Ordinarily when we speak of discipline, it is just a gentler way of saying punishment.  Discipline, these days has an almost completely negative connotation.  In reality, at least in biblical trerms, discipline always carries a positive connotation.  Much of what we consider “learning” would have fallen in the category of discipline in biblical times.  I suppose that we are speaking about that kind of discipline when we talk about “training”.

These days people hire trainers and pay them hourly to cause them to do things that many of us would call punishing in order to accomplish some goal.  Back when I was a schoolboy, my parents paid for a Piano teacher to see if I was going to be any good at piano.  Frankly, I didn’t have the self-discipline to do the practice required and I was bull headed enough that I wouldn’t accept anybody else’s discipline.  At least not to play piano.  And that has been part of my problem as an adult.  For me very few things in life are worth the hard work required to excell at it.  And I think that how something is valued is what determines the discipline or training that a person is willing to endure.

So that leads us to the question.  How does God discipline, train, lead, instruct, or prepare us in order for us to be fit for his purposes?  But that is not necessarily the first question that ought to be asked.  Does God discipline us?  Another would be;Why does God discipline us?  And yet another might be; For what purpose does God discipline us?

So, Does God discipline us?  The scriptures tell us that God disciplines those He loves.  If God left us to our own devices, as many have believed in the past, that would be a testament that God did not care about His creation or His creatures.  Some of the founders of our nation considered themselves to be Deists.  They believed in a higher being, but they thought that higher being was so far beyond us that we were like a watch wound up and waiting for the spring to unwind and all of the movement stop.  Their God was so indifferent to creation that he neither loved, nor cared for them.  That is the opposite of discipline, and even the opposite of punishment.  That is indifference, and that is not the God of the bible.

Why does God discipline us?  The simple answer is, because God loves us.  But let me flesh that out a bit more.  The greatest gift that God gave us when He created us was the gift of the freedom of choice.  He gave us the ability, and the responsibility to choose at every possible opportunity obedience or disobedience.  God told us what he wanted from us.  He defined sin and he defined love and then He let us choose our own way.  But His attention did not end there.  He continued to speak to us and act for us.  God became persuasive.  He could have simply commanded that we love Him, but that would not have been a love that was subject to our choices.  That would have been coercive.  So He communicates with us and tries to persuade us to follow him.  He allows our bad choices to have bad consequences so that we might eventually see that His ways are always better than our ways.

For what purpose does God discipline us?  We are intended to be children of God and to be partners with him in His kingdom.  That is such an amazing fact that it explains why a large number of the Angels rebelled.  Here we are, flesh and blood, yet animated by a spirit like the Angels have, and yet a little lower than them.  But they were created to serve and we were created to rule.   It is understandable that they became jealous.  It takes a lifetime, but God’s discipline of us is supposed to train us in Godliness so that when it comes time for us to take our share in the rule of the Kingdom of Heaven, that we will be ready and equipped to rule as God rules and to be fellow participants in the work of the Holy Trinity