What is the benefit of such discipline? It is to make us partakers of His holiness. This is glorious! Holiness is God’s nature. We may say that holiness is also God’s character. It is for this that God uses many ways to discipline His children. From the time we believed in the Lord, God has been disciplining us. He disciplines us with the view that we may partake of His holiness, His nature, and His character. The Bible speaks of a few kinds of holiness. The holiness in Hebrews specifically refers to God’s character. For Christ to become our holiness is one thing. For us to be sanctified in Christ is another thing. The holiness spoken of here is something wrought into us; it is not a gift. It has to do with our constitution. This is something we have been emphasizing for years. This means that God works something into us in a gradual way. The holiness here is a holiness that is constituted through His discipline, something constituted through His scourging and daily, inner working. His discipline and operation are for the purpose of making us partakers of His holiness.
After we suffer a little chastisement, we partake of His holiness. After we suffer more chastisement, we learn more holiness. If we remain under God’s discipline, we will gradually realize what holiness is. If we continue under God’s discipline, there will be a gradual constitution of holiness into our character. If we stay under God’s discipline all the way to the end, we will become holy in our character. Nothing is more crucial than this! We must realize that the result of discipline is the constitution of God’s character into our being. All discipline has results, and we should reap the fruit from all of them. May the Lord be merciful to us so that His discipline, whenever it is upon us, may produce a little more holiness. May it result in more holiness, in more lessons learned, and in more constitution of God. Holiness must continually increase in us!
After we accept the Lord and become God’s children, He daily arranges many things in our environment to discipline and chastise us. All these things are lessons to us. Time after time these lessons come to us for the purpose of adding His holiness to us. We need much discipline before God can work out a holy character in us! In the eyes of God we have only a limited number of years to live our Christian life. If we neglect God’s discipline, and if it does not produce the needed effect in us, our loss will be an eternal loss indeed!
God not only gives us His holiness as a gift, but He also wants us to partake of His holiness through His discipline. He wants us to be constituted with His holiness; He wants to wrought holiness into our being little by little. Carnal persons like us require years of discipline from God before His holy character and nature can become ours. We need all kinds of blows, situations, guidance, frustrations, urgings, and chastisement before we can partake of God’s holy character. This is a great matter! God does not merely give us holiness as a gift. This holiness must be wrought into us. God has to constitute us with His holiness!
This is one distinctive feature of salvation in the New Testament. God first gives us something, and then He works the same thing into us. He constitutes us with the same thing little by little. When we have both aspects, we have full salvation. One is a gift from Christ, and the other is a constitution of the Holy Spirit. This is a distinctive feature of the New Testament. One is a gift, and the other is a constitution. Among all the crucial things in the New Testament, there is this clear statement: God is making us partakers of His holiness through His discipline.