Charles Ryrie writes, “Love consists of affection and correction. Babies are cuddled and corrected, and both are true expressions of parental love. Furthermore, both are done by parents in the belief that they are doing the best thing for the child at the time. Love seeks good for the object loved. What is good? In God it is the perfection of holiness and all that that concept implies.”3

I have always enjoyed the following verse about training toward perfection:

I must not interfere with any child, I have been told,

To bend his will to mine, or to shape him through some mold of thought.

Naturally, as a flower, he must unfold.

Yet flowers have the discipline of wind and rain,

And though I know it gives the gardener much pain,

I’ve seen him use his pruning shears to gain

More strength and beauty for some blossoms bright.

And he would do whatever he thought right.

I do not know, yet it seems to me

That only weeds unfold naturally.4

No one wants to be a weed, yet we resist the painful pruning required to make flowers of us. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t asked that ageless question about why people suffer. Why can’t God simply make all the bad things go away? We’ve heard all the well-reasoned answers. Yet when we get a flat tire or some calamity befalls us, we hear ourselves praying, “God, how can You? Surely this wasn’t Your plan for me. Can’t You fix it?”

However, when the deepest conviction of our hearts is that God loves us, our questions will turn to prayers. Instead of accusing God, we will begin to pray prayers like, “Father, help me to trust You.” “Lord, what are You teaching me and how do You want me to change?” “How is this trial evidence of Your love for me?”

The Reasons for God’s Discipline

To help answer these questions, let’s begin by cutting through some of the confusion that exists about God’s discipline. Much of the confusion exists because we fail to distinguish between the different reasons for God’s discipline. As we shall now see, not all discipline is the same. In fact, there are at least three categories of discipline. By examining all three, we will learn much about why and how the discipline of God comes to us.

God Disciplines to Punish Us

If his sons forsake My law

And do not walk in My judgments,

If they break My statutes

And do not keep My commandments,

Then I will punish their transgression with the rod,

And their iniquity with stripes.

—PSALM 89:30–32

The need for punishment is a hard but necessary truth. God is not Lewis’s laid-back grandfather; He loves us too much to be so lax. He is determined that we will learn our lesson.