God's Paternal Discipline

Driving home: The Father's love plus adoption equals discipline. And that formula never changes.

Pastor Martin apologizes to the kids for bringing math into Sunday and then unfolds his 'mathematical formula': Father's love + adoption = discipline. The playful image makes a stark equation memorable.

Now, it's a terrible thing to bring math in on Sunday, kids. I know that. You thought you got an escape from it, at least Saturday and Sunday, and you'll have to face that ugly creature tomorrow when you go back to school. But this may help you to feel the force of the teaching of these verses. The first mathematical equation which they warrant is this. The Father's love plus adoption equals...

10:42 - 11:09 Read in full sermon

Just as schoolchildren find at least one course tolerable besides gym and recess, none of God's discipline is pleasant in the moment - all chastening seems grievous.

I doubt there's a child here this morning who doesn't have at least one course in school that you really like besides gym and recess. But in this context, all of the instruction, all of the paideia is grievous. So you see, he's speaking of this educational process in terms particularly of a dimension of it that is grievous.

15:00 - 15:27 Read in full sermon

The point: Reject the prosperity teaching that all Deuteronomy 28 blessings carry over to the new covenant - new covenant faith inherits suffering with Christ.

Some old covenant saints were sawn in two, sewn into animal skins to become playthings of beasts - what new covenant faith actually inherited, not Deuteronomy 28 prosperity.

Some were sawn asunder. Some were sewed up in the skins of animals, thrown to the animals to paw them and to make little playthings out of them until their mangled bodies become the laughingstock of heartless, cruel, bloodthirsty people. He says, look, you forgot something. You thought that in the blessings of the new covenant, chastisement, afflicted dispensations would be absent. He said, no. Your response to them must be one in which they do not come as a surprise. Expect chastisement. Whom he loves, he chastens. Remember the mathematical formula. The Father's love plus adoption equals disc...

28:40 - 29:35 Read in full sermon

The point: Reject the prosperity teaching that all Deuteronomy 28 blessings carry over to the new covenant - new covenant faith inherits suffering with Christ.

Discipline and a wholesome, open, loving relationship are not antithetical. Every well-ordered home has discipline aimed at producing a balanced, responsible adult.

wholesome, open, loving relationship to the parents are not antithetical. Every well-ordered home is a home in which the children know that part of the framework of that home is discipline. Yet they also know that the context is paternal and maternal love. That never disciplines as a trigger reaction of anger. It doesn't discipline to get rid of psychologically pent-up pressures

30:37 - 31:06 Read in full sermon

Driving home: If you don't submit to it, you're resisting the very means that keeps you in the way that leads unto life.

The Greek word for 'exercised' is the root of our 'gymnasium' - God's discipline is exhaustive spiritual training, not random punishment.

That word in the original is the word from which we get our word gymnasium. Now what do people do in the gymnasium? Well, that's where they consciously engage in exhaustive physical disciplines. Now this is what he says. Our chastening should have this effect upon us, that it keeps us in spiritual shape. We are exercised thereby in that discipline.

41:18 - 41:44 Read in full sermon

The point: Parents must train children that they cannot live in God's world by obeying their whims - this is preparation for adult life.

Pastor Martin describes counseling adults who can't hold a job, get up for work, or function in life because as children they were never made to do what they didn't want to do.

Those mornings they don't feel like getting up. They lie in bed. Can't hold down a stable job. Why? Because as kids, they were never made to do what their darling little hearts didn't want to do. And now they suffer. You kids, listen, what a privilege it is to have parents who don't want you to go into life emotionally and psychologically crippled. They want you to become a man or a woman who under God in the strength of the Spirit can be a responsible, useful part

45:07 - 45:34 Read in full sermon

The point: Parents must train children that they cannot live in God's world by obeying their whims - this is preparation for adult life.

He recounts his mother saying, 'Son, doing things you don't like to do develops character. Do it - or else.' Forty years later he still reaps the fruits of that discipline.

Hardly a day, a week passes, but what I don't think of some discipline that was exerted upon me as a boy, as a little guy. And it seemed so unreliefable at the time. But as a grown man, an old man in the eyes of some of you, I mean, 45 is down the hill and on the way out. How I thank God.

46:07 - 46:29 Read in full sermon