I wish I could find some new way to tell you how much it means to me to be able to come and share together with the Lord and a few brothers and sisters. It is just a real treat for me, and I do treasure the times the Lord grants us to come and be with you, brothers and sisters.
My heart just rejoices for the grace that He pours out upon you, for the good work that He does in you, both individually and as an assembly, as His people.
This morning, I would like for us to look together at some verses in Hebrews 12. I am sure that you have probably, on many different occasions, read and heard ministry from this portion of Scripture. I know that our brother Stephen has done extensive teaching on this book, and yet I found my heart impressed to lead us in considering some thoughts from God’s Word from this portion of it.
So, shall we begin to read with the first verse of Hebrews 12?
Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us,
let us also lay aside every encumbrance,
and the sin which so easily entangles us,
and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,
fixing our 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 the throne of God.For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself,
so that you may not grow weary and lose heart.You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin;
and you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons,“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor faint when you are reproved by Him;
for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines,
and He scourges every son whom He receives.”It is for discipline that you endure;
God deals with you as with sons;
for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?But if you are without discipline,
of which all have become partakers,
then you are illegitimate children and not sons.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.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.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.
Can we pray together, please?
Father, again, You have so blessed us by calling us together to remember Your Son and to offer praise and worship to Him. We found our hearts and souls touched again this morning as we were confronted with the reality of Who He is and the wonderful work that He has accomplished on Calvary, so that we might be the recipients of all the spiritual blessings that are in heavenly places in Him.
So we want to thank You this morning. We do thank You as well now for this time that we have together in Your Word. How we do bless You, Lord, from the bottom of our hearts, that we have available to us the blessed Holy Spirit of God, that He will be here today and cause the Word of God to be a living Word, that He will work in our hearts and in our minds, enabling us to see and hear what it is that You have planned.
So, Father, we thank You that You have included us in Your eternal purpose. We pray today that, as we consider this portion of Your Word, more of that purpose will be revealed to us, and more of it will be worked out in our lives. We will be careful to give You the praise and the glory for all that You do as we share this time together. We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
When one comes to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, a lot of wonderful things take place.
Now, first of all, we are born again. That is, we were dead in our trespasses and sins, and by the wonderful working of the Spirit of God, we are caused to be born again. In that experience, we are alive, in a sense, for the first time to God. We know God, and we have been born again.
It is also as part of that experience that we receive, as a gift from God, eternal life. That is the very life that God has in Himself. When we believe in His Son, God grants it to us as a gift, as we receive Him.
It is also good news that, in that experience of believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, our sins are forgiven. All of the sins that we have committed have been dealt with; they have been atoned for. They are no longer recorded. God has erased them and removed them from His sight, and therefore we are fully forgiven.
We are also brought into the family of God. We are made members of God’s wonderful family in God’s house. So we are introduced into a wonderful family with thousands and millions and millions of brothers and sisters throughout the ages, throughout the universe, and throughout the world today.
We are just a small number of them who are gathered here this morning, but it ought to remind us that we are part of a large family that God has redeemed unto Himself.
It is also true that, when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are put into Christ. Everything that is in Christ is now ours. Everything that God has put in Him—all the fullness of the Deity—is in Him, and then He goes on to say that we are complete in Him.
So, by a wonderful transaction of God, God has put us in His Son. I realize that, to many of us, that is a mystery. I am sure that in many ways it will remain a mystery, but more and more of it can be opened up to us. What a wonderful truth: that we, as mere mortals—not only mere mortals, but sinful mortals—have been put into the Lord Jesus Christ.
Then, wonder of all wonders, God has put Christ in us. Not only has He put us in Him, but He has taken His own Son and placed Him in us, which has become the hope of our glory: Christ in us, for the hope that one day we will become what God had initially intended for us to be.
Also, as part of this experience, we have been taken out of the kingdom of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of His dear Son. We are under new government, under new management. We have a new King, a new Ruler over our lives.
We have been ushered into the government of God, and God has a wonderful way of governing things and ruling over things. You and I, by our belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, have been introduced into that kingdom.
But there is something else that we discover happened to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. Maybe many of us are unaware of it this morning, but when you believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, you did not realize, maybe, that you were actually signing up to run in a race.
This writer here in Hebrews 12 is reminding us that, as Christians, as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are in a race. We signed up to run in a race.
Now, this race that is set before us is a particular kind of race. Maybe some of you in high school or college, or in other places, were engaged in racing. Maybe you were an expert in the hundred-yard dash, or maybe you could even run farther—the three-mile, or whatever it may be.
But this particular race that you and I have been brought into is an endurance race. It is not only the Boston Marathon; it is even more than that. It is more than twenty-six miles of running. As a matter of fact, it is a race that you will be engaged in for the rest of your life as a Christian.
From the moment you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you begin this race. The whole issue is that God wants us to be involved in running that race to the very end. It is an endurance race. It is not the hundred-yard dash. It is not a Sunday afternoon stroll, but it is an endurance race.
The issue is not winning the race. The race has already been won by our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Leader and the Finisher. He has finished the race. So it is not a matter of competition. You are not competing against anybody, in a sense, except yourself and those things that would hinder you in finishing this race.
So let us get clear in our thinking this morning that this race that the writer is talking about is an endurance race. The issue is: are you going to be in the race at the end, or are you going to be a dropout along the way?
That is really what is in his heart: to encourage us to consider that we have been called by God and placed by God into this race of endurance.
Now, when you look at this, especially in this context, what we discover is that the issue at stake is the issue of faith. It is not a race of struggling and making yourself better and doing all these things that we think religious people ought to do.
The race that the writer is talking about is the race of faith. You will recall back in Hebrews 11 that the whole issue is the issue of faith. He begins by saying that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Then he goes on to catalogue these various individuals who have already run the race of faith. From the beginning of their experience with God all the way through, they finished up. Now, I did not say that they never stumbled along the way. He simply said that they finished the race.
The issue before us is, as Jesus puts it in another place: when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth? Will He find it in your heart? Will He find it in my heart?
If our Lord Jesus would come today into our situation, could He discover, upon looking into our hearts, that there is a living faith by which we are living? Or are we just going through some religious routine?
That is really the issue that is at stake in this matter of running the race. Again, it is not winning the race; that has already taken place. It is not competition with anybody else.
He points out to us that, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us—now, who is this cloud of witnesses? It is those that he mentions in Hebrews 11, who have already run the race. They have finished their course, and they are seated in the coliseum as spectators, witnessing us as we run our race.
We are not in competition with them. We are not to try to be like Abraham or Noah and run the race the same way they did. The issue is: are we going to run as they ran? That is, are we going to be in the race at the end?
He sets them before us as a great encouragement. There have been others just like you and me, with all of our weaknesses and all of our difficulties, and yet they finished the race.
It is a wonderful encouragement to think that there were people in other generations whose situations were more demanding than ours will ever be, and yet they ran the race and finished. The author greatly encourages us, because that is really what the writer is interested in: encouraging those who somehow find themselves in a place where circumstances are such that they are at the verge of dropping out and giving up on finishing the race.
As he sets before us this cloud of witnesses, our hearts are to be encouraged to remember that there have been others who have gone before, who ran this race and finished the race. Now the baton has been passed on to us, and the issue is: are we going to be a people who are continuing to run in the race at the end?
The author of this letter is concerned about those to whom he is writing. He says it in a number of different ways.
In Hebrews 2, he is concerned that they should drift away from what they have heard. Also in Hebrews 2, he is concerned that they would neglect the great salvation that has been wrought by the Lord Jesus Christ. In Hebrews 3, he is concerned that they would fall away from the living God.
In Hebrews 4, he is concerned that they might come short of the rest that God has provided for them. His concern is: are they going to be dropouts along the way?
Now, maybe it would just be a healthy thing this morning, brothers and sisters, if we faced up to some matters—not in a critical or judgmental way, but simply to face up to them.
There are a lot of people who have started this race who are not in the race today. You know some of them, and I know some of them. Unless we hear this word of encouragement to our hearts, it could very well happen to us.
Not that we ever intend to allow this to happen, but it can happen. I think it is good for us to be warned in the right way and encouraged to stay alert, so that at the end of our life—whatever it is, whether the Lord Jesus should come back in the midst of it or whether we live all the way to a healthy old age—we would still be in the race at the end, running the race that has been set before us.
This writer’s heart is full of encouragement. He wants these dear people, for whom he has such a burden, to be greatly encouraged to run this race that is set before them.
He begins in this first verse by saying, “Since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us.” You notice that little phrase, let us. It reoccurs fifteen times in this letter. It is his way of saying, “Let’s go on. Let’s not give up. Let’s not let the difficulties keep us from finishing the race that we have started to run.”
Here he uses it again as a way of encouraging us to take the necessary action to assure us that, at the end, we will be in the race, running all the way to the end.
Having put before us the matter of these others who have run the race and finished, he now says to us, “Let us lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us.”
First of all, if we are going to finish this race, we have got to learn to lay aside some things that we are trying to carry along with us in the race.
Now, I do not know a whole lot about racing and running, but it has been pointed out to me that there are certain people who are fanatics about this matter of running. I mean, it has become an obsession with them. There is just something in them that, in the natural, would like to run long distances in a short period of time.
You know what some of these runners will do? They will go into an equipment store and begin to examine their shoes, for example. They will even be concerned whether one pair of shoes weighs a quarter of an ounce more than another pair of shoes—a quarter of an ounce.
Some of us think, “What in the world would they be concerned about a quarter of an ounce for on their shoes?” But stop to think for a minute. A quarter of an ounce on your foot: multiply that four times, and it gives you an ounce. Then multiply that by sixteen, and that gives you a pound.
It means that every sixty-four times you pick up your foot, you have carried an extra pound that was unnecessary for you to carry. Maybe for the hundred-yard dash that is not the issue. But if you are running a marathon, a long-distance endurance race, you could actually pick up tons that you would not necessarily have to pick up if you had laid aside that thing that was an encumbrance before you ever got started.
But do you know what some of us as Christians are trying to do? Up on Long Island, when I lived there, we had a number of fishermen, and they had these big waders, these hip boots that came all the way up. They were long boots. They came all the way up to here.
Can you imagine somebody wanting to run the Boston Marathon in those waders, in those hip boots? But some of us feel like it does not make any difference what we have along with us. We just expect that, at the end, “I’ll be there. I’ll have enough strength. I’ll finish the course.”
But here the writer says to us that, if we intend to finish, then we need to learn to lay aside every encumbrance—the thing that keeps us from finishing the race.
I do not want to get into detail this morning, but let me just mention some areas that I think we ought to give some thought to. First of all: earthly possessions.
Some of us are being hindered in our running of the race and maintaining our faith because we are too encumbered with earthly things. They mean too much to us.
Please, we are not trying to put condemnation or guilt on anybody this morning, but just to put before us some of the things that could very easily get in the way and keep us from finishing.
We are not talking about salvation. Let us get that clear this morning. We are not talking about whether you are going to go to heaven or not. That is not it. If you were to stop the race today, if you are a child of God and you dropped out today, you would still go to heaven. That is not the issue that the writer is talking about.
The issue is: are you going to be in the race at the end? “He that endures to the end, the same shall be saved.” “He that endures with Me, suffers with Me, will reign with Me.” That is the issue. Are we going to reign with Him? Is our life going to be such that He can entrust responsible matters into our hands?
But sometimes earthly things mean so much to us, and we hold on to them, and they become an encumbrance. It hinders us in our running of the race.
Another thing that I think can get in our way is mental concepts—concepts we have about God, about ourselves, about a whole range of things. We need to have our minds renewed. We need to let the truth of God come in and adjust the way we think about things.
If you are convinced that you will never finish the race, there is a good chance you will not finish the race. Whatever other faulty concept you might have of yourself or of God can really hinder you. It can encumber you in finishing the race.
Dear people of God, both previously and presently, and in the days to come, we are living in the kind of world where we can experience emotional hurt. We can be hurt by people and by situations, and those things can become encumbrances to us.
We can spend the rest of our lives feeling sorry for ourselves, sitting alongside the racetrack, feeling sorry for ourselves, just sitting and having a pity party and trying to get some other people to join us.
We need to get free of that encumbrance of a hurt that we have experienced.
In the midst of hurt, sometimes we can make vows: “I will never.” Have you ever heard yourself say that? “I will never.”
When you say that, something gets registered inside of you, and that becomes an encumbrance. It keeps you from really entering into the race in the fullness that God has planned.
Under the Holy Spirit’s direction, we need to learn to examine the vows that we have made—the vows, “I will never,” or, “I will.” Are they the will of God? That is the issue.
These can become things that really entangle us, hinder us, slow us down, and exhaust us so that we have to give up the race. There is no need to. We can lay these things aside and become free of their influence upon our lives.
Then he says to lay aside as well the sin that so easily entangles us. Those who study the Scriptures all have varied explanations as to what this sin is. Let me just share with you what I have come to understand.
I think, in the context of the Hebrew letter, the real issue he is talking about is the issue of unbelief—how it entangles us, gets us all twisted up, and keeps us from putting one foot in front of another.
It was the issue at stake when the children of Israel could not move into the land that God had promised them. It was because of their unbelief. There were giants in the land. They made all kinds of excuses, but the issue was that they did not put their faith to work.
That is, they did not, as Hebrews 11:1 says, substantiate what was already there. Unbelief, in a sense, shuts the door to heaven. You cannot get anything from God with unbelief.
Those who come to Him must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Without faith, it is impossible to please God.
The sin that so easily entangles us is our unbelief. So many times it starts right up here in our thinking, in our minds, in our rationalizing, where we look at things and come to conclusions in our minds rather than allowing the Spirit of God to lift our understanding into the heavenly realm and allow us to see things from God’s perspective.
Then we put our faith to work and reach up there and lay hold of that which is already ours. Our brother Craig this morning read out of Ephesians 1 about this long catalogue of what God has blessed us with in His Son.
Are those ours in experience, or are those just theology—something that we discovered from Bible study? Are they becoming ours experientially? Are we laying hold of them by faith, bringing them in as ours, substantiating them, making them ours in our everyday lives?
That is the issue. We need to set aside this matter of unbelief. We need to declare war on the unbelief in our lives. It needs to be dealt with.
We do not need to play with it, excuse it, or nurse it. We need to deal with it. We need to be radical with it. It is an enemy to us. It is a sin in our lives.
Again, not through condemnation, but by taking a good, hard stand against the unbelief that is there and laying it aside, so we will not be hindered in our running of the race.
Then the writer tells us that we should do another thing: fix our eyes on Jesus. Oh, somehow, if we could learn this lesson: fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Leader and Finisher of our faith.
Why would he have us look at the Lord Jesus? I think in this context he would have us be reminded, dear people of God, that our Lord Jesus Christ ran this race as a man—a unique Man, but nonetheless a Man.
It was not like He was a superman or a super-spiritual Being Who did not have all the problems of being a human being. He won this race as a human being.
He finished the race. He won the race, and He is seated at the right hand of the Father. We are to fix our eyes on Him—not the people in the crowd, not your brothers and sisters, not your friends, not the people around you, but fix your eye on Him.
When you gaze upon Him and realize that the indwelling you is this Christ that he is talking about, you see that this matter of you finishing the race, brothers and sisters, is very clear: He is the only One Who can finish it.
You cannot finish it by yourself. I do not care how determined you are, how strong you are in your own discipline of yourself. There is only One Who can finish this course, and it is the Lord Jesus Christ.
It is the same thing that Paul is talking about in Galatians 2:20: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me.” It is no longer I who run, but Christ Who runs in me and through me.
That is why he would have us focus on the Lord Jesus Christ, realizing that He finished the race and now He has come to indwell our lives so that we, in turn, could finish the race.
I hope our hearts are encouraged this morning. I hope that you are not feeling like you cannot make it. In one sense, you cannot. But if you get your eyes in the right place, if you get them on the Lord Himself, then you know you can finish the course.
That is what Paul said: “I have fought the fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.” That is the issue before us, and it can only be done as we allow the Lord Jesus Christ to become more and more and more of our life.
In this matter of running the race, I have to refer again to those who have had some experience in long-distance running. Everyone who runs a long-distance race, the best I have been able to determine, has an experience they call “hitting the wall.”
As best I understand what this experience is, you are running along, and you get to a certain point where your body screams out and says, “I can’t take it anymore. This is it. I’m quitting.”
If you give in to those feelings or thoughts that you are having at that point, you will quit. But they call it hitting the wall. If you understand the dynamics of what is going on inside of you, you will not listen to what your body says, and you will not listen to your mind. You will go ahead and tap the resources within you, go beyond the wall, and finish the course.
But so many people hit the wall and stop when they hit the wall.
May I say this to us? This is my own personal observation. I believe that every believer in the Lord Jesus Christ who is serious about following the Lord and is serious about finishing this race that we have been enrolled in is, at some point in life, going to hit the wall.
In other words, there is going to be something that comes into your life that is going to scream at you, “Now it is time to quit. You can’t make it. It is too hard.”
There is the real test of what you are going to listen to. It is in those kinds of situations that I believe we have an opportunity to discover the exceeding greatness of the power that God has placed within us: the resurrection life of Jesus Christ.
That life can give us victory, can get us beyond the wall, and can get us to the end of the race.
That is why it is so important that we understand something of the dynamics of running. This is not a Sunday afternoon stroll, as we mentioned earlier. It is not just strolling along and enjoying things, and if you get tired, you sit down. That is not what we are talking about, dear people of God.
We are talking about being in a race where all of your energy is necessary. It has to be mustered in order to make it through to the end.
You can almost be sure, if you have not already experienced it, just be forewarned: if you are serious, you are going to encounter something that resists you and wants to keep you from going on.
If your approach to Christianity is a Sunday afternoon stroll, you will probably never hit the wall. You will sit on it, but you will never hit it.
But if you are serious about going on with the Lord, there is going to be an experience in your life where you encounter something that resists you and wants to keep you from going on.
It is so very important, dear people of God, that we keep our eyes focused on the Lord Jesus Christ so that His life within us can energize us and get us beyond that wall that we will hit.
Another thing that the writer does, and he does it quite extensively in this chapter, is to help us understand how important it is to have a proper perspective about discipline.
He uses a number of verses here to put before us, as the people of God, this matter of discipline and how important it is in our lives.
He begins in verse 5 by telling these particular believers that they had forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to them as sons:
My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor faint when you are reproved by Him;
for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines,
and He scourges every son whom He receives.
First of all, he says to us that we need to stop regarding lightly the discipline of the Lord. That is, do not fail to take it seriously.
If we do not take seriously the discipline of the Lord, then there is a very, very good chance—I think we almost have to be absolute here and say—that if you are unwilling to embrace the discipline of the Lord in your life, you are not going to finish the race.
I do not want to be so dogmatic. Maybe I am incorrect. But it just seems to me that if we regard lightly, if we do not take seriously, the matter of God’s discipline upon our lives, then we are simply not going to make it.
What are we talking about, dear people of God? We are talking about God being able to form His Son in us in such a way that He can stand all the resistances, all the obstacles, all the problems that come flooding into our lives. At the end, we will still be standing. At the end, we will finish the race.
Now, in ourselves, we cannot do that. Discipline is God’s way of forming His Son in us. Without this discipline, if we regard it lightly, if we do not think it is important or something to which we have to give ourselves, then I think there lie ahead of us some very awakening experiences in terms of not finishing the race.
He also says that we should not faint when we are reproved by the Lord. Some of us cave in under correction. We just cannot handle it when somebody corrects us—even the Lord.
When the Lord corrects us, as gracious and loving and kind and gentle as He is in His correction, some of us cannot even take it when He corrects us because we believe in our minds that correction is rejection.
We get so turned in on ourselves and take ourselves so seriously. Some of us think we ought to be able to do it perfectly the first time through. We are so great at this thing of running a race, and whatever it is that God puts our hands to, we should never fail.
We almost say, “Watch me. I know there have been people who have gone before me, and they have blown it at least twenty times, but just watch me.” Yes, watch me fall on my face.
But when the Lord comes and corrects us, adjusts us, we do not need to learn to go off into a corner and pout and say, “Well, if that is the way He feels about it, forget this running of a race.”
We need to learn to know God’s corrective word to us. When He says to us, “You need to make an adjustment,” it is for our good.
It is not because God is angry. It is not because He has just got something that He is irritated about and is correcting us. He has a goal in mind. You know what that goal is? He wants you to finish the race.
If you are doing something wrong now, it is going to end up affecting you so that you are not going to finish the race. How unkind of Him not to tell you if He knows. And how foolish of us to cave in when He brings a correction into our lives.
Some of us need to become a little more thick-skinned in God’s dealings with us. I know we are His kids, but we need to grow up a little bit too and not get our feelings so easily hurt when God has to deal with us about some of these matters.
It is also helpful that the writer points out to us that what God is talking about is discipline and not punishment. In our thinking, we have those two things all twisted up together: punishment and discipline.
With our children, as parents, that is what we usually talk about. The kids see it as punishment; they are being punished. But it says here that those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines. He does not punish those whom He loves. The wrath of God comes upon those who are His enemies.
This matter of discipline is not punishment. It is not God saying, “You did this wrong; therefore you have got to pay by doing this. I am going to do this to you somehow to justify what you did wrong.” No.
The discipline of the Lord is this: if you are doing something wrong, His discipline comes in to adjust you so that you will be doing it right. Afterwards it produces the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
Do you understand, dear people of God? Because He loves us so much, He wants us to live righteous lives. When we are living lives that are unrighteous, that are wrong according to what He has in mind for us, then we need to learn to be corrected and understand that He is doing it because He loves us and not because He is angry with us.
I am not saying that we do not do things at times that anger God, but those are very rare times—very rare. If we are a normal child of God, I think those times are very rare.
I have had a few of them. I will not even tell you about them. I have had a few times when I felt I had done things that angered the Lord, and He dealt with me in love. He dealt with me, and how I praise Him that He dealt with me.
But most of His dealings with us are in this matter of disciplining us, training us to run in such a way that we will still be in the race at the end.
We need also, I think, to face up to what the writer says: this matter of discipline is something that is necessary for everyone. It says that He scourges every son whom He receives.
In other words, if you are without discipline in your life, there is something wrong in your relationship with the Lord. That is, you have not really come into the place of accepting the fact that you are His son.
If you are without discipline, he says, then you are an illegitimate child. We need to be careful about that word illegitimate, because it carries connotations with it that I do not believe this writer had in mind. It means that you are just not a real child of God, that you are not serious about this matter of walking with God.
But every person who is serious about walking with God is going to experience discipline in their lives. It is for everyone.
So just because you see one of your dear brothers and sisters going through discipline, do not get the idea, “Now, they must have done something, and the Lord is having to really take them behind the woodshed for a while.” That is not the issue.
If you just keep your eyes and ears open, it is going to come your way too, if you are serious. It is for everyone. It is an inclusive thing. It includes every one of God’s children: this matter of being disciplined.
As we already mentioned, in verse 10 it says that earthly fathers disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.
Again, it is so very important, people of God, that we understand before we get into the discipline situation that God is disciplining us for our good. In other words, the results are going to be good for us.
What is actually taking place, unbeknownst to us, is that God is so working in us that we begin to fellowship His holiness. That is what the word means: to be partakers of His holiness—to fellowship, to have in common with God, His holiness.
You know what I think sometimes is a real hindrance to us in this matter of really yielding to the Lord’s discipline? We are satisfied to be much less than what God wants us to be.
Probably in our thinking we say, “Well, I know there are some minor adjustments God needs to make in my life, but for the most part everything is pretty good.” Well, it depends on what standard you are using to measure yourself.
If you are measuring yourself by other people that you know, that could very well be true, though I think it is a little arrogant for you to feel that way. It may be true that all you need to do is make a few adjustments and you will be just as good as some of the other people you know.
But what is God’s standard? What is His standard? According to the measure of the fullness of Christ. That is God’s standard. By that standard, how do you measure up?
That is what God has in mind: that we would be partakers, sharers, fellowshippers of His holiness. We sang about the thrice-holy God this morning. He is beyond anything—I do not even know what to say—and God wants us to share in that.
Not just share in it as a blessing, but actually have it worked in us. You know what He says to His people? “Be ye holy, even as I am holy.” Is that not amazing?
God could have lowered the standard, and still we could have been a pretty good human race. But He says, “My standard for you is for My holiness to be your holiness, and your holiness to be My holiness.”
The only way that is possible is that somehow God Himself can get into us. All the discipline that God imposes upon our lives has this ultimate outcome: that we would be partakers of, participators in, the very holiness of a thrice-holy God—a God Who is holiness.
Discipline, according to the writer of Hebrews, is a method that God uses to train His people—train them in righteousness.
It is true that, through the shed blood of the Lord Jesus, we have a righteous standing before God. Our sins have been fully atoned for, and when God sees us in His Son, He does not see our sins. Therefore He justifies us. He declares us to be righteous, to be without sin, to be not guilty. That is our standing.
But what about our lives? What about who we are in our person? How about the way we think? How about the way we conduct our everyday lives? How about the way we deal with other people in the world? Is that righteous?
God is determined that not only is our standing to be righteous, but our conduct, our lifestyle, is going to be righteous as well. Discipline is God’s way of coming in and bringing righteousness as a reality into our everyday lives.
It is His method of training us—discipline, training us to walk in righteousness.
Discipline is necessary in order to finish the race. Verse 11 says that 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.
It may be helpful for some of us here this morning just to face up to what the writer says here: no discipline is joyful for the moment.
We try to convince ourselves of it. We try to convince others. When God has His hand of discipline upon our lives, He has us in one of those corners that only He can put us in, and we are going through a very difficult situation in our lives, we try to convince each other that everything is just fine. We come with our plastic smile.
But the writer is so honest to say that, when you are under the discipline of God, it is not joyful.
I do not mean that we are supposed to walk around and have a procession behind us of all these non-joyful people. But we need to understand that when the discipline of God is upon our lives, it is going to have an effect on us—somewhat of a negative effect for a while.
But please remember that afterwards. It is so hard to wait for that afterwards.
We begin to murmur and say, “Lord, this is too hard. It is not fair. It is not right that You should let those people do that to me. Lord, it is not fair. I am one of Your kids. Why should You let me experience this financial downswing in my cash flow? Why?”
We begin to murmur, but we lose sight of the fact that God is in that and is bringing us to an afterwards.
Now, if you murmur too much and complain too much, there is a good possibility that God will withdraw His hand for a while, and you will not experience the afterwards. What I find is that God is so persistent, He is going to rearrange it another time anyhow.
You might have to go through it now. You are probably three-quarters of the way through anyhow. Why start all over again and go three-quarters of the way all over again? Why not just say, “Lord, let’s finish this thing. Help me get out of the way. Help me to give up. Help me to deny myself.”
Let this process of discipline be finished in my life so that the afterwards can become my experience.
Let me just quickly try to mention the sources of God’s discipline in our lives. The writer does not particularly mention them, but I think there are times when the Holy Spirit Himself, Who is God, directly disciplines God’s children.
There is an activity of the Holy Spirit that He takes as a responsibility for every one of God’s children: to bring direct discipline upon their lives. We need to learn to recognize that.
There is also another source: the Holy Spirit uses the circumstances, the people, and the experiences of our lives to discipline us.
Again, I find it so helpful if, in the midst of what we are going through, we can remember that the Holy Spirit went to a whole lot of trouble, in all probability, to get you into the mess that you are in. He engineered it. It is not a coincidence. It is not an accident. It is engineered—or at least it has been permitted.
Even if you decide to go your own way, do not think that you are going to get away from Him. Where can you go from Him? Even if you go ahead and do your own thing, God will be there, and He will take that circumstance.
Did He do it with Elijah? Elijah ran away and found himself in a cave, but he did not escape. “Elijah, what are you doing here?”
So it is, brothers and sisters. Some of us bemoan the families we were born into, or a whole lot of things. We go back over our history and say, “Oh, this was not right. This was not right.”
But you know, dear people of God, our God is so big, so capable of causing all things to work together for good to those who love God and are called. He can take the most horrible childhood and turn it for good.
He can take those impossible people—impossible in your estimation—that God puts into your life, those people who are impossible to live with, and use them as an instrument of His discipline upon our lives.
Let us not try to get away from it. I am the number-one culprit. I do not like to be with people who do not mesh with me. They are not like me. Of course, they are not at all like me.
I mean, these laid-back Southerners, you know, who just think nothing is ever wrong—I cannot stand it. Let’s get with the game here. Let’s get going. This is serious business. No time to sleep. No siestas. Let’s go.
But guess where I am living? Alabama.
It takes them five minutes to say “y’all.” Do not you tell them I said that.
But our God loves us so much that He takes all the circumstances of our life and uses them as an instrument to bring discipline, to form us into the image of His Son, to put us in a place where we experience for ourselves His own holiness.
Let us not look lightly upon the discipline. Let us not despise God’s discipline. Let us not cave in under His correction of us. Let us learn to realize that those things that are going on in our lives now—even when we blow it, brothers and sisters—are things only God can take and use for good.
Only God can take our stupidities and use them for good. If we commit them to Him, He will use them to that end.
There is another discipline that I think we need to be aware of, and that is self-discipline. There are things that the Holy Spirit deals with us about directly, and then indirectly through our circumstances and people. But there are times when we need to learn to impose a discipline upon ourselves.
One example, just to illustrate: reading the Scriptures.
The Holy Spirit can say to you twenty-four hours a day, “Dear child of God, you need to read the Scriptures.” God can put you in a situation and make life impossible, and yet you may not read the Scriptures.
I remember a dear sister among us. She was in a wheelchair; she could not get around. Her family left her all day long. So she found it in her heart one day to say to the Lord, “Lord, I really want to learn to read Your Word and get in Your Word and meditate in Your Word and let Your Word do a work in me.”
One day, her family all left. Her husband went to work, the children all left the house, and she was in the kitchen. Her wheelchair got tied in the telephone cord and on the table, and she could not go anywhere. She had to stay there in the kitchen the whole day, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon when the family came home.
Her wheelchair was entangled in the telephone cord. She could not go anywhere. On the table in front of her were her Bible and her Sears Roebuck catalogue. Do you know what she did all day long? Yes, she did it. She confessed. She sat there all day and read the Sears Roebuck catalogue and never opened the Word of God.
You say, “Oh, not me.” You do not know yourself.
We need to learn how to discipline ourselves. There is a part of us that does not want it, hates it, thinks it is horrible. We need to learn how, dear people of God, to discipline ourselves to do some of these things that we know the Lord has indicated to us.
Not in some legalistic way, but just in a living way, in a living, loving way to the Lord, we go and do these things that are important for us to be able to finish the course.
The writer concludes in verses 12 and 13 with what, in my opinion, seems to be some remedial action that he suggests we take.
There may even be some of us here this morning who started the race and just found it too hard, or maybe had a negative experience along the way, and you have decided to drop out of the race.
Listen to what the writer would have to say to you:
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.
If you have already experienced that, or if somewhere down the road you experience something that, in a sense, causes you to drop out of the race, I believe the Word of God would speak a wonderful word of encouragement to you.
Just because you dropped out does not mean you cannot get back in. You can get back in the race again.
You can begin to take action so that you find yourself back in the direction, heading towards that ultimate goal of being in the race at the end.
Just because you have blown it does not mean that the race is over. That is the kind of God we have: so gracious, so merciful, that from our perspective we have totally blown it, and God says, “Let’s go. Let’s get back in.”
So he says to them, “Strengthen your weak hands and your feeble knees.” In other words, begin to exercise a little bit.
If you have to, come to the Holy Spirit and say, “Holy Spirit of God, I need some therapy. I need some help.” He is there as your Helper, as the One the Lord Jesus has sent to meet you at the point of your need.
You will not find Him criticizing you. He will not say, “You dummy, why did you fall? Why did you drop out?” He will not do that.
He will come in with the most tender, loving, caring, patient way and say, “Let’s see if we cannot bend this knee a little bit and get it to work, strengthen it up a little bit. And those hands, let’s work on them. I’ll give you some weights, and you can begin picking them up a little bit.”
Eventually, what you will find is that there is strength again. Those weak knees spring to strength, and all of a sudden you find yourself taking steps, being able to pick up some responsibilities. You find yourself back in the race again.
But he also has a word of caution to us, I believe. He says, “Make straight paths for your feet.”
Do not be so foolish as to do the same thing you did before. Watch out for those areas where, if you run in that rocky place, there is a good chance that you are going to sprain your knee again, and you will be out of the race for a while.
Be careful. Keep your eye on the things that are going on. When you run, run in that straight path. Do not go out of bounds. Do not try to take a shortcut. There are boundaries that God has set in this race.
Do not be a pioneer racer. Do not feel, “Well, I can go to the place all the people have not.” You have got to follow the race course that Jesus set. You need to stay within those certain boundaries.
I would want to say to us that I think one of those boundaries is having fellowship with God’s people.
If you are out of fellowship—if you have been hurt by some of God’s people for whatever reasons, and you have decided, “Man, that is the end of it. It is not only the end of fellowship; it is the end of the race”—you need to come back and find an assembly of God’s people who love you and love the Lord.
Get in there and begin to run the race all over again. But do not be foolish. Do not be a hero. Do not think that because you have blown it, injured yourself, and been injured anyhow, you can do this thing with no problem.
Do not be that way. Be humble. Admit your weaknesses before the Lord. Acknowledge that. It does not mean you will stay in that weakened place, but acknowledge where you are.
There is so much pressure among us as a people of God to be more than what we really are. We need to let that go.
There is a peer pressure to be spiritual. Who are we kidding?
Now, we do need to grow, dear people, but I have not found any spiritual giants yet. Praise be to the Lord, I have discovered some people in whom the Lord has been able to do a work, and they have been a tremendous encouragement and set an example for us.
We need to be in the body of Christ with people who love each other, who encourage each other, and who can even be one who goes and says, “You know, maybe you need to look at this thing.”
Please remember, whether it is now or down the road, just because you dropped out does not mean you have to stay out. You can get back in the race again.
Get your eyes back on the Lord. Get them off people. I will guarantee you: if you get your eyes on people, you are going to get off course. You are going to end up in a mess somewhere.
Our race has been set before us: an endurance race. It is to God’s glory and to our great benefit if we finish that race.
The issue is not salvation. The issue is: are you going to endure to the end? That is the issue.
I hope that we can hear, by the Spirit of God this morning, the deep encouragement the writer of this letter has for those who are seeking to be serious about their walk with the Lord.
I hope the Spirit of God has spoken to us this morning to encourage our hearts, that we would have this in our heart: we want to be in the race at the end.
So we learn and experience how to yield to God’s discipline. If we are one of those people who need remedial action in order to be brought back into the race, let us be humble about that.
Maybe you need to go to a brother or sister and say, “You know, this is what is troubling my spirit, and I need some help.” You will find the help that you need.
Just cry out to the Lord. You will discover that He will come to your aid. All of a sudden, just down the road, you will discover yourself back in the race again, maybe even running more effectively than you were before.
That is what is so wonderful about the Lord: the latter years can be greater than the former when God is in charge of what is going on.
May the Lord help us.