732 Discipline as Children Part 2 - Hebrews 12:7-8

Do you discipline children that don't belong to you? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. This is the second part of a two-parter about how our discipline of children and how God disciplines us to relate to one another. Today, let's read Hebrews 12:7-8, and I'm reading from the English Standard Version. "It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom His father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons." 

We talked yesterday about how our discipline of children is an example of the type of discipline that God is putting us through. Even in different translations, the challenge at the beginning of verse seven was to endure suffering as a discipline.  In the ESV, it says "it is for discipline that you have to endure." The things that we have to endure, and the things that we go through are for this discipline, this training, this guidance and development that God is doing in our lives.

God is developing you to be the person that you will be for eternity, and He's doing that for me. Now, I don't understand the mechanics of all this. I do know that when I discipline my children, they learn the benefits of living with discipline, and we will learn more about that in the future that's part of the reason why I'm studying this whole chapter in a series, or at least this section of this chapter in a series.

My goal is to communicate to us that discipline has benefits. If we can take those benefits from the suffering that we face or the negative experiences that we have to endure, as it says here in the ESV, then God is making positive things out of the negative that happens to us. God is in charge of the world and we broke it. He let us break it. He gave us free choice and we broke it, and much of the consequences, all of the consequences that we face the result of the sin in the world. The sin that began when Adam ate the apple and it began when you and I decided that something was ours and we stole it from our brother or our parents or whatever. None of us are without sin. In Romans 3, it says " all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

So the consequences of our sin are part of this strategy that trains us to become the people that God would have us be. We are not illegitimate, but we are sons. We have been adopted into the family of God and He is raising us to be what He would have us be and to use us in the world. And part of that is the way that we endure difficulty. It's the way that we face challenges. It's the way that we deal with suffering. Part of that is also the way that we live in and among people in the world. That's our goal as followers of Christ, let's live in such a way that we glorify him. If we can remember that the difficult things that we face are part of God's discipline, we bring new energy to every situation and we make things possible.

We create, and we live this visible hope that we're challenged about in 1st Peter 3:15.  People will ask us about our hope and they will ask us about the hope they see, and when they do that's when we get a chance to give a defense. This is all part of our strategy. God has this grand plan to deal with our broken world by letting us be his witnesses in it. 

I want to invite you to join God. Be part of His strategy in your sphere of influence. Let's live as we trust Him. Let's remember that the difficulties that we face, the unfairness and the challenges in our job, and the difficult customers, all of those things contribute to us being able to make God visible in our workplace. If we can adopt the attitude that we trust God in this environment, then we're free to serve other people, and it makes our hope visible to them. Try it, check it out. Let's live like Marketplace Christians. 

Thank you for being a marketplace Christian, and for considering how you can make a difference in the lives of others, your actions matter.

Thank you very much.