The “Discipline” of the Father

The recording of Saturday’s teaching  from Hebrews 12 will be up soon. In the meantime I wanted to add one point that I didn’t have time to bring out in the teaching.

 We were talking about how God corrects and trains us (disciplines us). (Hebrews 12:4-17) And that many believers have been taught that God is using sickness, lack, pain, and loss as His “scourge” to teach us things and punish us. But we saw that it is actually His Word . . . His voice . . . that He uses to correct and train us. What I failed to mention was that we don’t have to speculate. We have a living, breathing example of God’s methods of correcting and chastising . . . in Jesus.

Hebrews 1:3 says Jesus was and is “an exact representation” of God’s nature. He only did/said the things He saw His father doing and saying. Right? 

Jesus frequently chastised, corrected, and trained His disciples. So how did He do that? Did He hit them? Did He put sickness on them? Did He cause their fishing business to fail? Did He kill a loved one? 

Of course not. When they missed the mark . . . when they failed to have faith . . . misperceived the situation . . . were operating out of the wrong spirit . . . He SPOKE to them. (Sometimes pretty sternly. Sometimes in exasperation. But it was always His voice, not His hand.)

• “Where is your faith? (Luke 8:25)
• “Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” (Matthew 8:23)
• “Allow the children to come to Me; do not forbid them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” (Mark 10:14)
• You don’t know what spirit you’re of. (Luke 9:55)
• “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; but only one thing is necessary; for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”
• “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:9)

Yes, Jesus did do some scourging (literally) on one occasions but those on the receiving end were not “His.” Judgment and discipline are two very different things.

Jesus corrected and trained just as our wonderful heavenly Father does. With His voice . . . His Word. That means we can wholeheartedly and confidently resist the works of the enemy and the effects of the Curse. God’s house is NOT a house divided against itself. Specifically, God isn’t simultaneously redeeming us from and rolling back the effects of the Curse on one hand . . . and using those effects as His tools of discipline on the other.