7. Endure your trials as “discipline”; God treats you as sons. For what “son” is there whom his father does not discipline?
8. If you are without discipline, in which all have shared, you are not sons but bastards.
9. Besides this, we have had our earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them. Should we not [then] submit all the more to the Father of spirits and live?
10. They disciplined us for a short time as seemed right to them, but he does so for our benefit, in order that we may share his holiness.
11. At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.
12. So strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees.
13. Make straight paths for your feet, that what is lame may not be dislocated but healed.
14. Strive for peace with everyone, and for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
15. See to it that no one be deprived of the grace of God, that no bitter root spring up and cause trouble, through which many may become defiled,
16. that no one be an immoral or profane person like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal.
17. For you know that later, when he wanted to inherit his father’s blessing, he was rejected because he found no opportunity to change his mind, even though he sought the blessing with tears.
18. You have not approached that which could be touched and a blazing fire and gloomy darkness and storm
19. and a trumpet blast and a voice speaking words such that those who heard begged that no message be further addressed to them,
20. for they could not bear to hear the command: “If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.”
21. Indeed, so fearful was the spectacle that Moses said, “I am terrified and trembling.”
22. No, you have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering,