
January 19, 2022
Episode #129
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As a child, what kind of discipline did you experience in your home? David and Karen Mains talk about their childhood and then explore the kind of loving Father that God is to those He has chosen to belong to Himself.
Episode Transcript
Karen: One of the things I think that would be helpful when we’re talking about being disciplined or disciplining others or being disciplined by God is that I think being disciplined by has such a negative connotation to it. We think of structures and strictures that are onerous, but I think it’s more helpful to think of it as training.
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David: Looking back on the way you were raised, Karen, would you say that it was your dad or your mom who was more the family disciplinarian?
Karen: Well, my father was the regulator of family function. He was a disciplinarian, but he was a loving disciplinarian. So, I don’t have the kinds of trauma or negative feelings about him being the family disciplinarian.
Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.
David: Do you remember what issues related to you being disciplined by your loving father? I know in my family, a messy room that came up quite often.
Karen: That was your mom.
David: I didn’t practice the musical instruments the way I was supposed to. I just lacked talent and discipline.
Karen: You know, there probably were some areas. I mean, I had to clean my room weekly, and in between the weekly cleanings, they left me alone. They were just both busy. They both worked out of the home. But I think what they did that was really brilliant was they invited me into sort of a participatory family function. I was older than my brother by 10 years and my sister by six and a half years. So, it was kind of a surrogate, ancillary parent substitute.
David: Very young.
Karen: Very young. And I think older children often develop kind of more adult sorts of functions because their parents and families depend on them to do that. But I don’t have negative feelings about it all. Perhaps I’ve forgotten them. They praised me. They welcomed me with my gifts and my ideas. And it wasn’t an onerous sort of thing. It was, again, that invitation, that more participatory thing. And my middle name is Sue. So, when they needed me to do something, they would say, “Now Sue, could you help?” You know that kind of stuff. But without any negative focus, which I think was remarkable.
David: You don’t have bad memories.
Karen: I don’t. But I kind of wash bad memories out of my mind anyway. But I don’t really believe there was much of that, if any.
David: This is a passage from Hebrews, chapter 12, about God as a disciplinarian. “Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us, and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of our spirits and live? Our fathers disciplined us for a little while, as they thought best. But God disciplines us for our good that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seemed pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”
Karen: One of the things I think that would be helpful when we’re talking about being disciplined or disciplining others or being disciplined by God is that I think being disciplined by has such a negative connotation to it. We think of structures and strictures that are onerous, but I think it’s more helpful to think of it as training. I’m being disciplined or trained to behave the way that God has made me to function. And if I function according to the way that he is disciplining me or training me to function, I will be healthy.
And this is really true. When you go into the health dialogue that’s happening today among medical professionals. If we eat the right foods, if we get exercise, those are all disciplines. But when we do those things right, when we develop a mental attitude that’s positive, which is seeing the good in others and in the world and what God has given to us, then we are healthier as people. And I really think that these scriptures should be put into the context of some of the things that we’re discovering in our contemporary approach to what health is and what a good life is.
David: I think all that is good. And then I go back into the Old Testament, and I think God pretty much says, okay, I’m going to lay it out. Pay attention. This is the book of Deuteronomy in chapter 28. It’s good to read this every so often.
“If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all my commands I give you today, I will set you high above all the nations of the earth. All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God.”
That doesn’t sound too contemporary.
Karen: But I think he does create rules and those rules we think of them as being onerous, but they are life-giving.
David: I won’t read all the good side, but I’m going to come to the bad side. He says, “However, if you don’t obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands I’m giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.” So, I’m wondering, you know, do we call God loving or is he a strict disciplinarian or what?
Specifics. “The Lord will send on you curses, confusion, rebuke in everything you put your hand to until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you’ve done in forsaking him. The Lord will plague you with diseases until you’re destroyed from the land you are entering to possess. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, scorching heat, drought, light, mildew, which will plague you until you perish. The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder.” Here’s the even worse, “…the Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them in one direction but flee from them in seven and you’ll become a thing of horror to the kingdoms of the earth.”
So anyway, that’s God saying this is how I will relate to you. You choose how you want to respond.
This is not a day, Karen, in most churches where sin is talked about very much, but I think that the country has become foul in so many ways and we just ignore things God’s trying to get our attention regarding this. And I’m wondering, I’m struggling this within my own mind, is God trying to say something to this nation and if so, how does he do that? He does it probably the same way Moses was talking about all those years back. He’s saying you either will be obedient or I’ll have to teach you in a hard disciplinary way.
Karen: Yeah, I think what I’m trying to say is God, he’s not petty.
David: No.
Karen: So, when he gives us standards by which to choose to live that are life giving and health giving, the result of that is that evil then has a foothold in our lives and we know this to be true. If you’re not faithful to your spouse and you’re promiscuous, evil has a foothold in your life. You open the door to it.
So, his regulations that say, “If you don’t follow my rules that are given to you from love and you go your own way, these are the things that are going to happen to you.” And fine, it’s part of his curse, but that’s not his normal nature. Do you see what I’m trying to do?
David: I see, I hear you.
Karen: We have a loving God and he’s given these wonderful rules for living and when we do that, we receive his blessing and his mercy because they’re built into them, and we have his favor. But if we don’t live that way, we go into evil, we choose our own way, we choose to be sinful. He turns his face from us and those curses are apparent in our lives and they get magnified the more we choose to live in that sinful fashion.
David: But he in that whole process continues to try to get our attention in different ways and how does he do that? I would say, if in old days of the time he says your crops are going to fail, you’re not going to get rain, enemies are going to come against you. For example, you’re to keep the Sabbath every seventh day and if you don’t do that, I’ll send the enemies in, they’ll take you captive and the land will have its Sabbath time. But there are specific warnings that he gives. And I wonder some of those warnings we’ve had natural calamities in this land so much lately, massive fires that have destroyed whole communities.
Karen: Hurricanes and tornadoes and floods and just extraordinary.
David: Yeah, is that just nature or is God involved in that? A pandemic, I know the pandemic is worldwide. COVID is not just an American problem but with the incredible medical advances we have in this land.
Karen: Scientific advances, we can’t bell this pandemic, it’s gone raging into another form again.
David: One of the things that he says in the Old Testament and in the New Testament as well, there will be confusion of mind. There will be, I would take it a step further, say a government that should naturally work, it’s a wonderful form of government.
Karen: For the good of the people. Right.
David: And yet it’s not working. And it looks as though we can’t figure out how to get it to work the way it should, the way it used to work. And have we come to the place where democracies are at an end and do the strong men around the world begin to rise up and say, “Okay, we’ll solve these problems for you, we’ll just take over.” So, there’s a sense of confusion of mind, that military thing that God talked about, your enemies are going to come, and they will be victorious over you. We were, for a long time thought of as the most powerful nation in the world and to some degree supposedly we are, but it’s been embarrassing.
Karen: Militarily.
David: I mean, we try to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Karen: Biggest mess you can imagine.
David: There’s this sense of fear regarding the future.
Karen: Uneasiness.
David: That’s a big part of what God was saying about Israel. You’ll live in fear. You won’t have what he promises them, which is peace and prosperity. That’s not where this country is. This country is incredibly divided. So basically, I’m wondering if we’re in a position where God is saying, can’t you understand that I’m trying to get your attention, but you’re just ignoring what is going on. In fact, I don’t hear anybody talking about it, whether it’s outside of the church or within the church, that God’s saying this country is in trouble.
Karen: To turn its face to me again and make me the priority. Right?
David: I’ve been trying to write a sentence. This is probably the worst sentence.
Only foolish people would ignore their heavenly father’s painful disciplinary method. I don’t think anyone would question it. God is not sadistic. He is not a father who enjoys beating the tar out of his kids. He’s a very gracious, loving father, but when people ignore Him…
Karen: When they turn their backs on him and his principles.
David: Then he has to somehow resort to more forceful ways of speaking to a people. I have to say Karen, it sounds very kooky that maybe all of the problems we’re facing as a nation are because of our relationship to God and he’s trying to get our attention. I mean, if you say that, you’re setting yourself up for people to make fun of you.
Karen: Because our neglectful relationship with God. Well Dave, I do think when we turn from basic what we used to call Judeo-Christian morays and morality. When we have a loose way of looking at this sexuality.
David: Sexuality and lust, that’s the way ministers go at it. I think even in terms of truth telling.
Karen: Truth telling is huge.
David: Truth telling has been a huge problem, a sin.
Karen: We slanted according to what we want it to be, not according to what the truth is. I think this division of peoples is perhaps one of the greatest signs that we’ve turned away from God. Love God with all your heart, mind and strength. And then love your neighbor as yourself.
You know, who cares what political side they’re on. These are human beings. We need to cross those lines and no one and others in our essential humanity. Not in our political hats we’re wearing, but we can’t seem to get beyond that. At least in the orchestration of what the press is giving us. You know what they choose to show and report.
David: I think it’s embedded in the country. People can’t even hear one another talk. There’s a desperate need in these areas. As a believer, I started this with you. We need to examine our relationship to our earthly father. So, I would say in terms of my dad, my dad was the most loving, gracious person. He would travel a lot because he was a salesman. And then he come home, and mom would say, “Okay, here’s the problem with your kids. Doug’s got two spankings coming.”
Karen: Oh, Jesus.
David: Poor dad. That’s the last thing he wanted. He just wanted to hug his kids with you.
Karen: Yeah.
David: And I’m not stating that accurately because my parents were loving people. But I think that our image of God is determined to a large degree by our image to our earthly parents.
Karen: Our image of God is our heavenly father. Yeah, I think it really is. I think people have had loving parents, a loving father. And of course, many people didn’t grow up with fathers. Either they had died, or they abandoned the family or there was a divorce. And that took the father out of the home. But when you have a loving earthly father, it is so easy then to look at our heavenly father with the same sort of attitude. Those people who did not have good fathers then often cast this viewpoint on God. They’re afraid of him. He’s a rigorous taskmaster or he is disapproving or he’s negative in his way of thinking about it.
David: Or he’s inconsistent.
Karen: Or he’s inconsistent. I agree. And so, what we have to do then is when we’ve had that kind of parenting, say, “Lord, I need you to heal the wounds from the past. And those wounds from the past really live on in our adult selves.” That’s what psychological counseling often is all about, is identifying and then recovering from the way we grew up.
So, we don’t want to cast that on God. We want him to show us who he truly is. And what he truly is a loving heavenly father who wants the best for us and has given us certain ways to live because that is the best way for us to live. We will be happy and healthy if we learn to live that way.
So, what some of our listeners are going to have to do is examine how the bad parenting or the less than best parenting of their past has influenced how they think of God, the heavenly father.
David: And I’m thinking here, and there are a lot of people like us who had good parents, very gracious, compassionate parents. Who wanted nothing but the very best for their kids. But I’m thinking we also now have to come to the place where we say we are in a society where I think God is saying, “I’m going to use extreme measures to try to bring you back to the place where you really understand who I am. And I’m doing it because I am a good father. This is for your own.” Nobody likes discipline at the time, but it’s that Hebrew’s passage. You do it and at the end, if you’re trained in righteousness, you become holy people. And with that come all the benefits of being those people.
So yeah, examine yourself. And I’m looking at who I am and I’m saying, “I think I’ve preached enough messages about the good side of God. And I need to go to the holy side of God. And I need to say sin is sin.” This is a country that is in desperate need of confession of sin and saying we have been wrong. There need to be tears of repentance all through this. And including in the church, that’s where it all begins when you talk about a movement of the Holy Spirit.
Karen: We’ve become so enculturated in the Christian church in the States. I mean, we are sometimes more businesses and enterprises than we are the church of the living God. And we’ve learned to trust in our own capacity. We can really program things well. We can move people to hurrahs! or to tears through our natural human ability. But what we want to want is something that is beyond just human capacity that goes into the arenas where we say, “That has to be God. We could not have manufactured that. This is God moving among us people. And that’s the hunger we need to have. And that’s the hunger that should drive the prayer that says, Lord, I’m going to spend time on my knees saying, restore this nation to what it needs to be in order to love you and then to love our neighbors as ourselves.”
David: I have said it many times, and I think a lot of times when we talk through concepts, it comes back to, okay, what do I do about this now? I’ve often said the church has forgotten what it is to preach about sin in a loving, gracious way. I would take that further and say, I need to learn how to preach about sin. Sin has terrible consequences. And it’s not because we’re in charge of the world. It’s because God’s in charge of the world and he’s in charge of this land. And I believe that he wants to bring this land back to himself, but he’s not going to be able to do that if people refuse to recognize the sin in our lives. And that relates to all of us.
And so, I’m saying, God, I want to be able to represent you fully in the wholeness of what I know you to be. But I haven’t preached those kinds of sermons for a long, long time. And so, I’m asking you to somehow give me the ability to speak it in a proper way. Not a tirade. I don’t want to go there, but just in a way so people can hear it. And so, they can know the refreshment of walking and the ways that God again.
Karen: Here’s a simple example of that. I have a prayer journal, and I work in it every day and I try and make sure that the first moments of the day, the waking moments of the day, or days that I give to God and to worship him and to look at scripture and then to work in my prayer journal. And one of the prayers that I have prayed regularly, and I can prove it because I can open it to the pages, is God, help me to do… and then I have the list of all the things that I feel like I need to be doing that next day. Lord, help me to do. I need your assistance to do it. And after years of doing this, I heard this still small voice, say, “Karen that really is not the right prayer. You need to be praying. Lord, what do you want me to help you to do in this world today? Your list should be listening to me and saying, how is it that I can help you in your work in this world today?”
Total change of reference. It seems minor, but it’s not minor to the point where I had to actually ask for forgiveness that I had been praying such a self-centered prayer for all of those years. I mean, this is extraordinary, right?
David: Praise the Lord.
Karen: Yeah.
David: Yeah, it’s the Lord saying, if I put it back into what I’m so accustomed to talking about, it’s revival. Lord, begin the work in me.
Karen: Yeah, begin the work in me. Right. Change me.
David: Change me. Yeah. That’s where it all comes back to. I was on a phone call with dear people. Used to be a part of the congregation many, many years ago.
Karen: That you’re a pastored.
David: Yeah, pastor. And they said, when you pray for revival, how do you do that? One gentleman, a dear guy, he said, you pray the same prayer over and over again? I said, “No, there’s a sense in which you say, I’m going to begin it with me, Lord.” I don’t know. I think it was Gypsy Smith, but I may be wrong. I said, you go in the closet, draw a circle, stand in the circle, and say, “Lord, change me first,” and then you get out of there, change our home, change our family.
Karen: And relationships.
David: Yeah, and then you begin. Somewhere we need to understand that God is not pleased with where the country is. I would say in a smaller circle, he’s not pleased with where the church is, not pleased where a lot of people are, and he is using means that are very painful. Maybe it’s a loss of family members, not only to evil, but to death.
Karen: To COVID.
David: Yeah, he’s using those methods to try to bring us back to himself, which includes bringing us back to the wonderful life of living under his blessing.
Karen: Given to us by a heavenly Father who loves us.
David: Yeah, so it sounds funny, but I have a dear friend in that prayer group. He says, whatever it takes, Lord, whatever it takes, bring us to that place. And maybe it’s going to take a certain amount of pounding, you know, a certain amount more of fire, more of what’s going on, maybe the demise of a nation. I hope not. I really hope not. It’s a heavy topic, isn’t it?
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