May 6, 2026 • 27 mins
Discover how God’s discipline reveals His love and protection. Rick Hughes explains the stages of divine discipline from Hebrews 12, showing how God corrects His children to build humility and prevent self-destruction. Learn the difference between discipline and judgment, and why daily growth in God’s Word keeps you on course and spares you from unnecessary suffering.
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(00:08):
Welcome to the Flat Line with your host Rick Hughes.
For the next 30 minutes you'll be inspired, motivated, educated
but never manipulated. Now your host, Rick Hughes.
Good morning and welcome to the Flat Line.
I'm your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please
(00:28):
stay with me. It won't be long.
Only 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some
education. And no, absolutely none, not
one, not one bit of manipulation.
Because we're not going to try to con you into giving money.
We're not going to con you into buying a product.
We're not trying to ask you to join up, fess it up, give it up.
(00:49):
We're just asking you to listen up.
Listen as I try to verify and identify the plan of God for
your life. And if I can do that, then you
know you're capable of oriented adjusting to that plan.
That's really up to you. It's your choice, your decision.
So I pray you'll listen. Listen very carefully today.
I mentioned last Sunday morning that we have a book called
(01:10):
Life's Toughest Years. If you have any young people in
your family as headed back to school this year, this is a
great book for them to read. It's a compilation of five
messages that I taught at a private school in Mississippi a
few years ago. And we put it all down on into
into a book. We made transcripts and put it
into a book and I think you'll enjoy called Life's Toughest
(01:32):
Years. You can order it free of charge.
We never charge for anything on our website.
They're all free compliments of the grace of God because we
believe that God's in it. He'll pay for it.
If he doesn't, then we'll do something else.
Also, if you go to our website, rickhughesministries.org, you'll
find several books that we've written that are all free of
(01:53):
charge. You'll also find older radio
shows you can listen to via the website.
And you'll find several of our books that are read out loud
that you can listen to from the website as our announcer, Jack
Steele reads them to you. So thank you for listening.
Thank you for being with me. This is show 1040, eight 1048
(02:14):
Sundays. We've been on the air with a
flight line across America. Today we're going to take a look
at the concept of God's discipline.
And this is not a fun subject tostudy at all, but we're going to
look at God's discipline in the life of a Christian, in the life
of a believer like you and I Payclose attention to it because it
(02:34):
may be what you are currently experiencing this very moment in
your own life. First, let's remember that God
does not discipline his childrenbecause he's mad at them.
If we are under divine discipline, it's because he
loves us. He's trying to save our lives so
we don't completely self destruct.
You know, we are, after all, ourown worst enemies.
(02:56):
And most of the suffering we endure is because we mismanage
our personal relationships with individuals.
We mismanage our decisions that are critical in our life and we
mismanage our own health. So divine discipline is designed
to bring about enforced humility.
Listen to that word enforced humility.
What we should have is genuine humility.
(03:19):
But if we had genuine humility, we could avoid many
circumstances that are detrimental to our spiritual
lives. The word humility is
teachability. It's what it means.
It's teachable. A arrogant person is not
teachable. The arrogant person possesses no
humility. He or she justifies why their
behavior is OK based on arrogantirrationality.
(03:43):
An irrational arrogant person can not only destroy their own
life, but their actions and their decisions can also
permanently injure others and their periphery.
This explains why a lot of crime, a lot of criminals, a lot
of things that happen because people are irrationally arrogant
and believe that they are doing the right thing, when in
(04:04):
actuality they're not. So let's look at what God has to
say about this discipline issue in Hebrews 12/5 through 9.
Here it says, You have forgotten, and, and ye have
forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto
children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord,
(04:27):
nor faint when thou art rebuked of him.
For whom the Lord loveth He chastens, and He scourges every
son whom He receiveth. If you endure chastening, God
deals with you as with a son. For what son is he whom the
Father does not chasten? But if you be without
chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then obviously you
(04:48):
are a bastard and not a son. Furthermore, we have had fathers
of our flesh, which corrected us, and we gave them reverence.
Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of
spirits and live? OK, let's look at this word
chastening again. For whom the Lord loves, he
chastens and scourgeth. The word chasten is a Greek word
(05:11):
pronounced Padilla PAIDEIA Padilla.
This noun is from the verb paduo, and it means to teach or
to educate. The writer uses it for
instructive punishment with God's fatherly love for His
children, according to the Mount's MOUNCE Bible Dictionary.
(05:34):
So Padilla, I always think aboutpaddling to paddle.
But anyhow, I'm not sure that's exactly what it means, but it is
way that God uses instructive punishment with his fatherly
love to correct us. If we apply Ephesians 6/1
through three to this situation and look at it as an analogy, it
(05:55):
says there are children, and that's for God's children and
parents, for God our our heavenly Father.
God is our Father. And when we use this passage,
Father, we find that obedience is respect.
Children obey your parents. Children obey your parents and
honor your father and your mother.
(06:16):
Obedience is respect. And our heavenly Father is the
key to living a long life on this earth.
Again, listen to Ephesians 6-1 and three.
Children, obey your parents and the Lord, for this is right.
Honor your father and your mother, which is the first
mandate with a promise, and it may be well with you, and you
may live a long time on this earth.
(06:39):
Here's the secret to having a long life, having enough
humility to obey those in authority over you.
The next word in the Hebrew passage we need to look at in
this word is scourgeth in Hebrews, where it says He
scourges every son whom he receives.
What exactly is the word scourges and what does it mean?
(07:02):
It's pronounced mestigeo mestigeo and it means to
administer painful, painful punishment like the Jewish
method of scourging, which was athree tongue, 3 thong leather
whip by which the person who wasoffended, the one that was an
offender, the guilty person would be beaten 13 times with
(07:23):
the whip on the bare chest and 13 times on each shoulder.
That's 40 stripes save one. This happened to the apostle
Paul 5 different times in his ministry and he mentions it in
2nd Corinthians 1124 where he said of the Jews five times
received thy 40 stripes save one.
(07:45):
This was the most harsh form of punishment the Jews used other
than death by Stoney. So in our passage, the word
scourging is used metaphoricallyfor extremely harsh discipline.
This is the thought that believers chance your chance and
my chance to correct our course before the heavenly Father
removes us from this earth and takes us home prematurely.
(08:09):
He will do that. And I've seen it happen, and you
may have seen it happen too. So finally, the passage in
Hebrew said it would be much better to be in subjection.
That's to obey the Father of spirits and live.
So here we have a three-step plan that God uses to bring
about our obedience to his plan for our lives.
(08:32):
So again, verse 8, Hebrews chapter 12, if you be without
chastisement whereof all our partakers and you're not a child
of God, you're a bastard. But furthermore, we've had
fathers of our flesh which corrected us and we gave them
respect. Shall we not much rather be in
subjection to the Father's spirits and lives?
(08:53):
That's exactly what we want you to do, to live a long,
wonderful, prosperous, happy life.
So divine discipline, when we'retalking about divine discipline,
it's the sum total of punitive action taken by the justice of
God in grace to correct, to punish, to encourage, to train,
(09:14):
to motivate, to motivate our free will towards the protocol
plan of God so that we'll be obedient, we'll obey, so we
don't destroy ourselves and destroy other people along with
us. Therefore, divine discipline is
must be distinguished from divine judgment.
They're two different things. Discipline is for Christians
(09:35):
only, but judgment is directed towards all categories of the
human race and including angels under certain circumstances.
Divine discipline for the believer must also be
distinguished from the law of volitional responsibility where
you have self-imposed, self induced and self indulging forms
(09:56):
of misery. Bad decisions not only destroy
future options in your life, butthey result in tremendous misery
that you are able to manufactureby yourself and you have to take
responsibility for that. Whatever man sows, he's going to
reap, the Bible says so the resultant discomfort, misery and
unhappiness in your life may last for a short period or a
(10:17):
long period of time. Just depends.
But punishment from God often follows the failure to rebound
from our sins. We're told if we sinned, to
confess our sin and he'd be faithful and just to forgive us
and to purify us from all unrighteousness.
If we fail to rebound from our sin, then we get ourself in big
(10:41):
trouble. Our every sin originates from
our free will. You choose it, I chose it.
We did it on our own. Temptation may come from our old
sin nature, we may be baited by Satan or another source, but we
have to make the decision on ourown, and all wrong decisions
(11:01):
come from some form of arroganceor lust in our life.
So God in His grace provided divine discipline.
That's what He does. His divine discipline is to
motivate us to correct our course, and it is motivated by
His love for our life. He does not punish us because He
likes to see a squirm. It's not what's happening.
(11:24):
He is perfect, He is just, He isfair.
We are His children as members of the royal family of God.
So listen to Proverbs 312. For whom the Lord loves, He
judges by punitive action. Therefore, like a father to a
son, and whom he delights, so divine discipline to the
(11:47):
believer is parental training inthe royal family of God by our
heavenly Father. Like parental training, divine
discipline is designed to inculcate humility, and from
that humility to bring us the true objectivity for our lives
so that we don't let arrogance control us.
(12:08):
That's why Revelation 319 says as many as I love, I rebuke and
I chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and
repent, which means to change your mind.
That's what a lot of people get mixed up on that word.
Repent and repent means to change your mind, not
necessarily to feel sorry for what you've done.
(12:28):
That's an emotional thing and that doesn't last.
So we as believers have the opportunity to learn the easy
way, which is the consistent intake of God's Word on a daily
basis, and not only to take it in, but to apply it into our
life. Because like a subject in
school, once you learn it, you're going to be tested on
what you learned to see if you actually learned it.
(12:52):
I want you to do something for me right now.
I don't ask you to do this very often, but I want you to imagine
a blackboard in a school classroom.
Did you ever see that when you growing up?
In school we used to fight over who got to clean the blackboard
and get to get out of class and go get the sponge and clean the
blackboard. Imagine the blackboard in a
(13:13):
school classroom and you're sitting in your desk and a
teacher asks you to go up there and draw a great big Z on that
blackboard so that all can see the Z.
The easy way to learn is going to be illustrated by this big Z.
If you start in the upper left hand corner where you drawing
the Z, if you will write the word communicate on your
(13:35):
blackboard, communicate. That's the first thing you want
to write by that Z, and then if you come across the blackboard
to the right hand corner of the upper Z.
This is where learning starts, where a pastor communicates to
you accurate Bible principles. The best way to do this is line
upon line, precept upon precept.Once that pastor does this, it's
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the Holy Spirit's job to capturethe content that He gives you
and to convert it into spiritualfuel.
If you're not filled with the Holy Spirit when you're taking
it in, you're not going to ever make the the conversion.
So the upper letter of the word Z is what communicate and then
capture on the other side. The pastor communicates, the
(14:23):
Holy Spirit captures what he communicates to you.
Now we're coming down to the bottom part of the Z, drawing
the line down now that we've been accurately fed.
Now we go to the bottom of the Zfrom left to right, completing
the with the diagram, with the word comply.
(14:44):
This is where God wants you to comply, what you Holy Spirit
captured with the pastor communicated.
And this is where we actually obey the mandates taught in
Scripture. The Greeks had a word for
knowledge and that word was gnosis.
GNOSIS. But there was another word which
was much more important, and it's pronounced EPI, gnosis,
(15:07):
EPIGNOSIS. The difference in these two
words is the actual doing, not just the hearing.
Truth heard but not applied is useless.
It's just knowledge, but truth heard and applied is the
accumulation of wisdom. This process must take place
while under the filling of the Holy Spirit or it's just an
(15:30):
exercise in ritual that has no reality to it.
So if you go back to the blackboard up at the top, you
got what? Communicate the pastor, capture
coming across the top of the Z. The Holy Spirit does that and
brings it down to the bottom of the Z where you comprehend it,
you understand it, and if you goacross to the other side of the
(15:50):
Z, you comply or you keep the what the Bible tells you to do.
Communicate, capture, comprehend, and comply is
critical in your life. You have to understand the Word
of God. You have to understand that just
going to church and sitting there and listening to the
message doesn't mean anything unless you apply what you hear.
(16:11):
You and I have been given some mandates.
Those mandates are to study and to grow spiritually.
Study and grow. You can read about them in
Second Timothy 2:15 which says study to show yourself approved
unto God, a Workman that needethnot to be ashamed, but rightly
dividing the word of truth. And then you can see second
(16:32):
Peter 318 where it says grow in the grace and the knowledge of
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
These are two mandates. These are not requests.
They are mandates. And when you ignore these
instructions from God, you continue to put your wishes and
your desires in front of God's mandates as you eventually come
(16:53):
unto warning, discipline, chastening.
He will chasten you. He will spank you, He will warn
you. This is easy discipline.
This doesn't hurt. This is God trying to teach you
the easy way. You may see something on the
Billboard that reminds you, go to church, read your Bible, and
then in your mind the Holy Spirit will say, uh huh.
(17:14):
You're not doing that, are you? It's God's way of getting your
attention. It's not necessarily painful,
but it's definitely uncomfortable.
The reason is this is designed to bring genuine humility into
your life and for you to quit being arrogant and making
arrogant excuses why you don't have to do that.
(17:34):
Arrogant excuses come from self justification and self
deception. So then what God does through
discipline 1 chastisement is to create humility in your life and
bring about obedience. And when that doesn't work, if
it doesn't work with you, if you're too dumb headed, hard
headed, not head, then the scourging comes.
(17:57):
That's the learning with pain associated, the learning with
pain associated. And again, it's not because he's
mad at you, but it's because Godis trying to stop you from
destroying yourself through multiple bad decisions.
That that scourging is called intense discipline.
(18:18):
So you have warning discipline. That's the chastisement and
scourging, that's the intense discipline.
That's intense discipline. So you have warning discipline
and intense discipline. Now listen very carefully to the
next part of Hebrews 12. Furthermore, we've had fathers
of our flesh, which corrected us, and we gave them respect.
(18:39):
Shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of
spirits, and live and live? The final stage of divine
discipline is called dying discipline.
In Proverbs 1510, the Bible says, correction is grievous
unto him that forsaketh the way,and he that hateth the reproof
(19:02):
of God shall die. This is God taking you home way
too soon. In first John 516.
If a man sees his brother sin, asin which is not unto death, he
shall ask, and he shall give himlife for them.
That sin not unto death, but there is a sin unto death.
And I do not say that he should pray for that.
(19:25):
It's a sad thing to see when believers get out of fellowship
and stay out of fellowship, whenthey don't recover from their
sin, when they don't rebound their sin.
I don't know what your sin mightbe or what you might be involved
in, but I'm warning you. I'm telling you straight up, you
may be under God's discipline inthis very moment, and This is
why your life is so miserable. This is why you're suffering,
(19:48):
because you're under divine discipline.
You're a child of God, but you're not studying to show
yourself approved unto God, a Workman that needed not to be
ashamed. You're not growing in the grace
and knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
You're pursuing your own objectives and your own desires
and your own will, and you're only making yourself more
miserable by your continuing baddecisions which limit future
(20:11):
options. So the discipline you're under
right now is to rescue you from yourself, not from somebody
else, from your own self, because you are the one
destroying your life, because you want to be obedient to God's
plan for your life. You got your will and your way,
and that's what you want to do. And I have seen it happen in
(20:33):
people's lives that I won't mention any names, but it's been
a very sad thing to watch believers that I know that are
Christians who at one time sought after God's will in their
life, but they kind of eventually went down the my way
highway and the end was not nice.
Sometimes God has to take him onhome to keep from destroying
other people along the way. So remember that.
(20:59):
And now since summary, most of our suffering comes from
ourselves under the law of what we call volitional
responsibility. But when we ignore the suffering
and courage from the law of volition responsibility and we
continue to live in the dungeon of the cosmic world, the cosmic
system, the cosmic vortex, and God can bring us back to reality
(21:21):
with chastisement, scourging, getting your attention.
Here's a very critical point I want to make to you.
Divine discipline does not implyloss of salvation.
No matter how intense the suffering you may go through,
you're not losing your salvation.
Once you believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, there's not one
(21:43):
thing that you're going to do that God will cancel that and
kick you out of His family. God's plan is established and
once and forever, and once you become a member of the royal
family of God, he doesn't kick you out because you started
sinning and you got into some sin.
You can look at the illustrationof the prodigal son and see that
in Luke, the whole story about the prodigal son, the parable
(22:05):
that Jesus gave the son who wentdown the my way highway and
eventually almost destroyed himself and came home and his
father still loved him. So what about you?
Are you on the My way highway? Are you under divine discipline?
Are the decisions that you're making causing you to have
misery and suffering in your life?
(22:27):
Then rebound. Confess those sins first.
John 19, The sin of not studying, the sin of not
growing, the sin of not staying filled with the Holy Spirit.
Confess those sins. Let God cleanse you and make a
decision like any other decision.
I want to be the person God wants me to be.
(22:48):
I want to grow in the grace and knowledge of my Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ. And it's not going to be easy.
It will be testing. Satan will do everything he can
to stop you from honoring that decision.
He will distract you and discourage you and try to defeat
you because he knows that a mature believer has a maximum
impact for God in this world. Now let's talk about one other
(23:09):
thing before we wrap it up this morning.
Let's talk about national discipline.
National discipline, not personal national in Hosea 4,
one through 6. Listen to this.
Hear the word of the Lord, you children of Israel, for the Lord
has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because
there's no truth, no mercy, and no knowledge of God in the land.
(23:34):
That's Hosea 41. Now let me skip to verse 6.
My people are destroyed for lackof knowledge.
Because you've rejected knowledge, I will reject you.
You hear that? Because you reject knowledge, I
will reject you, and you will beno more a priest for me.
(23:54):
Since you have forgotten the laws of your God, I will also
forget your children. What is it that destroys the
nation? It's a no knowledge of God's
plan. There's one thing Satan's tried
to do in this country. Shut down the Word of God so
that people have no knowledge ofGod.
In this plan, do away with the 10 commandments in the school.
(24:15):
Stop prayer from happening in the schools.
Anybody that tries to preach in the public can condemn him and
criticize him. No knowledge of God in the land.
How about you? How much about God do you even
know? God said in Jeremiah, I want
people who know me and understand me.
And I've told you before, it's abad thing to not understand the
(24:37):
God that you know. You may know him, yes, you may
be saved, yes, but you might notunderstand the God that you
know. Last week I told you that
passage about go outside and seeGod.
Would you want to do it? And then I read the verse that
said no man can see me and live nations can become arrogant and
under divine discipline. In Leviticus 2619, I will break
(25:00):
down the arrogance of your power, and I will make your sky
like iron and your land like bronze.
In Ezekiel 710 he said, behold, the day is coming, your doom has
gone forth. The rod of discipline has budded
because arrogance has blossomed.In a nation such as ours,
national arrogance will destroy us.
(25:21):
National discipline comes from the pivot of mature believers,
shrinks up and begins to disappear.
When divine judgement falls, it always comes in the form of
historical disaster, idiotic government policies that tell
you the end is very near. If the pivot is large enough,
the nation will be delivered. But if the pivot is too small,
(25:43):
and that's you, you got to be inthat pivot, the nation will be
destroyed. Every nation has its
relationship with the justice ofGod through those laws of divine
establishment, freedom, marriage, family, and
nationalism. So religion is the greatest
enemy of a nation because in thename of good it produces more
evil than any sin ever could produce.
(26:06):
Historical disaster as the cleansing of a nation is taught
under the concept of the five cycles of discipline in
Leviticus 2614 through 38. Write that verse down and read
it. Leviticus 2614 through 38.
You will see how the divine discipline of God comes in five
(26:26):
distinct cycles. And I could tell you this, the
United States of America is under divine discipline.
We're in big trouble. Unless we pull out of it, get
things right, we're going to lose what God has blessed us.
And that's the freedom that we have to worship and enjoy Him.
All right, I hope you understoodthis message.
(26:46):
I hope it applies to your life. I hope it serves as a warning to
you to recover and get back where you belong.
Start growing in the grace and knowledge of your Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ. Until next week, I'm your host,
Rick Hughes, and I thank you forlistening to The Flight Lion.
Thank you for listening to the Flight Lion with your host, Rick
(27:08):
Hughes. If you'd like to contact Rick,
please write to him at PO Box 100, Cropwell, Alabama 35O54 or
online at www.rickhughesministries.org.
Welcome to the Flat Line with your host Rick Hughes.
For the next 30 minutes you'll be inspired, motivated, educated
but never manipulated. Now your host, Rick Hughes.
Good morning and welcome to the Flat Line.
I'm your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please
(00:28):
stay with me. It won't be long.
Only 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some
education. And no, absolutely none, not
one, not one bit of manipulation.
Because we're not going to try to con you into giving money.
We're not going to con you into buying a product.
We're not trying to ask you to join up, fess it up, give it up.
(00:49):
We're just asking you to listen up.
Listen as I try to verify and identify the plan of God for
your life. And if I can do that, then you
know you're capable of oriented adjusting to that plan.
That's really up to you. It's your choice, your decision.
So I pray you'll listen. Listen very carefully today.
I mentioned last Sunday morning that we have a book called
(01:10):
Life's Toughest Years. If you have any young people in
your family as headed back to school this year, this is a
great book for them to read. It's a compilation of five
messages that I taught at a private school in Mississippi a
few years ago. And we put it all down on into
into a book. We made transcripts and put it
into a book and I think you'll enjoy called Life's Toughest
(01:32):
Years. You can order it free of charge.
We never charge for anything on our website.
They're all free compliments of the grace of God because we
believe that God's in it. He'll pay for it.
If he doesn't, then we'll do something else.
Also, if you go to our website, rickhughesministries.org, you'll
find several books that we've written that are all free of
(01:53):
charge. You'll also find older radio
shows you can listen to via the website.
And you'll find several of our books that are read out loud
that you can listen to from the website as our announcer, Jack
Steele reads them to you. So thank you for listening.
Thank you for being with me. This is show 1040, eight 1048
(02:14):
Sundays. We've been on the air with a
flight line across America. Today we're going to take a look
at the concept of God's discipline.
And this is not a fun subject tostudy at all, but we're going to
look at God's discipline in the life of a Christian, in the life
of a believer like you and I Payclose attention to it because it
(02:34):
may be what you are currently experiencing this very moment in
your own life. First, let's remember that God
does not discipline his childrenbecause he's mad at them.
If we are under divine discipline, it's because he
loves us. He's trying to save our lives so
we don't completely self destruct.
You know, we are, after all, ourown worst enemies.
(02:56):
And most of the suffering we endure is because we mismanage
our personal relationships with individuals.
We mismanage our decisions that are critical in our life and we
mismanage our own health. So divine discipline is designed
to bring about enforced humility.
Listen to that word enforced humility.
What we should have is genuine humility.
(03:19):
But if we had genuine humility, we could avoid many
circumstances that are detrimental to our spiritual
lives. The word humility is
teachability. It's what it means.
It's teachable. A arrogant person is not
teachable. The arrogant person possesses no
humility. He or she justifies why their
behavior is OK based on arrogantirrationality.
(03:43):
An irrational arrogant person can not only destroy their own
life, but their actions and their decisions can also
permanently injure others and their periphery.
This explains why a lot of crime, a lot of criminals, a lot
of things that happen because people are irrationally arrogant
and believe that they are doing the right thing, when in
(04:04):
actuality they're not. So let's look at what God has to
say about this discipline issue in Hebrews 12/5 through 9.
Here it says, You have forgotten, and, and ye have
forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto
children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord,
(04:27):
nor faint when thou art rebuked of him.
For whom the Lord loveth He chastens, and He scourges every
son whom He receiveth. If you endure chastening, God
deals with you as with a son. For what son is he whom the
Father does not chasten? But if you be without
chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then obviously you
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are a bastard and not a son. Furthermore, we have had fathers
of our flesh, which corrected us, and we gave them reverence.
Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of
spirits and live? OK, let's look at this word
chastening again. For whom the Lord loves, he
chastens and scourgeth. The word chasten is a Greek word
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pronounced Padilla PAIDEIA Padilla.
This noun is from the verb paduo, and it means to teach or
to educate. The writer uses it for
instructive punishment with God's fatherly love for His
children, according to the Mount's MOUNCE Bible Dictionary.
(05:34):
So Padilla, I always think aboutpaddling to paddle.
But anyhow, I'm not sure that's exactly what it means, but it is
way that God uses instructive punishment with his fatherly
love to correct us. If we apply Ephesians 6/1
through three to this situation and look at it as an analogy, it
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says there are children, and that's for God's children and
parents, for God our our heavenly Father.
God is our Father. And when we use this passage,
Father, we find that obedience is respect.
Children obey your parents. Children obey your parents and
honor your father and your mother.
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Obedience is respect. And our heavenly Father is the
key to living a long life on this earth.
Again, listen to Ephesians 6-1 and three.
Children, obey your parents and the Lord, for this is right.
Honor your father and your mother, which is the first
mandate with a promise, and it may be well with you, and you
may live a long time on this earth.
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Here's the secret to having a long life, having enough
humility to obey those in authority over you.
The next word in the Hebrew passage we need to look at in
this word is scourgeth in Hebrews, where it says He
scourges every son whom he receives.
What exactly is the word scourges and what does it mean?
(07:02):
It's pronounced mestigeo mestigeo and it means to
administer painful, painful punishment like the Jewish
method of scourging, which was athree tongue, 3 thong leather
whip by which the person who wasoffended, the one that was an
offender, the guilty person would be beaten 13 times with
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the whip on the bare chest and 13 times on each shoulder.
That's 40 stripes save one. This happened to the apostle
Paul 5 different times in his ministry and he mentions it in
2nd Corinthians 1124 where he said of the Jews five times
received thy 40 stripes save one.
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This was the most harsh form of punishment the Jews used other
than death by Stoney. So in our passage, the word
scourging is used metaphoricallyfor extremely harsh discipline.
This is the thought that believers chance your chance and
my chance to correct our course before the heavenly Father
removes us from this earth and takes us home prematurely.
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He will do that. And I've seen it happen, and you
may have seen it happen too. So finally, the passage in
Hebrew said it would be much better to be in subjection.
That's to obey the Father of spirits and live.
So here we have a three-step plan that God uses to bring
about our obedience to his plan for our lives.
(08:32):
So again, verse 8, Hebrews chapter 12, if you be without
chastisement whereof all our partakers and you're not a child
of God, you're a bastard. But furthermore, we've had
fathers of our flesh which corrected us and we gave them
respect. Shall we not much rather be in
subjection to the Father's spirits and lives?
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That's exactly what we want you to do, to live a long,
wonderful, prosperous, happy life.
So divine discipline, when we'retalking about divine discipline,
it's the sum total of punitive action taken by the justice of
God in grace to correct, to punish, to encourage, to train,
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to motivate, to motivate our free will towards the protocol
plan of God so that we'll be obedient, we'll obey, so we
don't destroy ourselves and destroy other people along with
us. Therefore, divine discipline is
must be distinguished from divine judgment.
They're two different things. Discipline is for Christians
(09:35):
only, but judgment is directed towards all categories of the
human race and including angels under certain circumstances.
Divine discipline for the believer must also be
distinguished from the law of volitional responsibility where
you have self-imposed, self induced and self indulging forms
(09:56):
of misery. Bad decisions not only destroy
future options in your life, butthey result in tremendous misery
that you are able to manufactureby yourself and you have to take
responsibility for that. Whatever man sows, he's going to
reap, the Bible says so the resultant discomfort, misery and
unhappiness in your life may last for a short period or a
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long period of time. Just depends.
But punishment from God often follows the failure to rebound
from our sins. We're told if we sinned, to
confess our sin and he'd be faithful and just to forgive us
and to purify us from all unrighteousness.
If we fail to rebound from our sin, then we get ourself in big
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trouble. Our every sin originates from
our free will. You choose it, I chose it.
We did it on our own. Temptation may come from our old
sin nature, we may be baited by Satan or another source, but we
have to make the decision on ourown, and all wrong decisions
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come from some form of arroganceor lust in our life.
So God in His grace provided divine discipline.
That's what He does. His divine discipline is to
motivate us to correct our course, and it is motivated by
His love for our life. He does not punish us because He
likes to see a squirm. It's not what's happening.
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He is perfect, He is just, He isfair.
We are His children as members of the royal family of God.
So listen to Proverbs 312. For whom the Lord loves, He
judges by punitive action. Therefore, like a father to a
son, and whom he delights, so divine discipline to the
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believer is parental training inthe royal family of God by our
heavenly Father. Like parental training, divine
discipline is designed to inculcate humility, and from
that humility to bring us the true objectivity for our lives
so that we don't let arrogance control us.
(12:08):
That's why Revelation 319 says as many as I love, I rebuke and
I chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and
repent, which means to change your mind.
That's what a lot of people get mixed up on that word.
Repent and repent means to change your mind, not
necessarily to feel sorry for what you've done.
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That's an emotional thing and that doesn't last.
So we as believers have the opportunity to learn the easy
way, which is the consistent intake of God's Word on a daily
basis, and not only to take it in, but to apply it into our
life. Because like a subject in
school, once you learn it, you're going to be tested on
what you learned to see if you actually learned it.
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I want you to do something for me right now.
I don't ask you to do this very often, but I want you to imagine
a blackboard in a school classroom.
Did you ever see that when you growing up?
In school we used to fight over who got to clean the blackboard
and get to get out of class and go get the sponge and clean the
blackboard. Imagine the blackboard in a
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school classroom and you're sitting in your desk and a
teacher asks you to go up there and draw a great big Z on that
blackboard so that all can see the Z.
The easy way to learn is going to be illustrated by this big Z.
If you start in the upper left hand corner where you drawing
the Z, if you will write the word communicate on your
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blackboard, communicate. That's the first thing you want
to write by that Z, and then if you come across the blackboard
to the right hand corner of the upper Z.
This is where learning starts, where a pastor communicates to
you accurate Bible principles. The best way to do this is line
upon line, precept upon precept.Once that pastor does this, it's
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the Holy Spirit's job to capturethe content that He gives you
and to convert it into spiritualfuel.
If you're not filled with the Holy Spirit when you're taking
it in, you're not going to ever make the the conversion.
So the upper letter of the word Z is what communicate and then
capture on the other side. The pastor communicates, the
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Holy Spirit captures what he communicates to you.
Now we're coming down to the bottom part of the Z, drawing
the line down now that we've been accurately fed.
Now we go to the bottom of the Zfrom left to right, completing
the with the diagram, with the word comply.
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This is where God wants you to comply, what you Holy Spirit
captured with the pastor communicated.
And this is where we actually obey the mandates taught in
Scripture. The Greeks had a word for
knowledge and that word was gnosis.
GNOSIS. But there was another word which
was much more important, and it's pronounced EPI, gnosis,
(15:07):
EPIGNOSIS. The difference in these two
words is the actual doing, not just the hearing.
Truth heard but not applied is useless.
It's just knowledge, but truth heard and applied is the
accumulation of wisdom. This process must take place
while under the filling of the Holy Spirit or it's just an
(15:30):
exercise in ritual that has no reality to it.
So if you go back to the blackboard up at the top, you
got what? Communicate the pastor, capture
coming across the top of the Z. The Holy Spirit does that and
brings it down to the bottom of the Z where you comprehend it,
you understand it, and if you goacross to the other side of the
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Z, you comply or you keep the what the Bible tells you to do.
Communicate, capture, comprehend, and comply is
critical in your life. You have to understand the Word
of God. You have to understand that just
going to church and sitting there and listening to the
message doesn't mean anything unless you apply what you hear.
(16:11):
You and I have been given some mandates.
Those mandates are to study and to grow spiritually.
Study and grow. You can read about them in
Second Timothy 2:15 which says study to show yourself approved
unto God, a Workman that needethnot to be ashamed, but rightly
dividing the word of truth. And then you can see second
(16:32):
Peter 318 where it says grow in the grace and the knowledge of
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
These are two mandates. These are not requests.
They are mandates. And when you ignore these
instructions from God, you continue to put your wishes and
your desires in front of God's mandates as you eventually come
(16:53):
unto warning, discipline, chastening.
He will chasten you. He will spank you, He will warn
you. This is easy discipline.
This doesn't hurt. This is God trying to teach you
the easy way. You may see something on the
Billboard that reminds you, go to church, read your Bible, and
then in your mind the Holy Spirit will say, uh huh.
(17:14):
You're not doing that, are you? It's God's way of getting your
attention. It's not necessarily painful,
but it's definitely uncomfortable.
The reason is this is designed to bring genuine humility into
your life and for you to quit being arrogant and making
arrogant excuses why you don't have to do that.
(17:34):
Arrogant excuses come from self justification and self
deception. So then what God does through
discipline 1 chastisement is to create humility in your life and
bring about obedience. And when that doesn't work, if
it doesn't work with you, if you're too dumb headed, hard
headed, not head, then the scourging comes.
(17:57):
That's the learning with pain associated, the learning with
pain associated. And again, it's not because he's
mad at you, but it's because Godis trying to stop you from
destroying yourself through multiple bad decisions.
That that scourging is called intense discipline.
(18:18):
So you have warning discipline. That's the chastisement and
scourging, that's the intense discipline.
That's intense discipline. So you have warning discipline
and intense discipline. Now listen very carefully to the
next part of Hebrews 12. Furthermore, we've had fathers
of our flesh, which corrected us, and we gave them respect.
(18:39):
Shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of
spirits, and live and live? The final stage of divine
discipline is called dying discipline.
In Proverbs 1510, the Bible says, correction is grievous
unto him that forsaketh the way,and he that hateth the reproof
(19:02):
of God shall die. This is God taking you home way
too soon. In first John 516.
If a man sees his brother sin, asin which is not unto death, he
shall ask, and he shall give himlife for them.
That sin not unto death, but there is a sin unto death.
And I do not say that he should pray for that.
(19:25):
It's a sad thing to see when believers get out of fellowship
and stay out of fellowship, whenthey don't recover from their
sin, when they don't rebound their sin.
I don't know what your sin mightbe or what you might be involved
in, but I'm warning you. I'm telling you straight up, you
may be under God's discipline inthis very moment, and This is
why your life is so miserable. This is why you're suffering,
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because you're under divine discipline.
You're a child of God, but you're not studying to show
yourself approved unto God, a Workman that needed not to be
ashamed. You're not growing in the grace
and knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
You're pursuing your own objectives and your own desires
and your own will, and you're only making yourself more
miserable by your continuing baddecisions which limit future
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options. So the discipline you're under
right now is to rescue you from yourself, not from somebody
else, from your own self, because you are the one
destroying your life, because you want to be obedient to God's
plan for your life. You got your will and your way,
and that's what you want to do. And I have seen it happen in
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people's lives that I won't mention any names, but it's been
a very sad thing to watch believers that I know that are
Christians who at one time sought after God's will in their
life, but they kind of eventually went down the my way
highway and the end was not nice.
Sometimes God has to take him onhome to keep from destroying
other people along the way. So remember that.
(20:59):
And now since summary, most of our suffering comes from
ourselves under the law of what we call volitional
responsibility. But when we ignore the suffering
and courage from the law of volition responsibility and we
continue to live in the dungeon of the cosmic world, the cosmic
system, the cosmic vortex, and God can bring us back to reality
(21:21):
with chastisement, scourging, getting your attention.
Here's a very critical point I want to make to you.
Divine discipline does not implyloss of salvation.
No matter how intense the suffering you may go through,
you're not losing your salvation.
Once you believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, there's not one
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thing that you're going to do that God will cancel that and
kick you out of His family. God's plan is established and
once and forever, and once you become a member of the royal
family of God, he doesn't kick you out because you started
sinning and you got into some sin.
You can look at the illustrationof the prodigal son and see that
in Luke, the whole story about the prodigal son, the parable
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that Jesus gave the son who wentdown the my way highway and
eventually almost destroyed himself and came home and his
father still loved him. So what about you?
Are you on the My way highway? Are you under divine discipline?
Are the decisions that you're making causing you to have
misery and suffering in your life?
(22:27):
Then rebound. Confess those sins first.
John 19, The sin of not studying, the sin of not
growing, the sin of not staying filled with the Holy Spirit.
Confess those sins. Let God cleanse you and make a
decision like any other decision.
I want to be the person God wants me to be.
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I want to grow in the grace and knowledge of my Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ. And it's not going to be easy.
It will be testing. Satan will do everything he can
to stop you from honoring that decision.
He will distract you and discourage you and try to defeat
you because he knows that a mature believer has a maximum
impact for God in this world. Now let's talk about one other
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thing before we wrap it up this morning.
Let's talk about national discipline.
National discipline, not personal national in Hosea 4,
one through 6. Listen to this.
Hear the word of the Lord, you children of Israel, for the Lord
has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because
there's no truth, no mercy, and no knowledge of God in the land.
(23:34):
That's Hosea 41. Now let me skip to verse 6.
My people are destroyed for lackof knowledge.
Because you've rejected knowledge, I will reject you.
You hear that? Because you reject knowledge, I
will reject you, and you will beno more a priest for me.
(23:54):
Since you have forgotten the laws of your God, I will also
forget your children. What is it that destroys the
nation? It's a no knowledge of God's
plan. There's one thing Satan's tried
to do in this country. Shut down the Word of God so
that people have no knowledge ofGod.
In this plan, do away with the 10 commandments in the school.
(24:15):
Stop prayer from happening in the schools.
Anybody that tries to preach in the public can condemn him and
criticize him. No knowledge of God in the land.
How about you? How much about God do you even
know? God said in Jeremiah, I want
people who know me and understand me.
And I've told you before, it's abad thing to not understand the
(24:37):
God that you know. You may know him, yes, you may
be saved, yes, but you might notunderstand the God that you
know. Last week I told you that
passage about go outside and seeGod.
Would you want to do it? And then I read the verse that
said no man can see me and live nations can become arrogant and
under divine discipline. In Leviticus 2619, I will break
(25:00):
down the arrogance of your power, and I will make your sky
like iron and your land like bronze.
In Ezekiel 710 he said, behold, the day is coming, your doom has
gone forth. The rod of discipline has budded
because arrogance has blossomed.In a nation such as ours,
national arrogance will destroy us.
(25:21):
National discipline comes from the pivot of mature believers,
shrinks up and begins to disappear.
When divine judgement falls, it always comes in the form of
historical disaster, idiotic government policies that tell
you the end is very near. If the pivot is large enough,
the nation will be delivered. But if the pivot is too small,
(25:43):
and that's you, you got to be inthat pivot, the nation will be
destroyed. Every nation has its
relationship with the justice ofGod through those laws of divine
establishment, freedom, marriage, family, and
nationalism. So religion is the greatest
enemy of a nation because in thename of good it produces more
evil than any sin ever could produce.
(26:06):
Historical disaster as the cleansing of a nation is taught
under the concept of the five cycles of discipline in
Leviticus 2614 through 38. Write that verse down and read
it. Leviticus 2614 through 38.
You will see how the divine discipline of God comes in five
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distinct cycles. And I could tell you this, the
United States of America is under divine discipline.
We're in big trouble. Unless we pull out of it, get
things right, we're going to lose what God has blessed us.
And that's the freedom that we have to worship and enjoy Him.
All right, I hope you understoodthis message.
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I hope it applies to your life. I hope it serves as a warning to
you to recover and get back where you belong.
Start growing in the grace and knowledge of your Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ. Until next week, I'm your host,
Rick Hughes, and I thank you forlistening to The Flight Lion.
Thank you for listening to the Flight Lion with your host, Rick
(27:08):
Hughes. If you'd like to contact Rick,
please write to him at PO Box 100, Cropwell, Alabama 35O54 or
online at www.rickhughesministries.org.
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