Being Holy, Responsible Children and Siblings, part III

1. Joyfully receive the Father’s discipline, given for your growth and peace Hebrews 12:4–11

As you’ll remember from last week’s passage, our author closes verse 3 with an encouragement to endure hardship and persevere through trials. He picks up this sentiment in verse 4. To put it plainly, he points out the obvious. Christians are going to go through difficulties. It’s simply apart of following Jesus. For some, there will be explicit persecution; for others, perhaps more subtle forms of persecution. Christians will endure loss, hardship, trials and tribulations. Some of this will be the result of living in a sinful world. Our bodies fail and we die because of sin. Some of the hardship we go through will simply be the consequence of bad, sinful decisions we’ve made. A person may go through financial hardship because they were unwise with their money. Some hardships we go through as Christians, however, our author says, will be the direct result of God’s intervention. In other words, some of the difficulties you face in life will be things that God intentionally places before you.

Now talk about something that seems entirely counter–cultural. What does the world love to say about God? God is love. God just wants you to be you. Our culture loves the idea of a loving, peaceful God. They hate and scoff at the idea of a just and righteous God. But what our author says in verse 4, is that God not only permits trials, but sometimes He even instigates them. Well this seems entirely contradictory to a loving God. This makes God sound like a bully or a mean, spiteful God. You see the objections to Christianity have not changed over the millennia. We like to think that we are smarter and more advanced than people and culture use to be, but the fact of the matter is that we have not changed a bit as people. Just as many reject the God of the Bible as a mean and spiteful God today; so too in the first century A.D. some rejected God because of the existence of suffering and hardship.

But here’s our author’s point,

5 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.
6 For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.”


When God places trials and hardships in our paths, it is a sign and it is proof that He loves us; for these trials are not merely arbitrary or gratuitous, though sometimes in the circumstance it feels that way, but they are forms of loving fatherly discipling. Read verse 7, again. We come then to point of Hebrews 12: 4–11, number one, joyfully receive the Father’s discipline, given for your growth and peace. As we already said, some troubles are not directly divine discipline, but many of our troubles are just that. Our author gives us this quotation from Proverbs 3:11, therefore, to help us put our present circumstances in proper context.

In other words, there are two keys things we must realize whenever God disciplines us. First, that fact that we are being disciplined means that we belong to God. In other words, divine discipline is a sign of our salvation. Moreover, if we have never been disciplined, then we should question our standing with God. Read verse 8. Simply put, when hardship is our lot we should accept it as God’s method of training and disciplining us, and as a token that we are really his beloved sons and daughters. God spends considerable amount of time and care in the upbringing of his heirs; to prepare us to rule with Christ.