Sometimes you see people who claim to be Christians, even preachers, and they do terrible things, and sin seriously. It may even be a TV evangelist, and yet he is a crook, and is cheating and swindling. And living like a millionaire. All this goes on and he never changes. Why isn’t there a discipline from the Lord to put him back on the right track? Because he is not the Lord’s. The discipline of the Lord is for his children. So that is a fearful thing. If there is no interest in holiness and there is no discipline, it may well indicate that there is no salvation.
This is one of the reasons why Anglicanism is entirely untenable. We know that historically there have been many saved men and Bible men in the Church of England. We know that in the past there were many, there are some remaining today. But we say it is a great pity really, that they should be stuck in the Anglican system because it is untenable. It isn’t biblical to have a church system where saints and sinners have the same rights, and the same membership, and the same votes. The church is a witness which is to be kept pure. So far as we can, we are to receive into membership only those who are born again. We are not to be like Old Testament Israel, a mixture of those who are saved and those who are not saved, all equally members with the same rights as each other. That is not honouring the Scripture. The church is composed of those who are to be striving against sin. Every local church is a unit of God’s people projecting a testimony of behaviour and spiritual life and proving him and witness, and so something like Anglicanism, which says, ‘We want to be the state church, and everybody in the parish is in, if they want to be’: that is untenable. It is not fighting the battle, striving against sin in the way God intends, even though we recognise that many people in that system are saved.
Again, why do hardships happen to us? Are they all disciplines from the Lord? How would you know? If things are going wrong for you or you are ill because of a discipline, how would you know? Not all illness is a discipline, in fact, probably, for the Christian, most illness is not a discipline. Most hardship or difficulty is not a discipline, God allows it; various troubles and sicknesses are allowed for other reasons also, as in the case of Paul’s thorn in the flesh. God gave a painful illness to Paul the apostle, because his privileges and his revelations threatened to lift him up, so to counteract these, he had to see God's grace through a burden. So it is with us, sickness is not always a punishment it may be to wean us from the world. It may be so that we can be a witness to people around us. It authenticates our faith. They see how we are helped by the Lord, and how cheerful we remain and how thankful to God, and how our faith is not shattered by what is happening to us. That is a great witness, a great testimony. So the unbeliever says this faith is authentic, this is real and it is a witness. It maybe to focus us in prayer, to help us to appreciate spiritual good all the more. So not all troubles and sicknesses we have to stress are for a punishment. If it is a discipline of the Lord and it is because we have wandered, we will know. ‘I know I have un-confessed sin’, I will say. ‘I know what I have done to another person. I know what shortcuts or dishonest or proud thing I have done. I know this has been going on for ages, and I am not surprised that the Lord now deals firmly with me.’