Love discipline? What?

 To learn, you must love discipline; it is stupid to hate correction. (Proverbs 12:1)

As a student in school, we received grades or 'marks'. Those papers were returned with positive 'scores' or some negative ones depending on how the teacher noted your work. The goal of a positive grade was to give credit where credit was due. The goal of any negative grade was always to encourage the student to do better the next time. In other words, to correct what was done wrong, learning from it as you did. Those grades were a bit of 'discipline' designed to get us 'motivated' to do better.

When God corrects us, he isn't trying to point out what we did wrong. He is attempting to get us to see we can do better if we embrace what he is trying to teach us. The teacher in the classroom doesn't want the student to fail. The teacher wants the student to learn to love the lesson and get something out of it they can use throughout their life's journey. Why would God be any different in his lessons?

He wants us to get something out of each correction. Why? He wants us to take the 'lesson learned' with us along our path for the next time we need to put it into practice. No lesson is ever of value until it is put into practice. We learned a lot of math in school, but the most common of addition and subtraction are the ones we actually 'use' in life. We might not use all those theorems we learned in geometry, but we do know if we want to double a recipe, we multiply everything by two.

To learn - that is the real goal of all correction. Love discipline - that seems like an oxymoron to some, but if we want our actions to actually change, we need to learn to love it. It is the most important action required for change. Embracing correction is the step that takes the lesson to the level we can actually use it time and time again. Just sayin!