Jeanie and I recently read a book with a provocative name—The Insanity of God—by the pseudonymous author Nip Ripken. Of course, the title elicits the question, what is insane about God—a question the author never directly answers, but only becomes evident upon contemplation of his message.
It turns out he and his wife were veteran missionaries to Africa, where, among other things, they pioneered efforts to establish missions work in horribly war-torn and Muslim dominated Somalia on the horn of Africa. After losing a teenage son to illness in another part of Africa, they spent six years distributing food and supplies where the threat of persecution of Christians was so great that they didn’t dare preach Jesus. Nipken only celebrated the Lord’s Supper once, with four other Somali believers, and within a short time each of them was murdered by Muslim extremists in separate incidents on the same day.
They came home tired and disillusioned, wondering why God permitted such horrific persecution, and more than that, how believers in places where persecution was a regular part of life handled it. It launched Rip on a world-wide tour of interviewing believers in persecuted places to discover those answers. And the answer he discovered is the very answer provided for us in the Book of Hebrews, chapter 12, this morning. The insanity of God is that he actually uses something intended to destroy Christianity to build it up—He actually uses persecution and affliction to perfect His people and grow His church in every way.
Obviously, this is counter-intuitive in every way. It apparently was counter-intuitive to the Jewish believers in Judea in the first century. They were being discouraged terribly by their on-going experience of persecution, so much so that they were considering walking away from Jesus. Instead the writer to the Hebrews in Hebrews 12 tells them to let the Lord use persecution to lovingly perfect them for their good and God’s glory. That’s what both they, and we need to remember in any of the adverse circumstances we face in life: God uses those trials, and persecution, to perfect us for His holy purposes.
And there are at least three steps he mentions we need to take to keep on keeping on for Jesus. First, we need to lay aside every sin & hindrance to following Jesus. Second, we need to look to Jesus as the ultimate inspiration for endurance. And third, we need to let our Heavenly Father’s disciple work for our Good and God’s glory.
As we come to Hebrews 12, we come to the climactic exhortation in the entire book. The writer is now summoning the force of everything he has previously said, and especially of all the examples of faith in faith’s hall of fame in chapter 11, to encourage believers not only to persevere in the faith, but to run the race unrelentingly to the very end.
And in order to do so, he tells us to lay aside every sin and hindrance that might keep us from not just enduring but running the race of the Christian life to the end.
“Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us and let us run, not walk, but run with endurance the race that it set before us.”
Of course, the great cloud of witnesses are those he has just reminded us of in Hebrews 11, all those who by faith endured to the end believing in God’s promises, and whom we will join in the Kingdom to Come to experience glory with them. They are now on the sidelines, in the stadium, cheering us on as we play the game, run the race, complete the contest on the field of action. Their lives are inspirations to us that what we are doing can be done and can be finished with a flourish.
But in order to run the race of the Christian life successfully to the end, we’ve got to put off every sin, and any hindrance to running it. This year, we’re hoping we can once again enjoy the Olympics, after a year’s delay due to the Pandemic. Have you ever seen an Olympic competitor even attempt to run a race while carrying a backpack, or a suitcase? That would be ridiculous! And yet that’s the way we often attempt to run the race of the Christian life—encumbered or weighted down, distracted or discouraged by some sin that so easily entangles us. And boy, does it so easily entangle us, I admit from personal experience.
So the question you might justifiably ask, is how do I get rid of the extra weight, that sin that encumbers me? Well, I was recently having a conversation with a dear Christian friend who is a very devoted believer and has experienced tragic things in his own Christian walk, but still endures. He explained to me how he, in the midst of struggling with discouraging and even devastating thoughts and feelings, meditated on I John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” And as he focused on the conditional promise that we must confess sin in order not only to be forgiven, but to be cleansed, or purified, to get rid of our sin, he realized he must be disciplined to confess sin each time, in his mind, he began to entertain it, especially I imagine, by way of discouragement or depression. And since these thoughts were habitual and cyclical, initially he was confessing his sin dozens of times within an hour, but it was when he was so disciplined to do so, that he began to experience victory, the realization of the promise of I John 1:9: He was cleansed of his sin to the extent that He was disciplined to confess it every time he even briefly participated in it.
Now we both had been instructed at one time, I believe, that yes, you needed to confess your sins, eventually. You might confess your sin at the moment of sin, or save up your sins, so to speak, to confess them altogether, perhaps at the end of the day. The problem with saving them up, confessing them in wholesale fashion at the end of the day is two-fold: 1.) Often our confession of sin at that point isn’t specific, but general. And 2.) the promise of the cleansing is not fulfilled until there is specific confession and repentance. So we leave ourselves in a condition where sin becomes habitual because we have neither immediately repented of it when we have become aware of it, and without the fulfillment of the promise of being cleansed from it until we get to the matter of dealing with it. I can’t imagine that this is God’s will—to allow sin to dominate our lives or our thought lives until we get around to confessing it. The key to laying aside sin in this race is to deal with it immediately and repeatedly by confessing it to gain God’s promise of being cleansed from it.
I tried it, and it works!
So if you’re stumbling in this race, confess, confess, confess, every time sin raises its ugly ahead in your life, immediately and specifically, and experience God’s cleansing.
Second step Fix your eyes on Jesus. Look to Jesus for the ultimate inspiration of endurance.
Verse 2: “Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
Life is so often a matter of our focus—what will we focus on, what will we think about. And what we choose to focus on often determines our outlook and the outcome of our lives. In this whole matter of following Jesus, obviously we need to focus on the leader, the author and finisher of our faith, if we’re going to follow Him.
And so the exhortation here is to do just that. The Greek work for fix means to look away from one thing in order to look at, focus on something else. We look away from those things that encumber or discourage us and focus on Jesus, the climactic example in Faith’s Hall of Fame of those who lived by faith, and patiently endured suffering in order to experience the Glory to come.
And as our faith has been perfectly constructed, we can never accuse God the Father of showing favors to Jesus or making things easier for Him. Here is someone who was absolutely sinless, who unlike us did not deserve any of the suffering He experienced, and yet endured greater persecution and a more excruciating and shameful death than any of us have experienced—death by crucifixion, that He might save us from our sins. If Jesus endured such an unjust and shameful, excruciating death, without deserving it, and He is our leader, how can we complain?
He is after all the author, the pioneer, of our faith, so He set the standard. But more than that, when it comes to persecution or suffering of any kind, note that He endured suffering. He actually despised the shame. It was not fun or pleasant for Him either. How did He do it? In part because of His focus—He was ultimately focused on the joy set before Him—the joy in saving us and experiencing glory at the right hand of the Father in heaven. So it was ultimately worth it all, and it will be for us, whatever we suffer.
Verse 3: “For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself so that you will not grow weary or lose heart. You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin.”
In other words, if you are alive and reading this, Jesus has certainly gone before you and gone beyond whatever you have so far suffered, so there is no excuse. And He set the example of just how far we should allow our suffering to go, to death, if necessary, to follow Christ to the end.
And He is the finisher of our faith. He is the one who will enable us to finish well, if we allow Him to, if we ask Him to, if we follow Him in the power of the Holy Spirit, praying as He did, from the heart, not my will, but thine be done.
And then finally we need to Let our Father’s loving discipline work for our good and holiness. Let your heavenly Father’s loving discipline work for your God and holiness.
The readers had evidently forgotten an Old Testament exhortation that today many of us regard to be a New Testament quote, and of course it is, now that it’s in the Book of Hebrews. But the original recipients of this letter had it too, in their Scriptures, in Proverbs 3:11-12. And the writer’s concerned they had forgotten this exhortation which was addressed to them as sons: Verse 5: “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 faith when you are reproved by Him, for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.”
Now there are a number of critical points to remember from this exhortation. First, persecution, or the problems of any kind we experience can be equated with God’s discipline. Persecution, trials, problems of various kinds, are permitted in our lives by our loving Heavenly Father in order to discipline us so that we become more like Christ. They are not accidents; they have been sovereignly permitted by God for His purposes. So whatever trial you are experiencing, and name some, it is not an accident. It represents God’s sovereign discipline upon your life to make you more like Christ and is intended for your good.
Second, don’t take that discipline lightly. Don’t blow it off. It is a big deal. It’s God’s big deal, and He wants you to learn something from it. Your job is to figure out what that is, what you’re supposed to learn and how you’re supposed to behave as a result of it.
Thirdly, from verse six, notice God’s motivation. “For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges, He spanks, he severely disciplines, every son He receives.”
Don’t make the mistake of thinking God is dealing with you hatefully, or out of revenge. There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. When bad things, like persecution, take place in your life, God has a good and loving purpose for it. Because he loves you, not because He is angry with you, He has permitted these things to take place in your life to perfect you, to mature you in Christ, so that your behavior conforms to His image, in accord with God’s holy will.
Now this is a vital realization. God lovingly deals with you as sons and daughters. Persecution and trials are not a sign of his anger or his wrath, but a sign of his loving discipline of you toward His good and holy purposes. The moment you misinterpret them as signs of his wrath or justice against you, you may end up being embittered against Him. And that would be totally unfair. He loves you and wants what is best for you, and that’s why He doesn’t leave you undisciplined or as you are, because as we know from Proverbs, he who spares the rod does his son no favors. Consider persecutions or trials signs of God’s love and respond to them as you would to a loving Heavenly Father who is always working for your good and your benefit, and you will do well. So it was with these Jewish believers, the on-going persecution they were experiencing needed to be regarded by them as signs of God’s love.
And then fourthly, if you are not disciplined, that is not a good sign. Verse 8: “But if you are without discipline, of which we have all become partakers, then you are illegitimate children, and not sons.” In other words, if you’re not experiencing God’s discipline somehow, then that’s when you really have a problem. It may be a sign that you are not a child of God, not even a believer. The fact that you are afflicted or struggling in some way is a sure sign you are a child of God, and that God is working in your life for His good purposes.
And then we have the common “from the lesser to the greater” argument used here. If we were subject to the discipline of our earthly fathers, how much more should we be subject to the Father of Spirits and live. Verse 9, “Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected/reverenced them, should we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share in His holiness.”
This verse brought back a memory to me of one time my earthly father’s discipline had a huge impact on my life—was perhaps a turning point in my entire experience as a person. As I was growing up in Southern California, our next-door neighbor, Ernie, was involved in the very ambitious project of building his Shangri-La in his large backyard. He was installing a hill with a water fall that flowed into a Koi pond, and he installed a swimming pool, and all this activity was occurring just over a cinder block wall that separated our two properties. One day, as a skinny nine-year old, I looked over that wall and saw some of the beautiful large rocks he had purchased to lay alongside the border his Koi Point, and I coveted them.
I looked to the right and then to the left, and scrambled over that rough cinder block fence which was well over my head several times, severely scraping my body each time, ran, and stole three of those rocks, which I then proudly displayed before my dad on our patio! Strangely, I thought at the time, he was duly unimpressed. And then, despite the fact that he himself was no paragon of virtue, in consultation with my mother, he required me to march right over to Ernie’s front door with one of the rocks, ring the doorbell, and confess that I had stolen three of his rocks. It was one of the more embarrassing and painful disciplines of my life. But Ernie merely laughed, and accepted my childlike folly for what it was, and graciously took the rocks back without any hint of rebuke. And I have never ever since knowingly stolen a thing from anyone. In fact, just this past week, as I walked out of a watch repair shop, I noticed they had undercharged me by a mere two dollars, and I went back and informed them of it, paid the two bucks, and was grateful I was so easily able to buy the peace of mind, and peace I had with God for so little as a result.
Yes, as verse 11 says, such discipline, though painful at the moment, afterward yields the peaceful fruits of righteousness. What a grand picture, a great expectation, not only with respect to what we hopefully learn from our earthly parents, but what we will learn, if only we will willingly and gratefully subject ourselves to the loving discipline of the Father of our Spirits, so that may not only live, but experience the peaceful fruits of righteousness as a result.
The Insanity of God—He uses the very things which the devil intends to use to destroy our faith, to build it up, to discipline us to be more like Christ.
One of Rip Nipken’s journeys took him deep into China where he was able to attend a secret gathering of many believers from many house churches—believers who had repeatedly and regularly experienced great persecution because of their faith. He was impressed by the intense devotion to Christ of these believers, and he discovered the reason why—most of them had spent years in prison as a result of their faith. In fact, what he found is that the one experience that seemed to qualify people to be spiritual leaders in their churches was the standard prison sentence that each of them had received for association with an underground church—three years in prison. In fact, that three years in prison seemed to have the same effect on the maturity of believers there that three years in seminary in the U.S. is supposed to have—it equipped and matured the believers so that they could be spiritual leaders in their churches.
Yep, remember God uses persecution, and trials of all kind to perfect us for His purposes.
Will we remember that important truth when trial of any kind, especially come are way? For persecution, and affliction of all kinds, is God’s loving discipline designed to perfect us for our good and His glory.
Let’s pray.
