A Sermon on Hebrews 12:3-17
A sermon on Hebrews 12:3-17 has been lightly edited for ease of reading.
Discipline, Love, & Holiness
If you have your Bibles today, I do ask that you would take them up now and turn with me to the book of Hebrews. We are continuing to work our way through the book of Hebrews, and today we will pick up in Hebrews chapter 12, beginning in verse 3. I’m going to start in verse 1, but we will cover verses 3 through 17. So hear the word of the Lord.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood, and you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons. My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. Endure hardship as discipline.
God is treating you as sons, for what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are an illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of our spirits and live? Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good that we may share in his holiness.
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.
Make level paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed. Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy. Without holiness, no one will see the Lord.
See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and to defile many. See that no one is sexually immoral or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. He could bring about no change of mind, though he sought the blessing with tears.”
Let’s pray.
To the great God and Father, as we see your glory in creation, we see it more clearly in your word.
And your word has the power to change, the power to bring blessing, the power to bring salvation, the power to bring joy. And so, Lord, as we approach this word today, I do pray that every word of my mouth and meditation of my heart would be pleasing to you. Oh, God, my rock and my redeemer.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
So everything happens for a reason.
Back in the 1990s, early 2000s, if you were walking around a mall in most places within America, you would come across a store called Successories. Success, accessories. Yes, marketing in the 90s was amazing.
But in Successories, you would find goods that would help you become successful in your endeavors, whether it was endeavors as a parent, whether it was endeavors in sales or management, whatever it was, they had positive affirmations in artistic presentations that would help you in your pursuit of success. Well, like most all things in our world, we also have parodies of Successories. And one of the parodies that has stuck with me throughout decades was the parody of Successories that had the beautiful picture that would often be there on the Successories artwork that you would hang on your wall.
And underneath it, it said, “Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes that reason is you’re stupid and make bad decisions.” And that is just stuck with me.
And there’s truth to that. Maybe not the stupid part, because I know one relatively smart man who has made a handful of good decisions that have paid off in dividends throughout his life, but a whole lot of bad decisions that have paid off in wisdom. But everything does happen for a reason.
And sometimes that reason is that we make bad decisions. And the author of Hebrews addresses that in today’s passage.
Remember, he is addressing a group of people who are suffering persecution for what it is that they believe.
And he has answered them in their temptation to leave by calling them to look unto Jesus. That is the hope. That is the theme of the book of Hebrews.
He says it explicitly in verse 2 of chapter 12, where he says, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” But that is the theme in the midst of suffering, in the midst of hardship, in the midst of persecution. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
Today, in today’s passage, verses 3 through 17, he focuses on that hardship as an act of God, specifically God’s act of discipline upon his people. Suffering, he says, comes to us as God’s discipline. It comes to us as discipline because God has set his love upon us.
And this discipline rooted in God’s love is meant to spur you and I on to holiness, both a personal and a corporate holiness. And so today we will learn that because God loves us in Christ, he uses suffering as a means of discipline to move us on to holiness.
DISCIPLINE
So first, let’s look at this discipline.
Picking up with the theme of looking to Jesus, the author opens by calling us to “Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” This is an echo of those words in verse 2, where he says, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” What does it mean to consider Jesus?
Does it mean that whenever life is hard, we just go, “Oh, yeah, Jesus had it kind of hard, too. So I guess I’m like Jesus,” and then move on trying to do it, deal with it. No, that word consider means to think through carefully. And so what he’s telling us to do is to think through carefully or to meditate on what it was that Jesus has done on our behalf.
Meditation is a theme that shows up throughout the scriptures. It shows up often throughout Psalm 119, that great song praising God in the midst of lament for the word that reveals God’s goodness and God’s call to holiness. Over and over again throughout Psalm 119, the author says to meditate upon the law of the Lord.
Meditation is not an emptying of ourselves. It is a filling of our mind and our heart with the word of God so that we are constantly going over and thinking about that word of God in our mind as we go throughout our day. And the author says, when you are suffering the hardship of persecution, consider and meditate on the hardship that Christ undertook for your salvation.
He goes on to say, “You have not suffered to the point of shedding your blood.” Likely the people who are being persecuted in the church that the author wrote to had not suffered martyrdom at this point, but they had also not shed redeeming blood as Jesus had done. We oftentimes think about how much does God love me? We ask that question.
And yet the answer to that question is found at the cross and is found in meditating upon the suffering of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He didn’t do that because we were good enough. He didn’t do that because we had earned any bit of favor from God.
Romans chapter five tells us that he did it simply because God chose to set his love upon those who would believe. And so think about what Jesus went through whenever you are suffering, whenever you are struggling. Look to Jesus in the good times and the bad times to strengthen your weaknesses, whether he uses the metaphor of the weak arms or the weak knees or the lame that need help in a smooth walk through this world.
Look to Jesus for the strength in the midst of suffering. And he goes on to tell us why we will need strength. It’s because sometimes God uses suffering as a discipline.
Now, we have to be careful with this because oftentimes we hear the word discipline and it brings up negative connotations. I remember my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Douglas, she had that paddle right up there on the ledge of the chalkboard, and it had those holes drilled into it that made it more aerodynamic. And I bring up Mrs. Douglas because she was the one that all of us feared, even over our principal.
We did not want the punishment that would come for our transgressions at school. We also knew, at least within my family, that if you brought home a note saying that you had to undergo corporal punishment at school, you were going to undergo it again when you got home.
When we say discipline, that’s typically what we think of. We think of punishment.
But discipline is so much more than punishment. Think of the book of Proverbs, that great book of God’s wisdom, both for the church and for the world.
For the church, it’s rooted in the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. For the world, the world can gleam wisdom for their life, for their work, for their marriage, for their family from the book of Proverbs, although they won’t get the full message if it’s not rooted in the fear of the Lord.
Punishment is mentioned in that pursuit of wisdom. But far, far more often, instruction and gentle correction is the idea behind discipline in the book of Proverbs.
Jesus had disciples, disciples that he disciplined by teaching them. Yes, occasionally correcting them, but by spending time lovingly teaching them and putting them on the path.
Discipline is a process of instruction, correction, and advising that leads the young onto the path of godly maturity. Paul says in Ephesians 6:2, “Fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
The author of Hebrews picks up this theme in verses 9 and 10 when he compares the discipline of our earthly fathers to the discipline that God brings to us. Earthly fathers have us for a time, and they disciple us to adulthood, but God’s discipline, God’s discipling is lifelong because he is discipling us to heaven, to live in the glory and the peace of his presence. The author of Hebrews, God through the author of Hebrews, calls you and I to endure hardship as discipline.
Yes, going through hardship is painful. You don’t want to do it. But we keep our eyes on the one who learned what it meant to obey as a human through suffering and hardship in this world.
God disciplines his children through suffering. There will be times brothers and sisters in our walk where we will begin to get too attached in an idolatrous way to the things of this earth and sometimes God will use suffering and hardship to bring us, to draw us back to him. But God doesn’t just discipline us because he’s the great meanie in the sky.
LOVE
God disciplines us because he loves us. Once again, you and I are tempted to assign wrong motives to God’s hard discipline.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where all of us know parents, people who had parents, maybe you were one of these parents who disciplined for the wrong reasons.
Maybe their abusive past gave them bad habits they were unwilling to overcome. Maybe their need for control led to an undue strictness in their discipline. Maybe their fear of you turning into what they hated in themselves led to harshness.
But God doesn’t discipline for any of those reasons. We don’t look to earthly fathers to see who God is. We look to God to see what earthly fathers should strive to be.
God doesn’t discipline us for earthly reasons. He disciplines us because he loves us. Paul in one of his letters to Timothy says, you no longer have a spirit of fear, but a spirit of the adoption of the sons of God in the Holy Spirit.
The doctrine of adoption teaches that when the Holy Spirit comes into the life of a believer, at that moment of regeneration and conversion, when the Holy Spirit comes in and makes us alive through the work of Christ, he also adopts us as sons and daughters of God. This is a glorious truth, brothers and sisters, that is true of all of God’s children. Rather than traitors and enemies of God, you are now his beloved child.
And just like earthly fathers discipline their children out of love, your heavenly father disciplines you because he loves you. The author of Hebrews goes so far as to say that if you are not being disciplined by God, then you are not loved. The illegitimate child in the first century was often cast aside, was often cast out of the family, did not receive the support and the love of the father.
You know, there’s one thing, as I was being disciplined in my life growing up, there was one thing that I did not understand until I myself had children. And it was the statement, “If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t care.” As a child, I said, “Well, I wish you didn’t care as much.” But as an adult, I’m like, thank God they love me that much.
Are you feeling the hardship of living life in this world? If this is a moment of God’s discipline in your life, then you are feeling his great love. If you have never looked to Jesus as the author or perfecter of your faith, your hardship is designed to draw you to him for that first moment. That hardship is designed to push you to surrender to the call to Jesus to repent and believe.
HOLINESS
If you’re a child of God, his loving discipline is designed to lead you to holiness. We’ll come back to the first half of verse 14 here in a few moments, but it says, “make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; Without holiness, no one will see the Lord.”
In Colossians chapter one, beginning in verse 21, Paul writes these words. “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation.”
Brothers and sisters, as the sons and daughters of God set apart by the Holy Spirit, made alive and adopted as the children of God by the Holy Spirit, Jesus has done the work for you to set you apart as holy. That’s the glorious truth.
You are holy. Paul, at the beginning of his letters, addresses the letters to the saints in the churches at Colossi in the letter we just read from. Is he talking about people who’ve done a couple, a handful of miraculous things and have led a perfectly holy life and five years after their death are voted on by the church to be called saint? No, he’s talking to average everyday Christians.
You are holy. You are set apart as holy in Christ. And because you are set apart as holy in Christ, you are to pursue holiness.
You are holy. Now go be holy. That’s the gospel. That’s one summary of the gospel for those who have been set apart by the work of Jesus.
You are holy. You are blameless. You are above reproach before God. Now in the power of that status before God, go pursue holiness in your life today.
What does this holiness look like? Well, first, holiness looks like being at peace with everyone.
And let me make one thing clear. Peace with everyone is not pursued at the sacrifice of holiness. We can be both holy and strive to be at peace with everyone.
It’s everyone within this room. It’s everyone within the world. Too often the world does not strive for peace with those who disagree with them.
But the Christian is called, as much as it depends upon them, to live at peace with all men. Do your conversations outside of this church, do your conversations inside of this church promote the peace of God’s people? That is part of holiness.
Secondly, we are to work to make sure no one falls short of God’s grace.
As your minister, I am responsible for your walk of holiness. But guess what? As members of this church, you are responsible for mine and each other’s. And this is a hard truth.
It says to make sure that no one falls away, no one falls short of God’s grace. If you are truly regenerate, you cannot fall short of God’s grace, but you may be living a life that looks like you’re in danger of doing that. And it is each and every one of our responsibility in this room to make sure that does not happen.
This is a scary part of holiness, brothers and sisters. It’s scary for me if one of you sees a pattern in my life and you come to me and says, “Hey, I’ve got something I need to talk to you about. I think you’re in danger of falling short of the grace of God.”
But it can also be scary for that person that is convicted enough to come to somebody within the church to say, “Hey, I see something going on in your life, and I’m worried about your soul.” It’s a hard thing to say to somebody because we’re good Americans. We just want to be kind and get along.
But we are called, each and every one of us, to walk alongside of each other to pursue holiness.
Part of that walk in holiness is the third thing, is that we are to see no bitter root grows up to defile the people of God. We read a harsh passage from Deuteronomy earlier.
That’s what happens when that root of idolatry that the author, that Moses in Deuteronomy said, that is the root of bitterness, the bitter, poisonous root that grows up within the people of God is idolatry. We don’t have statues and we don’t have god’s named Baal and Ashtoreth and Moloch and all those other things like they have there. But we have idols within our own world and with our own church sometimes.
Sometimes we idolize political power. Sometimes we idolize relationships and friendships. And part of the walk of holiness is to make sure that no bitter root grows up within our heart and no bitter root grows up within this family.
Fourthly, we are to see that no one is sexually immoral. That’s not a big deal in our culture, is it? Now this is directed to people within the church. To use Christopher Yuan’s term, we are to pursue a holy sexuality within the church.
We don’t call the world to holiness. We call the world to faith in the gospel and then they are to pursue holiness. But we are to be sexually pure within the church.
And lastly, and this is kind of a summary of all of those things that he said already, part of the walk of holiness is to make sure that the people of the church don’t fall into Esau’s trap.
What was Esau’s trap? He gave up all the blessing. He gave up all the goods. He gave up all the money that was due him as a first-born child in the family of Isaac. He gave it all up for a bowl of soup.
Too often the people of God pursue instant gratification rather than setting aside temptation to sin and the things of this world because of the hope of the benefits of the world to come.
Part of our walk of holiness is to set aside instant gratification. Beware that you do not give up heaven for something as eternally trivial as a bowl of soup.
Like Esau, there will come a time when it is too late to reverse that decision. And no amount of wailing, no amount of gnashing of teeth will change the outcome.
CONCLUSION
Brothers and sisters, as we live in a fallen world and we suffer in this fallen world, not if we suffer but when we suffer, understand that God will use hardship to help us lay aside the sins and the hindrances that easily beset us. God doesn’t discipline us because he’s a big meanie. God disciplines us because he loves us.
And God’s discipline has a result which should lead us to holiness.
One of the mistakes we do make when we study the Bible is to solely focus on how the teachings of the Bible apply to me.
But in verses 12 through 15 where he’s talking about holiness, all of the occurrences of the pronoun you are plural. So whether you say “y’all,” “youse guys,” or from that small area around Pittsburgh where they say “yinz,” that’s what you should read in these verses.
Y’all be holy and live at peace with all people.
Youse guys see to it that no one misses the grace of God and idolatry is kept out of the church.
Yinz pursue the heavenly reward rather than the fleeting pleasures of the flesh.
It starts with me and the elders. We are here to direct the spiritual life of the church in such a way that holiness is maintained within this body. We are here as the elders of the church to set things right when problems get too big.
But each and every one of you is tasked with your own holiness and the holiness of others.
Before you confront a lack of holiness in others, make sure that you have gone through a process of reflection and repentance. As Jesus said in Matthew 7, removing the plank from your own eye before you confront the speck in another brother’s or sister’s eye. That especially goes when there is a conflict between you and someone else that you feel you must address.
But if you are the individual who is addressed, I say this, if someone comes and confronts you in the area where you are lacking in holiness, listen. God and his love has sent them to you, and I would imagine that they have agonized and prayed and are fearful of the process before they come to you to speak.
Brothers and sisters, know that hardship and discipline will come and that when they do, they are a sign of God’s infinite love for you.
Let’s pray.
Our God and Father, keep our eyes upon Jesus. When suffering comes our way, help us to look to him, to see your love, to see your grace, to see your mercy, and to know that you are preparing us for eternity.
Give us strength to repent where we should repent. Give us strength to rest in you where we should rest in you. And Lord, if you call us to the hard task of addressing somebody else’s lack of holiness, give us that grace, give us that mercy, and let us do so in love.
We pray all this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
BENEDICTION
God loves you enough to bless you. And so today I give this blessing from God to you.
“The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord, like a gracious father, make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
Behold, he who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen! Come Lord Jesus!
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