Hebrews: Jesus Is Greater

By faith, we look past the pain of discipline at the moment to the product of discipline in our lives. God is producing in us the “peaceful fruit of righteousness.” An exposition of Hebrews 12:11.

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The book of Hebrews chapter 12. And we’re going to begin reading at verse 9, and we’ll read 9 through verse 11 and be looking today at verse 11. Hebrews 12, verse 9:

9 Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live?

10 For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.

11 All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. (Heb. 12:9–11 NASB)

You and I are driven by incentives. Everything that we do in life is a response to an incentive. We do things in life because—or we make decisions, I should say—based upon what we deem to be in our best interest in the moment, either in the immediate or in the long term. We make short-term decisions based upon our long-term interests. Looking ahead, we do this often when we invest. We will take money that we could spend on something that we want now, that would delight us now, and we would save that or invest that or set that aside in some way in order to get something in the future that we think that we might enjoy in the future even more than what we might enjoy in the present. So we’re always making trade-offs in the decisions that we make: how we spend our time, how we spend our money, what we do each and every day. It’s all geared in some measure by incentives. We do those things that we deem to be in our best interest in the moment, or at least in our best interest at some point when we expect to get a payoff.

We endure in the short term all kinds of difficulties and sacrifices and pain, and we are willing to do this if we are convinced that the long-term benefit is worth the payoff. Athletes do this. This week is the NFL draft. And if you watch the NFL draft, as I monitor it and sometimes watch the first round, you will see a whole bunch of athletes, people who have spent their time and their energy and their effort exerting themselves and disciplining themselves and training themselves in the hopes that their name will be called sometime during the draft and there will be a payoff, that all that they have sacrificed is going to come back to them and pay rewards or dividends in the end.

Entering into any professional sport is always a group of people that know people in their lives that—while they were on the court or on the field or sacrificing and training and being disciplined and exerting themselves and investing in what they viewed to be their future—they’ll always have people in their lives who spent that same amount of time playing video games in the basement, chomping on Doritos, and not spending any time at all investing anything for any kind of a payoff. There are the short-term people and the long-term people. The people who are athletes, they are willing to adjust their diet and change their routine and sacrifice their spare time and spend their weekends putting forth the effort because they believe that there’ll be a payoff. They’re going to make the team or they’re going to win the championship. They’re going to get something that is worth the sacrifice in the short term. We see this with athletes.

We see it also in the medical procedures that you and I are willing to endure. We are willing to let somebody cut us open and put us to sleep (not in that order). We’re willing to let people put us to sleep and then cut us open, and even go through the physical therapy, the pain of physical therapy, and change our diet, and sacrifice that pain in the short term if we have the hope that we can beat this disease or cure the pain or somehow make our life better, repair an injury.

I will give you a personal example. I tend to steer away from personal examples, but a couple of years ago when I had my shoulder operated on and I preached for a few weeks with my arm in a sling like this, I had to keep it immobile for six weeks. Well, during that six weeks, apparently my body created a lot of scar tissue so that when I finally started to go in for physical therapy, one of the things that the physical therapist had to do was stretch out my shoulder in an excruciatingly painful fashion. And I made very little progress for several weeks. I went in and visited the doctor again, and he said, “You are one of a small number of people whose body produces scar tissue abundantly and quickly.” So if you wonder, what does Jim do better than most of the population?—that is my thing. That’s what I’m skilled at, apparently. I’m an overachiever in terms of scar tissue.

So the physical therapist, every week when I would go in, she would have to stretch my shoulder out, and the goal was to tear the scar tissue that had formed inside the joint. It was excruciatingly painful. Why was I willing to let her do that to me? Because at some point in my life after that I wanted to be able to raise my hand like this. Now, if I raise my hand in a class, I’ll usually raise my right arm because I’m right-handed. But what if I lose my right arm in some accident? Not being able to raise your arm higher than this would have its drawbacks. So I was willing to let her tear scar tissue in my shoulder in the short term, as excruciatingly painful as that was—and it was—because I wanted the payoff of being able to raise my arm and function. Putting your arms above your head, apparently, I think, is kind of a nice feature of having two arms. We don’t use it in our worship here very much because we’re not charismatics, but there are other applications for using both arms above your head.

Sometimes we are willing to sacrifice and endure pain for the hope of the payoff. And not even the guarantee of the payoff, just the hope of the payoff. We’re willing to gamble, if I can use that word. We’re willing to sacrifice something and invest something in the hopes that there will be a payoff, even when that payoff is not guaranteed. We take the risk of losing something in the near term so that we can have the hope of gaining something greater in the long term.

The same mentality must be applied to the subject of God’s discipline in our lives and the afflictions that He sends us. We endure pain in the short term. This is what verse 11 says: “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful” (Heb. 12:11). We endure this and we embrace this in our life in the near term. Why? In the hope that, or with the certainty that, “afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness” in the lives of those who have been trained by that discipline. That is embracing something in the short term with the confidence that if God’s Word is correct, if God’s Word is true, if He’s going to keep His Word, there is going to be, after the short-term sacrifice of the suffering in the midst of affliction, the sorrow, there’s going to be, after that, the enjoyment of the peaceful fruits of righteousness. That’s what verse 11 is about. Let’s read it again. Verse 11. We looked at half of this last week. “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it [that is, by the discipline], afterwards [that discipline] yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”

One of the peaceful fruits of righteousness in verse 10 is that we would share His holiness. That is something that God is preparing us for and doing in us in discipline. Another one is that we enjoy the fruit of that discipline. Even though the difficulty is real in the short term, the fruit is just as real in the long term. And the author here is contrasting what we experience in the short term (the sorrow) with what we get to enjoy in the long term (the peaceful fruit of righteousness). And all the way through the passage, he has been imploring us to understand that the difficulties that we face in this life are not indications of God’s wrath upon us or His displeasure with us in that sense, but rather the discipline that we endure in this life is, in fact, an expression of God’s love for us as He trains us for the life that is to come and for enjoying in this world the peaceful fruits of righteousness.

Last week we saw that the pain of discipline is our present experience. And this week, today, we’re going to look at the last half of verse 11 and see that the product of discipline is our certain and future expectation. Now, last week I said something that I want to give a little bit of a clarification to because it might have struck some of you, particularly those of you who might have come since, say, the middle of January when we covered this subject. Last week, I talked about God scripting our lives and writing things into the story of our lives and appointing and sending things to us like illness, sickness, chronic pain, houses burning down, children dying, a spouse dying, and even a miscarriage. And I think that there was a visceral reaction on behalf of some of you, and that may be because you weren’t here back in January when we covered this reality that the discipline that God sends into our lives is not because of something that we have done that deserves that. So if when you hear something like that, you’re thinking in your mind, What have I done to deserve a miscarriage?—immediately you have framed discipline wrong. Discipline is training. God uses as training all of these adversities that come into our lives. But it doesn’t mean necessarily that there is a one-to-one correspondence between something you have done and something bad that has happened to you. That’s the wrong way to think about it. Because discipline is not an expression of God’s wrath. It is not a punishment for your sin. If God dealt with all of us according to what we deserve, we would all be in Hell right now. That’s what we deserve. God doesn’t deal with us according to what we deserve. So discipline is not a punishment that God inflicts for some sin you have committed. We covered this back in January, and I don’t want anybody to hear what I said last week and think to themselves, “Jim is suggesting that God is just up there punishing us with these things that come into our lives, and we’re not even aware of what it is that we have done.” Just want to reframe that, because I know that there are people here who are new, who were not here back when I laid all of that foundation so insufferably long ago.

The product of discipline as our future expectation. Now, this verse is structured around this contrast between how discipline is experienced by us in the present and what discipline produces for us in the future. You see that contrast in the word yet, or maybe some translations have but or then again or and then at the middle of verse 11: it “seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet [here’s the contrast] to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”

Who are those who have been trained by discipline? I would remind you, it is only God’s children who are trained by discipline. God does not discipline unbelievers. He is not training unbelievers in righteousness. He is not producing for and in unbelievers the peaceful fruits of righteousness. He’s not allowing them to share in His holiness. This is a blessing, this is an intention of God that is strictly aimed at His children. We are the ones who get the blessing of discipline. And I want you to get used to that idea of the blessing of discipline. It is a blessing that is reserved only for those who are within the family. No other child in the world received the blessing of the discipline that I would give to my own children. That was my blessing to them. My gift to them was discipline. Likewise God does not pour out His discipline upon unbelievers. He pours out His wrath on unbelievers, His judgment on unbelievers, but not discipline. Discipline is God’s work in the hearts of His people, His children, to train us in righteousness, to produce in us holiness, so that we’d share His holiness and so that we would enjoy the peaceful fruits of righteousness.

And notice that verse 11 describes those who have been trained by it. Notice that it doesn’t use the word discipline. All the way through this passage, up in verse 5, down in verse 6, verse 7 twice, verse 8, verse 9, verse 10 twice, verse 11, the beginning of the verse has the word discipline—discipline has been his theme all the way through this, but this word trained is a different word. Notice it doesn’t say “for those who have been disciplined by Him,” but “for those who have been trained by the discipline.” It’s a different word. It’s the word gymnazo. Gymnazo, from which we get our word gymnasium, describes being trained or undergoing discipline to practice or to exercise. It describes a rigorous exertion that is intended to hone skill or develop capabilities. That’s what it describes. Those who have been “gymed” by it. G-y-m; I just realized I need to specify there. Those who have gone to the gym and been trained by the gymnazo, the training. That is what’s being described. A gymnasium was a place of athletic training and rigorous exercise where discipline was inflicted, physical training, where athletes and people developing certain skills and honing abilities would go to have those skills and abilities honed and crafted and made precise so that they could compete in the exercises, so they could compete in the races.

This is not the word that is used for discipline. The word for discipline is paideia, and that includes training and child-rearing. We talked about the definition of this back in verse 4. I’ll just remind you, it is a broader term that describes all kinds of instruction, training, teaching, even punishment. It describes tutorage and education, and sometimes just generically rearing or raising children is the idea. So it’s a broad term. Discipline is a broad term which incorporates a lot of things, all designed to mold and shape and train and form children in the rearing process. And those who have undergone discipline, they are the ones who have been trained by it. Those are the ones who have been trained by it. There is a training aspect to discipline, and this is ultimately what it is that you and I are looking for in our own lives in terms of discipline. Not so much that we are embracing pain for the sake of pain, but that we are embracing discipline because it produces something in us and trains us for something. That’s why we embrace it. Not because we love pain, not because we delight in difficulty, not because we receive joy from the tribulations itself, but because these things are intended by God for our training, for our equipping, to hone us and to shape us, to make us capable, to do something in us that is for our good and for His glory.

With that word training, the author returns to the athletic metaphor that he began up in verses 1 to 3. Remember, run your race with endurance. Run with endurance the race that is set before you, looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, keeping your eye on the finish line. You’re to run that race that God has laid out, the course that He has set for you. You are to do this. Then he begins to talk about the discipline, the rearing, and the training, yes, that is required for those who will run the race effectively.

So now he’s just sort of capping—with this reference to training, he’s capping now this athletic metaphor that he started back at the beginning of chapter 12. The same theme is being developed, and here it comes to the conclusion: for those who run their race, there is discipline that is involved in this. This discipline is itself the training for the race that God has laid out for you. This is why we embrace it. This is why we regard discipline in our lives as a blessing sent from God. This is a transforming way of thinking about affliction, suffering, persecution, hostility from unbelievers, hatred that the world heaps upon us and the scorn. We are to look at that and see it and receive it as God’s blessing in our lives. Yes, this difficulty is real. Yes, the difficulty is painful. But this is God’s training. He’s disciplining us. And His only intention is love.

You and I are in a race, and discipline is not pain for the sake of pain. And even when I said, as last week, that in the midst of discipline, pain or sorrow is the point, I don’t mean it’s the point in terms of that is the only goal, that it’s just pain for the sake of pain. But rather I mean the sorrow and the pain, the difficulty of it, is part of the intention of God in it, because it is through the difficulty and the sorrow that you and I are trained and disciplined.

So, like children who will not learn from the loving discipline of their parents, if you and I refuse God’s discipline and His chastisements and refuse to learn the lessons and pursue holiness, then He will send further discipline. Come to grips with that. If you will not heed the first chastisements, more chastisements will come. You think it’s miserable now? Child of God, continue in your sin and you will learn new degrees of misery. God will sometimes scourge His children is what verse 6 says. He will goad us. He will afflict us until you and I embrace the very thing that He wants us to embrace, until we learn it, until we receive it. And the reason is not because He hates us, not because He is filled with wrath. The reason is because He loves us too much to leave us in our stiff-necked rebellion. Because He loves us too much to leave us in our stiff-necked rebellion.

He knows what sin does to us. He will do all that is necessary to purge that from our lives. This is why the author encourages a right response in verse 5: “Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him.” Will you respond, will I respond, to God’s chastening with humility and obedience or hostility and obstinance? Will we seek to learn obedience and grow in grace or harden our hearts and resist His purposes? Will you respond in faith, trusting in a God who is sovereign and good? Or will you respond with insolence and pride and hard-heartedness and stiff-necked rebellion? That is the choice. That is what is before each and every one of us that endures God’s discipline.

This is a revolutionary mindset that you and I have to have toward afflictions in our lives, that this is here for a purpose and God is doing something in it for my good. And so now the question is, what can I learn? What sin can I put off? What sin can I mortify? How can I pursue holiness in this? How can I finish this training exercise and be more useful to the Lord, more fruitful for Him, and draw closer to Him? Because it is not a purposeless pain. It’s not an aimless discipline. It has a purpose. It has an aim. And it is training us for our race. God knows exactly what needs to happen to you and I for us to be fruitful and for us to be faithful and for us to mortify sin. And those are the very things that God sends into our lives to shape us and to prepare us for His usefulness.

So when does the fruit come? Look at verse 11. “Yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” It comes afterwards. Fruit is not instantaneous. The fruit of discipline is not instantaneous. Now, sometimes it is. And there are fruits in discipline that come immediately as a result of discipline. But generally speaking, the bulk of the fruit that you and I enjoy as a result of God’s discipline is something that comes afterwards. It’s later on. Discipline—the fruits of it are not always immediate. The fruits of discipline are not only immediate. They’re not always immediate, and they’re not only immediate.

Now, I don’t think that the author intends here to rule out the possibility and the reality that there might be immediate fruit in the life of a believer as a result of discipline. You can think of ways in which suffering can immediately produce a fruit in your life. Something bad happens, a tragedy strikes, you get bad news, and immediately you begin to pray. Immediately you begin to focus your mind and your heart upon Scripture, upon God’s truth, upon disciplining your heart and your mind. You begin to pray in ways that you’ve never prayed before. That’s an immediate fruit that comes out of the midst of discipline and affliction and suffering. And those are good fruits, but sometimes those are short-lived fruits. In other words, the fruit is there, and as soon as the affliction is gone, then we go right back to normal, don’t we? Not praying as much, not seeking the Lord as much, not being as concerned about holiness in our lives as much. As soon as the affliction is lifted, the fruit vanishes. Well, if God is going to produce long-lasting fruit, He’s going to produce in us the peaceful fruits of righteousness.

A mistake that many people make is they become deeply grieved when they do not see immediate results from discipline in their lives, because they undergo affliction and they want to see immediately, in the moment, something good that comes out of this. “I want to see what the Lord is doing, and I want to see all that the Lord is doing right now.” But that is not how God works. Sometimes the connection between our suffering and our affliction and the fruit that comes from it can be years in the making. You don’t plant a seed and immediately expect to receive fruit off that within a couple hours, do you?

Children do. Children do, right? Remember I said several weeks ago that children are foolish. When I would take my kids out when they were young, we would plant a seed, and within a few hours they would be out there looking at it, wondering why the seed didn’t come up, maybe even a couple of days later, wondering, “Where’s the seed? Where’s the plant?” And I had to explain to them, “You need to have a long-term idea here of what is supposed to happen. It might be a couple of weeks before we see the beginnings of the plant, and it’s going to be even longer before we see fruit off that.” You don’t prune a tree and expect it to produce fruit the next day. There’s affliction, and then there can sometimes be a long period of time before you see the fruit of that affliction. You may not perceive an immediate improvement or profit in your life off the discipline that God sends to you in the moment. Get that carefully in your head. You may not see immediate improvement or profit in your life, but I can promise you discipline produces fruit in the long term. How can I promise that? Because Scripture says that afterwards that discipline yields the peaceful fruits of righteousness.

We can’t always connect the dots between our suffering and affliction and the discipline and the fruit that it produces. I am positive—I could say without any hesitation; I would be willing to die for this truth—that there are spiritual peaceful fruits of righteousness, peace in my own life, that are present today that are the result of some affliction or difficulty that I have endured at some point in my Christian life. Possibly even from an affliction that I in this moment cannot even remember ever having. But that fruit is there. I’m not the same person I was twenty-five or thirty years ago, and neither are you. If you’re in Christ, you’re not the same person you were even last year. God is producing fruits in your lives all the time, and He is using affliction to produce those things. So I cannot always connect some peaceful fruit of righteousness that I enjoy in my life, my character, in my heart now directly with an affliction and say, “Well, this is tied to this.” Sometimes that’s possible. Sometimes you can say, “I suffered this. Here are the three things that I learned, and here are the things in my life that are different as a result of me going through that affliction.” Sometimes that is the case.

But sometimes there is fruit in your life that is tied to a difficulty or an affliction, some act of discipline in your life that God brought into your life, and you can’t necessarily even remember the discipline or the difficulty. And yet, God has produced fruit out of that. That is certainly the case. Sometimes fruit is immediate. I will acknowledge that. Sometimes fruit is immediate. But the point of the author is that we don’t necessarily have a justification for expecting to see all of the fruit immediately. And we can always know that there are better and greater things to come in terms of the fruit of God’s discipline.

Spurgeon, using the children of Israel and their time in Egypt and coming out of that in the Exodus, draws an interesting parallel to the immediacy of fruit. Listen to what he says. “The good of trouble is generally not while we are in trouble, but when we get out of trouble.” You just need to stop, selah. Meditate upon that for a few moments. “The good of trouble is generally not while we are in trouble, but when we get out of trouble. Yet, on the other hand, it sometimes happens that God can give us the jewels even before we leave Egypt, so that we can march out of the house of bondage with golden earrings hanging at our ears and covered with all manner of ornaments. But for the most part, however, it is nevertheless afterwards that this happens.”

Remember the children of Israel coming out of bondage? They asked the Egyptians for treasures, and the Egyptians gave them, and they walked out incredibly wealthy, having been slaves for centuries? Spurgeon says sometimes that’s what difficulty does. Sometimes in the midst of discipline, we walk out immediately with the jewels and the treasures that the discipline has produced. But we always know that, even in those times when we walk out immediately with treasures from our discipline, there’s still greater fruit that is still yet to come in the future, because afterwards it yields the peaceful fruits of righteousness. So sometimes God does give you the jewels from discipline in the immediate, but He’s always going to do even more in the future as you enjoy the peaceful fruits of righteousness.

In Psalm 119, verse 67, the psalmist says, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Your word.” Notice how he connects “before I was afflicted—my affliction—I went astray” and “now I keep Your word.” The psalmist says, “Affliction has produced in me obedience.” Because of the affliction, I have learned obedience. Also because of the affliction, he learned God’s statutes. “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes” (Psalm 119:71). So even when there is immediate profit to us in our discipline, there is still even greater fruitfulness afterwards from our discipline.

This is, in fact, what was true of the heroes of faith. Remember back in chapter 11, Abraham waited. He was promised a son. He was promised a land. He waited years to see that son of promise. And he died in the land, having never received the promise of that land. And Isaac followed and did the same thing, and Jacob, and then Joseph, all of whom lived their lives and never saw the fulfillment of that promise. And we look at Abraham and we say, “Man, there is a faith to emulate.” He’s one of the heroes of the faith. Here was a guy who endured through affliction and embraced God’s discipline. Like Moses, Abraham was a man who “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter [this is describing Moses], choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward” (Heb. 11:24–26).

Later on in Hebrews chapter 11, “women received back their dead by resurrection; and others were tortured, not accepting their release, so that they might obtain a better resurrection” (v. 35). All those Hebrews 11 heroes of faith, they anticipated something greater in the future, and they were willing to endure in the present all manner of difficulties and sufferings and afflictions and discipline. Why? Because the reward, the payout, they were convinced, was greater than anything they would sacrifice in the present. And we look at their faith and we say, “That is magnificent.” We want to emulate until we’re offered the chance to emulate, and then we say, “No, I’m done. No more affliction, no more discipline, no more difficulty.” You’re not going to emulate the faith of Abraham and Moses and those who were willing to be tortured and not accept their release for a better resurrection—you can’t emulate that faith unless you are put in a position where you can look to the reward and say, “I’m willing to endure in the short term whatever it is that the Lord has appointed for me so that I may enjoy the peaceful fruits of righteousness.” This fruit that is enjoyed comes after the conflict. After the conflict.

Now, what is the peaceful fruit of righteousness? I want to skip past for a moment the word peaceful, since that describes it. I will come back to that in just a moment. What is the fruit of righteousness? There are two ways to understand that phrase. The first is kind of a narrow sense of understanding it, and the second is broader. I’ll give both of them to you. I’m not going to ask you to choose between the two because I think that the author can mean both of these things. I think that both of these things are true.

The first way of understanding this, the narrow sense, is that the fruit that he is describing is, in fact, righteousness. It is the fruit of righteousness. Righteousness is the fruit. These are the same thing. In other words, the fruit that is produced through our discipline is righteousness. Now, if that is what the author is describing here, he is not talking about the righteousness that makes us acceptable before God on judgment day.
That’s imputed righteousness. That’s a righteousness that is not ours, that is credited to us at the moment of faith. In other words, that righteousness describes our standing before God. So it’s not imputed righteousness. If that’s what the author is describing, he’s talking about practical righteousness, that is, holiness of life. It’s righteous living that is in view. It would be akin to what he says in verse 14: “Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification [or holiness] without which no one will see the Lord.” And so some have suggested that the righteousness here in verse 11 is basically the same thing as holiness that is mentioned in verse 14. You and I are to pursue peace with all men and holiness or sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.

I find it interesting that in verse 14 where this becomes a command to pursue something, he has the words pursue peace and pursue holiness. And in verse 11 he has there the peaceful fruit of righteousness. So if righteousness and holiness are synonymous, then what we have here that God is going to affect in us through discipline (the peaceful fruit of righteousness)—he tells us in verse 14 to pursue these very things: peace with all men, and holiness without which no one can see the Lord. So if this is what is being described, then all he’s describing here is righteous conduct that itself is the result of discipline. It’s the fruit of discipline. And there is certainly a sense in which discipline produces this in our lives—righteous conduct. When we go through affliction, the point of the affliction is that you and I would mortify sin, that we would lay aside the encumbrances that keep us from running, and lay aside the sin that so easily entangles us, and run with endurance the race that is set before us. It is the putting off of sin that is the point. It is the goal of discipline. So it could be that the fruit here is itself a righteous conduct.

It could be understood in a second sense, which is a little bit broader. That is to say that it is the fruit that righteousness in our lives produces. In other words, as a result of discipline, you and I become more righteous in our conduct, and that righteousness in our conduct, in our behavior, practically speaking, begins to produce all kinds of other fruits. Like what? Like, for instance, love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, the fruits of the spirit. So if that righteousness which has been imputed to us as a gift from God begins to take shape in our lives, practically speaking, and we begin to work out and live out our salvation and the righteousness that God has given to us, that is going to start producing all kinds of other fruits in our lives, which would be the peaceful fruits of righteousness: submission to God’s will, mortification of sin, a heavenly-mindedness, trust and reliance upon God’s grace, appreciation for the Scriptures and God’s promises, a thankfulness, obedience, the pursuit of holiness, readiness for every good work. That type of fruit is produced by afflictions and discipline in our lives as God takes the one who has been made righteous by faith and begins to prune them for fruitfulness and effectiveness. Every vine that is in Jesus Christ will be pruned so that it may bear more fruit. That’s the goal. Discipline is the pruning. It’s difficult. It’s painful. We get that, we understand that. But the end result is not just pain for the sake of pain. The end result is pain that produces fruitfulness, so that you and I can enjoy the peaceful fruits of righteousness.

And the very fact that affliction in the life of a Christian produces fruit of this nature, of this kind, is itself a testimony to the divine nature of what is going on in our discipline. Spurgeon says this: “Trials breed discontent, anger, envy, rebellion, enmity, murmuring, and a thousand other ills.” That is, he says, naturally speaking. That’s what he means. Trials produce these things, naturally speaking. You take somebody who has suffered, somebody who’s not a believer, who has suffered horrible difficulties and trials in their life, and what does it produce? All of these things. “Trials breed discontent, anger, envy, rebellion, enmity, murmuring, and a thousand other ills; but God overruleth and makes the very thing which would make Christians worse to minister unto their growth in holiness and spirituality. It is not the natural fruit of affliction, but the supernatural use to which God turns it in bringing good out of evil.” The natural result of affliction is not humility and gentleness and patience and kindness and goodness and self-control and reliance upon God. That is not what is naturally produced by suffering. Naturally, suffering produces bitterness and anger and resentment and hostility and pride and stiff-neckedness. That is what it naturally produces. But the fact that these things can produce in Christians all of these fruits is a testimony that God is at work. So you see some gentle little church lady sitting on the pew who has gone through all kinds of afflictions. She is physically suffering all kinds of difficulties and trials that God has appointed for her, things that she has had to deal with. And yet, she’s the most gentle, kind, meek person you have ever met. Tell me, how does that happen? That’s a supernatural thing. It can only happen supernaturally. That’s the work of the Spirit of God. The natural result is a hardness of heart and a stiff-neckedness and a bitterness over difficulties, because that’s how the natural man responds to it.

So why is it described then as peaceful, this fruit of righteousness? All of these things are peaceful. I think that describes how it is that you and I enjoy it in the moment, as opposed to the discipline, which is sorrowful. You can probably think of few things in your life that you would describe as sorrowful and peaceful. Can you think of any? Where you thought, “Man, this was, this point in my life, a season of my life, was just sorrow upon sorrow upon sorrow, but boy, it was so peaceful and joyful.” Can you think of any example in your life? You probably can’t. See, sorrow in the moment is what describes discipline. Peacefulness in the future is what describes the fruit that comes out of the discipline. So peaceful stands in stark contrast to the sorrow of the moment that we experience in the moment of the discipline, and it stands in contrast to the discipline itself. In discipline, we often are not at peace. Discipline does not produce peace in the moment that we are suffering. No child is at peace while being disciplined by their parents.

So think in terms of the types of hostilities that are described in the book of Hebrews that these early Christians were facing: persecution, reproach, anger and hostility from their enemies, from the world, being cast out of the synagogue, being excluded from their family gatherings, losing their possessions (as it says some of them had been seized and they accepted joyfully the seizure of their property, back in chapter 10). Does any of that sound like peaceful circumstances or situations in their lives? It’s not. But that was what discipline was. Discipline is not peaceful. Discipline is painful. The fruit is peaceful. The fruit is something we enjoy later on when the discipline is gone, and we enjoy it in peace, and it brings us peace.

Discipline is itself a pledge of our peace with God because He only sends it to His children. And so when we experience discipline, we say, “Well, this is God’s pledge that I belong to Him. He would not be doing this in me if I were not His child. And therefore I know that I am at peace with God.” And you and I can be at peace in our soul, even in the midst of the conflict that is outside. We can suffer, we can sit in difficulty, in affliction, and say, “I will be at peace with this.” We can be at peace in our hearts in terms of how we are before God, even in the midst of extreme difficulty. But when we come out of the discipline, the fruit that we get to enjoy from that is enjoyed peacefully.

One last observation I want to give you, and that is that in verse 11, the description there in its entirety is the opposite of sin. Notice that. See, discipline is intended to rid us of sin. Discipline is sorrowful in the moment but joyful in the future, pleasant in the future. Sin, on the other hand, is pleasant in the present and sorrowful in the future. These are polar opposites of one another. The description of discipline is the opposite of what sin gives us. Discipline is sorrowful and not joyful. Sin is joyful, pleasant, and then sorrowful later. Discipline produces in us peace and fruit and righteousness afterwards. Sin produces rottenness and destroys righteousness. Discipline produces it, sin destroys it. Discipline purifies the soul, whereas sin sickens the soul and rots it from the inside. The outcome of discipline is peace and life and fruit and joy and glory. The outcome of sin is death and barren souls and sorrow and destruction and the loss of everything that you treasure.

Discipline feels in the moment like you are going to lose everything and gain nothing. Sin is the opposite. Sin feels in the moment like you are gaining everything and you’ll never lose it. And yet the payoff is exactly the opposite. With discipline, you feel like you’re losing everything in the moment, but in the future, the payoff is enormous, because the glory that is to come as a result of that is more than you and I can possibly imagine. So discipline in the moment is difficult, but the payoff is huge. Sin in the moment is pleasurable and glorious, but the payoff is destruction and death and ruin and the utter loss of everything. So sin always feels in the moment like I’m gaining everything, but in the end, I lose everything, including my soul. These two are opposite, which is why discipline, one of the intentions of it, is that it would rid us of sin and purify our hearts. Because in the end, sin causes you to lose everything and you profit nothing from it.

And so you and I embrace discipline, that we might gain infinitely more. And we embrace discipline not because it makes discipline pleasant, but because it makes discipline profitable. Makes it profitable. Why would you, Christian, be struck with God’s rod and profit nothing from it? You’re going to be struck with the rod, you might as well profit from it. It might as well be to your usefulness and to your fruitfulness. Therefore, do not despise the discipline of the Lord.

I close with one last quote. This one’s not from Spurgeon. In fact, I don’t know who said this. I did some “internetting” this week and couldn’t find out who originally wrote this, but I found it in John MacArthur’s commentary, and he didn’t give an attribution for this. He just said, “Someone has written.” Now, it might be that the person’s name is Someone, in which case this is an attribution. But here’s what it says: “And so what do I say? I say let the rains of disappointment come, if they water the plants of spiritual grace. Let the winds of adversity blow, if they serve to root more securely the trees that God has planted. I say, let the sun of prosperity be eclipsed, if that brings me closer to the true light of life. Welcome, sweet discipline, discipline designed for my joy, discipline designed to make me what God wants me to be.”

By faith, we look past the pain of discipline at the moment to the product of discipline in our lives. God is producing in us the “peaceful fruit of righteousness.” An exposition of Hebrews 12:11.

Sermon Transcript

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Hebrews chapter 12. Today, we are back in Hebrews 12, and you will likely be relieved to find out that we are nearing the end of our study in God’s discipline. In fact, the study in God’s discipline may be itself discipline in your life as you’re looking forward to the affliction being lifted and moving on to more important—or we should say more enjoyable—subjects later on.

Discipline is a difficult thing for us to grasp, to get our minds around, and we’ve been taking our time, or I should say I’ve been taking my time—you really have no choice in the matter—but I’ve been taking my time working through this so that we might think rightly and respond appropriately to God’s hand in our lives. That our hearts and minds would be flooded with the truth about discipline so that when it comes—not if it comes, but when it comes—we would embrace it and cooperate with the Lord in the sense of responding rightly, that He would produce in us those things which He intends through the difficulties: the peaceful fruit of righteousness and being able to share in His holiness.

We are looking forward to an eternal reward. That is what we are seeking after, that is what we desire. And so, as the author says in chapter 10, verse 36, “You have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.” And we want to endure, and we want to respond appropriately so that we can do the will of God in the midst of His afflictions and disciplines that He sends, and then we can receive, after that, the reward.

Back at the beginning of verse 4, I offered to you an outline that has sort of been our guiding framework as we’ve worked our way through the passage. There were four points. Unfortunately for you, there weren’t just four sermons, but there were more than that. There have been four points. In verses 4 through 5, we looked at the proper perspective of discipline, and we saw there that discipline is a blessing that God reserves for His children. He does not give that to His enemies. He punishes His enemies, but He blesses His children with discipline, with afflictions. Discipline is from a heart of love and not from wrath. There is not a drop of God’s wrath that is mixed in with His discipline in our lives, not a bit. It is all motivated by His fatherly and redeeming love. And we embrace discipline by not despising it, by not looking down upon it, and by not despairing under it. And those are really two opposite extremes. The one is to reject it and to hate it, and the other is to just lose heart underneath of the discipline. Then in verses 6 through 8 we looked at the proof of discipline. We saw that discipline is an evidence of God’s fatherly love for us, and it is an evidence of our adoption into His family. Then in verses 9 and 10 we saw the purpose of discipline, which is our sanctification as God prepares us and molds us and shapes us so that we might share in His holiness and enjoy holiness of life.

And now we come to verse 11. And we’re looking now at the product of discipline, that God produces in us the peaceful fruits of righteousness. Look at verse 11: “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” Now, there are a number of contrasts in verse 11. There is the contrast between what discipline seems to be doing—that is, creating sorrow—and what it is actually doing, which is creating the peaceful fruit of righteousness. So there’s the contrast between those two things. There is the contrast between how discipline affects us and how we experience it in the moment. No discipline seems joyful in the moment, in the present, but afterwards (that’s the contrast)—afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

So there is the contrast between what it seems to be doing and what it is actually doing; between what it does in this moment or how we experience it in this moment and how we actually experience it in the time that is to come in the future, when it produces the fruit; and then there is the difference, of course, between how discipline feels to us and the fruit that we enjoy from it. And it’s two totally different things. And the difference is between what is taking place in the moment and what takes place or what is enjoyed in the future. And these contrasts confront us with the necessity of embracing discipline by faith. We’re not that far removed from Hebrews chapter 11, and we spent more than just a couple of weeks in Hebrews 11, looking at the definition of faith and all of the manifestations of faith in the heroes of old all the way through the Old Testament, beginning back even just after the sin of man outside the garden with Cain and Abel. We looked at all the expressions of—not all the expressions, but all the expressions in Hebrews 11 of faith and what it is and how it preserves and protects the child of God in the life that we live, through the difficulties and the afflictions, the trials and the tribulations that inevitably come into this life. And we looked at all of those examples of men and women of whom the world is not worthy, men and women who did not live for this life but lived for the next. And they looked forward to the life that is to come and did not judge the faithfulness of God to His promises based upon what seemed appropriate to them in the moment, but instead judged the faithfulness of God to His promises based upon the character of God. That He is trustworthy and that He will keep His word. So these are men and women who looked forward to the life that is to come.

The author is calling us in chapter 12 to embrace discipline by faith and to face the trials and the afflictions with the same faith that preserved the men and women of old, to approach the difficulties and hostilities of this life with the same resolute trust in God and His promises as we look forward to afterwards when discipline yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness, and to not judge the character of God or His love for us or His purposes in terms of what seems to afflict us in the midst of the moment. So verse 11 is about anticipating the peaceful fruit of righteousness which is to come, which is, in fact, the forward-looking element of faith. And we don’t assess the character of God by what seems to be striking us in the moment.

So Verse 11 is our text for this morning. We’ve noted a couple of the contrasts in the verse, and so we’ll kind of approach the verse from that perspective, noting the contrast. So here would be our outline for this morning. Number one, we’re going to notice the pain of discipline that is our present experience. Look at that. “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful.” And then we’ll notice the product of discipline, which is our future expectation: “Yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” There is the contrast between what we experience now and what we can anticipate for the future.

So let’s look first at the pain of discipline that is our present experience. Verse 11: “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful.” Now, I have to appreciate the author’s bluntness. Right, after all of this talk about discipline, he just comes right out and says to us something that we’ve probably been longing to hear since verse 4, and that is that all discipline seems not to be joyful in the moment, but sorrowful. This is how we experience discipline. We don’t experience discipline as something that we enjoy. We experience discipline as something that causes us deep sorrow. Discipline is not joyful, it’s sorrowful. It’s sorrowful in the moment. It’s sorrowful for the whole time that we’re going through discipline.

In fact, discipline is not intended to be joyful. This is why I appreciate the author’s bluntness. How much discipline is joyful? “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful.” So not some discipline is sorrowful, not most discipline is sorrowful. But how much? All discipline in the moment seems not to be joyful, but instead sorrowful. This, in fact, is the nature of discipline. And I shouldn’t have to say this, but I’ll go ahead and say it. Chastisements and discipline by nature are unpleasant. That is the point. That’s the point. The point of discipline is that it’s unpleasant. The point is not that it is joyful, but that it is sorrowful. Discipline is intended to cause sorrow. So if you say, “God has brought an affliction into my life, and I am not enjoying this. This causes me deep grief and sorrow and pain in the moment,” that’s the point. It’s not intended in the moment to cause you anything else but the sorrow and the affliction and the trial that you are experiencing in that moment. That is the whole point of discipline. All discipline seems not in the moment to be joyful, but instead it is sorrowful.

All training, all discipline for a race, for instance, is intended to hurt. It’s intended to be difficult. Remember, we are not that far removed from the athletic analogy in verses 1–3 of running the race, casting off the sin that so easily entangles us, and laying aside all of those encumbrances, and fixing our eyes on Jesus, the finish line, and running the race with the expectation of the reward that is to come. That’s the athletic metaphor in verses 1–3. The author does not just flip the table over and begin a new metaphor in verse 4. There is a parenting parallel here with the discipline, but the idea of discipline itself is that of training and preparing one for things which are ahead. And that is the analogy here with discipline. The discipline is intended to train us for what lies ahead of us in the future—if that is difficulties that are to come in the future or usefulness in the kingdom in the future, or whether it is just simply ministry in this life that is in the future, or if it is so that we may enjoy more of a heavenly reward in the future. All of those things are the point of discipline. That affliction and that sorrow is the very purpose of the discipline in training us, in preparing us for what is to come.

You don’t train for a race by sitting in the basement watching other people race on a television while you pound down a bag of Doritos and a two-liter of Pepsi. That might feel enjoyable in the moment, at least for half a bag of Doritos and half a two-liter of Pepsi. It might feel enjoyable in the moment. It might be something that you like at that point. It might taste good. It might be relaxing. It might be easy. It might be comfortable. But that’s not training. When you go to the gym and train, then you’re training. When you go out onto the practice field and train. When you are sweating, when you are straining, then you’re training. I could trademark that. When you’re straining, then you’re training. But you don’t train in a basement pounding back Doritos and Pepsi. But instead you have to put forth the effort. It has to be difficult, it has to be painful. That, in fact, is the whole point of discipline.

Listen to Spurgeon. I have, I think, four quotes from Spurgeon’s sermon on this passage, and I would commend that you go read Charles Spurgeon’s sermon on Hebrews 12:11. He does a better job in his sermon than I’m going to do today and next week on this passage. He does a far better job. For one, even though he’s wordy, he’s far more concise, and so it’s one sermon instead of two. You’re getting two for the price of one. And I don’t mind saying that Spurgeon does a better job because I don’t have to worry about you wishing that Spurgeon was here as your pastor because he’s dead, and so you’re stuck with me. Here’s what Spurgeon says:

If affliction seemed to be joyous, would it be a chastisement at all? I ask you, would it not be a most ridiculous thing if a father should so chasten a child, that the child came down stairs [sic] laughing and smiling and rejoicing at the flogging? Joyous? Instead of being at all serviceable, would it not be utterly useless? What good could a chastisement have done if it were not felt? No smart? Then surely no benefit! It is the blueness of the wound, says Solomon, which makes the heart better. And so if the chastisement does not come home to the bone and flesh—if it does not distil [sic] the tear and extort the cry—what good end can it have served?

That’s it. That’s the purpose. That’s the point of discipline. Because you and I learn through pain. We learn through adversity. God teaches us things in the midst of suffering that He does not teach us outside of suffering. I would dare to say even that He teaches us things in suffering that we could not learn outside of suffering. The suffering is the point.

There’s a sanctifying work or effect that is going on. There is a difficulty that we face that when we come through that at the end, even if it means that we exit this life because of the suffering and we step into glory on a resurrection Sunday, for instance, and we stand in the presence of the Savior, and that’s when the affliction ends, we learn something in that affliction, and listen, the affliction will cease the moment it ceases to be useful to the Lord. But as long as it is useful to His ends, then it will continue. And so we never have to get in the middle of affliction and say, “I think I’ve learned everything I can learn from this, but for some reason the affliction continues.” No, the affliction is the point. The suffering is the point. If it were pleasant, then it would have no corrective power at all. It wouldn’t make us hate this world and long for the next. It would make us love this world and forget about the next if afflictions were just enjoyable. Affliction wouldn’t make us think about Heaven. And we would forget the future if it were peaceful, if it were enjoyable. If it were joyful in the moment, it would make us comfortable and we wouldn’t cast off sin. Instead, we would trifle with sin. We’d play around with it. And we’d actually think, if we didn’t have to go through afflictions which purged us of sin, we would actually begin to think that God Himself does not take sin seriously.

Another quote from Spurgeon. If discipline were pleasant, he says,

it might even work the other way and be hurtful. For the child would surely think that the parent only played with his disobedience and that the disobedience was a trifle, if those very gentle blows were enough, with one or two soft chiding words, to express parental hatred of sin. But if only the mockery of chastisement were given, the child would be hardened in sin, and even despise the authority which it ought to respect.

That’s it. If the discipline or the chastisement does not sting, then the child has no sense that he has displeased the father. But if the chastisement is difficult, and if the chastisement is painful, then the child begins to be softened by the chastisement and begins to realize how seriously those who love him take his disobedience. And so if all God’s chastisements were joyful and easy for us to endure and not difficult at all, we would start to think that God trifled with sin and that He didn’t think it was that serious. And then we would begin to trifle with sin. Discipline is intended to make us hate sin as much as God hates sin. And God will take the sin of His children very, very seriously because He loves us that much. And He takes our holiness very, very seriously because He loves us that much.

Again, Spurgeon—you might start to wonder if it’s Spurgeon who’s preaching or me. It is me, quoting Spurgeon.

My brethren, if God sent us trials such as we would wish for, they would not be trials. If they were chastisements that on the very surface seemed to be joyous, then they were not chastisements. They would still be the sweets, the harmful sweets which children like to eat until they turn their stomachs and are overtaken with sickness.

See, if you and I were to write the script for our lives, we would write into it all kinds of riches and ease and comforts and conveniences and joy and delights and delightful adventures and things that were always happy to us. We would never write in anything difficult.

Now, maybe we would start to feel guilty after a few hundred pages of our life’s manuscript, and we might write into it a few things, a few difficulties, just to sort of strike a balance. So we would have—for instance, we would show up at a restaurant and the food would be served cold. Or they would overdo our steak. Or you would accidentally burn a steak once a year. Have a sore throat once every four or five years. Or it might rain on your only day off during that week. Or you get stuck in traffic for twenty minutes. Those are the types of difficulties that we would write into our lives if we had the choice. And we would do that just for balance, you know, so that we could at least know what it’s like to experience a little bit of affliction. Just last night, for instance, I was at a restaurant, and they didn’t bring out the refills of the garlic fries nearly as fast as I would have liked them to have done that. In fact, I did not get a refill of garlic fries, all I got was a refill of normal fries. The indignity of that was almost unbearable. That’s the type of affliction that we have to endure, and those are the types of things we would write into our lives.

But would you write into the script of your life the loss of a child, a miscarriage, the loss of a loved one, terminal illness, chronic pain, the death of a friend, betrayal? Would you write any of that into your lives? Not a single person here would. These are the things that God writes into our lives so that He might sanctify us by it. The affliction is the point. The pain of it is the point. God is not trying to keep you from sorrow, by the way. Let me bounce your mind back up to verse 6: “Those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” Look at verse 8: “If you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons” (emphasis added). So every single child of God experiences discipline at some point and in some measure in this life for their sanctification. Every last one. And if you are without discipline, you are an illegitimate child, not a true legal child. You have no inheritance. You’re not part of that family. If you’re in the family, then discipline is your blessing. And all discipline is what? Sorrowful. Doesn’t feel joyful. So therefore, if God’s intention is to bring discipline into all of our lives, and all discipline is sorrowful, then sorrowful is His intention in the moment. In the moment. God is not trying to keep you from experiencing sorrow. If He were trying to do that, He is failing miserably because we’ve all experienced it.

Just yesterday, I stood at a graveside and buried somebody from our church family whom I love. This coming Friday, we’re going to stand up here and we’re going to have a memorial service for somebody else from our church body whom I love. Our lives are full of sorrow. God is not trying His best to keep you from experiencing it. That’s not His intention. His intention is not to guard us from the difficulties of life. And as a parent, if you’re a parent, you understand this. There are times when you know that you are going to make your child cry. It is unavoidable. I came to this conclusion early on in my parenting. There’s no way that I can raise these children without making them cry. So I gave up trying to not make them cry. Now, I didn’t start trying to make them cry, but I gave up trying to not make them cry because I understand that every time that I say no to something that they want, they’re going to cry about that. Every time I say yes or do something that they don’t want, they’re going to cry about that. Every time that they don’t get what they want or they get what they don’t want, they’re going to cry. So you just give up trying to keep your kids from crying. You realize that if they don’t cry, I’ll never teach them virtue. All the things that I want them to learn in this life are going to be learned through tears. And so the sooner we come to grips with that as earthly parents, the easier our parenting will be. And the sooner we come to grips with that as God’s children, the easier it will be for us to embrace discipline. God is not trying to protect us from crying.

Now, this should not discourage you. I know at first glance it doesn’t seem like I’m trying to not discourage you, but this should not discourage you. Let me give you two points of application that I want you to walk away with from this. Number one, you and I are not required to enjoy God’s discipline. That’s what verse 11 is saying. It’s not intended to be joyful, but sorrowful. That means that you and I are not required to enjoy it. God doesn’t demand that we love pain for the sake of pain, that we enjoy sorrow for the sake of sorrow. It’s not His expectation. You and I are not biblically required or morally required by Scripture to enjoy trials or difficulties. We’re not masochists. We are, however, required to enjoy the fruit of discipline. We do get the fruit of discipline that we get to enjoy, but we are not required to enjoy discipline itself.

Number two, it is OK to acknowledge that discipline is hard. It’s OK to acknowledge that. In fact, if you are in the midst of discipline, admitting that you are suffering or sorrowful or that you’re not delighting in it, you’re not enjoying it, that doesn’t make you less of a believer. Doesn’t mean you’re less mature. Doesn’t mean you’re less spiritual. Doesn’t mean that you’re less sanctified. A stoic disposition, the type of disposition that just grits its teeth and says, “No, my spine is stiff and my heart is hard and my neck is unbent, and I will not bow down before this,” that’s the despising of discipline that we talked about weeks ago. God does not require of us this sort of stoic “This has no effect on me. This isn’t affecting me and my family at all” type of disposition. That is not the mark of spirituality or spiritual maturity. So, you’re not required to enjoy discipline. And it is OK to admit that discipline is difficult.

Paul didn’t enjoy or rejoice in being in prison. He asked people to pray that he would be let out of prison. So he didn’t enjoy the prison, but he rejoiced in the prison. Do you understand the difference between those two things? It’s not the prison that brought him joy. The Lord brought him joy in the midst of the prison. So it is with affliction and difficulty. We don’t take joy in a disease or a chronic illness or a chronic pain or the death of a loved one. There’s no joy in that. There’s no delight in that. There’s no treasure in that. It’s not that which we cherish and enjoy. But we can rejoice in the midst of the affliction. And that, in fact, is what we are called to do. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, by the grace of Christ, you and I are able to do that. To rejoice in the midst of the affliction. To give God praise. To bow our heads and our hearts under His hand, under His loving rod, and to say, “Lord, I will take this from Your hand, and I thank You for it. I don’t understand what You’re doing in it, but You will teach me through this, and so I will worship You. You give and You take away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” That response can be ours in the midst of discipline, even though we are not required to enjoy it or to love it.

In fact, recognizing that discipline is hard is a necessary prerequisite to verses 12 and 13. Look at verses 12 and 13. “Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.” That’s the responsibility of the body in the life of those who are undergoing discipline and suffering affliction. We’re to come alongside and recognize that discipline makes for a weakened state in the moment. Discipline makes for us to be lame and out of joint, and our knees are feeble, and our feet are uncertain. It’s not easy on us. And so we recognize that, and we reach out to the body of Christ, who has to come alongside of us, has the joy of coming alongside of us and encouraging us in the midst of this. See, verses 12 and 13 are not unrelated to the issue of discipline. Verses 12 and 13 are the response of the body, other believers, around those who are enduring discipline, as they recognize discipline is difficult and sorrowful and a trial in the life of this person, so let’s come alongside them and strengthen them in the midst of this so that they will not be put out of joint, that this will not ruin them, but instead produce in them the peaceable fruits of righteousness and give them the grace to share in God’s holiness.

Now there are in verse 11 two things—two dangers, as it were—in our own assessment of afflictions that we need to be aware of. And the first is in that phrase “in the moment.” I want you to notice it. “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful.” The point here is not that discipline only lasts for a moment. In other words, the author’s point here is not the brevity of the discipline, because that would not be true, would it? There is some discipline that lasts for a lifetime. You lose a child, that is something that sticks with you for the rest of your life. Or if you lose a spouse. Or if God allows for a diagnosis of a terminal illness in your life, an illness that will eventually take your life, that discipline is not for a moment, that discipline is for the rest of your life. Some affliction, some suffering, and some trials, in fact, last for the duration of our lives. So, the point of the author here is not that the affliction is just for a moment. He’s not saying “Look, affliction is just for a moment, so just kind of blink and it’ll be gone” or “Here’s God’s promise to you: it’s not going to last long.” There’s no such promise in Scripture that afflictions and trials will not last long. They might last long. And they might be painful and last long. That’s by God’s hand as well.

Rather, the point of the author is in describing the perspective that we are to have upon the trials. We are not to judge the benefit and the fruitfulness of affliction in the moment that we are enduring it, that is to say, in the present. All discipline does not seem to be joyful in the present. In the moment of the affliction, it is not joyful. And here’s the danger. The danger is that you and I would begin to pass judgment on the fruitfulness of the affliction or begin to pass judgment on God’s faithfulness to us in the midst of that affliction based upon either how we feel or based upon the fact that what we are enduring right now is what we’re experiencing in the present. In other words, I judge God’s plan and His purposes, which are overarching and lifelong, in terms of what I am suffering or enduring in the moment. In the moment, it’s sorrowful. Therefore, don’t view God’s hand, His purposes, and His love through the sorrow, but instead recognize that you as a creature are limited by your perspective in the moment. A sinful response would be to say “I don’t see the point in all of this, and I don’t see even now what I’m learning in the midst of this affliction. Therefore, because I don’t see it right now in the moment, God must not have a purpose for it.” Or “Because I’m not experiencing this peace in the moment, there must be no peace to come.” Or “Because I don’t see the fruit of this, and I am not enduring the joy of this, and I don’t see the delight in this in the moment, therefore God can have no purposes that transcend that moment.” That’s the point of the author. It is with the eye of faith that you and I must assess affliction. It’s with the eye of faith that says God is a good God, God is a sovereign God, and every last thing that He appoints for me is for His glory and is for my good. And it is because of His infinite love for me that I can look beyond how I feel about this in the moment and see the hand of God writ large in my life.

In Romans 8:18, Paul says, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Notice the contrast: the sufferings of this present age and the glory that is to be revealed. Paul says that they’re not worthy to be compared. You put my suffering and you put the glory side by side, one next to another, and you start to draw comparisons to them, and they’re not worthy to be compared. They’re apples and they’re oranges. They’re two totally different things. They’re not even in the same category. The one does not even deserve to be put up next to the other. So my afflictions are here, the glory is here, and the glory is such that when I put them side by side, that’s the perspective, that I have to push the afflictions away and say, “It’s the glory that overshadows all of that.” But in the moment, the only thing we can see is the affliction because we cannot see the glory with the eyes of flesh. But with the eyes of faith, we can step back and say, “God is good. God is sovereign. So every last thing that He has appointed for me is for His glory, and it is for my good.” So we can say, “For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). Not worthy to be compared. Sufferings in the moment are always overwhelming. They’re always overwhelming.

The second danger that we run into is the danger of assessing our sufferings, our afflictions and discipline, not just by what is in the moment, but by what appears, or seems to be, with the eye of flesh. And this is in the phrase what it seems. “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful” (Heb. 12:11).

See, these are two dangers that we fall into. The one is to assess everything on the basis of what we experience in the moment. The other is to assess all of God’s purposes and plans in terms of what appears to us to be the case in the moment. This word seems here is the word from doke?. It’s a verb that describes to perceive or to think, to suppose or to presume or to assume, to believe. It describes what strikes the senses, what appears to the senses, and not the spiritual senses, not the eye of faith, but the natural senses. What strikes the eye in the moment. And this, unfortunately in this world, is all that we have to go by in terms of our fleshly afflictions and what seems to us and the assessment that we can make in this world. If it’s just in terms of the moment, and if it’s just in terms of our assessment of it in this world from what we can see, then we will always despair in the moment of the afflictions. This is the assessment of flesh and blood, how it appears to us.

So in the moment, we use the mind of flesh and the heart of flesh and our own sinful reasoning and our own warped evaluation, and we take what appears to us in the moment concerning our difficulties or our trials, and we make an assessment of God’s purposes based upon that. How it appears or seems to us. But are we perfect in our perception of reality, spiritually speaking? Are we even close to perfect in our perception of reality? We most certainly are not. We are prone to deception. We are prone to mistakes. We are limited in our knowledge, our wisdom. Our assessment is therefore limited. Our discernment is limited. We can’t see the future. We can’t see the unknown or unseen realm. We don’t know what the future holds for us, so the difficulty that we are enduring right now may in fact be preparing us for something even greater later on, and not a difficulty, but a blessing. But we can’t see that because we have eyes of flesh. And without the eyes of faith, we cannot even believe that God would be doing something like that through our discipline. We can’t see everything unfolding in our lives. There are tons of things that are hidden from us that we don’t know. Dangers which we might face. Sins that threaten to undo us. The devil’s designs in our lives. All of that is unknown to us. And so the minute we begin to assess our discipline based upon how it seems to us in the moment, we have immediately stepped into the darkness and begun leading ourselves around into ditches. And the author is saying you can’t do that.

 Last quote from Spurgeon:

So it is with many of us. We are so jealous of our own ease and pleasure that the moment we even see the rod, we are affrighted and alarmed. And at the very first stroke of it, before it has even made the flesh to tingle, we think it is utterly unbearable and that God intends to destroy us. What then? With the clouds of fear, the dust of unbelief, the smoke of ignorance, and the mist of selfishness, it is little wonder that we do not perceive the truth. And thus we say no chastisement seems to be joyous.

See, that’s the assessment of the flesh, the mist of unbelief, the smoke of doubt, the delusion of our lack of discernment. We can’t see even 1 percent of what is real concerning our lives, the lives of others, or our futures. We don’t have any of that. We are blind men in a dark room with black walls on the surface of the room. And we are stumbling about in the midst of our affliction. And in comes the truth of Scripture, and the light comes on in the room, and the light says God is good, God is sovereign, and every last thing that He has appointed for us is for our good, even if it is difficult. Even if the sorrow in the moment seems unbearable, God is doing something good through it. So you can either stiffen your neck and resist that, or you can bow your head and embrace it. But stiffening our necks and resisting that, it’s not going to unlock the door and get us out of that dark room. We just simply do not know what all is going on, and we have to confess our ignorance. In fact, that’s the best that we can do, is to confess our ignorance in that moment. Not to judge or assess the work and the hand and the purposes of God upon what seems to be true—appears to us in the moment—but based upon what God’s Word says is true. And that takes the eye of faith.

William Cowper, in his hymn God Moves in a Mysterious Way, has these lines:

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust Him for His grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,

Unfolding every hour;

The bud may have a bitter taste,

But sweet will be the flow’r.”

It seems to us, in the moment, to be sorrowful. That’s the bud—has a bitter taste—but sweet will be the flower. Afterwards, it will yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

Now God’s discipline is intended to produce in us holiness, the fruit of righteousness, and we’re going to look more at the peaceful fruit of righteousness next week. We are to pursue holiness, and we are to pursue righteousness in our lives. One of the intentions of God in discipline is so that we might hate sin as much as He hates it and cast it aside and lay it aside and pursue holiness and pursue righteousness, turn from our sin, repent, trust Him for His grace each and every hour. We are to pursue that. As Hebrews 12:14 says, we’re to “pursue peace with all men, and the [holiness or] sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.” We’re to pursue that holiness. And to that end, we engage in self-examination before the Lord’s Table. I’m going to read to you 1 Corinthians chapter 11, which describes God’s discipline, His disciplining work, and the purpose of examining ourselves before Him. First Corinthians 11:23–32:

23 For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread;

24 and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is My body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”

25 In the same way He took the cup also after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.”

26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.

27 Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord.

28 But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

29 For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly.

30 For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep.

31 But if we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged.

32 But when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be condemned along with the world. (NASB)

There is a sobering reminder in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, namely that one of the things that God does in order to purge us of sin is to bring discipline and chastisement. So Paul says examine yourselves, mortify the sin, put the sin off so that God will not judge you through discipline. He doesn’t mean “judge” in the sense of eternal damnation, but that there is a discipline that happens in our lives that is intended to rid us of sin. And if we persist in it, then all we’re doing is saying, “Lord, You have given me opportunities to turn from this sin, to mortify it, to put it to death, and to pursue righteousness, but I am refusing to do that, so therefore, bring discipline into my life to do that.” Now that’s not actually what you’re saying with your words, that’s what you’re saying by your life. So this is serious. We don’t trifle with sin. It is a profane thing to have sin in our hearts that we are not dealing with, that we leave unresolved and unconfessed and unrepented of, and then to come to the Lord’s Table and to partake of this and to make a mockery of the blood of Christ and the death of Christ. So the invitation is to examine yourself, identify your sin, turn from that sin so that God will not judge you by bringing chastisement into your life to purge you from that very sin. So if you want to make the chastisements of the Lord only those things which are absolutely necessary in your life, then do the work of putting off sin in your own life so that He will not chastise you in order to do that work.

If you’re an unbeliever here and you have never repented of your sin and trusted Christ for salvation, you’ve never been born again, then this Table’s not for you at all. Because that is an ultimate blasphemy for you to claim that you have a part in this when you are not part of the body of Christ. These are the elements of His death, His sacrificial death on the cross for His people. God commands you first to repent of your sin and trust in the Savior and be born again so that you might have eternal life, and then you can come to the Table and enjoy the elements with the people of God. So if that doesn’t describe you, if you are not a believer, then please don’t partake of these elements. You’re eating and drinking judgment to yourself.

For the believers, our duty is very solemn. We are to solemnly examine ourselves, to confess our sin to the Lord. We can confess that the things which we are required to do we have not done, and the things that we are told not to do, those are the things that we have done. Confess those to the Lord, turn from those, and pray for His grace to strengthen us in resisting sin. So let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

The author contrasts the imperfection of the discipline of earthly fathers with the perfection of the discipline of our Heavenly Father. God’s discipline is aimed at producing holiness in our lives allowing us to share in His holiness. An exposition of Hebrews 12:9-10.

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Romans chapter 8. Two familiar verses that I’ll begin with, verses 31 and 32: “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?”

Now, that is a profound promise, because it is an argument from the greater to the lesser describing God’s intention to give to His people—His elect, for whom He has nothing but unlimited and infinite redeeming love and grace—God’s intention to give to them everything less than Christ that is for their good. Everything less than Christ that is for our good, God will lavish that gift upon us.

Now, what things are less than Christ? That’s everything. And that’s Paul’s point. If God did not spare His own Son, but instead delivered up for us the highest and the greatest and the best thing that God could give to us, and if that is for our good, and it is—it’s for our redemption and our salvation, for our sanctification, eternal life, the glories of the kingdom and the new age to come, all of that is all ours because of what Christ has done, because of what God has done in giving up Christ for us. If God has lavished upon us the greatest blessing that can be given, then does it not logically follow that anything else that is for our good that is less than Christ, that He will lavish that upon us as well?

Why would God give us the very best thing and say, “No, but the lesser things that are also for your good, those things I will withhold from you. Those things I’m going to be stingy and not give those things to you,” even though He has already given to us the very best that He has? That’s Paul’s argument. If God, who has not withheld from us His only Son, how will He withhold from us anything else that is lesser that is for our good? Ultimately, God’s purpose is to give us every good thing. God has no ill intentions whatsoever toward any of His elect. Everything He does is for our ultimate good. Everything He does is for our glory. He will withhold from His own no good thing. He will accomplish what is best for us.

And God’s eye is not just on this life and what transpires in this life, but God’s eye is on eternity. He is looking forward to the life that is to come, and He is accomplishing in this world, through all of our afflictions and all of our suffering, everything that is necessary for our ultimate good and our ultimate enjoyment. God is looking forward to the future, caring not only for us here in this life with an infinite and familial love, but He is working everything in this life to accomplish our ultimate and eternal good. Not just our good in this life, as if the things in this life are all going to work out for good, and we get to the end of this life and say, you know what? Yeah, my wife left me. Yeah, my child died. Yeah, I lost that job. But ultimately it was for good. That’s not the point. The point is that everything in this life is preparing us and directing us for that ultimate good, so that when we stand in His presence, we will look back at this life and say, “God took everything that happened in this life and worked it for my ultimate joy and betterment.”

How will He, after giving us His son, not afterward give us every good thing to accomplish our ultimate good?

Don’t answer this out loud because this is a trick question. Some of them I warn you about, some of them I don’t. I’m warning you about this one. Don’t answer this one out loud, but this is an easy one. This is true or false. True or false to this statement: God is not interested in your happiness; He is interested in your holiness? True or false? Just think about it. God is not interested in your happiness; He is interested in your holiness. In other words, God is accomplishing in this world not the things that will necessarily make you happy, but the things that will necessarily make you holy. Is that a true statement or a false statement?

Some of you would probably say true to that. Some of you would probably say false to that, depending on what I mean by happiness. Because, really, that’s at the heart of the issue. What do we mean by happiness?

If by happiness what I mean is that God will give me everything that my flesh desires, everything that I, in my sinful, earthbound, created, fallen-creature state, think will ultimately make me happy in this life, then that is true. God is not interested in that happiness, but instead He is pursuing my holiness. Because God is not interested in appeasing our sinfulness or placating our temporary comforts or making us happy in this life. That is not His ultimate goal or His aim if by happy we mean “what my flesh desires.” God is not interested in providing those things.

But if by happiness we mean our ultimate and highest delight and joy, if by happiness we mean the perfect state of soul in which we enjoy all that is truly good, truly beautiful, truly lovely, and truly glorious, and we enjoy it to the fullest, if that’s what we mean by happiness, then yes. (Sorry. What was the question?) If that’s what we mean by happiness, then no, God is not pursuing my holiness over my happiness.

Here’s the answer to the trick question. I forget even what the question was now. Here’s the answer to the trick question. God does not have to choose between holiness and happiness for us. Because here’s the key, Christian: your ultimate happiness is the result of God making you holy. He makes us happy through holiness, not in opposition to holiness. And He doesn’t make us holy without making us happy. Because, ultimately, you and I are created for enjoying and sharing in God’s holiness for all of eternity. And God is going to give us, then, our ultimate happiness, what is truly best for us, and that is intimately connected to our holiness. So God doesn’t choose between your happiness and your holiness. He makes you happy by making you holy.

Furthermore, He makes you happy by causing you to love holiness and then to share in His holiness and to delight in His holiness. That is true happiness. And when you pursue happiness at the sacrifice of holiness, you’re pursuing a mirage. That is the devil’s decoy that gets us pursuing and chasing after things that can give us no true happiness at all.
We think we have to sacrifice and give up holiness in order to be happy, to pursue happiness. And we mistakenly and sinfully and unbelievingly think that if we pursue holiness, we have to sacrifice happiness on that altar, and we don’t have to choose between those two. God accomplishes both of those things for us, for His people. Happiness without holiness is a cheap imitation. He is working to make us eternally happy, infinitely happy, joyfully happy. And in this life, we get a little bit of that happiness, but that happiness is tied to God progressing us in holiness so that we may share His holiness.

Charles Spurgeon said this: “I would sooner be holy than happy if the two things could be divorced.” Stop there for just a second. He’s saying, “I would rather, if I had to choose between holiness and happiness”—as if, Spurgeon said, you could just cut them and divorce them one from another—”if I had to choose between holiness and happiness, if the two things could be divorced, I would sooner be holy than happy.” Now listen, start over the quote. Here it is. “I would sooner be holy than happy if the two things could be divorced. Were it possible for a man always to sorrow and yet to be pure, I would choose the sorrow if I might win the purity, for to be free from the power of sin, and to be made to love holiness, is true happiness.”

To be free from the power of sin and to be made to love holiness is true happiness. See, we cannot separate those two things. If true happiness, then, and holiness cannot be separated, and if the goal of all of God’s workings with us is to create in us holiness, to share, in the words of verse 10 of Hebrews chapter 12, His holiness with us, if that is God’s design, then ultimately, all of His discipline is designed to make you happy. Do you follow the reasoning? If God is pursuing your ultimate holiness, and if He is disciplining you to create in you holiness because His ultimate aim is to make you happy through that holiness, then all of God’s discipline is intended for your happiness.

Now, you say, that’s not what verse 11 says. It says “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful.” That’s right. For the moment. But, see, we live in the moment. What we do not understand is how God is using the discipline to create in us holiness for our ultimate happiness. And it is a happiness that you and I can enjoy when we are made to love holiness in this life. And it is a happiness that we will get to enjoy for all of our lives. We are created in Christ Jesus for holiness. We are sanctified to be made holy. When we see Christ, we will be made perfectly holy, just as He is perfectly holy. We will be separate from sin and we will share in His holiness. And that is our ultimate happiness.

It is impossible that you and I could enjoy God’s highest good and not be happy. It is impossible that you and I could enjoy God’s highest good and not be happy. Well, if God’s highest good is our holiness, then holiness and happiness must go together. He will share with us His holiness. We will be made to love holiness. We will be made holy, and then we will be happy. And we are happy when we are made to love holiness.

Now, we’re looking at the purpose of God’s discipline in Hebrews chapter 12. And I have been arguing that we are obligated to respectfully submit to God’s discipline since He disciplines us in a far better way, for a far better purpose, and with far better wisdom than any of our earthly fathers ever disciplined us.

There is an intentional contrast in verses 9 and 10 as he is describing for us the ultimate purpose of God’s discipline, which is at the end of verse 10: “So that we may share His holiness.” There is a contrast in verses 9 and 10 between the discipline that our earthly fathers gave us and the discipline that our heavenly Father does for us. He, our heavenly Father, is the Father of spirits. That’s verse 9. And He is working for us discipline. He is disciplining us, not just so that He may train our outward conduct. He is not after merely outward conformity to some standard, but instead God is after our soul. He is shaping our soul and conforming us into the image of Christ, making us just like His Son, which, in effect, is the way in which He shares His holiness with us. So God’s ultimate purpose is so that we may share His holiness.

And this is a higher and better end for His discipline than anything that our earthly fathers and mothers ever did for us. They could not create in us holy conduct through physical discipline. It’s impossible. And as much as our earthly parents—if you had godly parents who disciplined you well—as much as they might have wanted to produce in you a hunger and a love for holiness, no amount of earthly discipline by an earthly parent can accomplish that. All they can do is give you a hatred for the pain that disobedience is attended with. They can give you that. But they can’t create in you a hunger for holiness. I wish it were possible for us as earthly parents to do that, but we can’t.

God’s ultimate purpose is so that we may share His holiness. Now we are obligated, since that is God’s ultimate purpose, sharing His holiness, and since that holiness is the path to our happiness, ultimate and full happiness, then you and I are obligated as obedient children to submit respectfully to His loving discipline.

Notice in verse 9—this is just a couple sentence recap of what we looked at last week: “Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live?” There is this contrast between earthly parents and their discipline, and our heavenly Father and His discipline. And if earthly parents, in spite of their limitations and their inequities and their failings in discipline, if we respected them, how much more should we respect a Father who disciplines us perfectly, always perfectly, and has our ultimate good in mind? That’s the contrast he’s making.

So now in verse 10 we’re going to look at a couple of the contrasts between earthly parents’ discipline and our heavenly Father’s discipline. There are a number of imperfections that are mentioned here. Notice, first of all, in verse 10, “For they [that is, our earthly parents] disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but [now notice the contrast. But our heavenly Father . . . ] He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.” There’s the contrast. Notice the first limitation of earthly parents: they discipline us for a short time. That refers to the relatively short period of time of the earthly discipline that earthly parents give to their children. It is a short time.

Now, when you are the parent of a newborn, it doesn’t seem like it’s a short time. You think, fifteen years? I can’t even imagine what ten, twelve, fifteen years is going to be like. That’s your first kid, and if you have kids after that, then you’re looking even further down the road, and you think, that’s a long time away, isn’t it? Fifteen years is such a long time away. And then when they turn fifteen, you’re like, wow, that went by like that. It’s such a short period of time.

And I say fifteen because in the ancient cultures, they had to adopt adult responsibilities and adult status far earlier than we do in our culture. In our culture, you can have a prolonged adolescence that goes on into your late twenties, early thirties, where you’re living in Mommy’s basement, still playing video games and living off the family checkbook, and they think that this is OK, this is somehow agreeable and reasonable and acceptable when it’s not. In the ancient world, you got to be thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old and you adopted sometimes the family name, family responsibilities, family business. You were reckoned an adult much earlier in that culture than we are today.

I’m not entirely opposed to putting those kinds of responsibilities on people, so long as they think that they can handle it and so long as they can handle it. But when you’re a parent and you’ve got ten or fifteen years to discipline your child, on the front end of that, that might seem like a long time. When you get to the end of that, it’s not a long time. It’s a very brief period of time.

And then there comes a point in disciplining your children where the discipline changes and the relationship changes, begins to change, and those children become more equals in some sense than they were when they were much younger. That period of time that you have to shape and mold their soul and to teach them truth is very brief. That’s the author’s point. They disciplined us for a very short period of time. It’s just a few years.

And so, woe to the parent who neglects this or delays in it. Because you say, I’ll put that off. I’ll teach them that later. Now’s not the time. I’m too tired. I’m too busy. I’m too occupied. I have other things. And then your child is going to grow older and get to be a certain age, and you’re going to realize that you missed a lot of opportunities to shape their soul and to teach them truth. And those missed opportunities never, ever come back in the same way that you had when they were younger.

So if we submit and respect earthly parents who are only disciplining us for a short period of time, how much more then should we respect our heavenly Father, who never puts down the rod of love, who is always watching over us? From the moment that we become His till the time that He takes us home, He is always watching over us, always shaping our soul, always doing what is best for us, always conforming us to the image of Christ. He never puts down the rod. He never ignores us. He never does what is in His own self-interest. He always pursues us.

So, if the brief discipline that is exercised by our earthly parents is worthy of respect, then how much more a God whose holy interest and familial and redeeming love for our good never leaves us and never stops? Our earthly parents just get us for a little bit. And yet that little bit of discipline, that little window that shows us that they love us, they care for us, they’re shaping us, they want us to know the truth, if that little bit creates in us a respect, how much more a God who, from the moment we become His till the moment He takes us home, He is never off of us? His gaze never comes away from us. His love is never removed from us. His rod is always there. His interests, His pursuit of our holiness is always actively in our lives and forming us and shaping us and molding us into the person of Christ. He deserves a lot of respect, doesn’t He? And that we would submit to that discipline? That’s the point.

Notice the second limitation in verse 10. “They disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them.” Now, there’s two ways you could take that or understand that phrase “as seemed best to them.” And translations are a little different. Some translations translate this according to one sense, and some translations translate it according to another sense. There are two ways that we could understand it.

First, that parents operate on limited information and are often doing the very best they can, even though they don’t necessarily know what is best. Right? They just disciplined us according to what seemed best to them in the moment. Parents are fumbling through this. It appears to be best. They’re doing what they can in the moment to try and do what they think they should do. But often parents are acting on limited information, or they really don’t know what the best approach to discipline is. And yet they try their best. This is how the NASB translates it: “as seemed best to them.” The NIV likewise: “as they thought best.” That’s the first sense. Parents don’t always know what the best course of discipline is, do they?

If you’re a new parent, you’ve been a new parent, you understand this. You don’t always know. Sometimes you’re going on poor information or scant information. You’re in the kitchen and you hear the screams coming from the bedroom upstairs and you run upstairs and your two kids are up there playing. And here’s little Karyn on the floor with her toys, and her brother Shembley. Karyn and Shembley [similar to the names of the speaker’s grown children]. This is hypothetical, so any similarities to persons living or dead is completely coincidental. But Karyn and Shembley are sitting in the middle of the toys there, and they are both red in the face and crying. And for the last thirty seconds they have been throwing curses and calumnies at each other that would make your hair curl. And you walk in. You have no idea what has happened, what has precipitated this, what caused it, who is at fault. Both of them are professing to be completely innocent in the matter. They are angels who, in that moment, could walk on water. It is the other devil incarnate who has caused all of this chaos. And both of them would swear before a court that this is exactly what has unfolded, according to their story.

And you walk into the midst of that, and how do you handle it? You’ve got limited information, don’t you? You don’t know what has happened. You don’t know how long this has been going on. You don’t know who is guilty. Both of them could be guilty. It could be just an innocent misunderstanding—I doubt it—that escalated. But you have no idea what has caused it. And you have no idea who the real perpetrator is. One of them is the perpetrator and one of them might be innocent, or they both might be guilty. You don’t know. How do you discipline in that moment? In that moment, you’ve only got to go with limited information and do what seems best in the moment. If you do nothing, then somebody has gotten away with a crime against humanity. If you do something to both of them, then one of them is getting punished too severely and probably the other one not severely enough. And if you punish both of them, then maybe one of them is entirely innocent. You don’t know.

Sometimes, as parents, we are too lenient. We’re lazy and tired and exasperated. We just don’t know how to fit the discipline to the sin or the situation. We don’t know how to make it right. We don’t know how to right the wrong that has been done. Sometimes it’s just too harsh. We overcorrect and punish out of anger and bitterness and frustration and pent-up resentment over these kids who are doing this yet again. Sometimes we discipline the wrong child for the wrong thing, or we start discipline too late in life, or we discipline inconsistently. All of these things “exasperb”—exasperate children, almost as much as it exasperates me to try and use the right word sometimes. All of these things exasperate children.

When we are inconsistent and we say it’s OK to jump all over the furniture at home, but not at Grandma’s house, or not at the neighbor’s house. It’s OK to get up and run around the table during the meal at home, but in a restaurant, that’s unacceptable. When you go over to somebody else’s house, that’s unacceptable. Your four-year-old or your five-year-old does not understand that at all. It’s OK to scream when you don’t get the cereal you want at home, but not OK in the cereal aisle at Walmart. They don’t understand that. So all of these inconsistencies in discipline, all of the harshness, the leniency, these are the things that exasperate. These are the things that frustrate children and make life difficult for them, make them angry at parents and frustrate the entire home life.

We don’t always do what we know to be best. Furthermore, we don’t always even know what is best. Such is not the case with God, by the way. He knows perfectly and flawlessly exactly what you need and when you need it, flawlessly.

Second, it’s possible that this phrase “as seemed best to them” could be describing parents who discipline with the wrong motives. And this is how the RSV translates it: “they disciplined . . . at their pleasure,” or we might say, for their good, as seemed best to them. In other words, they’re disciplining us for their best interests. This is another thing that sometimes parents do. We discipline for our good because we want the chaos to stop. We want the child who has done this thing to never, ever do this again, because this will upset our idol, or it will disrupt our peace, or it will frustrate us, or it will embarrass us or give us a bad reputation. Those are polluted and sinful motives out of which to discipline.

And I wish it were true that as parents, in the moment, we could just sit down and, in a split second, decide what is the best motivation. Where is my motivation in this? What is a pure and holy approach to discipline? And what is the best thing to bring to bear on this situation, to correct it, to train them, and to remedy this situation? I wish we could do that, but oftentimes we can’t.

We sometimes go into a discipline situation and we don’t even know what our motive is in that moment. And we might be able to sense that, yeah, there’s something sinful going on here in my own heart, but I’ve got to deal with this right now. And because I have to deal with this right now, I don’t have time to deal with what’s going on in my own heart. So I’ll discipline them. Then I’ll deal with my corrupt motives later on. And guess what never happens? Dealing with my corrupt motives later on. Because we think,
OK, we’ve done what the Lord called us to do. I’ve disciplined them. Therefore I can just sort of calm down, and maybe next time I’ll take the time to analyze my own motives in it. But then Karyn and Shembley go at it again, and in the heat of the moment, you’ve got to come up with a whole new discipline plan.

Our earthly parents disciplined us as seemed best to or for them sometimes. It’s in their best interest to do this. And we fail as parents when we do not consider what is in the best interests of the soul of my child. Right? That’s the question that needs to be asked in the heat of the moment.

God suffers from none of these frailties. He lacks no wisdom. He knows perfectly what we need. He knows perfectly how to accomplish what we need. He knows how to sanctify us and make us holy. He knows our weaknesses and our strengths. He knows our blind spots. He notices the things that escape our notice in our lives. And He does it for our good, not according to appearances, not as if to satisfy something in Him, but He disciplines us for our good. This is verse 10: “He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.”

Whereas, as earthly parents, we sometimes discipline according to a lack of knowledge, God never does. Whereas, as earthly parents, we sometimes discipline for our own good, God never does. God is not in any way improved by disciplining us. You realize that? We don’t add to His holiness. His glory is not made any more. He is not morally improved. He doesn’t become greater than He was before. God doesn’t discipline us to satisfy anything in Himself. He gets nothing from it because He needs nothing. He needs nothing that our discipline provides. And He is not satisfied of some want that He has by bringing us affliction and suffering and teaching and training us. His aim is our ultimate good. This is His purpose, and this is His pleasure.

Now, does God accomplish all His good pleasure? Yes, He does. Scripture says that. Does He do so—accomplishing all of His good pleasure—does He do so infallibly (that means perfectly)? He cannot err and He cannot fail. That is what Scripture says. And if that is true, then He is working out for you, through discipline, your highest good and your greatest joy, because that is what He has purposed to do. What is that? It’s at the end of verse 10: so that you may share His holiness. That you may share His holiness.

Friends, the fact that that is even possible is stunningly profound. And I don’t want this to be lost on any of us, what it means to share in His holiness. You and I are children of dust, fallen in Adam, once rebels to His will, haters of God, at war with Him. We had in us no capacity for proper affections, no ability to be holy, no hunger for holiness or thirst for righteousness. We had none of that. In fact, we were alienated from God, estranged from Him, enemies of God in our minds through wicked works, at war with Him and hostile against Him, unable and unwilling to submit ourselves to the law of God or to His righteousness, unwilling and unable to bow before His holiness. And we were under the just wrath of God, a holy God, because of our sin, and our crimes were more than we can count. Our guilt was more than we could fathom. And the wrath that was due to us was more than we could ever bear. Our penalty was more than we could ever pay.

That was the condition in which we once were. And now God, by His grace, took those who had no ability or desire for holiness whatsoever and caused us to be born again through the redeeming and regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. He regenerates us and creates within us holy affections, holy desires, and capacities that we never had before.
And then He fills us with His Holy Spirit and gives us the ability to long for and taste and love holiness. And then He shares His holiness with those creatures who were once rebels to His will and under His just wrath. That is a profound reality that you and I should not just breeze over quickly, that He would share with us His holiness.

What is holiness? It is a separateness, an otherness, a set-apartness. That’s what holiness is. I will describe to you what God’s holiness is here in just a moment so you can kind of get some idea of what it is that He shares with us. The word holy or holiness comes from a family of words that describes things set apart. It’s sometimes translated as “saint” or “sanctified” or “sanctification.” It describes that which is holy or made holy or separate.

In their book Biblical Doctrine, John MacArthur and Richard Mayhue describe holiness this way: “God’s holiness is His inherent and absolute greatness in which He is perfectly distinct above everything outside Himself and absolutely morally separate from sin. God is inherently great and resists all compromises of His character and therefore is transcendently distinct from all His creatures in infinite majesty. He is majestically unique.”

Those are four very lovely words: He is majestically unique. That is His holiness. Nobody is more other than God is other. You think that He is like you in what capacity? None. He is like nothing in the created realm. He’s not like water. He’s not like a three-leaf clover. He’s not like an egg. His nature is not in any of those things. There is nothing to which we can liken God. “To whom [to what] will you liken Me?” (Isa. 46:5). There’s nothing. He is completely other, completely distinct, completely set apart, not just from His creation, transcendently existing above that, but morally, in all of His perfections and His righteousness and His purity. He does not compromise His character. He is morally distinct and holy above all things. He is majestically unique. That is His holiness. There is this moral separation that God has from His creatures. It is a separate purity, a separate distinctness that we get to taste and love and enjoy here in this world, and we will for all of eternity.

Now, holiness is inherent. That’s the word that was used twice, I think, in that definition.
Holiness is inherently a characteristic of God because of who He is. He is majestically unique in a way that nothing else is unique. Everything else outside of God is created. That means none of us are unique in that sense. God is uncreated, which means He has capacities, He has characteristics that nothing created shares. He is majestically unique. And holiness is an inherent quality that God has, because none other is more other than God is other, infinite in all of His perfections.

Isaiah 6, verse 3. Do you remember what the angels cry out around the throne? “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory.” Right? The One who was and who is and who is to come. Uncreated He was; He exists, He is the I Am; and He always will be. He is majestically unique. He is holy.

Everything else that is holy is a derived holiness. So when God said to Moses, “Take off your shoes, for the ground on which you walk is holy ground,” He didn’t mean that there is this little patch out in the Arabian Peninsula that was somehow set apart and unique and it was just a special place of creation. No, it was made holy because God met with Moses there. So that ground, then, becomes set apart, sanctified. It becomes holy in the sense that it is unique and separate for Moses and for that encounter in a way that no other piece of ground on the planet is. It becomes holy or set apart or sanctified because it derives its holiness, its uniqueness, from the God who gives it that uniqueness.

So when we become holy and we pursue holiness, or God creates holiness in us, it is not that we add our holiness to Him. He is majestically unique. But rather He shares that distinctness with us and communicates that moral separateness to those creatures with whom He shares holiness. God communicates His holiness to us, as He has set us apart in Christ from before the foundation of the world—that is a positional sanctification—and as He continues to conform us to the image of Christ in time, and that is progressive sanctification. So we are made holy in two senses. And I will cover these quickly. Two senses.

First, we’re made holy in that God has made us positionally holy. And if you’re in Christ, you will never be more positionally holy than you are right now. You can’t grow in positional holiness. He has taken you out of the kingdom of darkness and put you into the kingdom of light. He has taken you out of the family of Satan and placed you in the kingdom and the family of God. He has taken one who was alienated from Him and has made you His child and adopted you into His family. You who were under His wrath are now only under His grace. He has taken you from the position and condition in which you once were, and He has brought you near to Him. So He has redeemed you as His own possession. That’s sanctification. That’s positional sanctification. He has made you His own. That will never change. You will never be less positionally His or more positionally His. You are positionally as sanctified as you will ever be and you can ever be. You’ll never be more or less in the kingdom of darkness, more or less His child.

Practical sanctification, on the other hand, now, that’s a whole different story, isn’t it? Because practical sanctification is the way in which you and I live out and pursue and express holiness in our own personal lives. That’s the practical side of it. That is the progressive sanctification that is described in Scripture. We are progressing toward ultimate holiness. We’ll never reach it in this life, because we will always be shackled to these bodies of death. Our flesh has a memory, and it will always put those things in our minds and cause our bodies to desire things that are inappropriate and illicit. And so we will always struggle and battle against those things.

But we can have confidence. As Paul says in Philippians 2, verse 13, “For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” God is continuing to accomplish His sanctifying and holy-making purposes in you, and He will do so until the day of Christ Jesus, Philippians 1:6 says. And God’s goal in this life is to sanctify you, to make you more holy through the discipline. So 1 Peter chapter 1, verse 15 says, “Like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves. . . .” Be holy, set apart, separate from sin, sanctified, practicing holiness in your life. The moral purity and the righteousness that characterizes God, He communicates that to you and I by giving us the capacity to live holy lives here.

Colossians 1:22: “Yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach.” That’s the goal. We will stand before Him and we will be as He is when we see Him as He is.

Ephesians 1, verse 4 says God chose us in Christ “before the foundation of the world, that we would be [what?] holy and blameless before Him.” That’s the goal of your election. That is why God chose you in Christ, to make you holy. That is why God sanctifies you and saves you in this life, to make you holy. That is why God left you here instead of taking you to glory, so that you would grow in holiness while you are here. That is the point of your life here, to grow in sanctification.

“Those whom He [God] foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son. . . .” (Rom. 8:29). So God is shaping and molding you into the image of Christ.

Jude says, “Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless . . .” (Jude 1:24). That’s the goal. That is what God is pushing you toward.

First Peter 2, verse 5 says we are a holy priesthood. First Peter 2, verse 9 says we are a holy nation. Second Peter 1, verse 4 says, “By these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature. . . .” You and I partake of the divine nature. How does that happen? It happens when we are born again by the Holy Spirit and indwelt by the Holy Spirit and there is made new, created within us, a capacity that is not there before regeneration, namely a capacity to partake and enjoy of God’s holiness and His righteousness and to commune with Him.

And then He begins to sanctify us by His truth, as the truth is read and memorized and practiced and preached. We are all sitting under the sanctifying influence of the Word of God, so that that ends up creating in us holiness and righteousness.

God then sends discipline into our lives that creates within us a longing for Heaven, a desire to be free from sin and suffering. He removes from us our taste for this world, teaches us to rely upon Him and not upon our flesh. It causes us to seek God in prayer for relief and strength and endurance. He gives us a taste for holiness. He draws us near to Himself. He casts us upon His mercy, makes us mindful of His sovereign purposes. He teaches us about Himself, our sin, and His goodness. And He brings the Word of God to bear upon our lives, whereby we learn His Word and cherish His Word. And then He, in the midst of all of the afflictions, reminds us afresh of His promises and His purposes, so that discipline ends up making us fix our eyes on Jesus, who’s the author and perfector of our faith. The hostility that we face in this world makes us consider Him who endured such hostility against Himself by sinners, so that we do not grow weary and lose heart. And so that, when we look with the eyes and the heart of faith in the face of Christ, Paul says we are “beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, [and we] are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). The Spirit of God begins to shape us and mold us. And we go from one degree of conformity to the image and likeness of Christ to the next. And there is a slow, progressive progress in sanctification, in holiness, through the course of our entire Christian life, and discipline does that work.

So what are you and I to do? Look at verse 14 of our passage. We’ll get to it in several weeks. “Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14). Holiness. You and I are to mortify sin, to put it to death, to put off the old man, and to put on the new man which is created and renewed in Christ Jesus. And as we do that and we pursue holiness, you and I can have the confidence that God has created us to pursue holiness. He has caused us to pursue holiness. He has given us the capacity to pursue holiness. And when we pursue that, because He is using discipline to teach us those things, we pursue the end for which God is driving us, teaching us, disciplining us—the end for which He has saved us. How confident do you think it is that you will enjoy that holiness? Pretty confident.

Now, you may say, Jim, I can’t do that. I can’t pursue holiness. I don’t have a taste for it. I don’t think I have the capacity for it. The only way that is true of you is if you are not in Jesus Christ. If you are a believer, then let me remind you, you are chosen for holiness. He has destined you to holiness, set you apart for that purpose positionally. He gives you the capacity for it. He has caused you to be born again by the Holy Spirit, and then sealed you with the Holy Spirit, and then caused you to be indwelled by the Holy Spirit, and He commands you to be holy. He’s given you the capacity to be holy. He’s shown you what holiness looks like in His Word. He has called you to it. He will strengthen you for it. He is working it in you. He is disciplining you for this purpose: to make you holy. He has given you His holy Word, and He uses it, by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, to produce holiness in His holy people.

So if you are a believer, you are chosen to this, destined to it, and God is doing this in your life the whole time in between. And therefore, having commanded you to be holy and commanded you to pursue holiness and separateness, you can pursue that with the confidence that you will taste and share and enjoy His holiness.

F. F. Bruce says this: “The goal for which God is preparing His people is their entire sanctification, which consummated in their manifestation with glory in Christ.” That is the purpose that God is preparing you for. He’s preparing you for ultimate holiness, happiness, and joy, And He commands you in this world to pursue it.

See, there is no discipline in Heaven. You realize that? There’s no discipline in Heaven. In fact, there’s no discipline in Heaven or in Hell. There’s no discipline in Hell because God is not interested in the moral improvement of sinners in Hell. He is not in any way pursuing their good. He does not in any way intend to create in them holiness, to make them more into the image of Christ. So He is not disciplining them in Hell. He’s punishing them in Hell. But punishment and discipline are different. Remember, we covered that. Punishment is there, not discipline. God doesn’t discipline sinners in Hell. He’s not interested in their moral improvement or sharing His holiness with them. That is not His intention.

And there’s no discipline in Heaven because it’s not needed. There’s no discipline in Hell because there’s no point. There’s no discipline in Heaven because it’s not needed. When we’re in Heaven, we will be fully holy. And when we see Him, we will be made just like Him. There will be no moral improvement in Heaven. There will be no ability to grow in our holiness in Heaven, because we will be perfected in it. There will be nothing to improve, and there will be nothing to resist of my sinful nature. There will be no self there to say no to. There will be no wicked thoughts to mortify, to put to death. There will be no desires that I need to deny. There will be no self that I need to crucify. There’ll be none of that. So there is no discipline in Hell and there is no discipline in Heaven.

But while we are here, His every dealing with us flows from His love, His every motive is our good, His every stroke is necessary, His every reproof is profitable, and His ultimate goal is that we may share His holiness. So pursue it, because that is your ultimate happiness.

The author contrasts the imperfection of the discipline of earthly fathers with the perfection of the discipline of our Heavenly Father. God’s discipline is aimed at producing holiness in our lives allowing us to share in His holiness. An exposition of Hebrews 12:9-10.

Sermon Transcript

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Scripture often uses earthly things, earthly analogies and metaphors, in order to illustrate spiritual truth. This is in fact what the parables are: Jesus taking earthly ideas, earthly stories, and using them to communicate spiritual truth.

Scripture uses symbols and metaphors, analogies. Many of the events of the Old Testament—the feasts and the festivals and the things that were connected with the old covenant and the Old Testament—those are themselves an earthly acting out of spiritual truths and spiritual realities. There were spiritual truths communicated through the things that the nation of Israel observed and celebrated. There are Old Testament events like the flood and the exodus and the Passover which are themselves not just stories in Scripture, but they are historical events with a spiritual significance and also spiritual parallels in and under the new covenant.

The history of Israel is filled with events that teach spiritual truth. This is something we are familiar with, as often we will point to physical things in the physical realm to illustrate and analogize spiritual truth in the spiritual realm.

In fact, we have such an analogy in Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1 and 3 with the race that we are to run with endurance. Just the analogy itself of a race. A race is likened there in those verses to the Christian life and finishing with endurance and running with endurance. And so we are likened to runners who are running a race in a stadium, being watched by a large cloud of witnesses.

But as they say, every analogy limps. No matter what analogy you give, there’s always a way in which the analogy falls short of the reality. Every analogy has its liabilities. And pictures and images have those limitations because they’re not always perfect pictures or perfect images of spiritual truths and spiritual things. And as we’ve been discussing discipline in Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4–11, we have likened God’s discipline to the discipline that is given to us by our earthly parents. And there is a way in which those similarities are very striking, in which we can draw very good analogies between the earthly discipline that our earthly parents give to us in this world and the spiritual discipline that our spiritual Father gives to us in our spirit, in our soul.

But there is a way in which that analogy can limp, and it does have its limitations. I am aware—and this is the limitation—I am aware that not everybody in this room had perfect parents who disciplined you perfectly all of the time, who always got it right.

Jesus did not have perfect parents. And if Jesus did not have perfect parents, there’s nobody in this room who had perfect parents. I grew up in a home without a father at all. He never disciplined me because he was never there. The only thing my father ever did to me was lie to me. The five or six times that I saw him between the age of three and the age of twenty-one, I can associate a lie that he told me on every one of those occasions.

I know that there are people sitting here who have grown up in households and in homes and under parents that are abusive, or that were abusive, neglectful, absent, lazy, indifferent, unloving, inconsistent. Parents who disciplined you too harshly, parents who were far too lenient in their discipline, parents who seemed to care all too much, and parents who seemed not to care at all. There are people here today who grew up in such an environment.

And so when we talk about earthly discipline in the earthly realm with our physical fathers and we liken that to spiritual discipline that God does as our heavenly Father, we run afoul of the danger—I should say there is the danger—that we will take our experience in our imperfect environment and that we will translate that into our image of God. Often this is what happens in people’s minds.

People who have grown up in an abusive environment cannot think of God as a loving, benevolent, gracious, and perfect Father because their only understanding of a father is somebody who was abusive or neglectful or negligent in some way in their upbringing and in their discipline.

So that is where the analogy limps. The author of Hebrews is aware that there are limitations to his analogy and he mentions them in verse 10. Our study of God’s Word up to this point has drawn largely upon the parallels between the earthly and the spiritual. And yet the author is aware that earthly parenting has its limitations and all of us face them.

I wish it were true that I as a parent had perfectly disciplined all of my children perfectly all of the time. But that’s not true. I did not do that. And I would never, even in discussing what good discipline is, want to communicate that I was flawless in it, because I wasn’t. And I’ve talked to my children about this. They know that, my wife knows that, I know that, and anybody who saw us do that knows that. In spite of that, my children have somehow grown up to not be vagrants and delinquents and criminals. So far, so good. Tomorrow is another day. But so far so good. The imperfect parenting that I was somehow able to instill in my own children’s lives did not come from me in a way in which I was unaware of my own limitations.

Verse 10 talks about some of the fallible limitations that we have. Look at it. “For they disciplined us for a short time [that’s a limitation] as seemed best to them [that’s a limitation], but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.” Now, the things that limit and make fallible and imperfect our attempts at parenting and disciplining our children, those limitations like that there’s sin involved in it, there’s wrong motives involved in it, we are sometimes lazy and lax in doing it, sometimes we are inconsistent, sometimes we are too harsh, sometimes we are not harsh enough, sometimes we go into a situation not knowing all the details of that situation, and so our discipline of our children is limited by those things, none of those things limit God. He is not limited by a lack of knowledge, He’s not limited by sinful motives. There’s no foolishness involved in His discipline, no fatigue or frustration. He is not ignorant, He has no inabilities. All of those things that plague us in our parenting, none of them plague God, so that all of God’s discipline of us in the spiritual realm, all of it is always perfect. It’s perfect in its timing, it’s perfect in its harshness, it is perfect in its design, and it is always perfect in its outcome. In fact, in God’s discipline, He has intended for us the absolute best thing that can be given to us through discipline. And that is, namely, our good—that we would share His holiness. You see it at the end of verse 10: “ . . . so that we may share His holiness.”

Now, there are a number of contrasts in verses 9 and 10 between earthly fathers and spiritual fathers. The author does not want us to think that everything that we might have experienced or received from the earthly fathers is perfectly analogous to a heavenly discipline that we have received from a heavenly Father. The earthly fathers disciplined us for a short period of time. God does so for the remainder, the duration, of our Christian lives. They did what seemed best to them, even with a lack of knowledge and sometimes even with impure motives. They did what they could as best they could. And yet, the author says, we respected them. And if we respected them, then how much more should we respect the Father of our spirits whose discipline is perfect? Always perfect in its design, always perfect in its intention, always perfect in its content, always perfect in its timing, and is intended to accomplish something that no human parent could ever give to their children, namely, that we may share in His holiness. Therefore, the author is giving a lesser-to-the-greater argument. If we respect earthly parents in spite of all of the limitations and the fallibilities of their parenting, if we respect them and submit to that, how much more should we do that to a perfect heavenly Father who perfectly disciplines us perfectly all of the time? That’s the argument.

Let’s read together verses 9 and 10. Actually, before we do, I’ll just remind you of the structure of our passage so far. In verses 4 and 5 we looked at the proper perspective on discipline. We saw that we are to embrace it by not despising it and not despairing under it. In verses 6 and 8, we looked at what it is that discipline proves, the proof of discipline, namely, that it is an evidence of God’s fatherly love and an evidence of our adoption, our sonship.

And now, in verses 9 and 10, the purpose of discipline. God’s discipline is perfectly fit to accomplish His perfect goal, which is our holiness. Verse 9: “Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness” (Heb. 12:9–10).

Now, verse 9 offers, as I said, a lesser-to-a-greater argument. If this, then how much more this? If this is true, then this thing which is far greater is also true and on a much greater degree. You see that in verse 9: We had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much more respect a heavenly Father with His perfect discipline and His perfect wisdom? And the parallel is obvious. The earthly father trains his son, trains his child, by disciplining them. And in doing so, he not only earns respect, but he deserves respect. And this whole lesser-to-greater argument trades upon the notion, a well-accepted axiom of human life, namely, that it is the responsibility of parents to discipline their children and it is the responsibility of children to submit to and respect that discipline. That’s the assumption that is behind verse 9. It is the responsibility of parents to discipline their children, and it is the responsibility of children to submit to and to respect their parents and their discipline.

Look at chapter twelve, verse 7. “It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; [Then the rhetorical question:] what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” Do you remember that’s such an obvious answer? There can be no son whom his father did not discipline. Which makes my father’s neglect of me all the more egregious, because we gladly confess that it is the responsibility of a parent to discipline their children. That is the assumption of Scripture. It’s a given; it is dictated by the nature of the relationship. It is only illegitimate children that were not due the education, the discipline that a parent was obligated to give them.

Illegitimate children who were outside of the family in that way, they were the ones who were neglected, and there was no legal obligation upon them to discipline or to provide for those children. But a legal child who was a son indeed, it is understood, it is given, it is assumed that that child will receive discipline and training and instruction from his father. That is just the nature of the responsibility. Look, parents, you created a human being. You created a human being. The fact that you did that means that you have certain moral and ethical and biblical responsibilities to the human being you created. If you are not prepared for those responsibilities, don’t create human beings. Don’t do the thing that results in human beings being created. But if you’re going to create human beings, then you have a moral obligation to those human beings. That is simply assumed. We could say that’s a natural law. It’s also biblically revealed that that is the assumption. You have a legitimate, moral, social, ethical responsibility for the moral, social, ethical, and spiritual formation of the children whom you beget.

Likewise, it is the duty of every child to respect and submit to their parents. Discipline should teach respect to children. That is part of discipline in growing up. And again, I did not do this perfectly, but in my house, you were not allowed to disrespect your mother. Now, I allowed my sons a little bit of back and forth with me because I like that stuff. But when it crosses the line into disrespect, we always knew that that was the line you do not cross. You respect your parents, you respect elders, you respect adults. This was something that we expected. We expected respect. And I would sometimes say to my children, “You will not speak to my wife that way. (Not “your mother,” but “my wife.”) You will not address my wife that way. Because now you’ve gotten into an area of disrespect.” It is expected, it is required of children that they submit to and respect their parents for disciplining them.

Sometimes parents are hypocrites and liars, they’re inconsistent, they’re harsh, they’re abusive, they’re negligent. I understand all of that. But even in spite of those failings, parents are still due respect. When I said earlier that my father never did anything but lie to me, I didn’t intend to suggest that I was whining about that, that I wanted your sympathy, that on Father’s Day I wanted a card from everyone in the congregation expressing sorrow, none of that at all. I don’t hold any animosity or hostility toward him for that. He’s dead. He died years ago. So I don’t hold any hostility or animosity toward him for that; it’s just a reality of what transpired. And even when I did see him, I tried to give to him the respect that he would deserve as somebody who was older than me, because that is something that fathers, even neglectful and negligent fathers, are due from their children. We are called to do that.

Now, this correction that the author gives us in verse 9—we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; how much more our heavenly Father who does this perfectly?—that analogy trades upon this assumed relationship between the father and the children, that the children are responsible to submit and that the parents are responsible to discipline.

And verse 9 corrects a lot of the incorrect responses that we might have toward discipline. And if you were disciplined as a child, even if it was properly as a child, there were times when you got reprimanded or spanked or had a responsibility taken away from you when you would respond with anger toward your parents, even deep-down, deep-seated hatred and hostility toward your parents, frustration and bitterness, and you would want to be angry with them for hours on end. It’s the natural inclination of the wicked and sinful heart to respond to discipline like that. So every child who has ever been disciplined has had a response like that.

Well, this passage corrects that in terms of our spiritual response to God and to His discipline. We should not despise it. We should not complain about it. We should not question it. We should not assume that He has ill intentions. We should not question His love. We should not doubt our sonship. We shouldn’t give up all effort. We shouldn’t respond with bitterness or anger or frustration.

What does the lesser-to-the-greater-than argument of the passage require of us? That we respectfully submit to God’s gracious hand of discipline. That is hard. That is hard for any child to do. It is hard for us as adults to do who are children of God, to respectfully submit, to place ourselves under His gracious hand. The argument is very clear; since we do this and are expected to do this with earthly parents, how much more a God whose every stroke of discipline in our lives drips with divine love and only divine love? There is no admixture of sin or ill motives or wickedness in any of His strokes that He gives to us, not a bit. There’s nothing but love, deep and abiding divine love, redeeming love, familial love. There is nothing but love. He does not discipline us out of frustration or anger over our sin. It is not dripping with wrath.

It is love, and only love, that intends only our good. God does not discipline us for His sake, but for our sake, because He is producing in us something good. So since the outcome is good, the motive is good, and the Discipliner is good, that means that the method of the discipline, the means of the discipline, the timing of the discipline, the extent of the discipline—all of it is good, and all of it can only be good. And if all of it is good and can only be good, then how much more should you and I willingly, gladly submit ourselves under that divine rod and receive from His hand everything that He has decreed for us? That’s the responsibility.

Verse 9: “We had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live?” Father of spirits. That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? It’s only used here in all of the New Testament. No other place in Scripture, actually, is God called the Father of spirits with a phrase like this. Now left to itself, isolated probably in any other context, the word “spirits” would refer to angelic or heavenly beings. If you just saw “spirits” by itself, that’s the way that the word would be used, of angelic or heavenly beings. In this context, since he’s not talking about angels and he’s not talking about heavenly beings, it is human beings that he is referring to here.

He refers to God as the Father of spirits or our spiritual Father. So what is he doing there? Why does he call God the Father of spirits? Look at the context, the beginning of verse 9: “We had earthly fathers to discipline us.” Notice the contrast: earthly fathers and the Father of spirits. This is the author’s way of drawing attention to two realities. Number one, it highlights the nature of our relationship with the Lord. We are not His by physical birth. Nobody’s born into God’s family in a physical sense. You must be born again. This is what John chapter 3 says. If you are not born again, if a man is not born again, he will not see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). Because, 1 Corinthians 15, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15:50). There is nothing about our natural birth, even if you are a descendant of Abraham or a descendant of a ninth-generation Christian family, there is nothing in your physical birth that gives you any claim upon divine blessing or any claim at all upon spiritual or eternal life.

So in order for one to have God as his spiritual father, then he must be born again. You must receive a new nature, a new heart. If you have never been born again, I do not care how much you know about Christ, how Christian your home is, or how much truth you understand from Scripture, how much you can follow along with everything that’s going on up here. If you have never been born again, you are outside of the covenant, you are outside of Jesus Christ, and if you die right now, you will perish everlastingly. You must be born again. You must have a new nature, a new heart, born from above by the power and the regenerating work of the Spirit of God. That takes place when you understand your sin, you turn from your sin, and you believe upon Christ, His sacrifice, His death, burial, and resurrection on behalf of sinners. Then you are born again to a living hope.

God causes you to be born again. It’s a regenerating act. And so those whom God disciplines are not children of His according to the flesh, but children of His according to spiritual and new birth. So it is appropriate for him to refer to God as the Father of spirits, because we are His through conversion and regeneration and salvation, which are spiritual realities. That’s why He’s called the Father of spirits, in contrast to our earthly fathers. We have a spiritual heavenly Father to whom we are related in a heavenly or spiritual relationship, one that is the result of a brand-new birth. Not a birth according to the flesh, but a birth according to the Spirit.

Second, that phrase highlights the nature and goal of His discipline. The nature and goal of His discipline. See, the emphasis here in this passage is not on the outward behavior or the outward discipline that God brings into our lives. The emphasis here is on the soul-affecting spiritual element of God’s discipline. In other words, God in His discipline is not producing holiness which is an exterior or fleshly or physical attribute or trait. You can’t look at somebody’s picture and just say, that’s a holy person. You can’t know that because holiness is not something that is physically manifested in terms of an outward reality. Holiness is something that is wrought in the spirit by the Spirit of God. And therefore, discipline is not something that God does outward physically, to just modify our physical outward conduct and shape and appearance, but something that God does in the inner man. The physical parent can take the rod and spank a child and modify their behavior, but there’s something that a physical parent in the earthly realm cannot do. He cannot produce holiness in that child. Cannot do it. No amount of beating could beat holiness into my children. Not that I ever beat them, but no amount of swatting could ever put holiness—I can’t rub holiness on my hand and then apply it to the seat of learning and expect that they are going to absorb holiness. I can’t do that. That’s a limitation of earthly parenting.

Oftentimes as earthly parents, our desire is behavior modification. But if that’s all that you desire as a parent disciplining your children, you’re falling short of really what the goal of discipline is even in the earthly realm. You can modify behavior through discipline. In fact, when your children are young, this is what you do. When they’re one, two, three, you’re seeking to modify behavior through training, sometimes through discipline. Not harsh, but you’re seeking to modify behavior. A two-year-old who acts up in Walmart needs their behavior modified. You’re not going to explain the gospel to a two-year-old in the aisle at Walmart, but you will modify their behavior. But if they’re twelve and you’re still trying to only modify their behavior, you have failed as a parent. Because that’s not the goal of discipline.

The goal of disciplining the children as they grow older is to be an instrument and a tool in the hand of God to teach the child holiness. To teach the child spiritual truths about violating God’s law, falling short of His standard, and the reality that there is punishment for these things. So the goal of a parent when children get older is not behavior modification. It’s not just shaping the outward aspect of your child’s life. It is to use discipline to try and address the heart. That’s the goal of it. You don’t just spank for the sake of spanking. You spank for the sake of instructing in righteousness and training them through that so that they will begin to reflect upon the condition of their own heart, and their own desire for disobedience, the reality of sin, and what that might mean for them for all of eternity. That’s the goal of that.

So, when the author refers here to the Father of spirits, he is simply calling our minds and our hearts toward this higher reality that God is not after behavior modification. God is shaping and molding your soul in discipline. Don’t miss that. It’s the Father of spirits, not the Father of your flesh. God can make you suffer physically. He could do that. He allowed that to happen to Job. He causes that to happen in people’s lives all of the time.

Who do you think is ultimately behind our physical afflictions? It is the hand of God. That is the rod that He brings into our lives. And so God can cause you to suffer physically; yes, He can do that. But in the process of that, it is more than just physical affliction. It’s soul shaping that God is doing. He is intending, the end of verse 10 says, to conform us to the image of His Son “so that we may share His holiness.” That’s the goal of discipline.

So calling Him the Father of spirits is a way of describing the spiritual realities that are going on in discipline and what God is after. He is after conforming your spirit and your soul to the image of Christ so that you may attain your highest good, which is sharing in His holiness.

So, the author says, verse 9, that we have respected earthly parents; “shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live?” Hold on a second. Live? Now that’s kind of an interesting word, isn’t it? What’s the opposite of that? Did you even notice the word live in the text until I suggested to you that there might be an opposite of that? We respectfully submit, and live. Or, disrespectfully reject, and what? Die? Perish? Is it possible that the author here, without really being too overt in his warning, is suggesting that one of the ways that God can discipline His children is to take their earthly physical lives from them?

There are two ways that that reference to living could be understood. It could be—and some have suggested this; this is possible, but this is not what I would suggest—it could be that what the author has in mind here is a contrast with the true sons and the illegitimate sons that is mentioned in verse 8. “If you are without discipline [look at verse 8], of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.” In other words, what the author might be doing is using live here as sort of a symbolic reference to the fact that—you remember there are illegitimate children who perish. Those illegitimate children are not disciplined. They are not given the training, they’re not given the love and the inheritance. And so, in a spiritual sense, they’re kind of cut off. They’re dead, as it were, to the family. Well, if you’re a true child, then you will be disciplined along with true children, and then you will live. You will be part of that family, welcomed in that family. So it is possible that the author here is simply saying that as true sons, in other words those who live in terms of the covenant and in terms of God’s inheritance and in terms of our relationship to the family—the true sons live because they submit and respect. But those who are illegitimate children, they are cut off because they’re not really given that discipline. That’s a possible contrast.

I think that what is intended here instead, and this is the second option, is to contrast here respectfully submissive children who live—and it’s physical life that I think is in view—with rebellious children who are punished with death. Now, let me make the case. The context is encouraging us to embrace God’s discipline. Verse 1: “Lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us.” Verse 5: Do not despise God’s discipline. Do not despair under His discipline. Run the race that is set before you and endure it all the way to the end (verse 1).

You say, “But that involves hostility. I face hostility and I face persecution, and I face trials and tribulations.” That’s right. So fix your eyes on Jesus, “the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of . . . God. . . . Consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Heb. 12:2–3). Keep your eyes on Him. And yes, cast off the sin and run that race. Don’t despise the discipline. Embrace the discipline. Embrace the affliction. That’s the message all the way up to this point.

Then he says in verse 9 that we are to respect and to submit to God’s discipline. And I think that the opposite of that is not respecting; that is, to despise or to reject or to despair under His discipline. And if the opposite of respecting and submitting is disrespectfully not submitting and rejecting it, then the opposite of living is dying.
I think that that is the warning that the author intends. He is saying, “Don’t reject, don’t resist, don’t become bitter. Embrace God’s work of purifying your soul through these afflictions that He has appointed for you.” And if the child of God remains hard-hearted, impenitent, and stubborn in the face of God’s loving discipline, you run the risk of mortal danger. Don’t skip by it. You run the risk of mortal danger. You are playing with fire. Keep your neck stiffened, keep your heart hardened, keep resisting, don’t submit, reject it, despise it, become embittered by it, and if you will not let go of the sin in your life that God is bringing discipline into your life to correct and to rid you of, then you run the risk of mortal danger.

There was a provision in the old covenant in the Old Testament for rebellious children to be executed. Remember that the author was writing to a bunch of Jews who had grown up under that covenant, who understood that law. They knew it well. They could recite the passage that I’m about to read to you from memory. They knew it because it was part of their culture. It was the expectation that if you had a rebellious and stubborn child that you could take them out and you could execute them. In fact, it was incumbent upon the parent to do this.

Now, before you lose your hair, your face turns purple, you get upset, and you think, oh, man, next Sunday is going to be wild here at Kootenai Community Church because we have a child who disobeys like this and we’re going to take them out in the parking lot and stone them—before you lose your hat over all of this, that provision was not for little two-year-old Johnny, to whom you said, “Johnny, clean up your Lego”—notice how I pronounced it correctly with the right enumeration—“Clean up your Lego,” and he gets all of them but two of them, and two of them he just kicks under the couch, and you say, “OK, that’s it. That’s the second time this month. Get the city elders together. We take him out to the gate of the city and we’re stoning this child right in front of everybody.” Or little Levi pulls his sister’s hair for the second time this month, and you think, “I’ve done it. Six-year-old needs to die. I’m tired of disciplining.” That’s not the type of provision this was. OK? Listen to the description.

Deuteronomy chapter 21, verse 18:

18 If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him [Listen to that. There’s discipline involved. “When they chastise him”], he will not even listen to them,

19 then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his hometown.

20 They shall say to the elders of his city, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.” [Does that sound like a two-year-old? No. “‘He is a glutton and a drunkard.’”]

21 Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death; so you shall remove the evil from your midst, and all Israel will hear of it and fear. (Deut. 21:18–21 NASB)

That was the provision of the law. Not little Johnny forgot to pick up his Lego or neglected to do so. “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, and we have chastened him. We have done all of this. He will not listen. He will not obey. And he continues to persist in God-dishonoring sin and rebellion.” The parents will take him out. The parents will be the first ones to bring those charges against their son. That is how serious God took obedience, children obeying their parents.

Now listen, children. We’re not going to stone any of you. It’s not what this is about. So calm down, breathe easy. Listen to what is being described. It presumes that there are godly parents in this equation who have sought to instruct the child. They have chastened him. So it means there has been discipline, proper discipline. He continues in his stubborn rebellion, and he is emboldened in his sinning, his drunkenness, and his gluttony. And even in the face of death and these charges by his parents, he remains hard-hearted and impenitent. And he will not turn from that iniquity. And notice the lack in that passage of submission and respect for his parents. “He will not obey us, he will not listen to us, he does not receive discipline.” He stiffens his neck, he hardens his heart. He persists in his rebellion and his unbelief. In order to rid the nation of Israel from men and women like that, God required that they be stoned. This demonstrates how seriously God takes obedience to parents and how important respectful and proper submission to parental authority was and how important it is to receive gladly discipline given in love.

So if you will not respectfully submit and live, and stiffen your neck, harden your heart, then you are in mortal danger. Because one of the tools that God can use in discipline—it is within His purview—is to take your life.

I’ve known of people, and I have known people, who I think were children of God, who persisted in sin, and God took them. It happens. In fact, it happened in the first century. Remember 1 Corinthians chapter 5—the man who persisted in his sexual immorality by having his father’s wife? Paul said he would be turned over to Satan for what? The destruction of the flesh. That is, you put him outside that protection and you say, “Devil, have your way with him.” And he becomes outside of that protection. And God allows the devil to do to that man what God allowed the devil to do to Job, except, in this case, the entire flesh is destroyed and the man is killed.

 There is in 1 Corinthians chapter 11 this reminder concerning the table of the Lord: “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep” (1 Cor. 11:27–30).

There were people dead in the Corinthian congregation because they came to the Lord’s table with their sin in one hand and took the cup in the other. And without repenting or dealing with their sin at all or judging their body at all, they instead held onto that sin and persisted in it with hard hearts and impenitent souls, and then partook of the Lord’s table in an act of blasphemy against the body and the blood of the Lord. And Paul says, “You have done this, and for this reason some of you are sick and a number of you are dead.” God had executed a number of the believing Corinthians. We can assume that they were believing Corinthians in the church who had persisted in that rebellion while taking the Lord’s table.

So, Paul says, if we judge ourselves rightly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be condemned along with the world. God taking the life of some who persisted in that sin was an act of His discipline. They had profaned the table of the Lord.

Let me give you a third example, and that is the sin that leads to death in 1 John chapter 5. John warns us, “If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death” (1 John 5:16–17).

Now, that is not some mysterious, unnamed sin that you might commit. You know, walking out of here and you get angry because somebody parked wrong right next to your car and you can’t get out, and you think, “Man, Shepley [the speaker’s son] did it again!” You get upset in your heart. God’s not going to strike you dead right there. That’s not the kind of sin we’re talking about.

I think that John is describing a high-handed rebellion against God, and he is describing one who knows it is sin. He has been confronted with this sin and he is experiencing discipline from the Lord, but he holds on to that sin. He will not submit to it, he will not receive that correction, he will not lay aside the sin that so easily entangles us, and run his race. And instead he wants to cling to that sin and have it both ways. He wants to enjoy the blessing of God and the delights of his sin. And when you do that and you have somebody in that situation, John says, “There comes a point where I don’t even say that you should pray about that because he has committed a sin that is going to result in death.” I think that that’s what John could be describing. Under the old covenant, a child who would not receive discipline and forsake their rebellion was punished by death as a warning to others and as an ultimate discipline. And we know then that we should respect and submit to God’s discipline because it is within His disciplinary toolbox to use physical death to bring about that correction.

Now, you may be wondering, how do I know if I’m close to that? How do I know how near that I am? Is the guillotine of God’s discipline hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles at this very moment that could come crashing down at any time? If you read the text, you’re not going to see any checklist of “here’s how you know when you’ve committed that sin or whether you’re in danger of that.” There is a solemn warning here. But notice that the warning that the author gives here is a warning that is stated in a positive way, right? Submit, respectfully submit, and live!

You and I are left to sort of step on the other side of that sentence and say, what if I disrespectfully reject it and I continue in my unbelief? It is possible that God may kill you. That is something we have to come to grips with if we continue in that sin. So what should our response be? I’ll tell you this, when the Lord begins to discipline you, to convict you of a sin, deal with it and deal with it right away. Get it out of your life. Make whatever sacrifice, make whatever effort, you do whatever you need to do to get rid of that, to go to war against it, to kill it, to shed it from your life, to turn from it every time you see yourself doing it. That’s it.

Just go to war with your sin! Don’t play games with it. Don’t say to yourself, I’ll just keep my head down; certainly the pain will pass, and once the pain is over and I’m on the other side of this very difficult time, then I can get back to the delights of my sin. It is not your attitude and should never be our attitude. We see a sin and we say, I’ll go to war with this. I’m going to kill it, I’m going to mortify it. If I have to do this for the rest of my life, then that’s the battle I’ll fight for the rest of my life. I’ll do it. Because I will cast off every sin which so easily entangles us and every encumbrance that keeps me from running my race. And when God brings affliction into my life, He does so to make mortifying that sin easier. Never more difficult, always easier, because then we draw near to Him. We embrace that discipline, gladly welcome it, respectfully submit to it, and live.

What does God have in mind by living? That we may have our souls so shaped and formed and molded that we may share in His holiness. That is the goal of it. The goal of mortifying sin is not just so we can struggle and kick and fight and resist all the time, but so that we may share in His holiness, which is itself our highest good and our delight.