Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but whoever hates correction is stupid. (Proverbs 12:1, NIV)
The golf course can be a dangerous place. I was playing with my high school team many years ago when we started to hear reports from another hole. A college player had been hit in the head by an errant tee shot and went to the ground, knocked out. Today we’d run him through a concussion protocol.
Long before that, while swinging a cut-down 4-iron in our backyard, a neighbor boy caught me flush in the chin. I lost a tooth and needed eight stitches to sew the wound closed.
Thanks to scenarios like this, we learn early on that one of the game’s most fundamental “rules” is this: be aware of your surroundings. This is true whether you are the one standing around watching or the one swinging the club. So we teach new players to stand back and to keep their eyes open for what’s happening around them. It’s a discipline that protects them (and us) from harm.
God uses discomfort and suffering to move us off our stubborn marks toward a closer reflection of his heart.The title of today’s devotion may cause you to first process loving as an adjective, in the way that we might correct children with loving discipline. Instead, it is meant here as a verb, something we do—in maturity, we take up the attitude of loving discipline, just as we read of it in today’s proverb, where those who love discipline do so because they anticipate the benefits it will bring. In the context of athletic training, we’ve even come to adopt the expression “no pain, no gain.”
Now here’s a greater question. Maybe our muscles have to be tested and stretched in order to be strengthened and enlarged, but does that same principle apply elsewhere? Specifically, does it apply to our spiritual lives?
When we come to trust in Christ and make a decision to follow him in the things we say and do, we expect that some things will need to be changed. A few of those changes come supernaturally, as a seemingly instantaneous, “easy” switch from wrong to right. But most changes come over the long haul, with difficult discipline along the way. God uses discomfort and suffering to move us off our stubborn marks toward a closer reflection of his heart. He is in this way correcting us, and because God is the one doing the correcting—even when he uses others as his agents—we are “stupid” to oppose him and “love knowledge” when we allow him to make us more like him.
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Jeff Hopper
July 9, 2021
Copyright 2021 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
OTHER DEVOTIONS IN THIS SERIES
Oh, To Be Wise 1: Finding Wisdom
Oh, To Be Wise 2: Good Advice
Oh, To Be Wise 3: A Tested Heart
Oh, To Be Wise 4: A Guarded Heart
Oh, To Be Wise 5: A Winning Way
Oh, To Be Wise 6: The Right Word
Oh, To Be Wise 8: Equal Before God
Oh, To Be Wise 9: Growing Stronger