The Father’s Discipline (Part 1 of 2)

When we commit ourselves to Jesus as Lord and Savior, God becomes our Father. We are counted as one of his children. But how can we be sure that we're actually part of God's family? Well, today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg examines a classic expression of our Father's love.

Our study begins in Hebrews chapter 12 verse 5. It is often the most diligent of men who feel the greatest challenge. They're trying to please their bosses and respond to their customers. They're trying to live up to the high standards in fulfilling the role of a biblical husband. They also want to be the spiritual leader in their homes and therefore recognize their responsibility for their children.

And in many cases, they're living on a fault line, with a growing fear that the big earthquake may come at any time and engulf them. As fathers this morning, there are certain things that are inescapable truths to us. I note these in here under the section of the role of a husband, and I wrote these from somewhere with myself in view some time ago. I find them distinctly challenging. Number one, I am a dad.

That's fact number one. Even on the mornings when I don't feel like it, even when I know I blew it, even when I think I'd rather be doing something else, the central fact of my existence is that I am a husband and a father. Secondly, the home is the single most important influence on my family. I can delegate a lot of my responsibilities at work, but I cannot delegate my hopes for my family. Because of its inherent difficulty and importance, fathering is the most dignified role I will ever play. The dignity of fathering has been eroded. Television has portrayed fathers as buffoons, absentee workaholics, or permissive nice guys who don't have a significant value or ethic in their heads.

So it's no wonder that many men have ceased to devote the kind of time and energy the task of real fathering demands. Four, being a parent is one of the greatest sources of joy we can ever know. Five, we can all improve on what we're doing. Six, everybody's unique. Our children, and so are we. And therefore, we must learn from one another. And seven, it is jolly difficult to be a good parent. There are no magic formulas, no special potions. One of the great myths in society is that we can be parents without real investment of time and energy.

The great truth is that there is no substitute for the investment of time and effort. Which of us this morning, as fathers, can then evade the challenge that is before us? A whole generation is growing up around us who have no knowledge of fatherhood at all—not because their fathers are gone, their fathers are present, but their fathers are not fathers.

They're everything else but father. And it is because, in many cases, we have missed the great essential distinguishing factor of what it means to be a child in a home and a father over a home. Of all the characteristics that the writer of Hebrews may have used to describe the fatherhood of God here in chapter 12, the one that he isolates—and it's not unusual in the course of the Scriptures—is that of discipline. Discipline.

Verse 7, Endured hardship as discipline, God is treating you as sons. In other words, the classical expression of a father's love is discipline. It's not the provision of what the child desires. It is the provision of what the child requires. All kinds of people can meet the desires of our kids, but only to the parent—and in this case, primarily and particularly—is given the responsibility of jurisdiction over the discipline and the forming of their lives.

If our children are to come to maturity, then we neglect this to our peril. Now, the context in the letter is simply this—that these individuals who had become God's children through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the way in which an individual becomes a child of God—we are all the children of God by creation, insofar as none of us exist physically without his creative handiwork—but we become his children, his spiritual kids, if you like, by grace, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And these people to whom the letter has been written had heard the preaching of this good news, and they had turned from their previous way of life, and they had embraced Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and Master and Friend and Guide, and they had set out on the journey of following him. They hadn't gone very far down the road until they began to meet with some significant roadblocks, when they began to find out that this was not a cakewalk, when they began to hum to themselves, as it were, the country Western June, I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, there's gonna be a little rain sometimes. And these people were said, A little rain?

It's like it's gonna rain forever. Is this what it means to follow Christ? Is this what it means to have God as your Father?

Is this what I signed up for? Is the spirit of Pliable at the very beginning of Pilgrim's Progress, when Pliable leaves the city of destruction along with Pilgrim, and they haven't gone very far, and they end up in the Slough of Despond, and they're in this dreadful, muddy predicament, and they're sinking and further and further? And Pliable, you may recall, turns to Pilgrim, and he says, Is this the kind of thing you promised to me?

Is this what it means to have God as your Father? I'm getting out of here, and I'm getting out on the side of this Slough that is closest to my home. And so Bunyan describes how Pilgrim got out on the side on the way to the destination, Pliable got out on the far side and retreated to his house. And the readers of this letter were tempted to retreat, tempted to go back. And that's why from chapter 10 he's been saying, We're not the kind of people who retreat.

We're the kind who continue. If you want to know what it's like to continue, take a walk through the portrait gallery of Hebrews chapter 11. And then he says, as he comes into chapter 12, By the way, you may be tempted to focus so much on these individuals that you fail to keep your eyes on the right person. And the right person is Jesus.

What did Jesus do? He endured all these things, all the opposition of sinful men. And he says, If you keep your eyes on him, then you won't grow weary and lose heart. But it is a necessary reminder. And so he says in verse 4, In your struggle against sin you haven't yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

You think this is bad? he said. You're still alive. And where there's life, there's hope. Others have died.

Read the second half of chapter 11. You're still going. But it is a struggle. And anybody who sells you Christianity or God as your Father, as some kind of soft-soap, wishy-washy journey for mamby pamby nitwits, then they don't have a Bible in front of them. Because it'll take everything in you as a man to live for Jesus Christ. It will take the striving of every sinew within you to resist the influences of those around us, who mock us in our day, who deny the truths of God's Word. The nonsense that spews from various pulpits all around us here in the city, such as I was listening to this morning and driving here from someplace—that the name Adam in Genesis 1 is not Adam, it is earth person. And he is the first earth person. And he was introduced to another earth person.

And there is no gender between them, save that which is externally established. And so much nonsense you could never imagine within ten or twelve miles of where I'm standing right now. Now, if you're going to stand up and affirm the truths of God's Word and live for Jesus Christ, then there's going to be a struggle that you face. So he says, I want you to figure on the struggle that you're facing, and I want to remind you, verses 5 and 6, of the Scripture you're forgetting. He says you're forgetting to read your Bibles. And you see, when we forget to read our Bibles, things start to go wrong.

Because it is by our Bibles that we are given the food for the journey, and we're given the map on the way. He says you haven't been reading the book of Proverbs. If you've been reading the book of Proverbs, he said, you would remember the verses, My son, do not make light of the LORD's discipline.

Because the LORD disciplines those that he loves. So he says, I know your circumstances are difficult. I know that life has not been going particularly tranquilly for you.

I know that it's not a walk in the park. But I want you to remember something you've been forgetting. You haven't yet shed your blood on this journey.

And secondly, you haven't been paying attention to the Bible as you should. Now, let me summarize what he says here in verse 5 and 6, just in a couple of phrases. Number one, he says, Don't be careless. Don't be careless. That's the phrase, Do not make light of. You see, the danger lies in failing to recognize that God's hand is at work both in our struggles as in our successes. That I have made greater progress, small though it may be, in times of tear, pain, difficulty, disappointment, disenchantment, than ever the progress that I have made when my spirit has been lifted up within me. And yet I still am foolish enough to seek always that which lifts me up, sets me up, and sets me on. And in seeking to shun trials, I fail to receive blessings.

And the danger is that I am just careless in relationship to the Lord's discipline. I make light of it. I say, Well, it's not really there.

Oh yes, it's there, and it's there for a purpose. Secondly, he says, Don't be crushed by it. The first danger is that we would be casual or careless in relationship to it.

The second is that we would be crushed by it. That's the phrase in the second half of verse 5. Do not lose heart.

Don't lose heart. You see, this is a very, very important word to these people, because they were in danger of being completely overwhelmed. The adversity of life was such that they were loaded down with all kinds of troubles, and their natural tendency—and let's be honest, as is ours—was simply to think that their father had given up on them.

And that somehow or another, now they were left to their own devices. That God had the phone off the hook, as it were, and he'd gone away to look for something, and all this was taking place while he was gone, and it would seem that he wasn't coming back to pick up the phone, and we were left with all these unanswered questions at the end of the line. He said, Now, don't you be crushed by the Lord's discipline.

Don't be casual or carefree about it. But verse 6, be clear. And what is the clarity that he wants us to have? Well, he says, I want you to be absolutely clear that the Lord disciplines those he loves. He disciplines those he loves. What other verb would we perhaps have put in there?

We'd be tempted to put all kinds of verbs in there. The Lord provides for those he loves. He does. The Lord protects those he loves.

Of course he does. And so we could fill it in with all kinds of things, but the distinguishing feature here for the writer of the Hebrews is, if you want to know that you're a child of God, you'll know it, because the Lord disciplines you. He doesn't discipline those to whom he is indifferent. And his affection for his children—those whom he has accepted or adopted there at the end of verse 6—does not overrule his purpose for us. He is not about to overlook our faults and our foibles, because these very things will stunt our spiritual growth. And therefore, as in earthly parenting, he cannot let his kids away with it. Because if he does, we will turn out less than that which he desires for us, which is to be mature in the face of the struggle.

If he were to simply wink his eye at sin, if he were simply to allow us always to live in tranquility and in ease, if he were simply to provide for everything we asked at the time that we asked and to be some kind of cosmic genie in the sky, then there would be no reality in this partnership that is described here. Don't be crushed. Don't be careless.

Do be clear. God uses discipline in order to cure us. And I'm using cure there in the way in which tobacco is cured or ham is cured or leather is cured. It goes through a certain process in order that it might be more useful at the end than it was at the beginning. You see, most of us want to be really useful without being cured. Most of us want to be strong without doing the exercise.

Most of us want to get soft and tender eyes without ever having that which makes us cry and weep and breaks our hearts. Most of us want to be able to minister to others out of the fullness of our experience, but we don't want the fullness of experience that gives us the ability to minister. We want a press-button-A, press-button-B, Christian kind of experience, and it's certainly not in the Bible. And the writer says, I want to tell you about fatherhood, and I want to give it to you in one word. And the one word is discipline. I mentioned to somebody this morning, they said, What are you speaking on?

Is it Hebrews 12? I said yes. She said, And what is it? I said discipline. She said, I don't like that topic.

I understood what she meant by that. I don't particularly like it myself. But I want to say three things about discipline. Actually, I don't. I want to show you three things that the writer says about discipline.

And they're very simple. Number one, the privilege of discipline. The privilege of discipline.

Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as sons. It is a sign of our sonship.

Now, we might use sonship generically here so that ladies do not feel left out, nor should you. Because in the context in which the writer is describing these things, he was not limiting this simply to the male gender. But people would have understood the generic use in a way that is an example to us. If we were really God's children, some of these people were saying, then we wouldn't have to face these things. Have you ever said that? You know, if God really loved me, then this wouldn't happen to me. I visited in the hospital this week, and somebody described a situation in the intensive cardiac care unit where one man had died and another man had lived. And the person started to explain to me, Well, it must be that God loves this one and he doesn't love that one. Or it must be that the one who lived was doing a lot of good things, and the one who died was doing a lot of bad things. I said, Well, it's easy enough to say when your guy's the one that lived. Kind of difficult when he's the one that passed away. And I said, Do you really believe that God would operate on that kind of scale?

And we had a wonderful opportunity to talk. But at the very heart of it all was this flawed understanding. If God really loved me, I wouldn't go through this.

No, the reverse is the case. Because God really loves me, I am going through it, I have gone through it, or I am about to go through it. Set it down as a fixed point in your life—that if you and I are going to follow wholeheartedly after Christ, if we're going to live as children within our Father's house, then discipline will be an ongoing part of our experience. And it is by that very experience of discipline that we are marked out as his sons and his daughters. Indeed, he says in verse 8, the absence of discipline is not an expression of blessing. The absence of discipline indicates that we are illegitimate. We're illegitimate children.

If you're not disciplined, then you're illegitimate kids. If you've come up with some approach to this Christian life whereby it's all smiles and laughter, it's all sunshine and springs, then he says the chances are you don't even know what it is to be a Christian. Because this privilege of discipline distinguishes the believer from the unbeliever.

Now, in verse 9, you'll see he moves from the lesser to the greater. He argues from human experience. Moreover, he says, we've all had human fathers who disciplined us, and we respected them for it. That's the normal course of events.

That's how it's supposed to be. You discipline your children, and they respect you for it. If you don't discipline your kids, they won't respect you.

Oh, they may think you're a big, cozy, dozy character, but they won't respect you. Proverbs 29, verse 15, the rod of correction imparts wisdom, but a child left to himself disgraces his mother. Just take the teenage circumstances of our contemporary culture and look at this. You're not allowed… The European Parliament has legislated not simply about the punishment of children in schools but the punishment of children in homes. They want to take away from parental jurisdiction the very thing that safeguards the culture in a coming generation.

Because it is the rod of correction that imparts wisdom. And the child left to himself will be a disgrace to his mom. Why are these screaming, raging, fiendish little rascals terrorizing supermarkets all over America?

How can they close the place down with such amazing ability? Reduce the mothers to tears. And TJ Maxx, I want the big book! I want the big book! I want the big book! And the mother's going, No, I have a nice little book. This and that. Look at that. I want the big book!

I want the big… I want to go over, take the big book, bam! Not on the kid, on the mother! Get that thing out of here, take it home, and get the rod of correction out. Do you realize you're ten years away from a total nightmare? You think his teacher's gonna fix this?

You think the courts will fix this? Hey, Dad! Step up! Same thing. Discipline your son he'll bring you peace, he will delight your soul.

Fail to, he'll bring you anguish and agony. Somewhere in here, I have a quote from the newspaper. I think I got it from Ann Lander. It was a letter by a father to his son. It went like this, Dear son, as long as you live under this roof, you will follow the rules. In our house we do not have a democracy. I did not campaign to be your father.

You did not vote for me. We are father and son by the grace of God. I consider it a privilege, and I accept the responsibility. In accepting it, I have an obligation to perform the role of a father. I am not your pal. The age difference makes such a relationship impossible. We can share many things, but you must remember that I am your father.

This is a hundred times more meaningful than being a pal. You will do as I say as long as you live in this house. You're not to disobey me, because whatever I ask you to do is motivated by love.

This may be hard for you to understand at times, but the rule holds. You will understand perfectly when you have a son of your own. Until then, trust me, love Dad. You turn to the pages of Scripture, and it is there right before our gaze. He says, We all had human fathers who disciplined us. If we did, we should arise and call them blessed. And we respected them for it, and so we ought. How much more, then, he said, if that is the case on an earthly basis, should we then submit to the Father of our spirits and live, if through our earthly pilgrimage we granted honor and respect to those who were our physical parents? How much more, then, should we bow and give that same honor and obedience and respect to our Father, who is the author not only of our physical lives but also of our spiritual lives? Indeed, we should pity, then, the child whose father has assumed that love demands that he allow his son to do what he likes, have what he wants, and to come and go as he pleases. And I want you to know that this is a challenge for me.

That's why I said I wrote this for myself. That, of course, is Alistair Begg with a message titled The Father's Discipline. We'll hear part 2 of this message tomorrow. You're listening to Truth for Life. If you're enjoying listening to our current series titled Fix Our Eyes on Jesus, we want to encourage you to make this study your own. The study covers the entire book of Hebrews.

It's available on a single USB drive. Visit truthforlife.org slash store or look for the study on the Truth for Life app. As we're learning in this study, the Christian life is not always easy. Life's challenges can leave us discouraged. We can experience feelings of loneliness, and that can be overwhelming.

But we're not alone. So we need to be reminded that God is with us, reminded of his presence and his promises. And that's why we're recommending a book titled God Does His Best Work with Empty. Each chapter in this book recalls God's past provision for his children and his promises, which are trustworthy. The book assures us that these promises still hold true for us today. This is a book we believe you'll read and reread. It's so full of truth. You can request your copy of the book God Does His Best Work with Empty when you donate today. Click the book image in the Truth for Life app or call 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lapeen. Hope you can join us again tomorrow as Alistair explains how discipline, which is often challenging for us to endure, is actually for our good and for God's glory. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.