Monthly Archives: January 2022

PRESCRIPTIONS FOR A HEALTHY CHURCH

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PRESCRIPTIONS FOR A HEALTHY CHURCH

See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many (Heb. 12: 15).

This verse is so important that I will deal with it on its own.

The writer has two prescriptions for the health of the church:

1. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God. What does he mean? Paul throws light on the meaning for us.

As God’s co-workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain. For he says, ‘in the time of my favour I helped you.’ I tell you, now is the time of God’s favour, now is the day of salvation (2 Cor. 6:1).

Paul followed this statement with a resume’ of the many hardships he and his colleagues suffered for the sake of the gospel. Instead of becoming embittered, he laid hold of God’s grace – His supernatural favour and help which enabled him to endure and overcome. 

On one occasion, Paul cried out to God for deliverance from the hardships that plagued him, which he described as a “thorn”. What was this thorn? Before God’s people entered the Promised Land, He issued a serious warning to His people about the inhabitants of the land.

But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you live (Numb. 33: 55).

It would seem that Paul identified his “thorn” as the many troubles he endured and the unbelievers who plagued him and hounded him from one city to the next as he spread the gospel across Asia Minor and Europe. But, instead of removing his thorn, God gave him a promise.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it from me. But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12: 8-10).

Instead of “falling short of God’s grace”, Paul gladly acknowledged his weakness and embraced God’s grace to make him strong in the face of all the hardships and difficulties he had to suffer at the hands of those who hated him. He refused to allow the way people treated him and the tough experiences he had to endure as part of his calling, to embitter him.

2. And that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. When hardships come, and we refuse to embrace God’s grace, something happens inside of us. We allow a “bitter root” to grow and cause havoc in the fellowship of God’s people. What is this bitter root? Again we turn to the Old Testament to shed light on its meaning.

You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through the countries on the way here. You saw among them their detestable images and idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold. Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison (Deut. 29:16-18).

The readers would certainly not be idol-worshippers in this context, but refusal to receive God’s grace indicates a far more subtle form of idolatry. When they harboured grudges against their persecutors and refused to accept God’s grace to love their enemies and to do good to those who hated them, as Jesus taught, they were putting themselves above God which was, in effect idolatry. This attitude was poisonous and would soon affect and infect the entire community of believers.

Life throws us many curved balls. How are we going to handle them? When we hold grudges against others instead of forgiving and letting offences go, it rips a community of people apart. This happens when we think more of ourselves than we do of God who provides the grace to forgive and love instead of becoming embittered. Only on the basis of Jesus’ death which paid the debt for all sin, can we forgive and be set free from bitterness.

This is the solid foundation on which a fellowship of believers is built. Whether offences come from inside or outside the fellowship, forgiveness through God’s grace is the only way to preserve the unity. Selfishness is idolatry and will most surely destroy what God has built through His grace.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

THE OUTCOMES OF DISCIPLINE

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THE OUTCOMES OF DISCIPLINE

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen you feeble arms and weak knees. “Make level paths for your feet,” so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.

Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord (Heb. 12: 11-14).

We hate discipline, don’t we? As children, we needed it because, left to ourselves, we would have become monsters. In whatever way our parents disciplined us, as much as we did not enjoy the pain, we reaped the benefit of being saved from our self-destructive behaviour.

We don’t always recognise God’s discipline. When we suffer, we think He is being unfair or uncaring, or that He is punishing us for some or other wrong we have done. The hardships and suffering we endure have puzzled God’s saints for as long as sin has been in the world.  There is no chapter in the Bible that sets out the answer for us but, as we read, we can glean answers from the way God dealt with His people in the past.

The Israelites were a wayward bunch. If ever there was a group of rebels, the Bible points to them. Their history is peppered with the evidences of their stubborn resistance to God’s ways which He lovingly revealed to them in His covenant. No other nation on earth had the pledge of His presence and favour on them as they had, and yet they threw it away and persisted in their senseless idolatry because they wanted to.

Time and again, when God’s patience with them ran out, He handed them over to their enemies to be overrun and destroyed. He always had a few who were faithful to Him and yet, who suffered with the guilty ones. Unlike the wicked people on earth who were destroyed in the global flood, God never wiped Israel out because of His promise to Abraham. Although they were eventually scattered across the earth after the Romans overran their land in 70 AD, they remained a people until God called them back in 1948.

But what about us? Why do we have to go through trials and suffering? We don’t worship idols like they did. Really? Think of the many things we have in our lives that replace God. Why does God hate idols? For two reasons, I believe.

Firstly, because He is jealous for us. He is the source of everything good. When we replace Him in our lives with anything less than He is, we lose out. When we follow the devil’s lies, we are robbed of the unity He wants us to have with Him so that we can know, enjoy and glorify Him. He is passionate about us and, only in union with Him can we experience everything He made us to be and everything He promised us.

Secondly, God knows that we will become like the thing we worship. Whatever replaces Him in our affections will pull us towards it. In Israel’s day, the idols they worshipped represented the worst of human wickedness, and they practised every form of ungodliness in the name of their gods.

Hardships drive us back to God. We know, instinctively, that whatever we hold on to in place of God cannot help us in our time of need. We forget Him when life is easy; we cling to Him when we are in trouble. God does not send trouble – He allows it to call us back to Him.

However, unlike the Israelites who persisted in their idolatry until trouble hit, we shouldn’t wait for trouble to pull us back to God. Instead, “strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.” Let’s allow our hardships to teach us the lessons of faithfulness and trust. Children who have learned to submit and obey their parents no longer need discipline. Only the stubborn ones do.

When we submit to God’s discipline by living with Him in the centre of our lives and trusting Him in everything instead of whining and moaning about every little discomfort, we learn to hate what He hates and love what He loves. That’s what holiness is. Sin is everything that contradicts who He is. Holiness is everything that affirms His character as the true and perfect God. That’s who we are already in His sight, perfect in Christ, but it’s also what we are moving towards if we desire to live with Him forever.

Through Jesus, the writer affirmed that we have already been made perfect. Now God is making us holy – and discipline through hardships and suffering is one of His methods. Submit, and you will live. Resist and you will die because, without holiness, no one with see the Lord.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

THE PURPOSE OF DISCIPLINE

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THE PURPOSE OF DISCIPLINE

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as His children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined – and everyone undergoes discipline – then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in His holiness (Heb. 12: 7-10).

Ignoring God’s directions for life leads to all kinds of problems. He gave us instructions and prohibitions for a very good reason. He knows that life becomes a mess when we ignore the “no entry” signs along the path. One of the huge “no entry” signs is the one about the way we handle our sex drives. This one says “sex outside of marriage is dangerous” but, of course, because we humans think we know better than God, we ignored that one and set up our own rules – which in effect are no rules. Anything goes!

The result is a world of fatherless people, either because the biological father is absent and plays no part in the child’s life or because the father has opted out of his responsibility to father his children. Divorce has ripped families apart, leaving many mothers to raise their children while fathers are out hunting for another mate or, at best, absentee fathers who see their children periodically and play no part in their upbringing.

Fatherless children grow up hurt and angry because they have no identity, and insecure because they have no one to affirm them and no one to set the boundaries within which they feel safe and free. There is no strong authority figure to bring order and discipline into their lives without which their sin nature plays havoc and leads to broken and destroyed people. Our prisons are full of criminals who grew up without the loving and guiding hand of a father.

It isn’t any wonder that so many of God’s children don’t understand what He is doing when hardships come. Discipline is not part of the equation. Punishment, yes, because many of the fathers are harsh and unpredictable, disciplining according to their moods and whims without purpose.

This writer of “Hebrews” perhaps experienced a father who loved him and disciplined him as a way of guiding his life towards a productive future. If so, it was easy for him to understand the purpose of hardship and suffering. God is the perfect Father. This writer knew that His people needed to be corralled in order to stay on the path. Without discipline, we lose our way amid the many temptations that appeal to our flesh and pull us away from God’s path through life.

How does God discipline us? He allows us to experience situations that bring the flaws in us to the surface. We bump up against people who irritate us, make us angry, or jealous, or who offend us in some way. We blame the other person when, in actual fact, our reaction comes from within us. Unless we own our own fault instead of blaming him or her, the exercise is wasted and God will have to keep up the heat until we learn the lesson.

He also allows us to get into sticky situations that require us to trust Him in the dark. Instead of trusting, however, we often try to fix things ourselves in a worldly way when He has said, “The battle is not yours but God’s. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.” We pray desperately to get out of our problems instead of being still and trusting God in it. Our faith in Him cannot become stronger if the sun shines all the time. We need the storms to teach us how to hold on to Him in trouble.

“God uses hardships to discipline us,” said the writer. He has a goal in mind. He is building a family of sons and daughters who have progressed beyond the infancy, toddler and teenage stages. Each phase has its characteristics of immaturity. He has given us the model of His Son who lived as a perfect son instead of a spoilt brat or a stubborn rebel. His family is destined for unity with the Father, sharing His holiness – His separation from and abhorrence for sin.

When we submit to His discipline instead of bucking and whining, something happens inside. A calm descends and a trust grows that God is, after all, in charge, He is good and is moving us towards a desired end. If some earthly fathers did a good job, and they are fallible after all, submitting to and trusting in our heavenly Father will eventually bring us to maturity in this life and perfection in the next.

Is that a path worth following?

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

DISCIPLINE VERSUS PUNISHMENT

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DISCIPLINE VERSUS PUNISHMENT

Consider Him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you completely forgotten the word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his sons? ‘My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the ones He loves, and He chastens everyone He accepts as sons.’ (Heb. 12: 3-6).

How important it was for his readers to fix their eyes on Jesus! Like Peter walking on the water, the turbulent circumstances around them caused them to waver and to lose confidence in their Master and in themselves and their resolve and ability to follow Him, no matter what. As His disciples, they knew that their relationship with Him was far closer than mere admirers. To be a disciple was to learn to become just like their rabbi, to live like him and to imitate him in everything he said and did.

By turning away and going back to the yoke – the teaching and way of life – of a lesser rabbi, they were in effect saying that they no longer believed that Jesus was most authoritative rabbi to follow. They were declaring, by their defection, that His life and teachings were no longer authentic for them, and repudiating their right to be called sons of God.

By doing that they had forgotten the reality of who they were. If they regarded the suffering they were undergoing as believers in Jesus as punishment for their sins, they had missed the truth of the radical change that had happened when they believed and received Jesus as their Messiah and Saviour. They were no longer slaves but sons.

The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by Him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children (Rom. 8:15).

Slaves had a different relationship to their master from sons. Slaves did not belong in the family. They did not share the name or the inheritance of sons. They lived in fear of punishment if they did not comply with the master’s orders. They could be beaten or even killed if they disobeyed.

‘You are not slaves, but sons,’ the writer reminded them. The troubles they were experiencing were not punishment for sin as they might have erroneously viewed them. God has dealt with sin, once and for all, in the death of His Son. The writer had taken pains to explain to them that Jesus’s once-for-all, never-to-be-repeated sacrifice had taken care of sin forever. Unlike the sacrifices of the old covenant which had to be repeated again and again as a reminder of sin, the blood of Jesus had perfected them forever and they were now undergoing the process of being made holy.

Their hardships were not punishment but discipline. Punishment was for slaves; discipline was for sons. Punishment was retribution for doing wrong; discipline was correction to point them towards becoming true sons in their attitudes and behaviour.

How important it is for us to understand what God is doing in our lives when we go through the pain and hardships that don’t make sense and seem to indicate that God is either absent or doesn’t care! “The problem of suffering” has troubled both believers and unbelievers from time immemorial. Books and sermons abound; solutions are offered or denied.

Two facts must never be ignored; we live in and are part of a fallen world – we cannot evade the effects of sin and the suffering which sin brings; we are God’s children – He uses every experience we go through to mould us into the likeness of Jesus.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters (Rom.8:28-29).

How else can God reveal the remnants of the old nature in us if He does not allow us to experience the circumstances that trigger our sinful responses? Since we don’t understand what He is doing, we mistrust or blame Him. Instead of growing in grace, we waste the opportunities to imitate Jesus. He endured opposition from sinners because His eye was on the reward. If we keep our eyes on the prize instead of bewailing our suffering, like Jesus we shall endure, persevere and, in the end, inherit God’s promises.

What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ – the things God has prepared for those who love Him – these are the things God has revealed to us by His Spirit (1 Cor. 2: 9-10).

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

THIS ONE THING

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THIS ONE THING

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race set out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfected of faith. For the joy set before Him He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Heb. 12: 1-2).

Why did the writer call the people he had written about in chapter 11 “witnesses”? Witnesses can be one of two things – people who are the process of seeing something happen, or people who bear witness to what has already happened. Are these witnesses those who sit in the grandstand and watch the readers perform or are they those who bear witness to what they have already experienced in their lives of faith?

I believe that these witnesses are people who trusted God and obeyed Him in spite of adversity and opposition. They have gone ahead and are even now reaping the reward of their faith. They bear silent witness to us who are still in the arena of life that God’s promises are true and that there is a life beyond the grave which is worth the suffering.

To run the race of life as winners requires letting go of the encumbrances which hinder us, whether they be legitimate or illegitimate. There are many things that entangle us and hinder our progress towards the goal. Legitimate things can become distractors which pull our attention away from our purpose – activities, money and possessions, friends and even family, books we read or programmes we watch on television can so occupy our attention that we drift away from the Lord and become entangled in the affairs of this life.

There is nothing wrong with any of these things in themselves but, when they take our attention away from Jesus, they slow down our progress and even cause us to veer off course and lose sight of the one who has called us to follow Him.

Of course, there are also illegitimate interests and activities which we must shun at all costs – anything and everything that goes against the nature of God. On this race course of life there are many  “No entry” signs which warn us of danger if we trespass in these areas. They are clearly spelled out for us in God’s word. Sin not only takes us off course, it also ensnares us so that we become slaves to its power all over again.

The writer warned us not to allow ourselves to become entangled in the things of this life that are necessary – we must do what we must do, but no more – and we must avoid at all costs those things that ensnare us and pull us back into slavery again.

How do we do that? He gives us a simple prescription for staying on course – keep looking at Jesus. He is both the pioneer and perfecter of faith. What is a pioneer? One who goes ahead and charts an unknown way. He is the way to the Father and, by His life and example, He opened the way for us to go to the Father through His death, He showed us how to live to please the Father and He gave us His Spirit to live within us so that we have the power to do as He showed us.

In every awkward and difficult situation, He shows us Jesus if we are willing to pay attention. Instead of going it alone and living out of our old sinful nature and reacting in our old fleshly ways, through the Holy Spirit, God provides the grace to die to our sinful ways and to live out of our new nature which is a reflection of Jesus. Instead of worrying, we trust; instead of bearing grudges, we forgive; instead of hating, we love; instead of getting even, we respond with kindness because Jesus showed us how to be true sons of God.

How did Jesus overcome? He kept His eye on the goal. What people did to Him because they hated Him paled into nothing compared with the reward that lay ahead for Him because He persevered and endured. Every marathon runner keeps going because he wants to win the prize. No matter how long the course or how many obstacles he has to overcome, he keeps going because the reward far outweighs the suffering.

So it was with Jesus, and so it is with us if we want to gain the eternal prize. There are others who have gone before us who bear witness that it was worth it. The worst that human beings could do to them could not deter them from trusting God and believing His promises. What about us?

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.