A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford
The little boy didn’t believe his father when he said, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” though his daddy’s eyes were filled with tears. Tommy had stolen some money at school. The principal discovered it, and left it to the boy’s father to discipline him. Tommy’s daddy put his arm around him and hugged him tight. “Tommy, this hurts me more than it hurts you. I have to punish you because I love you. You’ve got to learn that doing wrong always has bad consequences.” Little Tommy didn’t believe him—the punishment hurt pretty bad! Perhaps you didn’t believe your father either when he said it hurt him to punish you. Tommy didn’t believe it until he himself had grown up and had a 10-year-old son who needed to learn the same difficult lesson. Tommy wept, too, as he said to his son, “This hurts me
more than it hurts you.”
Many people think of God as being an angry old man, spitting out threats, just waiting to zap us when He catches us doing wrong—and that is such a wrong concept of how your Heavenly Father feels toward you. God has to punish sin. Why? Because sin hurts us so badly. It puts us in bondage. It destroys our relationships with others. It spoils the future. It affects our eternal destiny. But like Tommy’s daddy, God doesn’t enjoy punishing His children. But He must teach us just how destructive and wicked sin is and its terrible consequences. Are you surprised to read that the prophet Jeremiah said, “God does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men”? (The NLT translates it, “He does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow.”) That’s not what most of us think when we are undergoing the bad consequences of our sin. God does have to punish us to help us learn do right. But our Sovereign God grieves when He punishes us. He does it because He must, not because He enjoys it. He loves us too much to let us get by with sin. Here’s what the Scriptures plainly say:
For the Lord will not cast off forever.
Though He causes grief,
Yet He will show compassion
According to the multitude of His mercies.
For He does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men. Lamentations 3:31-33
Hebrews 12:9-11 shows us how to respond to this chastening of our loving God:
“We have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much
more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? For they indeed for a few days
chastened us as seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness.
“Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it
yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”
Take heart, dear child of God, if you’re suffering the consequences of a bad decision in your life. Of course your suffering doesn’t “seem to be joyful, but painful.” But when we submit to God’s patient and kind chastening, we will profit from it. How foolish it would be to undergo all the pain of His discipline, and then not profit from it! “God does not willingly afflict the sons of men.” It’s how He proves His love and commitment to us!