Sovereign Discipline

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  Sovereign  Discipline

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  Please turn in your Bibles to Proverbs chapter 3. We're finishing a series this morning that we started a couple weeks ago on the biblical theme of discipline. We have looked at self-discipline and the practicality of how we kind of set some guardrails and guides in our own lives to be the best that we can be. And truly a lot of that, though it's motivated from the inside for the glory of God. It is for our good. And we in some ways that might be the easiest one, even though it could be, in our minds the most difficult because we've tried and failed at it. But when you think about it, when it comes to some of those habits of self-discipline we talked about two weeks ago, they really are on you in the sense of you have the control to do them or not to do them. When we talked about being on time or keeping your word or whatever it might be, that just comes back to you. So to some degree, though difficult inaction to carry out, they rest on you. So of the things we're discussing, that might be the easiest. Then we looked last week at societal discipline, which was just a way to talk about the next kind of level of pushback we get. Difficulty, adversity around us could be from other people's feedback for us. And again, not easy to be told you're incorrect or being rebuked or you could do this or that better. But again, we can accept that because there is something we can do about it. We can receive that feedback and try to make some of those changes. Ask that person more questions so that we can again, be all that we can be for God's glory and our good. So again, difficult, but, um, the one we're going to talk about today might be the most difficult because it's the most outside of our hands. Self-discipline really entirely up to you in the sense of you're either going to do some of those things or you're not. Societal discipline, the feedback you get from people around you, are you teachable to receive what they're telling you? You do have some control over that. What we're going to talk about today when we think about think about sovereign discipline, about how God is in control of our lives, and he is the one who determines our path. We could devise our way. We could think we want to go a certain way. We think life's going to turn out a certain way, and we could even do the things we've talked about the prior weeks. We could have some self-discipline. We can receive feedback from people around us, and still God's going to do what he is going to do. And the question is, how do we receive it? How do we respond to it? And that's really the subject of sovereign discipline. It's the one that maybe is the most perplexing, most challenging of them all because we feel helpless at times. And so that's where we're going to start today in the book of Proverbs, chapter 3, with the concept very, very simple but not simplistic. And those aren't the same thing. It's two verses in Proverbs 3:11 and 12 that break it down to explain it. But it's not trivial by any means, because the moment we start talking about suffering, adversity, things outside of our control that are happening in our lives and we don't quite know why, there's nothing trivial about that. There's nothing easy about that. But the scriptures do explain it for us in a way that we could at least know what we need to know, to have the right categories for it to fall into, and ask the Lord to work in our hearts, to be able to work through it by his grace. So let's read Proverbs 3. I want to actually read 3:1 to 12, even though we're just going to look at 11 and 12, because 3:1 to 12 was another lecture by King Solomon to Prince Rehoboam, likely...one of his sons, a father to a son. Even you see the first two words, 'my son' and those typically in the first nine chapters of Proverbs we talked about this last week, are lectures a father's giving to his son, broadly speaking, on the Way of Wisdom and the Way of Folly, they cover different themes. They move about in different areas. But the main thing Solomon is wanting to instill in his son is you're on a path in life and there are voices on both sides. We saw this last week in chapter 9. The voice of wisdom is saying, come naive, come the one that doesn't know what life is really about yet. And there's more to learn come my way. And then folly is trying to say the same exact thing. No, it'll be better my way. And Solomon, in these lectures, in the first nine chapters of Proverbs, is trying to get through to his son, trying to help him understand some things. And we're going to see that in particular on the subject of discipline today. But we want to take the path to get there in this section of teaching in 1 to 12. SoI'll read it. You can follow along with me and hear the call to wisdom from Solomon to his son.
  "My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments for length of days and years of life and peace, they will add to you. Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. Soyou will find favor and good repute in the sight of God and man. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your body and refreshment to your bones. Honor the Lord from your wealth and from the first of all your produce. So your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will overflow with new wine. My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord, or loathe his reproof, for whom the Lord loves he reproves even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights."
  Our father, let us not ignore your truth today and soften the receptivity of our hearts to receive your correction and instruction, because we trust you. Amen.
  Well, you just heard another call to wisdom different from last week in chapter 9, but evoking similar imagery of you, the listener, being on a path. You heard that language in verse 6 about...there's a path that you can follow called wisdom, that blessed by God will be a straight path, a good path, a one that actually will help you arrive at a destination. In verse 13, how blessed is the man who finds wisdom. We want to end up in the house of wisdom, not the lair of folly. And he's saying, the path that you're going to take through chapter 3 to get to verse 13 is going to have some check points on it, some mile markers. That's kind of the image I had in my mind as I was reading it this week and studying it, not just verse 11 and 12, but Solomon is giving you some check points along the way to get you there. Maybe you heard them. Verses 1 to 4 in chapter 3 is first the check point of are you listening to God's truth? Because right out of the gates he says, my son, do not forget my teaching. Let your heart keep my commandments. And in verse 3, don't let the kindness and truth I'm teaching you leave them. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. Meaning you need to be listening and learning from me. And here's the payoff. How Solomon writes these verses is you get an admonition in the first part, and then in the following verse you get the payoff. So the call to listen to God, the call is in verse 1 and in verse 3. That's the checkpoint. Are you listening to God on the path of life? Are you hearing him? Here's the payoff. Verse 2. Length of days and years of life and peace. They'll add to you. Verse 4. You'll find favor and good repute in the sight of God and man. I mean, that's wisdom 101. You're not going to get anywhere in the path of life trying to get to that blessed place of wisdom, if you are not listening to the Word of God, if you're not hearing his call. It's that simple. You don't pass go. You don't collect $200. You are stuck where you're at. If you're not listening, that's the first call on this path. Then you see in verses 5 and 6, you're not just to listen to God, you're to trust him. And again, those are coupled together 5 and 6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. And do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him. That's the admonition. He's saying the same thing a few different ways. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don't trust in yourself. In every way you can imagine acknowledge him, trust him that he's in control. And if you do, what's the payoff, verse 6? He will make your paths straight. You won't be twisting your ankle on the trail over some rut. You're not sliding off the side of some precipice, tumbling down into some canyon. I speak from experience. Point 2 on the path. Trust me. Trust God. Point 3 mile marker is fear the Lord. You see that in verse 7. Don't be wise in your own eyes, but fear the Lord and turn away from evil. And here's the promise if you fear the Lord, if you turn from evil, if you don't trust your own sight, it will be healing to your body and refreshment to your bones. I mean, he's just promising a life that look, this will come back to bless you if you fear the Lord. If you turn from sin, your body and your bones...He's saying all of you will be blessed, because what's great about the Proverbs is that he's not trying to always categorize your life into the physical and the spiritual like we do. Yeah. He's just saying, no. You are bound up as a being inside and out and the things on the outside of you affect the inside of you, and the things on the inside of you affect the outside of you. And he's saying, if you fear the Lord and turn from sin and don't trust yourself, the whole person, mind, body, soul, you'll be blessed. That's the third checkpoint. The fourth one is 9. Honor the Lord from your wealth and from the first of your produce. Oh! Command to honor the Lord. Serve him. Don't hold anything back from him. Why? Well, if he's the one that gave it to you in the first place, why would you then try to hoard it for yourself? And the promise when you follow that admonition is verse 10. So your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will overflow with new wine. There's a promise there of prosperity, Oh prosperity. But what would be the point of it? When he gives it to you in overflowing. It's so that you can pour it out to somebody else, not hoard it for yourself. If you trust him with the first of your wealth, the first of your produce. Again, we're in agrarian times in the writing of this. You'll have more than enough. And rather than keep stocking it up for yourself and building bigger silos, as Jesus talks about in a parable, and you're going to lose your life tonight and not do anything with it, I didn't give you that prosperity for you to just take it and hoard it. I wanted you to be a blessing and benefit to people around you. So honor the Lord first. So you get these four checkpoints along the path of wisdom. And I would imagine at this point, the average listener in the audience is going, you know, I'm down with those four things. Broadly speaking, if you say you're a follower of follower of Jesus Christ. I know I need to listen. I mean, that's like Christianity 101, The gospel. It's a call to repent. It's a call to follow Jesus. I got to listen to that. Okay, sign me up and trust God. Yeah. That's faith. So I'm going to listen to this call to repent and believe in him, but not have faith. Come on. Okay, good. I can trust him. Fear him? You know what? Yeah. I see as I grow in faith that sin is not better than God. So I'm down with that and then finally honor him. Okay, um, it might take a while for me to warm up to this because I feel like I need my own. But I'd like to be generous. I'd like to take what God gives me and share it. So I think most people could read Proverbs t3 so far and say, if those are the four checkpoints in the path to wisdom, this lecture that Solomon has given to his son. I'm good. I listen, I trust him, I fear him, I want to honor him, I do. And then the bottom falls out, verse 11 and 12. And in fact, he leans in again to his son. He calls him my son again. He's saying, listen up again. Now I want to tell you about this part of the path that you're really not going to like. My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord or loathe his reproof. And that's where a lot of people are, like, I'm out. So that's built into the system? That when bad things happen to a good person, when I listen to him and I'm trusting him and I'm fearing him and honoring him, I might still face adversity. I just saw some prosperity. Let's go back to verse 10 and hang out there. And he says, hey, right before you get to that, verse 13, that blessed place, the man who finds wisdom and gains understanding, there's one more checkpoint along the line. And if you're on the path of life, if you're on the journey, if you're climbing through the hills and you mapped it out and you saw those first four checkpoints and you hit them. And then you round the bend and the sky grows dark and the mountain gets really big, and the terrain starts to go uphill. What happens next? That pack starts to feel really heavy, doesn't it? And your feet start to get sore and your legs start to give out and you want to turn back. Welcome to the mountain of God's discipline. And you didn't see it coming, usually. And you certainly didn't sign up for it. You were fine with the path as it was. Wasn't it supposed to be a straight path? Now I don't even know where I'm at. And this is just scary. And I don't like it. And I see no sign of the sun breaking through the cloud. What am I supposed to do? That's really what Solomon has brought you to. When you get to verse 11 and 12, it's all led up to this, if you so far, were willing to agree to those prior four checkpoints and say I'm down with that. Now he's saying, okay, I've got one last one and it's going to be an uphill climb. But do you still believe God is designing your path for his glory and your good? Because if you do, then listen close son. I've got a lesson to teach you about the discipline of God. What is the discipline of God? Before we jump into verse 11, here's a short definition. I put it together this week just so we have an operating idea. Because if the first thing is a warning against rejecting it, it'd be good to know what it is. So here's a short definition. What is God's discipline? It's his fatherly love in action towards his children meant to grow us in spiritual maturity through adversity. God's sovereign discipline is his fatherly love in action towards his children, meant to grow us in spiritual maturity through adversity. There's your operating definition.  
  Now let's see the prohibition of rejecting it (discipline). Verse 11, my son, do not reject the fatherly love in action towards you his child meant to grow you spiritually through adversity. See how that works? He says don't reject it or loathe his reproof. Are those two sentences saying the same thing in verse 11? Different words and slightly different meanings. Sometimes in the Proverbs you just get a verse that says the same thing twice, and it's just meant to kind of punctuate a point. But here you get these two warnings of what not to do with the discipline of the Lord, his reproving, his correcting. One verse says don't reject it and then the next one in my version says loathe it. Yours might say resent it or grow weary from it. So I want to pause here and in this opening warning, this admonition not to reject or resent it kind of process that a little bit with you. The first one, don't reject the discipline of God. Your Bible might say despise or abhor. The literal meaning is to cast something away because you don't want it. It's used in Isaiah 31:7, in this realm where it's talking about the people of God who had created idols, and now they need to cast them away. Isaiah 31:7...in that day every man will cast away his silver idols and his gold idols. That's a good thing, but it's just a literal image of, I've got this thing that I shouldn't want anymore, and I'm just going to chuck it. And that's what Solomon is saying to his son. When the discipline of the Lord, when the chastisement comes, when the hardship and the suffering comes. Your first response should not be to just chuck it like a toddler. A mom puts the plate of carrots and he just chucks it. I don't want any of it and then stiffens the back or the mouth. And I won't let you put those carrots in there. That's essentially the language of this, because the discipline of the Lord is about his methods of child rearing us, his children beloved by him. And so he says, don't reject it. Don't stiffen your back and try to discipline your kid with the rod. Spank them, straightening the back. That's kind of the feel of this. It's really that you can see it in this rejection. And that's the first way he cautions you don't just right away become so obstinate and hard hearted against it and not going to going to happen and I'm chucking it. And then he, using this wisdom literature, proverbs style, he goes deeper into it in the next verse. He's trying to cover the whole gamut, he says, and don't loathe his reproof. And this word loathe is more of an inner feeling. It's a weariness of soul. It's growing weak with dread. So you match those up and you say, what's Solomon doing right here in trying to teach us about how we should respond to the discipline of the Lord. He's just giving you a holistic picture of yourself. You may be the rejector who when the going gets tough, you get hard and you just resist. You get stiff necked. Or you might be the person who is just gets really fainthearted and weary. And beyond that, giving up...loathes it. Just the attitude is there is nothing good here. And if you have children and they're different, you see those responses in them, don't you? Some just wilt at the littlest sight or site of difficulty. Others stiffen their neck. So you get resenters and you get rejecters. But either way, he says, don't do it. I remember doing a lot of hiking in my California days, and one time my brother and I and some friends had great ambitions to hike the high country of Yosemite. And if you've done Yosemite before, I've seen pictures of Half Dome. Everybody can get to Half Dome. Well, not everybody, but I mean, I remember the first time I went and you get to the part that's a real steep pitch, and there's just cables stuck in the ground and there's no guards, and you're just going up and you're going up one side and everybody coming down the other. And I was afraid at the bottom until I saw there were some octogenarians going up, and there were some people, like with the kid on their back going up. And I was in my 20s and like, okay, if they can do it, I can do it. And all that being said, everybody can get to there. But to go into the high country, you think you're high there and then you have to keep ascending up and the breathing, the air thins out. It's harder to breathe. Your pack is heavy because you packed in for a few days. And I remember a couple friends of mine. I remember the rejector and the resenter, what started out as a great hike and we're all ready to be, you know, the next Daniel Boone or whatever, discovering lands never seen. And there was a rejector who he just started to get mad. His boots hurt, his pack was too heavy, you know, he was throwing his stuff and he can't get his tent to get up. And he was rejecting the adversity that was coming, as if we didn't plan this thing out for weeks. And then there was the resenter, who just started to loathe it and complain about everything and every ten minutes just wanted to stop and lay on his pack on a rock and stare at the sky and question why he was alive. And adversity will do that, right? Suffering will do that. You just either get hard hearted or you or you just get weak to the point of resentment and loathing. And Solomon gives these back to backand just says, that's not to be your response, son. So the question any son would ask is why not? Where's the redeeming value in suffering? I have never met a person that's being honest, truly honest, and said, I love discipline, I love adversity, I love suffering, I eat it for breakfast. I say, no, you don't. You want to eat Froot Loops? You want donuts? We all do. Unless you understand the purpose behind it. Right? The principle in operation. So Solomon says, let me tell you the principle here. Let me show you the promise. The reason you don't reject it or loathe it is because of verse 12 For the son that the Lord loves, he reproves just as a father corrects the son in whom he delights. That's the principle of God's discipline...in verse 12. The operating principle that allows us to see, okay, this isn't an entire waste, or at least get angry that stiffening back or loathing my God doesn't care for me. I'm mad at him or I'm giving up on him. Whatever he says. No, you might think that way if you thought God didn't love you. That might be how you react. If you think God's against you, child. He says that's not the way God's working here, because the principle of God's discipline is this...the Lord loves those he reproves and just as a father corrects the son in whom he delights...delights, so it's love and delight we see from the outside. We turn that bend. We see mount discipline. It's dark. It's ominous. It's weary. We're tired. We resent it. And he's saying by faith you have to know that what runs inside the heart of that mountain that you can't see are rivers of love and delight in you. But you got to believe that by faith, even when you can't see anything other than the challenge. And if you give up now, you'll never experience the good God has on the other side. So he says, the principle is that God does love you. He hasn't forgotten about you. He hasn't turned his back on you. And he then goes from the greater to the lesser in the second part of verse 12. Let me just reason with you from an earthly standpoint, just as earthly fathers correct their kids. I mean, that's the operating principle for his discipline later on in Proverbs 13:24. He who withholds his rod hates his son, but he who loves his son disciplines him diligently. So justification for parents disciplining your kids, spanking their bottoms, is that you love them. And love without correction is not love because you're letting them take that path to folly that will be to their own destruction eventually. Likewise, correction without love isn't the solution. The exasperating father who doesn't do it in love but does it out of anger. Knee jerk. That's not the solution either. It's to be done...discipline is always to be administered in love. It's a heart of love. And even when we talk about that, like, make sure your discipline comes with love. And even saying that almost makes us sound like they're in separate categories like, here's daddy discipline over here, and here's Daddy love. And I got to get these guys to meet. No. Part of love is discipline because you care about them. You love them more than you love your own comfort of having to do it and the pain you know it causes. But you know it's for their good. That's the parenting advice Solomon gives in Proverbs. But it's rooted in our relationship with God, our Father. That's the principle. And he makes it very clear. And as I said before, just because it's clear and simple doesn't make it simplistic and trivial because of the pain behind it. Suffering, adversity underneath God's discipline is, I mean, when we just talk about some of the hardest things in life to deal with and even address, is that. Because we don't always have answers, and then when we come to answers, we may not like them, but the Bible refuses to lie to us. It's not going to be mirror, mirror on the wall. Just tell me something I want to hear. No, we come to it and it's actually a mirror. It says in James, one of us. It shows us who we really are. It reflects back to us and we see, okay, I've got to deal with me, but I have God's word to do it. So we get the principle of God's discipline. He loves us.
  So now we move to its purpose. If the principle is I know I have a loving Father and as a Christian of all people. You're the only people that know absolutely for sure God loves you because why?...He sent his Son to die for you. He demonstrated his love for you while you were a sinner Christ died for you, Romans 5:8. I mean, that's what you get back to, isn't it? When everything else falls apart, you go I the things that are falling apart in my life, the walls closing in around me. That would make me wonder if God really loves me. What's the last theological thread my faith hangs on? It's the love of God for me in Christ. If he loved me enough to send His Son, his most beloved son, his only begotten son, to die for me, then I know I'm loved. I don't have the ability right now to see it around me, but I know that's true here. If you're not in Christ this morning, that's the starting point of the gospel. I mean, me talking about discipline, the discipline of God in your life. What's the point of it? Well, the point of it in your life up till now, if you're not in Christ, is to show you that you're dealing with somebody more powerful than you. Trust me. Have you learned that by now? You can kick against his goads. You can fight against his hand. You're not going to win. You can keep stiffening or you can loathe and resent, but it's not going to get you anywhere with him. And so he might keep bringing the difficulty and the suffering. Because he wants to show you...look, you may think this is bad. I've been through something far worse. I gave my Sonto die for you...the one kicking and fighting against me. What more could I do for you? And it breaks your heart. As in, it breaks down the sin, the hardness. When you hear the gospel and realize God would do that for me. He already did. You have to trust him. You have to trust his Son. You have to realize you're a sinner and need forgiven. And when we do that it totally removes the way in which we want to see the world centering around us, and then we see it center around God and His glory, and we're a part of that. And then now I have a new way to look at the hardships in my life. But you have to call out to him by faith this morning to forgive you and to change you from the inside. All of it is to call out to him, to trust him, to fear him. All the things we've covered already. But it starts with, do you really believe in his Son, Jesus? He's paid the penalty for your sin. So that's the love of God for his children. But what about the purpose in the discipline? Why? Why does he take me through it? What's he trying to do in me? I know it's motivated out of his love, but what's he trying to change in me? And I would say, fundamentally, what he's trying to do in you, in whatever means he employs it, is he's trying to grow your affection for him. And you say, that's weird. I get disciplined, and I'm supposed to love God more because of that? Well, what the discipline does is it pulls you away. It severs the connection you have with lesser loves called sin, called idols of the heart. Lesser desires, lusts, and desires you still have as a Christian because you're still in the flesh. And what God is doing in his discipline is he's severing the cords to those, because the human experience is we're going to hold on to things. We what? We're going to hold on to things we love. We're not going to give them up easy. And he wants all of your love for him. He does. That's what he wants. Because he knows that's what's best for you. And he's not going to settle for anything less than all of your love. So the purpose of his discipline in our lives can look a few different ways. First, he can discipline for our correction as Christians. Now there's three of these...correction, protection and instruction. We'll start with correction. And yes that does form the abbreviation CPI. So if you think about CPI Crime Prevention Incorporated you see those signs around town. The red sign that says warning mess with my house. Some robots going to talk to you. The dog sign works better for me, but I did think about that as I was thinking about God's discipline and its correction, its protection and its instruction. And so, you know, CPI isn't a bad thing to think about because it's warning you. Correction, protection and instruction in our lives in the discipline of God should warn us against something. You're going back to that thing you shouldn't love anymore. It's not good for you. I want your love for me. I'm a jealous God. Exodus 25 is the first time he calls himself a jealous God. We don't talk about the jealousy of God. We probably don't understand it in our human estimation. But we do know in Exodus 20:5, it's couched within the command to have no other gods before me, no idols, no nothing. Well, why would he then say, And I'm a jealous God? Because back to the point. Your heart will go after those things. God knows how we're wired. And I'm jealous for all of your affection for me. And it's the jealousy that's out of a heart that knows what's best for you. Not just what I want. Because we think of jealousy. Maybe why we don't talk about the jealousy of God is because it's petty. If you're a middle schooler. No offense. None taken. But we all were adults in here, and you all had a middle school crush, and you had a middle school crush who one day liked you, one day didn't. And then their affection. Affection went to somebody else. And you sat there and pouted or got mad and you were jealous. And it was a very shallow jealousy, millimeter thick. You thought you loved them and they loved you. After talking to them once at lunch, sharing a cupcake, and now you're mad at everybody, you're gonna throw that cupcake at the other boy or girl, whatever. That's petty jealousy, isn't it? There's no petty jealousy with God. It's the furthest thing from it, because it's your good he has in mind that he is willing to go to the extreme for your heart. There is nothing shallow in the least about that. Sowhat's he going to do for it? First, he'll discipline us for our correction. Chastisement for sin aims to correct us. And this is to God's children. You sin. There are times he will chastise you for that. But here's what you need to know that has no bearing on your eternal security. God's correcting chastisement of your life as a Christian is not about payment for your sin. Why? Who paid for it already? And how much did he pay? So there's nothing left for you to pay if you feel yourself under the hand of God, being disciplined, feeling his chastisement. You know what you've done. What you can't do is this is wonder...man am I paying for my own sin here? No, you're suffering a consequence. God's trying to correct you saying, don't do that anymore. Don't go back to that. Give your heart to me. But what he's not doing is saying, ah, yeah, you know, I don't know if you're gonna make it to heaven now. How do you make it to heaven? By the grace of Jesus Christ and the gospel. By his righteousness alone, not yours. So hear me loud and clear. First and foremost, out of the gates. The correction of God's discipline in your life as a Christian is not salvific. It's not meritorious. He took that out on his Son. Jesus took the wrath of God for you, and he took all of it. But he's still going to correct you to keep you from those lesser loves. You have to look no further than the example of David, a man after God's own heart. And when he sinned, God corrected him. You hear about that in multiple passages. We probably all think of Psalm 51 where he could say something like this. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. As in, you were the one that did the breaking of them...broken inside. I want to rejoice again. Restore unto me the joy of your salvation. Notice he didn't say, restore to me my salvation for my sin. When I committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband murdered, he doesn't say, I need my salvation back. He says, restore to me the joy of it because I don't have it anymore. Sin has sucked it out. So maybe I need to correct it. Psalm 39:10-11 David says, remove your plague from me because of the opposition of your hand I am perishing. That's a Christian talking. Verse 11, with reproofs you chasten a man for iniquity. David is saying this. You reprove me, you discipline me. You chastise me for my iniquity. Why do you do it? Next part of verse 11 of Psalm 39. You consume as a moth what is precious to him. Imagery of a moth gets in your closet, eats the sweater. Hopefully I don't have any holes in it, but they just can chew up things. Now you just have a hole and it's gone like it was never there. But a moth can't chew through steel, can it? The answer is no. But it can chew through your sweater. Something perishing. Something light. Not something strong and impenetrable. So David says, your reproves chasten me for my sin. And like a moth, it'll eat up the things that they're precious to me. But they don't last. Do you see what God's trying to do for you in correcting you and disciplining you?...sometimes. Not all the time. God is not an exasperating father who spanks you for every single time you get out of line. You spill the milk. You spilled more milk trying to clean up the spilled milk. You put the thing in the wrong thing. Spank spankspank spank spank. That's an exasperating father. It's not the kind of Father God is. Because as Christians, many things we still do that disobey him. And it's not like the immediate I do the thing. I immediately feel the chastisement. Only in his all pervadingwisdom that he knows exactly when to bring the thing into my life, to get me back in line. And he says, don't reject it. Don't despise it. Receive it. God's corrective discipline. Life of David...you need to look no further than there. Second, God disciplines us for our protection. This is not corrective as in correlated to a sin we're committing, but it is preventative for a sin that we might be led into. Preventative discipline. Any teachers out there remember learning about this? Where do you put the kidyou know that's bad in class? Not next to the other bad kid. You know, because they'll do bad things together. They'll incite each other. So preventative discipline is, you know what? I'm gonna. I know my seating chart. I'm putting this guy there. I'm putting Aschoff right in front of me because he's always getting in trouble. I figured that out eventually. Why am I always the object of my teacher's affection right in front of their desk? Except when I had my dad, I was in the back of the room. I'm not dealing with that guy. But that's preventative discipline. You move the pieces on the board in advance to not end up in the place you don't want to be. And God does that with us. We see this in the life of Paul, don't we? You know, he was a bad dude before coming to Christ. Acts 7 and 8. He's killing Christians. The blood's on his hand. Acts 9. He is saved by grace. And then the rest of his life. These epistles we have. He seems to have a pretty great testimony. You can't find anything on him, can you? Except 2 Corinthians 12. And it takes a while for him to finally boast, because Paul knew he was a prideful man when he was so, so prideful of his righteousness. Sothe last thing Paul needs, and he knows this about himself, is something to boast in again. So he keeps a secret for 14 years. What was the secret? 2 Corinthians 12 I know a man in Christ doesn't even want to say it's him...it's him who, 14 years ago, whether in the in the body I don't know or out of the body I don't know. God knows.  Such a man was caught up to the third heaven, and I don't know how such a man, whether in the body or apart from the body, I don't know. He's making his point, guys. This is not about me. I don't know how this all went down. I don't know why I got taken up to the third heaven. I don't know how it all happened, but this is what happened. Verse 4 I was caught up into Paradise. I mean, would that change you the rest of your life if you had that experience? So he gets up into Paradise and he hears inexpressible words which a man is not permitted to speak. And sohe's had to zip it for 14 years, but he is being so critiqued and run out of town by these bad Corinthian false teachers. He's like, you know what? Okay, I will tell you a little something about myself, some of my apostolic authority and why I come where I come from is because I've seen some things and heard some things nobody else has. But I never wanted to tell anybody. But now you're forcing me to do it. And he says that I don't I don't want to boast in this, but I will boast in it to teach you something about a weakness of mine. So I got to see and hear all this, and I heard all this. But this was what God did to me. As a result, he lets me get this amazing experience. I hear whatever I heard up in Paradise, things I'm not allowed to express. And then he says this verse 7, because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, I wrote a book and profited by selling it for millions, saying that I got to go to heaven before everybody. Oh, no, he didn't say that. Just checking to see if you're with me. This is what Paul actually says because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations. For this reason, to keep me, prevent me, from exalting myself, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from exalting myself. So preventative discipline. He's not admitting even to pride there. He's not saying I came back and was so proud. God did this, he says, to keep me from even getting close to pride. God protected me by afflicting me, and I didn't necessarily want that affliction. Next verse. Concerning this, I ask. The Lord implored him three times that it might leave me. And God said, yeah, you can handle it, Paul. No, he said, my grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. That's God's response to Paul asking, take the thorn away. Take the affliction away. And he says, no, you'll learn to be okay with this weakness, and it'll actually produce more strength in you and more humility in you, because I'm protecting you from you and your pride.  All of us are susceptible to exalting ourselves, as Paul states, so God might discipline us to protect us from more pride in ourselves, to prevent us from that sin. A very awful thing to have purveyed in the heart of a believer. But you just have to get the principle out of this. It wasn't because Paul was proud that God did it. It was because God did it that Paul wasn't proud. Did you catch that? It wasn't God being reactionary to Paul's pride. It was to keep him from that pride. God sent that affliction. That's called preventative discipline. And God has the wisdom and right to send it our way, if he knows it's for his glory and our good. That's category number two. Category three of discipline. He disciplines for our instruction. And again, this isn't chastisement for a sin we're committing. This isn't prevention of a sin we might commit. What is it? God disciplining for our instruction is taking us through a trial, through suffering, through affliction. At the very least, to teach you something about him and something about yourself that you didn't know before. At the end of it, that's what you've gained. You know more of your God, and in knowing more of your God and His majesty and glory and righteousness and justice, suddenly you start to see yourself in a new light because he brought you through that affliction. You say, where do you see that in the Bible? Well, Job. Story of Job...a man who right out of the gates. Job 1:1, there was a man named Job. He was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil. Sounds like he was on that Proverbs path, right? Listening to God, honoring God, fearing God. And yet he's afflicted. God allows Satan to afflict him with the worst things we could imagine from the lesser, like losing his wealth and properties and then losing his health. Worst of all, losing family, losing loved ones, seeing his own children die. The only thing Satan wasn't allowed to do was take Job's life. And, in the midst of all this loss. And his wife says, why don't you curse God and die? And Job says in 2:10, should we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?  He nails it. God sends both. And it says twice in 1:22 and then 2:10...through all this, Job did not sin, nor did he blame God, nor did he sin with his lips. Soyou could take corrective discipline out of that, right? There's no evidence there was a sin. Even though you get into Job and his friends are insistent....Job, you're in sin. Clearly, because this is how God works. Bad stuff happens to you. You've sinned. So just repent of it already and you'll get out of it. That's also how God works. Like you would not dare let it linger one second longer if you just say, okay, I got all this sin. So it wasn't corrective. And as far as we could tell, we don't see any prevention in it. This was just discipline for the sake of instruction. God wanted Job to know more of him. Did it work? Read Job 42, his final confession. Job answers the Lord after everything God taught him about himself from 38 to 42. Job answers the Lord and said, I know that you can do all things. No purpose of yours can be thwarted. Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore, I have declared that which I did not understand things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Hear, now, and I will speak. I will ask you, and you instruct me. How dare I say that? But this is what I did learn. Verse 5, Job 42...I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes. So what was it all for? Why did Job have to suffer unimaginable loss and inconsolable grief? Because at the end, he says, I thought I knew you and I didn't know you. And I thought I knew myself and I didn't know myself. So now the things I know of you I can worship. And the things I see in myself I can repent of. A clear example of discipline for the sake of a closer walk with God. And it came through adversity. Charles Bridges wrote about this. "Nowhere are our corruptions so evident, or our graces so shining as under the rod." Those corruptions we have in ourselves become a lot more evident when we go through adversity, don't they? The tendency in our hearts to resent the tendency in our backs to stiffen, our fists to clench. And we see that. And eventually we see that's not the way it should go. And then somehow, breaking through the darkness of the mountain is the glory of God in that. Most of all we see it in His Son. And we say, well, look at all that Christ went through for me. Look at all he endured for me. That's the drive of Hebrews 12. Isn't it? An expansion, if you want to study Hebrews 12 this week and expand upon what we learned in Proverbs 3:11 and 12. Read Hebrews 12:3 to 13. You think you're going through suffering? I want you to fix your eyes on Christ, and consider him who endured such hostility by sinners against himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. So fix your eyes on him. Now notice, I mean, this letter in Hebrews was written to some suffering Christians, some people that are questioning was it worth leaving what we had in Judaism to follow Jesus? And so, um, I think there's a good example in the writer of Hebrews that he doesn't poke them in the eye with chapter 12. Back in chapter 1, he teaches them of the of the glory and all surpassing wonder of Jesus Christ for 11 chapters to get to chapter 12 to say, yeah, you did get the better deal. Jesus is better than anything you had before in Judaism. He's worth it. So fix your eyes on him. And don't forget that in his humanity, he endured more than anybody could have endured. And then he jumps right into Proverbs 3. He  preachesfrom verses 5 on. He preaches a little sermon, seven verse sermon on Proverbs three because he quotes it, my son, don't regard lightly the discipline of the Lord. So this is all back to discipline for our instruction. Sometimes God's just trying to teach us there. Now you take correction from God and protection from God and instruction from God, and you can put them all together. And they're doing one main thing for you. They're preparing you for heaven. They're preparing you now to know God more. But ultimately, they're preparing you for glory. They're all tributaries into the same river of preparation. Now, the good works. He's prepared in advance for you, but also to come into heaven and say it was all worth it.
  And that brings us to the end. The path in God's discipline. It's a path that in Hebrews 12 we're told not to take lightly. Verse 5, the start of the path is don't, don't take it lightly. If you're going to move any further ahead, Hebrews 12:5 says, don't forget the exhortation which was addressed to you as sons, my son, don't regard lightly the discipline of the Lord as in you're meant to take this discipline in and learn something from it. So even today, we're to we're to look at our lives and make an evaluation and say, what am I going through? What have I have I been through? Not to try to solve the unanswerable questions of why. But to understand more of the God that we know loves us, and to then maybe trace back to corrective discipline, or instructive or preventative and do kind of that, you know, evaluation of life and look back and say, when did God allow some affliction in my life that I could see now, prevented me from something, or corrected me for something, or just I went through it, and years later, the only thing I know that what I learned is I learned more about trusting God. It could be any of those things. And that's the exhortation of the preacher in Hebrews 12. Don't regard it lightly. Think on it. Why? What's that going to do? Go down to verse 11. It's going to train you. So perseverance and affliction isn't just for the sake of perseverance. It's to teach you and train you and build you up and strengthen you and yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness in your life. You're a different person now because of it. I mean, wouldn't it be sad and awful and a waste to go through adversity and suffering and to learn nothing? To go through it and have nothing on the other side too say...it is what it is. No it's not. That's to think lightly of the discipline of the Lord and not see that he was trying to teach you and train you and strengthen you and build you. And yes, he knows it hurts, but he loves you enough with the jealous love to win your affection to him.
  I'll close with this from Charles Spurgeon on the jealous love of the Lord that goes to any length to keep our hearts close to him, he writes. "One of the most solemn truths in the Bible is the Lord thy God is a jealous God. Where there is an intense and an infinite love that glows in the heart of God. There will be and must be jealousy. Oh, how jealous God is of the hearts of his people. How determined he is to have all of their love. How I have known God to take away the objects of our attachments one after another, break our idols, and deprive us of our most precious vanities, all to get our hearts wholly to himself because he knew it would never be right with him while we have a divided heart."
  Let's pray. Father, we know we are prone to wonder and prone to leave the God we love. So we may not understand your ways, unfathomable as they are, but we at least have some starting points today. The starting point of your love and delight in us as your children that we know is true. Because you sent your son to die for us. And he suffered, and he went through something more unimaginable than we could, and he did it for the joy set before him to win a bride, to win the redeemed. And so we are in the process of not redemption...our salvation is secure, but we are in the process of being remade, conformed into the image of your Son. And as Job said, shall we not see that prosperity and adversity are both from your hand? And you can use adversity particularly to shape us and mold us into the children you would like us to be. So help us today, just with a little more than we came in with the ability to receive it. And even as we go to song now, praise you for it. Amen.