DO NOT DESPISE THE DISCIPLINE OF THE LORD.

WRITTEN BY CHARISSA GRIFFITH

Are you operating as a legitimate son of God? 

Hebrews 12:8 tells us that if we are left without discipline
we are illegitimate children and not sons.

So I will ask you again,
are you operating as a legitimate son or are you practically functioning
as an illegitimate child?

Take a moment to slowly read
through this portion of Hebrews 12:

5 And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
  nor be weary when reproved by him.

6 For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
    and chastises every son whom he receives.”

7 It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 9 Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. 11 For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

12 Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, 13 and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. 14 Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. 15 See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; 16 that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. 17 For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.

The Lord disciplines those he loves. 
Do you know how to experience the love of the Father through discipline?

Have you heard the voice of your Father convicting you, correcting you, rebuking you and offering you a better way?
Or do you tend to walk through your days and weeks without hearing His correction?

When you hear His voice, how do you respond? 
Is your heart soft, tender and pierceable? 
Or do you hear corrections and harden your heart?
Do you respond with rebellion? 

Maybe you find yourself thinking you would rather choose your own way when His voice comes.
Maybe you choose to yield to sin and self gratification above obedience.

Do you respond with self-righteousness? 
Do you deny there’s anything to be corrected when He speaks?
Do you deflect the voice of the Father because you think you’re right and justified in a particular situation,
having no need to be disciplined?

Do you respond with fear, running or hiding?

Maybe you do not fully understand or have not fully learned to accept the unwavering love of the Father
and the eternal positional proximity you have because of the perfect blood of Jesus?
Do you think your own shortcomings demand punishment and distance? 

I want to tell you there is a better way offered to you than each of these responses.
There is the way of true sonship offered to you.

The spirit of true sonship hears and responds. 
True sons hear with tender hearts and stand ready to repent and obey righteousness.
True sons are able to hear about blind spots they have from the One with perfect perspective.
They are able to recognize where the image of the Son still begs to be formed deeper in them.
True sons are able to give up their rights, their perceptions, their realities, their thought patterns,
their biases, their hurts and their walls and receive the mind of Christ and the perspective of their Father.

Sons are able to stay close when correction comes rather than receive correction as relational rejection.
Sons know how to receive rebuke and stay close. They know how to be cut, sobered and grieved by sin or shortcoming,
yet not ashamed or wounded to a point where they can’t stand to look their Father in the eye.
Sons can receive the discipline of the Lord confidently because they are confident in the love of the Father.
Sons can receive discipline because they know how to receive discipline as love.

Sonship knows though discipline may not feel pleasant in the moment,
that it is for their own good and it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness in time…
to those who are willing to be trained by it.

That phrase from Hebrews 12:11 is so important, “to those who have been trained by it”.
Discipline yields peace and righteousness only to those who have been trained by it.
You can avoid and ignore correction and training, and therefore not be trained by it.

More than that, if you are not being trained by righteousness, you are being trained by something else.
Something is always training you. You are always being conformed into the image of something and someone.
If you are not being trained by righteousness, you are being trained by rebellion.
If His voice comes and you can’t receive it, you are training yourself in rebellion.

Hebrews 3:

6 but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.

7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,

“Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
    on the day of testing in the wilderness,
9 where your fathers put me to the test
    and saw my works for forty years.
10 Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
    they have not known my ways.’
11 As I swore in my wrath,
    ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”

12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. 15 As it is said,

“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”

16 For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? 17 And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness?18 And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? 19 So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.

Do not harden your heart as in the rebellion.
It will prevent you from entering rest.
It will prevent you from yielding the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

There is a rest of righteousness where we fully live in sonship identity.
There is a righteous rest where we learn to be trained and corrected by our loving Father.
He wants to keep us close and form us into the image of the Son.

Oh, that we would let Him.
Oh, that we would cooperate with grace and with discipline.
He disciplines us for our good, that we might share in His holiness.

Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet,
so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.

Hebrews 12:12-13

Again we see Hebrews 12 present us with two options, two ways, two outcomes.

If we do not yield to the discipline of the Lord, and allow our hands to droop, our knees to remain weak and untrained and continue to walk upon crooked paths
that we’ve made for ourselves, what is lame will be further put out of joint.

But if we lift our drooping hands and strengthen our weak knees and make straight paths that we might walk in them,
we will be healed.

When I read these two verses I can’t help but think of Revelation 3:

1 “‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. 

When His voice comes may we be awake and alert,
eager to strengthen what is weak and about to die. 
Let your Father heal you according to holiness and give you life.

Do not be one who bears the name of Christ but is unwilling to have Christ formed in you.
Do not be one who bears the title, ‘son’, and yet refuses His voice and His discipline.
Do not deceive yourself into thinking you can grow up in God and bear the peaceful fruit of righteousness
if you continually refuse His correction and harden your heart to His voice.

You will only enter rest by tenderness and obedience to His voice.

The response to the Father’s voice that I just talked about is just the beginning of the obedience and humility we can walk in.
There is a deeper revelation of sonship found in Psalm 141 that has been striking me lately.

It is one thing to be able to receive rebuke in the secret place, directly from the Father, straight to your heart.
It is another to be able to receive rebuke out loud, in the open, from a brother who walks with you.

You know you’ve submitted to the discipline of the Lord when your heart is humble and tender enough to receive it from the mouth of a brother.
It takes humility and divine trust in His leadership and His discipline and His fatherhood to receive it from a brother as from Him. 

Can you receive the Father’s correction and the Father’s voice through the mouth of a brother? 

The blood of Jesus has brought you near into the corporate body of Christ.
Though many members, we are one body under the headship of Christ and as iron sharpens iron,
so one person sharpens another. 

Can you hear and receive the word of Christ through a brother in Christ? 

In Psalm 141:5 David writes:

Let a righteous man strike me—it is a kindness;
 let him rebuke me—it is oil for my head;
 let my head not refuse it.

Will you let a righteous man - will you let a brother who is righteous by the blood - strike you with rebuke?
Will you let his observations cut you?

If it be true… if the brother corrects or rebukes us (rebuke meaning, ‘to express sharp disapproval for behavior or actions’)
and there is truth found in the state of our hearts or lives they are observing… will you let yourself be cut by it?

Do you regard it as a kindness? Are you able to recognize that it is for your own good that they may bring and observation to you?
Do you believe that you have brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters who want to be in relationship with you and want the image of Christ to be formed in you?
Do you believe that there are people who want you to have freedom in your heart and wholeness in God and are bringing you correction that you might experience it?
Do you believe that people might actually have your good and your holiness in mind when bringing rebuke to you?

Even if someone doesn’t communicate it well… if they don’t communicate with patience or grace…
are you able to hear the perfect voice of the Father through the imperfect communication of man? 


Are you able to hear the perfect correction of the Father
through the imperfect correction of man? 
Are you able to receive rebuke as loving discipline?

How do you respond when correction, accountability, discipline, and rebuke comes from people?
Do you ignore it, throw it away completely and think you have no need for it?

Do you get offended? Do you set your heart against the person who brought it to you? Do you flip it and project it onto them?
Do you isolate yourself from community and correction? Do you disallow the voice of others to have any influence over you?
Do you reject accountability from peers and authorities and elders? Do you internalize it as rejection and hide away?
Do you choose the ‘just me and Jesus Christianity’?
Or maybe you choose to surround yourself with people and voices that will only affirm your behavior and help justify you and solidify you into your flesh and sin and rebellion.
Do you surround yourself with ‘yes men’ who will only sing your praises even when you’re in the wrong?

There are so many different ways our flesh may want to respond when something sinful or broken in us is confronted and uncovered.
But by the Spirit, I pray that we can choose humility and brokenness and contriteness of heart before God.
I pray that we choose the fear of the Lord and allow trembling to come over us as we come under God’s word and righteous standards.
I pray the desire to be conformed into the image of the humble Son, who was obedient even to the point of death on a cross (Philippians 2),
would be the lens with which we view correction and rebuke through.

Let even the cutting be as oil that is pleasing and healing to our hearts. 
Let correction be as oil for our heads- oil that protects, preserves, anoints and heals.

We don’t want to be like those who heap up teachers (or peers) for ourselves that tickle our ears and comfort our flesh like we see in 2 Timothy 4.
These are those who will not put up with truth, but will surround themselves with voices that tell them what they want to hear and aid in their delusion and falsehood. 
We want to know the truth that will set us free into greater liberty as the Spirit sanctifies us and takes us from one degree of glory to the next.

May Psalm 139:23-24 be the posture and prayer of our hearts when correction comes:

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart!
    Try me and know my thoughts!

24 And see if there be any grievous way in me,
    and lead me in the way everlasting!

May we continually ask the Lord to search us, try us and test us.
May we have the truest desire to be found pure before Him in everything at all times.
May we be those who desire to be purged of whatever is grievous to Him.

May we eagerly desire that there be nothing grievous to the Holy Spirit found in the temple, the home, in which He dwells. 
We know that we are His temple and that He has been made to dwell within us.
May we be a suitable home and a pleasing resting place for Him.
And may we ever allow Him to truly lead us in the way of everlasting life.

Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord… but receive it as love… receive it as wisdom.
Let us be those who cry out for wisdom and understanding, even concerning our own hearts, minds, intentions, motivations, words and actions.
May we be those who ever live in the fear of the Lord, continually tremble at His word and eagerly look for ways to be conformed
into the image of the most beautiful, humble, glorious Son.