God Disciplines Those He Loves
In part 2 of an interview from our Babylon podcast series, Gabriel, Ken and Nate discuss a crucial lesson they've learned in their walk with God: God disciplines those He loves. (from Podcast Episode #500 - Satan's Kingdom of Pride)
Click here to check out part 1 of this discussion.
Nate: As believers in Christ, we all experience His hand of discipline and correction in our lives. But I don't think that any one of us could say that we always deal with His discipline perfectly. There are a lot of ways to respond to His correction that are wrong and don’t actually make us more life Christ, but actually just come out of our self-life. So, let’s talk about ways that we've responded to God's correction that we realize now, was not how we should have done it.
Ken: Since I tend to be in my head a lot, one of my default responses to God’s correction used to be morbid introspection. I would always be looking at myself and saying, “God is pointing out something in my life. God is bringing correction or His discipline to bear in my life.” But when I did this, I was missing something crucial. I should have seen His correction as first and foremost the loving hand of my Father wanting to spur growth in me, and wanting me to grow spiritually. I also should have seen it as an invitation into a closer relationship with Him by removing any obstacles that were getting in the way. But when I don’t see that, and when I simply look at myself, I see His discipline as Him putting His thumb down and condemning me.
That's my default mode and I’ve had to get out of that mindset and realize that God disciplines those He loves. He's not out to get me. He would have already squashed me if He wanted to. It's not like He has to figure out how to do that. He could do it in a millisecond if He wanted to. But it's His kindness and His goodness that leads me to repentance. As I humble myself and embrace the process, even though it's painful to die to self, there's something better on the other side. And it’s ok when God disciplines me because He loves me, and He knows what He's doing. If I had to try to figure out things on my own, I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fix myself. And even if I could, it would just foster the very pride He's trying to undermine and destroy.
<pull-quote>As I humble myself and embrace the process, even though it's painful to die to self, there's something better on the other side.<pull-quote><tweet-link>TweetThis<tweet-link>
Nate: How long did it take you to start to gain that kind of perspective?
Ken: I would say it definitely took me a few years after coming here and I'm still working on it. Because that's my default mindset I’ll gravitate towards that way of thinking if left to myself. But the Lord is helping me to get out of that mindset and instead focus on Him and the reality of what's really going on, not what I would naturally think is going on.
Nate: What about you, Gabriel?
Gabriel: Love and discipline. I really had a hard time with those, and I wanted to know how those went together. Alongside that, looking back, I did not respond well to my spiritual authority. That's one of the things I learned over time as my mind was being renewed. It took time for me to see God's love through my spiritual authority correcting me. I had to see that I wasn’t going to be able to do things on my own and the people that God surrounded me with are the very people He's using as instruments to shape me up and to sanctify me. And, you know, at times I've been critical and even bitter. I've had to work through forgiveness because I’ve felt offended. I’ve felt totally misunderstood. And my thoughts were, “If you would actually take some time to get to know me, you wouldn't be correcting me on this issue.” Those are thoughts that I really dealt with. And the Lord knew all those things and still was very patient and loved me through it. Getting to see that in Him was very special.
Hebrews 12 is one of my favorite chapters in the Bible. It wasn't always that way, but it has become that. I can see where I was compared to I am now and it has put faith in me to believe that the discipline I have experienced was all His love. I'm not abandoned. I'm not left alone. I've got markings of God's love through His discipline in my life. And it's taken several years, but I have grown to love the Word of God because when I'm corrected or I'm disciplined, I can go there, and I can get right. It helps me understand why correction is happening, and I don't have to be left on my own trying to fix myself. Oftentimes I don't get it right still and I continue to struggle with understanding the combination of God’s love and discipline. For example, I'll be in the middle of going through discipline in my life and I'm not kidding you, it won’t be until the next day that I realize that’s what I was really going through. I'm still learning and I'm still figuring this out and it's going to take some years ahead before I really understand more and more of God's love in that.
Nate: Yeah. I have one story in my mind that kind of illustrates often how I handled discipline. And let me be clear, I did not handle it well. I had this pattern in my life where I would start feeling pretty good about my spiritual life and about my progress and my growth, and I would start going, “Man. I think I'm actually getting this.” You know, because when God really shows you how messed up you are, that kind of sticks with you for a while and you just don't know internally if you will ever really know how to walk with God. But at this point I was really starting to feel like, “I think I'm getting this.” And it was like, as soon as I started feeling that way, somebody would call me out about my pride. So, at one point, I said, “All right, God, let me get this straight. Whenever I feel good and happy about my progress in my walk with you, you just knock me down. Why God? Do you just want me to feel miserable about myself all the time?”
OK. That's not my finest moment. But probably a couple of years after that, I started seeing the pattern and started realizing that God is saving me from myself. He's not trying to hurt me. He was trying to save me because that self-confidence and that self-assuredness and that sense of thinking I was doing pretty good was not glorying in Him. That was glorying in myself. And then, on the flip side you get corrected and you're just like, “I'm miserable, I'll never get it. I'm just a loser. I'm a failure.” But that's just my wounded ego wanting to glory in itself and being frustrated because it can't. So looking back at how I’ve handled discipline, I just feel like I have done so much of it wrong. But I think it's very similar to what you were saying Gabriel, that the discipline of God is the love of God. It's a clear manifestation. God is saying, “I love you and I accept you.” It's not rejection, it's acceptance. But that reorientation process to see His discipline correctly takes a long time.
