In Heb 12:7 the author says ‘endure hardship as discipline’, then goes on to tell us how God disciplines his children out of love. So how exactly is allowing his followers to go through hardship a form of love? In a word, it makes us ‘strong’.
Doctors will tell us the only way to make our bodies strong is to put them under physical stress several times a week. Weight training is literally killing muscle cells, so that the body will replenish itself and make even more muscle cells (hence muscle growth) to avoid that same damage in the future. Aerobic exercise is designed to hurt, to improve our general fitness. If we are not putting our bodies under real physical stress and pain regularly, we are slowly growing weaker and weaker.
The exact same principle applies to our psychological and spiritual strength. If our faith or our emotional wellbeing are not being placed under real stress and pain, those aspects of our being will begin to weaken. The remarkable economic and material prosperity of the last 40 years, coupled with an explosion in bulldozer parenting (removing all difficulties from before our children) has resulted in the emotionally weakest generation to ever walk this planet. Where previous centuries dealt with world wars, working in the mines, or the black death, this generation crumbles into a blithering mess if someone says something offensive. How little is our strength (Prov 24:10)!
As psychologists will tell us, bulldozer parenting is not loving. The way to prepare your children to face the harsh realities of this world is to help them navigate difficulties, not shield them from them. In the same way, God shows his enormous love by using times of difficulty to build our emotional and spiritual resilience (or ‘hyper-standing’). God does not want pathetic weaklings, who crawl into the foetal position every time they’re offended. He wants battle-hardened soldiers, who will go out into the world and do his bidding.
