The Gospel for Those Experiencing God’s Discipline

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. In the name of Jesus, tonight we will be looking at Lamentations chapter 3 together.

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And it's important for us to recognize that scripture makes a very firm distinction between God's law and the gospel.

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God's law tells us what it is that God demands of us. His commandments tell us what we ought to do, how we are to think, what we are to do and not do.

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And because it is always telling us what we ought to do, because we always fall short,

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God's law always accuses us. And it's very easy when we face trials, troubles, persecutions, sufferings and things of that nature to believe that God has somehow forgotten the gospel.

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That somehow what we are really getting is our just desserts and that whole gospel thing was just too good to be true anyway.

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And so it's clear that God is angry with me or with you.

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And that's not a good way to think. It confuses law and gospel. And in our text in Lamentations, we're going to see a very important theme.

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And that is the theme that is kind of fleshed out in Hebrews 12. And we'll look at that before we get into Lamentations 3.

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This idea that now that we are forgiven and that we are in Christ and we've been reconciled to the

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Father, that God the Father disciplines us. Now being a father,

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I know a thing or two about disciplining children. And I can tell you this, it's no fun, it's quite awful, but at the same time, totally necessary.

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And I can honestly say that there's never been a time in my life where I've disciplined my children where in disciplining them,

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I thought, well, I never will love them again. You know, in fact, when we discipline our children, we do it because we love them and we care for them and we see and we understand things about life and about their behavior that they don't quite get.

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And as sinful, fallen human beings, it is imperative for us to understand that because we fall so far short of the glory of God, that we aren't even close to really getting what it is that we need to get and to understand.

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And therefore, God as our Father disciplines us.

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And this is far different than the idea of God in his condemning, judging, eternal wrath, punishing us for our sins.

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There's a big difference between the two. So to frame our text for tonight in Lamentations, I just want to read out a little bit from Hebrews, chapter 12, verse three.

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Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself so that you may not grow weary or faint hearted.

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So this is a passage that is calling for endurance, calling for perseverance, but endurance and perseverance through what?

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Well, the divine author of Hebrews then goes on to say, in your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

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I wish I could say that my struggle against sin is that spectacular. In fact, oftentimes my struggles against sin feel like anything but a struggle.

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And he says this, you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons.

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So my son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the

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Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the

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Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastises every son, and we can be inclusive here, and every daughter whom he receives.

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It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons for what son is there whom his father does not discipline.

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If you are left without discipline in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.

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Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them.

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Shall we not much more be subject to the father of the spirits and live?

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For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness.

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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.

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This is a long -forgotten concept in Christianity, and one over and again that is denied by those who would turn

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God into a genie, who is there for answering our every beck and call. We ring the bell,

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God comes and he writes us a check, we have a snotty nose, God miraculously heals us, and there's no pain or suffering in this life.

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That's not how it works. So consider Lamentations 3 and watch how the text itself, there's law and then right in the middle of it starts coming forward the gospel.

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And you can see this theme of God's discipline, one that we must lament over even when we're going through it because it is painful.

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But understand this, when we are disciplined by God, that is a tangible way in which

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God is telling you, I love you. He is in that painful discipline, correcting us and pruning us and bringing us to a point where we can enjoy the fruits of righteousness.

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But that requires us to have our sinful natures and our desires and passions curved.

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Lamentations 3 then, verse 1, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath.

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He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light. Surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.

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And you'll note this portion of Lamentations is written in the first person. This is the prophet

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Jeremiah speaking of his own experience. He's not speaking about Israel now, he's talking about himself.

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He has made my flesh and my skin waste away. He has broken my bones.

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He has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation.

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He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago.

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He has walled me about so that I cannot escape. He has made my chains heavy, though I call and cry for help.

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He shuts out my prayer, at least that's what it seems like at the time.

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He has blocked my ways with blocks of stone. He has made my paths crooked.

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He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding. He turned aside my steps, tore me to pieces.

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He has made me desolate. He bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow.

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He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver. I have become the laughing stock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all the day long.

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He has filled me with bitterness. He has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes.

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My soul is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what happiness is.

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So I say, my endurance has perished, and so has my hope from the

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Lord. Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall.

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My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.

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But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.

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And with the beginning of the turn in verse 21, we can see really what's going on here. This is not a man describing

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God unleashing His wrath like we saw last week. This is

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God exercising discipline with somebody that He loves. Because this is a man who can speak in such a way that in the midst of the suffering, in the midst of this wormwood and gall and affliction, and the feeling and the experience as if God had completely turned

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His back on him, He dares to hang on to hope.

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And what is it that He hopes for in the midst of all of these trials? And then we get this wonderful verse.

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The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.

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They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.

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What an amazing piece of gospel in the midst of what total darkness.

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And I remember when I was in high school, I attended a Christian high school. One of our math teachers, he had actually taken these words from Lamentations chapter 3 and he had written his own song.

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And I still remember it to this day. The steadfast love of the

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Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.

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They are new every morning. New every morning. Great is thy faithfulness,

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O Lord. Great is thy faithfulness. Beautiful words.

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Those are the types of words that give us hope in the midst of what just seems to be an awful, difficult, bitter, gravel -in -your -teeth kind of life.

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And understand this, all of that is as painful as it is, is not because of God's hatred and wrath for you.

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It's because of His great love for you. If we didn't have Hebrews 12 to explain that God disciplines those

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He loves, we wouldn't get this. And so there's Jeremiah in the midst of all of this, and the one singular thing he knows with certainty is the steadfast love of the

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Lord never ceases. It never does. And it never will.

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And how could it? Because Christ Himself, He was pierced for your transgressions.

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He was bruised for your iniquities. The chastisement, the punishment that brought you peace was upon Him.

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And because Christ was forsaken, you will never be forsaken. Because the

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Son of God died, you are now adopted as sons and daughters of God.

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And His steadfast love never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.

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And this is a good bit of news for us. Because over and again, because of the very real, real experience we have with our sinful nature, and being disciplined by God, it would be very easy for us to believe and misunderstand and somehow despair and think that God's mercies had come to an end.

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But they never do. Not for you who are in Christ. The Lord is my portion, says my soul.

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Therefore, I will hope in Him. The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks

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Him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the

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Lord. Isn't that what life just feels like once your kids are out of the house?

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Waiting for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.

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Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him. Let him put his mouth in the dust.

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There may yet be hope. Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes. And let him be filled with insults.

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Oh, that sounds like Jesus is preaching in the Sermon on the Mount, does it not? For the

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Lord will not cast off forever. But though He cause grief,

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He will have compassion according to the abundance of His steadfast love.

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For He does not afflict from His heart or grieve the children of men.

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And see, this verse, verse 33, is so crucial. Over and again, I love the fact that Luther insists that if you want to understand the true character and nature of God, you look at Jesus bleeding, suffering, dying on the cross for your sins.

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And verse 33 comports with that wonderfully. You see, the grief that we go through, our bodies breaking down, our relationships strained to the breaking point, bosses that mistreat us, politicians that scandalize us and make us so angry.

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And all of, in the midst of this, that feeling that somehow God is gone. You see,

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God does not afflict from His heart. This is not what He truly desires to do.

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It's akin to the father who says to his son when he's going to spank him, Son, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.

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And the son never believes it. He goes to his room sniffling and snuffling from being spanked and says to his brother or his sister,

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Dad is an idiot. Sit there and had the audacity to tell me this was going to hurt him more than it hurt me.

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And while that boy is in his room scoffing at his dad's words, his dad is sitting on the bed with a belt in his hand, weeping.

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Weeping. There's no joy in disciplining our kids. There's no joy in it for God.

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This is His nature. What a powerful verse. To crush underfoot all the prisoners of the earth, to deny a man justice in the presence of the

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Most High, to subvert a man in his lawsuit, the Lord does not approve.

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Who has spoken and it came to pass unless the Lord has commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the

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Most High that good and bad come? The answer is yes. Why should a living man then complain?

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A man about the punishment of his sins. So let us test and examine our ways.

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And let us return to the Lord. Let us repent. Daily return to the waters of our baptism.

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Let us return to the Lord. Let us lift up our hearts and our hands to God in heaven.

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Listen to this great, great confession. We have transgressed and we have rebelled.

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And yet from our experience it feels like these words that come next, and yet you have not forgiven.

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You've wrapped yourself with anger. You've pursued us, killing us without pity. You've wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through.

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At least that's what it feels like. You have made us scum and garbage among the peoples.

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All our enemies open their mouths against us. Panic and pitfall have come upon us.

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Those words in verse 46, of our enemies opening their mouths against us, that's exactly what happened to Jesus on the cross.

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Psalm 22 picks that up when it talks about those who are surrounding Him, make mouths at Him.

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A little bit of a veiled reference to the cross. Panic and pitfall have come upon us. Devastation and destruction.

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My eyes flow with rivers of tears because of the destruction of the daughter of my people. My eyes will flow without ceasing, without respite, until Yahweh from heaven looks down and sees.

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My eyes cause me grief at the fate of all the daughters of my city.

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I've been hunted like a bird by those who are my enemies without cause. They flung me alive into the pit.

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They cast stones on me. Water closed over my head. I said,

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I am lost. I called on your name, O Yahweh, from the depths of the pit.

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And in Jeremiah's case, that was a literal pit. He was actually thrown into a mud -filled cistern.

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Nearly died in there. And then he says this, You heard my plea.

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Do not close your ear to my cry for help. You came near when

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I called on you. You said, do not fear. You have taken up my cause,

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O Yahweh. And you have redeemed my life. Redeemed it from the pit.

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You have seen the wrong that has been done to me, O Yahweh. Judge my cause. You have seen all their vengeance, all their plots against me.

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You have heard their taunts, O Yahweh. All their plots against me.

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The lips and thoughts of my assailants are against me all the day long.

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Behold, they are sitting and they are rising. I am the object of their taunts. You will repay them,

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O Yahweh, according to the work of their hands. You will give them dullness of heart.

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Your curse will be on them. You will pursue them in anger and destroy them from under your heavens,

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O Yahweh. What an interesting turn. What a fascinating text.

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In it, we saw and witnessed and read the darkness of being disciplined by God.

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In it, we saw the daring to hope in the Gospel and in the steadfast love and the forgiveness of God.

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In it, we saw Jeremiah's angst and the very real feeling that he experienced that God had somehow forsaken him and then the turn that God hears,

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He responds, and that He will judge righteously and even vindicate

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Jeremiah. And those who were his enemies will see his salvation.

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And because of their impenitence and sin, God will then pursue and destroy them from under the heavens.

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The last bit is a little bit hard to swallow, but it's all part of the story, if you would.

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And so let us then dare to repent, consider our sins, and dare to hope and to love the

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Lord, to hang on to His steadfast love and His mercies that never come to an end.

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They are truly new every morning, whether in Lent, whether in Epiphany or Christmas or Pentecost or Easter, it doesn't matter.

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Every morning when you wake up this week, remind yourself that Christ's mercies are new today.

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They never come to an end. With the morning dawn comes a rich supply of an unending mercy and love for you.

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And even if you are given by God to suffer tomorrow or the next day, or God has chosen in His fatherly love for you to discipline you, know this, that that's not what

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He truly desires to do, but He does it in love so that you may reap the benefit of the fruit of righteousness.

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So hang on to that hope. Believe those Gospel promises. You can take them to the bank.

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His mercies never come to an end. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

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And again, that address is We thank you for your support.

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