Focal Point

Pastor Mike Fabarez: God is a God who loves holiness in your life more than he's committed to you being comfortable or happy. As a matter of fact, he'd rather see tears in your eyes than see sin in your life. And he is willing to even inflict you with pain so that you will stop walking down a path of sin and start walking down the path of righteousness.

Dave Drew: If you're a parent, you know that disciplining your kids can be tough. Perhaps you've told your child, "This will hurt me more than it'll hurt you." Well, today on Focal Point, Pastor Mike Fabarez describes the character of our heavenly Father and his discipline in our lives.

Today's message is part of a series called "Our Fight with Sin," and to go along with our study, we're offering any first-time listener a free copy of Pastor Mike's booklet, "Storing Up Treasures." Just say hello online at focalpointradio.org. Now, here's Pastor Mike.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Have you ever broken a bone? I just thought I'd start with a positive question. Have you done that? It's awful, isn't it? Just the sound, the feeling. It's just terrible. I've done that a few times, four or five times, I think.

I broke my bones on the playground as a kid, broke my bones on the ball field as a teenager, and even broke my bones in my fights with my brother. It's one thing to break your bones by accident. It's another thing to have your bones broken on purpose. I'm not talking about my brother. I don't think. Maybe he did do that on purpose, now that I think about it.

I'm talking about when people say they're breaking your bones for your own good. I remember I broke my arm, both the radius and the ulna just above the wrist, which is an ugly sight, by the way. The doctor, of course, cast me up and then gave me those instructions. "Now, go easy. Don't use your arm. Don't use your hand. Don't pull. Don't push. Don't shove. Just go easy. It's got to heal."

Of course, that's for sissies. I used my arm. This isn't going to slow me down. That is until I went in for the checkup so many weeks into it when they X-ray your arm again. So, they took the X-rays and he went, "Hmm." He said, "There needs to be some changes here."

To me, I thought, well, that's going to be maybe a new cast, new color, I don't know, more cotton stuffed in. I didn't know. Changes? I started to get the idea when he took his little buzzsaw out and he cut my cast all the way around my wrist in two places. Then he put his big strong hand on one side of the cast and his other hand on the other side of the cast and looked up at his X-ray.

Then he looked down at my arm and he looked up at the X-ray, and he said, "Are you ready?" I'm like, "For what? What are you doing?" And he said, "One, two, snap!" What are you doing to me? And then he said, "Now, don't use your arm, okay? No pushing, no pulling, no playing. Be careful." I listened to him that time. And thankfully didn't have to have my arm reset. That's what he called it. Reset. It sounds nice. He snapped my bones on purpose.

Psalm 51, David talks about some broken bones in his life. He's not talking about the calcified frame that holds his body together. He's talking about the component parts of his life that have been shattered. If you know the Bible, you know Psalm 51. It was a time when he was really grieving over some of the crushing in his life that he had caused—his sin, his foolishness, his rebellion against God's Word.

Interestingly enough, in the middle of Psalm 51, he says it just forthrightly and plainly. He says, "You know, God has broken my bones." He doesn't even use the word fracture or break. He uses the word "crushed." He crushed my bones. Now, that's counterintuitive. It's a bit of a surprise. Here we picture this God who is so kind and so loving and so nice, and here David says that God has done this to me.

That just doesn't fit our caricature of God. We carry around this little cartoon theology of a God who loves us so much he would never let anything bad happen to us. When it does, sometimes we have a big enough view of God to say, "Well, he allowed some things in my life that were painful." That's not at all the verbiage of Psalm 51. He says he not only allowed it, he intentionally and purposefully caused it.

He then uses an analogy of broken bones that if we've experienced, we know, wow, that's acute and distressing. That's big. That's tough. Would God do that to us? The context of Psalm 51 is the same as Hebrews chapter 12. And the Bible says yes, God would do that. And he does do that.

As a matter of fact, if he hasn't done that to you, the Bible says you've got a reason to question that you're even a Christian. Because God is a God who loves holiness in your life more than he's committed to you being comfortable or happy. As a matter of fact, he'd rather see tears in your eyes than see sin in your life. He is a God of holiness who wants to replicate that holiness in your life.

He is willing to even inflict you with pain so that you will stop walking down a path of sin and start walking down the path of righteousness. Hebrews chapter 12, if you haven't turned there, take a look at this very counterintuitive and surprising passage to a lot of people that have yet to understand this thing I like to call spiritual spankings.

It's a God of discipline. And the picture here, the analogy, is not one of a physician. It's one of a father who loves his child enough to bring pain into his life for a strategic corrective purpose. Verse number five, "You've forgotten that word of encouragement." Talk about counterintuitive. I'm thinking at this point encouragement. You're going to give me a word of encouragement addressed to us as sons? I'm expecting something that can be on a Dayspring card.

Give me something flowery. Give me something comfortable. Well, here's the word of encouragement. Here's the counterintuitive part. If you don't have a reference Bible, be sure and jot it in the margin. This comes right out of Proverbs chapter three, verses 11 and 12. And he quotes this Old Testament Proverb, and he says, "My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you." Those are big words.

The Lord disciplines those he loves. I know that's hard for us because if God loves us, isn't he going to make us always feel good? The answer is no. As a matter of fact, circle this word: he "punishes." That's a big, big vocabulary word. That's the word "chastisement" some of the old translations translate. That's the word for corporal punishment. That's why I call it spiritual spankings.

This is about God applying, and I know it's an analogy, but to our lives, the kind of acute pain that we would picture in a father taking his child and having to corporately punish his child to get him to do the right thing. He punishes everyone he accepts as a son. End quote. Now he says, "Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father?"

If you're not disciplined, and everyone undergoes discipline, then you're an illegitimate child, right? You're not a true son. Those are illegitimate children that don't have God's discipline and not true sons. Moreover, verse nine says, "We all had human fathers who disciplined us, and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live?"

Our fathers disciplined us for a little while. They had until we were teenagers, as they thought best. They didn't always do it perfectly. But God disciplines us for our good in the best sense of the word. He not only does it well, he does it with the best of intentions, that we may share in his holiness. That's what all of chapter 12 is about.

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. That's a mouthful. Basically one analogy, all stemming from Proverbs chapter three, verses 11 and 12, and that is that if God loves you and you are his child, he will discipline you so that you will be corrected in a path of your sin and walk in the path of righteousness.

The first thing I want to do is just kind of get the flow of all of this, kind of give us a sense of what spiritual spankings are all about. I know some of this is elementary, but if we put this down in some kind of chart form here, we can get a sense of what it's all about.

Let's start with this. It all starts with our sin. And that's the context here, right? That's how it started in verses one and two. The sin that so easily entangles. We're supposed to get rid of it. According to verse four, we're in a struggle with sin and we're really not trying as hard as we should. I mean, we're really not heavyweights in this. We're not martyrs, we're not shedding blood. We're lightweights, but we need to grow up.

We need to fight this with a little more vehemence and a little more discipline and resolve. It's all about fighting sin. And that's the context. Remember two sides to this. We've tried to emphasize this in the last two weeks. Sin in God's book is not only doing the thing you shouldn't do, right? That's a transgression, a violation. It's also not doing the things that you should do. Both of those are wrong.

When we're there fixing dinner and we say to our kids who are zoning out in front of the television, "Hey, get up and set the table." If they go, "Hmm," if that's their response, that's sin. We've asked you to do something you're not doing. He can't rationalize it in his head, "Well, it's not sin because I'm not doing anything I shouldn't do because I'm just sitting here passively." No, not doing what you're supposed to do was as much sin as if they're throwing the ball around in the house and I say, "Stop that," and they go, "Hmm," and they keep throwing the ball.

That's sin too. We need to recognize that God will discipline us for both. We need to be aware of that. But it all starts with our sin, transgressing what God has asked us to do. We need to recognize it's not like God is just sitting there warming up his paddle, just waiting for corporal punishment opportunities.

This context is about a loving father. Loving fathers, put this down, the reaction is grief. Fathers are grieving over the fact that their kids aren't obeying. It's not like my kids disobey and I go, "Great, opportunity to spank. I can't wait for this." That's not how it works. If I love my kids, I want them to do right and I'm grieved that they don't do the right thing.

If you know your Bible, you may have already written this down, but Ephesians chapter four, verse 30. The context there is about saying the right things and doing the right things and not going down the wrong path in our minds or our words. He says, "Listen, don't grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." Don't grieve him. He hurts over this.

By the way, put down this, you might want to jot down Genesis chapter six, verse six. Another passage where we think of God ready to destroy the world with a flood, and it starts with a statement of God's grief. I know it says well, man's inclination of his hearts was sinful and he was sorry that he made mankind, but then it adds this phrase and it says, "And he was grieved in his heart."

We're not dealing with a software program here. We're dealing with a person. A heavenly Father who looks from heaven and sees us sin, and his heart is broken over that. And that's his first reaction, a father to a child going, "Man, I wish they wouldn't do that." If I tell my kid to set the table, "Get up, set the table, come on, let's go," and he sits there for a minute zoning out because that magnetism from the eyeballs on the screen and they just get whatever, they're zoning out.

If they go all of a sudden they kind of wake up from the zombie state and they go, "Oh, oh yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't respond right away, but here I go." Fine, done, that's it. Discipline is not invoked if there's obedience. But the reason for discipline is, let's put this down, when you don't stop sinning. If I tell my kids, "Stop throwing the ball," and they throw it and then they go, "Oh, I'm so—yeah, right, I shouldn't do that. I'm sorry." Then we're done. No need for discipline.

Discipline happens when in sin we don't stop. When we're doing something we shouldn't do and we don't stop. When we're not doing what we should do and God's going, "Come on, set the table. Let's go. Stand up, be salt and light in your office, speak up, let them know you're a Christian," and week after week you don't do it. Then there's what I like to call "Dad has to get off the couch." Remember that? He's getting ready to apply pain. That's the discipline.

So, star that one. That's Hebrews chapter 12. God then is getting off the couch. My kid's sitting there, "Come on, set the table, let's go," and they just sit there and they don't do it and I ask them again. If they continue in their lack of obedience, that's when it's time for Dad to act. Dad has to get off the couch. The purpose of that, of course, is pain. That is what God says he will do.

Those are the words and let's just go through them really quickly here. Look at verse number five. He quotes Proverbs chapter three and he says, "Do not make light of the Lord's discipline." There's one word to describe it, which by the way, ends up eight times in this passage. I know in English you'll count nine, but there's eight occurrences of it in the Greek text here.

Eight times he repeats this and that's a lot of times for one little passage of Scripture. The word is the word that is used of a dad having to do something that's unpleasant to correct a child. Discipline. The next word, he says, "And do not lose heart when he—" this is not a positive word, circle that one. What's the word? "Rebuke." I'm going to get in your face about what you're doing wrong. That's the feeling of rebuke.

The Lord disciplines, there's the second occurrence of it, those he loves and he punishes, to spank, corporal punishment. It's the word to actually, in the analogy here, Dad applying the back of his hand or the shēbeṭ, the Hebrew word, the stick to the rear end of the child. It's a paddling. It's a whipping if you will. Then it says this in verse seven, here's another word to describe this, "endure hardship."

If you got your Greek New Testaments, you'll see there's just one word here and it's a familiar word to us, it's the word hupomonē. And here it's not hupomonē under the pressures of temptation. Here it is that we have to endure the discipline of our father. Speaking of that, drop down to verse 11. The next new descriptive word for this is a negative.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time. And that's the word chara, the word joy or gladness. Whatever it is, it's the opposite of that. When God disciplines us, it takes away our gladness, it takes away our joy. Then the next word, if that's not clear enough, here comes the antonym for it, it says, "but it seems painful." It hurts. That Greek word is colorful too. It's grievous, it's affliction. It's a word sometimes translated suffering. It hurts us.

Those are the words: discipline, rebuke, punishes, endure hardship, not pleasant, painful. That's a list of things that you can start to, I hope now, include issues and things in your life that you're all of a sudden going, "Oh, I get it." Because it's not like you're laying in bed and then all of a sudden your rear end starts to hurt. "Oh, God must be disciplining me."

That's an analogy. But it is circumstances that fit the description. And the description is one of pain. That's why we defined it. God applies pain. If you want some examples of this, and we won't take time to turn to all these, but you might want to jot a few of these down. First Corinthians chapter 11, verse 30.

The context is discipline. God is loving his church and his people, and because they will not stop sinning, he says some among you are weak, some are sick, and some have even fallen asleep, which is a euphemism for death. Let's start with the first two. In that context, we're talking about physical problems. If you want to kind of categorize some of the pain that he may inflict, put this one down: health problems.

That's one thing that God uses according to Scripture to apply pain to our lives to get us to stop sinning. Sometimes in our lives, from a sore throat to cancer, just across the board, the whole spectrum of physical health problems. He can use those to say, "Hey, I'm trying to get you to stop sinning." By the way, that's the goal, to get you to stop sinning.

Haggai chapter one, verse number nine. Here's another whole category of pain in adult Christian lives that is sometimes defined as discipline. The context here, discipline. And here's what he says. He says you bring home money from your work and I blow it away. You take money and you put it in your purse and it's as though you're putting it in a purse with holes in it.

The first one's health problems. Let's call the next one money problems. Do those hurt? Oh, yeah. No, just me? They hurt you too? Yeah, they hurt. Do you ever have money problems? Bible says sometimes those money problems can be God's discipline. Haggai chapter one, verse six. It says you eat and you're not satisfied. You put on clothes, but you're not warm.

Let's just put this one down: a sense of general dissatisfaction. That sense of just something's not right. It's akin to what David said in Psalm 32. It's like every day it's like I'm sapped with the fever heat of summer. I'm just not content. Let's call that one emotional pain. We got health problems, we got money problems, we got emotional pain.

We got general dissatisfaction in our lives. We could go on and on through the Scriptures, but that's enough to let you know anything that will qualify for the concept of not pleasant but painful, suffering, affliction, is something we can define as a possible arsenal that God pulls off the shelf and says, "I'm going to apply this to my child to correct them." And the goal, as I said, is for you to stop sinning.

Here's the deal. Let me just put it this way. Here's a blanket statement. If you are a child of God, God will get you. If you're on a particular path of sin, the sin that so easily entangles you, he will get you to stop. He will. He will get you to stop because the last step of discipline, as I said there in First Corinthians 11, verse 30, is death. Does that sound weird and harsh?

I know it is from our perspective, but God will even take your life, which for us, of course, we understand there's another room to this whole thing. Dad gets off the couch if he can't get you to stop. He'll take you into the next room where you're going to live for eternity anyway. But he's going to get you to stop sinning. That is what he's going to do.

It's battles in this area and then it's battles in that area and then it's—I'm not talking about Wesleyanism or perfectionism. I'm just talking about the fact that if you continue in a particular sin, God is going to get you to stop it one way or another. He will use discipline to get it done. And the ultimate tool in his arsenal is to take your life from this planet. That's a whole another sermon, but we need to know that's part of this goal.

He's going to get you to stop. And that's verse 10. Are you still in Hebrews 12? So, what's the purpose? It's for our good that we may share in his holiness. That's the whole point. He wants to get you to stop. It says in verse 11 that we can have this harvest of righteousness. That's the goal. Discipline is to get you to stop sinning. So, it works both ways.

If we stop, jot this one down. God's response: he forgives. I put that in quotations because I know some of you are sensitive to this concept. Some of you are sensitive to the concept of God forgiving a Christian because you have a wrong perspective of how God operates. We view God as kind of like the locker in junior high. He's a combination lock or something. He's a computer program or he's some equation.

He's a person. You realize that, right? And even though you are forgiven forensically and legally the moment you become a Christian, right? Are you not forgiven for sins past, present, and future when you become a Christian? That's total forgiveness. That's legal justification. In the process of sanctification, there is also forgiveness that is granted to you. And that's what I like to call the patching up of our relationship.

There may be no penalty, no condemnation. That's why the word punishment unfortunately in verse number six is a bad one because we often think punishment is a payback, a retribution, a quid pro quo. You did this, I'm doing that. That's not what he's doing. He's applying pain to get us to stop. He's not paying us back. That's vindication or vindictiveness. That's not what God's doing. What God is doing is applying enough pain until you stop. That's the goal, because your sins have already been paid for.

Dave Drew: God disciplines those he loves. This is both an encouraging and humbling truth, isn't it? You're listening to Focal Point in a message titled "Reexamining the Nature of the Church." You can revisit this lesson anytime by going to focalpointradio.org or by downloading the free Focal Point app, which lets you access all of Pastor Mike's Bible teaching resources wherever you go.

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Ask for this insightful book when your gift arrives this month. It's a resource worth exploring. Call 888-320-5885 to claim your copy of "Sinners in the Hands of a Good God" or give online at focalpointradio.org. You can also mail your donation to us by writing to Focal Point, PO Box 2850, Laguna Hills, California 92654. I'm Dave Drew, inviting you back again tomorrow for the next part of Pastor Mike's message, "Reexamining the Nature of the Church." That's Wednesday on Focal Point.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Hi, Pastor Mike here. God's Word promises it'll never return void. So, I wonder, how is God's Word moving in your heart right now? Drop us a line, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to be praying for you here. Just go to focalpointradio.org. And then be sure to join us again tomorrow right here as we continue to explore the depths of Scripture. We'll see you then.

Dave Drew: Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.