Surgery and Sanctification

Prognosis

Several years ago, I had surgery in my inner ear. The doctor’s plan included replacing an inner ear bone and removing a small growth in the inner ear. The goal was a relatively simple procedure through the ear canal. He said, however, that there was a chance that a more invasive surgery – a mastoidectomy – would be required if he was unable to deal with this looming danger the easy way.

Just like most things in my life, the easy way was not meant to be!

What was supposed to be a simple 1-hour surgery allowing me to return to work and regular activity the following day became a near 5-hour surgery that included an incision spanning the top and bottom of the back of my ear, drilling into my skull behind the ear to access the growth, LOTS of morphine, an extra night in the hospital, and another 10 days of no work and no rigorous activity. I really don’t know how to just do things the easy way, do I?

The road to recovery

As my head was recovering from the operation, other than making sure I didn’t injure or damage anything, pain management was the name of game. And what a game it was! It got bad, almost as if someone put another hole in my head, kind of bad. Most of the day was good, but when the pain struck, it was paralyzing. Nighttime was the most difficult, and sleeping was strained. They prescribed me some serious opioids, but I figured it would be wise to manage the pain with Advil and Tylenol. For the most part, it was manageable.

One night in particular, I woke up at 4am because of the pain and I thought to myself, “Man, I can’t wait for next week. The pain will be gone, life will get back to normal, and all of this will be behind me. I wish I could just fall asleep and wake up next week. I wish I could fast forward all of this pain and get to being healed up at the end of it.” Then I realized there would be a way to avoid the pain, as it were, and just haze through the next seven days – make good on that hydromorphone prescription, lie down, and cruise into next week. I didn’t want the pain. I wanted the benefits of the surgery, and I wanted to have the finished product – a healed-up inner ear with restored hearing.

Discipline

As I meditated on these things, my mind soon went to Hebrews 12, and I saw in my weakness, short-sightedness, and strong desire for pain-free comfort, a truth in the spiritual realm mirrored in the physical realm.

John Piper has said, “God is not coming to his children late after the attack, and saying, ‘I can make this turn for good.’ That is not discipline. That is repair. It’s the difference between the surgeon who plans the incision for our good, and the emergency room doctor who sews us up after a freak accident. This text says, God is the doctor planning our surgery, not the doctor repairing our lacerations.”

God is in the business of making His children look more like His Son, Jesus Christ. This process is called sanctification. It is a process by which He helps us to bear Christ’s image by dealing with our sins and helping us pursue holiness. This process can be rather painful. Maybe not physically, say, like an achy inner ear, but painful in other ways – emotionally, spiritually, mentally – ways that are uncomfortable and difficult. And how does the Lord accomplish this sanctification? Through His loving and intentional discipline.

What can discipline look like? For Peter, it looked like his utter failures and denials of Christ, preceding costly obedience for allegiance to Christ. For Paul, it looked like a demon tormenting him to keep him humble. For me, some examples looked like my dad leaving when I was younger, being fired by a church when I was 22, or many, many more things (I did say that I tend to go about things the hard way).

The point is this – discipline from the Lord is not punishment, but a loving plan for the future that involves a painful present in order to make us more like Christ. Discipline is always for our good, for our growth, and for working toward our glorification. It is God’s way of shaping us to become more effective and more useful for His purposes, putting sin to death, and enabling us to pursue a righteous life. It is present pain for future holiness, pure and simple.

Wretched man that I am!

Many times, the Scriptures, supremely aware of the human condition, hit you like a truck. The writer of Hebrews says this, “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons… For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it (Hebrews 12:7-8, 11).” Painful rather than pleasant; if ever a portion of the Word could receive “Understatement of the Year Award,” this would be it.

And what do we humans know about pain? Well, I know that I want to avoid pain, almost at all costs. I want to fast forward the pain and get right to the good stuff. What’s true in our bodies is also true in our hearts, minds, and spirits. We know that the Lord disciplines us because He loves us. We know that it is painful. We know that He is working for our good. We know that the end result will be greater holiness, greater joy, and greater peace. But we want the rewards without the work. We want the gifts without the cost. We want gain without the pain. And the Lord will not have it.

Why do we want to circumvent the pain, just skip it and get to the other side of it where we are all healed up and good to go?

The truth is, the pain reminds us that we are weak and finite. It reminds us that we are not nearly as capable and strong as we thought, and just one bump in the road causes us to spiral into chaos and misery. The pain reminds us that we don’t have it all together and that we are most definitely not in control of our own lives. The pain forces us to accept not only our limitations, but our weaknesses, and, most crushing of all, our sins.

Thanks be to God

But this is precisely why the Lord brings His loving, and often painful, discipline. He needs us to see our weaknesses, our failures, our limits, and our sins. Why? Because we (and by we, I most definitely mean I) are so stubborn and so proud that we forget how much we need His grace. This is why Hosea says, “Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up (Hosea 6:1).” He is reminding us that we must lean, with every fibre of our being, into Him. Why? Because, as it turns out, we actually DO need to cling to Christ as if our lives depended on it because they do.

The pain also gives us hope for the future. We anticipate that eventually, once the healing has been completed, the pain will subside. The pain forces our eyes future-ward, anticipating a restoration. This is ultimately the goal of discipline, to get us where He wants us. The pain reminds us that we are BEING healed, that we are BEING sanctified, and that we are BECOMING more like Christ. The pain gives us a frame of reference and sets our hope in what is still to come. Remember what the writer of Hebrews wrote? “Later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it (Hebrews 12:11b).”

Easier said than done

This is an easy concept to understand, and we don’t have trouble with these truths in theory. Our problem is one of practice, namely, that we have to go through it. There are no easy verses to make the loving and painful discipline of the Lord seem like sweet ice cream on a sunny day in the park. Seasons of the Lord’s refining work can seem unending and unbearable. And yet, we are not expected to bear it alone. God has given us His Word to guide us, His Spirit to strengthen us, His Son to lead us, and brothers and sisters in Christ to support us.

Therefore, lean into what the Lord has given you as He disciplines you. Find in His Word food for your souls and an anchor to secure the ship of your heart as the stormy waters of discipline rock you about. Fix your eyes upon the finished work of His Son, and find in Him the example and power to suffer well. Ask the Spirit of God to give you joy and strength in the midst of your pruning. Surround yourself with godly people who will pray with you, laugh with you, cry with you, and say all of the right things that you might not want to hear.

As a 40-year-old man who has experienced my share of supreme failures, devastating heartaches, and much of the Lord’s loving and heavy hand of discipline upon me, let me conclude with every ounce of sincerity I can muster:

In the 24 years since God called me from darkness into His marvelous light and made me born again out of my spiritual death, He has never disappointed me. Never! He has never failed me, and He has never given me a single reason not to trust Him. Christ has always been enough for me, and I am confident that He will always be, and that goes for all of His children too.