Brad asks a very simple question: “How and why does God discipline believers today?”
Why does God discipline believers?
The answer is simple. He does so because He loves us.
Proverbs 13:24 says,
He who spares his rod hates his son,
But he who loves him disciplines him promptly
God is our heavenly Father. He is the perfect Father. He does not spare the rod because He loves us.
Have you ever known children who were not disciplined by their parents? The children essentially raise themselves. They are not corrected. They are not told what to believe, what to do, and what not to do. The result is wild children who are difficult to be around.
I realize that some parents are abusive in their discipline. But that should not prevent parents from disciplining their children. It should cause them to be careful. Paul said, “And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Eph 6:4). On the one hand, do not exasperate your children. On the other, do train and admonish them. Find the right balance.
How does God discipline believers?
There are many ways in which God disciplines us.
The believers in Corinth suffered sickness as a result of getting drunk at the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:30).
David’s bones ached when he did not confess his sins of adultery and murder to the Lord (Ps 32:3-5). He wrote, “Your hand was heavy upon me” (Ps 32:4).
The blessing and cursing motif is prevalent in Leviticus 26. God’s discipline on His chosen people included wasting disease and crop failure (Lev 26:16), defeat by her enemies (Lev 26:17), plagues (Lev 26:21), attacks by wild beasts (Lev 26:22), pestilence (Lev 26:25), premature death (Lev 26:30), destruction of cities (Lev 26:31), deportation (Lev 26:32), and fear (Lev 26:36).
We might experience difficulties at work, in our family, with our cars, with our home, with our health, with our finances, and so forth.
Of course, God’s discipline is not only poured out when we rebel against Him. Paul experienced a thorn in the flesh that had nothing to do with sin in his life. God used that to mold Paul. He also experienced many persecutions that God used in his life (2 Cor 11:23-29). The discipline of Hebrews 12 is not reserved for believers out of fellowship with God. Hodges writes,
The readers also seemed to have forgotten the encouragement found in Proverbs 3:11–12, which presents divine discipline as an evidence of divine love. Thus they should not lose heart (cf. Heb. 12:3) but should endure hardship (hypomenete, lit., “persevere”; cf. vv. 1–3) as discipline and regard it as an evidence of sonship, that is, that they are being trained for the glory of the many sons (cf. 2:10 and comments there). All God’s children are subject to His discipline, and in the phrase everyone undergoes discipline the writer for the last time used the Greek metochoi (“companions, sharers”), also used in 1:9; 3:1, 14; 6:4. (Lit., the Gr. reads, “… discipline, of which all have become sharers”) (“Hebrews” in BKC, p. 810).
We should rejoice that God is training us to rule and reign with His Son in the life to come. As Dr. R. loved to say, “This life is training time for reigning time.”
Keep grace in focus.
