Listen to Counsel and Accept Discipline!

Proverbs 19:20-21 & 27 (NAS95) 

Today, we are going to walk through the four action steps of a soldier’s training routine to learn the next battle drill – “Listen to Counsel and Accept Discipline!” 

The military is an uncompromising environment for obedience; that is for one primary reason: the mission is dependent on every single soldier doing his or her job, regardless of the circumstances. Soldiers are expected to follow orders, to listen to the counsel of those who have been put in places of responsibility over them, and to accept discipline when they have not done the first two. The Church of Jesus Christ is set up the same way because, like the military, we are a missional people – the mission is dependent on us understanding clear lines of authority. In other words, just like the military exists by decree of national authority to execute the will of its Commander, so the Church exists by the grace of God to fulfill the will of God. The clearest illustration of this is Jesus’ praise of the centurion’s faith in Matthew 8:9-10: 

“For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this!’ and he does it.” Now when Jesus heard this, He marveled and said to those who were following, “Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel.”

Let me be clear, in praising the centurion, Jesus was not praising Rome nor affirming the military occupation of Israel. Jesus was not rubber-stamping might makes right, political coercion, nor the subjugation of a people. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, was praising the centurion, a Roman military officer, for understanding authority and submission to authority, in a way that military people uniquely understand – good soldiers reflexively, instinctively, and habitually follow orders! Paul understood this and called the church to have the great faith of the centurion – to teach us how to live under authority and focused on the mission of God for the glory of the King of Kings, Jesus, our Commander. Let’s learn how to train today’s battle drill, “Listen to Counsel and Accept Discipline,” by seeing what the Field Manual has to say about it.

Action Step #1) Know the Field Manual.

Action Step #2) Train together as one unit.

From the beginning of the book of God’s Wisdom, as we previously discussed in this sermon series with the battle drill, “Heed God’s Wisdom,” Proverbs 1:33 states, “But he who listens to me shall live securely and will be at ease from the dread of evil.”

Just as today’s Scripture, Proverbs 19:20 reminds us, “Listen to counsel and accept discipline, that you may be wise the rest of your days.” Stated in the negative, Proverbs 19:27 illustrates the same point, “Cease listening, my son, to discipline, and you will stray from the words of knowledge.” The connections between these verses are obvious. If you want to live the victorious life of Jesus Christ, then, like a good soldier, you must submit to God, by listening to and obeying your Commander! I’m not trying to be overly simplistic, but, truly, just like I would counsel a recruit in the Army, it is that simple. [So why do we make it so hard? I’ll explain that in action step #3, but let’s keep learning how we are to train this before we focus on why we don’t do it.]

There is a very important theme here, and for those of you who were with us last week, it will sound very familiar: Listen! There is an important Hebrew word behind this big concept, and it is found in all three of the above verses: Shema, translated “listen” or “hear” is a famous Hebrew concept because Jesus Christ declared the Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:37) to be what the Jewish people traditionally call, “the Shema,” from Deuteronomy 6:4-5: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”

Every good soldier of Jesus Christ must learn that if you want to train to live on mission, then you must listen to and obey God’s wisdom. We must heed God’s reproof when He warns us or disciplines us. This is the way of wisdom! The book of Proverbs gives us the primary way to discern whether you are a wise person; it is by how you respond to the wisdom of God – to His counsel and His discipline. Accordingly, King Solomon teaches us that there are only three categories of people: 1) the wise, 2) fools, and 3) mockers (“scoffers”). Fools and mockers hate God’s wisdom, do not listen to counsel, nor accept discipline; rather, they turn away from it and hate God’s messengers who bring it. This is made clear in Proverbs 1:20-33:

Wisdom shouts in the street, she lifts her voice in the square; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the gates in the city she utters her sayings: “How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded? And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Turn to my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit on you; I will make my words known to you. Because I called and you refused, I stretched out my hand and no one paid attention; and you neglected all my counsel and did not want my reproof; I will also laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your dread comes, when your dread comes like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. Then they will call on me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently but they will not find me, because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord. They would not accept my counsel, they spurned all my reproof. So they shall eat of the fruit of their own way and be satiated with their own devices. For the waywardness of the naive will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. But he who listens to me shall live securely and will be at ease from the dread of evil.”

This passage captures one of the major themes of the book of Proverbs – be wise by listening to and obeying God’s counsel; don’t be like the fools and mockers. Wisdom must be trained into our lives and that requires the discipline of listening to God’s counsel through His Word and its messengers, and accepting God’s discipline through providence, the direct work of the Spirit through the Church, which is Paul charged his protégé in 1 Timothy 4:6-11:

In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following. But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance. For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers. Prescribe and teach these things.

Action Step #3) Seek the Commander’s approval.

Last week’s battle drill was dependent on you cultivating the character quality of humility, and we learned that humility is forged in the crucible of your prayer life. It is in your quiet times with God that you become like Jesus.

Today’s battle drill is dependent on cultivating the relational quality of trust! Trust and humility go hand in hand. They have a reciprocal relationship – you will never learn to trust God until you humble yourself and submit to His authority! We learn to trust our Commander by putting Him to the test every time He tells us to do something. What do I mean by that? I mean you listen and obey! You listen to His counsel as if your life depended on it, and you accept His discipline as from the hand of a good and loving father who only has good plans for you. Until you trust God, you will not listen to counsel, from God or His people, nor will you accept discipline from God or those He has placed in authority over you. 

In fact, until you learn to trust God you will be a stubborn, stiff-necked person who will not listen to anyone else’s counsel, but only that which agrees with you and presumptions about how your life should work out, and you won’t even accept the premise of your need for discipline, because all that you do is right in your own eyes. That’s not being a good soldier of Jesus Christ, that’s being a self-righteous person who does what is right in your own eyes! I have countless stories from the 929 chapters of the Old Testament to pull from for where such thinking will take you, but allow me to read what the prophet Samuel said to King Saul in 1 Samuel 15:13-23:

Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, “Blessed are you of the Lord! I have carried out the command of the Lord.” But Samuel said, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?” Saul said, “They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and oxen, to sacrifice to the Lord your God; but the rest we have utterly destroyed.” Then Samuel said to Saul, “Wait, and let me tell you what the Lord said to me last night.” And he said to him, “Speak!” Samuel said, “Is it not true, though you were little in your own eyes, you were made the head of the tribes of Israel? And the Lord anointed you king over Israel, and the Lord sent you on a mission, and said, ‘Go and utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are exterminated.’ Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord, but rushed upon the spoil and did what was evil in the sight of the Lord?” Then Saul said to Samuel, “I did obey the voice of the Lord, and went on the mission on which the Lord sent me, and have brought back Agag the king of Amalek, and have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. But the people took some of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the choicest of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God at Gilgal.” Samuel said, “Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and insubordination is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, He has also rejected you from being king.”

The word “obey” in verse 22 is shema – listen and obey! You think you are worshipping God with the things you choose to do for Him, by doing what seems right to you, but the fact is, according to God’s counsel and the example of His discipline, you are only truly worshipping God when you are doing what He commands you to do. So, listen to my counsel today and hear God’s word of counsel to His people from Jeremiah 7:22-28:

For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this is what I commanded them, saying, “Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you will be My people; and you will walk in all the way which I command you, that it may be well with you.” Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and in the stubbornness of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward. Since the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have sent you all My servants the prophets, daily rising early and sending them. Yet they did not listen to Me or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck; they did more evil than their fathers. You shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you; and you shall call to them, but they will not answer you. You shall say to them, “This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God or accept correction; truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth.”

This is a prophetic word to our nation today. I beseech you, God’s people, train this battle drill until its reflexive, instinctive, and habitual – listen to God’s counsel and accept His discipline. Trust that your God is a good and loving God who only speaks truth and only disciplines His true children for their good, and for His glory, as Hebrews 12:7-11 explains:

It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

Action Step #4) Live on mission.

In John 15:8-11, Jesus calls us to this very purpose:

My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, just like soldiers who are serving in the military, the church has a mission that depends on every member of the body of Christ to do his or her job, regardless of the circumstances. Paul teaches this in Ephesians 4:11-16, where we hear the reason why the centurion’s faith is so critical for us today because God has placed each of us under authority so that His church will be faithful to fulfill His purpose for enlisting us as members of His body:

And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

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