Back in the 1940’s and early 50’s when we lived in Evergreen, Colorado, we would drive to Idaho Springs to visit with my Aunt Nettie and Uncle Clyde Lyons and spend a day with them. My uncle had several gold mines in the area, and they had a beautiful big home, with a dance floor on the second floor for when they had a band and had parties. It was a beautiful place to visit, and they had a wonderful Saint Bernard dog that I loved.

I noticed that the roads up the mountains were just cut out of the mountain and weren’t paved or very wide at all, and I wondered how they got the machines up to the mines to dig the tunnels and haul the things they needed to dig the gold. It was an interesting time, and people had to be pretty tough to work and build homes and get along in life. My dad built homes for wealthy people in Evergreen, often on a mountain and hard to get to, but I was too young to think much about it, because he always came home safe and didn’t talk much about it. He knew exactly how to deal with his surroundings. 

In a discussion in our church Bible Study recently, we were discussing the difference between God’s discipline and God’s refinement in our lives. It brought to mind the refining of the gold I had wondered about as a young girl, so I began looking into it. 

I thought of refining as a slow process or procedure to work on a product to bring out the best in it, whether by using heat, water, or some other method. It may use extreme measures to get to the end result, but you have to keep working on it and not give up in order to produce the best results. You refine something to purify it and free it of impurities, imperfections, and undesirable qualities, and to polish it. The dictionary points out that to refine a person means to free them from vulgarity or coarseness and give them a keen sense of thought or expression. We can sense when a person has a refined character by their speech and actions. 

The dictionary describes discipline as training that is expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior; especially that which is expected to produce moral or mental improvement, controlled behavior, and a systematic method used to obtain obedience. It’s a process or punishment intended to correct or train. 

I always think that refining in my spiritual life is my responsibility to read, study, and apply God’s Word to my life, as well as to learn from sermons and Bible Studies. Through that process I can come to know and understand how God wants me to live. I use discipline to stick to a plan to study and pray and seek God’s wisdom and direction for my life. God uses life experiences, both good and bad, to help me gain strength and obedience to His Word. He is trying to help me to be the best me I can be and to perform His purpose with my life. 

I think God uses discipline in my life to show me that I am going in the wrong direction and need to change, and to abruptly put a halt to what I am doing. Some of His discipline is extremely difficult and causes pain and sometimes loss. But through work and prayer and by using the resources He has given me, I have come through many trials and learned many lessons. He has always used the results to make me a better person.

Sometimes discipline can be more like God’s loving punishment for doing something we knew was wrong and doing it anyway. Like a child being spanked for doing something they knew all along was wrong but doing it anyway. It can be for an act of omission or commission. Since I am God’s child, He has the authority to punish me and I need to thank Him for it, as He did it out of love for me. 

Proverbs 3:11,12 “My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord or loathe His reproof, for whom the Lord loves he reproves, even as a father, the son in whom He delights.
Hebrews 12:10b,11 “but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”

As we travel those rough roads life sometimes leads us on, we need to pay attention to the directions God gives us along the way. He will always show us how to avoid those rough spots and handle the curves life puts in our way. And He will continue to refine us as we trust in Him and follow His path so that we can be the best we can be and arrive safely at our destination to be with him for all eternity.