Friday, August 19, 2022

Between Pinnacle & Pit - Part 2

Friday, August 19, 2022

Who ever heard of a child who is never disciplined by its father?  If God doesn’t discipline you as he does all of his children, it means that you are illegitimate and are not really his children at all.  Hebrews 12: 7b-8

We are continuing with our investigation of the gap between the pinnacle of genuine faith, and the pit of unbelief.  The issue is discipline, and it will drive you to one or the other.  Unbelief will receive discipline (from God), as well as faith.  Any “bad response” will drive you to the pit; God’s advice throughout this passage is to respond well to His correctives, and be lifted to the pinnacle of faith, a joyful relationship with your Creator.  So, the question is begged and on the table:

What is a Good Response?

In our text the writer poses the question:  What child isn’t disciplined?  This is a loaded question in contemporary culture’s parenting mode.  The lack of even the simplest forms of accountability when it comes to civil behavior, or manners, runs rampant in our land.  So is the result – a lack of respect for any kind of authority, and a nation’s character crumbling like the Towers on 9/11.

In fairness, you must consider the “WHY” behind parents not saying “no” to their children, backed-up by consequences.  It stems from a faulty evaluation of who we are at our base nature.  Parents imagine their children are “good”, and unacceptable behavior is merely a phase, which will give way to that inherrent goodness, like cream in a milk bottle, rising to the top. 

Scripture informs us[1] that our sin nature does not give way…it resists any inhibition whatsoever:

For I know how stubborn and obstinate you are. Your necks are as unbending as iron. Your heads are as hard as bronze.  

Isaiah 48:4

So, a child left uncorrected, unaccountable, doesn’t tire of his unacceptable behavior, changing into a fine human being – he keeps pushing the envelope until it breaks.  He abuses parents, peers, and those who get in his way, until God, or the penal system intervene.  Just like a garden that is left unattended, a lack of discipline will evolve into a rowdy mess of weeds, unproductive, unsightly, and totally unstable.  Humans in that category are tempermental, angry, selfish, sociopathic child-adults, unable to play nice with others.

A side-effect to all this is the child infecting the parents.  Many a parent, unwilling to say “no” to their child, has become frustrated that their hands-off routine didn’t work!  They get to that last straw of frustration and begin to abuse their child(ren), in a knee-jerk rebound from their failure.  What then replaces permissiveness is overbearing punishment, frustrating the child beyond any hope of accepting the parent’s intended good will.  The conclusion is that permissive parenting doesn’t work, because it is founded on a faulty premise:  good children left to their own choices make good choices.  How wrong, and how sad.

For You Today

True discipline always begins with love for the child.  Defined by He who IS LOVE, genuine discipline is always accountability-based, instructive, helping a child to learn to obey God’s authority, so he can grow into God’s loved and loving child:

For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Galatians 5:14

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these:  Punishment Island and Earth Day - Part 4      

[1] Images:  Pixabay.com     Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©  


[1] The word “stubborn” appears 66 times, relative to human obstinacy – (see the list here)

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