Untitled Sermon (2)
(ii) A man may accept discipline with the grim sense of getting it over as soon as possible. A certain famous Roman said: “I will let nothing interrupt my life.” If a man accepts discipline like that he regards it as an infliction to be struggled through with defiance and certainly not with gratitude.
(iii) A man may accept discipline with the self-pity which leads in the end to collapse. Some people, when they are caught up in some difficult situation, give the impression that they are the only people in the world whom life ever hurt. They are lost in their self-pity.
(iv) A man may accept discipline as a punishment which he resents. It is strange that at this time the Romans saw in national and personal disasters nothing but the vengeance of the gods. Lucan wrote: “Happy were Rome indeed, and blessed citizens would she have, if the gods were as much concerned with caring for men as they are with exacting vengeance from them.”
(v) So we come to the last attitude. A man may accept discipline as coming from a loving father. Jerome said a paradoxical but true thing: “The greatest anger of all is when God is no longer angry with us when we sin.” He meant that the supreme punishment is when God lets us alone as unteachable. The Christian knows that “a father’s hand will never cause his child a needless tear” and that everything can be utilised to make him a wiser and a better man.
As Robert Browing wrote in Rabbi ben Ezra:
“Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joy three-parts pain!
Strive and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
For thence—a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks—
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail;
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me.
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.”
We shall cease from self-pity, from resentment and from rebellious complaint if we remember that there is no discipline of God which does not take its source in love and is not aimed at good.