The sermon text this morning is Hebrews chapter 12, verses 7 through 11. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons. For what son is there whom a father does not chasten? But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons. Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of Spirits and live? For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed best to them, but he for our prophet, that we may be partakers of his holiness. Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful. Nevertheless, afterward, it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. helping us to understand that you are a father, that you are a father who can care for his children in a way that an earthly father cannot, in a greater way, in a way for their greater good than any earthly father can. And yet the things that we learn from our earthly fathers, the things that we see, the methods that you've given to them to chase and incorrect, we see that they are rooted in and are shadows of the way that you correct your children. We pray to God that we would understand how crucial it is that we learn to receive correction, how crucial it is that we see chastening as being from a hand of one who desires our profit, who desires good for us, not just a household that runs smoothly. but children who can partake of the holiness of God. We pray to our God that we would see this, that we would not mistake the shadows for the substance, that we would not misunderstand the nature of your goodness. We thank you for your words. We thank you, dear Lord, for bringing us to this place in the book of Hebrews. We thank you that we have this day to hear your words. to listen to them, dear Lord, and to turn from our sins that we may cooperate with your chastisement. Amen. So in the passage last week, we heard how we're not to despise the chastening of the Lord, nor be discouraged when we're rebuked by Him. Now in this week's passage, God is going to explain why. Why that's important. He's going to do that by comparing how a human raises their child versus and compares it to how God raises His children. In human child raising, we're trying to instill in our children the things that we think are best for them. Hopefully. Hopefully they're the good traits that we see in our own lives that we want them to imitate. And they want to conform to us in the areas where we walk in righteousness. But we're still sinners. And so we hope that they don't imitate us in the areas of our sin. At the same time, as we raise them, we see they have different capabilities and different talents than we have. So we try to build on those capabilities and talents. And that's the same as how God raises His children. It's to mature us to be like Him. He is God and we are but flesh. And so we're not going to walk and be like Him, like in His power and His might and His abilities and omniscience. we can be like him in his holiness and his righteousness and when were resurrected we will partake of his holiness completely right now he's working to make us like him in holiness human fathers train their children to be as we think they should be as we would like them to be which would never be exactly like us because of our sin. For God, He can call us to be like Him. He can call us to be holy like He is holy. He can call us to be perfect as He is perfect. Even fathers have traits that they hope their children will not have, but that's not true with God. We are to be full partakers of His holiness. And He also trains us. He trains us because He hasn't left us here to be idle. He's left us here to do the good works that He created us to do, or His workmanship created for good works. And so He trains us. He uses trials. He uses difficulties so that we're prepared to do the work He would have us to do. We look at our children, we say, oh, I think he has this ability, or I think I can develop this in him. God looks at us with perfect understanding, with perfect knowledge, and says, this is what I will train them so that they do the work that I have for them to do. Human fathers do it the best they can. God does it perfectly. Because He knows. He knows our strengths. He knows our weaknesses. He knows what we need to learn. He has full knowledge. And so when we think and look at how a father trains his son, we have to understand that he's doing it with so much ignorance, with so much lack of knowledge, lack of understanding. And God, when He trains His children, He doesn't have any of that. And so His training is perfect. And so we can look at it, and if we're supposed to look at our father's training and go, we don't despise our father, how much more when we look at God's training, which is perfect, are we supposed to respond and say, God knows what he's doing. I am not wiser than God. I am not smarter than God. God knows exactly what he's doing. And so we should take that training and not despise it, but instead we should rejoice in it because he has a purpose for it. to make us like him, it's to make us partakers of his holiness. Verses 7 and 8. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons. For what son is there whom a father does not chasten? But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons. You know, if you endure chastening, that word endure is the same word that was used in verses 2 and 3. looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was 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 endured such hostility from sinners against himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls." God is saying, don't become weary, don't become discouraged. Because look at what God did to Christ and He endured. And He didn't deserve it. He didn't do sin that He was being trained out of. We do sin that we're being trained out of. So when we look at Christ enduring on the cross, it's supposed to say, how much more should we endure? How much more should we fight to endure? He endured hostility against Himself because He walked in righteousness. We endure the chasing of the Lord because we're unrighteous. He did it to serve God. God's doing it to serve us. Not that we're serving us like we're God, but He's doing us to make us in a better place. He's doing us to correct us, to change us, to improve us. And so when we receive chastening, we should have the opposite. We shouldn't just endure it, we should rejoice in it because God is actually using it to make us more like Him, which is where peace and joy is. Sin is what causes sorrow and suffering. We should rejoice when we have suffering, because God is using that suffering to bring us closer to Him, so we can have the peaceable fruits of righteousness. So when we think about our receiving discipline from a loving Father, it's not in the same category. We fall short of the glory of God, and Christ does not. But yet He endured, so how much more should we endure? How much greater shall our hope be Because we all need to be cleansed. We all have propensity to sin. We all have an old man that needs to be put to death. He was God and we're being conformed to the image of the only begotten of the Father. We're being conformed to Christ through those trials, through that chastening. So how much more should we not despise it? How much more should we recognize our need to be chastened? That word for chasing comes from pideia, which means to raise up a child. It's directly related to a young child being raised up. And so we're supposed to look at it and not think, oh, look how mature I am in the faith. Instead, we're supposed to look at it and say, I'm coming to God like a child. And as a child, I should expect Him to train me and the people in this room that are training children, you know how many times you have to use the rod on a small child. It takes a lot of training. And that's how we're supposed to look at our Christian walk and say, if this is what a human father has to do to a human child, understand this is what God has to do to us. It's not like he chases us once and boom, we're all fixed. That's not how human children are. And God does the same thing. God uses that as a picture. He created that picture in the world so that we can understand what we're like, how hard-headed we are, how many times it takes before it gets through our thick skulls, so that we can actually understand, no, this is the good thing to do. This is the right way to walk. Christ was God, but we're like a small child that needs to look towards God and assumes that He knows far more than we do and not look at the trials or look at the suffering or look at the sorrows that come into our life and look at them and go, this is unfair. And so we're supposed to look at them and go, God knows more than I do. That's what faith is to produce in us. he has a purpose for it, he has a use for it, he's not just randomly just letting things happen in the world, he's directing all things. By his word, the worlds are framed. So he knows exactly what he's doing. So, we shouldn't just endure the chastening. Instead, we should look at the chastening and say, we are immature. We need chastening. We need to be changed. We need to have a greater partaking of His holiness. So, if you endure chastening, God deals with you, as with sons. When we're saved, God adopts us. We become His children. We become part of His family. We become joint heirs. We receive real privileges. But part of receiving those real privileges that you receive through adoption is, one of those privileges is God starts to treat you like His child. And as His child, He is not going to let you bring dishonor on His home. He is going to train you. He is going to change you. He is going to make you a partaker in His holiness. When human fathers do it, they do it as seems best to them. They do it in the ways that they think right, but that's not how God trains his children. He's omnipotent. He's omniscient. He's omnipresent. He does it with full knowledge, with full understanding of exactly what's going to happen with the chasing. So where human fathers do it and fail, God doesn't fail. He knows what he's doing. If you know all the outcomes, if you know every possible outcome, if you know all things, then what you do never fails. So human fathers chasing their children and sometimes they lose their children. God, when He chases His children, He will never lose them because He knows what He's doing. Human fathers are looking in darkness to try to train their children. God's looking with perfect light and perfect understanding. He deals with us as a perfect father. who knows how to get the results that he wants, knows how to train our wills, knows how to do it so that we understand what's good for us. Human fathers try to do that. We do it, and we have some success, but we also have some failures. God doesn't fail. He's God. He's perfect. He does deal with us as with sons. So we need to remember, since it's so widespread in our culture to turn children over to others to be trained, When we think of raising a son, we don't think of the responsibility of a parent to raise their son. We are affected by the culture around us. We live in a culture where there are so many sons that are not trained by their parents. But we need to understand when you read this verse that God is saying, this is basic. This is how societies work. And it's a sign of a complete decaying of our society that parents don't think that they have responsibility to train their children. Because when you think of it, when you have a child, you're supposed to be training them to replace you, to be the adult in the next generation. Galatians 4.1 says, Now I say that the heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is master of all. The child is treated and is disciplined, but because he's the heir, he's raised to replace the father. That's how fathers are supposed to look at their children. They're supposed to train up their son to be an heir so that they can carry on the family work. That they can keep the family, the goals and the desires and the work that the family has into the next generation. And that's what God is doing. He's not just training us so that our sin is constrained. So that the world's a better place, so we have a better life. That's how you train a slave. The goal of a slave is not to make them adult. The goal of the slave is to make them more productive. That's not how God trains His children. He trains His children as heirs. The bride of Christ, the joint heirs of Christ, they're trained to be responsible. He's training His children to be adults. He's training His children to walk in holiness by their choice, so that when they receive their inheritance, they will choose to walk in holiness. It goes on and says, for what son is there? Of course, it's axiomatic. It means that it's just intrinsic in the relationship that everyone who has a child, even the worst father who doesn't abandon his child, he will train his child to some extent. He might just train his child to not annoy him, but even that is constraining his sin. Every father, regardless of how sinful he is, he trains his child unless he abandons him. In this day and age, there's many parents who think that they should not train their child, that their child should be allowed to do whatever they want, however destructive they are. But even those who hold that in theory, they can't hold it in practice. Because children intentionally do things to annoy the parent, and the parent is going to train them to stop doing those things. At some point, the parent will constrain their behavior. And it may not be out of care for the child, but it will be out of care for themselves. a parent that truly cares for their child, they are going to chase them, because for what whom a father, for what son is there whom a father does not chase him? Anyone who's looking and saying, this is my representative, this one as they go out in the world, they're representing me, this is the one that's going to carry on my legacy, they will chase them, they will train them. This is what God does for His children. We are the body of Christ. We are the picture of Him to the world. We're the light of the world. We're how people see God. The true believers, those who truly have faith, this is how the world sees who God is. So God is going to train us because we're His representatives, we're His ambassadors. And this is what a father does because his son is going to be his ambassador to the next generation. So even a father with the least sense of responsibility will discipline their children. They'll train them in the way they should go. That's the responsibility they get when they become a parent. But if they, even if they acknowledge the child, but they're not really training them, then they really are treating them as if they're not their child. They're treating them like they're illegitimate. For if you're without chastening, it's so basic. If your parent doesn't do anything to train you, then they're rejecting who you are. They're rejecting you as their child. Because if you're without chastening, of which all have become partakers, all children that have truly been acknowledged that their parent's child, they will receive discipline. And in God's case, every single one He adopts. He does train. He does discipline. He does make them a disciple. Every single one. He never treats any of his adopted children as illegitimate. They're all raised to be a true part of his household. They're all raised to be a true representative of him. There might be some that pretend to be adopted by God, and He has no obligation to them. The fact that they lie and that they say they're part of the household of God doesn't make them part of the household of God. By their will, they decide that they're part of the household. That doesn't make them adopted. But those who He adopts, He will be. He promises He will be a faithful father to them. He will discipline them. He will train them. He will not leave them as a child in the faith. And so if you don't, you're illegitimate. If your earthly father ignores you, if he's treating you as illegitimate, regardless of the words he used, regardless of how many times he expresses his love towards you, it's not real. Proverbs 13, 24 says, he who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly. Those who actually treat their child as their child, they discipline them. If they don't, they're treating them like they're illegitimate. And this is true with God. God disciplines every single child He receives. And if He doesn't discipline you, it's because you're illegitimate, you're not really a son. You can call yourself a Christian, but if He's not chastening you, chastening is not a sign of unbelief, it's a sign of belief. God doesn't treat those who aren't His as His children that He has a duty to train. Yes, He constrains their sin. Yes, He causes them to not run to the fullness of their iniquity as mercy to the world around them, but He doesn't train them up to be righteous. He doesn't train them to be partakers of His holiness. He doesn't use the rod on them to correct them and to change them. He uses the rod as punishment. He uses trials as punishment to stop them. There's a big difference. A father uses a rod to cause the person to change. The state uses a rod, right? The rod is for a fool's back. The state is to use the rod to cause people to stop. That's the fundamental difference between what a father does and what a judge does. A judge just wants the behavior to stop. A father wants to correct it so that you do the right thing. It's a fundamental difference. If God is stopping your sin, that doesn't just mean that somehow He's your father. It's where He corrects you so that you turn from your sin. That's the sign of Him being your father. where He doesn't just stop the behavior, but He trains you so you don't want to do the behavior anymore. You're illegitimate and not sons. Many people see trials as a testimony of God's wrath towards them. The response to trials determines if it's wrath or if it's discipline. Those who are being disciplined, they are changed by it. They see the sin, they see the wickedness of their ways, and they change their ways. That's what it means that God is treating you like a child. He actually trains you, as opposed to just suppressing your evil. It produces fruit. If God is your Father, it produces fruit in the one being disciplined. It doesn't mean the season can't go on for long. It talks about enduring chastening. It doesn't just say, oh, you get chastened once and it's over. We're hard-headed. It can take a lot of beatings before it gets through your head that you need to stop and what the real problem is. A lot of times we'll go, yeah, I'll stop doing that without actually repenting of the sin. So then we should expect more chastening until you actually repent of the sin because God is not trying to just conform our outward behaviors to some standard. He's getting us to desire that standard from the heart. That's how you partake of His holiness. partake of His holiness is not to be suppressed like an enemy, but it is to see His view like a son. And so God, if He is your Father, He will discipline successfully. And like a human parent that sometimes they fail, God doesn't fail. Verses 9 and 10. Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of Spirits and live? For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed best to them, but he for our prophet, that we may be partakers of his holiness." So furthermore, to go beyond our expectation, our expectation is that God will send trials our way to stop us from sinning. when we're disobeying, maybe to toughen us and to strengthen us so that we'll be able to do greater things for His kingdom. But our response shouldn't be not just to accept it or not even just to not despise it, but our response should be to see it as coming from God. So our response should be to grow in faith. Our response should be to grow in trust towards God. If we had human fathers, again God is tying the picture of why He put human fathers on the earth so we could understand the relationship to our heavenly Father. God gave human fathers and we understand that human fathers, they corrected us. son whose father has corrected him somewhat, or someone else who plays that role, whoever it is, the one who is training them, who's turning them from the error of their ways, their response is to pay them respect. They're going to have respect towards that father who trained them. They're going to have respect towards that mother who trained them. They won't always show that respect the way that they should. But over time, they will have respect. And as they mature, they'll grow in that respect. in the middle of discipline, often they don't show that respect, but later, sometimes years later, they look back and they respect the person who actually loved them enough to discipline them and to train them. Because they see that they weren't hated by that parent, that they were actually loved by that parent because they didn't despise, that they used the rod. In a society like ours, there's so much immediacy that can be hard to recognize when you don't show respect right away, that 20 years later you're going to look back and say, boy, that person was helpful, that did that discipline to me, that person who confronted me in my sin, that parent who used the rod on me to turn me from my evil ways. That's what it means to pay respect. It doesn't mean that we pay respect immediately, but over time we look and we say, this was beneficial. This truly helped me. So we owe respect to the people who are willing to do it, starting with our parents, but those who are willing to turn us from our sin. Spiritual fathers, spiritual mothers that will actually confront us in our sin. We owe them real respect. And then God says, but how much more readily, how much quicker should we be? If we respect a parent who forced us to obey, so we learn not to do things that they're doing with their limited knowledge, their limited understanding, their limited ability to do things, how much quicker, how much more joyfully should we be willing to be in subjection to God? How much more should we choose to obey God? How much more should we look at him and say, it is a blessing to have him as a father. If we see how our physical father has turned us from sin, or our physical mother has turned us from sin, and we show them respect, how much more should we say, look at what God is doing in our life, and cause that to produce in us worship. If we learn to listen to them, we learn to follow the instruction of a physical father. over time. How much more should we learn this about our Heavenly Father? How much more should we want to hear from God? How much more should we desire instruction from His Word? How much more readily should we be in subjection to the Father of Spirits? It's not just a human father that's walking in the flesh. He's the spiritual father, who isn't just training us in physical things, but He's training us in spiritual things, and the physical things flow from the spiritual things. So we should want to be in subjection to Him. We should want to hear what He has to say. We should want to see the commandments in His Word. This is what it means to show Him respect. If you don't care what He says in His Word, you're not showing Him respect. You're not in subjection to Him regardless of what you say. If you don't actually want to read His Word and see the commandments in it, then you're not in subjection to Him. So the writer of Hebrews is saying, understand, human fathers, you look back and you say, yes, I should have listened better to my father. Right now, if you have God as your spiritual father and you're corrected, the response should be, I need to study the scriptures more to understand what God is telling me to do. If you go, I wish I had more knowledge from my physical father, how much more should we be going? I need more knowledge from my heavenly father. We're supposed to desire the Word like a baby desires its mother's milk so we can grow thereby. That isn't just for when you're first born. It's when you see the goodness of God, when you're subjected to His discipline and His chasing. The response to that should be, God, show me things from Your Word so I can turn from my sin before I'm beaten for my fault. You see, you don't do it randomly. God is a just God. He is a good God. He does it for our good. But how much better is it to be chastened by His Word than by His rod? How much better is it to be chastened through the examination of ourselves at the Lord's Supper than it is by trials? So what we should do is that we should use those trials to give us more zeal to turn from sin before we have to be beaten for our faults. God treats us as a Father who turns us from our sin. so that we don't die the second death. He's doing it for our good. How much more should we desire to hear from him? How much more should we desire to know his way that's the narrow way that leads to life? If human fathers tried to deliver us from running out in the street, human fathers teach their children not to run out in the street so they don't physically die. God, the Heavenly Father, the Father of Spirits, teaches us how not to die spiritually. How much more should we want to be subject to Him? For indeed, every human father, they train and they chase and they had other pressures, they had other limit, they had limited resources. They can only do it for a few days. They had limited time. It can seem like a long time when you have small children. But if we compare it to the decades that God uses to train His children, in most cases, obviously some die, some are saved right before they die. A lot are trained for decades. Human fathers train their children just for a short period. Again, it may seem like a long period. You look at those, when the baby's born and you go, 18 years, I have to train them. And then you go back and you see how little time that is because there's so much they need to do. So, our ability to teach character, that starts to shift in the early teens. So, it's not even until it's 18. Usually, it's a lot harder after about 13 or 14 that you can really make a shift. So, you don't have that much time. So, you need to be about chastening and about training and disciplining early. Human fathers, they chasten, they train, but they do it without knowledge. The parents are experimenting. They don't understand what all the outcomes of the things that they'll do. It's complicated to raise children. Many now in our society that the average birth is like 1.6 per woman, most don't have the experience of being with older siblings or younger siblings and see how it's done and have those experiences. So the human fathers, they do the best they can. They do what seems best to them. They do what seems right. Usually, for most, it is to improve the future of the child. But sometimes it's just to get the household under control. They do what seems best, but they don't even know what's best. And yes, it doesn't mean that God says children have a duty to obey and respect their earthly fathers. But again, consider that compared to God. because God knows what's best. He doesn't just think what's best. He knows what the perfect discipline is. He's not like a parent who just goes, I think this is the right thing to do. I think this will produce the outcome that I want. I think this will be best for the child long term. Then consider God. He knows all that. He knows all that with perfect clarity, without any doubt. He knows what the result of every chastisement will be. So while we try to train our children and try to be a blessing to them and try to help them and try to teach them to control their sin, God does it for our profit, not potential profit. He does it for our profit. It will produce good fruit. It will produce advantages for us. God is God. He is not us. When we train our children, we try. When God trains His children, He succeeds. He is God. He never fails. Human fathers get disturbed. They get frustrated with their child. That never happens to God. He never disciplines out of anger. He never disciplines out of lack of control. He has perfect self-control. He has perfect order, perfect knowledge, perfect wisdom. He knows exactly how we're going to respond before we do it. So He directs us to go where He wants us to go. God the Father never does it because of His own weakness. He never does it because of His agenda. His agenda is to do what's best for His children, because that's what brings glory and honor to His name, is to have holy and righteous children. So what He does, we can always know that He's doing it for our profit. And that word prophet means like to carry away. He does it for what we'll carry away from it. That's why he sends every trial. That's why he sends every difficulty. That's why he sends sorrows. That's why he sends all these things that happen in our lives. So we carry away good things for our advantage, to put us in a better place than we were. He doesn't have the pressure of another agenda. He doesn't have the pressure of, oh, I don't have time to deal with this right now, or I have to feed my family, or I have the pressures that all human fathers experience. He's infinite. He doesn't have any of those problems. So what he does is always perfect, and it's always for a profit. So we can perfectly trust what he's doing. He's always doing it to perfect us, to sanctify us, to cleanse us. He does it so that we can be partakers. Specifically, what we get out of it is that we're made more like Him. Instead of being conformed to this world, we're becoming conformed to God. We become partakers of His holiness. He conforms us so that we become more like Him. He promises in Romans 8 that all who He began a good work in, He will conform us to be like Jesus Christ. Every chastisement is part of that process. Every trial that He puts us through is part of that process. And that won't ever happen until we're resurrected and all our corruption is put away. But God is still moving us in that direction. And every trial that we see, by faith we have to believe that He is moving us to make us more like His Son. That's what He promises in His chastisement. Now God does have a separateness, a holiness, which is what that means, that's unique to Him. He's separate and distinct from the world. We're still a flesh. He's a spirit. We can have a holiness, a righteousness, not being conformed to this world, but instead being like Christ. That's the holiness we can have. not in power, not in might, not in wisdom, but in walking in righteousness. That's the holiness that God trains us in. That's the holiness that God makes us partake in through His chastisement. When God sends us suffering, when He sends us difficulties, when He uses all the different things that He uses in the world to chastise us, it's to separate us from the world and make us more distinct from the world so we don't follow in the ways of the world. He makes it so that our minds are renewed, so we see the world differently. That's what His chasing is about. Verse 11, Now no chasing seems to be joyful for the present, but painful. Nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Now no chasing, we know we're not supposed to despise the chasing. We know from James 1 we're supposed to count it all joy. We're supposed to know that God is doing it for good. God still knows our frame. He knows that we're just dust. Just like a parent understands when they use the rod on their child that they're doing it for the good of the child, but the child is still in pain. The child is still crying. The child is still trying to reject the chastening. Doesn't mean they like it, even if they understand it's for their good. Even there's times where little children will come up and say, I need a spanking. They know it's for their good, but they still don't find it enjoyable. And we have to understand that by faith we can understand that it's good, but it doesn't mean we find it enjoyable. No chasing seems joyful. We're not supposed to delight in the suffering, but we're supposed to look through the suffering. Again, it goes back to why Jesus Christ endured. Why He endured. He ran the race with endurance. He went to the cross because of the joy that was set before Him. He despised the shame. It wasn't that he went, oh, this is wonderful, that the process was wonderful, and God is using that as a picture of what our chasing is like. We're supposed to look through the trial, and by looking through the trial and trusting and by faith go, this trial will have a good outcome because God is God. So I hate the trial. I find the trial to be painful, but I can look at it and look at the joy that's set before me because by faith I can trust God is doing it for good. at the end of it will be good. At the time it can feel like there's no way this can be good, but by faith you go, but it will be. Because God knows what he's doing and I don't. He doesn't have to tell me what he has to do and what he will do as a father has trained me. And the training will be good. The training is to our advantage. It's to our profit. So it may not be joyful for the present. The trial is to create pain. Using the rod on the child, if it doesn't create any pain, it's not going to create any changes. But it means later they can look back and they can see. They can see that it was helpful. They can see that maturity is what was produced. But it takes maturity to do that. And the chasing has to happen to produce some maturity. So you can't see it until you're matured. So, of course, it's not going to be joyful for the present, but painful. Because it's pain that causes you to move. It's pain that causes you to move to a better place. And that's what God wants us to be. He's not that worried about how much pain we suffer. He worries about where we end up. Do we end up being a holy people or do we end up being coated with the filth of the world? So, nevertheless, even though it's painful, the pain is not without purpose. Nevertheless, afterwards it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness. That word translated afterward could be translated eventually. It's not a promise that it's going to like... The chasing happens and immediately afterwards you get the benefit of the chasing. That's not what the word means. can be translated eventually. Eventually you'll get it. Because sometimes it takes, you know, with a small child, it can take a lot of spankings before they finally get it. And just like that's true for Christians too. Sometimes it takes a lot of spankings before they finally get it. When you chasten a small child, you expect an immediate change in behavior. But as they get older, the discipline and training take longer, because more difficult things are being trained. And that's true for God as well. That when they're small and they reach for something hot and you slap their hand, they pull their hand back. But as they get older, it gets harder and harder to get them to understand, because the situations are more difficult. So, some chasing happens and there's an immediate turning. Other chasing, we need to recognize that we have to endure the chasing. by trusting and having faith that God has a purpose for it. God has a profit for us out of it. And it will yield. That yield literally means to give off. The chasing gives off. It produces the peaceful fruit of righteousness. The chasing that is caused by not having righteousness results in walking in righteousness. Righteousness is what allows us to walk through the world and not second-guessing everything that we do, to wonder when we're going to be caught, to have no peace, because you know that there will be consequences for your sin. Instead, he chastens us, so we go, this is the wrong thing to do, so we make better decisions. The person who's always worried about being caught because of their sin, they'll never have peace. It's when you desire holiness from the heart, when your mind is seeking to have holiness. That's where you get peace, because then you don't have to worry about it. The person who's speeding down the highway, they always have to look to see if there's a police officer there that's going to stop them. The person that obeys the law and obeys the commandments, they don't need to worry about it, because who cares? The police aren't going to stop them, even if there's a car there. This is the difference. This is the difference between having the peaceable fruit of righteousness. When you know you're sinning against God, you don't have peace, because when is the other shoe going to drop? When is God going to do something about this? When is God going to prevent me from going on this path? But when you've been trained by it, so that you desire the holiness, you desire to walk in righteousness, you don't need to worry about it anymore. You have peace. It produces peace. Righteousness and peace go together. Righteousness is what produces peace. So, it produces the peaceable fruit of righteousness by those who have been trained by it. But you don't get the peaceable fruit of righteousness until you've been trained by it, until you've learned your lesson. The word trained is where we get the word gym. And until you work out constantly, if you just go to the gym once, you don't actually get in better shape. The way you get in better shape is you have to keep going. And that's the word that God is using by how we're trained by Him. It's not like you go once, He chases you once, and you go, okay, I'll never do that again. That's not how it works, unfortunately. Instead, we just keep getting beat. We keep doing it. It's like the gym that you have to go to. You have to keep going to it if you want to get in shape. And God is saying, I'm going to make my children get in shape. I will keep chasing them until they get in shape. And so the picture is this routine, this practice, this thing that God is going to do, just like you do with your little children. When you're young, it just seems like you're spanking them all the time. because you haven't gotten them trained yet. And God's using that same picture with us to say, He'll beat you until you actually learn that, I desire righteousness. And then you'll find some other area in your life that He's beating you for that you don't desire righteousness the way you should. And He will keep doing that. He will keep using the rod. He will keep chasing us. And He does it more than once usually. It's not like you just get repentance and that repentance never fades again. Instead, it's like going to the gym where he has to keep taking you back and training you over and over again. I'm going to give you some applications. The first is we need to recognize how immature we are compared to what God is training us to. When we think of the promise from Romans 8 that He'll conform us to the image of His only begotten Son, we should remember how far we are from the righteousness of Christ. Even if we faithfully sought and worked to follow God for 50 years, we're still like a little child compared to Christ in holiness. And so we should recognize that throughout our Christian walk, regardless of how long you live, there will always be chastisement. Because we never get that mature. because we know what maturity looks like. What maturity looks like is Christ. And we don't receive that level of maturity until after the resurrection when all our corruption has been put aside. And we see Christ and we now know as we are known. That's when we're truly mature. Before that, we should always think of ourselves not like a teenager, but we should be thinking of ourselves like a toddler. Or maybe we get old enough to be a preschooler. But that's where you get your Christian walk. Because God trains us, but we're so affected by the world, we're so affected by our sin, there's so much of the old man that needs to be put to death. We always need to recognize that we have to approach God as a little child. Because He is all-wise, He is all-knowing, He is perfectly righteous and holy. And we approach Him going, God, You know. You know. You know better than I do. We need to have childlike faith, to understand how little we understand so that we can take the chastening, not as someone who's going, no, I know everything, but we can take it as someone who recognizes they're far from adulthood and they need to be trained like a little child. Another application, after 100 years of the state teaching people, they're still not the ones that are primarily responsible for training children. The public school system is working hard. It's expanding it as they do all these laws that are passed like in California where they don't even tell the parent of the child if they change the gender of the child and teach the child to lie about who they are. They don't even tell the parent anymore. This is still the state working to say parents don't have responsibility, but that is not how God works. created the world. And as much as they kick against it, as much as they do it out of hatred of God, which is what our public school system is largely based on, hatred of God, regardless of how much they do it, it doesn't change the reality. The reality is that parents are the primary instructors of children. But parents actually want to believe the opposite, and we need to recognize that we're influenced by that. We recognize it's not true, but don't be deceived. Bad company corrupts good morals. When you walk in the culture we walk in, don't think it doesn't affect you. Parents start to believe the opposite of what the Bible is stating as just an axiomatic truth, that parents train their children. This is your job. This is what you have to do, regardless of what the society says. You have the responsibility for training your children. There's been a systematic attempt in our society to replace the God-ordained means with a horrible scheme that is destroying the lives of so many people, so many children, destroying the next generation. What the Bible says that all children partake of discipline or they're not treated as sons, they're treated as illegitimate. We should recognize we live in a society where many parents treat their children as illegitimate because they say, what do I have to do with training them? If they do, they're treating them like they're like they're illegitimate, like they're not their children, regardless of what they say. Another application, we should respect whoever does the work to turn us from our sin. Obviously, this should include our own father and mother, but it should also apply to others. When we rebuke one another with a righteous rebuke, if somebody turns us from the error of our ways, this should produce real respect towards them. this should be our response. A righteous man rejoices in a rebuke. And because of that, You know, the passage is saying, look, people respect their father because they turn them from their sin. We're supposed to respect anybody that turns us from our sin. We shouldn't want yes-men around us. We shouldn't want people that just agree with us. We should want people around us that will tell us you're wrong. That's the greatest blessing that you can have, and those are the people that are deserving of respect, not the people who will go along. The people who are deserving of respect are the ones that will rebuke. True caring is wanting to turn them from the errors of their ways. James 5, 19 and 20. Brethren, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his ways will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins. It's always easier to walk by. And so we should always pay respect to somebody who turns us from sin because it's always easier to walk by and not care enough. But those who are worthy of respect are those who care. Be somebody who's worthy of respect. Care enough to turn people from the errors of their ways. Another application, being in subjection to God means that you want to receive instruction from Him. It means when you read the Scriptures, you're not reading it thinking, I hope I don't see anything. That means I have to change. Instead, we should read the scripture saying, I know that I'm a sinner. I know I have sinned. I know I have an old man among me. I know there's ways that I don't, in my members, I know that there's ways I'm not walking in holiness, that I'm not partaking of holiness the way that I should be. So we should read scripture saying, show me God where I'm falling short. Show me where I need to repent. Show me where I'm not in subjection to your commands. Show me commands I don't even recognize. Being in subjection to God means that we're not passive. We shouldn't just go, I'll do it if God tells me. I'll do it if God forces me. I'll do it if God convicts my heart. Instead, we should seek out the Scriptures and say, God, show me from your Word what I should be doing. Too often people only want to do things if they feel like God is smacking them upside the head. That's a horrible way to treat your father, your earthly father. That you'll only do it if he punishes you? Really? That's how you're going to treat your earthly father? And why do you think that's the only way to treat your heavenly father? Oh, God has to really convict me. He has to make it so that I'm sure this is right. Instead of you reading his word going, God, show me what I should do. You're not in subjection if you're passive. If you're passive, what you are is you're being forced by God. That is not what our relationship with God is supposed to be. Instead, we're supposed to be proactive, looking for things in His Word that tell us the things that we're doing that we shouldn't be doing, that tell us the things that we should be doing that we're not doing. We should eagerly anticipate His instruction. and we should come with an expectation. We should come with an expectation when we hear a sermon that God's going to show us something we should be doing. God's going to cleanse us. He's going to remove a spot. He's going to remove a wrinkle. When we hear it preached, when we read it, when we discuss it, we should have an expectation that God has these discussions, these times of the ministry of the Word to cleanse us. This is the point. So we're partakers of His holiness. And we should want that to happen without pain, without suffering. Don't you want that for your children? That you tell them what to do when it's a good thing for them to do, and they do it, and they choose to do it, and they want to do it? You want that for your children. Don't you think God wants that for His children? He will use the rod, but you don't want to use the rod on your children. Don't make God use the rod on you. Listen to His instruction. Want to hear from Him? Want to actually hear what His commandments are? Another application, be diligent with your use of time. Especially parents with your children. When your children are small, you'll think they'll never grow up. And then they get older and you go, there's so much I should have done that I wasted time and didn't do. The time is a lot shorter than you think. We just chase them for a few days, it seems right for us. God the Father is training character, and that's what we're supposed to be training. And it takes a long time to teach somebody to have character. It takes a long time to teach somebody this is the way they should go. This is why it's good to go there. There's real advantages of it. And just like it says in Hebrews 5, where it says it's only through use that you can determine good and evil, this is true in human training too. You train them, you force them to do something, and it takes a long time before they go, oh, wait a second, I see why my father was telling me to do this. Most people don't see it until they're married and have children, and they see the children behave like they did, and they go, well, that was really stupid. I should have listened to my father. Instead, recognize you don't have that much time to train your children. Be diligent. Be careful. Be a good steward of those very limited time that you have with your children. There is so much that you have to teach them, so much that you have responsibility to teach them. Make sure you're a good steward of that few days that you have to train them. Another application is, remember, God's discipline is to conform us to Him rather than the world. His discipline is so we're partakers of His holiness, and to be partakers of His holiness is to be like Him rather than like the world. And so it's more than just constraining our sin. It's causing us to think differently about the sin. That's what his chastisement does. Romans 12, 2, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. God's discipline is not just to constrain us, that's what punishment is for. Punishment is to constrain. Discipline is to teach so people choose not to do it. Not that they choose not to do it just out of fear, and obviously with a little child you have to teach them not to do it out of fear. But making a disciple is more than that. Making a disciple is so that they understand why. So in the heart they want to do it. They see the goodness of it. And that's what God does. He doesn't just get us to not sin. He gets us to see the evil of sin so we're partakers of His holiness. If all we're doing is having our sin constrained, we're not partaking in His holiness. All we're doing is not sinning. We partake of His holiness when our mind is renewed, so we go, this is what I want to choose. This is what I desire. I see this is good, and I desire what is good. God uses punishment to constrain sin. That's how He will make all of His enemies His footstool. He will use punishment to constrain their sin, so they will be forced to be in subjection to Him. But that's not the picture of what a child should be like. He chastens his sons so that we're partakers of his holiness, that we change how we look at the world. So when you go through trials, don't just go, I need to stop doing this. Go, I need to see the evil of doing this, which is why God would chasten me this way. Because God is trying to change our attitude towards sin and not just get us to stop sinning. Another application, we need to remember that God created a world that has suffering in it. that has sorrow in it. He created a world where there's real shame, real embarrassment. And as with everything else, He did it because He's a good God. Through sin, these things all came into the world, and God brought them into the world for good. He did it because He knew what He was doing. From Adam and Eve in the garden, God made sin shameful so that it would be constrained. When it's not treated as shameful, like what our society is working very hard to do, with things like sodomy, transvestitism, fornication. We should understand the cost because when you eliminate shame, you'll get more unconstrained sin. Unbelievers are slaves to sin. The more it is unconstrained, the more they will obey their master. That's what happens. The world constrains sin so that even though their master is pushing them to sin, they can only go so far. When you remove the constraint, they go further. Think about California. California, I think it was an amendment to the Constitution that made it illegal for it to be a felony for a theft under $950. And what happened in California? They removed the constraint, and BAM! Everybody stole $950 worth of stuff. Not everybody, but huge numbers of people. This is how it works. Men, unbelievers, are slaves of sin. If there's no constraint, they will sin more. This is true in your house. This is true with your unbelieving children. The constraint cannot change their heart, but it sure can make their slavery to sin more palatable. And this is how God designed the world. He put suffering in it. He put shame in it. He put pain in it. He put all these things that came because of the fall so that the wicked would not run to the fullness of their wickedness, which is what a slave of sin will do. Instead, he puts all these constraints on it. And so, we should recognize that suffering, it's easy to look at it and not find it joyful but painful, instead of going, boy, God put suffering in the world for really good things. Otherwise, the world would be unbelievably bad. California stopped the suffering of having to go through the legal system. They weren't even put in jail if they did it, but they went through the legal system for a felony. And all of a sudden, that suffering was enough to turn a whole bunch of people away from their sin. Recognize God put suffering in the world for good, to constrain sin. He also uses that same suffering. He uses that suffering to constrain unbelievers, but He uses that same suffering for good, to train those who believe, so they're partakers of His righteousness. Another application. Throughout this passage, it's about God training His children to be mature, to be like Him. I've said this many times, and I'll say it again, always remember you're not raising children. You already have children. You're raising adults. That's how God uses discipline. That's how you need to be thinking of it when you discipline your children, is how is this discipline causing them to have a profit? How is this discipline moving them to be in a better place? That's how God uses discipline, and that's how we should use discipline. We're not disciplining to leave them as children. We're disciplining them so that we have adults. As our children, when they're full grown, they're still not acting like children. God is raising us to be mature. God is raising us to be the bride of His Son. He's working to remove the spots and wrinkles. He's preparing his bride, his son's bride, for the wedding day. And that's how we're supposed to look at raising our children. Are you preparing them to be adults? Then the last application. Peace comes from righteousness. When we think of having peace, it surpasses all understanding. We need to understand what undergirds that. What undergirds having peace that surpasses all understanding is righteousness. The prosperity gospel says, oh, God will give you all these things because He owes you, because you're His child. The true gospel says that if God adopts you, He'll give you His Spirit, and that will cause you, His Spirit will cause you to walk in His statutes and His commandments. He will use the chasing rod on you that will cause you to walk in His statutes and His commandments. And walking in His statutes and commandments, that brings you peace. The fruit of righteousness is peace. True peace only comes through righteousness. If you don't have peace in your life, ask you, where is your sin? because it's sin that takes away peace. Righteousness produces peace. Let's close in prayer. Oh Lord, we do thank you for this passage. We thank you for that you have us here, that you have a purpose for us to be here. We pray that you convict us and guide us to truth. Let us not have to suffer. Instead, let us willfully and joyfully choose to listen to our Father and walk in your ways. You promise us the peaceable fruit of righteousness. or let us be trained by your word so we don't have to be trained by your rod. We ask this in your son's name. Amen.