Don't Despise God's Training - Bill Shiley

So we want to be careful. This is really important that we let God work in our lives through His training experiences, these hard things that make us into a hero. You don't make a Navy SEAL sitting on the couch playing video games and eating chips.

But if we don't allow God's training to grow us, the only other option is joining the other army.

Some things we talk about because somebody needs to and we're responsible to. Some things we talk about because it's an intellectual odyssey that we're on exploring and learning something. Another thing is because it's something that is very much a part of our daily life and focus.

And that's the way this message is: heroes. We all like to read and think about heroes, people who ride in and save the day.

In our world, there's military heroes. There's the courageous ones who charge in against the enemy and put aside their fears and go through tremendous things to bring a victory, short-lived and with many side effects, as victories are of the kingdoms of this world. There's, you could say, humanitarian heroes.

There's people like Mother Teresa or Amy Carmichael who have gone into someplace and, by great sacrifice and personal investment, made a difference for a lot of people. There's stories like the famous or what started the Iditarod dog races, the diphtheria pandemic in Nome, and the dog team that brought the vaccine there and basically saved the whole town.

Then there's the heroes that are more behind the scenes. You don't notice them. Moms are one of those kind of people, people who sacrifice and, in small ways, pour themselves into others to give them a platform, to give them nurture so that they can move, grow, and move on and bless the world. But heroes don't happen.

About two months ago or something like that, Brother Kevin shared the story of Captain Sollenberger who landed the airliner on the Hudson River and how people called it a miracle. And really, it wasn't so much of a miracle as years and years and years of training, both training his mind about procedures and also training his responses and just a lot of things, being a man of endurance and discipline.

The Bible has a list of heroes. In Hebrews chapter 11, we have a list of heroes, we call them, people who did outstanding things to lift up and advance God's kingdom in God's way. Some of them are swashbuckling stories like Gideon, and some of them are seemingly very passive experiences. You have guys like Abel who simply lived a life of simple obedience to God and offered up the sacrifice God wants and absorbed his brother's evil. And so the writer of Hebrews says, "And he is still by that example, he's still talking today. He's a hero we look back to." There's Noah. He's my hero as a preacher. He preached for 120 years, the only one, and didn't have any converts.

Now, I'm not saying we just preach and just don't care for any, but talk about persistence. And in the meantime, investing his life in building something that everybody thought was absolutely nuts. But those people didn't get that way overnight. They weren't born with it. They didn't get a shot when they went to the doctor that gave them those kind of things.

And Hebrews chapter 11 leads into chapter 12. So we focus in chapter 11 about what faith, what believing God, how that motivates people and what it causes people to do. And then in chapter 12, he turns the focus to us. The question is, now we're standing in the amphitheater and all these people are around in the stand. We see all the heroes who have fought in this battle before. And the question is, what's our story going to be when Hebrews chapter 11 gets down to, "By faith, Bill," or "By faith, anyone of the rest of you." And I don't want to say names because then I won't be being favorites. But what is it going to what is the annals of history going to show that faith made us do?

And that's what Hebrews chapter 12 deals with. And the fact is that people become heroes through a lot of hard training. And so Hebrews 12 deals the first part deals with how we relate to God's training in our lives and what that looks like.

And this has just been a major scene that I have struggled and battled with, is the things that God has brought into my life to make me who I am today and to continue to grow me into who He is going to make me over the next however many years He gives me life.

When I am complimented or just moments when I realize between me and God that the reason I'm able to do this is because of this that happened before. And I have some real repenting to do some of those times because I know that many of those experiences I really fought God over. I really resented the things that the training He brought in my life. And so I want to share this as a message to us, whatever it is in your life that you're facing that's just a difficulty that you're just like, "Why in the world is this going on?" To be an encouragement to you in how to handle that.

One Bible study practice that I learned from Conrad Sollenberger is paraphrasing.

There's something about when you take something and you turn it into your own words to explain it to somebody else that makes you own it in a better way. I've done that a few times, and this passage was one of them. So what you have in your hands, the BSP stands for Bill Shiley Paraphrase.

So I'm not sharing this because I think it's a better translation. It's not a translation. It's a paraphrase. It's idea for idea. It's not with the previous translations, diligently—how does the King James say that?—studied and compared. But this is just me trying to understand it, put it in our everyday language.

So follow along as we read this.

"So since we are in a contest with the stadiums full of people who have testified by their actions that God is trustworthy, watching us and cheering us on, let's get rid of everything that hinders and persevere in this contest of allowing God to work His will in us in the midst of adverse circumstances. Let's stay locked in on Jesus' example. He started this way of trusting obedience to His Father and will give us what we need to live that way to the end. He looked beyond the cross to His goal of fulfilling God's plan of redemption and made it so much His joy that the shame of the cross didn't matter.

Stop and think about what He went through, how He endured being left alone with the whole world against Him, and let that keep you from thinking you've got it too hard and giving up. Your circumstances haven't got to the point of costing you your life like His did, and you have forgotten God's plea to you as children to not resent the training of your heavenly Father and have a pity party and give up when He points out something you need to change.

See, God doesn't just let His children sit where they are, but corrects, trains, and develops them. If you experience training, that's evidence that you are children loved and cared about by your heavenly Father. What decent dad doesn't correct and train his children? If you don't experience training, that should make you question whether you are God's children or not.

Now, we had earthly fathers who trained us for a while so we would turn out the way they preferred, and we learned it was best to cooperate. And looking back, we don't regret it. Wouldn't it make even more sense to submit ourselves to the Father that designed and created everything and experience the life He has envisioned for us rather than resisting Him and coming to ruin? You see, our earthly dads trained us to keep us from being troublemakers, but God trains us totally for our own good so that we can become holy just like Him. Don't get me wrong, these training experiences aren't fun. Quite the contrary, they are hard and painful. But if we let them change us, it is worth it in the end because we become more and more like our heavenly Father.

So encourage your brother when he's wore out and get on both sides of him and give him an arm when he's about to collapse. Be careful that you live a life that is a good example and free of things that would cause your brother to stumble. You don't want to cause weak people to wander off the path or turn away from following God, but instead to strengthen and heal them. Strive to be instruments of God's peace toward everyone and to be pure and holy.

Those are the only people who will see God. Know your brothers and sisters and be sensitive to what's happening in their lives because there's a great danger that someone is not allowing God to give them what they need to pull through the training experiences. There might be someone who is becoming resentful toward God and trying to alleviate life's difficulty by giving up and turning to the short-term relief, sinful responses, and pleasures afford.

Like Esau, they sell their inheritance in God's kingdom for no more than a bowl of soup that is gone in a few minutes. Remember the story? You don't want your brother to end up like him, crying, pleading, and begging for a chance to change his choices once he discovers that he has lost everything and is reaping the awful consequences.

Quite a pathos in those words.

As we start out here, one thing that stands out to me is that the heroes cheer us, but our focus is on following Christ. He's the one we want to be like. These other people encourage us, and we see that it can be done, but we keep our focus on Christ, and we want to grow up to be like Him.

And He learned obedience by the things which He suffered, it says earlier in the book of Hebrews. And I don't understand why it's this way, but something about the world God has made that we can have a heart that desires something. We can have goodwill and good intent, but until we actually make it happen, it's not really us.

And it seems like that in order for Jesus to be the ideal human, He had to come here and live here and go through the paces and actually make it happen in human form to set us free and to show us to start this movement of people, the new humanity, people who live the way God meant for them to be. And so we look at that and realize that even Jesus went through difficult things to become a perfect person and to become a partner with God, the human Jesus.

I want to talk a little bit about the word chastening. So I had a really bad concept of this term chastening, partly from my concepts of God, but for some reason, I had this picture of chastening that you chase somebody around with a stick. You're always running around, "Hey, come on, get busy. Hurry up. Quit that. Stop that. Come on."

And that was my picture of chastening, basically spanking and scolding. And that's actually a very bad picture of this idea. So when you look up this word chastening in Hebrews chapter 12, it's the Greek word pahadia, which is translated in all of the following ways. In Acts 7:22, it says Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. That's the same word translated chastening in Hebrews 12.

Acts 22:3, Paul was brought up at the feet of Gamaliel and taught according to the law. Chastened is the same word. Titus 2:12 says, "The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us." That's the same word, chastening. Ephesians 6:4 says, "Bring them up," talking about fathers to their children, "to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." That word nurture is the same word.

And 2 Timothy 3:16 says, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for instruction." And that is the same word as well. So we get this when I looked that up, that helped me get—I don't know Greek—but that gave me a broader picture of what this concept is that Hebrews 12 is talking about. It's not talking about punishment only. It's talking about quality time. It's talking about information God gives us, teaching and helping enlarge our understanding. It's talking about training exercises, difficult things that we go through to learn how to make it happen. And in the education world, we talk about the different disciplines that are studied. Typically, that's high school or college.

And that's what it is. It's information, but it's also practice where you do things. You learn then to write your own stories. You learn how to solve a math problem. You learn how to do it yourself. So it's all those things. It's quality time. It's relational time, enjoyment, celebration.

It's correction. It's getting things marked wrong on your problem. And a good teacher always does that, not so that they feel bad about it, but so they know, "Oh, that's not the right way," and they can fix it.

And it's development. It's exercises to work them out and help them to grow and be able to do more than what they did before.

And so God's chastening of us is all those things. Now, the first one, quality time, isn't something we really struggle with resenting. We don't have a hard time with resenting a beautiful sunrise or a good time with friends that God gives us or an inspiring time in prayer and reading God's word. We don't have a hard time resenting that part of chastening.

It's the correction that is what we have a hard time sometimes not resenting and the development, the hard exercises we go through that grow us. So that's what I want to talk about this morning a little bit. One thing that I think is going to make or break us on this whole issue of how we relate to God's chastening, God's training, is what our goals are for our life.

And normally, our goals are self-preservation and self-enjoyment.

The Declaration of Independence from this country states that very plainly and unabashedly that our rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And so anything that interferes with our happiness or what we perceive to be our liberty, we tend to view that as a threat, as something to be avoided.

Romans 8:28 says that all things work together for good to those who love God, and most people like to stop right there. But it goes on. It says, "To them that are the called according to His purposes." Then the next verse, the King James, is a little hard to understand, but it says that God knew ahead of time who was going to choose Him, and He predestined them to be conformed to the image of His Son. So there we learn what God's purpose for us is. It's that we become like Jesus.

And so that was a major lesson for me to learn. And I think one of the things that has made me struggle with God's training in my life is because my agenda for my life was to have less problems, less conflict, less deprivation, to have the normal comforts, relationships, and finances, and those kinds of things that everybody's entitled to, right?

And that wasn't what God wanted. God had other things for me. And so I resented God's training because it seemed to be taking me away from a comfort zone that I felt was very reasonable and legitimate for me.

So when our goals become what God's goals are, it's going to make this whole training thing a lot easier for us. And in Hebrews chapter 12, it tells us that His goal is to train us for our profit, that we should be partakers of His holiness. And so as we get that straight in our lives, that's going to make the training go a whole lot easier. Our goal becomes what God's goal is. It's not to have a good time here so much as it is to become like Him. And it doesn't make our tribulation easier, but it does change our attitude towards it. When those things come, we realize, "No, wait. I know that I don't like this, but this is something God's bringing in my life to help me to grow to be more like Him."

Another part of that is, how did Jesus redeem the evil of the world? And if we want to become partners with Him, we are going to have to follow in His steps, His method. And 1 Peter chapter 2 tells us that Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow in His steps. And that's referring directly to suffering. And Peter talks a lot about that in his epistles. The last part of chapter 2, chapter 3, and chapter 4 in 1 Peter deal a lot with this concept of being willing to suffer, that that should be a major part of our identity, is that we're going to suffer if we're going to be partners with Jesus in turning around the evil of the world.

So those are some things that I think about that I still struggle with, but I know that that's begun to help me when I start realizing that really my comfort is going to take me away from being able to be a partner with Jesus in bringing about His kingdom in this world.

Not that I purposely try to lay on beds of nails and things like that, but when difficult things come up, I need to make sure that I turn my mind and my thinking and say, "Wait, this is actually something God can use to make me an instrument of His peace in the world."

So as we approach life, what is our goal? If our goal is like God's goal, that's going to make this go a whole lot easier. If we have a concept that our life is not our own and we are here, we are willing to, we expect to suffer in this world because our goal is to become like Jesus and be able to partner with Him in bringing change to the world.

I know that may sound morbid, but I think it's real. And my goal is to neither be pessimist nor optimist, but to be a faith-focused realist.

And many times that ends up like Puddleglum, the marsh wiggle who likes to know the worst of a thing so he can put a bold face on it.

So this correction. So some of the training is correction, and that's one of the hard things is when we're wrong, when we're heading the wrong direction, and God's got to hook us with that staff and say, "Mm-mm, back here, like sheep." Some things to remember about that. I know I struggled with deeply, and I know from what I hear many people struggle with, feel like, "Well, when something bad happens, is God punishing me for something? Am I paying for a choice that I've made?" And while God does allow we reap what we sow, we never in this life reap the full magnitude of what we've sown because God is merciful. People say, "Well, life isn't fair."

And then people ask the question, "Well, is God fair?" And I'm here to tell you this morning that God's not fair, and I'm thankful for that. He's merciful. He doesn't give us what we've deserved. Psalm.

Oh, I don't have that one down here. I thought I had it down here. But Psalms tells us that He's not rewarded us according to our iniquities. David says, "Lord, if you would mark iniquities, who could stand? If you would keep tally and pay us back for everything that we do, we'd all be vaporized."

So that's not God's point in relating to us. It's not to pay us back. He's not retributive. He's not trying to do something to us to make us pay for what we've done.

God is merciful. Psalm 103 says that like a father pities his children, God pities us. And He doesn't give us more than we can take. He understands that we're dust. And so He's soft-hearted and kind-hearted in the things that He does give us, the things He allows to go through His correction. Lamentation 3, if you're ever in that situation where you do feel like, and maybe you are, this is something you're getting this because of some choices that you've made.

Lamentation 3 is a great passage to read because that is a lament. It's crying out to God about the difficulties that Israel is going through because of their sin and the captivity, the destruction that came. And the last part of the chapter there, I think it's chapter or verse 15, He says, "This I recall to mind, therefore I have hope."

It's of the Lord's mercies that we're not consumed because His compassions fail not. They're new every morning. His faithfulness is great. And then it goes on, says, "God doesn't delight to crush under His foot the sons of men," just to take out things on us. And He doesn't enjoy seeing us having a hard day. But it's actually out of His love that He allows us to reap a little bit of consequences for what we've sown so that we realize we wake up and we say, "Wait a minute, this is not what I want, and I've got to change."

So even if what you're experiencing is because of bad choices, it's not the end of the story. And God doesn't want you to grovel and just say, "Oh, I will just forever be a failure." That's Judas. That's Judas' road. And look where that got him. And God wants us to be like Peter that come back to Him and say, "I'm sorry," and weep. And in those two people, we can see the choice, the paths that those two choices led to, whether we draw back from God and view it as God crushing us, or we don't reach back out to God for His love and His mercy and to learn and to grow through it like small children who are disciplined, who maybe receive a spanking or something.

So as we view correction, if the training we're experiencing is corrective, those are some things I think to keep in mind to help us to reach toward God in those things rather than allowing ourselves to be caught up in fear and discouragement and that make us draw back and become weaker through them.

The other side of things is development. So the training that God brings in our life to help us to grow.

The error of Job's friends is still alive and well today, that if you follow God, that you will be healthy, you will healing, everything should be healed, you should have plenty of money, God will bless your finances, and all those kinds of things. And if it's not happening, then it must mean that you did something wrong. And while we do need to examine our lives and don't keep beating your head against the wall, if God's Spirit is speaking to you and saying, "Hey, here's something you need to learn," but don't necessarily take bad things happening in your life, "bad things," as that you've done something wrong necessarily. We want to humble ourselves before God and open ourselves to Him and examine ourselves, but it doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong.

Like with Job, God actually spoke very highly of Job through the whole situation. But this was just something to grow Job. It wasn't because he had done anything wrong necessarily. But in the end, Job says, "I used to hear about you. At the hearing of the ear, I've heard about you, but now my eye sees you." Job came to know and trust God in a way that he hadn't before. And on top of this, this is the side that we don't see when we're in Job's situation. But Job's story has been told millions of times throughout the world and encouraged countless people to persevere and to trust God through difficult times. And if we want to be able to be a partner with God, if we want to be a hero whose story blesses and inspires and lifts up other people, we're going to have to be willing to go through those dark times where we scream and we say, "God, what's wrong?

Why is this happening? I don't know which way's up and which way's down. Can't you leave me alone long enough for me to swallow my spit," Job says.

We're going to have to be willing to go through some dark times. Sometimes they're just rough to navigate. Again, we don't want to just go through those times and just say, "Well, I'm sure it's just that God's trying to grow me," and when maybe there are things in our life that we do know God wants us to change. But we can't get hung up on that issue.

So we've already talked a little bit about this idea of dark times. Just when things are happening, things are going wrong, we feel alone in the world like Job. Other people were criticizing him and saying, "This is all your fault."

We have God's testimony that that wasn't the case. In times like that, we just have to hold on to God's promises and know that God's good, to search ourselves and trust that if our heart is not condemning us, then we can have confidence toward God.

Working with difficult people. Somebody's probably coming to your mind right now. I hope it's not me. I could name a few names from last week. It's not Justin. And it's not Kevin's family that I'm thinking of, or any other employees from Breckbill Trailers. But there's a story that I like different times. I've had people on occasion compliment and say, "Well, you're very patient," or something like that. And that doesn't happen. I'm not naturally that way. I still have a lot to grow in. But there's a story about a man who went to visit a friend in Central America.

And he went in the guy's shop, and he has this yoke that's got three neck holes, like oxen plowing. And he said, "What's that for?" And the guy said, "Well, I have this one ox, and he will not plow with another ox." Because usually with oxen, you put two together, right? And if you need more, then you put another row behind or something. But you always have an even number together.

He said, "I have this one ox that will not plow with another ox. And so I'm going to try sticking him between two good oxen, and maybe he'll get the flow of things." Well, the man went back to North America, and it was years later. He meets up with this friend from Central America, and he says, "Hey, what happened to that project?" The man said, "Well, actually, I never got it, never followed through with it because I have a native friend that lived up on the mountain." And he said, "Oh," he said, "I can take care of that." He said, "I have a jackass," which is a scientific term. It's the proper name for a male donkey.

And they are really nasty. That's why people get called that sometimes.

And so he sent this ox to his friend, and the friend took it up there on the mountain and made it plow with his jack. And when it came back, it was just the nicest ox, and it would just plow with any of the other ox and just as nice as anything.

And so that's the story of my life, is God has made me plow with some humans that were like that. And that took a lot off of me. And there still will probably be many circumstances like that, that working with difficult people changes me. There are a lot of ways I've told my students. They don't understand this. I say they're my students. I know I'm not teaching anymore, but they're still my students.

If it hadn't been through having the father I had, some of the employers I worked for, you would not want me as a teacher at all. But going through those things, I know what it's like to be on that side. And so I can't relate that way to them. It's changed me. So working with difficult people does something like that to us. It breaks us. It helps us keep us from becoming like them many times if we soften ourselves to it and we allow it to not make us resentful. You want to read a good book about that? Read The Tale of Three Kings. Can't remember the author's name now.

It's about Saul and David in Absalom.

Loss. Just going through times where we lose a loved one, a relationship, health, financial, material losses, those kinds of times are times of training. They make us, they refocus us. They help us to think differently about life. They help us to see needs in other people and understand others and be able to empathize and help others better. They change our values and make us long for something deeper to live our lives for, to pursue with our lives.

Overwhelming responsibility. Leadership. Leadership isn't very fun many times. There are times that are very fun. But I don't know. I just don't use the term fun, really, to describe things like that. They're enjoyable. They're rich. They're a blessing. But John Maxwell says, "When you get kicked in the rear, you know you're out in front."

And that's the way being a leader is sometimes, or just having responsibility in whatever way it is. It's many times thankless and very rigorous. And our tendency is, especially as men, when we get punched in the face for trying to be a good leader, our tendency is to draw back and say, "It's just not worth it. It's too much of a mess."

And what God wants us to do is He wants to soften us. He wants to break us. And He wants us to keep on giving like Jesus did and keep on loving and keep reaching out to people. And it's through that brokenness and that being willing to suffer that God's work can be done. We become leaders who are more like Him.

False accusations is often part of that. And again, we need to be careful. We don't just go around and say, "Oh, everybody's accusing me falsely." But times like that, we have the opportunity to either become sour and bitter and hard or to become a soft person who can love and be cheerful and give pleasantness back in the face of false accusations. Abuse. Times when we are on the other side of the fence and we are treated wrongly by people, we're treated like a doormat or railed on and things like that. Those are not fun times. And sometimes we wonder, "What did I do wrong? Why did I have to go through this?" Especially when it's for a long period of life, like a childhood that's that way or something like that, or being in a marriage that's that way.

And those are things that we have to remember that it's whatever it is, even if it is something that we've made a bad choice, it's always God's love wants to use that in a good way in our life, to something to grow us, to soften us. God redeems those things. He allows people to make choices. He allows us to make choices that hurt each other sometimes. But God redeems those things if we let Him, if we don't harden ourselves, if we don't listen to that lie that God doesn't have our good in mind, that we're left alone, we're orphans. Jesus actually said that to His apostles. He said, "I will not leave you comfortless." And that term there is orphan.

I have not left you orphans.

Anything that's difficult. It could be the shape of your nose that just you can't see the rest of the world for it, no pun intended. Just whatever it is about you. Anything that is not pleasant is difficult in life. I'm not saying that God engineers those things, but God always wants to use those things as training in our life to make us a softer person, to make us hungry for something deeper in life, to grow our character, to make us patient, to help us to put our roots in His love so that we can step out into deeper waters.

The fact is, chastening is not fun. Training is not fun.

It doesn't feel good. And it's not just between us and God, though, but there is a kingdom of rebels, Satan, and the world around us that wants to make us think that if we're experiencing things that don't feel good, that God doesn't care about us. That's really what Satan's been trying to do all through history, tried to do it in the garden, tried to convince him that God really didn't have their best interest in mind. He was trying to rip them off, actually, keep them dumbed down. And so it's a spiritual battle because it's not just about our emotions and our feelings, but there is a force out there. Satan and the people listening to him want to make us think that.

They want to make us feel stupid for trusting God through these difficult things. Or they want to offer other things. Say, "You can't trust God through this. You're going to have to have a drink or indulge in lust or be angry and bitter. It's okay for you to act that way because this happened to you." And so we really need to guard against those things.

Hebrews 12 takes us to a character. And ironically, it's Esau, who is Jacob's brother. And I'll try to be accurate in my interpolation of his life here. But it takes us to this story of Esau. And the Bible doesn't tell us a lot about him, but it takes us to this story where he came in from hunting and he was so wore out and his value of his birthright was so cheap. Somewhere he was living for the moment, it seems like. He was living for his own heroism or whatever, but he was living for the moment. And the blessing of his father and of God and the partnership that God had offered his father that he was to partake in was so worthless to him that he said, "Sure, swap it for a bowl of soup because right now I just feel tuckered out."

And we know the story how afterwards in the end, he wept and he cried for a blessing, but it was over. It was too late. And it's the same way in our lives. We want to really be careful through these chastening experiences that we don't pull back from God, that we don't go to something else to salve our suffering, our pain, to escape from it because it's poison.

And we don't want to end up in the end like Esau, reaping the effects of lust, of workaholism, of anything to try to escape and not have to face and let the difficulty we're going through work on us. Bitterness is one of those things. It's like, "Did you ever bite your lip?" And then it kind of feels good to keep it hurts, but it actually feels good to keep biting it. And you kind of have to kick yourself and quit. "Don't do that, or I'm going to have a whole bunch of sores."

Don't have to raise your hand. Am I the only one? I've talked to a few other people about this, but that's the little way bitter. It actually feels kind of good, but it's destroying us. And that's one of the things that is so easy. My dad used to have this term that there's got to be a donkey to pin the tail on from Winnie the Pooh.

And that's the way it is when we're in a difficult situation. It's like somebody's got to pay for this or somewhere it's got to be somebody's fault. And sometimes it just isn't. And we just have to sit back and say, "Yeah, there are some things I can learn from this. I would have done differently. I'm not going to blame myself. I'm not going to blame other people," and let it soften us and let it do good things in us. And let God bring healing in relationships and make us into a person who's able to be redemptive rather than the irony is that when we hold a grudge against somebody, we often end up becoming just like them.

It's my own life. And that's one of the things that scared the tar out of me when I left home. And I started seeing the same response patterns in me when I got under the pressure of the wide world as I detested in others.

So we want to be careful. This is really important that we let God work in our lives through His training experiences, these hard things that make us into a hero, whether it's in a public way or whether it's in a private way, but somebody who is building God's kingdom. The interesting thing about this, I won't say this yet, you don't make a Navy SEAL sitting on the couch playing video games and eating chips. It's rigorous.

And while we don't condone the world's methods of victory and domination, like Paul, there's a lot of lessons we can learn from the military world, from the sports world, how they relate to their battles and the diligence they put into it. And the Navy SEALs go through some tremendous training, nearly killing themselves in many ways to become the world's elite forces.

And one of the things they go through is what they call hell week, where it's a week where they get like a total of about four hours of sleep and are pushed to ridiculous limits physically and emotionally and mentally. It's meant to try to break them down because they only want the very, very best. And throughout their training, there's this bell up there. And you can just go up there and ring the bell, put your helmet down, ring the bell, and walk out. It's all over.

And towards the end of hell week, they put them through this hypothermia test where they have extremely rigorous workouts. They swim for a couple of miles in the sea. They have their hands tied and put in a pool, and they have to bob up and down for hours and keep their air. And so physically, they're under shock. Mentally, they're just maxed out. And then they put them on a dock without any clothes, and they spray them with cold water and cold air to bring them right to the edge of hypothermia. And there's a bell there. And there's a coffee station there and blankets. There's an ambulance there and all this stuff right there. And they're sitting there, and they can see it.

And that's what Satan does with all these different things we've talked about, these coping mechanisms. Satan does that. He has these things out there, whether it's bitterness or whether it's lust or whether it's escaping in work or whatever it is, to salve that, to escape from having to face and deal work with that situation and let God break us and mold us through it. And that's such a temptation to ring that bell. And if you don't become a Navy SEAL, you can come back to the US. You can get a job, be a respectable citizen. Your buddies might boo you for being a wimp, but it's really not going to damage you for life.

But if we don't allow God's training to grow us, the only other option is joining the other army. And that's horrific. And we don't want that to happen. So it's of utmost importance to us that we don't resent God's training, but that we let it work in our lives and let it grow us into a person that's more like Jesus.

The interesting thing to me is the last part of this portion of the chapter switches from talking to the individual to talking to the group. And he says, "So encourage your brother when he's wore out and get on both sides of him and give him an arm when he's about to collapse. Be careful that you live a life that's a good example and free of things that would cause your brother to stumble." Because you don't want weak people to wander off the path or turn away from God, but instead to strengthen and heal them.

So he turns and he begins to talk to the church and says, "We have a responsibility in this to know what's going on in our brother's lives and to watch for this, this bitterness, this resentment towards God's training in our lives and to get on either side and give him an arm and to help him up." And all those things, prayer is important, but in a physical way to be part, to do everything we can to be part of this journey for him, of this battle with him.

I have come to different times in my life where I realized that this is what I needed. And Hebrews 3 says, "To exhort one another daily, lest any of us be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin." And I'm part of a group right now that's been a big help to me like that, to daily talk about what's going on in our lives and encourage each other and pray together to help us fight through some difficult things. And I think that's an incredible part of this. We each have a personal responsibility to not harden ourselves, not resent God's chastening. We also have a responsibility to each other to live and be a body and walk with each other through these things to help each other out so that we can become people who live and have a leave an effect in the world like Hebrews 11, whether it's somebody like Sarah that simply was faithful and supported Abraham and was a good mother to Isaac and is considered an example that all women should follow in being godly, or whether it's being somebody who's more outspoken or outfront.

So I hope that can be an encouragement to you to not despise God's chastening, whatever it is you're facing in your life right now, to not give in to the idea that God's punishing you. He doesn't like you, and that's why this is happening.

And to not resent it, but to let it soften you, to let it grow you and develop you into somebody who trusts God and believes God and obeys Him through whatever circumstances you go through so that each of us as individuals and our church here can be a pillar in God's kingdom.

Let's bow our heads and pray. Thank you, God, for your love toward us and your love that doesn't let us sit as infants, as toddlers, and that doesn't let us grow up to be brats. And thank you for your love that's steadfast and merciful and that continues to call us and work with us, even though sometimes, God, we fight you so hard. And we ask your forgiveness, Lord, for that. And help us, Lord, to change our agendas for our lives, our goals for our lives to yours because in the end, that's the best for us.

And help us to have a mentality of sacrifice and willingness to suffer to learn to be like Jesus so that we can be part of creating your character in the world around us. I pray that you would help us as a church to grow in being brothers and sisters to each other, truly being a body and helping each other in this journey. We pray in Jesus' name.