More About Discipline

And you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, "MY SON, DO NOT REGARD LIGHTLY THE DISCIPLINE OF THE LORD, NOR FAINT WHEN YOU ARE REPROVED BY HIM; FOR THOSE WHOM THE LORD LOVES HE DISCIPLINES, AND HE SCOURGES EVERY SON WHOM HE RECEIVES." (Hebrews 12:5-6)

Why would I faint when reproved by God? I think one prominent reason would be if I thought that His discipline was coming in the same way and with the same spirit that the abusive discipline was administered to me in my childhood. That would be a big cause for becoming very discouraged and not seeing any useful outcome for the discipline. It would only reinforce the negative ideas about God induced in me through years of faulty discipline.

I believe that it is only after I begin to really get a glimpse of the real truth about God and the ways in which He relates to His children in contrast with the mistakes of others who have used counterfeit methods that I will be able to accept “healthy” discipline from God without fainting. It is only when a person accrues a certain amount of confidence in the trustworthiness of a superior that they can entrust themselves to the various means necessary for mentoring including discipline. If I have not first learned to trust the heart of God and His unfailing goodness and His good desires for my life, then I will be too suspicious and fearful to trust Him when circumstances seem to scream that He is trying to punish me someway for some reason other than good intentions toward me. It will only reflect the tragic and twisted notions about God's wrath so prevalent in the world today.

For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines. At first glance this seems to ring with the same hypocrisy that it had whenever my Dad would say those words about the reason he wanted to beat me. Somehow it did not correspond very well with the spirit that I sensed from him or the way that he was relating to me. I am not saying at all that my Dad did not love me in some way – I am very sure he did. But at the same time, using that reasoning to justify venting his frustration and anger on me through whippings was not an effective expression of his love and did not even accomplish what he hoped for. I now realize that the reason he did that was for lack of knowing what else to do from his own lack of proper mentoring and he was at the limit of his abilities to know how to properly express love in the raising of children. He had never experienced love in his life, had not even had a father of his own to relate to, and therefore did not know what it looked or felt like to be nurtured and mentored properly. This was the best he knew how to do and was also very common in the culture in which he lived, but that did not prevent it from badly distorting the image of God in my soul. Very sadly I realize that I did not do much better myself with my own children.

It is not only until very recent years that I have begun to perceive the radical difference of the passionate love that God has for me in contrast to the dark, distorted methods sometimes used by my parents and other authorities. The more I learn about the startling truths of the real gospel the more I see the ugliness of human counterfeits and substitutes of that love. But the more I learn about the beauty, attractiveness and trustworthiness of God the easier it is for me to trust Him when my feelings are telling me its not really true. Its like learning to believe the sun is still really shining even when it has been overcast for days. That is what I think this phrase is talking about, do not faint when you are reproved by Him.

It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? (Hebrews 12:7)

I find the first part of this verse very curious. I think I am going to wait and see what else God wants to show me about this because it seems to be one of those places in the Bible that is like a trap door hiding all sorts of interesting things just underneath it. If you have any ideas feel free to share them with me. God can talk with you just as quickly as with me if you are interested in listening.

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Healthy Discipline

I'm still working on unpacking this passage about discipline in Hebrews 12. I decided to go look up the word in Greek and compare it to the Greek word for disciple. I have been told all my life that the two words were so similar, at least in English, that they carry much of the same meaning. But that has always been an observation that I have never personally checked out for myself. So I decided that it is time to go see for myself what the similarities and differences are in these two words.

At first I began to wonder if they were very related at all as I looked at their definitions. The Greek words themselves looked very different. But then I saw what was going on. The word translated “disciple” simply means to be a learner or a pupil, a student. That is pretty straightforward. But when I looked at the word for discipline there were a lot more options. When there are a lot of options there is also a lot of room for a translator's own preferences and prejudices to leak through in how they interpret a word or passage. But it can also leave room to see how an alternative meaning can sometimes better reveal the truth about God that has been hidden by someone else's bias.

Some of the potential meanings for the original word translated “discipline” do involve punishment, but I found interesting nuances when I looked through the root words that make up the Greek word. The primary meaning seems to have to do with training and educating someone. The references to the painful part of it denote that the violence of the smiting, when it must be done, is conservative and less than other potential violence. But primarily it seems that this word has more to do with training and educating a person more than creating pain for them.

What I see when comparing these two words is the two sides of the same concept. The disciple is the one who is the recipient of the training and education, and the discipline comes from the one who is doing the training and educating. It does not seem to be implicit that there has to be any smiting or punishment going on in this process, but if it is necessary it will always be very measured, restrained and deliberate for only assisting in the training and education process, not for punitive reasons. I believe that it would be safe to say, especially given the character of the Teacher in this case, that any pain that has to be inflicted to accomplish the education needed in our lives will only be to the extent necessary to bring good growth and healthy advancement. There would be no abuse of power or coercion or punitiveness to this process. Only that which would be for the benefit and maturing of the recipient would be allowed.

While that is not something I would clamor for, it is a vast improvement over the abusive punishments that many human fathers inflict on their children. Much of that is done as a means of venting the anger or frustrations of the parents on the children or trying to force their desires on their children instead of carefully trying to help them learn skills of self-control and healthy thinking and real maturity.

In reality, if we want to know what good discipline looks like, we would find the best example in the way Jesus related to His personal disciples. That was the perfect model of a match between disciple/student and discipliner/teacher. If we carefully analyze and learn from the ways Jesus treated His followers in all sorts of varied circumstances and especially in times when they were making mistakes, we will begin to get an idea of what healthy discipline looks like.

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What is Good Discipline?

(This post is only one part of a whole series of writings that I am “experiencing” in my journey through chapter 12 of Hebrews. I felt convicted a few weeks ago to jump into this search for my bitter roots in my journey to freedom and I was directed by the Spirit to this chapter as the context in which God would reveal some things I need to know to help me to freedom. Because of the sensitive nature of this journey I have not felt free at this point to post most of the things I have written because I need to allow my heart to feel safe enough to show me its true feelings without fear of exposure to insensitive others at this point. Maybe later when it has experienced more healing and feels stronger and safer I may be able to post the whole series. But for now I will only put out the things that it gives me permission to post, and even then with some trepidation.)

(Hebrews 12:5-11)

While it is true that discipline in the life of a person shows that they are a legitimate child, if their experience consists of not much other than discipline then something would seem to be quite wrong about their relationship to the one disciplining them. Any family where discipline is the main feature is usually a very legalistic, perfectionistic-oriented family that is not very healthy. When relationships revolve more around discipline and punishments than they do around positive, joy-building activities, then it is very likely that the discipline is being administered in the wrong spirit and is not having the effect that it should have if done properly.

If discipline is not producing a noticeable change in our life then either the administrator is not doing it properly or the recipient is resisting it all too effectively. Since God, the perfect parent, is also perfect love and all of His discipline is done totally in that context, then if we are resistant to true love (not the redefinition of the word used by abusive parents) then we will be hardening our heart and stiffening our necks in rebellion against the holiness of God. For this passage says that this is the purpose of God's discipline, to make us partakers of His holiness.

I know that when I was growing up my attitude of rebellion was often met with a reflective and similar attitude from those in authority over me. They reacted to my resistance by employing even stronger measures of arbitrary force without real love for me which in turn only produced more rebellion and resentment which simply intensified the vicious cycle. To justify their use of abusive methods against me they claimed that they were only doing it in love. But their spirit did not convey that message and so it created a lot of bitterness about authority that became my inner picture of what God was like and strongly taints my relationships yet today.

But since God is a perfect parent He is not going to administer His discipline in ineffective ways or in ways designed to force and break my will or produce fear like earthly parents often do. God does not want us to have a spirit of fear. (2 Tim. 1:7) Fear is something He repeatedly commands us to not have throughout the Bible, so why would He use discipline to instill it into us and then command us not to have it? No, God is not like our earthly parents and He does not discipline us like they did which was too often more for their own benefit more than for ours.

It says here that one of the objects of His discipline is so that we may share in His holiness. Holiness is something we have very little, if any, understanding of if stripped of its legalistic connotations. But holiness is one of the primary descriptions of God so whatever it is it describes who He is – it is His identity. So logically thinking we can conclude that discipline from God is designed to bring our identity into harmony with His identity. That really means restoring the image of God back to its original condition in which we were created six thousand years ago.

If all I have known or seen is corrupted ideas of discipline, then how can I ever cooperate properly with the good kind of discipline from God when I don't even know what that means or feels like? I will naturally apply the assumptions about discipline to things that have happened to me and then come to false conclusions about my experiences and about God because of my twisted ideas of what constitutes discipline. If real and value-enhancing discipline is something that is outside my internal definitions, if it is simply not found in my database of knowledge based on personal experience, then it will be extremely difficult to either respond positively to it when it happens since I won't recognize it, or I will mistake things coming from the enemy as coming from God because it resonates with the distorted ideas about discipline that I am familiar with.

But even though this presents a problem for God I am also quite sure He is not baffled by it or surprised and confused. He knows my predicament and lack of context for understanding how to relate to good discipline but He also has very effective means of dealing with that obstacle of which I know nothing.

As I think about it I realize that one of the most important goals for good discipline is not to get me to trust in the plans or methods of God that I can see are reasonable and make sense but that I learn to trust the heart of God above everything else, and especially above my own limited knowledge of Him and of truth. If I begin to trust my knowledge more than His heart that is far beyond my knowledge and understanding, then I am headed into more trouble and confusion and may need more discipline to get my focus back on His heart more than in His ways.

I feel like these things are coming to me in real time and I am very grateful for God's willingness to share them with me in my search for real understanding of this subject that has so much pain and bitterness attached to it in my life. I stop at times and ask God if my heart is hearing this as much as my head is enjoying the dialog. It is difficult for me to know what my heart is doing as it is mostly out of reach of my conscious mind. It has remained hidden for most of my life in a prison of fear, dread and apprehension. It feels safer staying hidden in the dungeon even though it becomes extremely lonely at times, because it thinks that staying there is safer than coming out into the open where it may encounter even more abuse, shame and rejection.

It is very difficult for me to get in touch with my real feelings. They are very slippery and evasive and I usually only catch a passing glimpse of them, like a rare bird that avoids detection or frightened deer that stay far away from civilization. Consequently it has been a long and sometimes discouraging journey to draw my heart out and offer it to the Doctor for repair and restoration. I have not yet met a human with the skill and sensitivity needed to create a safe enough atmosphere for it to come out of hiding very far. My heart is completely convinced that no human exists like that and that any human that it might trust very much will sooner or later betray its trust and will once again abuse and assault it for selfish exploitation.

There it goes again into hiding. It was like it came out for a few moments to tell me what it felt and then disappeared into hiding again. Well, I appreciate whatever I can learn in those moments when I can really feel genuine, but they usually only happen when I am alone. I am overcoming much of my fear, at least the conscious ones, about God and I think my heart is very slowly trying to trust Him more intentionally. But trying to bond with other faulty humans who are guaranteed to make mistakes is another thing altogether. I logically know that I am supposed to have some kind of relationships like that but I find it impossible to establish any very effectively at this point. I don't fully understand why but I am getting clues here and there.

I want to experience healthy, positive bonding with other hearts as I was designed to do and am told that I am supposed to do. That is the only way I think I will ever truly feel satisfaction at the deepest levels. But my fear is still way out of proportion to my intense cravings for satisfying relationships so I remain isolated but hopeful that God has surprises in this area for me. According to the things I read in His word His plan involves living more transparently within the context of the body of Christ – whatever that really is. I am trusting Him to show me where and who that is and then how I am to connect properly with the rest of them.

Of course another big problem (but not for God) is that everyone else who wants to be part of that body is also fearful and carrying around confused ideas of discipline and proper bonding and so are sure to make mistakes in their attempts to bond just like I do. Because of my deep desire to bond with others I notice that I often do impulsive things that I later (or sooner) deeply regret. Sometimes those things cause intense pain to others in their inability to read the true intentions and desires of my hungry heart. That is very often the case. But as a result my heart withdraws again and tends to vow never to try to come out again in the open because someone may get hurt again, either me or the other person or both.

What the consistent factor is in these scenarios is the avoidance of pain. I logically realize that and can declare that it should not be the determining factor in my decisions, but that is all a bunch of absurd nonsense if you were to hear what my heart really believes. And I suspect the same is felt by the vast majority of the people in the world. That is not to say that it is right, it is just the normal reaction of a heart that still is in need of a great deal of healing and wholeness.

I just realized that that very point takes me back to the problem of accepting or even comprehending the nature of good discipline. If my heart has been thoroughly trained to avoid pain above everything else then it also has been diabolically trained to avoid even the pain that might be involved in the good discipline brought into my life by the One who loves me intensely and will never abuse me. It is just like the evil one to set this trap inside of my heart to prevent me from growing into the loving relationships that God intended for me to enjoy not only with Him but with all of His children. If I keep pain avoidance as a higher priority than maturing and growing and thriving, then I will remain stunted in my growth and imprisoned in my heart. Again, my head can begin to accept this but my heart needs quite a bit more assurance before it is willing to buy into this proposition.

It is becoming more clear to me that the missing ingredient in abusive discipline is real and obvious love. The abuse of that word in the administration of abusive forms of so-called “discipline” has also severely damaged my heart's understanding of that word too. Because I have so little comprehension or memories of what real love might look or feel like I have no context in which to believe and accept the idea of healthy discipline. If love and caring and respect are missing in the spirit of anyone who is exercising discipline in the life of another, then that discipline is going to produce the wrong results and the heart is going to suffer more damage than good from the experience. And since very few of us have ever experienced good discipline from a loving parent that accomplished its purpose of drawing us closer to their heart, then God has a very big job to reverse that tragic damage to our psyche and bring us into close relationship with Him. And I have to confess that I have passed on just as much malfunction from skewed ideas of discipline as what I received myself.

It is quite clear here in Hebrews that God fully intends to use discipline in the transformational process in our lives. I believe that He is only going to administer the right kind of discipline, though it may very often seem like the wrong kind primarily because of all the baggage in our hearts described above. I also believe that quite possibly we are too quick to label experiences in our lives as discipline from God based on our false notions of God when in fact they may actually be attacks by the enemy posing as Divine punishments and trying to reimpose and reinforce our twisted picture of discipline and our old feelings about an abusive God. Satan is not about to stand by and allow us an easy transition into the realization of God's beauty and perfect love and compassion for us without trying desperately to keep us locked in the lies about God that he has spent so long weaving around us to keep our hearts imprisoned in fear. This is now getting to the very core of what the Great War is all about.

It just came to me that my emerging understanding about the differences between the legal model of thinking and perceiving reality and God's true way of relating based on family-oriented relationships can help me understand what is involved in correct discipline. Abusive discipline that produces fear and often rebellion is arbitrary in nature. It is really punishment and not true discipline but it likes to use that term. God's kind of discipline is actually very full of grace. Let me explain.

In God's view of reality and the ways in which He operates, sin produces natural consequences that are not arbitrary at all in nature. These consequences are not imposed by God unless you think that He is responsible because He set up things to work that way. If you violate the law of gravity by stepping over the edge of a dangerous precipice without proper precautions you will be sure to experience the natural consequences. God is not imposing them on you arbitrarily. You committed the act and you experienced the natural result. The very same principle applies to all of God's laws, for all of His laws are descriptive in nature, not proscriptive like our legal model produces.

So as I am starting to just now see, whenever I suffer the natural consequences of violating the principles of reality that were put in place by God, I am setting myself up to suffer the full consequences of those violations. But that creates a much bigger problem. For if I were allowed to experience the full consequences of my mistakes and bad decisions then most of the time they would ultimately and often very quickly lead to my demise and then I would not be able to learn from them or grow into more maturity through the experience.

This is now where I am beginning to see what may be involved in the good discipline of God. He does indeed allow me to experience the natural consequences of my mistakes to some extent, but He always limits those consequences in order to protect and preserve me so that instead of raw justice (the natural results of contradicting reality) terminating my existence I am given opportunity to respond to this demonstration of His grace but also learn lessons from the pain of the limited amount of consequence that I do experience.

Given this view of discipline, it can be seen that instead of imposing arbitrary punishments on me for disobeying His orders and rules, God is constantly at work to shield me with His grace from experiencing the full effects of my many mistakes. And again, those consequences are not of an arbitrary nature any more than getting hurt by gravity is arbitrary and artificial; but they are unavoidable results of breaking the order and principles that constitute true reality as it has been created to operate. If it were not for the protective love and intervention of God's grace to prevent me from proverbially hitting the bottom of the canyon lethally when I stepped off the cliff each time I sin, then I could not survive to learn the truth about His love and just as importantly learn not to get so close to the edge of cliffs in the first place.

I realize that I have heard this explanation to some extent in the past, but because the context and the condition of my spirit was so conflicted with the message I could never really hear the truth in it before. It always sounded very arbitrary in nature because that is the only way I perceived God. But with God's recent revelations about Him self to my heart, it is only now just beginning to make sense to me and my heart is actually listening to this quite intently and with a feeling of hopefulness. I sense that I want this truth to become a much more permanent part of my perception of reality and my view of God. I have never understood grace very well as it was a topic generally avoided in my culture so this is really helping me perceive it more clearly.

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Roots of Bitterness - 7

Yesterday and with another couple pages this morning, I wrote extensively about my negative context about this word “discipline” that triggers me so much here in Hebrews 12. I am glad that it is triggering me in a way because it allows me opportunity to access the sources of those triggers more easily. And accessing the roots is exactly what this whole study is all about. I want to expose all the roots of bitterness in my life so that God's healing revelations of truth can replace the millions of lies that riddle the field of my heart.

In fact, now that I have put it that way, possibly one of the reasons that my heart is so hard is because it is so root-bound from all these roots of bitterness. These roots are so extensive and prolific that they have grown into a hard mass under cover of the subconscious and uprooting them myself would mean certain death to my soul. It is only the healing grace, truth and love of my Creator who has the ability, skill and compassion needed to deal effectively with my root-bound condition of overgrown bitterness.

I stop right now and dialog with God about this whole process.

God, I am writing this all for you, not just for me. I have been writing all these things for several days as Your Spirit has been bringing them to the surface as honest expressions of whatever I see and feel in my heart directly to You more than to anyone else. I do not write these things to impress anyone or to just vent my anger and frustration for venting sake. That may have a limited relieving effect on my heart but I need much, much more than just relief from inner pressure, I need multitudes of lie-based beliefs exposed and replaced with Your love and the real truth about reality and how You really feel toward me.

I also need Your truth and perspective on my past and my relationship with my parents, teachers and other people who caused so much of this pain and confusion inside of my heart and mind. I want to see them from Your perspective and with Your feelings so that I can become free of any residual resentment and bitterness that may continue to poison my life, my perceptions and those around me. I do not revisit these memories and feelings in order to cast blame on others or put them down, for I realize, at least with my head, that they too, were victims of abuse, lies and tragic childhoods that instilled so much confusion and bitterness into their own hearts that they simply later passed on to me, just as I have done the same to so many others, especially my children and wife.

God, this is a huge mess You have here, but that does not overwhelm You in the slightest. I just need to verbalize these things so that I can come closer to seeing things as You see them. Please continue this process, continue to fill my mind and heart with the presence of Your Spirit to flush out, resolve and heal even more than You are now. I am hungry for real heart-connections, not only with You but with other people as You arrange them in my life. I want to grow up in Christ and become more mature and less damaging to those around me. I want to be filled with the freedom and joy and peace that You have designed for me to thrive in as I live my life in Your presence.

I have noticed that there is a distinct shift in my thinking and feelings whenever I make the transition from saying “I want to...” to thinking or saying “I choose to...”. There is sometimes a legalistic guilt-trip voice in my head that demands that I comply immediately to this conviction or there will be consequences that I won't like and I have to resist that. But at the same time I find that I need to consciously move past the stage of expressing what I want to do to the act of choosing deliberately with my mind to move in that direction. I believe that in the supernatural realm it is a very important distinction that makes a significant difference in how the powers in that realm are allowed to relate to us.

When I stay stuck in the “wanting” faze of my experience it allows the dark forces to continue to exploit my lack of firm decision and fill me with doubts and fears. But whenever I state unequivocally my decision to deliberately choose to do what I want to see or move toward, I am laying claim to the covenant promises and commitments that God has provided for my success and that allows the forces of light to protect my heart and mind from much of the access and harassment that I may encounter in my neglect to announce that firm decision.

So I choose today to place myself under the shadow of the Almighty and the accompanying protections of His covenant. I openly invite His Spirit to dwell in me and make my heart His prayer room and throne. I surrender my rights to Jesus as well as bringing Him my fears, problems and confusion. I hereby give God unlimited permission to do whatever work or experience He desires to do with me in any way He chooses for today and to the extent possible for the rest of my life.

I want to not only become free from the heavy baggage from my past that is being exposed here in Hebrews 12 but I also choose to learn, especially at the heart level, what the real experience is of living within the context of God's good discipline. I am not so much interested in finding someone else's teachings on this right now as I am in hearing from God directly what He desires for me to know about what it means to be His son. If all I have now is messed-up distortions of this concept from my past, then I now want to know the truth about what healthy, life-producing discipline really looks like and feels like. I want to hear directly from God through His Word and any other means He chooses through which to communicate His truth to me about this issue. I want to lay aside, to become free from, to have all tentacles disattached from, all the false ideas in my heart about discipline and to be completely retrained and rewired so that I can relate properly to the discipline that comes from the undiluted goodness of God's heart.

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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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The Mind of a Hebrew

As I return to Hebrews today to continue my quest to uncover roots of bitterness, I began to think about who this book was written to and the possible reasons they may have had to entertain bitterness. Hebrews were Jews, the chosen nation, the people of God for many centuries to reveal to the rest of the world the truth about God. They finally rejected that position so completely that God had to accept their demand for divorce and revealed His backup plan – the body of Christ, His new bride. But this body was not distinct and separate from the Israelites but an outgrowth of them as is explained in Romans. The Jewish “branches” were broken off and Gentile branches were grafted in their place. But the trunk was not replaced and the opportunity is always there for the original branches to be grafted back in quite easily.

But if I was a Jew in those days listening to Paul's words about all of this and seeing thousands of non-Jews being welcomed into the favor of God that I thought was exclusively my prerogative, there would be a lot of potential for bitterness in my mind. And that was certainly demonstrated many times by the treatment by the Jews toward the Christians in those days. Most of the persecution suffered by Christians was instigated by jealous and bitter Jews trying to prevent God's plan to replace them as His chosen people on earth. They had for generations long believed that God's favor was only for Jews and just being born a Hebrew was enough to guarantee them a place ahead of everyone else in God's system.

Now, one of their most celebrated and zealous champions of that very belief had turned traitor on them and was now the zealous champion of their worst enemies, the Christians. And this very man, Paul, was going around teaching that Gentiles were considered in God's eyes as equally favored by Him when they accepted what seemed like a terribly watered down version of truth. Not only was Paul inviting millions of heathen and barbarians into fellowship with God that were disgusting to any good Jew, but he was also teaching that most of the strict requirements for being a chosen one were no longer valid. He was basically replacing all the good, religious doctrines that had been cultivated and worked out for centuries by the experts in religion with a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about love and faith and other emotional stuff that seemed to have no place in true piety. This sounded like heresy of the highest order and most Jews simply could not tolerate such perversion of what they strongly believed was “the truth”.

But remember, Paul is writing here presumably to converted Jews who are now part of the Christian believers. But that does not mean that they are free of all the previous baggage and beliefs about God from their past. It is also clear throughout the New Testament that there was a long-running undercurrent of discontent among the Jewish Christians about how Gentiles seemed to get off so easy compared to what the Jews believed was required to be a real Christian. They still could not believe in their heart that the gospel could really be that simple and easy to experience as the teachings of Paul seemed to imply. Because of this there was even within the church a lot of discontent and even bitterness in the hearts and minds of many Jewish Christians who felt that Paul was not strict enough in his teachings and beliefs.

The Jews were just like many, if not most people today in the religious world. They believed that one has to have a certain amount of tradition and rule-based behavior control to be a successful Christian. Sure you had to have help from God, but the responsibility for producing righteousness in the life to please a very austere, just God was the job of each person who expected to get to heaven. They believed that the gospel as Paul taught it was dangerously deficient in legal structure and requirements. They insisted that righteousness could only be accomplished through the imposition of strong regulations and ceremonies and discipline to keep people in line. They assumed that since God had taught them all of these “truths” for so many generations that it was simply absurd to throw them all away and embrace a completely new paradigm of thinking and relating to God. They promoted a more pragmatic approach to progress, a modification and improvement of the old ways but not such a radical break with the past. This was simply going too far and was sure to offend God and make Him angry with them. This would surely lead to the loss of many souls through dangerous deception and the disintegration of God's plans on earth.

It is at this point that the real problem begins to emerge. The fundamental misunderstanding in their thinking (and with ours) was their perception of what God is really like. They assumed from their view of the past that God was one who had to be placated and appeased or there would be dire consequences. God, they were certain, was very demanding of strict obedience to all the rules of law that had been compiled and revealed over history. Sure, maybe they had gone too far in their multiplication of rules and regulations and needed to revise and trim them down in certain areas, but fundamentally they still could not let go of their picture of God as a legal-based being who was more interested in obedience to law than He was in salvaging and restoring the hearts of His lost children. That was too much emotional based kind of thinking, had no real power to control people with fear and therefore had little place in “true religion”.

I believe this is likely a reasonable description of the general mindset of the average Jewish Christian in Paul's day. I'm sure there was a lot more involved, but basically human nature has not changed much over the centuries and the same problems tend to be repeated over and over again. The pervasive thinking in legal-oriented people today is pretty close to reflecting the same kind of thinking that has plagued people in all ages.

Given this context and placing myself in this mindset while reading Hebrews 12 it is easier to see why the writer is saying the things I find here. A Jew, or any legalistically-minded individual, would need to hear the various warnings and advice and instructions put down in this passage.

• There needs to be a better understanding of what faith really is and to experience more of it in our own life.

• There needs to be an understanding of our true relationship with those people who lived in Old Testament times.

• We need to understand the true nature and identity of beliefs that are really preventing us from entering fully into the freedom and peace that God wants for us as Christians.

• There needs to be a great deal more focus on Jesus and the intimate role He has in the true Christian's life.

• We need to understand the truth about Jesus' example and how to apply that to our own life.

• We need to see what sin really is outside the legal model and then how we are to resist it.

• We need to understand our relationship to God as children instead of slaves and what that means for interpreting the circumstances that come into our lives within that context.

• We must realize that the way our earthly fathers treated us is often not the right paradigm for understanding how God disciplines us.

• We must realize what God's real goal is for us – sharing in His holiness at the heart level, not external-oriented perfectionism. (We also need to know what these words really mean)

• We need to realize that much of our depression and discouragement comes from our misconceptions about God and His disposition toward us.

• We need to understand that our legalism has a wilting, discouraging effect on others in the body of Christ and that instead we need to be strengthening others, not making them weaker by our condemnation.

• We need to realize that instead of pursuing our righteousness and external perfectionism that God's desire for us is to pursue peace and sanctification (another seriously misinterpreted word), but in the ways He has outlined for us in the true gospel, not in the old ways of the letter of the law.

• All of these things are potential roots that if not corrected in our minds and hearts become sources of bitterness that cause endless trouble and defile the spirit of many around us.

Once again this passage is trying to get across to us the radical nature of the difference between the true gospel of God and the religious ideas that have been cultivated by humans throughout all of history. The fountain of the heart must be purified before the streams can become pure. He who is trying to reach heaven by his own works in keeping the law is attempting an impossibility. There is no safety for one who has merely a legal religion, a form of godliness. The Christian's life is not a modification or improvement of the old, but a transformation of nature. There is a death to self and sin, and a new life altogether. This change can be brought about only by the effectual working of the Holy Spirit. {DA 172}

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