It's been a delight to be at the conference this weekend. It's been wonderful to receive your warm Christian hospitality. And our family has really enjoyed being here in your beautiful city of Greenville, South Carolina. This morning, we are going to be looking at the family likeness, and at least the latter portion of my sermon will be coming from Hebrews chapter 12. I want to read that for you this morning, so if you would turn to Hebrews chapter 12 verses 1 through 13. Hear the word of our Lord. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, Let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or faint hearted. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. 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. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. 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? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 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? 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. 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. Therefore, lift up 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. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this weekend in which we are pointed again and again to your name, Father, in the great privilege that is ours as your children to take it on our lips. We do so now through Jesus Christ, our Lord, our elder brother, your eternal son, the one to whom we are united by your Holy Spirit. We pray that your Holy Spirit would now soften our hearts to receive this word. And may the Holy Spirit preach a better word to our hearts than what I am about to say. We pray these things through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen. One of the more fascinating and disturbing stories of the last century is that of Frank Abagnale Junior. By the age of 19, he had successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, meanwhile lining his pockets fraudulently with millions of dollars. He was pursued all over the globe, including by the FBI. He was finally captured in 1969. in France and subsequently served several years in prison. This story may sound familiar to you because it eventually made its way to the big screen in 2002. It was made into a movie, Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale, Tom Hanks as the FBI agent. The movie was gripping. It was told with a lot of panache. Some said maybe a little too much panache, given that it glorified the rampant flouting of law and order. Well, that might be so. I was struck by the movie. I was gripped by one particular thread in the storyline. It tragically unfolded between Abagnale and his father, played brilliantly by Christopher Walken. Frank Abagnale Sr. was at turns fascinated and concerned about his son's reckless and lavish lifestyle. There's a culminating scene towards the end of the movie where their relationship receives a quick summation. Abagnale Sr. firmly reminds his son, I'm your father. I'm your father. His son quickly says back, then tell me to stop. Tell me to stop. I don't know if there's been a more poignant moment in film that held together both the purpose and the loss of fatherhood. Now, of course, this was about human fatherhood. But the purpose and loss of human fatherhood points us to the fatherhood of our God. At the core of God's fatherly love toward us is a sacrificial love that issues forth in protective and fruitful discipline. And this discipline has as its goal the formation within us of a family likeness. Now over this weekend, we've been looking at various aspects of what it means to be children of the Heavenly Father. We've looked in the first place at the love of God the Father, which is the source of our position and status as children, as sons and daughters in the Father's family. Now, of course, unlike the eternal Son of God, we're not natural children. We are adopted by God's grace into the Father's family through our union with Jesus Christ, the Spirit himself uniting us to Christ, the Spirit himself within us causing us to cry, Abba, Father. Coming into the Father's family carries with it, then, blessed privileges. So we looked at the rights of adoption. and along with that, one of the most significant rights, which is the access we have to the father in prayer. Well, this morning, we continue to look at the glorious implications of being adopted into the father's family. What we know of in human adoption is that one who is not a member of a particular family is legally brought into a new family with all the rights and all the privileges that go with it. This means gaining a new family name, new parents, maybe even new brothers and sisters. And whether it's an adoption into your own family or someone you know, one of the remarkable things that we recognize in adoption is that there are always, you know, immutable biological traits in a child that is going to be adopted, and they're going to differentiate someone. But while those are there, over time, certain family likenesses of that new family begin to shine through. Certain ways of talking, unmistakable habits, a common outlook. life. I have a niece and nephew who are adopted and sometimes frankly I need to remind myself of that reality because of the family likeness that over time shines through in them. This is not too unlike our heavenly adoption. Through our union with Christ we obtain a new name. We are no longer of our old father, the devil, but we have a new gracious heavenly father. We've gained a myriad of brothers and sisters spread out through time and place in the church. Brothers and sisters, in fact, much more real, much more lasting than the biological ones that we have in our own earthly families. Now, when forming this new family, the father has very specific designs. Those designs we could say are to produce in his children a growing family likeness. He intends in the midst of all of our unique personalities, the traits that he has given to us to replicate certain unmistakable characteristics that flow from a common pattern, the pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, why does the father produce this family likeness within us? Because he loves us. The father loves his children. To connect this back to our theme from Friday night, the father loves us in the son. He so loves us that his love conforms us to the image of that eternal blessed son. We're going to look now at this conforming love this morning. The production of the family likeness within us through three points, a family of love, a family of law, and a family of discipline. First, a family of love. The greatest commandment in Scripture found in Deuteronomy 6 repeated in Jesus earthly ministry is that we should love the Lord our God with our whole being. But as we learned Friday, this is a responsive love. A love that answers to the prior love of God, who John tells us is love. God is love. The Father loves the Son from all of eternity. The Son loves the Father in the bond of the Spirit. The triune God has forever existed in holy love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From this love, God loves us supremely in the giving of his only begotten son, his most blessed son, most beloved son. We love because he first loved us. We are called to love. Jesus instructs us, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. So a family of love, it begins in the Trinity and then it is manifest responsibly in God's people, loved by the father through Christ in the spirit. We then respond in love. But this love, it doesn't remain in the vertical dimension. The Apostle John, in particular, continually reminds us that if we say we love God, we also love our brothers and sisters. 1 John 4, 21, whoever loves God must also love his brother. Our vertical relationship means we necessarily now have new horizontal relationships. The word for brother, interestingly enough, in Greek is adelphos. Adelphos. You have in that word a, the a at the beginning, which means from, delphos, meaning brother. To call one another brothers conveys the idea that we come from the same womb. The same womb. God's people have truly, if we know him, been born again. But how often do we consider that that new birth for all of us is from, in some sense, the same womb? In one sense, in light of our new birth coming from the resurrection of Christ, that's the connection that the Apostle Peter makes in first Peter one, three, the new birth coming from the resurrection. If it comes from the resurrection in one sense, our common womb is the empty tomb of Jesus Christ. All of us, if we are full of love for God, have been born from the same womb. Therefore, we're family. We have been loved by the Father in Christ. The Spirit has caused us to love him in Christ, and we love one another. 1 John 5.1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of Him. It is unmistakable we are a family of love. If we're gonna display our family's lightness, it will be through love. But we need to be clear, this is not a love-lacking definition and so tailored according to our shifting personal preferences. The love of the family of God is a holy love given shape by our holy Savior, Jesus Christ himself. Indeed, Jesus gives us a measure of our love. It's his commandments. It's God's law. Part of living out the family likeness is living according to God's law. Indeed, we are a part of a family of law, which is our second point. How much havoc we create as Christians, both in our own lives, and this comes out in church cultures as well, when we neglect or we mishandle God's law. To handle it rightly, we must keep together the character of our God in the provision of his law. The commands of God do not come from a far off, distant, cold God, nor do they come from an overbearing, angry God. They come from the lips of our loving Heavenly Father. Neither are the commands of God optional extras, bugs, not features of our relationship with Him. If we look at scripture from the garden all the way through the New Testament, it does not separate God's love from his own person, from his gracious and loving character by which he has brought us into his family. In fact, it's through his commandments being follow and internalize that God's people will bear the marks of being members of the family of the father. If you love me, Jesus says you will keep my commandments. John 1415. He goes on in verse 21 to say that indeed keeping his commandments is a sign of our love. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he is who loves me, Jesus says, and he who loves me will be loved by my father and I will love him and manifest myself to him. This is a very striking truth to the contemporary ear. Law, love, they're not inherently in tension. We make them so because of our sin and our misunderstandings and our ignorance. But inherently, they complement one another. The law shows us indeed how to love. Now, how does this process take place? That is, how does God use our affections? The love of God has been born in our heart through the spirit. Romans 5 5. How does God use that affection within us and the law in order to produce this family likeness within us? Well, when we love God, the Holy Spirit uses that to create within us a deep hunger to to be like God. And the way we become like Him is by shaping our lives more and more according to His will. And this happens by the Spirit impressing God's commands. Christ commands on our hearts. We see an illustration of this dynamic in the giving of the Ten Commandments themselves. If you look at the order of the gracious Exodus and the subsequent giving of the law in Exodus 20. Remember the first words of that chapter and God spoke all these words saying I am the Lord your God who brought you out of land of Egypt out of the house of the of slavery. you shall have no other gods before me. And then the rest of the commandments follow. You see the sequence there, the grace of the exodus and then the giving of the law. Let's never forget that order. As one author put it, the law comes to us wrapped, wrapped in grace, a grace that then incites our loves. But let's look more specifically at this relationship between God's commands and becoming like him. God's commands are nothing less than an expression of his character. And it is the Holy Spirit that works that character within us as he enables us to keep those commands. But he does so through a process where you have in tandem the Spirit and the Son working together. The Spirit and Christ, they're related by indissoluble, eternal bonds. And the Holy Spirit cannot help bring all those he indwells to Christ. He unites us to him in salvation and in his efforts to produce this family likeness, he continues to bring us over and over to the son that we might be made anew in him. We are objectively united to him, but subjectively there's the process of our union with the son of being renewed in him. And because of their shared nature, there's a, if I can put it this way, irresistible divine magnetism between the person of Christ and the Holy Spirit, so that if we're caught by the Holy Spirit, we will be swept into that magnetic pole, which over and over again brings us, draws us to Christ. And as that Spirit, as the Spirit draws us, He is softening us so that we, like moist and malleable clay, are prepared to be impressed upon, prepared to be impressed upon by the seal which contains the perfect image of Jesus Christ Himself. The contours of that seal, the image which is being formed within us, the contours that which is shaped to this image are the particular commands of Christ, because these are an expression of his character. And as that character is worked within us, we become more holy. Why? Because we become more like God's holy son, our savior, Jesus Christ. Let's consider quickly three examples of how the laws and expression of God's character to make this connection between Christ, the character of Christ, and that being in the law in his commands. The first example is from Psalm 119, 172. Jesus is the perfectly righteous one, and we learn in this verse in Psalm 119 that all of God's commandments are righteous. Second, Jesus Christ is the truth, and we learn in Psalm 119, 142 that the law is true. In a third example, Jesus Christ is perfectly holy. And in Romans 7 verse 12, the law is called holy and the commandment is holy and just and good. As more and more of the commands of God are obeyed from a loving heart, the more the particular and distinct image of Christ will be seen in us, producing this family likeness of which we speak. John 1334 is another verse that tells the disciples to love one another. But in it, Jesus makes a critical connection that illustrates this point. He says that it is by this love that the world will know that we are his disciples. When we love one another, as we're commanded to do, we give testimony that we are his. In that statement, he makes clear for us the tie between his commands and his character, which is revealed in us in this likeness. As the command is obeyed by the disciples, it is what, whose image? It's the image of Christ that is seen in the disciples. The family likeness, it has a Christological face. Paul puts it this way in Romans 8, 29, we are predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son. Let me leave you with two encouragements as we finish up this, our second point. If keeping the commandments of God is fundamental to our being conformed to Christ, well, we better be well acquainted with them. We better be well acquainted with where, then, we find them. They are found, of course, in Scripture. The first step in being conformed to the image of God is immersing ourselves. In God's holy word, regular time in scripture means being regularly exposed to his commands, commands that don't take us away from Christ to take us finally to Christ. They take us to him for forgiveness. When we break them into him as our master and teacher, when we desire to obey, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And we could add thereby, by keeping them from a loving heart, you will become like me. So the first commandment, the first encouragement is we must know scripture in order to know God's commands. But the second encouragement is not just to consider, not to just reflect upon his commands. We don't just sit there waiting sort of for the Holy Spirit to pick us up out of our pews and shape us according to Christ. Seek God, we continually hear in the scripture. Abide in Christ, John 15. These are active commands. Draw near to God, he will draw near to you. in his appointed means will be the process in which the Holy Spirit, yes, plays that initiatory role within us and that continued role of propelling us, creating love, which drives obedience, which creates more love, the end goal being conformity to the likeness, which is Christ himself. So let us know God's commands. Let us do God's commands. While disobedience born of love is our great endeavor, we do, though, often fail. Though indwelled by the Holy Spirit, though united to Christ, though adopted into the Father's family, we regularly transgress the Father's commands. We're not yet perfect. We struggle against sin. But let us never think that that struggle takes place on our own, separated from God. We are now children in a loving household of a loving father who uses instruction and love, authority, and discipline in order to shape us. It's a discipline specifically that we now look at in our third point, a family of love, a family of law, a family of discipline. And as we consider what it is to be a family of discipline, we turn more attentively now to our text from Hebrews 12. It's in the context of struggle against sin that the writer of Hebrews introduces a profound teaching on the fatherhood of God involving discipline in the Christian life. Often when my own children protest against my discipline, and I know well I protested against my parents' discipline, you want to detach that discipline from love. Now, as a parent, I'm a sinner. Certainly not all my discipline has been motivated by love. But when I'm being led by the Spirit and disciplining out of love, I try to remind my children of this connection between love and discipline. Now, it's a hard sell in the moment. I admit that. But I try to remind them that the Bible consistently connects loving parents and faithful discipline. This is patterned after our heavenly father who loves his children. He desires for them to be more like his perfect son. Therefore, he disciplines us. It's a sign that we're not illegitimate children. Well, the context of Hebrews 12, in particular, verses 4 to 13, is Christian endurance. In our resistance to sin in the Christian life, we're invited to consider this great cloud of witnesses, which the writer writes about in the previous chapter, encouraging witnesses. And we're further drawn to the captain of our salvation, Jesus Christ, who endured the cross. He now enjoys life at the right hand of the Father. And God intends to fully bring us to that place where he is, and a vital means by which he is going to bring us to that place where Christ is, is his discipline. Fatherly discipline. We're reminded that God's discipline in the Christian life marks us out as legitimate. We're legitimate children. Though at prayers, caps is counterintuitive in an age that's, let's admit, very confused about the aims of love, which we might think are unconditional acceptance for who we say we are at any given moment. Rather, discipline is evidence that the father cares for us and desires to shape desires to shape us. Loving discipline by the best of early earthly parents has maturity. It has shaping as its aim and the aim of the father's discipline is to make us more and more like Jesus Christ that that family likeness might shine through in us. We need to be reminded that this is a rather elementary experience, an elementary Christian experience. We're always in danger of losing it to forgetting it. The writer to Hebrews asks, have you forgotten this exhortation that addresses you as sons? Do we sometimes delude ourselves into thinking that when we get on in the Christian life, maybe A decade, a few decades, we're going to get beyond these trials and these difficulties. The spirit would remind us that trials brought by God's discipline are things we never move beyond this side of glory. Discipline is a staple experience by all of the father's true children to say otherwise is to forget. It's to be ignorant of scripture. Now this reminder is meant not for discouragement. This is a word of encouragement. It is the confirmation of God's love and care that we frankly sometimes need. Say we didn't have this word. This is an impossibility, but say somehow Hebrews 12 slipped out of the biblical canon. We might be led to think that as various trials come, God is against us. Read, look at verse four. Discipline involves hardship. Look at verse 11. It can be unpleasant. It can be painful, as we all know. But even this can be, in the end, welcomed. It can be welcomed if we know truly that it is from the Father. It can be a validation that the Father's love is active in our lives. He's a purposeful Father, working, as Romans 8.28 reminds us, all things together for the good of those who love him. Well, what does discipline from a heavenly father to earthly children look like? Let's look at four ways briefly. And in looking at these four ways, I want to point you to a really good book. It's one of the things you do at a conference, right? Books. Point people to good books. There's a very good, short gem of a book by a guy who I've quoted a lot, Sinclair Ferguson. It's called Children of the Living God. Children of the living God and in his chapter on fatherly discipline, he walks through these various ways that the father disciplines us first. First, he disciplines us differently, differently. That is to say, there's a variety to his spiritual disciplining. Good parents know that different children need different training depending on their personalities, depending on their stage in life. And think, we do that, and we only know our children partially. How often parents look back with regret as they learn more about their children. Oh, given that, I would have done this differently back in the day, which they would have treated them in a way that was more effective. Well, think of the apostles themselves and what, say, the apostle Peter needed, sometimes a very firm hand, and what the apostle John needed. Well, God knows us perfectly, unlike our human parents. He knows us perfectly, and with his many children, he aims to produce an appropriate fruit in our lives, to produce that family likeness, and he will, in his all-knowing providence, do that in a very distinct way among us. Second, the Father disciplines us through Scripture. Through scripture, God's word has one of its ministries, 2 Timothy 3, 16, to rebuke. It rebukes and chastens us as we read and study it. So often maybe we look to scripture as, I need a fresh word today, I need a pick-me-up, and scripture does that for us. But sometimes we go and we read the word and it brings, if I can say this, a slap in the face, a kick in the pants. It challenges us. Think of Simon Peter, a man called to Christ, but sometimes he needed that severe discipline, and Christ would bring it through his word to him as he lived with him, as Peter followed him, his master, as a disciple and apostle. Christ would expose the truth to Peter's mind so that Peter would more fully follow him. Scripture read, Scripture preached, has this function, and that's the third way our Father disciplines us. Still through the word, but through preaching based on scripture. Paul, when he was equipping the young preacher Timothy in 2 Timothy 4-2 tells him to rebuke. Ultimately, any rebuke a minister gives should come not from the minister, but from scripture. But a faithful servant of the word is going to be disciplining us through the faithful application of God's word. As our minds are instructed, as our consciences are touched. This takes time. As you sit over a prolonged period of time under a preacher who is faithful to God's word, you will notice that as the word is unfolded, it brings life. It exposes those things which we need to repent. Sometimes maybe the preacher's not even addressing the specific sin that you're battling with, but the spirit is going to use that word to lay open your heart, to bring you to repentance. The spirit working with the word reveals private and secret things to us. And this often comes only in the atmosphere of a sustained and faithful ministry of the word in a local church. And if you're not a part of local church, I encourage you to be a part. Put yourself under that faithful preaching of God's word. Well, last, the father disciplines us by the hand, by his hand, through the circumstances of our life. Think of King David. God establishes a wonderful, enduring covenant with him in 2 Samuel 7, one of the great high points of the Old Testament. And in that covenant, God says to David, I will be a father to you, and I'll be a father to those who come after you who are also kings. And the king will be a son to him. God said of the king when he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men with the stripes of the sons of men. But my steadfast love will not depart from him. Proof that the steadfast love did not depart from the king is the coming of Jesus Christ, who fulfills the seat of David, who did not need that that discipline for his own sin. But the previous kings leading to him, of course, did, and God was faithful in bringing that. Well, this word was born out in David's own life as he sins greatly with Bathsheba and Uriah, and God uses a story told to him by the prophet Nathan and life circumstances to bring David to a place of profound and genuine repentance, which you can read about in Psalm 51, which you can appropriate into your own prayers of repentance. Through all of these, God is making David into the kind of child that he wants him to be. And this is what we need to remember. If royal David, God's king, a man after God's own heart, is not above loving discipline, then neither are you or me. The father He uses many different means for one high goal in our lives, and that goal is given for us in verse 10. He disciplines us for our good that we may share in his holiness. The Apostle Paul puts it this way in Ephesians 4, 13. We are being built up into mature manhood. What is mature manhood, according to Paul? The measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. God's family is one of love, one of law, and one of discipline. Deep down, even the wisdom of this world grasps that fathers love their children through instructing them and telling them when necessary, no. Frank Abagnale Jr. desperately wanted his father to be a father, to tell him to stop his runaway life. Fatherly limits, they prevent foolishness and even death. And as was said yesterday, the divine father is not an indulgent grandfather, incapable of telling his grandchildren no. Life in the eternal Father's family starts with this gracious gift of love, which comes from the very love shared among the persons of the Trinity from all of eternity. Our loving response to that love, though, is shaped and it's guided by God's law. Again, Jesus says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. Law, though, does not simply function negatively in the thou shalt nots. It ultimately has a positive orientation, an orientation to conform us to the beautiful image of God's son. And as we're being changed, the father's discipline. Protects us, yes, but even more has this blessed aim. It's blessed aim of the family likeness, a likeness which has that unmistakable visage. of Jesus Christ our Lord. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are a father of love. Indeed, from all of eternity with the sun and with the spirit, you have. Been a father of love, loving the sun, the sun, loving you and the bond of the Holy Spirit. We thank you that you love the world so much that you gave your only begotten son, born out of your love for your elect, who you have eternally loved in the covenant of redemption. We thank you that by your spirit, you have united us to your son, that we taste of your grace in him. And we thank you that your Spirit has not only united us to the Holy Son, the Spirit is conforming us to the image of the Son so that the family likeness might shine through more and more in us. But we pray for strength. We pray for daily reminders by the Spirit that you will use the law, you will use discipline in order to conform us to the image of the Son. May we never consider that discipline coming from an enduring anger, coming from one who is disinterested in us. No, Father, you love us. You love us in the Son. You have a keen interest in shaping us daily more and more to the image of Christ. So give us the strength, give us the direction to immerse ourselves in your word, the strength to do the words that we find in the word. And may this be motivated by that response of love in our hearts given by the Spirit for the Son to your glory. We pray all these things for Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.