To Encourage You

Hebrews 12:10-12 “He disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees”

You do realize, don’t you, that the ultimate objective of God’s instruction to us in the Bible is not to fill our head with knowledge but to transform the way we live?  Everywhere we look in the Scriptures we have the proclamation of truth followed with the word “therefore” followed by instructions on how to put that truth into action. 

One such example is in the words above from Hebrews 12.  The writer has been telling us about the discipline of God for the children whom He loves.  He doesn’t turn a blind eye to their sin and lack of maturity.  He doesn’t ignore their erroneous thoughts when it comes to spiritual truth. Rather, He is intimately involved in each believer’s life, and He disciplines them to help guide them in the ways of Truth.  So in the passage above, we are told that if we know these things, it should “therefore” change the way we think and act regarding them.  He talks about those who have “drooping hands and weak knees.” In the opening verses of Hebrews 12 our life as believers is likened to a “race.”  Continuing with this analogy, it is common for an athlete to become weary, especially in a race of any distance, which the Christian life surely is.  The result is that the hands start to drop and the knees start to wobble.  It’s a mark of a runner who is beginning to slow down and might eventually stop.  But that’s not how we are to be as Christians. This discipline that the book of Hebrews talks about can be a very hard thing. The trials that God might sovereignly send our way can bend us low and slow our step.  They can seem overwhelming. We can be tempted to give up.  But God is telling us that in light of the things He has just told us about such trials, we are not to do this.  The difficulties that God has allowed to touch us as His children, be it difficult people, financial or physical hardships, or anything else that is, in the words of Elizabeth Elliot for suffering, “something we have that we don’t want or something we want but don’t have,” are always for our good. They are ultimately meant for great blessing. So, if we know this, it should greatly affect our attitude about them. It should cause us to “not get weary in well doing” (Galatians 6:9), but to “press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). It should enable us to “rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

So, if you are in a place of suffering right now, is that how you’re viewing it? Or are you depressed, downtrodden, afraid, and ready to give up?  If so, it’s time to change your thinking. It’s time to believe in the truth of the perfect Word of God.  It’s time to “lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees,” for the truth is that it is especially in times like these that the Lord is very near us in a very personal way, teaching us and maturing us as only the touch of a Father Who loves us in ways that we can’t even begin to fathom can do.