Developing Strong Character in Spirit: Steadfastness & Endurance

Jesus resisted sin until blood, showing his strength and commitment.

Hebrews teaches that we must work at developing strong character and resisting sin.

God disciplines us to educate and train us, not to punish us.

We must learn to obey God through suffering and discipline, just like Jesus.

Thank you. Now, a sidebar again here is the way we talk about this. It talks about the fact that Jesus resisted sin until blood. Remember reading that? It says that you have not resisted sin like Jesus to blood. Do you understand that Jesus had to resist sin? In fact, Hebrews is saying you're so weak, you're so undesiring to do what God wants, you won't even resist the blood like Jesus did. Now where did Jesus resist sin until he bled? Anybody remember? What did Jesus do that he actually bled when he was resisting disobedience? Mom? You bet. If you remember back to the story, it says that when Christ went off to pray, he said, Father, make this cup pass over me. nevertheless not my will but yours be done he was wanting to not die which is normal we don't want to die as humans he was a human body too there and it says he so resisted that disobedience even though he's even praying it it says he so fought it he began to sweat drops of blood out of his face and they now have proven that's a medical condition of extreme stress he was resisting disobedience to the point where he was literally, his body was breaking down and he was sweating blood out of his face. Wow. And Hebrews here says, you haven't even fought against sinning against God to a point where you haven't even shed blood like Jesus. You weaklings, is basically what he's saying. You're weak. You won't even resist even the smallest things to the point, I mean, you never even got to that point. You don't even resist. You just sin against God. He says you need to understand it's not some kind of tingly thing and you can obey God. You must work at it. You must become strong in what he's saying here. It says here, the way it's worded, it says, In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up definite special petitions for that which he was not only wanted but needed, and supplications with strong crying and tears for him who was always able to save him from death. And he was heard because of his reverence toward God. That means his godly fear and piety. And in verse 8 it says, although he was a son, he learned obedience. How? How did he learn obedience? It says that Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered. How do children learn obedience? By reasoning with them and talking to them. It says you actually teach children to obey by spanking them, is what the Bible says. What happens when they spank them? They suffer. It's no fun. and through suffering they learn. God has literally established this principle. You will not learn to be obedient to Him until He forces you through suffering. Be not discouraged by the fact that life gets rough on you. Be excited. It says it proves you're truly a child of God because if you're not being spanked and disciplined by God, you are a false child just like Judas. That's what it says in that portion. Now, to think through on that, it says, he completed his experience making him perfect or equipped so that he became the author and source of eternal salvation. Through suffering, through obedience, he was able to accomplish God's will, which was for him to sacrifice his life. Has God ever ordered you to die for him? Not yet, anyway. But he ordered Jesus to sacrifice. And in obedience, he had to take the greatest command of all to give up his life for us. And he struggled through it to resist not to be disobedient. You hear what I'm saying? He swept blood to make sure he did obey. And God says, I want you to be in that same mentality. So in chapter 12, verse 5, it says, My dear children, don't shrug off God's discipline. Don't shrug it off. Why? Don't be crushed by it either. See, some people get, oh, God must not love me. All I have is rough life and struggles and temptations and trials. Listen, it's the child he loves that he disciplines. The child he embraces, he also corrects. God is educating you. That's why you must never drop out. He's treating you as a dear child. This trouble you're in isn't punishment. It is training. Training. You get punished to be trained. The normal experience of children, only irresponsible parents leave children to fend for themselves. Would you prefer an irresponsible God? Absolutely not. I would want my God to make sure I get to where He wants me to be. And that's what He's saying here. So listen to Hebrews 12. Here's some words from the King James Version to get you understanding of the ideas behind it. The word chasing is used. For every child he has, he chastens them. Chastening means Tutorage, education, or training, And by implication, disciplinary correction. Both, see? It's not just that it's positive or negative. We think of chastening as a negative thing. It's the training part, like going to school, But when you get offline, you get punished. It's both. Instruction and punishment Is all part of chastening. It's part of what's necessary to get you mature. Secondly, in King James, it says that don't be discouraged when He rebukes you. And the word rebuke means basically to convict, convince, to tell a fault, or to correct you and really sharply straighten you out. Sometimes God needs to straighten you out by putting a roadblock in your life that you don't like. He will ruin you. He will make you lose your job. He'll make you have problems beyond what you want. you'll be ruined by the experience because you have to be corrected and your character is so essential you're not listening. So he has to take you and really move upon you And the worst one is it also says in King James that he scourges those he loves Now I don know about you but the word scourge has to do with what they did to Jesus before they crucified him Scourging literally means to flog. Now think about that. He just told you that when God really loves you, he flogs you. And if he doesn't love you, you never get flogged. Anybody get flogged lately by God? See, if you're not being flogged, and if you're not being rebuked, and if you're not being chastened by God, he says, basically, you're a phony. He says you're not real, because God only does that to his kids. So, think in the example then, spanking a child deals with their conscience and their will. Conscience and their will. That's what God does with circumstances out of your control. He's not going to sit and reason with you because He's already showed you your word and you've already reasoned yourself out of doing what He told you to do. So He's going to bring pressure upon you to force you to obey Him. He's dealing with two areas. Your will and your conscience. And when I spanked my kids when they were little, I didn't reason with them because they were children. In fact, the Scripture says in 1 Corinthians 13, when I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. Children don't reason well. They reason like a child. It doesn't make sense to them. Now that I've become a man, I'm done with childish ways and have put them aside. Reasoning doesn't work. You know, I can't reason with my dog either, my stupid dog. If I want her to go outside and she doesn't want to, reasoning doesn't work. Either bribery or punishment work. I've got to either give her a treat that's big enough that's worth the value of her going outside when she doesn't want to, or I have to drag her out there physically. You know, either way. Because she's already reasoned that she doesn't want to do it. And why? Her will is determined she's not going to do what I've told her to do. This is what immaturity is. Determining to do what you want to do, not what God says. Therefore, reasoning is not going to help here. So God breaks into your life and punishes you and forces you to do what you don't want to do. And that's what parents do with children. You force them and train them to do what they do. My kids never volunteered to brush their teeth. My grandson, he seems like to brush his teeth. But my kids never wanted to, so I made them. I didn't give them an option. I made them brush their teeth. I made them go to bed. I made them do all kinds of stuff because they didn't want to do anything but what they felt like. Making them do it trained them, forced them to be mature. You know what I'm saying? Just like going to school. You don't have the option. You're forced to go there because you must be trained in life. And so here we have to understand, when God is talking about it here, is He's going to make you grow up and mature if you're truly a Christian. Now there's the warning. If you're not really a believer, none of this matters to you. It doesn't matter. God does not reason with us in our training because you will understand later. When God first works in your life, He doesn't ask you to understand everything. He operates by the Holy Spirit and pushes you to grow up and be like Jesus. If you're ignorant, what happens? You struggle, you fight, you resist. What happens if you're smart enough to know God's will? You submit, you trust, you obey. See the difference? Because you don't have to understand everything to do what God wants. Verse 8 in the New King James says, But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are an illegitimate and not sons, or not children. Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us. We paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? And then in verse 10, I went to the Amplified Bible for a couple reasons. For our earthly fathers disciplined us for only a short period of time and chastened us as seemed proper and good to them. But He disciplines us for our certain good and the certain good of why He presses us without letting go but pushing us is this reason here. That you may become sharers of His holiness. The whole end of phase 3 it says is so that when you get up to phase 3 it says that you are adding godliness to your life. You'll never get to godliness it says until He brings you through these strong character developments that you will have a will that says I'll obey God, that you'll have a strength to say, I don't care what it takes, I'm going to go up and do what God says, I'm not making excuses any longer, I'm not going to keep following the ways of the world, I'm going to do what God says, no matter what it costs me, I'm going to do it. When you get to that place, godliness means you're like God, you're like Jesus. You'll never get there without being forced to be there by the trials of God. For the time being, no discipline brings joy, but seems grievous and painful. but afterwards it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. And so the idea here is real simple. To get you to godliness, God's going to force you to get there, and if you don't grow in character, you won't have the endurance to make it through the rough road that He's going to make you take to become like Jesus. Instead, you'll quit. You'll go half-hearted. You'll just not worry about it. You may go to church, but during the week you're not going to try. You go on other things. You just won't put any effort into it. You'll have any interest in it. You'll be just basically either a churchgoer or a no churchgoer. But you're not going to go through the effort. To go through what God's after, He wants you to be a marine, basically. You know what I'm saying? It's a marine religion here. You really got to go through it all the way. Hebrews 12, 12 says, So then brace up, reinvigorate, and set right your slackened and weakened and drooping hands, and strengthen your feeble and palsied and tottering knees. That's the Amplified. Notice what we're saying here. You weak, weak people, stop being weak because you must press forward with all your might. All your might to do the will of God. And he says, guess what? Look at here when he talked about being weak. What does it say? It says, so then brace up and it tells you to do it. In the King James it says, strengthen yourself. Strengthen yourself. Remember what I just mentioned. You say, Lord, give me strength. And God says, no. Make yourself strong. Now what's the difference between you asking God for strength and God telling you, no, make yourself strong? How can you make yourself strong? Nathan made me think of how to make yourself strong What do you do all the time now Nathan On your You make yourself I could keep praying God make me strong like my son Nathan Will he do that? No. Now, if I want to go pump iron with him, I'll make myself strong. He's made himself strong. You can pray all day, God, make me strong. He won't do it. You have to pump iron. You know what I'm saying? And we have a bunch of weenie Christians in churches who are weak because they keep praying, God, make me strong. And God says, no, go make yourself strong. God is saying, I'm not going to give you strength. You're wasting. If you guys quit praying these prayers, go make yourself strong. Don't tell me to do it. I can't. You go do it. I'm already established for you. Make yourself strong. Well, the question is, how do you make yourself spiritually strong? If pumping iron is a good example, how do you make yourself strong? Good question. Now, remember what we said here? What makes you strong then? according to God it says to make you do what's right it says he gives you punishment he gives you all kinds of issues well how do you become strong in life for one thing is stop running away from challenges stop running away from pressure what happens to make you strong well if you have a financial issues running off and going bankrupt and moving out of town so nobody knows it isn't going to make you strong is it that makes you weak What makes you strong is you face the situation. You bring solutions. You face the pressure. You face the threats. You face all that and you solve it. You deal with it. You sacrifice. You get done. You pay all your debts. And when you're done, are you strong or weak? You're stronger. You're stronger in honesty. You've been honest. You paid off all your debts. In honesty, you took care of those things. You worked out solutions. You maybe had to work a second job to do it. You might have to sacrifice and stop buying other things. but you took the issue in hand and you became a stronger person by it. That's how you become stronger. Think of those other areas. God says to not ask for patience. Why? Remember James? What's it say in James about patience? How do you get patience? It says in James that God will give you trials and tribulations. Trials and tribulations. He doesn't just say, bing, you're patient. He gives in your life hard situations that you don't handle well. He makes you face situations that you don't have solutions to and you drive yourself through them. You push yourself through them. You climb over them. What happens when you climb mountains? It makes you stronger. What happens when you move boulders? It makes you stronger. What happens when you work your way through situations? It makes you stronger. You face life and you plow through them. That's what it was giving examples with Jesus. Remember how it said it? It said he plowed his way through every circumstance, all the hostility of mankind that was spit at him, and he still plowed through it all, and died on the cross and saved you from your sin. He didn't quit and say, these stupid people should go to hell. They're a bunch of idiots. Forget it. I'm going back to heaven where I belong. He didn't. He plowed through all the circumstance, and the hatred, and the frustrations of life, and fought through it and did the will of God. And that's what he's trying to tell you. Face these situations. Don't run from them. Become a strong person and become a reasonable person. Stop living your life for yourself. Find the will of God. Take on the race and get done with it. Do what God said, even if it hurts. That makes you strong. Does that make sense? Is that helping you understand what we're saying here? It says become strong in this. Don't take the safe way. Cut through and make firm and plain and smooth straight paths for your feet. That literally, the Greek there that talks about make firm and straight, It's literally making sure you've got a direct direction of where you're going and how to get there. Let me describe it here. I think I wrote it in the next page here. There we go. Make yourself strong, exercise your will and desire, and establish your faith. Job faced the issues and firmly said, I believe in God and I'm not going anyplace with this. I'm not quitting. I don't have any answers why all these things happened in my life. I'm not sure why I lost all my goods, and I'm broke like crazy, and I have nothing left, and my children all died. I don't have answers, but I'm going to stand here as strong as I can, and I'm not going from God, and God gave me life, and I'm not going anywhere else. He brought me in this world naked. I'm going out naked. That's fine, but I'm not budging. I believe in God. That's strength. That's faith all mixed together. It says, make yourself strong. Exercise your will and desire. Straight means to erect or build straightforward, straight level for your feet. Again, it doesn't say, God, give me straightness of it. It says you build it. You plow through life and make your path straight. Certain examples are even small things, but I hear people in our day always say, hey, Pastor, I can't go to church. My kids are playing soccer, and the league said it's on Sunday at 11, so sorry, I'm not going to church. I said, hey, when my kids were in soccer, they told us that. I told them simply. We'll be there after church. We would bring Nathan to soccer games halfway through. And they said, oh, it's okay, okay. I said, now, if you don't like it, I'll switch to a team that doesn't have games on Sunday. No, no, no, no. You go ahead and you just get here when you need to. I stood my ground and said, I'm sorry, my God's first, and so we're not going to be there until we get done. We'll get there as quickly as we can, but our kids would be putting on their soccer clothes in the car as we drove from church, but we went there when it was over. We didn't let anything block us from doing the will of God. That's strength. That's making a straight path saying nothing's going to block me from the will of God. I'm going to plow through what's necessary and I'm going to establish my way with God because God is my King. That's making paths. It's a course of conduct. It's the way it's derived from the Greek. A course, a path that's straight before you. My path is God. No circumstance, no financial issues, no political issues. Nothing's going to stop me from the will of God. I'm going to do it. That's what he's saying here. This is what he's telling you to do. This is making your... And that's your choice. See, this is not God doing it for you. To make your strong, you take the choice of exercise. And secondly, you make your path the way it should be. God says he'll help you when you do this first. Your obedience is first. Also out of verse 14, it says follow. That word follow means to pursue. In fact, the word is also translated to persecute. If somebody's persecuting you while they're following you, they're pretty hard on your trail, aren't they? He's not saying just follow these things. He's saying pursue it like an obsession. You ever seen the movies like Dr. Kimball when the one guy what the name of that movie where he was accused of killing his wife and it wasn really him A one guy killed it And the guys the police chased him like obsessed over him all over the countryside to try to, anyway, whatever it's called. But pursuing this, God says, I want you to pursue this with such urgency. It's like people who so hate you, they pursue you till you're dead. He said, I want you to pursue this thing with all your gusto. And this is what people don't do. Make a straight course to holiness and do it with all your might and don't give up until it's accomplished. That's what he's saying. Now, final ideas as we go to the end of the section of Hebrews is chapter 12, verse 14. Strive to live in peace with everybody and pursue that consecration and holiness without which no one will ever see the Lord. Pursue means to chase like crazy after holiness. The very thing he says is phase three. being holy and righteous before God. Pursue it. Choose to chase it. Stop talking about it. Do it. Follow it with all your guts to do it. For you understand that later on when he wanted... And this is basically talking... Let me go back up to 16. That no one may become guilty of sexual vice or become a profane person as Esau did who sold his own birthright for a single meal. Let me read it properly here. defiled by it. And for example, they give that no one become guilty of sexual advice like Esau did when he gave up his right for his rights by selling it out for a bowl of soup. In other words, here's what it really boils down to. God orders you to do his will. It's not easy. But if you find out that as you're coming through this, God begins to put pressure in your life, which he always does for every person. He'll start causing you to have relationship problems if you're not obeying him. He'll start putting problems from your authorities. He'll start giving you pressure from relationship breakdowns with husband and wife or child with dad and mom. He'll start causing issues amongst you. He'll start causing neighbors to give you problems. He'll start financial situations to be a problem. He'll start causing all kinds of things to happen. All those situations you say, oh, why is God doing this? He's forcing you to obey Him. Because you don't see it with your eyes, you can do one of two things. You turn in bitterness, say, God, you're making my life miserable, why should I trust you? Or you could say, obviously I'm not listening and God is pushing upon me His will so that I will become, in character, a godly person. God's grace is not something that's disguised if you know that it means tribulation, trials and testings are going to come on your life. you will face the pressures of God invisibly behind you, pushing you to be right. If you don't listen, He'll make it bigger problems. If you don't listen, He'll make bigger problems. If you don't listen, He'll make it even bigger problems. He'll so hurt you that He's willing to literally make you cry out in pain for you to listen. Isn't that what spanking is? But see, God doesn't have a paddle that you see, so He uses your situations. he'll make you be so financially hurt and you'll start crying because you can't pay your bills. He'll do something that's so cram on you to force you to listen to him that he'll push you to the brink that you think you can't stand it. You can do one of two things here. You can bow to him and say thank you for all your pressure or you can get mad at God, mad at the world, mad at your husband, mad at your wife, and so forth and get bitter and fight in anger. See what I'm saying? Don't miss the grace. This is God's grace because grace is doing one thing, right? Giving you the desire. Well, what is a spanking to a child? Doesn't that give that child a desire to do what's right next time? Because when you spank them enough, they think it's more fun to obey now than it is to get to spanking. See, that is what grace is. That is grace. A spanking is God's grace. Working on your will to give you a new desire, a hyphen desire. I really want to obey my parents a lot more than I did last time because it hurt so bad. Last time I just obeyed, I don't want to do that again. That's giving grace, you know what I'm saying? That is grace. Grace is caught working on the will of somebody so that you'll have a new desire, a stronger desire, a bigger desire to obey God. Sometimes God has to whip you so hard that you really change your desires and say, I really want to obey God now. Before I only half-heartedly wanted to, but I do want to do it. Because God's already given you strength to do it, but you don't have the character of will to just do it. See the difference? And you might have to suffer the consequence. Now, I know it's kind of rambly here, but I do want to make sure that you see the visuals here again. One last point. In this phase, then, God is determined to make you a different person, to turn you from a Boy Scout to a military man, I guess is a good way to look at it, to grow up, to become a strong, obedient, godly person that he can use so that this world will know that he's God. And in between that immature state, he can't use you hardly. He's got to make you different to make you usable. And so he's going to take you through, first, filling your mind for his truth. Secondly, begin to get you to have the understanding to control yourself and do what's right. Thirdly, to give you the toughness to endure anything so that you're usable for Him even if He sends you to the ends of the earth and go to a tribe that never even understood you and you would say, yes Lord, I'll go do it because I love you. Instead of saying, oh, there's no McDonald's there. And besides that, it's too hard. Where is your strength? Are you a Samson for Jesus or are you a Judas Iscariot basically? Where are you? you got it

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