🙏 Hebrews 12:11 | God's Greatest Desire

📧 In today’s email…

• 📕 A quick review of what we’ve learned this week

• 👀 God’s greatest desire

• 🧐 In case you missed it..

 🧠 Memorize

_{see if you know what words go in the blanks}

___ ___ moment ___ __________ _____ _______ ______ ____ ________,

but later __ ______ ___ ________ _____ of _____________ __ _____ who ____ ____ _______ __ __.

Hebrews 12:11

A review of what we’ve learned 🤔 

Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve learned this week:

Background Context

• Author: Unknown but some options are: Paul, Luke, Barnabas, Silas and Apollos

• Audience: There’s a lot we don’t know about the audience of Hebrews, but much of the book emphasizes Christianity in relationship to Jewish teachings.

  • Persecution is present (Hebrews 10:32-34) and

  • The sacrificial system in the temple seems to still be in practice.

    • This tells us it was written before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 to people familiar with Judaism

Passage Context

Much of chapter 12 talks about 2 types of struggle:

1. When we sin and live outside of God’s will, we can expect Him to discipline us (in the way a loving father corrects their child)

2. For the sake of training, God sometimes puts us in positions where we struggle (in the way a coach trains an athlete to prepare them for competition)

Regardless of which type of suffering we find ourselves experiencing -

— They should cause us to run to God as a loving father instead of run away from him.

Original Greek

Two key words in our memory verse this week are discipline and trained.

“Discipline” is the word paideia → instruction or correction that aims at increasing virtue

• Nobody likes being disciplined in the moment. 🙅 

  • The world around us wants to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But if you look at Jesus’ life, you’ll see that this is not the call of a Christian!

“Trained” is the word gymnazō → to exercise vigorously

• Discipline gives you access to power beyond what you’re capable of right now.

  • When God uses discipline, it’s similar to an athlete training.

    • It’s not pleasant in the moment, but there is a higher purpose for the training.

    • The purpose is to:

      • Bear fruit (make you more Christlike in character), and to

      • Increase your capacity to trust God.

In short:

• discipline = correction

• training = preparation

1 Simple Practice to Train for Godliness 💪 

Get at least 2 trusted friends who prioritize following Jesus.

Establish a rhythm that includes these elements:

• Meet: Get together regularly (ideally at least 1x per week)

• Confess: Open up about your sin

• Receive: Feel the weight of your sin, and receive the forgiveness available in Christ

• Repent: Commit to change (to God and your friends)

• Pray: Ask for the power of the Holy Spirit to transform you and strengthen you

God’s Greatest Desire 🙏 

Following Jesus involves discipline, hardship, and suffering in this life.

We know this intellectually.

But when we find ourselves in hard times, sometimes all we ask God to do is to take the hardship away.

My prayer is that we would start to form a different habit.

To close out this week, I really want us to lean into this idea that we have a choice every time we face struggles.

Maybe we’re experiencing God’s discipline as a loving father.

Or maybe we’re reaping the natural consequences of sin in our lives.

But no matter what, we have a choice to:

• Run away like the Prodigal Son

• Lean into God’s loving arms through the storm

Thanks to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the veil between us and the Father is torn.

We can come to God weak, weary and broken no matter what our circumstances are.

And we’ll be met with open arms.

Because ever since the Garden, God’s greatest desire is for us to choose Him.

So friends - let’s choose Him this weekend, especially during the moments when we’re tempted to run away 🙏

In Case You Missed It 👀 

In case you missed it, here are some resources to help you dive deeper into this week’s memory verse:

• 📹️ Bible Project: Overview of Hebrews (link)

• 📚️ Better: A Bible Study of Hebrews by Jen Wilkin (link)

• 📚️ The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard (link)

• 📚️ The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer (link)

• 🎵 How Deep The Father’s Love by Worship Initiative and Shane & Shane (Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Music)

Answer key ✅ 

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.

Hebrews 12:11

How did you do? 💡