Coming to Grips with God's Discipline of the Believer
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About this ebook
When something goes wrong we are prone to ask, "What did I do to deserve this?"
We know that God disciplines all His children, but how do we recognize His discipline? And why are some people more severely chastised than others?
Dr. Lutzer points out three kinds of discipline. Educative discipline is given to strengthen us. Preventative discipline is brought into our lives to keep us from sin. And retributive discipline occurs when we are directly chastened for specific sins.
In this eBooklet, Dr. Lutzer treats the subject of God's discipline from a thorough study of Scripture and applies biblical principles to real-life experience.
Erwin W. Lutzer
Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer is Pastor Emeritus of The Moody Church, where he served as the senior pastor for 36 years. He is an award-winning author and the featured speaker on three radio programs that are heard on more than 750 national and international outlets. He and his wife, Rebecca, have three grown children and eight grandchildren and live in the Chicago area.
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Coming to Grips with God's Discipline of the Believer - Erwin W. Lutzer
Discipline
Introduction
One of the most important responsibilities a father has is to discipline his children. A father who does not take this responsibility seriously is negligent and does not love his children as he ought.
Though God is the Father of all men, He has a special filial relationship to those who have been born into His family through faith in Christ Jesus. Paul the apostle encourages us to develop intimacy with our Heavenly Father: For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’
(Romans 8:15).
That God disciplines His children is not in doubt, but how He does is not always clear to us. We are especially confused when we try to find a link between a particular transgression and God’s disciplinary response.
When a couple, whom I shall call Sally and John, had a deformed baby born to them, they asked a question that we all would likely have asked in their situation: What did we do to deserve this?
Eventually, they accepted their bitter disappointment as a judgment from God because they had had premarital sex. The chickens were coming home to roost, they thought.
Yet, when the baby grew up to be a special blessing despite his handicap, they wondered whether they were right in their original assumption about the discipline of God.
William Carey, the famous missionary, spent forty years in India starting churches and doing translation work. Thousands of painstaking hours were invested learning the vocabulary and grammar of strange languages and compiling them into a massive dictionary. But this, along with other of his priceless manuscripts, was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1812. A lesser man may have never recovered, but Carey accepted this as a judgment from God (perhaps because of his failures as a father) and began the task all over again with even greater zeal.
One Christian woman I know chose to ignore the counsel of the elders in her church and decided to divorce her husband on the grounds of incompatibility. A month later she took sick and nearly died. She interpreted the illness as a direct judgment from God for her rebellion.
We’ve all entertained the suspicion that one of these days God will get even for our misdeeds. It is natural to interpret our tragedies in light of our past sins and blame ourselves for what has happened. We remind ourselves that the hand of the Lord is against those who do evil.
Though Christians are opposed to the pantheistic doctrine of Karma, we do believe in a