The Father Who Disciplines

Our understanding of a father deeply shapes our identity and faith. In this series, we’ll explore how earthly fathers have impacted us, find healing for the places we’ve been hurt, and encounter God as the perfect Father who fully loves, restores, and defines who we are—so that His love overflows into the lives of others.

Transcript

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Thank you for listening to an audio resource from Stanwich Church, located in Greenwich in Stanford, Connecticut. The vision of Stanwich Church is to know Christ and make him known.

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The New Testament lesson for today is from Hebrews chapter 12, verses 5 through 11. This can be found on page 1196 of your Pew Bible. Our Heavenly Father, who desires our growth in holiness, disciplines us in his love. While this training may feel painful, our endurance will be our spiritual fruit. A reading from Hebrews, chapter 12, beginning with the fifth verse. 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 who 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 later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. May God add his blessing to the reading of his holy word.

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He loved me in incredible ways, which was amazing because his father died when he was six months old. And he was raised by a mother who had to be strong to be both father and mother to him in a difficult season. But I never felt outside of his love. We shared three things primarily: sports, Jesus, and work. Not always in that order. But uh a lot of people hear that he showed me Jesus. They think he was a pastor. He was an executive for Bethlehem Steele Corporation. And the way he loved Jesus by serving the church gave me a love for the church. He taught me to work. I can lean towards workaholism at times, but he gave me a good ethic about the value of work. And sports was where we had most of our conversations. We had a lot of lamenting to do because I grew up in Cleveland, so I'm not going to go there. But one of the things my father did was he disciplined me. He disciplined me in ways that would be considered politically incorrect today. But I'm glad that he knew what the woodshed was. Because at age three, little Chucky did not know how to reason. He needed to have boundaries set in his life because he had a strong will. And my father disciplined me, and I always knew it was in love. I respected him for it. There was one time when I was a teenager, he disciplined me, and we were beyond the woodshade shed era at that point. And I don't know if it was legitimate or it was he missed the point, but I didn't like the discipline. And in my dad's way to reestablish the relationship, probably several hours later, I came home and he said, Grab your baseball glove. We're going to go out and toss some catch. And I said, No, I don't want to. And I saw the hurt on his face. See, I wasn't willing to respect him in the discipline he was given there. And it stuck with me. As a 20-year-old, sometime I came to him and I confessed I remembered that day. He didn't remember it, or he pretended he didn't remember it, but he had forgiven me already. But I missed the benefit of discipline. We're in our series, The Heart of the Father. And the whole point is the heart of the Father is one of love towards us. We began in the beginning that he declares our identity. If you know that you are a son or a daughter of God, nothing else matters. All the other declarations over you have a way of just going away in those moments. We saw in the second week that God loves us with an unconditional love. You may be the wandering younger brother, but he's waiting for you to come home, or you may be the arrogant older brother who sits at pride, the father still wants to be in relationship with you. His love is not conditioned on our response. We saw in the third week that the love of the fathers expressed in his protection over us, with the reminder that protection doesn't mean it's always going to be safe. The protection is that he would be with us, especially in the times of trouble. We saw in the fourth week that he is our provider. And he's not upset when you tell him what you need. He's not even upset when you tell him what you want. He's not going to give you what you want all the time, but he's aware of your needs. And we saw last week that he is the one who will guide us. If we will commit our ways to him, he'll keep us on a path of flourishing. We will experience his bounty in our life. But this week we come to a challenging one. One of his signs of love is that he will discipline us. And if we don't take care of those initial foundational blocks, we're going to cringe under discipline. Part of it is, well, first of all, discipline is just not pleasant. The biblical text says that. It's full of pain. But we live in a culture that has spiritually formed us different than the Bible. Let's just be honest, folks. We are spiritually formed more by secular culture than the Bible. Because we get more messages from secular culture than we get from the Bible. Secular culture says, if you love me, you will agree with me. I don't see that as a part of love. What is there's 250 of you in here? I don't agree with 249 of you. But I love you. It's a fallacy that if you love me, you have to agree with me. The other one is if you love me, you will not put limits on me. Everything that I say is right, you have to agree that it's right. I need to live a limitless life. But the scriptures tells us about a different kind of love, a love that limits for the sake of others. In fact, our very gospel story is about a God who limits himself. Though he was equal with God, he had equality with God, he emptied himself and took on the limits of humanity to show love. And so we need a more biblically rounded perspective of love, and that will include that our Father who loves us will discipline us. So let's go to the text, Hebrews 13. It's a, no, let's try Hebrews 12, because that's the one we just read. Let me give the context. The letter writer that we don't know who it is, uh we don't pretty sure it's not the Apostle Paul. Uh somebody connected to the apostolic community writes to these Jews who are the diaspora. They're spread out in different places in the Greek world. Following Christ in that day meant a lot of difficult circumstances in your life. And if you were Jewish, naming Jesus as the Messiah, it was multiple difficult circumstances. Not only were you despised within society, your family would reject you. And your social group that gave you so much identity would no longer want to be a part of you. And the writer of Hebrews is giving a response to the challenges of living in this world. Now, the first 10 chapters are what we would call the meet. There's all of these Hebrew Old Testament illustrations that set up understanding who Jesus is. Those of you who study it know the depth of it. It's just a great connection back to the Hebrew scriptures. Chapters 11 and 12 are the so what. It's an elaboration on how to endure in this difficult world knowing who Jesus is. And chapter thirst, uh, chapter 13 is the now what. I love that the writer of Hebrews understood this ahead of time. Gives us steps that we're to take to live out the truths of the so what of our life. I want to highlight just three concepts from this passage. It's really rich. We actually should be taking it after having studied the whole book of Hebrews. But three things the notion of discipline, the idea of a relationship of a father and a son, and the results that come from that. So discipline, it's this Greek word paidea, which occurs nine times in our text. It begins this way: Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord. Discipline can have the sense of being punitive to us. Discipline can feel heavy. But in that world, the word padea had the aspect behind it of the Greco athletic world that you train. So discipline was not just reproof and correction, though that's an element of it, but it was training and instruction so that you could develop the character behind being a good athlete. Certainly, this is in Paul's mind because at the beginning of chapter 12, you know the passage well. We're told to run the race that's been marked out for us. And to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. And so Paul is continuing this notion of discipleship, and he says, face it, discipline is not pleasant. No matter what area of life, uh, these World Cup players that you look at today, running full speed and catching a ball over their head on their foot and then turning, that just didn't happen because God put a gift in them. There's a God gift in them, but they've trained and trained and trained. Uh for those of you who have to take exams for your work, those of you in finance, I've watched people use our meeting room in here with uh index cards spread over them so that they could keep their credentials to continue trading. Everything in life of value takes discipline, it's hard work. We forget this about the spiritual life. We are a grace-saturated people. We are here because of the mercy of God, but it calls us to a higher standard to invest in our spiritual well-being, to grow into what God has for us. And it can't be something that we take lightly. It's a discipline. And so there's the discipline of pouring in ahead of time, but there's the discipline that will come when we're off track, when we've missed the way. Listen, we all want to know boundaries. If you want to know the truth of that, just watch children. Have you ever watched a child when they're going to take the cookie that they know they're not supposed to take? They look over their shoulder because they don't want to get caught? No, they're waiting for you to say, don't take that cookie. Because we're all longing for boundaries in our life. We want to experience the limits because there's more safety in the limits. This just popped into my mind. A child who's walking through the woods, or a child who's in a fenced playground, who's safer? Yeah, that wasn't like a hard one there. But who has limits? The playground. Are you following? Maybe I'm not even following. And it just popped in my head and I shouldn't have even said it. So discipline, it's difficult, and we're told to endure it for spiritual benefit, not just the everyday natural things of life. Now, the key is this relationship that's expressed here, it's the father-son relationship. Whenever you see son in the scriptures, women, you can include yourself. It's really the parental relationship. The Bible was written in a male-dominated culture, and so most of the expressions are in male orientation, but they can be translated that this is a relationship with a father, with his son or daughter, and at the base of it is love. Let's go back to those verses. My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. Why? For the Lord disciplines the one he loves. He doesn't discipline the one that he doesn't love, but he disciplines out of love. Why? Because he wants the best for us. It goes on. And chastises every son whom he receives. Doesn't say he chastises the sons that he no longer wants in the house. These are the ones that he's receiving. And the writer goes on to say that if you are disciplined in this world by God, it's a sign that you are a legitimate son or daughter. If you're not disciplined, there's a little bit of illegitimacy. There may not be full adoption into the family of God. Discipline is a gift that shows that God loves us. Now that's totally countercultural to our thinking. That goes way against where our society says what love is. Because true love will come in and say, you're offline here. And then the writer uses the image of parental, earthly parental discipline. Now, this is where it becomes difficult. Someone has said that every metaphor and image limps. It means that images and metaphors can get you close to the reality, but especially when talking about God, He's given us images from earth to help us to go from the lesser to the greater, but they're never going to be complete. The reason is that none of us experiences perfect discipline from our parents. For some of us, our parents were too lenient. And we saw the result of that. It put us in difficult places. For some of us, our parents were too severe. And that had certain results in our life that we're still working through in different ways. Some of us lived the yo-yo life where one moment our parents were lenient and the next moment they were too severe. Then they were lenient and they were too severe. They were just confused about how to go about it. Some of us had absentee parents. Some of us had abusive parents. Even those of us who had parents that were good parents at times experienced discipline through an emotion of anger out of frustration that spoiled the disciple, the discipline moment. Or out of embarrassment, our parents disciplined us because they were concerned about what image we were giving out to the society. So as we deal with this aspect, we need to acknowledge that up front, none of us got first-level discipline from our parents. Only God can give unconditional first-level love. And so this passage isn't saying God loves you like your parents. What he's saying for those of us who are parents, love your kids the way the Father in heaven loves you. But the whole point that the writer is making is even though the discipline of our parents was incomplete, we respected them for it. Why did we respect them? Because we were being reminded that there are limits in this world. But God, when he disciplines us, disciplines us with perfect love. So there's nothing that comes our way that he doesn't see the long-term results and what he wants to accomplish. Parental discipline is usually for behavioral modification. Behavioral modification isn't bad. There's certain things I shouldn't do in life. But the discipline of the father is about soul shifting, of bringing transformation into the inner core of who we are, because God is more concerned about our character than our comfort. And he loves for you to become more and more like Jesus every step of the way. And so the writer turns it this way and says, Well, look at the results of this kind of God love and uh saturated discipline, verse 10, that we may share in his holiness. You are holy because of where you stand in Christ, but you are being made holy. You are positionally saved in Christ, but you are being saved through the transformation that comes in your being. You are sanctified completely in Christ positionally, but you are in the process of being that way. It is the discipline that leads us along to greater holiness. And beyond that, the text says, for the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields a peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. God's desire for you is flourishing in fruitfulness, that you would have come out of you the things of the kingdom that bring radical change. And out of his love, he will discipline you to bring these things into reality. Now, you're used to my so what's. I'm gonna stay up here for a while. It'd be a long time for you to crane your necks up there. I'm not gonna use a so what this morning. I'm gonna use a so how. How does God discipline us? I found four in this letter alone to the Hebrews. Uh Hebrews 4 and chapter uh chapter 4 and verse 12 says this. Four comes before 11, in case of any of you are wondering. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of the soul and of the spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. God's initial discipline tool in our life is his word. And this text tells us it's a living word. It's not just an ancient text. It has the ability to speak into our life every day to discipline us. This is the training aspect of discipline. This is the aspect that prepares us for what's coming down the road. Uh, I'm doing my quiet time right now in uh 1st and 2 Timothy, and I was in 2 Timothy chapter 3 the other day, and Paul says this of this word all scripture is breathed out by God. This isn't just a text. All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable, listen, for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. That the man and woman of God may be complete equipped for every good work. This is the standard that prepares you to run your part of the race and to be disciplined by God at crucial moments. Now, we're all at different levels in diving into the word, but we're gonna make some options available to you this fall if you want to go further. Uh, on Wednesday nights in Stanford, I'm gonna teach a course how to handle the Bible.

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If you're

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At the beginning of stages and don't even know where to begin, come and allow the word, how you'd handle it, be something that shapes you, that God can discipline you further in the race that He has for you. If you're further along, we're gonna offer the Bible study fellowship, BSF, in Romans. You talk about a pastor that's conflicted, Romans is gonna be taught here, and I'm teaching down in Stanford. I want to be in the Romans class. There are options, but you're gonna have to train yourself up. For us to be people that move against the cultural norms, we need to have a worldview that's situated in God's norm. And that's here. And you're gonna need more than Sunday morning. Sunday morning won't cancel out all the messages that you're hearing all week long, and you're being bombarded. The second how is God will use his people. In chapter 3, 12 and 13, it says this. Hebrews is after 2 Timothy, in case anybody's wondering. Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. We sang about this earlier. That's when I knew the Holy Spirit wanted us to hear that. Notice the hardening of our hearts by sin. We don't wake up one day and say, I'm going to destroy my life. But what we do is we secretly allow sin in and stages until it becomes a foothold and a stronghold, and then it destroys us. And that's the value of having people in our lives who have the privilege of saying, Chuck, I think you're out of line here. Scripture says iron sharpens iron. Proverbs says that the words, uh, the the um the rebuke of a friend is better than the kind words of an enemy. Uh, scripture talks about speaking truth with grace. You need people in your life who have access to you to say, hey, you better be careful there. You're in a place that could take you down a road that's going to lead to destruction. If you don't have those people, find those godly people in your life. The third thing is his spirit, chapter 3, 7 and 9. Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts in the rebellion. On the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. How will the Holy Spirit speak to you? He'll come in a quiet voice, but sometimes, and most of the time, it's going to be through his word, and it's going to be through the people that he's put upon around you. And then finally, and this is the one where I want to settle today, I call it his sovereign allowances. Another word for that is my circumstances and your circumstances. In Hebrews chapter 11, it's the great chapter of faith, and it talks about these people who had incredible faith and they overcame kingdoms and did all these things. But the chapter turns towards the end and says things like some of them got their dead back, brought back to them, some of them were outcast and left alone. This world was not worthy of them. The reason I call it his allowances is that God will allow difficult circumstances in your life to discipline you. Now there's three places where this will come from. One are the consequences of our sin and choices. God does not rescue us from every sin that we enter into or the choices that we make. He allows consequences to unfold because those become the discipline points in our life. They become the places that shape us to live into the full character of Jesus that he wanted for us. They become the places that we see him and call out to him in unique ways. The life of David is a classic example. David, a man after God's own heart, has his moment of wandering away, and God does not abandon him or the legacy that he's given for David, but there is trouble in David's family from that point forward. The second area are what I would call challenges or tests. These are moments that come in our life that are beyond our ability to handle, and God is looking for us to count on him. In the wilderness, when they ran out of water, they had to cry out to God. When they didn't have food, they had to wait on God for his manna every day. There's lots of examples in the scripture of the testing of God as a form of discipline to bring strength and faith and character. But the final one are what I call the crashes. Those are the moments that have no explanation to them. That you're wondering where the Father is and what he's doing in his sovereignty, for some reason, for a greater good than we can see, he's allowed that because he's accomplishing something bigger than we can see in the moment. Now just listen to this verse. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. Have you ever read that verse before? If you did, you probably read it really quickly. Even Jesus, who was without sin, yes, the mystery of the God man who walked perfectly on this earth was made perfect through his suffering. So I want you to hear what I'm saying, and not necessarily what I'm not saying in this. God will allow difficult circumstances because they will bring something greater out of us than all of the easy, comfortable blessings that we could have in life. I'm not saying that God uses sickness. I'm not saying God uses disaster. I'm not saying God uses brokenness. That's the work of the evil one. We have a broken world, and there's a mystery how brokenness comes into our lives at different times. But God in his sovereignty will sometimes pull the veil back and allow it to touch our lives. Case in point, the story of Job, the most righteous man of his day, experiences incredible trouble because of who? Not God, Satan. But it's God who redeems it and restores that brokenness for his good. See, God's not the causer of disaster, but he is the redeemer of disaster. So for two weeks, Ingrid and I have been in the middle of a disaster. For those of you on the prayer chain know about it, she went in two weeks ago for a hip replacement, a simple hip replacement, as we talk about it. Of all the replacements, everyone says this is the easy one. And it was. The next day she was up and walking, and we were doing well, but then something mysterious happened. She had a problem in her abdomen. They couldn't figure out what it was. They had to do two emergency exploratory surgeries. She ended up in ICU. She was there for three days. She was in the hospital for over a week. Watching the one you love, watching anybody suffer is not fun. When I see an animal hit by the side of the road, it makes me cringe. But to see a human being and the bride of my youth for 43 years suffering that way, I could feel the pain. But in that, God never changed towards me. He remained good in all of that time. Jesus never left the throne. Each day I woke up and I said, Lord, I want to be present to Ingrid, but you have a line, you put us in place, alignment for assignment. Who am I supposed to minister to in this hospital as well? What is your calling to this moment? And now that Ingrid is home and repairing, we're stewarding that difficult moment. We're not just existing through it, we're asking questions. Lord, what do you want to teach us? Not teach us because He sent it, but He allowed it. Now, during the last two weeks, and I want to say this for those of you who are in the midst of a disciplined time that feels really tough. For the last two weeks, I wasn't thinking about stewarding. The last two weeks, I was on warfare mode. I was doing battle with the kingdom of darkness, which is the source of all sickness. I was praying to the Lord for him to raise her up. I was there being present in that moment. But now on the backside of it, we're stewarding it and we're saying, Lord, what were you saying in it? Ingrid's already searching the scriptures to find out what is your lesson? And a lesson is not just for us, it's for all of us. Because we don't live faith as individuals, we live faith as a community. And we accept this as discipline. Why? Because God has the ability to redeem it and bring restoration and turn it to another place. So what's the so what of all this? It's found in the Hebrews 12 passage itself. Unfortunately, we stopped at verse 11 today. Verse 12 says this. Therefore, lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees. In the midst of discipline, we are being loved as legitimate children. And so if you're going through a difficult time, don't ever believe that God is punishing you. Know that He's allowed it and He's loving you. And if you will be trained by it, it will make you a person of gravitas. A person who knows the holiness of God. You'll know how to live and not just exist, but you'll also know righteous, peaceful, fruitfulness through your life. Your Father loves you in every situation. Amen.

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