Hebrews 12:3-13

We are in Hebrews chapter 12.

Hebrews 12 · chapter mention

We're almost done with Hebrews.

We have only uh a chapter and a half to go through.

And uh we're right in a section that is so much fun.

Here it says suffering.

Well, um, and we're gonna be, I feel like since we've been gathering as a church, we've been kind of like building a theology of suffering.

Um, and we went through, we've gone through a lot of stuff.

We all went through COVID together.

And um, this this morning we're gonna add kind of another aspect or another jewel this week and next week, another jewel to this idea of why God allows us to suffer.

And um I I think this is gonna be helpful for you.

Basically, my goal over the next two weeks is to show you that you never can lose if you're a follower of Jesus.

There's no situation, there's no situation where you have to be the loser ever, because of what um it we're gonna cover.

Um here's kind of a summary just to introduce us here to Hebrews.

The book of Hebrews, it's written to a people who are so beaten down with difficulties and troubles and suffering that they are ready to give up.

The book of Hebrews, therefore, is an intense public pastoral counseling.

At every point, the writer to the Hebrews is writing people, and he wants his readers to understand how to become the kind of people who can cope with the brutal realities of life.

It's very real, it's very realistic.

Hebrews, I've got kind of like this love-hate relationship with Hebrews as we've gone through it.

It's one of the harder books that I feel like I've taught.

But it is very realistic about life.

And this pastor is like a spiritual coach.

It's just saying, hey, we can do this.

We can do this.

When you're going through suffering in your own life, there is this question, is this God punishing me?

Is this something that I deserve?

Is this me reaping the whirlwind?

Is this the, you know, me falling into the pit that I dug?

Is this God getting back at me for something I did when I was a teenager?

Am I going crazy?

I mean, there's all these things that we think when we're going through suffering, and the the Bible actually frames up a relationship with suffering in a in a fairly helpful way.

Um and what we're gonna see this morning is uh one of those aspects.

Uh look, last year um I took a call from a Christian husband, um, not in this church, from another church, and let's just call him Alan.

Alan was struggling in his marriage, he had his own stuff that um his own problems, and his wife had a number of problems that she was working through, and he just felt like we're heading for divorce, this is irreconcilable.

And I told him, I don't know.

I don't know what what the future of your marriage is gonna be like, but I said, This is what I know is that let's say you are in a bad marriage.

I am only hearing your side of the story, I don't know what your wife has to say about you, and and he said he had problems.

I said, This is what I do know is that as you're on your way to divorce, if that's what's gonna happen, every day you can learn something in this difficult setting that's useful for yourself.

You can redeem and cash out on a difficult relationship, it almost seems unfair, but you can use, and God can redeem, a very difficult setting for your good and for your growth.

And, you know, his inclination was to be mopey and to be upset and to like cast blame and say, you know, my wife is more guilty than I am.

And I don't know.

Like, I don't even know this guy that well, I have no idea what's like what his future holds, but I know this that in a bad relationship, you can still learn some things, you can still grow.

And so here's these Christians in that are receiving this letter, and they're going through some difficult stuff that's not their fault.

But there are those questions, is this is like, is this God like getting back at me?

Like, you know, we we have this way of just thinking that, you know, God no longer loves us because we're going through some kind of suffering.

And this writer is going to turn that on its head.

You'll remember that we're in the context where in chapter 11, this pastor explains and holds up in front of us all of these examples of Old Testament saints that lived by faith.

And they did all kinds of things in faith.

And he then turns to you and I, the reader, and he says, You need to run the race that's laid out in front of you.

And you need to cast off the sin and the things that hinder you in this race, and you need to look to Jesus, who is the author and the finisher of your faith.

And that's where we stopped last week.

And we're gonna pick up in verse 3, and I'm gonna read to you three through thirteen, and we're gonna spend the next two weeks looking at verses three through thirteen.

Here's what it says it says, For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, so that you won't grow weary and give up.

In struggling against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

And you've forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons.

My son, do not take the Lord's discipline lightly, or lose heart when you are reproved by him.

For the Lord disciplines the one he loves and punishes every son he receives.

Endure suffering as discipline.

God is dealing with you as sons.

For what son is there that a father does not discipline?

But if you are without discipline, which all receive, then you're illegitimate children and not sons.

Furthermore, we had human fathers discipline us, and we respected them.

Shouldn't we submit even more to the father of spirits and live?

For they disciplined us for a short time based on what seemed good to them.

But he does it for our benefit, so that we can share his holiness.

No discipline seems enjoyable at the time, but painful.

Later on, however, it yields the peaceable or peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Therefore, strengthen your tired hands and weakened knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but healed instead.

Let's pray together.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

And as we as a church, as we uh submit to this text, we pray that you'd speak specifically to us as individuals.

You'd speak to us as a church.

Um, Lord, we want to hear what you have for us as correction and as encouragement, as reproof, instruction and righteousness.

Lord, have your way with us, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So there are a number of words in these verses that refer to pain and suffering.

I want to put those in front of you quickly.

He talks about enduring, growing weary, give up, struggle, resisted, shed your blood, lose heart, suffering, submit, painful, tired hands, weakened knees, lame and dislocated.

There's a lot of pain and there's a lot of like endurance and going through it that we see in this text, right?

There, like these people, or the picture that is being drawn for us is a picture of suffering.

Back in chapter 10, he talked about some of this suffering where some of him, he says, some of you have been thrown into prison.

Some of you have had your goods taken away from you, some of you, your friends, you've lost uh friends, have been sent to prison, and you're going through this uh season of suffering.

And we know from what we've seen in this book that they're considering just a falling away, uh leaving their pursuit of Jesus, leaving Jesus as the Messiah and returning to Judaism.

And this pastor who wrote this is saying you need to keep running the race.

So the first thing that he talks about is considering Jesus.

So there are, I would say, three major sections in 3 through 13.

The first is this idea of considering Jesus.

The second is um, you know, don't forget, uh, don't forget the exhortation, or that's the third thing, I'm sorry.

The second thing is you haven't resisted.

So consider Jesus, you haven't resisted, and then don't forget.

That's kind of the framework here, and we'll cover these in a comprehensive way over the next um two weeks.

But let's look at the first at this whole idea of considering Jesus.

In verse 3, the pastor says, For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, so that you won't grow weary and give up.

Notice he describes Jesus as the one who endured hostility from sinners.

He endured such hostility from sinners against himself.

And he's asking for these individuals to consider Jesus.

It's going to hopefully result in their life in this determination, or it's going to result in this, you're not going to grow weary or give up.

The more you think about Jesus and you take him into your mind, the more you are able to keep going.

I think the picture of the runner is in play here.

That the race that he called the readers to, he's still appealing to that.

And so just think about your life and your relationship with Jesus and what it means to be a follower of Jesus in your life.

He's asking for this tenacity, this endurance, this perseverance, but you're you're not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but you're often pulling into your mind Jesus and who Jesus is.

You're you're calling, you're reflecting on the person of Jesus who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, and therefore you're not growing weary and you're not giving up.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it's a it's a simple idea.

It's a simple idea, but it is um profound as you, if if you have that, if you're a runner or you've done some kind of competitive thing, if you have something that you can kind of set your mind on, it helps you keep going, right?

If you it it's it's this mental, they talk about like the mental battle in competition, the mental side of competition.

And here he's saying, look, you need to consider Jesus.

The second thing is this idea of you have not resisted, you have not resisted.

It's here in verse four.

In the struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

I think, I think, as he says this, he's again considering the example of Jesus who is facing all this opposition.

He goes to the garden, he's praying in the Garden of Gethsemane before the cross, before he's betrayed, and he's sweating great drops of blood.

And he is resisting the temptation to take back his own life.

And instead he's saying, God, I give you my life, I entrust my life to you.

And this pastor is saying, look, this is this is what it looks like for the followers of Jesus to do their, to do their walk, to do their race.

It's this resistance against sin that is to the point of where Jesus got in the garden, where you're absolutely submitted, you're absolutely obedient.

The early church faced this a lot.

They the the um conflicts that a follower of Jesus faced in the first century, uh, it was immense.

You you imagine for these Greek cultures, or a Roman city, a Gentile who hears about Jesus, they decide that they're gonna follow the Jewish Messiah who died and supposedly rose again, and then they're going to start reading the Jewish scriptures and make it their own.

They're gonna leave the idolatry and the paganism that they grew up in, and now they're going to adopt this ethic of Jesus, the Messiah, who loved his enemies and taught this humble way and this doing good to those who persecute you.

It's just this radically different way of doing life, and what ensued was a persecution and a suffering.

And this pastor is saying, listen, you're facing the threat of jail, the loss of your possessions, all of these hardships, and you need to resist to the point of shedding blood in your struggle against sin.

At the end of the service, I'm gonna read you a quote about pain from Dr.

Brand.

But it's it's amazing um how comfortable our culture is.

One uh pastor um was asked, what do you think is the greatest idol of um in the American church or for Christians in America?

And he said without hesitation, it's comfort.

We love how comfortable we are, we love to be pain-free.

Um, and unfortunately, then there is also those who think of Christianity and kind of the sacrifice of Christianity, they've melded it with like a patriotism.

I don't know when that happened or why that happened, but the idea of following Jesus and being patriotic, that doesn't come from the New Testament or my reading of the life of Jesus.

But a but there is a costliness to following Jesus in your life and my life that doesn't have to be chaste.

A simple obedience and just loving others and taking a stand for what is right in your own life can be extremely costly.

And so the pastor says, listen, you need, you have not yet resisted.

You can't back away, you can't backtrack, you need to stand your ground in your apprenticeship to Jesus.

I just want to step back for a second and just with these two verses, there is the Bible is teaching a particular worldview about being a human at this time.

In verse 3, we see that Jesus is afflicted and suffering because of the hostility of sinners.

Right?

Jesus is like, he's going through it and he's being crucified because of the hostility, but it's the hostility of who?

It's the sinners.

It's the hostility of sinners.

But then here in verse 4, he's talking to these readers.

He says that sin is something that needs to be resisted to the point of bloodshed.

Sin is something that we are tempted to engage, and we need to resist.

Sin and pain are related throughout Scripture, and the Bible presents a fascinating, it gives answers that the secular person can't find as they wrestle with pain in their own life.

Tim Keller said that when you are secular, you have no faith or religious belief system, and you go through suffering, the way that you can find, there is this desire, this innate desire to find meaning in your suffering, but the more you engage suffering and life logically as a secular person, the more horrendous suffering is.

Suffering doesn't fit well within a secular worldview.

There's no basis for compassion, there's no redemptive purpose, there's no sense of an overarching story that's playing out.

Suffering just is this odd puzzle piece.

It's like that piece just doesn't fit with this puzzle.

But when you are a Christian and you have a religious framework, the more you think logically and engage suffering from a logical perspective, the more meaning you're able to derive.

We don't have to escape and run away from thoughtful thinking or pursuit of meaning in life as we engage suffering.

Instead, we can think more robustly and find meaning.

One of the reasons why we need to engage life like a runner who's familiar with suffering is because of the existence of sin.

And there is this, um, there is a, how do you say it?

There, there is, yeah, it's a mental frame of reference, not an emotional state, right?

There's a oftentimes there's a I don't know what Christianity you grew up around, but sometimes Christianity is really packaged with emotional highs.

And the Bible doesn't discount or uh say emotions are bad, but it it also complements and it and uh encourages us to engage our faith with our brains to be both um mental and emotional in our faith.

And it is interesting to me in these two verses that the Bible says sin, it acknowledges sin not as something um that we need to uh just wish away, but there is this mental engagement with it in verses three and four.

In verse five, he begins to introduce this idea of discipline.

And he says, This, you and you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons.

My son, do not take the Lord's discipline lightly, or lose heart when you are reproved by him.

We're gonna stop there.

We'll we'll get into verses um uh six through thirteen next week, but I want to just spend a tiny bit of time on this quote out of uh Proverbs.

This is pulled from the the pastor is saying, This is um this is the exhortation that you're um tempted to forget from Proverbs.

Now, please notice this is a book, Hebrews is a book in the New Testament.

This pastor is taking the book of Proverbs, that was the Hebrew text, and he's saying, This is your exhortation.

While this is thousands of years old in its writing, this is an exhortation to you.

So he's using this Old Testament text as a contemporary word, a contemporary exhort uh exhortation for us.

So I know that some of you are new to the Bible and you're you're like, man, the Old Testament, it's big, it's hard to understand, and that's fine.

I uh uh there are many tools, and it is takes a little bit of time to kind of get a frame of reference.

About what's going on in the Old Testament.

But you need to understand that the New Testament leaned upon the Old Testament, and you it this is Jesus' Bible.

Like the Old Testament was these scriptures for Jesus.

And here this pastor is using it.

And he says, he quotes this passage from Proverbs 3, 11 and 12.

He says, Do not despise the Lord's instruction, my son, and do not loathe his discipline.

For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, just as a father disciplines the son in whom he delights.

Imagine for a second a bicycle wheel with the spokes that are coming off of it.

This text is the center of the wheel.

And as we will see next week, he's going to just look at just the implications that kind of shoot out from Proverbs chapter 3, 11 through 12.

Proverbs 3 · chapter mention

But he, in essence, is calling these Christians to go back to not forget.

Again, what is forgetting?

Where does forgetting happen?

Does it happen in our emotions or in our in our thinking?

It happens in our thinking, right?

Again, he is calling these Christians to engage in their minds in this discipleship to Jesus.

And I know this is simple, but one of my favorite Bible teachers said sometimes you just got to take what's just laying right there on the surface of the text.

And one of the things that's right here is that being a follower of Jesus means that we think about the things of Jesus.

That you're considering Jesus, you're thinking about what the Bible has to say, that it's it's a part of your thinking.

Now, I don't know how you engage life or what the habits are.

You've got to figure out like how you use your brain and when it happens and how it happens best.

This works, this is where the Holy Spirit kind of takes over and applies this into your normal life.

But I think one of the things that this pastor wants is he just wants you to know if you're a follower of Jesus, part of your thinking on a daily basis is just going back to him.

That your brain is engaged, just reflecting on what he has to say.

So reading your Bible is kind of obvious, right?

That we just read our Bible regularly.

It's a part of our life.

But beyond that, you know, it's like for me, it's podcasts.

I'll make sure that I'm listening to a couple of podcasts a week that are by different pastors, guys that I respect and that I trust, teaching me.

Um, and that's but it, but I just would encourage you, would you please run with that this week?

So he says, You have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons or as children.

My son, and this is the quote, do not take the Lord's discipline lightly or lose heart when you're reproved by him.

We'll close with this idea.

Don't take the Lord's discipline lightly.

He's gonna say, and what we'll see next week is that God allows painful things to happen in our life, and what he wants for you and I is for you and I to cash in on those moments as a form of discipline.

It doesn't mean God doesn't love you.

In fact, it's gonna be evidence that God loves you.

He's gonna reveal his love to you in the midst of that setting.

So don't take it lightly and don't lose heart when you're reproved by him.

The discipline of the Lord in your life is a form of God's love.

As Christians, in relationship with God, we're given an amazing perspective on suffering.

The text presents a picture of the individual not being victimized or powerless against sin.

The underlying assumption is that suffering and the fight against sin is now purposeful, meaningful, and leads to a clear end.

Again, the underlying assumption is that suffering and the fight against sin is now purposeful, meaningful, and leads to a clear end.

God loves you and I.

Embrace the pain and recognize there is good that is going to come out of this.

Paul Brand, Dr.

Paul Brand, he says this silencing pain without considering its message is like disconnecting a ringing fire alarm to avoid receiving bad news.

Dr.

Brand was a physician that was trained in England and became a doctor to leprosy colonies in India.

He spent a third of his life working and studying leprosy and had some significant uh breakthroughs based off of the work that he did.

Um he wrote a book called Um The Gift of Pain.

And he had this unique perspective because he was working with people who were losing the capacity to feel physical pain.

And it caused all kinds of ruin in their life.

And so he just was fascinated with this idea of pain.

And he talked about in his own life, he lived a third of his life in England, in London, and he experienced World War II and saw the bombing of London and the pain that that caused his uh friends and neighbors and family.

Then he went to India, where pain was just a part of life.

And people just would get sick, they would have diseases, and they had no access to medical care and would just live with all kinds of horrendous.

If you want to read horrendous, horrible, disgusting um medical things that were happening to people there in India, uh, you can read this book.

He describes it.

And he saw the um joy and the happiness that these people in India experienced while they lived in um constant pain in different ways.

And then he moved to the United States.

He retired to the U.S.

And he said, out of all three places, he said the location where he lived the la last, which was in the U.S., he said the United States is more fixated on avoiding pain than the other two locations.

We run away from pain.

We do not engage pain as meaningful or purposeful at all.

We want to fix pain as fast as we possibly can.

And only somebody you know who's been through those three different cultures is able to kind of reflect and give that.

We're used to, like I had a headache yesterday, I took ibuprofen, it was great.

Like 20 minutes later, boom, and I'm better.

It was awesome.

I love living in America where we have ibuprofen.

But we have this amazing like relationship with pain.

And so he's looking at it as a from a medical perspective.

He says, like, like doctors are out of business if people stop feeling pain.

Like we can't, he's like, we can't do our job if people can't feel pain because they don't know something's wrong with them and they don't show up at our office, and we can't help them.

We can't respond to the their condition.

This pastor is writing to some people that are going through very hard stuff, and they're, I'm sure you probably feel it.

You want to rescue them.

You know, say, you want to comfort them and say, it's okay.

You know, maybe you don't need to follow Jesus so much.

You know, just tone down your witness a little bit.

It's okay, it's okay.

Right?

But no.

This passage is like, keep going, keep going, keep going.

Don't forget that proverb, Proverbs 3, that exhorts you, it encourages.

Exhortation is the idea of a general that comes up behind you and basically kicks you in the butt and says, Keep going.

Let's go forward, march forward.

That's what it means in Psalm 23 when it says, Your rod and your staff comfort me.

It's literally like a prod in the rear end with the staff.

Keep going.

That's what this pastor is saying.

Keep going, keep going.

Understand that the pain that's happening in your life, that is a part of the loving work of God.

Like filling in the picture.

It's it's all works out.

All right.

So thank you.

We love this pastor.

Don't I think we're all gonna be done with Hebrews.

We're like, okay, that's when we're done with this.

We just want to take our ibuprofen and take a nap.

Right?

No, Jesus, Jesus is our example.

Our expectation should be that if Jesus suffered, then we will too.

That it's a part, it's a part of the plan.

And the beautiful thing about suffering for us is that when we look at Jesus, we know he suffered and that he was raised.

And so we have this framework of engaging our own suffering with just total hope of like whatever the resurrection is going to be like for us.

And yes, there's going to be our physical death and we'll be raised.

But the way the Bible teaches suffering is like, look, you suffer and you keep getting raised in these little micro dramas of the death and resurrection of Christ.

If you'll submit and you'll engage us and you'll let God work in your life.

Let's pray and then we'll take a communion together.

Lord, we thank you.

Thank you for your love for us.

Thank you that you want us to grow.

You want to shape us into the image of Jesus, and you let us go through hard things.

Um, God, for each person that is here and that they're going through, they're right at that point of intense suffering.

Lord, I ask that you would um use that as an instrument in their life to shape them into your image, and that you would um accomplish all of your good purposes as they patiently and suffer long, and they're patient through this season.

Thank you for um the hope that we have in you in every season of life.

We're grateful for your care for us.

Um Lord, we pray that you um would speak to us even now as we um come to the table and as we take communion together as a church, um, that you would be the one that we are considering, that we hold at the forefront of our minds.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.