said, look at them. Their lives are easy. They're a bunch of fat cats. Things don't go wrong for them. Things go wrong for me. I shouldn't be pursuing holiness and worrying about it. Look what it gets me. A bunch of suffering. But for every true child of God, suffering is not only, and this will shock you, it's not only a life experience that we share in common with unbelievers, but the New Testament says that suffering is a special calling that God gives to his people. You go, I want to see the chapter and verse on this one. Turn in your Bibles to Philippians chapter 1, verse 29. It's a verse we've heard in Bible study in the morning. But we probably didn't claim the second part of the verse. What does Paul say? For it has been granted to you not only to believe, you believe because God graciously granted you to believe, but also to suffer for his namesake. God has called you to suffer. To be granted something is to be given something, to be appointed something. Yes, I've appointed, I've elected you, and now you're going to start believing, but I've also appointed you to suffering. It's part of our calling as believers. to suffer. Why do Christians suffer? Well, there's a couple of quick and easy remembrances. Number one, Christians suffer for the trial and testing of their faith. Is your faith real? Really? Well, you've heard the expression, when you squeeze the sponge, whatever's on the inside comes out. Let me squeeze you. Let God squeeze you and see what comes out. Is that a believer that I see there, or is that a professed believer who, when the suffering comes, They flee the premises and they don't want to have anything to do with God. Isn't one of the marks of the stony soil, in Mark's account of the four soils, that when persecution or suffering comes because of the Word, they evaporate, they give up. And so for the testing of your faith to make sure that genuine, God will let you suffer. And the illustration scripture uses, well, you've got all this ore, you've crushed it. Now you're going to put it in this big cauldron, you're going to heat it up, and we're going to bring the impurities to the top as slag, we're going to drain that off. And what's left is the pure gold with the pure silver, the testing of your faith. And so one of the reasons the scripture says is to see if it's real. When you see a professing Christian going through a severe trial, you can see whether or not their professional faith is real and genuine. And I know people who profess Christ until they run up against their first big problem, and then they go, I didn't sign up for this, and they walk away. But a Christian who's gone to the Lord's school of testing has a more mature faith, a stress-tested faith. The second reason why Christians suffer is because you want to live a holy life, and you live in an unholy world. For example, Jesus was the truth incarnate, the light of the world, and how was he treated? Has it ever seemed shocking to you that Jesus was treated so bad? Now, sometimes you may be naive when you're at work, and people know you're a Christian, and sometimes some people just give you a hard time just because you're a Christian. You haven't done anything wrong. In fact, you're trying to do good things. don't like you for it. Well, the Bible says that because you want to be holy and you live in an unholy world, you're gonna catch it. Jesus told his followers in John 15, 18, if the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. But you're not of the world. But I chose you out of the world. Therefore, the world hates you. That helped me as a young Christian in college because I changed after I became a Christian. My life changed radically. And I purposed that I would start being nice, rather than whoever I'd been before. And people didn't like me being nice. They liked me back the old way. They liked me living in sin with them. They didn't like me pursuing holiness. I got grief, not because I was doing bad things, but because I wanted to do good things. In fact, there was a promise I came across, and I'll bet no one in this room has claimed this promise. Let's see, this is a promise. Paul said to Timothy, 2 Timothy 3.12, all who want to live godly lives in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. Does anybody ever claim that? I want that promise in my life. I demand that that promise be worked out. If you want to live a holy life, you will suffer persecution. Why? Because the darkness hates the light. and will not come to the light. And that was so insightful when I saw those verses go, oh, that's why these people are being mean to me or don't like me anymore. I'm less obnoxious than I used to be, but I'm getting more grief because I'm not of them anymore. I'm not going the same direction they're going. The reason that some professing Christians do not live a godly, God-centered life is they want to avoid suffering. If you mean I've got to run my flag up, if I wanted to show the world that I'm a Christian, I could catch it for being a Christian. So I'm going to be a secret service Christian. Nobody's quite sure. I'm going to be a stealth Christian. Nobody's quite sure what I am. God won't take that. In this fallen world, it's alright to be a little bit religious, but if you become too much like Jesus, they will hate you. Some Christians suffer because they're disobedient and rebellious to God as their father. A third reason why some Christians suffer is that they're rebellious and disobedient. So God chastens them rather than let them continue in their stubborn, stiff-necked, rebellious ways. God is not a sugar-daddy father. He's not, oh, that's okay. Like, I see now grandfather on the front porch rocking a rocking chair while the two grandsons are beating each other silly with a baseball bat and a John Deere tractor that they picked up and they're hitting each other. And boys will be boys. Isn't that fun? And they're just kind of don't care, don't have the energy to get up out of the rocker. God doesn't really care what you do. Not true. Not true. If you read the Bible, God disciplines his children and he won't let you stay a rebel. For example, Jonah knew that he brought his hard times and perilous journey on himself. When he's on board the ship and there's this terrible storm and the sailors, who were superstitious, but had a, since there is a God out there, why is this bad stuff happening to us? Maybe there's something we've done. Let's look around and see if there's something we can find that we maybe, one of the gods has ticked off at us and we need to find out what it is and deal with it. And Jonah goes, um, me. And he tells the story and they look at each other and they're like, we'll get rid of you and we'll avoid this. But Jonah knew exactly why this terrible thing had come upon all of them is because God was chastening him. God chastens and disciplines his true children because only he as the father has the right to do so. For example, there's a verse in Deuteronomy. Know that in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you. If you're a child of God, you will be disciplined. I will be disciplined. No one evades it. God trains his children to be godly and holy, and part of that training involves discipline, chastening. To be godly means that you're God-centered. Before you were a Christian, you were self-centered. There was that unholy trinity, me, myself, and I, and we ran our little universe. And then when you become a Christian, you find out there's a holy trinity, and the world doesn't revolve around you and your plans and your desires. And so for the first time in your life you become God-centered, where before you had been self-centered. And to be holy, which is not the same as to be godly, to be godly is to be to be God-centered, to be holy, is to say, I want to have the moral character of Jesus Christ. I want to be obedient to the commandments of God. I want to be pleasing to God in all aspects of my life. Before we were converted, did you ever think about being holy? I never gave it a thought. Didn't think about sin. Didn't think about disobedience to God's commandments. Never thought about that stuff. Never thought about it. We could have cared less about disobeying God. We did what we wanted to do. When your eyes open in the morning, you start thinking about, what do I want to do today? What kinds of things do I want to get done today? As opposed to, there is a God, He created me, He owns me by right, and I'm to live for Him. But after you're converted, God implants a new nature that has new desires, and January 2nd, 1969. January 1st I had become a Christian, so January 2nd was the first day that my eyes opened up as a Christian. And I knew that God was there. I knew that everything was different. I couldn't live the way I'd been living up until the day before, because I was now God's, and I belonged to Him, and I needed to live my life for Him. It wasn't about how I used to live my life for myself. professing Christians who are not godly or God-centered and not holy, that means they're careless about God's ways and God's laws, find themselves in an experience of chastening and discipline by their Heavenly Father. So let's look now at the ministry of chastening and discipline. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 10. For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, referring to our parents, but he disciplines us for our good, so that we may share his holiness. God has a reason and a purpose in his discipline for us. He says, you will be like me. You know, have you ever seen some pictures of some rich families? I've never seen poor families have this picture, you know, poor families go to pennies, rich people go to the other place to get your family pictures taken. And some families actually have all the men have like blazers on and they have a crest or something like that. And the girls all have Those haven't been our pictures. There's nothing wrong with that if you have those kind of pictures. More power to you. But those haven't been my pictures. But did you know in God's family pictures, all the men are wearing blazers and all the women are wearing blazers, too. And there's a family crest that says, Holiness unto the Lord. We are called to be holy. If you don't want to be holy, you don't want to be a member of God's family. Holiness is the family likeness to Christ. And So, God says, I want you to be holy, and if you don't want to be holy, then we're going to have to deal with this. If you really have a new nature, if God really caused you to be born again, then you, however staggeringly or intermittently you might be trying to pursue holiness, you will be. But if you say, no, I've just reached a point where I'm stuck and I'm not going to do this, the Lord says, I'm sorry. I have no permanent rebels in my family. to use an old-fashioned word, there are no juvenile delinquents in God's house. He said, I can deal with you. Now, sometimes you take on a two-year-old. The two-year-old goes, I'm as tough as you are, and I'll take you on. You may be 6'5", and I'm 2'4", but I have a strong will, and we're going to have this out. And they learn that they're 2'4", they're a kid, and they lose. But adults are like small children at times, that God's not going to make me do what I don't want to do. And he said, I could smash you, but I'm not. I can just change your heart and make you broken-hearted. In fact, one way that God has of breaking your heart is being nice to you when you know he should spank your fanny off. You know, I deserve to be really whack good, and he's being merciful and kind to me. What a wretch I am. But other times he will spank you until you can't sit down for six months. Not that I would ever know about that experience, but I've heard of that situation. Earthly fathers do it for a short time as seems best to them. But he disciplines us for our good. Our earthly fathers did their best. I loved my dad. My dad became a Christian after I did through me. But he was my leader, leader of my family. And he only lived a few more years with his mind before he came down with Alzheimer's. And he lived for Christ in the few years that he had before he came down with Alzheimer's. And I knew that he loved me and he did the best he knew how. His father had died in the great influenza outbreak early in the 20th century. And so, as the youngest child in his family at age six, that was when his father died, he had no father. He was raised by his mom and his older siblings. But he was a good dad. I respected him. I feared him. I loved him. He did the best he knew how. He didn't know a lot, but he picked up things from the culture, picked up things from his older siblings and his mom. picked up things from the army. Those weren't my favorite things, but anyway, he picked up things and he tried to be a dad and I'm thankful for that. But he wasn't a perfect dad. God is a perfect father to his children and he will perfectly discipline us when we need it. As a dad, haven't you ever had to apologize to your children and said, you know, I was really angry when I disciplined you and I disciplined you more out of anger than I did for the right way. Would you forgive me? I didn't collect all the data, and you didn't do it. Your brother here, your sister did it. I thank you for it, and please forgive me. I mean, we've all blown it as fathers. God never blows it. He never has to come back and say, you know how it's kind of hard on you? I didn't have all the information. Forgive me. He never makes mistakes, but always chastens us for a good. Let's look at three ways in which God chastens us. The ministry of chastening in our life. I mentioned earlier, God chases us to prove our sonship. This is a verse seven and eight. 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, scary idea, if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, all believers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. One of the great observable facts of life is that fathers only discipline their own children. I have not gone around and spanked any of the kids in this church, and not even my grandchildren, because I'm not their father. I'm tempted at times, but I've not spanked any children that weren't my own. And God only disciplines His children. And if you are without discipline, then that should be a scary wake-up call that you're not a believer at all, because He's just left you alone, and you're not one of His. God's Word says in Proverbs that if a father fails to discipline his son, it's because he hates that son. He wants him to fail. God will love all of his true children, and so he chastens them so they will grow up to be godly and holy and that they'll make it to heaven. Like I said, there are no permanent rebels, no permanent hardheads, no permanent juvenile delinquents in God's family. As they say in the world, I'm a cop in attitude for a while, but the Lord has his ways of straightening out attitudes and straightening out conduct and we will deal with this. If you see a professing Christian who's not walking in close fellowship with Jesus Christ, if that person is a real Christian, God will discipline them and chasten them until they are tenderhearted, teachable, and compliant. If God never chastens the professing Christian who is living a woefully rebellious and careless life, then you know they're not a real Christian at all. They do not belong to God the Father, so He doesn't chasten those. because they're not his own. Years ago I walked into a place of business and the man who owned it was a member of my congregation and he was involved in an adulterous affair. and he was caught in it, and I came by and found him at his work. He was kind of evading me, so I just went and found him, and I sat down in a booth. Actually, we sat down out back in the back of a pickup truck, and I said, you got two options, and neither of them are great. If you are a believer, because of what you're doing, and he was doing some embezzling money from his company, lying to employees, professing to be a Christian but openly living a double life before employees. I said, if you're a believer, God's going to spank your fanny off. I would really doubt that I were you. Although if you're not a believer, then your alternative is worse because you're still on your way to hell. But those are your two options. You either have to repent and pray God will be merciful in this discipline, or you're going to go to hell. Those are your options. You can't live like you're living and profess to be a Christian and be acceptable to God. And God graciously worked in his life, and he did repent. And his repentance was huge. And the consequences were big, but his repentance was huge, and God drew so close to that man that for a period of months afterward, if you want to have a quiet time, I'll just go stand next to Joe, and he has so spiritual mind that hopefully someone would watch over him for me, and I would have the blessing that God gave him. God loves the repenting sinner. The repenting sinner feels so guilty, so unworthy, so, oh, God doesn't want to have anything to do with me. But Psalm 51, 16 and 17 says, The sacrifices that God delights in are a broken and contrite heart. And a broken and contrite heart he will not despise. In fact, he's saying just the opposite. He comes close to the broken and contrite heart. He gets right up next to the broken and contrite heart. The broken and contrite heart feels like God wants nothing to do with me. I'm such a wicked person. Look at how I've acted. Look how I've offended God and hurt others. You open your eyes and God is right there. He draws close to the repenting sinner, the broken and contrite sinner. Well, he did repents, but he had to realize that his options were to repent and be chastened, and he was. He had big consequences. But he worked through all of them, and he's still walking with the Lord thirty years later. So to prove your sonship, to prove that you really are a member of God's family, God will take you to discipline. Also, God's chastening is to purge you from your remaining sins. Now, I don't know about you, but each of us has pet sins. You didn't really call it by God's name. You kind of come up with a better name for it. I'm not a liar. I just don't tell the truth as often as I should. That's a liar. Anyway, I'm not accusing you all of being liars, but let's take that. Lord, can I keep this? If I give it a bath and spray it with Chanel and put a pink ribbon around its neck and call it Fifi and I keep it only in the backyard so it doesn't get out of control and bite anybody, can I keep my pets in? And God says, no. I want you to deal with this. And each of us has our pet sins. They're not pets that you sit there and stroke it, but you avoid dealing with it. You give it a space. You don't really come to death. Come to grips with it and do the biblical thing. The manly thing is to kill it. Not to spray it with Chanel and call it by another name, but to kill it. And so we have our pet sins. And so God chastens us to purchase from our remaining sins versus 10 and 11. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful, yet to those who have been trained by it, afterward it yields a peaceful fruit of righteousness. Jonah was chastened with a great storm, then swallowed by a great fish. You know, the storm would get my attention, and then he's swallowed by a great fish, that would get your attention, and then he's dying or brought near to death for three days. I used to think he simply was close to death in the belly of the whale, but since he's compared to Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ was not just in the earth, but Jesus Christ was dead for three days. And I'm suspecting that Jonah was dead for three days, too, but that's not a hill to die on doctrinally. The point was, is that Jonah was going to be an obedient prophet, even if it killed him, and it did kill him, and when God revived him, brought him... Okay, well, on to Nineveh. I'm going to do this. He put to death what he thought, and what he wanted to do, and what he didn't want to do, and I'm going to now do what I didn't want to do before. I didn't want to go to Nineveh because I didn't care if those people died and they all went to hell, because I hate the Assyrians, and I hate their capital, Nineveh, and I hope all those people die and go to hell. Not all the prophets of the Bible were loving like you, or big-hearted like you. Some of them were nationalistic, cared only about their people, didn't care about other people. So God says, I will chasten you to purge your remaining sins that you don't want to deal with. And God's chastening is to promote our sanctification. Again, at verse 10, that for they disciplined us for a short time, as seemed best to them, But that means your parents only got you for, what, 18 years, more or less? They disciplined us for a short time, it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so we may share His holiness. The willful, hard-headed, stubborn Christian is going to change their will, and they will become humble, and contrite, and teachable. Like I said, God has no permanent hard heads, no permanent rebels, no permanent juvenile delinquents. You say, well, I'm kind of an edgy Christian. You know, I like to live on the edge. I do my own thing. I don't always play by the rules. I do what I want, when I want, how I want. And when God is through with you, you'll be sweet and humble and pliable, because God will chasten you until you get your edginess out of your life. Until you get that attitude that you have dealt with, until you get that stubborn rebellious streak mortified, God will deal with you. Here's a question, I'm looking at my own notes, and I was really convicted by my own notes. These are messages I gave six, eight years ago, maybe, I don't remember, but I was looking at this one line. Do I ever see Jesus Christ acting in the Gospels like I do? Oops. There's areas of my life I can't imagine my Lord ever being like that. And if I'm to be conformed to his image, what does that say about where I am? What needs to be dealt with? What are some of God's methods of chastening? If God is going to chasten us as a father, what are some of his methods? There are three methods that are used here in the text about how he chastens and disciplines. In verse 5 and 6, it says, Have you 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 scourges every son whom he receives. Do not be weary when reproved by him, but being chastened by him, to be rebuked and corrected. Sometimes the Lord can just give us a sharp rebuke. You wandered into the sanctuary, and that Brandon or that mean Steve Martin was preaching on something, and it's just like, I just felt so convicted, so rotten, You know, the Bible being convicted in the heart is like being stabbed in the heart or pricking against the goads is a phrase used in the King James. But in many countries that don't have cattle, electric cattle prods and other things, they would just sharpen the end of a long stick. And if this oxen wasn't moving, just give it a jab in the rear haunches and get along a little doggie and move it. And so they wouldn't like that. And they'd kick their big back legs back to try to remove That thing pricking them, pricking against the goads, is what Paul described as the situation he had been in for some time as being under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and God was pricking his heart, look what you're like. So God can rebuke us, and he can correct us and put his finger on exactly what's wrong. It may be your pastor preaching the word to you, a friend may say something, you may overhear something, you may be just driving quietly and the Spirit of God brings some things to mind, and you know that you're being dealt with. Did you think of times when God has clearly spoken to you by his word, pricking your heart and making you feel the wrongs of an action or an attitude? I know that. I've had that. If you're a Christian, I believe you have too. Now, what happens if you don't respond to stage one? God goes, well, nobody's perfect. Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. I'll just let live and let live. Well, that's a matter of things up versus six. Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord for the Lord disciplines everyone who receives. Discipline is repeated twice a year. There's various things of discipline. He can inflict penalties upon us for a willful sinning. He can keep on correcting and piling on the pain until we let go of the sin. He can make our life miserable. This is how many laps around Sinai do you really want? You know, I said football coaches always give you laps for punishment. Well, if God was the cosmic football coach, how many laps around Sinai do you want, son, before you're going to deal with this? When will you submit with a childlike attitude? And God can make our life very painful. Now, as I was thinking about it today, I think we know, have some sense of when we're under the Lord's chastening hand. He's not playing red light, green light, or hot and cold with us when we're trying to figure out, is this God chastening me or not? Sometimes there are some people who their knee-jerk response to all suffering is, God must be chastening. But that's not true. Not every suffering we endure is for chastening for something we've done wrong. But if you have done something wrong, and God chastens you, I think that you have an innate sense given by the Spirit that you begin to put two and two together, that I'm being punished because I'm not dealing with this. Those of us who have made it through many years in the Christian life would never have made it this far if God had not faithfully chastened and disciplined us all along the years. I spent eight years in my first pastorate learning the lesson. The Lord said, OK, I want you to bend over the bed and I'm going to spank you. And I don't want you to yell and cry out. I don't want you to put your hands back and flail away for the wooden spoon. I want you to take it. Now, he didn't really use the spoon. I didn't really have a bed. But I had a situation that didn't change for eight years. He says, I'm going to chase you and you're going to deal with this and you're going to take it like a man. You're not going to say anything. You're not going to defend yourself. You're just going to take it and trust in me. And the Lord says, you can do this. And because that was particularly quick, it only took me eight years to figure this out. OK, another lap around Sinai. Let's try this again. You will learn this lesson. But there's another way to, I think, in verse six. And this is a scary part. The Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. Now, the King James uses the word scourge. He scourges everyone whom he receives. If you will not listen to God's fatherly rebukes and reproofs, if you will not listen to his fatherly discipline, if you don't hear and receive the penalties that he's trying to inflict upon you, then he picks up a scourge. a small cat on nine tails and it takes a step behind the which is we have some serious work to do. Are you saying that God actually uses the rod of chastening the scourge of circumstances or some other serious act on his part to break our willful sinning? Yes. He will hurt you if that's what it takes. Why? Because sometimes remaining sin has such a hold on us and we have such a hold on it. I will not let go of this. The Lord says, yes you will. No I won't. So it starts ratcheting up. The Lord says, how high a pain do you want to go before you finally let go of this? I can play this game better than you can. And so he takes the scourge to us and finally, finally, For perhaps the first time, this sin doesn't look so pleasant, doesn't look so excusable, doesn't look so easily rationalized, rationalizable. It just looks like sin. It's been displeasing to my father, and I've held on to my sin, and he's making me let go. Praise his name. 1 Corinthians 10, 8-10. We must not indulge in sexual immorality, as some of them did, and 23,000 fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now, these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Read your Old Testament, look at how they got chastened, learn your lessons. You know, have you ever played golf or even watched golf? There's a phrase that's used in golf that's really important in life. You have a short putt, and this other man has a longer putt, so the longer person has the farthest distance to the hole goes first, but his line is going to go exactly where your line is, but you had to move your ball so he could putt. And he says, you can go to school on his putt. I watched what happened to his putt, and now when I put my ball down and putt, I can learn from what he did and make any necessary corrections to get it right. God saying, go to school on situations where you can see chastening and learn your lesson rather than have to go behind the woodshed and learn it personally. You know, it's a really hard-headed person who won't learn by watching others only have to learn by getting it on the backside themselves. 1 Corinthians 10, 1 Corinthians 11, 29 to 31 and some of the Corinthians Christians have their lives prematurely cut short Because God is not going to put up with them taking communion in such an abominable fashion. They were gluttonous, they pigged out at the agape feast, they got drunk with the wine that they drank at the agape feast, and they would have communion afterwards, they would stagger in here, drunk, taking the Lord's Supper. Or ghosts. You know, a bunch of you have been sick, and a couple of you all died, because you wouldn't get it in your thick skull, for this is an abomination, and you wouldn't stop sinning. Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 were struck dead for their hypocrisy in lying to the Holy Spirit. Now, we can make two big mistakes when it comes to the chastening of the Lord. The first one in our text is in verse 5, it says, My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord. What does it mean to regard something lightly? No big deal. God's not that... The God I like to think about is not Well, the God of the Bible says he's going to do what he says he was going to do. And if I take it lightly, if I don't give it much attention, if I don't seriously consider it and don't seriously engage with it, that's taking it lightly. I'm afraid so much of what American Christians do is they take the idea of the discipline of the Lord lightly. Those whom he loves, he chastens. If you're without chastening, you're not his. There's a story of a father who took his son with him whenever he would go visit some mutual friends. And this son, this particular time, was just acting terribly. His table manners were terrible. He was interrupting. He was rude. He was not playing well with the toys in that person's house and everything like this. And the homeowners were trying to be gracious, but the kid was just acting obnoxious. Finally, the father stood up, took his son by the hand and said, Son, I've tried every way I know to make you behave, and you are a dishonor to our family. Get up. I'm taking you home. And there have been Christians whose lives were shortened because God said, you are dishonoring the family of God, I'm taking you home now, meaning to heaven. I'm shortening your life prematurely, like the Christians in Corinth, because they were acting in an abominable fashion. To protect his name, he will take the life of a consistently rebellious Christian if it has to come to that. A second way we can mistake and not really deal rightly with the chastening of the Lord is in 5C. Nor faint when you're reproved by Him. You know, some of us are really good. Here comes Dad with the belt or this fainting spoon. I'm really sorry. Oh, you don't know how sorry I really am. I'm really sorry. You don't have to do this. I'm really sorry. And particularly if they see the other sibling gets punished first and they're really sorry. And we don't like discipline. We don't understand that we act like children. Children don't understand spanking. They think we're part sadists, that we get off on spanking them, and that's not true. We get off on disciplining them, that's not true. But they respond very immaturely to discipline. We as adults can do the same thing. And so what happens is we can faint, so to speak. We can act like this is overwhelming. You're being so cruel and tough on me. God's a perfect father. He would never be too hard on you, and he would never give you something to do that you couldn't do. You need to repent. Oh, this is terrible. Oh, lighten up. Deal with it. Become a man. Become a woman. Deal with your sin. to faith is to act like this is just overwhelmingly and possibly hard. Now, sin will energize you to sin, but God will energize you to repent. And sometimes repentance is hard. Sometimes repentance is such that it's like, oh man, I've got to do what? And I've gone with people. I remember repenting of things I had to deal with, and I've taken other people to repent of things. This girl came to me at a conference and She said, after the conference, she said, I'm part of two other girls in a shoplifting group, and we shoplift most days after school. And so I took her downtown to Noblesville, Indiana. I was living in the north suburbs of Indianapolis, and took her to Noblesville, Indiana. Okay, what are the stores? Because she wanted to make it right. So she saved up her money, and she knew what she had stolen, and we went to the stores. The store managers and the people we dealt with were shocked that here was a person wanting to make restitution and confessing that they had stole these things. How could she be right with the Lord and not make restitution? But that's painful, that's embarrassing, that could be costly, that could be a lot of things. Well, I'd rather be right with the Lord and lose these other things than keep these other things and not be right with the Lord. So her repentance was hard. But she didn't faint. And God blessed her tremendously. God blessed that girl tremendously. What's the message of chastening? Verse 5. First of all, there's a message of comfort here. The Lord disciplines the one he loves. In a certain way, you can take great comfort when God disciplines you and says, it's because I love you, son. If you weren't my son, I would just leave you alone. My daughter, if you weren't my daughter, I would just leave you alone. But you are my beloved child, and this chasing is a mark of my father love for you. It's a sign of belonging, a sign of acceptance. Undisciplined, unloved children are tremendously insecure. Undisciplined, unloved children are tremendously insecure. They never know where they stand with their father. It's a great comfort to know that you are God's child, because He's treating you, and disciplining you in this case, as His child. I can remember the day, like it was yesterday, a man calls me up and he's crying on the phone. It was one of the men in our church, a businessman. He said, so-and-so, what's up? I got fired today. OK? What's up? And he said, well, I'm just so thankful to the Lord because My life has not been right for a couple of years, and a week ago, a couple of days ago, I remember pulling up and coming home from work, and I checked the mail in the mailbox. There was my wife and kids up by the house. And I thought to myself, if I'm God's child, He should be chastening me for how I've been acting. And nothing was happening, and I was afraid I wasn't God's child. And I prayed that if I was His child, that He would chasten me. And I lost my job today! So you have to, what kind of psyche do you have? That's great. How do you rejoice with those who rejoice and grieve with those who grieve? Now, a couple of days later, I don't have a job. Okay, well, I can deal with this, but first things first. And God did get his attention by chasing him. He was the number two man in his whole division. And they decided that to save money, they'd let him go and promote somebody who they could get a lot cheaper from this other person. There was no rational reason other than somebody at the top wanted to save money, so he was let go. He later got a new job, a better job, a far better job. But he was rejoicing because he said, you know, God, if you don't chasten me, I know I've been rebellious and disobedient. If you don't chasten me, that means I'm not yours. And he had enough spiritual maturity to recognize no discipline, no sonship. The scalpel that cuts us so deep is held by the surgeon who is also our father. Another message of chastening is maturity. Verse 11. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant. And here's some thunder to just punctuate that. Is there anybody here who, I guess you'd call you a masochist, anybody here who likes punishment, who likes suffering? Okay, most of us don't. All discipline seems painful rather than pleasant. What would you call that? The understatement of the century? But later, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. I'm training my sons, I'm training my daughters. They will be Christ-like. As small children, we can't stand any pain or any discomfort. Later, we grow to understand that some pain is a part of life, and we can see good things that come out of certain kinds of pains. What athletic coach didn't say, no pain, no gain? You must exert your muscles to the point where they hurt in order for them to grow. In the 1980s, there was a man I came to really respect. His name was Dr. Paul Brand. He was the director of the leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana. The United States used to have two leprosariums, places where lepers would go. They had one in Hawaii, because there are lepers in Hawaii, and there's one in Louisiana, because leprosy is endemic in the soil there. It was only a few years ago that you were told not to eat armadillos. Why? Because they grub around, and they originally come from that part of the country, and armadillos carry leprosy, and so you don't want to eat a raw armadillo. Well, Dr. Paul Brand studied leprosy. He'd been a doctor in India for many years and dealt with it. And leprosy is not what you think. It's not a disease that causes parts of your body to rot and fall off, like your fingertips or your nose or extremities. He says it's a disease where your nerve endings die and you can't feel anything. So you're doing something with a fire and you drop your stick in the fire and you reach down the fire and pull it out because your hand doesn't feel that your hand is being cooked. A man fell asleep and his hand fell against a kerosene lamp and he woke up to the smell of his own flesh, the smoke of his own flesh charred. A man's using a rake to rake some leaves, and there's a splinter, and he doesn't realize until he sees the blood running down the rake that he's cut his hand, and it's gushing out. They can't feel things. They bump things, and they start losing extremities because they are injuring themselves and don't feel it. He says pain is a gift from God, and if you don't have pain, your life is going to be seriously in jeopardy. And so, superintending the pain is what we need to learn, and true leprosy is a disease that you can't feel things. And God says, I want you to feel pain, and pain is a good thing, and pain stops you from doing worse things. And so, there's a message there. Finally, chastening has a message of warning, and I think I've touched on that. We have examples from nature in the Old Testament. To put it bluntly, we can't live like hell and think we're going to heaven. If you know a person who's a professing Christian and they live an out-of-bounds, out-of-control, ungodly, unbiblical life, then they're in a very scary place. They're a rebel and they're not really God's son. If I'm convicted by these words, then the Bible says here in this passage, therefore, lift up your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees Act like a man, act like a mature woman. Take yourself and say, look, I need to deal with these things. I can't, oh, this is really hard, I'm going to faint. Or, eh, no big deal. God wouldn't do that. Those are both wrong answers. The right answer is grab a hold of yourself. Take hold of yourself and start repenting. The number one item on your to-do list for today and every day should be, be holy. Number two. Go back to number one. My job description is to be holy. It's not to be successful, it's not to be rich, it's not even to be happy, it's to be holy. A byproduct of holiness is spiritual happiness. But holiness and joy is different from happiness as the world conceives of it. Make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may be put out of joint but rather healed. Clear the way ahead, stop making excuses, come up with a plan to deal with the sins in your life that God's been convicting you of and you haven't dealt with. Thorough repentance clears the way to a walk with Christ again. You know, sometimes the weeds that we need to deal with in our life, we just need a weed whacker. But other times, we need to get the bush hog out and just go over these things. Oh man, I've let some of these things become huge. Make your way clear again. Verse 15. Without holiness, no one will see the Lord. I was a Christian several years, even taught on this verse and had it wrong. I was so much involved in evangelism, I thought the verse was saying, if I'm not holy, people aren't going to see the Lord in me. It's kind of true, but it's not what the verse is saying. The verse is saying, if I'm not holy, I'm not going to see the Lord. I'm not going to heaven. I'm deceived. There's a verse in Deuteronomy that I thought about preaching on sometime, but God hasn't led me to the right time. But you're aware that in verse 15, it says, in this passage here, it says, Beware that no bitter root comes out from among you. And that's an unfortunate translation. All the translations do that. But there's a reference in your margin that says, Look back at Deuteronomy chapter 29. So you go to Deuteronomy 29, and what's the reference? It's not a bitter root, or root of bitterness, I should say. Beware a root of bitterness. It's this, there is some fake believer in your midst who professes to be a believer, and they kind of sort of know they're not a believer, but they say, I'm just going to fly under the radar, and no one's going to catch me, and I can just live the way I want to live, but enjoy the accompaniment of Christians and their lifestyles. God says, I know who you are, and you're not going to fake me out, even though you may fake out your peers, and I'm going to deal with you because you will pollute other people. You are a root that has a bitter fruit. And that's the reference in chapter 12 of Hebrews. It's not, beware of being a bitter person. No, it's, beware of being a fake Christian who's not really a real believer, and you will, the overflow of your life will pollute other people. Esau was one of the twin sons of Isaac, but he despised his privileges of a relationship with God and being a believer, and he sold his birthright for sensual gratification. One simple hot meal. Later, he had a change of heart about the value of his birthright, but no change of heart about God and the value of having a relationship with Him. He couldn't bring himself to repent, though he wept bitterly, but he couldn't bring himself to repent. To use John Bunyan's description from Pilgrim's Progress, he was the man in the iron cage. I know I've done wrong, but I can't make myself repent. That's a scary place to be. Final note of clarity that I've done. God does not punish or chasten others for my sins, although sometimes, as the head of a household, other people may have to pay the freight of some of your activities, or I may have to pay the freight of my activities, because I've done something that may affect our whole household for a while. But He's not punishing them or chastening them. He may be testing them. They may have to follow us. But He's not punishing or chastening them. He may be punishing or chastening me. Well, what about Job's children? You know, when God let Satan attack Job, his ten children were killed when a tornado hit their house and they were all killed. Well, first of all, Job's children were not killed because they were being chastened. Job was the one was not being chastened according to the Scripture. I've just read through Job. He was being tested. He wasn't being chastened. God rags on. He's the most righteous man on planet Earth at this time. You're not going to find anybody better than Job. Satan goes, let me at him skin for skin. You let me do to him what I want to and he'll curse you to your face. He believes in the prosperity gospel. You cannot give God. You follow God and he'll treat you right. That's the only reason he's following you. You take the stuff away, he'll curse you to your face. God says, I'll take that debt. Thank you. All these things happen. He was not being chastened. He was being tested. And God was testing Mrs. Job, too. She did not do too well. God can take any of his creation back to himself when he wants to. You know, I don't have a right to be 95. I don't have a right to be 67. I'm 66. But I don't have a right to be 67. God can take me when he wants to. The potter can do with the clay what he wants, because what he wants is right, even if I don't understand it. If Job's children were believers, then they had an early promotion to glory. They were all married and had families. My adult children get killed in one fell swoop. I thought they'd all outlive me. I lived longer than they did. Was God being unfair to them? I don't know that he promised them long lives. And if they were believers, they got to be promoted early. If they weren't believers, they had less time to live than they thought. God's time for them on planet Earth was over. I think there's a lot of encouragement, but there's also a lot of sober reality in this passage. Chastening is a tough thing. It's because we're doing something wrong and we don't want to deal with it, so God has to chasten us. But I think there's much encouragement here that we can glean from this, and we can profit from it, and we can be holy men and women. Let's pray. Father, as guilty sinners, which of us don't feel under the pile, or don't feel rebuked by this passage unchastening. I have never felt the back of your hand. You've never gone off on me. You've never gone off on anyone here. No one here has ever felt the back of your hand. We have never been treated as our sins deserve. We have always been treated graciously and patiently through Christ. And if you had had to use hard circumstances in our life, it's because We brought it on ourselves. We wouldn't listen to you. We wouldn't submit to the pinpricks. We wouldn't submit to the goads being stabbed into our heart. And so you had to use something more severe. Father, I pray for my brothers and sisters and myself that we would be children who love you, who love you more than we love our remaining sins, that we would learn to drop them like a hot rock and flee to Christ, that you would make us holy and do whatever you have to do to take us to heaven. Make us like your son. May we all be wearing the family crest of holiness in that picture and glory. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.