If you’ve been a parent for more than about five minutes, you know that parenting is about discipline. It’s about seeing what your child is doing and then correcting them in a hopefully constructive fashion. But as a parent you probably also know how difficult it is to do that.

It’s hard to discipline your kids in the right way, with the right measure, and in the right spirit. So hard, in fact, that all of us fall short time and time again. We are too harsh or too lenient; we are too early or too late; we have too hard or soft a tone with our words. We mess it up no matter how many times we do it… and yet we do it.

Why?

Because we love our children.

So it is with God. We should expect the discipline of the Lord because He is our Father. And because we are His children. In fact, God’s discipline is one of the evidences we have for His enduring love for us:

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their Father? If you are not disciplined – and everyone undergoes discipline – then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all (Heb. 12:7-8).

We can be grateful for God’s discipline not only because it reminds us that we are His children whom He loves, but also because He also has none of the mistakes in discipline that we do as parents. He does it just right, all the time. Now sometimes God disciplines us reactively. This is the sort of discipline we are most familiar with as parents – we exercise discipline when we need to correct the behavior of our children. So also does God. He sees us in sin, or walking down the wrong path, or acting unwisely, and like any good father would, He steps in and disciplines us.

Leviticus 26 is a chapter in which the Lord set expectations for His people. He promised, in His covenant, that if they were faithful to obey Him, then they would see the fruits of that obedience in all kinds of ways. But He also level set their expectations for what would happen to them if they were disobedient:

“But if after these things you will not obey me, I will proceed to discipline you seven times for your sins. I will break down your strong pride. I will make your sky like iron and your land like bronze, and your strength will be used up for nothing. Your land will not yield its produce, and the trees of the land will not bear their fruit” (Lev. 26:18-20).

But here is where we come to another difference between the Lord’s discipline and what we exercise as parents – the Lord does not only discipline us reactively; He disciplines us proactively. This is more in line with the Hebrews passage above. These believers weren’t undergoing difficulty because of something they had done; in fact, it was likely the opposite reason. They were experiencing persecution and difficulty because of their faith.

But they, too, had a choice – they could take the difficulty they were undergoing as evidence of God’s absence or disapproval, or they could endure it and see it as discipline. That through these circumstances, God was shaping something in them. He was developing their character. Their perseverance. Their resolve. Their faith. This is the proactive discipline of God.

Perhaps we can have the same perspective, because surely we will also encounter all kinds of difficulties. And when we do, we can also change our perspective. We can see that God is not doing something to us; He is doing something in us. Because He loves us.