Hebrews 12:12
Buck up!

The imperative in this verse is to strengthen our hands and knees. In other words, to buck up, to not sit down and feel sorry for yourself, but to get up and do whatever God wants you to do. This is often easier said than done. We live in a fallen world and we are sometimes faced with real challenges: our health, our partners, our families, our bosses, our governments, or our finances, may fail us. We all go through times of serious challenges. So let's have a look to see if the context of our verse today gives us some help in how to 'buck up'.

The verses just prior to our verse talk about how God will chasten (correct, discipline) us, just like our earthly fathers did. So do some of those real challenges that we face come from God? Absolutely. God tests, refines, disciplines, and corrects us. He corrects and disciplines when we disobey him, and tests and refines us even when we obey. It is what a loving Father, who cares about the character of his children, would do.

Ok, so we know that at least some of our challenges come from God, and we know that we have to 'buck up'. But how? How do we actually do this? For this, we have to go back a little further. Hebrews 12 starts with encouraging us to run the Christian race with endurance, looking to Jesus. So when the going gets tough, the tough look to Jesus. Jesus faced some pretty challenging trials as well. One of the hardest ones was in the garden of Gethsemane, when He knew He was about to be crucified. And what did Jesus do? He prayed. There is a great sermon by Bill Cobb on Truthbase.net about how Jesus prayed in the garden, and how Jesus' example can help us. It is by using the acronym PRAY:

1. Pour out your feelings honestly to God.
   
2. Recognize that God is able to change anything.
   
3. Align your will (thinking and feeling) with the Father's.
   
4. Yield yourself to do God's will to the point of death.
   

Start by being honest with God. Tell Him how you feel about the situation. Don't hold back, He can take it. Jesus was honest and asked, if it were possible, that the coming suffering would be taken away. Spend some time being truly honest with God.

Then spend some time realizing that God can change anything. He can. Totally. He spoke our universe into being. He can create life out of nothing, and He can destroy it in a split second. He can change your circumstances, all of them, instantly.

After you truly realized this, its time to start aligning your will to His. Start to look at things from His perspective. He can change the situation, but He isn't. So He has a plan. Why is He allowing the current trials to continue? How will it contribute to His glory and my benefit? This is point is so important that I will elaborate on it below.

Finally, after you managed to align your thinking and your emotions with God's, then its time to 'buck up', and yield yourself, to do whatever God wants you to do. Yielding means surrendering. It is a decision of your will to say: "Not my will, but Yours, be done." God will give you the strenght to do what needs to be done, but only when you align your will with His.

So, about step 3, aligning our will with God's. How do we actually achieve that? Our context in Hebrews helps out again. We look to Jesus. So what was Jesus looking at? He was looking at His reward. Hebrews 11 makes the case that the saints of old did great things and pleased God, because they were motivated by rewards (Hebrews 11:6, 11:26, and 11:35 make this abundantly clear). And Jesus was motivated by rewards as well. He endured the cross because of the joy that was set before Him (Hebrews 12:2). He was obedient to death because of the future results of His obedience. What are those results? He Himself will get power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing (Revelation 5:12). And billions of Christians will be reconciled back to God and get eternal life. And God gets glory. Lots of joy!

If you are similarly convinced that God will reward your obedience now with future blessings, then you will be able to strenghten your hanging hands and weak knees, and you will also be able to endure, overcome, and receive a reward when Christ comes back. As it is written: "Behold, I am coming quickly and my reward is with me, to give to everyone according to his works" (Revelation 22:12 ).

So, buck up, and do good works!