Transcription:
Ok we are talking about wisdom again, you know why, I really, I’m still looking for it. You are. Wisdom as we said each week is so much more than just being good and moral and ethical. Wisdom is choosing always the right person to work with, choosing the right person to date or marry, choosing the right job, choosing the right project, never being surprised by how people respond because you understand people, never being surprised by how you respond because you understand yourself. Wise. How do we get wise? Now, do we do it through learning? Great education? Do we have to find a guru? Do we have to find, do we have to become a worldly wise and world traveled and sophisticated? No, not according to the book of proverbs and a perfect illustration for that by the way in modern literature is Ms. Marble, Agatha Christie’s fictional sleuth, hero of many of her mysteries or who done it’s, Ms. Marble and she’s frumpy, elderly, little old lady who sits in the, sits around knitting and yet she always saves the day, she always knows ahead of anyone else who done it because she understands people because she understands human nature and nothing shocks her and nothing surprises her and everything happens the way she expects. By the way, the twelve BBC TV movies that were made with Jones Hickson playing Ms. Marble are just marvelous. I was watching one the other day and there’s this elderly, he’s a retired Scotland yard inspector and he’s talking with one of his friends about a murder of course and this Scotland yard inspector says “you know I know it’s hard to believe that the little old lady downstairs in the hotel waiting room knitting is the greatest criminologist of all of England.” And his friends says, “what?” And he says “oh yes” and then he says “there she sits an elderly spinster, sweet, placid or so you’d think yet her mind is plumb the depths of human iniquity and taken it all on day’s work. She has lived all her life in a little rural village of Saint Mary Meed and it’s extraordinary. She knows the world only through the prism of that village and it’s daily life but by knowing the village so thoroughly she seems to know the world.” Now see what Agatha Christie is doing in this, in her novel is she is making a statement that’s very very close to what Proverbs says. Here is the greatest criminologist in all of England but she’s not a world traveler, she’s not sophisticated in anyway. She’s not particularly educated. The secrets of wisdom are locked in your ordinary experience, your common experience if you knew how to learn from it and she did and not many people do. Now, according to the book of Proverbs there are two particular fairly common experiences, two particular situations that happen with a certain amount of regularity and that when you’re in either of those two situations, you are in a moment of great spiritual danger and a moment of great spiritual opportunity. They’re tests and if you pass the test you’ll become wiser about yourself and about the world and about human nature and you’ll know how things work. But if you fail the test and you don’t respond properly in those situations, you’ll actually become more of a fool, more hard, more bitter, more out of touch with how things are and who you are. There are two great fairly common ordinary situations that come upon us and they are moments of tests and if we pass the tests we can become wise even if we are frumpy. What are those two tests, why do they work and how could we pass them? K? What are they? Why do they work? How can we pass them?
Ok, first of all what are they. Well take a look here at chapter three of the book of proverbs and early in chapter three, earlier in chapter three we have a very classic statement of wisdom. Many of you know it. It’s Proverbs 3:5 and 6 it says, “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding and all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths.” And that’s, that is wisdom because our lives are just a set of branching forks on the road are they not? You come to a situation, should I take this job or this job, should I go to school or do this, should I take up with this person or not? You have all these forks in the road and the bible says wisdom, when you have God’s wisdom, when you have wisdom, wisdom guides you to choose the right path over and over and over again. So it’s talking about wisdom but how do we get wisdom, now you get to verse 9, 10, 11 and 12 and there’s two situations brought before us and they’re juxtaposed deliberately, they seem actually like they don’t belong together but they’re juxtaposed. In verse 9 and 10 we have the experience of prosperity. “Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops and your barns then will be filled overflowing and your vats will brim over with new wine.” Now if we just had these two verses sitting there as they are, it sure looks like as if honor God, if you have good relationship with God and so on, you’ll have a prosperous life. Isn’t that what it looks like? “Honor the Lord with your wealth and your barns with will be filled with overflowing and your vats will brim over with new wine.” But then deliberately verse 11 and 12 seems to be a complete non sequitur, a complete disconnect. Suddenly it talks about something completely different. It says “and my son do not despise the Lord’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.” And we’ll get back to this in a second but the word discipline means among other things pain. When you discipline, when I discipline my children because one of my children lied to me and say “go to your room, you can’t play with your friends, you can’t go to the party” or whatever, I’m bringing pain into the child’s life. I mean discipline is pain and this is not say that God allows pain into the lives of some people. It doesn’t say “some he loves receive this pain” it says “those he loves”. Verse 9, 10, 11 and 12 are deliberately putting in front of you this fact that no matter who you are or even if you are as close to God as you possibly can be, you will experience prosperity, adversity, success, suffering, everything going your way, nothing going your way. Now most of the time, we don’t experience a great deal of either. There’s a kind of balance going on but we will have times of great success, we’ll have times of great suffering, we’ll have times everything going our way, we’ll have times in which nothing seems going our way and those are the two moments of tests. There’s nothing more spiritually dangerous then to be succeeding. There’s nothing more spiritually dangerous than to be suffering. There’s nothing more spiritual than prosperity and then adversity because those two experiences bring out stuff in your heart that you did not know it was there. There’s bad stuff that’s in your heart that you don’t believe is there, that you don’t expect to be there, you deny that it’s there. But those two situations bring them out and then you could either accept what you can see, embrace what you see, build your life on this new insight, repent and change, transform your life and become wiser and wiser about life and human nature and yourself or you can deny it. You can repress it, you can blame it on other people and become more and more of a fool but you will not stay where you were. These are the two tests! C.S. Lewis he gives a great illustration he says “now if you want to know whether there’s rats in your basement, don’t do this, don’t walk to the door, your basement door, clear your throat and say “oh I think I’ll go down and see if there’s rats in my basement” and jiggle the knobble a little bit and open the door and very, very leisurely, in a very leisurely way you turn on the light and clear your throat and you walk down the steps loudly and slowly. When you get to the bottom and you look around and you say “I have no rats in my basement”. If you want to know whether you have rats in your basement, sneak up to the door, you very silently open the door and then you flick on the switch and you jump to the bottom of the steps and you look around there and they will be scurrying away and then you’ll know.” Prosperity and suffering. Success and suffering. Prosperity and adversity both jump you to the bottom of the heart and you’ll see stuff that you’ve never thought was there and what are you going to do about it? That is what will make you either more of a wise person or more of a fool but you will not stay where you were. There’s a place in Lord of the Rings, not the movie but in the book when the King is going through the Houses of Healing and the Houses of Healing where all the poor people are dying and they’ve been wounded and they’re sick and he comes to little Mary the Hobbit and he has experienced great evil and he’s been wounded and he’s been lying in a coma, he’s experienced very, very great pain and suffering and yet the King looks down and says “this suffering will not darken his heart but rather will bring him to wisdom.” “It will not darken his heart but it will bring him wisdom.” And by the way that’s the only two alternatives. Success and suffering, prosperity and adversity, will either darken your heart or it will make you wise but it will not leave you where you were. So they are the two tests.
Now, why do they work? I mean, why are they tests, why do they do what we said. Let’s move on down a little bit to the middle of the page. Let’s take a look at chapter ten verse 16 and 25. “The wages of the righteous bring them life but the income of the wicked brings them just punishment.” “When the storm is swept by, the wicked are gone but the righteous will stand firm forever.” Now verse 16 is really pretty striking. It’s kind of surprising. Income, wages, prosperity, investments, you’re getting your dividends, you’re getting your return. Here comes the money. What are righteous, what are wicked? Remember we talked about this last week? In the book of Proverbs the righteous by definition are those who disadvantage themselves for the community. And the wicked by definition are those who disadvantage the community for their own interests. And what this is saying is, if you are wise, unselfish person, prosperity will make you more wise and unselfish. But if you are a foolish, selfish person, the worst thing that could happen to you is that you get all your dream coming true. The worst thing that could happen to you is success because it will just simply confirm you in your path. You know the Book of Romans chapter one in a pretty startling spot, Paul says that the worst thing God could do to people who are turning away from Him and resisting Him, what is the worst thing He can do, those people who are resisting His will? He gives them up to their desires. Do you know what that means? The worst thing that God could possibly do to you, if you are a selfish person, is let you have a good life. Nothing worse than that. But then the next verse, see the point is, prosperity is bad for you. If you don’t know how to process it. And then the next verse says, “when the storm has swept by, the wicked are gone, but the righteous will stand firm forever.” Now, this is saying and by the way somebody this morning said, “when the storm has swept by and the wicked are gone” and somebody said in one of our morning services, “so that’s why our numbers are down today.” I said “don’t flatter yourself.” Or I said “I just don’t think this is a proper application of the text.” Here is a proper application of the text, adversity shows, reveals the foundation of your life, it reveals who you are. If you are already moving into the direction of foolishness and selfishness, it’s going to make it far worse, it will reveal you for what you are. But the way you know that you’re a wise person is that you could take suffering, it doesn’t overthrow you. The way you know you’re on the path forward, being like God in wisdom and knowledge and grace is that you could handle trouble! It doesn’t overthrow you, it doesn’t decimate you. That’s what it saying!
Ok, now why are prosperity and adversity both such tests? Here’s why because they do two things: One is that they show you the evil of your heart in general and secondly they show you the idols of your heart in particular. They show you the evil of your heart in general and the idols of your heart in particular. And you could either deny what these things are showing you and become a fool, even more out of touch with how things are or you could embrace it and accept it even though it’s painful and grow. So for example, success, you might find it surprising, what success will do is, let me give you some extreme, let me give you two extreme examples first all right? I was reading an article in Atlantic Monthly, it’s actually published two years, April 2002 by Jonathan Rauch and he wrote an article called “Seeing around Corners” and it was a very chilling article because a part of it, it talks about research on how mobs start to rampage. You know in the Balkans, in Rewonda, in Indonesia even in inner cities of New York and other American cities over the last fifty years, we’ve had examples where large groups of people, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people who were normal people and you know mentally stable people, law abiding people, would go on a rampage. And they would not only do looting and they would not only do pillaging and they would do burning and sometimes they do beating and sometimes they did killing. Why would several thousand people who are sort of normal people find that some kind of spark, turn them into a mob and they begin to kill people? Thousands of other people? How does that happen? Now, in the past we’ve tried to say, rationalize the fact that that could happen by attributing it to something called, mass hysteria or some kind of group madness that people just snap and they, and there’s this hysteria and they don’t know what they’re doing, the research shows that’s not true. Follow up and research and account and interviews with people after these awful incidents, interviews with people that were part of it show that even if they’re embarrassed now, even if they are completely humiliated and filled with remorse and regret over what they did, they knew what they were doing when they did it. They were perfectly themselves, they were perfectly rational, they weren’t out of control. They weren’t drunk or something like that. So why did they do it. And the research and this is what is very frightening, the research goes like this: “if you get into a situation in which something that you’ve always known was wrong like robbing or rape or pillaging or killing, if you get into a situation where something you’ve always known was wrong and you’ve always lived in situations where to do it would bring you bad consequences, what if you are surrounded by so many hundreds and thousands of people that are also doing it? That you know there can not be any kind of consequences to doing it? In other words, what happens when behaviors you’ve always thought of as bad, suddenly there’s no consequences, there’s no way you’ll ever be caught, nothing, you’ll never ever have any consequences for this bad behavior. And suddenly you find, they said many many people find, when favorable circumstances make bad behavior consequenceless, to their shock they find themselves wanting to do it. They say, here’s how genocide start, there’s ten percent of people, or maybe just rampaging or pillaging, there’s ten percent of people you can call bad eggs who start it and there’s ten percent of people who you could call good eggs who just won’t do it even when the crowd is doing it but the vast majority of the people find that when there’s no consequence to doing bad behavior, stuff that they always thought they would never be capable of doing, they do it anyway and they are shocked. And this is one of the reasons why, I know that’s an extreme example but do you know what happens when success begins to happen to you? The first thing that happens to you is that you take credit for it. You start doing well financially, you start doing well on love, you start doing well and things are going well and first thing you do deep inside is you say “yeah, because” you know somebody says “oh you’re brilliant!” and you say “no,no,no,no” but inside you say “yeah.” “I am smarter than other people, I am harder working than other people, I’m more savvy than other people.” You take credit for it. It’s a frog in a kettle thing, it’s a very very slow thing but do you know what this means? Have you not seen what happens to extremely wealthy people? They make a billion dollars in widgets, they know all about widgets and they probably know a lot about investing and they make a billion dollars in widgets and yet you’ve very often find that they think they know about everything. Because they made billion dollars in widget, they feel like they know more than the psychiatrists about therapy, they feel they know more about the minister about theology, they feel they know more about everybody! Then everybody, why? Because they’ve been telling themselves how great they are for such a long time that’s very very slow, eventually they trust their insights, they trust their hunches, they trust their views, way too much, because they have been successful with it! But they become fools because anyone who is wise in their own eyes according to the book of Proverbs is a fool. Slowly as time goes on as you become more and more willing to take credit for it, something goes wrong deep down inside and you start to be able to be cruel, you start to be able to be haughty, you start to be able to be arrogant, and yet it’s very very gradual. You start to become capable of doing things that you never thought you would’ve capable of because of favorable circumstances, now you’re able to get away with things. And maybe to your shock you say “oh my gosh I didn’t think I could do such a thing like that” but what most people do is they rationalize it and so they go on down the path. Now let me give you the other example. As I said success brings out the evil in your heart, brings out the worst in you but certainly so does adversity. Let me give you another extreme case, I know when I talk about extreme case, but let me talk to you about something else. Adversity, Ray Van Leeuwen wrote one of the commentaries on Proverbs that I use every week. He’s a teacher at Eastern college in Philadelphia and he’s written a very good commentary on Proverbs and as you can tell from his name, he’s Dutch and he is about my age I think, he is the son of Dutch immigrant parents who lived through the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and one of the things that happened during that time was this. And by the way he mentions this in his commentary on the verses I wrote in the bottom, I put on the page here on the bottom where it says: “rescue those who are being led away to death, hold back those staggering toward slaughter, if you say but we knew nothing about this, does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?” He says during World War II, during the Nazi occupation, dutch families had Jewish neighbors. And actually you know, the Jewish neighbors started being taken away. And at one level you knew they are being taken away to be killed but if you would speak up, if you would say no stop doing it or if you try to hide them, if you try to help them in some way, you might be killed,your family might be taken away. And so chickened out in droves but they didn’t do it, they didn’t do it in a way that was, they denied it. So what they said was, after the war we had no idea they were taking people away to be killed, we just thought they were taking them somewhere. We had no idea about those death camps, we had no idea, of course they had an idea. Under stress, when it’s extremely hard, and there’s great consequences on being good, most people will not be good, just like we said when there is no consequences to being bad, all kinds of people will be bad and when there is real consequences on being good, all kinds of people will not be good, they will chicken out and they will deny it and they will find all sorts of way to say “oh we didn’t know.” Under stress, you will see the worse in you, you can see even in small, I know I have given you extreme examples, I’ve given you Rewonda, I’ve given you Nazi occupied in the Netherlands but can’t you see what happens this week when things go wrong for you, and you just start to fall apart, you can see the weakness of your heart, you can see your anxiety, you can see your anger, you can see your selfishness, you can see your pride, can’t you see it? Adversity, prosperity will bring out the worst in you, it will bring out the ego, it will bring out the self-centeredness. And the worst thing you can do is rationalize it. Is say, “we knew nothing about it”, it’s to blame others, or to find someway to rationalize it because they will darken your heart instead of teach you wisdom. So the first thing we see about these tests is that they bring out the evil in your heart. The second thing that we learn about these tests is they show you not just the evil in general but they show you the idols in particular. So let me just cut to the chase and give you a practical example that a lot of people will relate to because most people have been through something like this. Let’s just say you’re dating somebody you really love and you really hope something will happen and that person breaks it off, that person drops you. What’s going to happen? Well, there’s only two things that can happen: everybody, both, some people will be just filled with sorrow and they will be, and it will take weeks and months to get over it but they will get past it because they will become more, they will learn how to depend more on other people like their friends, they’ll learn how depend more on God, they’ll debrief themselves and say, I didn’t do some things right in this relationship, I see certain flaws in my character, I see certain ways in which I don’t how to conduct relationships like I should and when it comes out to the other end, you will become wiser, you’ll get through it, you’ll process the adversity and you’ll get through it and you’ll become wiser for it. And the other response that people give to it is that they never get over it. They hardly get over it. They stay bitter against the opposite sex, they get bitter against themselves, they feel like I’m a failure, I must be something pretty bad, nobody is ever going to love me, they begin to look around, they become bitter toward life, they become cynical about love, they refuse to ever trust somebody else, they never get over it! What’s the difference, here’s the difference: if you break up with somebody and you’re sad, that’s one thing. If you break up with somebody and you’ve lost all meaning in life and you feel like you don’t even want to live, that’s because that person has become an idol and we’ve talked about this a couple times during the series have we not? That person has become more important to you than God or Jesus or anything else. A greater source of significance and security than anything else and that person has become and pseudo-god, a pseudo-savior, right an idol. And it’s the suffering of losing this person that will show you the inordinate attachment you give to love or to romance or to that person and there’s only two things you can do with it. You can either admit that half my sorrow is the normal sorrow that comes from the brokenness of life and losing love, but another half of my sorrow comes because of an inordinate attachment, it comes because I don’t rest and enjoy Jesus Christ anywhere near like I should. I mean, believe in Him but He’s not my emotional center of my heart. And you can say “there is an idol here!” and then you can turn from it, or else you can not admit that’s the problem and blame the person and blame people around you, and blame the way the people of the opposite sex are in and then blame you know the society and just become harder and harder and more cynical and less in touch in who you are and less in touch with human nature and more distorted in your views the things you are becoming a fool. Less and less likely to make those right choices when you come to the forks in the road. Will you do that? Don’t you see, adversity will show you the idols of your heart, it will scream them at you and you can either admit what’s happening or else you can like most people just deny that’s what’s going on. Refuse to see the ordinate suffering and the inordinate suffering that comes from normal kinds of suffering and the inordinate attachments that come because my heart has been too attached with something. But it’s not just adversity that can show you the idols of your heart so can success. I love this quote from Cynthia Heimel, I find every excuse I possibly can, every year or two to get it out to read it to somebody because I love it so much. She being having lived in New York City for many years and in the village, she knew a lot of people when they were struggling artists and struggling you know actors and actresses and then afterwards they became, they hit it big and they became celebrities so she knew a lot of people before and after and here’s what she says about celebrities. She says “I pity celebrities, no I really do – Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Barbara Streisand, were once perfectly pleasant human beings. But now their wrath is awful. I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you he grants you your deepest wish and then laughs merrily when you realize you want to kill yourself. You see Sly, Bruce, and Barbara wanted fame. They worked, they pushed and the morning after each of them became famous they wanted to take an overdose. Because that giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything OK, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and happiness had happened and they were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable.” Now here’s what she’s saying, she’s right not about God playing this rotten dirty trick on you but certainly she’s right in saying the worst thing God can do to you because the bible says that is give you the desires of your heart. Here’s what she is saying: very few of us get the ultimate success but the few who do are absolutely appalled, I have stuff to read you that I’m not going to take time to read that talks about the fact that there’s a remarkable amount of dysfunction on happiness amongst the very elite and there’s also studies that prove it, why would that be? The few of us that do make it to the very top suddenly see something that is appalling. There is something so wrong with the human soul, there is a vacuum in the human soul so big that you put in three billion dollars, ten billion dollars, you can become the greatest star celebrity in the world and you’re still not going to be happy. It still won’t fulfill you, it won’t be enough, when you realize that, you begin to say, “oh my gosh! What in the world will ever satisfy me? How dysfunctional am I?” Well of course the bible says, it’s because the hole is God shaped and therefore success screams at you that you need God and adversity screams at you you need God. Adversity and prosperity scream at you: “here is the way to wisdom, will you hear it or will you just hunker down? Will you despise it? Will you neglect it? Will you rationalize it? Alright so on that is what the tests are and why the tests work, how can we be sure that we pass them when they come to us and the answer is two things you basically need to do according to these texts and let’s look at the top of the first four verses again. And here’s the two principles, the two principles are, you have to humble yourself out of spiritual danger of success but you have to affirm yourself out of the spiritual danger of suffering with the gospel. You have to, when you’re in success, it’s a spiritually dangerous situation, you have to humble yourself with the gospel in order to become wise but when you’re in suffering and adversity and everything is going wrong, you need to affirm yourself with the gospel in order to become wise. And I got that from actually a little verse in James chapter 1 verse 9 and 10 where James says, “the brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position but the one who is rich should take pride in his low position because he will pass away like a wildflower.” Isn’t that interesting? You see think of what the gospel is. If you’re religious, if you’re a moralist, if you feel like if I live a good life, God owes me, I mean there’s a secular kind of moralist who says, “I have a lived a good life and if there is a God he owes me a good life.” And then there’s a more religious moralist who says “I have gone to the bible and I’ve gone to church and I’ve tried my very best and God owes me a good life.” So if you’re religious or you’re a moralist then you’re either feeling like I’m living up which makes you confident but not humble, you look down on other people and when suffering happens you get mad at God or you feel like you’re not living up so you’re down at yourself, you’re humble but not bold and confident and when suffering happens, you get mad at you. You feel like you’re a failure, something has gone wrong with you, you’re just nothing. But what if you believe the gospel and the gospel is that I am wicked and yet loved. I’m not saved because I’m a good person, I’m saved because of what Jesus has done, I’m not saved because of my record, I’m saved because of his record which means that right now, I am very flawed and I’m very messed up in many ways and yet I’m completely loved, which means when I succeed, I can remind myself of the humility of the gospel and when I’m in adversity, I can remind myself of the affirmation of the gospel. Here’s how you do it, first of all when you go into success, red alert, immediately we’re told honor the Lord with your wealth. It doesn’t say honor yourself with your wealth. When the wealth starts coming in make sure you admit that it’s not you, don’t take credit for it in your heart, don’t take credit for it at all. Red alert, don’t get that process started that can take you down the paths we were talking about tonight. Now the way you do that is you use the gospel and it’s actually quite, you know it’s a quite strong medicine. Listen, here’s what the gospel says, I don’t care how much the world sucks up to you, I don’t care how beautiful you are, I don’t care how rich you are, I don’t care what your credentials, I don’t care your resume, I don’t care what you’re accomplishments, you are a sinner before God and you are lost without the grace of Jesus Christ and you are in God’s sight absolutely no better than anyone else in this world, no matter how ragged, no matter how degraded, no matter what a failure, you’re no different when it comes before the throne of God, no different at all. Do you believe that? Use that on yourself, that’s what it says, use that on yourself, it’s your only hope. So you have to humble yourself in the spiritual danger of success in order to become wise but on the other hand, you have to affirm yourself in the spiritual danger of adversity in order to become wise and here we see that in verses 11 and 12, “my son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke because the Lord disciplines those he loves as a father of the son he delights in.” Ah well, here’s a little bit on this. You have got, this says, when everything is going wrong, to not let your suffering knock you off of your certainty that God loves you. In fact, do you know how in the old days when there before there was anti-biotics and things like that, you know, when you’re out on the frontier, if you had a wound, you had to rub salt in the wound as a way of keeping it from festering, as a way of keeping it from getting infected, oh it hurt like crazy but you put salt in the wound, ok just like you put salt in meat so that it wouldn’t go bad right out, you know you didn’t have refrigeration. You have got to rub into your suffering, absolute certainty that God loves you or your suffering will go bad in your soul, it will putrefy. Now how do we do that? Well first of all, we are told here, you have to understand that the bible says if you have a relationship with God then the bad things that come into your life are discipline, now what does that mean? Well I started alluding to this but here, as a parent, there’s always two issues I face when I was facing a child who needed discipline, if my son would say to me, you know five year old son, “daddy, I’m going to do this” and I found that he lied to me, he lied to me, he deceived me, well I say, I have to bring some pain in this child’s life. If I just let that go, the child’s is going to become a liar! It’s a worst thing for him, so for the child’s sake, I say you can’t go to the party, or you can’t play with your friends, you have to go to your room, I’ve gotta do something for that child to be saved from being a liar. So one of the reasons I want to bring pain into his life is for his sake but there’s another reason I want to bring pain into his life for my sake because he humiliated me or he, how dare that little snotty five year old do that to me. And so the other reason you want to discipline a child is you actually don’t want to discipline a child. In the bible the word discipline is never ever ever used to mean punishment, it’s never used for example when God punishes the nation’s violence, never ever, never says that God disciplines, it’s very interesting, it’s a Hebrew word that really means pain for the sake of the person. Just enough pain not to pay them for their sins, that’s not the point, the whole point of it is enough pain to make the person a better person. The trouble is, as a parent, sometimes I want to punish my children to pay them back for the inconvenience, for the humiliation, for the egg on my face just, sometimes I want to put pain in their lives for my sake not for their sake and of course I struggle with this over the years and I never made perfection but God has. This texts says, God is a perfect parent and you if you have a love relationship with Him have to live in this knowledge. We live in a world that’s broken. There’s all kinds of bad things happening to everybody because we live in a world that is broken by evil and sin, someday God is going to fix it but for now there’s disaster, there is sickness, there is disease, there is death, there’s all kinds of suffering and everyone is involved in suffering but we’re told this, if you create through faith in Jesus Christ, a love relationship with God, God arranges your suffering so that it’s discipline, do you hear me? He says, “you’re going to have suffering,” but he’s going to arrange the suffering so that nothing comes into your life except that which is for you. You need to be humbled. You need to learn wisdom. You need to know, if there’s all sort of things that you’ll never learn, never learn about yourself, you never be wise without this and God says, I want you to realize that anything bad that comes into your life is through my arrangement because I love you, I love you, I delight in you and to the degree you understand that, to that degree, your suffering will not putrefy but to that degree it will make you wise instead of darkening your heart, do you believe that, do you understand that? You know if a little child comes up and throws his or her arms around you and says you’re the best I love you, he’s just a child, what does the child know? And yet it feels so good because you know it is, that is what we need more than anything else, adoration, you know we need it. You know it’s like water, it’s like food, it’s like air for us but if you knew how much that, that builds you up, do you know that God loves you like that? Do you know that God delights in you like that? Do you know that is that through Jesus Christ, he delights in you to the degree you live in the joy of that. To that degree suffering and adversity will make you something great, that’s what it’s saying. That’s the reason why C.S. Lewis actually says, to say “Lord, don’t let anything bad happen to me” is really a way of saying, “don’t love me” because he says, he says “we might have learned even from the poet’s that love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. Kindness, merely, as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. But if God is Love, He is, by definition, more than mere kindness. He has often rebuked us and he’s often condemned us but he has never regarded us with contempt. God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us. We are, therefore, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art. Now over a sketch made idly to amuse a child an artist may not take much trouble. But over the magnum opus of the artist’s life—the work which he loves—the artist will take endless trouble—and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were alive. One can imagine a alive picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute and not in magnum opus. In the same way it is natural for us to wish that God had designed us for a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. You asked for a loving God; you have one. Not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way…but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as an artist’s love for his work. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring.” Well, somebody says “how do I know that God really loves me and this is only discipline and not punishment”, I’ll tell you why because Jesus Christ came into this world and passed these tests for us. He was the most successful person everybody didn’t let it go to His head and He suffered horribly but He trusted His father in it. You see Jesus is the one son who didn’t need punishment or discipline did He? He was perfect so He didn’t need discipline and He didn’t sin so He didn’t need punishment but He took our punishment, the punishment we deserve that you can know that whatever comes into your life is only loving fatherly discipline because He delights in you. That’s why the tests work, that’s how you can pass the test, by trusting in the one who passed the test for you so that through Him you can begin to let these things turn you into someone who is wise.
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