The Everlasting Love of God’s Discipline-Hebrews 12:1-13
Key verse: 11: “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.”
Happy Sunday! The title of my message is, “The Everlasting Love of God’s Discipline.” I will be continuing last week’s message where Jim Cook covered the main points of who God is and what He does for us. I will be focusing on two themes or parts for this sermon, and specifically two passages from the new and old testaments. Let’s read these passages responsively (Hebrews 12:1-13; Jeremiah 31:1-6; Jeremiah 31:16-20). The key verse of this passage is from verse 3 of Jeremiah 31: “The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.’” Let’s pray; dear Lord, thank you for your Son and His ultimate sacrifice on the cross. Thank you for showing us that through His example, we may also endure and grow faithfully in discipline. Help us to know that no matter how bad we may and will mess up in life, that you will always be with us, loving us eternally. Bring us all closer to you so that we may celebrate with joy and peace throughout our lives. Help us all today to receive this message with praise and deep consideration. Please be with each of us throughout our weeks and thank you for the celebration of Labor Day where we appreciate the work each of us has devoted ourselves to for the betterment of others. I pray this in your name, Amen.
PART I: Persevering in Discipline
No matter your age or what you may have experienced, discipline is almost always unpleasant. We as humans are born with sin and will continue to sin throughout our lives. But there is a drastic difference between continuing to indulge in our sins and continuing to sin but coming to God each time we do fail. This is what defines a Christian: not someone who is without sin or faults, but someone who will cry out to the Lord when we make these inevitable mistakes. Verses 1-3 of Hebrews 12 begins to explain why casting away both our innate sin, or the sin each of us are born with in this world because of the Fall of Adam and Eve, and our personal sin, or the sins we continue to make throughout our lives, are important for us to hand over to the Lord. The “great cloud of witnesses” the author describes are people of the faith who have witnessed, or accepted and understood, Christ’s divine sacrifice on the cross. In order for us to grow and be such witnesses, it is critical that we admit our sins and confide in the church, more importantly God, to work them out, so that we are not so “hindered” or “easily tangled”.
The author of Hebrews is unknown, but most suspect that Paul wrote it, and I would have to agree. Verse 1 states, “And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” Paul has described the Christian journey and life as a race multiple times. Look at these four passages, all written by Paul (1 Corinthians 9:24-27, Galatians 5:7, Phillipians 3:13-14, 2 Timothy 4:7-8). Personally, I can relate fully to how Paul describes this as I ran cross country and track while growing up. I’m almost confident that Paul had to be a runner himself, with how well he describes it! He more likely is describing the Isthmian Games, which were like the Olympics at the time, but Paul seems to understand how brutal running a race can be.
When I began running as a freshman in high school, I was a wreck. We started training by running at least 3 miles every day, at which I would have to stop and catch my breath constantly, even while going at a slow pace. It was through the intense training by my coach, who maybe should have been a college coach now that I think about all he put us through as young teens, that I was able to achieve great success. Those breathless 3+ mile easy runs turned into a dedicated race pace where I was able to compete on the regional level. With this training and discipline, God blessed me with 7 regional titles throughout my career, culminating to the highly competitive “All-City” titles rewarded at the Chicago Public League Championships. But by no means was it easy, or at all pleasant. I had learned that on top of being an excruciatingly, physically demanding sport, cross country/track was also mentally debilitating. Especially by championship season, the sport turns more into a mental game than a physical. To learn how to reteach your mind when you’re enduring pain is exactly what Paul is trying to convey with these analogies. Despite your mind and body screaming at you to stop, you learn to accept the pain, and even encourage yourself to not only keep going, but to run even faster each mile in the race. And in life, your mind and body will constantly demand that you stop your journeys in faith and dedication, hoping to recede back into that feeling of perceived comfort. Understanding that we must always push back against our old and lazy ways of comfort and sin is how we are to achieve success in our faith and life. It can and will be harshly uncomfortable but knowing and reminding yourself of the grand prize that awaits at the finish line, or eternity in the Kingdom of God, is what must keep us going!
Let’s read Hebrews 12:4-13 together. Every one of us here has experienced some amount of discipline while growing up. Whether it be direct discipline from our parents or other mentor figures, the 13+ years we spend in school, the hardships and masteries of sports, or even simply navigating life as a kid, we have all been disciplined one way or another. And during these times of discipline, it’s almost always not at all fun or something we want to do. While growing up especially, it can be very difficult to understand why we are being disciplined. My parents grounding me from video games whenever I would lie to them or would get into fights with my siblings taught me well (especially with how much I loved video games) on what is good and what is unjust. An analogy from Arman during our Bible study Wednesday best explains this: when is a train most free? It is not when the train is off track, able to roam as it pleases that it’s free. It is when the train is strictly on rails that it is able to be truly free, able to accomplish what it was made to do. Similarly, we as humans are not most free when we are able to do anything and everything that pleases us, but when we are disciplined for sinful actions, like deviating off the track, that we are able to get back on our journeys of destination.
Returning to the passage, we continue to see why God’s discipline is good and necessary. Hardships exist in this current world, whether we want them or not. We can either succumb to these hardships and live in agony- or accept the hardships as discipline from the Lord. Just like a parent is to their child, God desperately wants the best for us. Like a parent aggressively removing their child from a dangerous road, in order to not get hit and potentially killed, God works similarly. In the hopes of not being condemned to hell and eternal misery, God works in us through harsh discipline so that we ourselves will not get hit and eternally killed. This helps to explain the age-old question of why a loving God allows pain and evil to exist in this world. It is imperative that we understand that through God’s mighty gift of free will, that us humans are the ones responsible for the evil that exists. But God, being all-powerful, will use and shape our shortcomings for the glory of His Kingdom.
Look at Numbers 14:20-25. God is forbidding the Israelites from entering the Promised Land because their hearts were not with the Lord, and thus not ready yet to be granted this prize. However, this section begins with God declaring “I have forgiven them, as you asked.” Knowing that even when we mess up and deviate ourselves from the path of glory, God still loves and forgives us endlessly. But it is still up to us if we want to receive the gifts God promises us, such as eternal life in the true Promised Land. Caleb and his descendants were granted this because of Caleb’s devotion and well-disciplined attitude toward God. Remembering that like Caleb, if we are to endure the discipline God sets for us in this world, we will indeed be granted favorably, with an unimaginable prize.
Part II: God’s Everlasting Love
In order to fully understand why God disciplines us, we must also understand God’s limitless love. Let’s read the second main passage of this sermon together in Jermiah 31:1-6 and 16-20. To give context, the prophet Jeremiah is speaking about the exile that has happened in Babylon. After Babylon conquered Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel, many Israelites were deported to Babylon. Despite this, God’s promise to His chosen people endured; He was and will continue to love them endlessly. God states in this prophecy that He sees them as His people, and that He will grant rest to them. His people “will find favor in the wilderness,” meaning despite the brutalities of the Babylonians (as they had destroyed and sacked Jerusalem, as well as committing other atrocities like cannibalism), God will still favor them in their exile in the wild that is Babylon.
Verse 3, and the key verse of the message, reads: “The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.” Love is both the foundation of the Lord and the basis for all His creation. It is through unimaginable love that the Lord gives us, from the beginning of creation itself, that we are able to experience this throughout our entire lives. An unfailing kindness is what drives the Lord to carry out His plans. And most importantly, God’s greatest gift of love was shown through the sacrifice of His own Son. We can even trace the prophecy that God would willingly provide His Son to save us back to Abraham and Isaac. Let’s read Genesis 22:11-18 responsively. God has shown two things about His love in this passage. 1) Child sacrifices were rampant during Abraham’s time, and God was showing that through love, despite the deadly penalty of sin, dying is not required when we confide in the Lord. It is only through His love that we are saved from the penalty of death. And 2) God will use His own Son, through Jesus being brutally sacrificed on the cross, that the penalty of death will be forgiven. “On the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.” This not only alludes to the ram that God provided as the sacrifice instead of Isaac, but also the Son that God provides later as the sacrifice instead of us. Each and every one of us, especially me, deserves the penalty of death for the sins we commit on a daily basis. But we will not suffer this great cost if we choose to believe in the everlasting love of God. It is only through His unending love that we are saved, and it is up to us if we want to accept this enormous gift.
Verses 4-6 expound on what God’s love is able to provide for the Israelites, and comparatively for us. We are utterly broken people because of the sins we commit. Yet God promises that He will build us back up, and so much so that we will dance, sing, and play instruments with great joy. He speaks of vineyards being sown and the people reaping a great harvest and enjoying its fruit. Similarly, when we plant our own faith in God, we will also enjoy the glorious fruits that it provides. And verse 6 says that we will cry out with joy to God, and we will be granted access to Zion, or God’s promised kingdom, which for us is eternal joy in Heaven.
Love does not only consist of granting great gifts of joy and happiness. Love is also having the emotional capacity to truly understand what others are enduring and suffering with, providing comfort when we are in despair. Let’s read verses 16 to 20 together. Here, the Israelites are crying out to God to save them from their agony in Babylon. As stated earlier, being a believer will not guarantee us a life devoid of sin and suffering. Instead, it gives us an outlet to rely on each and every time we are in need. King David himself, already cloaked in the love and glory of God, cries out constantly to God in the book of Psalms. And God wants us to always come to Him when we are in trouble, because He loves us so. Like a child running to their parent when they fall and scrape their knee, so much so does God want us to run to Him when we are wounded and hurt. This clip from Passion of the Christ gives a great example of how much a parent cares for their child and wants to rush to them when they are in trouble. Verses 18 and 19 expound on this, stating that God always hears our cries to Him, and He knows when we are suffering deeply. This is a clear sign that God has an emotional capacity far beyond anything we can imagine. And this is what love is. To know that God knows when we are in trouble and need of Him is a very comforting feeling. Even when we feel like no one else can ever understand the suffering each of us has gone through, know that God is always aware of it, ready to comfort us when we come to Him, is enduring.
When the travesty of 9/11 occurred, many asked where was God’s love and presence during this attack? Millions of Americans flooded into churches after the attack, asking the question: why? Why would such an awful event, where thousands of innocent lives were taken quickly, happen under God’s watch? Tim Keller, a prominent pastor, spoke of these events in a sermon delivered shortly after the attack. Although tragedy under God’s watch is ultimately a mystery, we can still confide in the fact that God is well aware of our deep sorrows and even weeps with us. We see this happen when Lazarus, a good friend of Jesus, passes away in John 11. Keller states:
“When Jesus reaches Mary, she asks him a major theological question: “Lord, why weren’t you here? You could have stopped this.” She asked him a question, but he couldn’t even speak. He just wept. All he could do is ask, “Where have you laid him?” He is troubled. He is deeply moved. This reaction is startling because when Jesus enters this situation, he comes with two things that you and I don’t have. First, he comes in knowing why it happened. He knows how he is going to turn it into a manifestation of the glory of God. He knows what he is going to do, and that in ten minutes they will all be rejoicing. When you and I enter into these tragic situations, we have no idea. The second thing he has is power. He can do something about the problem. You and I can’t do a thing to undo it. Yet still he weeps. Why? Why doesn’t he just come in and say, “Wait until you see”? If you knew you were about to turn everything around, would you be drawn down into grief, entering into the trauma and pain of their hearts? Why would Jesus do that?”
Even the all-knowing and all-powerful Jesus, who knew He had the power to raise the dead, still wept. We see clearly in this story that God has both deep love and a heart so big, that even with the promise of eternal life, or being raised from the dead itself, death still has a horrific sting that affects us all, including Jesus and the Lord. It was never in God’s original plan that we were to suffer the pain of death, or any other pains for that manner. But the great mystery of pain and tragedy persists, and we will not fully understand why until we reach the Kingdom of Heaven itself. Tragedy will continue to happen during our time on Earth, such as the war currently happening in Ukraine. But as John and Maria Peace addressed their congregation in Podil with a similar question of why, we cannot fully explain and can only rely on what Jesus says in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Not my will, but your will be done.”
Returning to the passage from Jeremiah 31 is verse 20. Ephraim, or the Northern Kingdom of Israel, are those that God loves deeply and delights in. God often speaks against them, as stated here, because He endlessly conducts the best for them, as He does with us today. And despite God disciplining us when we harden our hearts, He always remembers us. Not once will God ever turn His back against us, even when we feel like we’re in torment and exile. God’s heart yearns for us, and His compassion is what leads us to eternal glory. God has all the power, and the right, to turn away from us or to even destroy us for good, yet He still loves us so much! So much so that He sent His one and only Son to suffer enormously at our own hands, for our own sins. It is already a sign of ultimate love when God sent His Son to die, but even moreso when He dies from our own hands. God’s love is often times confusing, but to know that no matter what we do or what tragedy may fall upon this Earth, His arms are always open for us to jump into.
To conclude, God’s love and discipline may not always make sense to us. We as humans have little knowledge of why God does what He does, but that is what makes Him our sovereign Lord. Like a child relying on their parent to lead them through great troubles, God also does the same. Children are not able to fully comprehend why a parent does what they do, but they still place their trust in them and that they have their best interest at heart. But as Hebrews mentions, God has a role in our lives far greater than any parent ever had. Parents also make mistakes, but to know that God’s will is always perfect should bring great comfort to us. And God’s everlasting love is what will continue to draw us closer to Him. I pray that all of us, even if we may not fully understand, can fall on God’s grace when we are in need. As we celebrate this Labor Day weekend, commit your work from your job or school for the glory of God. Know that through the discipline of hard work, we shall be rewarded immensely with eternal life in His Kingdom. Do not forget the teachings of God’s Word and confide in it daily to remember what God’s love and discipline will do for us all. Let’s pray.
Bible Study Questions:
Hebrews 12:1-13
Key verse: 11:
“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.”
1. Read Hebrews 12:1-3. Jesus has set a clear example of how to endure pain and opposition from the world with His sacrifice on the cross. What still traps us in sin today, and how can we remember Christ’s example of freedom we achieve when we cast those chains away? Why is this process so difficult and painful for us humans?
2. Read Hebrews 12:4-6. What does it mean to “make light of the Lord’s discipline?” What happens when we do? The Father even had to discipline His Son, by having him fast in the desert for 40 days and nights. Read Matthew 4:1-11. How did Jesus use scripture to maintain discipline and resist the Devil?
3. Read Hebrews 12:7-12. Reflect on a time when you were not well disciplined or trained in a certain aspect of life. Did the lack of discipline bring you closer or further away from God? Why is discipline good and necessary for us humans? What does effective, biblical discipline look like? (Numbers 14:20-25)
Part II: God’s Sovereign Love
Jeremiah 31:1-6; 16-22
Key verse: 3:
“The Lord appeared to us in the past,[a] saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.””
4. Read Jeremiah 31:1-6. What defines God’s love, and why is it everlasting? If any sin can and will be forgiven upon repenting, why isn’t the unforgivable sin redeemable (Mark 3:28-29)? Does this mean God’s love has limits?
5. Read Jeremiah 31:16-22. How much does God understand and hear our cries of despair? Why does God use discipline and allow for pain to bring us back to Him? Is pain always necessary to remember God’s promise of eternal love (Job 5:17-18; Psalm 119:71; Jeremiah 30:11)?
