Disciplined Discipline with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medichurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

All right, man, I gotta say, I say this every time when I lead worship for the 115 uh PM service.

You guys are absolutely the most rowdy crowd.

Like I hear y'all singing.

I was in the back, I could hear you singing from back there, and we love it.

Man, there's not as many of you, but y'all are definitely louder.

So thank you for that.

We are so glad that you were able to make it today.

My name is Noam, one of the pastors here at MetaCurch.

I can't believe that we just got through spring break.

It's like the years go by faster, the older I get, but uh we were hope you were able to make lots of memories, have lots of fun with your families.

I got to do that.

I had my son Jack with me this past week, and we had some new experiences, went to some new places, and uh yeah, we're just so glad to be back here with y'all.

Now, a couple months ago, Pastor Clayton uh was talking with me.

He said, Hey, would you like to preach on this weekend?

I said, Yes, of course.

I would love the opportunity.

I like to do this a couple times a year.

It kind of stretches me as a pastor, it kind of puts me in an uncomfortable position, but really I just like to share the things that God has placed on my heart.

So I began to pray about what God would have me speak about today.

And now, usually he uh he prompts me with something he's already been working on in me.

And so I thought that's what uh was gonna happen this time, and the more I prayed, uh the less those things were resonating.

So I was like, okay, that's not what I'm supposed to preach about.

So I kept on praying, and God finally did speak to me.

And let me tell you why I know he spoke to me, because what I'm gonna talk about today is something I would have never chosen on my own.

In fact, it's something I'm not very comfortable with because I don't feel like I have like this really great grasp on it in my own life.

It's not that I don't have it at all, it's just that I don't have as firm a grasp as I would like to have on it.

But it is something I understand, it is something that I think is good for us, and it is most importantly something that scripture speaks to.

And so today, our message is gonna be called disciplined discipline.

Will you guys pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for this time that we have together where we can read your truths, where we can learn something new, we can hopefully take these things and apply them to our lives and be simple reflections of your light and love to a hurting and broken world.

Holy Spirit, we ask that you would speak to us.

We thank you for being with us.

Um, yeah, just help us leave with what we need to hear today.

We love you, Jesus.

We pray it in your name and everyone said together.

Amen.

Now, before we get too far into the message, I do want to echo something that Pastor Clayton has been saying since the beginning of the year.

He has really been encouraging us to become note-takers at MetaCurch.

And I do think this is important.

There's something about putting pen to paper or thumbs to smart screen, however, you take your notes, that helps us remember what we learned together in this place.

And even if you don't remember it, at least you can go back and look at what we talked about.

Now, I'll just be honest with you, I'm not really a note taker myself.

That's never been a strength of mine.

Like I spent my whole college career, never took one single note.

And if you think I'm bragging, I'm not, because I also never graduated college.

So you're really playing with your future here.

You can decide whether taking notes is important or not.

Now, we're talking about disciplined discipline.

And right off the bat, I want to talk about what discipline is not.

This is not what discipline is.

You're gonna wanna write this down if you're taking notes.

Discipline is not punishment.

Discipline is not underlying, underlying punishment.

And here's why we're gonna start here today.

Because so often when we talk about the subject of discipline, we think about what would happen to us as children when we misbehave, when we are disobedient.

That's what we call discipline.

And this could have come from any number of sources.

A parent, a teacher, maybe even a pastor or priest.

Something happened to us, it was under the heading of discipline.

Now, for us many people that are listening to this message online and here in this room, there's probably that many different ways of having been disciplined.

And so I'm gonna tell you how it worked for me and my family.

I was a spanked kid.

Where's the spanked kids in here?

Yes, there's been plenty.

Y'all find me afterwards.

We'll start our own life team, it'll be great.

We'll band together.

I'm just kidding, I'm not gonna do that with y'all.

I was a spanked kid, I got spanked plenty, uh, though my brothers would say I didn't get spanked near enough.

Certainly not as much as they got spanked, at least.

But here's how that would go down.

I would be doing something wrong, usually for like the fifth or sixth time, and my parents would tell me to go to my room.

I knew I was in trouble, but let me tell you something.

It was not a surprise to me.

Like they gave me plenty of warnings.

I may not have agreed with it, I may not have been happy with it, but I was not surprised by it.

I would go to my room and I would sit in my room until my dad would finally come and talk to me, and this was probably the worst part of it all.

He would talk to me for like 20 minutes.

At some point, I was like, Can you just spank me already?

Like, let's get this thing going.

He would talk to me for like 20 minutes, and he would say, No, this is what you did wrong.

This is the effects I can see it having.

These are the things that could have happened to you.

Like maybe I could have hurt myself or my brothers or the home, or maybe I was just hurting my relationship with my parents through my disobedience.

And then the conversation would truly become two ways, and we would talk about ways I could avoid getting in trouble in the future, how I could do better, how I could not be in this position later on in my life.

And we would have this beautiful moment where I thought we reached this new understanding.

It was like, yes, yes, we understand each other, dad.

I'm so sorry.

I guess I don't need a spanking anymore.

And then he would say the magic words, Noel, stand up, turn around, hands on the bed.

I was still getting the spanking.

And I know what you're thinking, Noel said that discipline is not punishment.

I'm gonna stand by that.

I do not believe that discipline and punishment are the same things.

Though I do think that punishment can be a part of discipline.

And this is uh like super important when you have kids because so often kids don't naturally experience the consequences of their actions.

Like for the parents in the room, if your kid throws a rock and breaks somebody's window, the owner of the window doesn't come out to the kid and say, hey kid, you owe me a hundred dollars, right?

Instead, they're gonna say, hey kid, where's your parents?

They owe me a hundred dollars.

It's not on them, it's on the parents.

And so punishment is actually a good way to help kids understand that there are actually consequences to your actions and to your behaviors.

And I think we can all think of some adults who probably didn't get that, that probably should have gotten that a little bit more.

It's the people who keep on living in ways and patterns where they don't understand why life isn't working for them.

When I would get in trouble, there's two parts.

The first was a conversation, which a lot of times did feel like the punishment to me.

But it was discipline.

It was about how I could be better out of this.

And then I got the spanking, right?

That was the punishment, that was the consequence, that's what I had to pay.

And so, for many people in here, you got punished and not discipline, but it was put under under the heading of discipline.

It wasn't actually meant to make you better, it was just a reaction to your behavior, and that's not what discipline is.

And so, we're gonna have some very simple definitions today.

We're gonna define punishment and um discipline.

The first one is punishment.

Here's our definition for today Punishment is about what you owe.

Punishment is about what you owe.

And you see this today when somebody's convicted of a crime, when they're found guilty of a crime, then they're sentenced some punishment.

Maybe it's jail time, maybe it's parole, maybe it's community service, whatever it is, they have to complete that sentence before they can resume their life as normal.

And we don't call that discipline, we say that's a punishment.

In fact, we'll say they're paying their debt to society, right?

They owe a debt and they need to pay it off.

Punishment is about what you owe.

Discipline is about how you grow.

Discipline is about how you grow.

Discipline is this amazing thing that when you can really implement it into your life, when it really takes root, it helps you move along the playing field of life.

It takes you from point A and brings you to point B.

And if you allow it to keep on doing its work, it takes you from point B and brings you to point C.

Discipline is the thing that if we can really engage with it, that will help us find our purpose that God has created you for.

And we say it all the time at Meturch, you were created on purpose and you were created with purpose.

I think most people want to have discipline in their life if we are being honest about it.

It's anecdotal, but here's why I think most people want discipline.

Because everybody, I'd be willing to bet, over the age of 20 in here, at some point in your life, has set a New Year's resolution, right?

We set New Year's resolutions because there's this magical time where everything starts over and we want to put something in our life that we think will make it better.

It's something that will help us.

That's our definition of discipline.

Discipline is about how you grow, it's a new discipline.

And unfortunately, statistically speaking, the overwhelming majority of people will abandon their New Year's resolution within 30 days of having made it.

And the reason they do this is because they want the results of discipline without ever going through the process of discipline.

And those two things are different.

The process of discipline is about what you receive.

A lot of times it's gonna look like opposition.

A lot of times the discipline you receive will make you want to stop on the path of discipline.

But if you can push past the opposition in your life, the the like speed bumps on your way to becoming disciplined, you can actually behave in new ways.

And that's what we call being disciplined.

And nobody becomes disciplined without receiving discipline.

We all know people who are disciplined in our lives are the people that you look at and you say, Man, I wish I could be more like that.

I wish I could add that into my life.

I wish I could work out more.

I wish I was like them.

Maybe you've even tried it a couple times.

Maybe you wanted to be a runner, but you never really had like a schedule that allowed you to run consistently.

And so you never gained that discipline.

Maybe you wanted to eat more healthily and you started with the best of intentions.

It's like you went to the grocery store, you planned out your meals, but then one day at work you forgot to take your lunch, and you're like, ah, whataburger's kind of a good option, too, right?

I'll just get one of their salads or something like that.

And before you knew it, you're all the way off the wagon.

And here's what we know about people who are disciplined in our lives.

We know that they didn't just come out of their mother that way.

They didn't come running out of the womb.

They didn't come reading books or bench pressing, right?

This was a discipline that they had to develop over an amount of time in their lives.

I think this message is coming right at the right time for us.

Because we just got out of a series where we were learning spiritual disciplines.

We read the Gospel of John together, one chapter a day for 21 days.

We prayed together, we fasted together.

And if you joined us on that journey, then I am very sure that you experienced something that maybe you've never experienced before, maybe it's just been a long time since you've experienced, but you experience interaction with God, and that's what comes with consistent fellowship.

That's why it's so important that we develop these spiritual disciplines.

But what are you gonna do now that that series is over?

What do you do now that there's not a blog reminding you to read, that there's not videos giving you insight into scripture, that there's no more prayer prompts?

Do you quit your spiritual discipline for what's more convenient, or do you continue pursuing a path of spiritual discipline?

Discipline is incredibly important.

Discipline is what helps us grow, and when we can receive discipline, we can become disciplined.

And the Bible has something to say about this topic.

We're gonna be looking in the book of Hebrews today, we're gonna be looking at Hebrews 12.

If you want to follow along, we'll have it on the screen.

Before we get into 12, though, I want to give you a little bit of scriptural context so we know what we're uh coming out of.

Hebrews 11 in the church is commonly known as the heroes of the faith, or what sometimes at Meadow we call it the hall of faith.

And the writer of Hebrews, which you're gonna hear me say a lot because we don't know who wrote Hebrews, and so I'm just gonna call him the writer of Hebrews, he's giving you this bird's eye view of all these people that lived in the Jewish scriptures or the Old Testament, and he's telling you about the lives of faith that they lived and all the good that came from.

And he's not only telling you about it, he's telling you about it with a purpose, and that purpose is to implore you to live that same kind of life.

But he's gonna give us a hint in chapter 12 on how to do that, and he's gonna give us an analogy to help us understand it.

And so before I give you uh too much of chapter 12, let's go ahead and start at verse 1.

It starts like this it says, Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares us.

Here's a Bible reading tip.

If you start randomly in the Bible and the first word you read is therefore, then you know you need to go backwards just a little bit because this is a connective word.

It's it's joining two thoughts together.

And we already know what happened before, right?

It was all the lives of the people who lived these uh great lives of faith that really changed the world.

He's saying, in case you were wondering, in case you doubted it, we have a large cloud of witnesses.

That's the people we read about in chapter 11 that testify to the fact that a life of faith can change the world.

And I do just want to say as a side note, your life, if lived with faith, can actually change the world, and if not the uh world at large, and certainly the world of someone around you.

It's important that we live lives that reflect the faith we have in Jesus.

But if we're gonna have that kind of faith, world-changing faith, then we need to do it in a certain way.

And here's what he tells us to do.

This is a first step, he says, let us lay aside every hindrance of the sin that so easily ensnares us.

Now, the writer of Hebrews, he had no clue all the things that could be a hindrance in our life in 2023.

But just off the top of my head, without even having to think about it very hard, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, any kind of TV, TikTok, Instagram, I mean, the things that are trying to get our attention are limitless.

You couldn't list all of them.

And here's the problem with those things is that usually when we engage with them, it starts off pretty innocently.

But it doesn't take you very long to start scrolling through Instagram before you find some content that maybe you shouldn't be looking at.

It doesn't take very long for you to be looking and watching Netflix before you find something that you're engaging with that actually goes against everything you profess to believe in.

And it's just entertainment, so it doesn't really bother you, right?

But that's not true.

It absolutely is doing something to you, it will affect the way you live your life.

It's important that you get away from those hindrances.

Maybe you just get on Facebook to connect with people.

I'm from a small town, it's like nice to connect with people I went to high school with, right?

But before you know it, you're looking up that ex-boyfriend or you're looking up that ex-girlfriend, and you're just seeing how life's going.

And if your wife or your husband knew that you're doing this, you knew, you know that they wouldn't be very happy about this.

It all starts out innocently enough, and the singular act of any one of these hindrances isn't necessarily where the problem is.

It's a pattern of engaging with them that so often lead us into the trap of sin.

Which is what the writer is saying, so easily ensnares us.

To be ensnared means to be stuck, to be caught, to be trapped.

You can't move forward any longer.

And this is not where you want to be in light of what he's gonna tell us next.

He says, Let us run with endurance, the race that lies before us.

Now, this is the analogy.

This is the thing he's gonna use to try and help us understand how to live our lives with an enduring faith.

He says it right there.

He says, Let us run with endurance.

This is an important word.

Endurance exists.

Hear this, endurance exists because opposition exists.

You have to endure because something is trying to stop you from moving forward.

You have to be able to push through this.

And he says, We're running a race.

Now, that's the analogy.

Your life is the race.

And if you were born, guess what?

You're running the race.

So turn to the next person or the person next to you and say, Welcome to the race.

Very loudly.

Okay, that was really good.

Y'all are really testing me.

See if y'all are as loud as I said you were in the beginning.

You're on the race, man.

Welcome to the race.

Now, I know you can't tell just by looking at me.

I am not a runner.

Running is not a discipline that I currently possess or even care to possess.

It's not something I am pursuing.

However, I do know what the goal of a race is.

And the goal of a race is to finish.

You want to finish the race, and you don't just want to finish, you want to finish well.

And we're talking about the race of life.

We're not talking about a hundred-meter dash.

We're not going for a world record.

We're not even trying for first, second, or third.

This is a race that you're running against yourself.

It's about what you can do with the things that God has provided to you from the day you were born.

It's how well you run the race that you're running.

This isn't a comparison race.

And if you're gonna run this race well, if you're gonna finish well, then you need to have endurance.

And endurance exists because opposition exists.

Now I don't run, but I do have a lot of friends who run.

And I've asked them when they train for marathons, I'm like, how do you even train for a marathon?

And let me tell you what I've never heard.

I've never heard them say, Yeah, I started running and then I got a leg cramp, and I was like, I just quit right now.

This isn't worth it.

No, that's not what they do.

They don't say, when I started running and the sweat got in my eyes, I was like, that stings, I'll just wait until the day of the race and I'll be fine.

That's not what happens, right?

Instead, the leg cramps, the fatigue, the sweating, all of those things act as discipline.

It's the thing that's pushing back against them moving forward, and it's the thing that they have to go past.

That's the endurance we need, and it helps them grow.

And that's what discipline does for us it helps us grow.

Instead of allowing the circumstances to ensnare them, a runner focuses on their goal of finishing the race.

You're running a race, and so that should be your focus as well.

You want to finish the race.

And in light of this, here's what the writer says: he said, let us run with endurance the race that lies before us.

Verse 2, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

Now, I started riding motorcycles maybe 20 years ago, a little more than 20 years ago.

And the thing I heard the most when I first started writing is, Noel, don't look where you don't want to go.

If you look where you don't want to go, that's where you go.

That's when you end up wrecking, right?

The opposite is true.

You can look where you do want to go.

So do look where you do want to go, and you'll be okay.

This is what this writer is basically saying.

Don't look back, don't look at the hindrances, don't look at the sin that so easily ensnares you.

That's the wrong direction.

That's not gonna get you where you want to go.

What you need to do is look towards Jesus, the pioneer, the one who started and the perfecter of the faith that we're professing to believe in.

This is how we keep on going in the midst of adverse of adversity, of suffering and pain.

In fact, he references this in verse 3, he says, For consider him, consider Jesus, who endured such hostility, there's our word again, endured, from sinners against himself, so that you won't grow weary and give up.

Even Jesus, even when he left perfect heaven and came to messed up earth, endured hostility from sinners against himself.

And he did this for a reason.

One was because it was all a part of God's salvation plan for the world, but two, because we were gonna be running the same race he's running, and we needed to be able to look at him and see how he lived so that when opposition comes our way, we wouldn't grow weary and we wouldn't give up, that we would keep on running the race before us.

And here's what I'm saying: like, I know y'all are dealing with real things.

I know there's things coming against you.

All of us have it.

If you're alive, then you are experiencing opposition.

That's one of the side effects of living in a broken world.

The writer says, in struggling against sin, in enduring past these things, and struggling against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

He's putting kind of a fine point on this.

He's saying, Yeah, you're struggling, you're persisting, you're enduring, keep on going because you haven't gotten to the point where you shed your blood, like I don't know, Jesus did.

Like Jesus endured to the point of shedding his own blood.

This is what you should do as well.

In fact, Jesus didn't just shed his own blood, Jesus died on a cross.

And the subcontext is basically saying, hey, if you're not dead, then you're not done.

You have to keep on going.

If you're still breathing, then you still have to run.

The race is not over, and the goal is to finish and to finish well.

I really want us to get this point today because too often the followers of Jesus see every setback and every bit of suffering and every failure as God punishing them.

And it's just not the case.

Because punishment is about what you owe.

Instead, God has promised that in all suffering, literally all types and all kinds of suffering, that He can turn those things around and be used for our good, that He can use those things to grow us.

And if you're growing from something like that, that has to be disciplined.

This is why Scripture calls us to endure, because we will experience the things that push back on us.

A lot of times, that looks like suffering in this world.

Suffering is one of those things that we need to endure through.

It's a thing that's trying to hold us back from running our race well.

Maybe what we need is to view suffering different than we viewed it before.

The writer of Hebrews says in verse 7, endure suffering as discipline.

He's given us a new perspective.

He's saying suffering and discipline are actually the same thing.

When you suffer, you should view it as discipline, and discipline helps us grow.

So suffering is actually a useful tool in our life to get better.

Since God is dealing with you as sons, for what son is there that a father does not discipline?

I want to be really clear God does not cause the suffering in your life.

Is not how God works.

He does allow it to happen.

And the reason he allows suffering to occur in your life is because he knows that you're running the race.

He knows that you need to grow your endurance so that you can finish the race well.

He knew this intimately because he sent his own son to run the exact same race.

He allowed the exact same suffering to happen to him so that we could see the life of Jesus and gather hope from it and gather our endurance.

Discipline, our suffering leads to endurance.

It's a thing that helps us become disciplined.

It helps us grow.

Here's how Paul says it in Romans 5, verse 3.

Romans 5:3

He says, and not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions.

Other translations say suffering there.

We boast in our suffering because we know that suffering produces endurance.

Endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope.

I love this chain that he goes through in this verse.

He says, suffering, we boast in our suffering.

We boast in our discipline because we know that discipline is meant to make us grow.

It's an opportunity for us to become better as humans.

It's an opportunity for us to run this race better.

Because when we have this suffering in our life, when we allow this discipline to do its work in our life, we grow in endurance, and endurance is what you need to finish a race.

And once you show that you have the endurance, you have a proven character.

This is not what you hope to be true about yourself.

This is about what has been tested and proven.

You have a proven character.

That proven character brings you hope, produces hope.

And only God could take your suffering, your immense amount of suffering, and eventually change that over into hope.

The suffering you have experienced in the past, the suffering that you're going through right now, the suffering that you're about to experience.

And everybody is one of these three.

I've learned this in my life, and oftentimes you're gonna cycle through all three of those.

All of those things can actually, when viewed correctly, can actually lead to hope.

I told y'all about a year ago in a message that I went through an amount uh immense amount of suffering about five years ago.

I lost my marriage of 10 years, I lost my best friend, I lost my wife, and I lost half of my son's childhood through custody.

It was incredibly painful.

Some of it is still incredibly painful.

I was in a deep, dark place, but luckily I had so many friends around me that were continually pointing me back towards Jesus.

And it wasn't easy.

I wanted to opposition to make me stop.

I wanted to not forgive.

I wanted to not love through it.

I wanted to just stop and wallow in my pain.

And yet I kept on going.

I'm not saying I went well all the time.

Sometimes I was just barely crawling, right?

But I never stopped.

I kept on moving.

And over the course of five years, I learned that I could be something different than what I have been before.

God uses suffering to make me into a better version of myself.

I am very convinced that people from five years ago, if they haven't seen me in five years, would say, I don't know who that guy is.

This is a completely different person.

There was a lot of, I still have a lot of rough edges, but there were a lot more back then.

There was hope that came from it.

And it was through this long process that eventually I was able to reconnect with a friend of mine that I had served on a worship team with over 10 years ago.

And after reconnecting with her, we started dating.

And after we started dating, we fell in love.

And now, this is my announcement to you all.

I'm getting married in July.

Only God can take that type of suffering.

Only God can take that type of suffering and change it into hope.

But you have to be willing to have a proper perspective of the role of suffering in your life.

If we only view our suffering as punishment, then we're never going to develop the endurance we need to finish the race that we're running.

The suffering that you have experienced or will experience or are experiencing right now, that suffering is not punishment.

And here's how I know if you've placed your faith in Jesus, which means you believe who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, that you believe he's the Son of God, and that he died on the cross for your sins, that sin debt you owed.

If you believe that, then that means he paid all of your sin debt.

That means you owe nothing to God any longer through your faith in Jesus.

It can't be punishment because punishment is about what you owe.

Instead, you are experiencing suffering.

That's real.

I would never try and tell you that's not real.

It is real and it is useful.

Because suffering can be viewed as discipline, and discipline will always help you grow if you allow it to take root in your life.

And Meta Church, our deep desire as your pastors and staff is that you would continue to grow.

That you wouldn't just survive this life, that you would actually thrive in this life, that by the power of Jesus Himself, you'd be able to break through the chains of sin that have so easily ensnared you, have so easily held you back from running the race that you are running.

And we hope that you run the race as well as you possibly can and that you finish well.

But all that comes through discipline, behaving in disciplined ways, and you can't act disciplined if you don't receive discipline.

I want to close with one final verse from Hebrews, it's chapter 12, verse 8.

And this is a cautionary verse, and uh I think it's worth uh really paying attention to.

Here's what he says: he says, but if you are without discipline, which I'll receive, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.

This is a little chilling if you read it properly.

He's like, if you are without discipline, which I'll receive, basically he's saying, you are with discipline.

Like this is happening.

If you choose to not view it as discipline, which I'll receive, you are not sons and daughters, you are like illegitimate children.

My church, if you've put your faith in Jesus and you are in relationship with God, nothing, nothing can change that.

However, you're gonna have to choose how you assess the trials and tribulations that come from living in a broken world and how you choose to view those things may be the biggest single factor in determining the outcomes and the quality of your life.

If you think that every negative thing that happens to you is punishment, then you will live your life as a victim to your circumstances, or you're going to live as a villain where you domineer every person in every situation around you so you can protect yourself from ever experiencing hurt.

An illegitimate child of God doesn't mean you lose eternal life.

It means that you live a life that is not reflective of the heart or character of your Heavenly Father.

But if you can choose today to view any and all suffering as an opportunity to become disciplined, there's nothing that can stop you from reaching your full purpose and potential.

And here's why that's important.

Because as a writer of Hebrews said, we're running a race.

It started when you were born, it ends when you die.

And the finish line, at the finish line, is Jesus for the believer.

It's Jesus.

And when you stand before Jesus, before the judgment seat of Christ, the Bama seat of Christ, you will be judged on how well you ran the race.

Not whether or not you were running a race.

That's already been decided through your faith in Jesus.

He's gonna judge how well you ran the race.

And here's why that's important.

Because on the other side of eternity, there's reward, or as the New Testament also calls it, there's inheritance.

You'll read throughout the New Testament it says, don't use vulgar language, don't do crude joking, don't be an idolater, gossip, all these things throughout the New Testament.

He says, for such people will not inherit the kingdom of God.

And here's why that's important.

When you put your faith in Jesus, you become an adopted son or daughter of God.

And your heavenly father has a great wealth and eternity for you.

It is an inheritance like you can't imagine.

And what determines what you get is how well you run this race.

Sons and daughters inherit their father's wealth.

Illegitimate children don't.

You'll be on the right side of eternity, but you won't get everything that there is to be had in eternity.

This is why living a life of discipline is so important.

It's important for us and it's important for the people around us.

It helps other people see the love of God being active in your life.

It shows that you really believe what you have professed to believe in.

And when you can receive discipline, you will behave in disciplined ways.

And when you behave in disciplined ways, you will be considered a disciple in the kingdom of God.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are grateful for your word.

Um we're grateful that we don't have to figure this out for ourselves, that you have made the way clear for us, that the path is straight and clear.

So, God, I pray that we would be able to uh live lives that reflect what we profess to believe in.

Father, I pray that you would uh, by your spirit, encourage people to stay in fellowship with you through reading your word, through prayer, God, through these spiritual disciplines that we've been learning together.

So that we can experience you as much as we can in this life and even more in eternity.

Jesus, we love you, we trust you, and we pray it in your name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast, you can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps, you can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.