Is God Punishing Me? What His Discipline Actually Means

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

Good morning, everyone. Good morning. It’s good to see y’all this morning. Hey, if you’re new or new-ish around here, my name’s Aaron Bjorklund. I’m one of the pastors here. The associate pastor. Our g- fearless leader, Alex, is on sabbatical right now, and so I hope he’s away. And honestly, I kinda hope he’s forgotten about us for a little bit, refresh, all these sorts of things.

You can pray for him. If you are new or new-ish around here I’d encourage you to visit this place in the lobby. It’s just for you to kinda check in and see if this is a community that you wanna plug into and find some community, find some relationships to grow deeper. Yeah I don’t know about you, but have you, you had the, one of those experiences where you have a no good, very bad day?

Every time I experience one of those no good, very bad days, or I hear about someone experiencing, I can’t help but think of track six on the Caedmon’s Call 1999 Forty Acres album, and specifically of verse three. Now track six is like this playful interlude on an otherwise theologically rich exploration of life, and emotion, and these sorts of things.

It starts playfully. It starts like this: “Danny and I spent another late night over pancakes.” What a great opening to a song. And I think about this song very often. It was written by a young Derek Webb as he told the story about two friends eating pancakes and talking about life, about soccer, about loneliness, about the longing for com- companionship and romance someday as young college students.

And it’s strange to me how often verse three pops in my mind, but every time I have one of those days where things just mount up, verse three comes to mind, or I hear about someone else who has one of those days. It, verse three starts like this: this day’s been crazy, but everything’s happened on schedule.

From the rain and the cold to the drink that I spilled on my shirt.” Have you ever had one of those days? Yeah, me too. You know the kind of day. The kind of day where you wake up and you do not feel rested, and you go downstairs and you get that much needed cup of coffee, and then you spill it on your shirt like the song says, and then you change your shirt and you go and you get the mail and then in the mail there’s that bill that you, ah, forgot about or hadn’t planned on, or your homeowner’s insurance goes up and you don’t have the budget for it.

And then, ah, it’s frustrating. It’s like an hour into the day and everything’s already a mess, and then you go to go to work, and the dog gets sick on the living room floor right there, right before you walk out the door. You have to clean that up, and you rush out the door, and you climb in the car, and the check engine light goes on.

It’s one of those kind of days. You know what I’m talking about? The chorus goes on and says this: “And so I suppose I just need some peace just to get me to sleep.” I couldn’t sleep, and I had no peace. About 13 years ago, I was sitting in, laying in our dark bedroom looking up at the ceiling, and I had no peace, and I couldn’t sleep, and I was crying out to the ceiling, maybe to God , “What am I doing wrong?”

Are you punish- are you trying to teach me something? Because it hadn’t just been one of those days, it had been one of those weeks, one of those months, and there was portions of it that had been going on for years. And I was just in my room, looking at that ceiling in the dark, crying out, “God, what are you doing to me?

And I know I’m not a perfect man, but which sin is it that, it, this is cau- that’s causing all of this pain? Which thing should I work on most? Why? I’ve tried this and I’ve tried that, and nothing seems to be getting any better.” And I had tears streaming down my face as I silently cried, trying not to wake up my wife.

Have you ever had one of those days?

Today, we’re gonna be asking those questions. Those same questions that I was posing in the dark room to heaven. And maybe you could boil them down to this: What is the purpose of all this pain? And a- am I being punished for something? When I boil it down in my soul, that’s what I was feeling. What am I doing wrong?

Why can’t I wake up and just learn the lesson so that I can finally move on? Yeah, welcome to church. Lighthearted topic. Summer series, easy breezy. Here at South, we like to stand when we read scripture. If you wanna turn in your Bible, you can turn to Hebrews 12. I think this passage, and then, and you can stand, I think this passage, I’m gonna read this over us as you stand for the reading of scripture.

I think this passage has some really profound answers, or at least not a- maybe not answers, but helpful resources for those s- these sorts of seasons. And the reason is, it was this very text that met me in the dark rooms, i- the days that followed that dark room experience for me. So let’s read, starting in verse one, Hebrews 12.

Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James. If you get to James, you’ve gone too far. All right. “Therefore, since we have been surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles us. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and set it, sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary or lose heart.” In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood, and have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son.

It says, “My son, do not make light the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when you, he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his child. For what children are not disciplined by their father?

If they, if you’re not disciplined, and everyone en- endures discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us, and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplined us for our good, in order that we may share in holiness.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but is painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who’ve been trained by it.” This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. And maybe … Yeah, go ahead and be seated. Maybe when you hear that, you’re like, “I’m not so sure thanks be to God, actually,” when you read a passage like this.

I’m wanna highlight right off the bat that there’s some landmines in this text, and I think as we go along, maybe some of those landmines will be dealt with, but there’s the word discipline, and there’s Father, and relationship, and p- and I thought you were supposed to be bringing comfort to pain and maybe what you’re reading and hearing in this passage is not comforting at all.

But hang with me, we’re gonna continue to look at this, and hopefully you’ll have a slightly different perspective. Today I’m gonna highlight three perspective shifts that I think this text has for us as we experience suffering and pain. Three perspective shifts, and those perspective shifts might, just might help us when we find ourselves in those dark night experiences, crying out to the ceiling, “Why?”

Because we’re diving into this passage right in the middle or towards the end of the Book of Hebrews, I wanna give us just a little bit of context. We don’t know a ton about the authorship. There’s debate amongst scholars who wrote this book. Some think it’s a sermon. We don’t know everything about the original audience.

But the context clues within the book itself indicate that this was a church that heard this originally, was a church that was suffering. And I think that there’s some good evidence in this in the context of this book that it might have been written a similar timeframe as the Book of Revelation, where we know the Church was deeply persecuted, they were suffering, and they were dying because of their faith.

And i- if that’s not the setting of this book, we do know from the context that’s some of the stuff that was going on for this church. And so some of the questions the original author of this was trying to deal with or wrestling with, this was a church that was suffering for their faith, and they wondered if God had abandoned them.

And so in a lot of ways, the things that they were experiencing, and the original author is stepping into a, the lives of the suffering church, and he’s trying to offer some sort of meaning or purpose or hope in the midst of a church that is suffering deeply. So that’s why I think we can get some hope out of this passage.

The first perspective shift that I notice in this text is this: It’s a shift from the idea of punishment to the idea of training. The first perspective shift I notice in this passage is h- he wants to teach us, shift us from this attitude of I’m being punished to I’m being trained. Where do I see that?

It’s right up here in the very beginning of the chapter. It says this: “Fix our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross.” Okay, so he endured this tr- excruciating pain and suffering of the cross, “scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” I remember in the days and weeks after my dark night of the soul and that dark night specifically that I was praying to heaven, I read this passage, and that verse just popped off the page to me, because here’s what I thought.

I thought my pain was punishment. I thought my suffering was a cosmic spanking from God. And then I read this, and I realized wait, Jesus suffered, and he did nothing wrong Not only did He do nothing wrong, He did nothing but good and beauty towards the world around Him, and yet He suffered. So Jesus suffered, and He was perfect, which means not all suffering comes from sin.

Now, some does, and we’ll get to that, but j- it was like this one little moment like, oh, suffering does not always equal punishment. So that’s my first move. Okay, it’s not always punishment. Okay, but maybe it is in my case, right? This is the first comforting word that I receive. And this text, I’ll just warn you right up front, this text is not that interested in answering the question where did my suffering come from?

What it is interested in doing is helping to find some meaning and some purpose within that suffering. So I wanna take a little bit of a rabbit trail and answer that first question, and at least grapple with it for just a moment. Most of the time when you chase rabbits, you do it impromptu. I planned this one.

This is the question: So where does suffering come from, fro- as, as far as we know from the scriptures? And we’re just gonna do a brief survey, and then if you have more questions about this, feel free to send them to the Red Couch Theology Podcast. But here are some of the answers. Where does suffering come from?

Sin and its consequences. Yeah, this is true. We know this from the scriptures, that sometimes we make mistakes, we are foolish, and we are unwise, and we reap a harvest from that foolishness. But I also think the scriptures make the strong case that the majority of the time Maybe every time the pain and suffering that comes out of our sin Is actually the natural byproduct of us stepping outside of our design.

So when we sin, God designed us to function and to thrive and to live in this way, and when we sin, we step outside of that way, and it’s like we malfunction. We can’t function well. That is the suffering. Now, our passage actually addresses sin. Look at it in verse four. It says, “In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.”

So I, I read this passage in the weeks after my dark night experience, and that first verse, in verse three, “Consider him endured such opposition,” I was like, “Oh, great. Not all sin or not all suffering is caused by sin.” And then I read the next verse and I was like, “Oh, goodness. I, it… the reason I’m suffering is I have not yet shed my own blood in resisting the sin.”

Oh, so it is a cosmic spanking, right? So I had this tension as I read this passage but I… Wait, not all of it’s s- from sin. Some of it might be. So I wanna reframe a little bit of what this verse is saying. Yes, sin is a painful thing, and I think Fleming Rutledge hel- is very helpful in this.

She’s a scholar and theologian. She says, “The true punishment for sin is sin itself The scripture’s account of sin, and yes, the Bible takes sin deadly seriously. So much so that it says this in Romans 6. It says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” And I think our natural inclination is to say, “Yes, the wages of my sin is this eternal death, and painful, and all this whatever stuff off in some disembodied future.”

I think Paul and the rest of scripture is actually more concerned with the fact that sin’s killing you, and you know it

When you sin, something inside of you dies And your father’s not okay with that ’cause he wants life. So that’s why God cares about sin. He cares about it because it’s killing his kids. We’re living our own suffering when we do this. It’s not his hand. In fact, most of the time when pain comes from sin, if not every time, it’s like it’s him reaching in trying to redeem us and protect us from ourselves.

God hates sin because it’s killing his children. So that’s one of the sources of suffering. But again, that’s not punishment from God. So the next one is this, a broken world. The brokenness of this world, it- it’s chaotic, there’s natural disasters and all those things, and you could have a theological debate we don’t have time for about a source of those natural disasters and so forth.

But when it’s all said and done, the world is a broken place, and sometimes just bad stuff happens because it’s chaotically broken and destroyed. And so again, that’s not necess- that’s not necessarily a punishment. You might just be y- swept up in the brokenness of this world. Another one is spiritual opposition.

I think this one’s important for us, especially in our context where we often don’t think about the spiritual world. But Fleming Rutledge I think s- says it helpfully like this, “There are not two actors in the drama, God and humanity, but there are three, God, humanity, and the powers. When Christ was apostoliced,” which just means revealed, “when Christ was revealed to the world, he did not arrive in neutral territory.

The occupying forces,” pictured as Satan and his h- hosts, “had to be driven from the field.” So in other words, sometimes when we experience pain, it’s the fact that we have an enemy who hates us and is trying to destroy us. So sometimes that’s the source of pain The next one is God’s discipline. There are times when God steps into our story and he disciplines us.

Now, I will deal with that word in just a minute. I’m gonna move on from that one. There are times when he steps into that, and actually, the majority of this text is using that language, so we’ll get there. Hang with me. The last one is absurdity. David Bentley Hart sort of articulates this pretty well in his book, The Doors of the Sea, where he wrestles through the problem of evil and natural disasters and sorts.

But part of what he’s communicating is that all of these are mixed together. Am I experiencing pain because of 10% this and 4% that and 35% this and then seven… You know what I mean? It’s the absurdity of the broken systems and structures of the world around us that sometimes land upon us and we experience it, and it’s absurdity.

So- That’s what I have time for to describe the sources of evil. If you have questions about that, feel free to send them in to the Red Couch Theology Podcast, and we can… I’d be more than glad than to address the problem of evil in that context. But I think this text is not that interested in saying, w- where did your particular pain come from?

Was it your sin? Was it your something else? What this text is interested in is stepping into that pain and saying, “I would l- I want to answer the question, what’s the purpose that can come out of this pain?” So the first one I pointed out, and we’ll look at a little bit longer here, is this, the shift from this attitude that I’m being punished to the attitude that I’m being trained.

Where else do I see that in this passage? I see it here in verse 5. It says “You’ve forgotten,” or you’ve completely forgotten, “this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son. My son, do not make light the discipline of the Lord’s discipline.” So again, when I was reading this passage those years ago in the midst of this dark night of the soul, I read this and I was like, “Okay, not so comforting.”

That first section may be comforting, and then I’m like, “So it is a cosmic sp- ” I’m, like, going back and forth. There’s this cosmic spanking from heaven, right? Discipline. But I knew it couldn’t only be that because of verse 3. So I did a word study on this word, and it’s this word here, paideia. Now it’s a noun.

It’s instruction, discipline, or training. What it never means in any of its usages, a retributive punishment. So in the scriptures, when this word is used, it’s most often used to describe a parent who is training and nurturing a child forward, who… a parent who’s trying to protect and help a child not touch the hot stove, not climb up on the wall, those kinds of things.

And then the other context that it’s used is for a coach training an athlete, and that was what met me in my dark place. Because instantly, I had this image in my head of this. So at the time, I’d been working out with one of my close friends named Rodney Pennington, and some of Rodney.

They’ve moved to Oklahoma now. But Rodney loved the bench press, and he would… we’d get on the bench press, and he’d way out-lift me like crazy. But then I would get on the bench press, and I’d be doing the reps, and I’d get to the last one, and I’d barely get it up, and then he’d say, “Five more.” And I’d say, “No way.

Not a chan- Are you… Did you see that last rep? Are you kidding me?” And he’d say, “Aaron, five more.” “You’ve got five more in you,” and then proceeded to curl the bar five times for me while I sat under it pretending. He might have been lifting my arms, if I’m honest. But he said, “Five more.” And when I read this definition of the word discipline, it was so comforting to me because I heard the voice of a coach who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself.

This wasn’t punishment, this was training

So the first perspective shift was punishment, from punishment to training. The second one I notice in this passage is this, it’s a shift from rejected to nurtured. Rejected to nurtured. Where do I see that in this passage? You see it in that same section there. It says, “And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that has addressed you as a father addresses his sons.”

It says, “My son, do not make light the Lord’s discipline and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he,” what? Loves, “and chastens the everyone he accepts as his son.” Now, before I get into this, I wanna just acknowledge an elephant in the room, that some of you, the word father is actually the biggest trigger word in this whole passage.

Because you didn’t experience a father that disciplined with kindness, with a training plan that was for your good. Instead, they disciplined you because you were annoying, or you were inconvenient, or you were a bother

I think one, one of the biggest challenges we have when we read a passage about our Father in Heaven is that we have this baggage around some of our childhood experiences of discipline. We don’t have any frame of reference for a parent who 100% of the time disciplines only and always for the good of their kids.

So we read discipline, and we immediately go backwards into this place. Oh, it is. I’m … I remember that harsh word or whatever it may be. Before we continue, I need to reframe this a little bit. I want you to maybe just imagine, did you have … If that was your experience, and maybe you had a great experience with your parents, but even a perfect or almost perfect parent in this world still did things wrong, maybe in your mind you can go back and you can think of your friend, one of your friends and their interaction with their parents, and you’re like, “I wish my parent treated me like my friend Johnny’s parents treated him.”

Or maybe you have fantasized about what it would look like or what it would feel like to be acknowledged in genuine, unconditional love without performance Even if you haven’t experienced this kind of love from a, an earthly parent, maybe you have imagined or daydreamed about that experience. That’s what he’s like

He’s like the father who disciplines always with the intent to draw out beauty, to draw out good

All right. Let’s get, continue into this verse. He continues, he says this, Hebrews 12:7, “Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as His children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined,” and everyone’s dis- undergoes discipline, “then you are not legitimate and not true sons and daughters.”

So weirdly, in this very confusing, emotional kind of way maybe, just maybe some of your pain is actually your Father saying, “I love you.”

And I’m not willing to watch you languish in the things that cause you pain and harm. Maybe, just maybe, some of this discipline equals love. Because if there was no discipline, look at that verse. If there’s no discipline, it means that you’re an illegitimate child, and some of us had parents like this.

It’s not that they beat you, they just didn’t show up. And I know, I’ve talked to some of you. Some of you look back on your childhood and you’re like, “Yeah, my parents were fine, they were just distant. They didn’t care. In fact, they wanted to be buddy-buddy with me, and now I’m reaping a harvest of not knowing how to show up in the world because my parents didn’t discipline me.”

So the f- this father has the perfect balance of knowing how to help in those situations. I think of this book. It’s not a perfect book, not a perfect parenting book by any means, but there’s so much beauty in this book for parents. It- let’s just start with this. Effective parenting centers around love.

Love that is not permissive, but also love that is powerful enough to allow kids to make mistakes and permit them to live with the consequences of those mistakes. If you’re a parent, you know what this is like. There’s times when you see your kid climbing up on the wall and you think, “Ah, if they fall, that’s gonna really hurt.”

And you ma- you have to make a judgment call. Am I gonna stop them from climbing on the wall, or am I gonna let them experience the natural side effects of the fall? And when they fall, a good parent, most human parents don’t do this a good parent does not show up and say, “I told you that’s often what I do.

A good parent, when they fall and they skin their knee, runs to them, and he picks them up, and he holds them. He says, it’s okay.” Why? Because sin is a punishment in and of itself, and the parent doesn’t need to say, “I told you the skinned knee says, “I told you some of your pain is the skinned knee that you produced for yourself, and your Father picks you up and He says, “Do you want an opportunity to learn from this and grow from this?

Embrace my love. Embrace my love.” So this second perspective shift, it’s from rejected to nurtured. So maybe some of your pain is actually a sign that you are nurtured, and it’s not a sign that you’re rejected If he didn’t care about you, he wouldn’t engage. The third one is this, it’s to shift from pain to harvest.

A perspective that this is just pain, meaningless pain, meaningless suffering, to know maybe, just maybe, there is a harvest. Remember, I read this last verse of our passage. After doing all of this wrestling, I read verse 11, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time.” Amen. Amen. Can I get a witness? but painful.

Later on, however It produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who’ve been trained by it. And I remember in my dark season, my, that particular dark season, I just said, “Oh, that’s what I want. I want a harvest of righteousness. I don’t wanna languish in foolishness. I don’t want to… I want this harvest in my life.

I want my life to blossom with goodness and beauty. And if maybe the end of this plan of training that you have for me, maybe if it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace, maybe I can tolerate another day.”

And this is the second image that I got. In that moment when I read this particular verse, I got this picture of my father doing this. What if the struggle you are facing is the whisper of your father or coach saying, “I believe in you, and I know you’re ready for more”? Now, that’s what I felt. I felt, I actually had this sort of visual in my head of my father whispering

And I said, “Father, I disagree. I don’t have five more in me.” But somehow my heart was strangely warmed and encouraged that my father thought I did. Like he believed in me. I had no doubt that I had nothing left to give, but he believed he saw something in me that was exciting to him that he thought, “Five more.

You’re gonna get stronger from this.” You’re ready for more. That statement, I would just have this. It became, I don’t know, it sounds maybe I need to go be hospitalized. It sounds insane. When the pain would increase in this season, these months beyond, the pain would increase and I’d say, “I disagree, but I’m so thankful that you think you’ve got it.”

And then he would help me lift the weight, right? And I’d, he- I’d hear that voice

See, God isn’t paying you back, He’s building you up. God isn’t paying you back, He’s building you up. This is the intention God has for your pain. Now, the risk we run today is this: This is not how it always works. There’s actually two paths you can go down when it comes to your suffering and your pain, and it’s this.

Your pain can produce a bitter root, or it can produce fruit. Your pain can produce a bitter root or fruit. Look at it with me in verse 7. It says, “Endure hardship as discipline.” In other words, you can endure hardship not as discipline. You can decide that this pain and this suffering, this, that you’re experiencing is meaningless, it’s just God being mad at you, or whatever you wanna fill in the blank.

This is what it is, and then you just suffer through it. Or, if you choose to be disciplined by it j- in other words, you endure it as discipline, you’re choosing to make it into something that can become fruitful. And my contention, call me crazy, is if we’re gonna have to suffer, we might as well get something out of it, right?

He says it again at the end of the verse. “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” In other words, some aren’t trained by it. Some just experience suffing- suffering meaninglessly. But he’s asking you, please choose to be trained by your pain This is the posture of God towards your pain.

Your Father deeply desires to redeem your pain. The question is, will you let Him? At this point, I wanna remind us about Kevin Butcher’s message l- last week. I told him this on the podcast. I’m so glad that it landed last week when he brought that message, because all throughout this series we’re gonna be running into these kinds of emotions and issues.

And depending on where you are in your journey of pain, and maybe right now it seems pretty light-hearted. Great. Praise the Lord for you. Yes, that’s awesome. But if you’re in a season where your p- pain is really near, maybe everything I’ve said today is just like, “I don’t care, Aaron. It’s so painful, so hard, I can’t even tolerate that.”

You, and you hit your threshold. No meaning statement to my pain is big enough to make it go away. And maybe, just maybe, you need to go back and visit Kevin’s message last week. Last week, he talked about what to do with the emotions when they hit that threshold, and you say, “I don’t care,” fill in the blank.

N- all the purpose statements, all of those things are not sufficient for me. I need a place to put all this emotion. Go back, listen to that message as Kevin taught us how and what to do as we learn to lament in the midst of our suffering. But this is the point here. God isn’t paying you back, He’s building you up

I remember similar to that song I mentioned, where it’s I think a moment in time that I heard those lyrics of that third verse, and it reminds me of no good, very bad days. I have this phrase that I rema- remember vaguely from maybe when I was 17-ish, and it wasn’t even spoken to me. It was spoken by my sister to someone else.

I don’t even remember who she was talking to. And it shaped how I think about pain and suffering from that day forward. And I was reflecting on that this week in preparation for this message, so I called my sister and asked for a little bit more context. But I’ll… Let me give you what she said initially And it’s helpful for you to know, my sister, who was in her early 20s when she said this, or mid-20s maybe she had experienced…

And I’m not gonna give any details right now, but she had experienced some of the most excruciating suffering and pain that I’d ever heard of a 20-something experience. You can fill in the blank of what that looks like. And so I’d overheard her talking about this pain with someone, and she said, “I’ve come to think of my life as a tapestry.

It’s a tapestry in which God’s weaving my story, and the dark threads, the pain that I’m experiencing, are as like the dark threads that allow the golden threads to pop off the background.” This week she sent me this image, this tapestry photograph that she documented in her journal. This is what she had in mind when she said that, and I didn’t know that this particular image was the thing she had in mind.

But this made scent to me, sense to me as like a 17-year-old-ish or something like that because of this. I was an artist at the time. I have lost all these skills, but I was an artist at the time and I do a, I was in advanced placement art in high school. And I had a teacher in art class that would constantly say, “Aaron, you need more contrast in your work.

If you don’t have enough contrast, the eye doesn’t know where to rest. Everything is bland. It’s just it’s one solid thing and your, the eye never has a place to rest. Beauty comes in the contrast. Add more contrast to your work.” And so when she said that the dark threads of this tapestry allow the golden threads and things to pop off the background, I was like, “Oh, this makes so much sense to me.”

And maybe, just maybe, some of your pain is the dark threads that God’s weaving in your life. I want to invite the band up as we, we’re coming to a conclusion. I’ve learned that as time’s gone on, I’ve become a musician, and I’ve learned that all beautiful art, all amazing art, works this way. Music works this way.

Music, beautiful pieces of music are a t- a tr- a contrast between tension and release, of quiet moments and loud moments, of minor chords and major chords, of dissonance and release. Art works this way. Po- poetry works this way. Narrative works this way. Everything good and beautiful Works this way. So maybe just maybe, some of your pain are the dark threads that’s providing the contrast relief so that the golden threads of your life might shine forward.

So we’re gonna take communion as the band sings this song over us, but I wanna remind us of what communion actually is. Communion, it’s a feast of fellowship for those who’ve suffered and understand. When we come to the table, we come to a table where we remember the broken body of Jesus and the blood that he shed.

And so when we fellowship with him at the table, he understands. This is a feast for those who understand suffering His broken body and his blood are reminders to us that he was not satisfied with watching his children languish in a destroyed, broken world. Instead, he stepped into time and space, and he suffered on our behalf.

The bread that represents his broken body when he was pierced for us, when he was stabbed in the back by his friends, and all these sorts of things, and his blood that he shed on our behalf, he suffered h- such hostility towards himself. Fix your eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of your faith, for the joy set before him.

What’s that joy? That joy is that because of the cross, he can confidently tell you that your pain has meaning because he created it at the cross. Your pain has purpose, and he will create purpose whether he caused the pain or not. Your… That’s the joy set before him. He endured the cross, scorning its shame and sitting down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Consider him who endured such opposition for who? For… From sinners and for sinners. And I’ll close with this final verse. This is verse 12 of this chapter. It says, “Therefore strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees.” Let’s not suffer meaninglessly, Church. I’d encourage you, let’s go ahead and stand, and we’re gonna take communion, and the band’s gonna p- play over us.

Come and receive the elements as soon as the band starts playing. Maybe take the bread. Remind yourself that this was his body. It represents his body that was broken for you, that he knows what it’s like to suffer. And feel free to take that on your own between you and your good Father. And then save the cup, and in a moment, we’ll take the cup together as a corporate fellowship of that same truth.