Hebrews 12:5-7

Main Thought: In these verses, the writer of Hebrews is telling his readers that God does discipline those He loves. This principle, he reminds them, was established in the Old Testament, where both Job 5:17 and Proverbs 3:11 speak of God giving discipline to those that He loves. We need to be reminded of that in our present day when most of the time we think the love of God for His people has nothing to do with disciplining us, and somehow we think our difficult times are because God is angry with us. But the writer reminds his readers further down in the chapter that our earthly fathers corrected us out of their love for us for temporal purposes, while our heavenly Father is disciplining us for eternal purposes and for the purpose of producing holiness in our lives, and out of His love for us. If we are able to continue to sin without discipline from God, then that says God is not our heavenly Father (Heb. 12:8). Sometimes that discipline is gentle, when God speaks to us from His Word, reminding and convicting us that we have strayed from the path of obedience. Other times it comes more harshly, when the Word spoken by one of God’s servants cuts us deeply like the “Living Word of God” (Heb. 4:12), bringing sudden realization and conviction of sin. However, there are other times, when we have spurned the written and spoken Word of God, that God has to use harsher measures to discipline us. I am reminded of the prophet Jonah, who rebelled against God’s command to go preach to Nineveh, and God brought a fierce storm and cast him into the belly of a large fish before Jonah submitted to God’s command. The Hebrew writer’s point is this, if we are a child of God, He will discipline us when we stray from Him. We should take the admonitions of God and the disciplines of God as reminders that God does love us, does desire the best for His children, and will do what is necessary to produce holiness in our lives. May each of us recognize this, stay in His Word daily, confess our sins regularly, and not despise the chastening hand of God.