Claire,
Your Daddy God child-trains you in love for your own good and spiritual development. And you live to learn from it. The word chasten literally means child train in the Greek.
In the OC there was child-training as well as punishment, the latter also cos that was the law system -- do good get good, do bad get beat.
But we are under the NC of grace now. God does not punish his children for their sins since Christ was punished on our behalf. Lawyers will tell you that the same sin cannot be punished twice.
The cause is the devil not God. Of course, when we stray from God, we become open targets for the devil (he steals, kills and destroys).
When I say punish, I mean God does not punish with sickness, accidents or death. Do you burn the fingers of you child becos she disobeyed you and played with fire? Do you put cancer in her throat becos she screamed in defiance? So how dare we think that of Abba Father!
Also, punish is different from child-training. eg when a man beats another man, he can get arrested, jailed and canned for it. Now you dont call that child-training, do you? So God does not give us such punishment when we sin. But he child-trains us.
When God corrects, he corrects with his Word thru our spirit (read Hebrews 12) and we live to learn from it and grow from it. we dont die from it! It is always in the context of love and for our own good. God has our best interest at heart and knows how to do it better than earthly fathers (Heb 12). Paul says that this is one way He shows us that we are legitimate children. If God does not child-train you, something is wrong!
btw: I urge you to get this lodged deep into your heart!!!:
Rom 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
Heb 8:12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.
Heb 10:17 And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.
hope this sets you free.