God’s Discipline Flows from His Love
A Biblical View of Revival - Part 2
by James Pool, OneCry National Prayer Director
Have you ever noticed that everything about Christianity is relational? Personally, I believe this is one of the main reasons Jesus taught His disciples to view and refer to God as “Father” when they prayed. When a person genuinely begins a love relationship with God by believing in Jesus and following Him as Lord of their life, that individual becomes God’s child (John 1:12-13).
Now, when you put this biblical reality into the context of revival, what you get is a caring, heavenly Father who loves His true children far too much to ever let them depart from the glory of His manifest presence with them.
So what does He do when one of His children slips back into the kind of lifestyle where that child’s love relationship with God is not healthy or growing? What does He do as a Father when His children stop listening to Him and lovingly obeying His commands (John 14:21)?
If you are like me, every time I disobeyed my earthly father, I was disciplined; and it would certainly appear in Hebrews 12:5-6 that God treats His spiritual children in just the same way. One reason God established the structure and authority of having parents as leaders in the home (Ephesians 6:1-4) was so that children would have a working, experiential model from which they could learn about the consequences of sin.
It is within the context of this wonderfully designed model that an individual is to learn how disobedience and sinful attitudes always put a strain on the fellowship and joys that were intended to be experienced by family members who truly love each other.
It is also in this same dynamic of family love where God, the only One who knows everything about us and is always right and just in His judgments, steps in as our heavenly Father to discipline us when we begin doing things that are harmful to our relationships with Him and others. Hebrews 12:8 even tells us that if we are not experiencing this remedial discipline from the hand of God, we are “illegitimate children and not sons.”
So, what does God’s discipline look like? The Bible tells us that, before we actually become a child of God, the final discipline for sin is extremely severe: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
Those who never receive this gift of having a relationship with God will forever “pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Being forever separated from the presence and love of God is by far the most severe, final discipline a person could ever receive for his or her sin.
However, the good news for the true children of God, who have been “born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3), is that God’s remedial disciplines—the kind of disciplines designed to help teach us God’s ways and conform us to the image of Jesus—are far less severe and are designed for correction instead of final, eternal judgment.
Space in this article will not permit us to look in detail at the disciplinary methods of God, but in preparation for next month’s edition, we at least need to see what was happening to the Corinthian believers when God stepped in to bring remedial discipline on them. In the context of the Corinthian church’s inappropriate observance of communion, Paul wrote,
Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. For this reason, many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep. But if we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be condemned along with the world (1 Corinthians 11:27-32).
Is it possible that you or your church could be under the remedial discipline of our holy and loving God?