Roots of Bitterness - 6 Discipline

Discipline. How do I relate to this word and the many confusing assumptions associated with it?

One reliable teacher that I value says that false, externalized discipline is really conditioning. It does not produce the skills for internal directing but teaches one to depend on outside authorities to determine their choices and results.

External law uses the slave/master model of relationship. Feeling like a slave tends to lead to addictions to mask the pain of bondage. That seems to fit how I felt growing up. But of course there was always a great deal of guilt associated with most things that presented opportunities for pleasure so the fear of the guilt often kept me from indulging in many of the pleasures. But this was all based on the fear-slave-punishment model of thinking.

In the grace model faith involves trust in a person who we know to be trustworthy from personal experience and relationship. In the Hebrew language the word for faith has implicit within it the idea of a person so worthy of trust that they cause you to trust in them. It is not something you generate but something evoked by the person trusted. But I have a very hard time coming up with examples in my own life of this kind of relationship. That explains why I have such a hard time with faith in God.

It seems that I spend most of my effort simply trying to dismantle the lies about God and about religion that my whole life has been built on and designed around. That feels like most of my financial life as well. I spend most of my life just attempting, usually unsuccessfully, to get back up to zero instead of really building real wealth into my life. My financial life and my spiritual life may have more in common than I thought.

My whole structure of thinking about life is so entrenched in the legal model that I feel I do not even have the mental equipment to comprehend grace, trusting, open, vulnerable relationships, unconditional love and mutuality. The very wiring of my brain seems to have only the circuits used for processing life through the principles of external rules, appeasement and human constructs about justice, fairness and equality.

Equality sometimes implies getting even until others have suffered as much pain as they caused – revenge. Equality implies that I get treated good if others are treated good. Equality sometimes even morphs into eventually thinking that everyone should have the same amount of money no matter whether they work hard for it or not.

Fairness is a lot along the same lines, but it can denote more that people should be treated according to what they have earned by their behavior. The harder one works to be good the more they should be rewarded with good things in their life.

Justice mostly has to do with getting even. Justice is always deeply immersed in externalism which is what the whole legal system epitomizes. That means that everyone is supposed to only get exactly what they deserve but must especially get all the punishment they deserve for all the problems and pain that they caused others. This whole way of thinking is based on artificial law, positive law, prescriptive law and feels absolutely true. It is the belief system of the whole world but was introduced, not by God but as an alternative way of living by Lucifer.

All of this background is the assumptions and context in which my perception of discipline have been developed. Discipline to me was seldom viewed as fair. Discipline and punishment were always assumed to be one and the same, as it is for many people. Discipline was the coercion used to force me to conform to the desires and decisions of those with more power or authority who wanted to impose their demands on me. I can never remember any real love associated with discipline, only anger, fear, force and manipulation. It was usually an attempt to break my spirit and force me to become weak, compliant and submissive without any nurture for my will. Discipline was a form of extortion to induce me, through fear of intense pain, to obey someone else's arbitrary rules. And of course all this was done using the name and appealing to the authority of God Himself invested in those perpetrating these practices on me.

That is my inner perception and memories whenever the word discipline is used. It is no wonder that when I read in Hebrews that God always disciplines the children that He loves that I immediately feel a sense of revulsion, resentment and conflict inside. For the things that I have been learning about God over the past few years all seem to be in direct conflict with the implications and feelings that I sense bound up in this word.

It is clear to me that I need a great deal of revision to the mental and emotional paradigms that I have on board for processing this passage. Or maybe I need a whole new apparatus for processing. Maybe my original equipment is unfixable. But I only have one physical brain and somehow God has to accomplish His work of transformation using the same brain that I have been using all of my life.

Beyond just coming up with a more accurate intellectual understanding of the word discipline, more importantly I have to have my memories and heart involved so that my reactions to circumstances and triggers will reflect the real meaning of discipline, whatever that is.

Law only defines. It has more to do with the results of sin but no way to really solve sin itself. In the strict legal model there is technically no forgiveness without shedding of blood. But God's ways are not based on the legal model but are primarily revelatory in nature.

This explains the contrast between what I have experienced growing up and the way God is trying to get me to see reality in recent years. In my training, forgiveness was always tied to my being sorry enough. However, in my mind the severity of the punishments that I received were the equalizing factor. After all, why should I feel sorry for some infraction of someone else's rules if I was just going to be whipped anyway. If it made no difference in the amount of pain that was going to be inflicted on me I saw no sense in submitting to the additional humiliation of “repenting” according to the common view of that word. I might just as well suffer the punishment even though I felt it was always far too harsh and then try to avoid getting caught again.

From this context it is becoming more clear to me why forgiveness too is a word that has a lot of confused feelings associated with it. Forgiveness has always been conditional in my upbringing. Forgiveness seemed to be a legal technicality by which someone who was offended could be persuaded or induced to forgo their right to “extract their pound of flesh”, to get even, to let their offender off the hook. If enough appeasement could be produced to placate the offended party then forgiveness could be received and some sort of uneasy peace could be restored to the relationship.

But since that was almost always never what happened in my training, the whole idea or usefulness of forgiveness seemed almost superfluous. Forgiveness was something demanded of me if someone who had offended me claimed that they were sorry. And saying we were sorry was sometimes a set of words that was forced from us as children under duress whenever we had hurt someone else and the adults decided it had to be straightened out. As I think about it now, the crazy and confused beliefs about all of these elements don't really make a lot of sense but I have seldom felt at liberty to even try to make sense out of them by admitting how I really felt about them. Just sitting here exploring my feelings about these things right now has been a real eye-opening experience for me.

James Wilder says that when you force a child to be generous at too early a stage of development before they have properly learned to receive with joy, that they often become stunted in their ability to give cheerfully. They may sometimes become very dutiful and even generous givers or hard workers in the church, but they cannot do it with spontaneity and gladness.

I think the same thing may apply to my situation in other areas. Because I was forced to say “I'm sorry” without any reference to or concern for the condition of my heart, I was in essence trained to be a good hypocrite, to repress my true feelings and to put performance far above internal reality or transformation at the heart level. Appearances were everything and feelings were to be forced, pretended or repressed. Being externally proper and right was made supreme and issues of the real heart and emotions were ignored and minimized. I early on lost the chance to develop the skills needed to bond with others properly with my heart. I also lost much of my ability to sympathize in many respects or to know what was proper to do when I did feel it.

Since I don't think hardly anyone understood the true nature of real forgiveness when I was growing up, I too came up with ideas about forgiveness that were just as distorted as everyone else's. Forgiveness usually meant something along the idea of suppressing my desire to get even and trying to forget the offense someone had done against me. It meant, in essence, excusing what they did and letting them off the hook in the arena of justice. It also seemed that I was expected to forgive others without conditions but that I had to earn forgiveness from others by enough groveling or appeasement to convince them that I was sincere in my “repentance”.

Repentance was another word that carried a lot of confused ideas. It meant trying really, really hard to repress my desires to do wrong things and try very hard with my will power to be a good person so that God would forgive me and allow me into heaven. It also meant trying to somehow divest myself of my natural desires toward sinning. Since it was generally acknowledged that our will power is not strong enough to do this then we were to spend whatever time and effort necessary to pray enough and read the Bible enough to induce God to give us more strength to reinforce our will and repress our evil tendencies. The Christian life was often described as an unending struggle, a battle and a march to overcome every evil tendency or desire and put forth super-human effort to be religious and become righteous enough to reach God's standards of perfection.

Whenever I failed in any area to do any of these things, then as a child of God under His strict administration I would very likely have bad things happen to me as a means of discipline to bring me back into line. These bad events would be potentially proportional in severity to the seriousness in God's eyes of the violations that I had committed or the mistakes I had made. God's punishment, of course, was supposed to be seen by me as an expression of His love for me as a means of preventing me from enjoying evil and thereby losing my soul, for if that were to happen He would have to torture me in the flames of hell on judgment day for not being good enough to please Him.

So in the context of all these assumptions about the meaning of religion, God's attitudes toward me and reality as I assumed it to be, discipline was primarily a means to coerce me under duress to stop feeling “wrong” desires for satisfaction and pleasure and to live a sterile, pure life devoid of very much pleasure but approved by all the authorities in my life. If my earthly family and church did not administer enough discipline to keep me in line then my heavenly Father would take up the slack and I never knew how angry He might get about something I thought was very small in my life. This has been the context for the word discipline as I now look back and see it.

Needless to say (but unfortunately the previous is still believed to be the right model by many) I developed increasing resentment in my heart about all of this that increasingly turned into rebellion and resistance against authority. The seeming unfairness of not only the whole world's and church's system of authority arrayed against me to force me to be good, but also heaven itself committed to my endless misery that was somehow supposed to be meant for my benefit, just seemed too much to endure. And to add insult to injury I was told that I must believe that all of this was done in love and that to resist it was to resist love itself which would result in even more dire consequences.

My expressions of the growing rebellion leaking from my heart in my earliteen years were met with even stronger punishments and assaults of Bible-thumping warnings that “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft!”. This demanded that I see myself as somehow associated with the occult if I felt strong feelings of resentment for all the abuse being carried out against me. In addition I felt I could not even allow myself to think of it as abuse or I would be in trouble for that as well because that would be disobeying the fifth commandment and I would then be in trouble with God.

I find it helpful to explore these feelings and memories and am surprised at the freedom that I now have to even do so. I also want to say very emphatically that I am not doing this as a means of throwing blame on anyone for the abuses and distortions that occurred in my past but as strictly a means of allowing God to shine His light into some of the dark recesses of my heart where there is still pain that has been sealed away for many decades. I have learned that until I can face my past misconceptions and embedded experiential beliefs in an atmosphere of safety and genuine love that they will continue to trigger false reactions to situations today that subconsciously remind me of those old feelings and threats against my heart.

As I am able to admit that what I was taught and what I learned through experience was really wrong, abusive and not true, especially about God, then I am taking the first steps toward real freedom. I am learning that the same God who was so misrepresented to me throughout most of my life is really a God radically different and infinitely better than I ever dared to imagine. As my heart slowly begins to accept that revelation, it also even more slowly begins to loosen its death-grip on the lies that it so firmly believes about reality and bit by bit God's true light is able to expose and replace those lie-based beliefs with true, unconditional love, healing compassion and seeds of truth that produce healthy, life-giving fruit instead of pain, bitterness and death.

I am glad that God is taking me through this process though many times I wish I were able to go through it faster than I do. It seems that whenever I plan and schedule specific times with trained people to facilitate this process that my heart tends to shut down and go into deeper hiding. But then later at times that are very inconvenient, in my thinking anyway, or even embarrassing, God will suddenly show up in my life and cause a moment of truth and revelation to flash into my heart in ways that offer resolution and intense emotions that I wish would occur within the more supported environments of the presence of people who could help me process it.

These events present a whole new dilemma for me. I feel that if I resist the revelation for fear of public shame in reaction to unexplainable emotional outbursts on my part for no apparent external reason, then God will not accomplish as much as He could if I would just ignore my circumstances and those around me and give Him free access to my heart immediately. I also have to deal with the feeling of guilt and fear that springs up based on the notion that if I resist the Spirit too much when it gives me these clear opportunities for healing that I will further harden my heart and I will just have to come back around to the same lesson again and learn it later in even more difficult circumstances. This is the typical feelings I have whenever this happens but it also smells suspiciously like these feelings too still have some lies about God operating in the background.

Anyway, this is what has come up as I look at this passage about discipline from God in Hebrews 12. I think it has been good to revisit these feelings and I hope God will use this to further His work in the healing of my heart and to bond me more intimately with His heart.

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