For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Hebrews 12:11

Recalling the quote from Francis Schaeffer in blog post Self Denial…. No Thanks, “Is it not true that our thoughts, our prayers for ourselves and those we love, and our conversations are almost entirely aimed at getting rid of the negative at any cost—rather than praying that the negatives might be faced in the proper attitude?” We want to believe that God is there to get rid of the negatives and that is how we focus our prayers. But in Hebrews 12, God is in, or behind, the negatives that the readers of Hebrews are experiencing. The negatives are presented as discipline… they have a divine purpose. We tend to believe that it is God’s job to help us to get rid of the negatives and when those prayers are not answered, we believe that God is absent. But Hebrews 12 presents a picture of God as a father who is loving His children within the negatives as discipline.

I think we stumble over this picture if we understand discipline to be punishment. This is not discipline as punishment but discipline as training, as verse 11 makes clear. The context of this passage begins with “let us run with endurance the race that is set before us“. As a competitive runner in high school and college, this analogy to a distance race speaks to me. My teammates and I regularly submitted to grueling workouts, designed by our coach, as training discipline. And they were painful rather than pleasant. But we submitted to them because we believed that they would yield the fruit of making us more successful competitors.

There was a physical benefit to these workouts that was strengthening the conditioning of our bodies to compete at a higher level. But there was also a mental side to this discipline/training. There is a strong element of self denial that is required to be a good distance runner; the ability to say no to a self that is telling you to slow down, that you have reached your limit, that it is too hard. Successful distance runners have talent, but they also have the self discipline to push themselves further than others through their pain and discomfort. It was the painful aspect of those workouts that helped us to learn how to do that in the races.

Perhaps the proper attitude that Schaeffer talks about would be viewing those negatives in our lives that God does not take away in response to our prayers as training discipline. To ask God to help us to understand the benefits of enduring the negatives. And if being a good disciple requires self denial, just like being a good distance runner, asking God to help us to see how enduring the negatives trains us in self denial.

Even the step of trying to have this attitude toward our negatives requires self denial because it is not the attitude of our flesh. Our flesh will cling to the attitude that it is God’s job to get rid of the negatives. But if self denial is necessary for fruitful discipleship, and we as Western Christians have far more comfortable and secure lives than people throughout history, then maybe we really need the training aspects of the negatives in our lives. In any case, if we accept the picture presented in Hebrews 12, then the negatives that we thought were indicative of God being absent are in fact indicative of His presence in the form of loving discipline.

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.