I once knew a child who had something wrong with the muscle of one eye. Sometimes he could focus both eyes just fine, but frequently one eye would wander off. When this happened, his father would say, “Son, fix your eye!” Then the boy would shake his head, and immediately his eye focused properly. Hebrews 12:2 tells us to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith. If one of our eyes is wandering off in a cockeyed fashion, we will have to get it fixed on the Lord.
The book of Hebrews is a rich book, probably one of the greatest sources of texts for expository messages in the Bible. The eleventh chapter gives us the account of many of the great men and women of faith who have gone on before us. And what more shall I say? For time will jail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection; and others were tortured, not accepting their release, in order that they might obtain a better resurrection; and others experienced mockings and scourgings, yes, also chains and imprisonment.
They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (men of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. And all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us, so that apart from us they should not be made perfect.
Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary and lose heart (literally: “fainting in your souls”). Hebrews 11:32–12:3.
Throughout this entire chapter, there is an emphasis on focusing on Christ. As you serve God, you are not to focus on your circumstances, but neither should you focus on the answers that you want to obtain from Him. Focus on Him. It is good to seek for a gift from God, but it is better to seek the Giver of the gift and be related to Him. Rather than focusing on the problems and the circumstances, or even on the answers to prayer that you are looking for, you should focus upon the Lord Himself.
This word should be a great help for everyone who has ever been discouraged or depressed, or who has felt the assault of the spirit of futility. It should open our hearts to see that, above everything else, God is putting us through these dealings in order to bring us to a certain conclusion. We could very easily emphasize the objectives and the end that God has in view, and everyone would accept that. Everyone likes to hear about the Kingdom. Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe. Hebrews 12:28. Hebrews 12:10 speaks of another objective for which God is working: that we will share His holiness. We love to hear about that, too.
Not only did the men of faith that Hebrews speaks about see the objective, but they also went through the things that God ordered for their lives. They were willing to do even as Christ, who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of God. We must focus on Him; we must set our eyes on Him. If one eye gets a little cockeyed and starts wandering off to the circumstances, to the problems, to the things that we want out of life, to the objectives we want to attain, then we are missing what God really wants. Then we must fix our eye so that it is not wandering off. We set our eyes solely on the glory of God. It is good to see the end in view, but we must also be just as dedicated and just as submissive by our faith to the means which God uses to bring that end to pass.
Concerning a father, the Bible tells us that if he does not chasten his son, he hates him (Proverbs 13:24). Yet often fathers and mothers say that they love their child too much to spank him. They do not; they hate him if they are not dedicated to the means to accomplish the end. You say you love your child too much to punish him. Do you also love him too much to see him go to jail or be killed? Do you love him so much that you would let his life be an undisciplined torture and confusion to him? If you do not discipline him, the truth is that you hate him.
Hebrews goes on to explain how God disciplines us, that if He does not discipline us, He does not love us. And you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him; for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Hebrews 12:5–8. Without discipline, your heavenly Father cannot even acknowledge you as being His son, as being one who was in any way begotten by Him, because if you are a child of God, He is going to discipline you; He is going to deal with you.
Hebrews 12 begins by speaking about the great cloud of witnesses, about fixing your eyes on the Lord, about laying aside every weight and running the race that is set before you—in other words, reaching all the objectives that God has for your life. That sounds beautiful. You may say you want to fight a good fight, you want to finish the course, you want to complete all that is set before you (2 Timothy 4:7); but it is in the everyday living, in the discipline that God puts you through, that He is applying the means which will accomplish the end that He has in view for you.
When you decide that you want a deeper walk with God, the first thing that happens is a lot of problems. When you pray for a walk with God, many hindrances come. You ask the Lord for real faith, and He moves on your heart and gives you great faith. You start claiming things, but none of them come to pass. You experience one delay after another. You may become discouraged because you wanted faith. Did you really? You just wanted quick answers. You wanted a magic wand. Real faith walks with God. God brings many delays in order to accomplish His will for your life. For instance, you pray for patience, and He gives you tribulation (Romans 5:3). You may pray for wisdom, and the Lord brings you problems.
God wants us to be just as dedicated to the means as we are to the end that we seek.
Many a young couple gets married with promises and words of faith over them as the Lord gives deep revelation concerning their lives. But after they set about the routine of everyday living, they have greater difficulty than does a couple in the world, who do not even know the Lord. The Christian couple is trying to follow divine order, but the wife is crying all the time because she is trying to be submissive, and the husband is wanting to withdraw from the authority that God is laying upon him. They know they love each other; they know they are in the will of God; but they cannot figure out why they are not living happily ever after. The truth is that God has something in mind for that marriage. The very fact that words of faith were spoken concerning their marriage shows that God has a goal and an objective in mind for it; so He begins to put them through the dealings that will accomplish His goal.
The Lord disciplines us, but He does not do it in a destructive way; He does it in a creative way. He disciplines us so that we learn how to discipline ourselves. The Lord says in Proverbs 16:32 that the man who rules his own spirit is greater than he who takes a city. How true that is.
Many people think they must constantly prove their success by things that are outside of themselves. That is not true. Happiness does not come as a result of the things you accumulate or conquer outside of yourself; happiness comes by the things that are wrought in your spirit as you live day to day. When you learn how to be content and how to be appreciative, then many things will open up to you. It is not how much you are doing, nor how many miracles and signs and wonders you do that is important. With all that, you can still have a heart that will cause the Lord to say, “Depart from Me, you worker of iniquity. I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23). You may have prophesied and cast out devils in His name, but that is not enough if there is rebellion within your heart and the discipline is not there.
God will put you through His dealings to obtain discipline in your life. You will probably fail time after time. God may bring a test to you, and you may become rebellious and say things and feel things you should not. The problems and the defeats are not permanent. Simply repent and go on. Time and time again the disciplines and the chastenings of the Lord bring you to the same point, but sometimes you get so discouraged and depressed that you become weary and begin to faint in your soul. Then it is time to fix your eyes. Bring them back into focus again. Fix your eyes on Jesus and consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself. The discouragement comes because you fail to have the focus on the Lord. He is disciplining you so that you have such a sustained focus on the Lord that in anything you face and anything you do, you are looking to the Lord and trusting Him.
Speaking of our earthly fathers, the writer of Hebrews continues: For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Hebrews 12:10, 11.
Discipline yields two things: the fruit of righteousness and a partaking or sharing in His holiness. God has something in mind for us and He must bring us out of the tendencies and the propensities of the human nature. For centuries mankind has been conditioned to respond to things in a certain way, and we do not readily break that conditioning. Only when the discipline of the Lord comes to us, do we break loose of our human frailties and our human responses and come to the place where we begin to move in the Lord and partake of Him. We are literally driven to a place where we cannot succeed on the human level. He drives us out of the flesh and into the spirit.
You do not come into a walk in the Spirit because you simply decide to be a spiritual person and not a carnal person. It is not an instant process. You submit yourself to the Lord, and He starts dealing with you. As He is dealing with you, all the carnal poison starts erupting. You pray for the Lord to make you pure and holy before Him; and the next thing you know, you are covered with boils and eruptions, as the poison of your human nature surfaces. When you ask the Lord for real holiness and righteousness, your need will be exposed to you. God always exposes the need before He brings the answer.
Remember Job, how he was crying out to God, sitting on an ash pile, scraping his boils with an old piece of pottery, wishing that he were dead. God had something in mind for Job. He was willing to put Job through those testings because in his latter end, He gave him a double portion. God certainly loved Job, but everyone else was telling him that God must he angry with Him, that he must have sinned, and that God was punishing him. Job made many speeches trying to defend his integrity, but no one believed him. God finally stepped in and said, “Gird up your loins, I want to talk with you” (Job 38:3). Then Job said, “I abhor myself” (Job 42:6). He had no more defenses. He finally came to that place of humility before the Lord that God was working for all the time. God was not concerned about how many boils a man could endure. He was not interested in discovering a new medical treatment using ashes to cure boils. He had something else in mind: He wanted to bless Job in a greater measure. He wanted to be closer to him. He wanted to reveal Himself to him.
When God begins to deal with you, and all you want is a closer walk with the Lord, you know what happens; when a man is prayed over and set apart for a ministry, immediately he starts going through God’s dealings. You must be as completely dedicated to the means that God uses to bring about the end as you are dedicated to the end that God has in view; and that is not easy.
To appreciate and to encourage is the human way of bringing people forth. Rather than dealing with people directly, we tend to encourage them and so bring them along. This is like the method a mother suggested when she brought her son to school. She told the teacher that her son was so sensitive, that if he started being naughty, all the teacher had to do to get him to behave was to slap the boy next to him. We would all like to learn by having the Lord slap the fellow next to us, but that is not the way God does things. He deals with us.
Everything God is trying to work in your life, He is doing because He really loves you. It may not seem like it, and that is the reason Hebrews says you are not to “regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him; for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.”
Nothing is as wonderful as a walk with God. As you come into it and become dedicated to the end that God has in view, He carefully deals with you, and you change. You change rapidly from week to week. You hardly realize it yourself, but others can see it. God is doing a deep work in your heart; and every time you think you have it made, the Lord brings more scourging, and a few more of Job’s boils erupt. When the Lord finishes, what a beautiful thing He will have worked in your life and in your spirit. It is easy to grow weary; but as you fix your focus upon the Lord, you can endure anything that you have to endure for the present. The victory is coming, even though you may think it is never going to arrive. When the Lord’s objectives are finally attained, you will be surprised at how many fringe benefits you have obtained and how many other things God has worked in you.
The Lord is preparing kings and priests, and the pathway to becoming a king or a priest of God is to become a bond-servant of Jesus Christ, to come to the place where you lose all the rights to yourself so that you are no longer your own man, but Christ’s man completely. When you finally get to that place and realize that you are nothing, you may feel that you have lost your identity. At such times you must remember you are just His child, coming into sonship. You are going to receive a Kingdom which cannot be shaken, and since the Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21), He has to be sure that there is nothing in you that can be shaken. You will not receive the Kingdom that cannot be shaken until nothing in your own spirit can be shaken, until you are steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58).
It is deadly when you get your eyes on the circumstances instead of keeping them on the Lord and on what He wants to do for you and work in you. It is deadly when you murmur and rebel because you are unhappy with your life and unhappy with the plan God has for you. Sometimes people withdraw from walking with God because they do not have the faith to submit to the discipline. Soon they begin to talk of how good everything is going for them. They cannot understand why anyone would try to walk with the Lord, for it involves struggle after struggle. Now they have received a promotion; they have more money; and everything seems to be great. But really it is not. It is just that nothing is happening in their lives now. Before, God was taking them seriously about their desire to walk with Him, and He was pushing them into one situation after another.
God deals and deals and keeps the whip on your back. He scourges every son whom He receives. Do not draw back from it! The only way the objective will be reached is by the means that God has chosen. Why does He choose such a way to bring about His will? I do not know. All I know is that this is the way He does it, and it is effective. You will have to enter into it by faith—faith to focus on the Lord, faith that will submit to the Lord and not grow weary or lose heart, faith that will not faint when you are reproved. You need faith that invites the Lord to deal with you. Every time He scourges you, look up and say, “I needed that.” That must become your only response.
Many times you react wrongly to the Lord’s dealings. Instead of swearing at the devil and cursing your luck, you must realize that God is teaching you to be a disciplined person. There is a time limit on His lessons. If you do not learn, He will do something more drastic to you. The shepherd may slap the lamb when it strays just a little, and the lamb cries, “Baa!” But if the lamb wanders off into a thicket where the wolves can get it, the shepherd takes His rod and breaks its leg. Then he binds it up. The little lamb is still crying, “Baa,” but he is not straying very far away. He stays close by the shepherd. He has learned! You must decide whether the Lord will have to break your leg, or whether you will he easily entreated and listen to what He has to say. He keeps speaking, but sometimes you do not listen very well. Are you ready to walk with the Lord with no more murmuring, no more discouragements, no more fainting in your soul? Your eyes must be fixed on Him.
Sometimes God makes work itself a discipline. He lays responsibilities on people to see what they will do with them. Some people are beautifully trained to throw off responsibility.
How does the Lord give gifts? It is all by His grace, but He does it in a kind of sneaky way. First, He will give you a dime, just when you were looking for a big treasure. Remember, if you are faithful in the little things, then He will bring you greater things (Matthew 25:21). Many of the most likely prospects for the ministry are kept in a state where they never have anything certain to depend on. They often become discouraged. They see another brother set into an office with great things prophesied over him, and all they have is a dime. They want some big prophecies too. But God’s question is, “What did you do with the dime?” Do not despise the little thing. Soon the Lord begins to multiply it, as you are faithful to give yourself wholly to the thing God wants for you. Believe in the objectives and in the end that He has in view for you.