For Our Good

“God loves us the way we are, but he loves us too much to leave us that way.”  Leighton Ford

You would never know just by looking at my dad that he used to be a smoker.  He has a great singing voice and is married to a woman who is fanatical about health issues, but when he was my age, he smoked cigarettes.  In fact, when he went to enroll at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, one of the questions they asked him was, “Have you smoked in the past six months?”  My dad told the truth - and rather than being awarded the Bob Jones Medal for Honesty, he was given a probation period whereby he was confined to campus for the first six months of his enrollment.

When my dad first told me this story, I got angry.  I saw it as a legalistic requirement placed upon my dad, but my dad had another perspective.  He said, “It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.” He claimed that if he had not been confined to campus for that semester, he would still be a smoker to this day (and he certainly would not have such a lovely singing voice).

Psalm 94:12-13 says “Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O Lord, and whom you teach out of your law, to give him rest from days of trouble.”  Truly happy is the man who undergoes discipline! Really??  Isn’t it ironic that the very things we think are intended for our hurt are actually giving us knowledge ("you teach out of your law") happiness ("blessed is the man") and rest from all our troubles.

Would God be more loving if he said to us, “You’re sinful and destitute, but whenever I try to work on you, you get frustrated, so I’m going to stop working on you.”  Would we want that?  You see, the so-called “punishment” my dad received was not really punishment at all, but rather, it was a redemptive and restorative measure.  So it is with God toward his children, and even more so than we can imagine.