The Correction of the Word

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Thank you, Josh, and thank you, South Burleson, for letting me be here today. It's so exciting to be bringing the Word of God to you. My name is Sam, and I love that y'all do name tags here. I actually grew up for a few years in the church that I'm currently the Life Groups Pastor at First Baptist Burleson. There's some people there. I should know their names, and I don't. And I really wish that we had these name tags there, because that would make life a lot easier for me. That's good to see all your faces today. And if you have your Bibles, I want to encourage you to go to 2 Timothy chapter 3. That's where we're going to be today. And by the way, you're in a series right now about the Word and as in this Word right now. And so this is a great time to start bringing a physical copy of the Bible with you to church if you're not already, just as you're going to be diving into this scripture,

what it teaches, what it's about, what it's for, who wrote it, all those great things. It's really, really good to have a physical copy of it, but if you don't and you can click there on your phone, you get partial credit for that today, so that's good. I love to see this behind me right here. How many of you are just tired of the traffic in Burleson? There's a lot of you. Okay, so how many of you have gone through Waco recently? Okay, by the groans, there's a few of you. I went to a wedding a few months ago, and I was sat at a random table next to a random guy and I struck up a conversation with him about ministry and church and he was part of a small church in Waco but the guy seemed to be very affluent and so I was wondering like okay so usually people like him would maybe be at a little bit larger church I was kind of diving into that like why are you there

why are you at this place he said well I am actually the chief coordinator and director for the 35 Waco project and I don't want to be around a lot of people Because I am the most hated man in all of Waco right now. As I don't blame you, that makes a lot of sense for you to be where you are right now. But I listen to probably in a given week about 14 hours of content, whether that be a podcast or an audio book, and I do that while I'm driving, while I'm walking at night. And through that, I just hear a lot of stuff, a lot of ideas. I love new ideas, love the information. I listen to a lot of sermons. And I remember one of my favorite non-Christian authors was on a podcast talking about where he grew up. He grew up in a small town in the Midwest. And it was one of those towns that is centered around a single industry and a single factory. And that factory, whenever he was eight years old,

shut down. And the town around him just began to dissolve. crime came in, drugs came in. He said he went from having a community to being essentially in some kind of wild west and it was awful to see. And it kind of changed my perspective on things. So I was, even that day I remember just being so frustrated by this construction project that was happening on this one street near my neighborhood and I had to go around it to be able to get to my house. And it was just the most frustrating thing in the world. And I had a couple curse words that came into my head, maybe, just a full confession. And I remember listening to that podcast and thinking, oh my gosh, I would so much rather have the burden of expansion than the burden of collapse any day. And so to be able to look back here and see expansion happening and to see things happening, I know that it can be a mess sometimes,

but seeing building, seeing construction happening, it sounds so much better than seeing your town fall apart. I couldn't imagine being in that place. But I bring up that story because the title of today's message is The Correction of the Word. And I had a corrective thought put into my head that changed my perspective about how I saw my surroundings. And that's kind of what the Bible does. It doesn't always change our circumstances, but it can change our perspective on things. And I went from, I still get frustrated by traffic, I still get frustrated whenever I get delayed going somewhere that I'm supposed to be, but I can see it through a much better lens now of that this is a good thing that's happening to my town. Things are moving in here, industry's coming here, expansion's happening. These are good things. It's birth pains, it's growing pains, but I can see it now much better.

And that's what scripture does for us, and that's gonna be the theme of today's sermon as we begin to look into this collection of 66 books that was written by 40 different authors over the course of 1,500 years. and try to apply it to our lives, which is a fun thing to do. Before we get into our text today, let's just go ahead and pray together. God, thank you for your word. Thank you that it does bring correction. Thank you that it is good for us today. And Lord, I pray that for each of us who get to hear your word preached today, myself included, that your words would come alive to us, that you would plant a seed that would grow into a strong faith. We love you. We thank you. It's in Jesus name. We pray. Amen. All right. Let's look at 3 second Timothy 3 16 through 17 says all scripture Is God is breathed out by God? I'm in the esv version all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching

for reproof for correction and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." And so what I want to do today is break down some of the key words in this scripture so that we understand what this passage is really saying because there's a lot of descriptors here and for us to know exactly what Paul is trying to communicate to Timothy and by extension the rest of the church since this is now included in the canon of scripture, I want us to be able to to understand what is actually being said here. So let's look at this first word, breathed. And in this version it's breathed out by God. Other versions say God breathed. And this actually comes from a Greek word that is unique to this passage and in all other scriptural and non scriptural texts. In other words, this is the only place in all of creation where

this word exists. So in other words, this is a word that was coined and created by Paul, much like the word Elbow by William Shakespeare. If you didn't know that, now you do. That's a fun fact for the day. So it's God breathed and this word is theopneustos, theopneustos from the Greek, which means to be God breathed. Carl Henry, who was a famous theologian from the 1900s, he's one of the men that co-founded Christianity Today and Fuller Seminary, he said this about this word, he said, this is that supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit whereby the sacred writers were divinely supervised in their production of scripture, being restrained from error and guided in the choice of words they used consistently with their disparate personalities and stylistic peculiarities. In other words, the Word of God was written by man through the influence of the Holy Spirit

free from error and also imprinted with their unique style and personality. And so it was written by the inspiration of God through people. And it was done so so that we might know Him. And this framework is extremely important for us as we begin to understand what this verse is saying and also what all of scripture is saying. We need to understand that this is from God written by human hands for us to know who God is. If we can approach it from that understanding, we can understand that whenever we come to this word, that we can come to it with our doubts of it, with our criticism of it, and with our questions. It is fully able to handle each of those things. It's also something we can come to with our problems because whenever we are approaching this text, we are not just approaching a book written by man, we are approaching the words given to us by God

in order for us to know who he is and for us to know who we are and how we fit into this story and who we are supposed to be. And also it's a place we can go to for correction. whenever we are doing something that is against God's will outside of his law, this book will be make it very clear for us that we are doing that. But the good news is that there are people in this room today who probably have doubts about this book. And maybe you're afraid to admit that. That is okay for you to be there today. Just wants you to know that. My encouragement for you is to take a next step and start approaching it with some of the doubts that you may have about it, because it can handle that. and also to get teaching from somebody, ask questions about it. Scripture is from God. And so that we can know that because it is from him and he is a good father, that its laws and its principles for our lives

will give correction to us that will be good for us and effective and it will be right and it will be just. That's what it means to be breathed out by God. That's what it means when the Bible says, scripture is God-breathed, it doesn't mean he just exhaled on it. It means that it came from him, it came from his heart and from his mouth through the filter of people. And by the way, you apply a filter to this whenever you approach it as well. We can't come to this objectively. We always come to this subjectively. And the purpose of reading it and knowing God is to remove that subjectivity from it, what we impose upon it and get to see what he actually is trying to say through it. So let's look at the next word. So all scripture is inspired, breathed out by God and then profitable for teaching. I'm so sorry, this keeps popping on me. Teaching. So what does the Bible teach?

It's extremely important for us to understand a couple of things. What does the Bible teach and what does it not teach? Because there are certain things that it will not teach you. Much to my chagrin, whenever I was in high school, I used to pray for better scores on my math exams. I did not get better scores on my math tests by praying for them. Okay, I couldn't praise a God please let me make a good score on this test and calculus that I didn't study for that I didn't do the homework for. God did not bless that. He did not allow me to have a better test score. So we need to understand this about the Bible, what it doesn't teach. If you are trying to learn math, science, or history, and history being outside a very specific group of people from a very specific point in time, you are going to be disappointed whenever you come to this trying to ask it scientific questions, historical questions, or mathematical questions.

Sure there are things that the scripture agrees, or science will, good science will agree with what scripture says, right? mathematics will agree with what scripture says, but if you go here and you try to learn how to do quadratic equations by flipping through the pages you're going to be sorely disappointed. And so we don't want to come to it under with that understanding. If we come to it expecting it to teach us something it's not capable of teaching we may be disappointed walking away from it. But But what it does teach is who God is. The purpose of it is for us to understand who the Father is, what his heart is, his attributes, and his working in and through people throughout history, leading up to Jesus through the birth of the church and to his coming again. If we approach it from that standpoint, knowing this is teaching us the heart of the Father

for his children, then we're going to approach it from the right standpoint. And because it is profitable for teaching, the necessary next step is that if it's going to teach us something that we have to be studying it, right? If it's a teacher to us, we have to subject ourselves to it through study. We need to hear it, which that's probably my favorite way to consume the Bible is to hear it. I mean, I'm a very auditory learner, I believe that's probably my most effective way of learning is to hear things and then I'll hit pause a lot on my phone whenever I'm reading through something. So I'll be like, okay, I need to think about that for a second. I will hear it and hear it over and over and over again. I'll listen to other people preach on it. I will read through commentaries and this is actually what's called the ESV study Bible since we're in a series on the word of God, I thought I should bring my biggest

Bible that I own and get some extra credit points today. But this has a ton of notes in it. Some of these notes actually helped me prepare this sermon today. And then I'll also read what other people have written about God's Word. I will contemplate with it. I will meditate on it. I will wrestle with it. And I will receive counsel from God through it. I will allow myself to hear what it is saying I will try to remove the things that I want it to say because a lot of times we come to this and we want it to say some things maybe that's a political ideology maybe that's a personal belief and we want to impose what we know today about our political and our social environment and try to transpose that into what this says but the purpose of this is for it not to agree with what you already to believe but to correct the ways that you are thinking so that you fall in line with God. And we can make the mistake a lot of times of saying,

well, I believe this about my country, and I believe this about God, and so I am going to read this through that lens, rather than allowing God to correct the lens you're reading it through. And so that is, it is good for teaching, and that teaching will bring correction. The third word, see, all scripture is breathed out by God, profitable for teaching, for reproof. Reproof is a legal term. It is to bring evidence or to expose wrongdoing. And so scripture will actually reveal things about us and what we think, what we do, how we live that are wrong. In other words, they don't agree with the heart of the Father. It will expose our sin and it will convince us of our wrongdoing. Hebrews 4:12, I'm going to turn there real quick and read this. It says, The word of God is living and active. It is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints

and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. That is what this word will do to us. It will observe our heart and our intentions and begin to divide the things out that are of God and not of God. And in a lot of cases, there's going to be a lot of not of God in me. And there's a lot of things that need to be pruned off and cast into the fire, if you know what I mean by that. So it offers every proof. And the question that we need to ask is, do I want that? my heart, do I desire for the word, for the Holy Spirit, for God to expose in me the places where I am messing up? Do I want to know where I am not thinking correctly? Why would I want that for myself? In order for us to be able to answer that question, we have to have an understanding of what sin is. have to know that the things that we try to hide from ourselves even are the

things that are going to kill us. The things that are going to wreck our marriage. They're going to wreck our finances. They're going to wreck our parenting. Sin will absolutely ruin your life and so we should want and desire to come to this for it to expose the areas in our lives where we are messing up. The issue that we all face is that we can easily justify our own sin and put the blame of our sins on other people. We like to be the heroes of our own stories, right? We like for ourselves whenever we tell the narrative of who I am and how I got to where I am today, we are the victim, we are the hero, other people are the enemies or the roadblocks that got our way along to where I am today. today and it is so easy for us to overlook our own faults and place the blame on other people. That's kind of our natural bent. That is every person in this room, myself included,

for us to try to hide away and stuff down in ourselves the things that we know God did not put in us that God does not agree with and we need to hear the voice of God to expose those things and bring correction because we're not going to do it ourselves. We don't actively seek out to see how we are being the bad guys in our own stories. We don't want that. Usually, sometimes we do, but usually not. And we need this word to bring correction into our lives so that we will be able to see where we need to bring that correction. So all scripture is breathed out by God, profitable for teaching, for reproof, and then for correction. For correction. So the good thing is that scripture does not just expose us and convince us of our sin, it also brings correction to that and tells us how if we are living this way, now we are to be living this way in line with God's teaching and God's truth. Psalm 119, 160 says, the sum

of your word is truth and every one of your righteous rules endures forever. Something that I believe to be true is that people that genuinely love you are going to be the people that are critical of you. And we hear that word critical and we think criticize, but there is objective criticism, there's subjective criticism. There is a criticism that is antagonistic for sure, and people can be critical of others and point out their faults in order to bring them down. But I believe the people that genuinely love you will be critical of you in a way to build you up. So there's a guy who's on staff with me. His name is Michael Glenn. I think he was here two weeks ago leading worship. Love this guy to death. And I have no doubts that he loves me as well. The reason I know that is because every Monday after I do announcements in service, or if I preach a sermon, or if I do anything at all pretty much,

he will come into my office and say, hey Sam, dude, great job yesterday. Are you in a good spot to receive some feedback? And every time he does it, I'm like, yes, man, bring it on. Because he's made a habit of doing this. And he will come with a small list and say, hey, you did this right here, you said this really well, great job. When you did this, maybe that pause was a little bit too long, and if you did it this way, a lot better, I have no doubt that this guy loves me because he is bringing correction to me in order to build me up. If he hated me, he would not be doing that. If he despised me, he would not be trying to make me better at what I'm doing. And so the people that genuinely love you will be the people that will bring that critical feedback. Our job in this is to be people who subject ourselves to that criticism. And that can be a scary, dangerous, frightening thing to do

because it is vulnerable. It is allowing somebody to see you, see a fault that you might have, and touch that a little bit and say, hey, that right there, we maybe need to do something about it. I have a friend that I meet with every single Monday morning for usually about an hour and a half, sometimes two and a half hours. And in that meeting, we intentionally, this may sound weird, so sorry, we expose ourselves to one another, but this is a spiritual exposure. I am throwing up on him every single thing that I did wrong this week. I am confessing my sins to him. He's confessing his sins to me, and we begin to minister to one another in that. I'm vulnerable and say hey man I messed up real bad this week, said this thing to my wife I shouldn't have said it and he will come back with man, totally understand where you're coming from, why did that happen?

He'll like walk me through step by step what happened leading up to that situation so that whenever I'm back in that situation it won't happen again or I'll be able to recognize that it's happening. He's also a professional licensed counselor so that helps a lot. He's probably a lot better at giving me correction than I am giving him correction, but I do my best. And we can be sure of this, that because God loves you as His children, He is going to bring correction to you. He is going to want to correct you. I think often our temptation is to be the ones correcting others rather than subjecting ourselves to correction. It's just easier to feel like you know everything and to feel like you're the one with the answers while not having to be corrected yourselves. Because being corrected requires vulnerability. Spiritual discipleship and sanctification, I think sometimes we can think of it, of

becoming more like Jesus as these grand experiences and adventures where, oh man, I went on this mission trip to Africa and it changed my life. still a good thing. But I think true sanctification comes from the ordinary. It comes from just putting in the work of reading scripture, of praying, of allowing the Word of God to correct you. And there's people who are okay with that and doing the work and there's some of us who resist it a lot and would rather have just the once-off big experience every once in a while. But if you will subject yourself to the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God to bring correction into your life, to come to this, to accept it as truth, and to allow it to bring correction to you. I believe you will see a spiritual transformation that you can't find in a seminary, you can't find it in an orphanage in Africa, it can only be found in the day in and day out

application of this scripture to our lives. That's the correction it brings. It is sanctification and that leads us into our next bit. It's all scripture is breathed out by God. It's profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. And this word training comes from the Greek word pedia which means the full training, holistic training of children. This is training of their bodies, their souls, their morals, and their minds. And training invokes this idea of practice. Practicing reading scripture, practicing praying and studying, meditating, wrestling with it. We have to be people who subject ourselves to the practice of reading scripture, to the practice of being corrected by it. An athlete that never goes to practice will eventually stagnate and begin to fall off unless they're Allen Iverson who famously said practice I just wake up like this but she did and you know we're not Allen Iverson

unfortunately I wish we could be but that's besides the point but training involves practice practice involves discipline discipline involves determination and whenever we fail here and somewhere along these steps we need correction in our lives from the Word of God. But training can only come from the practice of reading, being corrected, subjecting yourself to this word. And it says that we are to do that, to be trained in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete. Whenever we see this word complete in Scripture, I have a red flag that comes up in my head because one of my life statements is that there is no finish line to discipleship and there's no certification of completion that you get printed off once you have become fully like Christ on this side of heaven because as long as we are alive and living we are never going to be made complete in that sense that we are just like Jesus and free from sin and free

from falling into temptation. That's not going to happen for anybody on this side of heaven. If you think that you've gotten there, there may be some correction that needs to be applied to your life. And so whenever we see this word complete, we need to understand that it's not saying that we are complete as in we have finally arrived and the discipleship process is over. What this word means is that we are not perfect but fully able. We are not perfect but fully able to do the work that God has called us to do. And the work is good work. This is kingdom work. This is telling people your story. This is holding a door open on Sunday mornings. This is leading a... you'll have life groups or community groups here. You'll have life groups. This is being a part of a life group. It's taking a next step somewhere. And so whenever you see a complete for every good work, it means that you are fully able to do anything

God has called you to do. There is no completion without ongoing correction. There's no completion without ongoing correction. If we are going to be made complete for the work of righteousness, there needs to be an ongoing correction pathway for your life. There needs to be a rhythm of correction and this could happen every morning for you or every evening or throughout the day. Whenever we come to the Word of God whenever we come to God in prayer we should never leave that the same person we went in as. Every time that we go to the Lord and go to this scripture there is always an opportunity for us to take some kind of next step. And again, it doesn't have to be a giant leap. It can be just a little step. And maybe that step for you is just opening the book and reading it. We all have to start somewhere and maybe your pathway of faithfulness and obedience

isn't going to be to come to this and understand and dissect every meaning of it, but just to open it up and read it. That might be your next step today. Or it may be for you that you need to start reading commentaries alongside of this thing or listening to other pastors outside of your tradition even, talk about this word of God so you can begin to wrestle with it from different viewpoints, from different denominations and different styles of belief. There's a lot of things that we can do to take a next step in here, but we're going to be made complete in it if we come to it and subject ourselves to correction. The last part is equipped for every good work. Equipped for every good work. This is being fully supplied for every good work. And whenever I say good work, I always want to make it a point to mention this, that the miracle of salvation is not upon you to perform.

It is not our job to die for other people's sins. Jesus already did that, which is great news. Our job, whenever it comes to sharing the gospel, to being people of his story of his testimony and sharing our own testimony is to be obedient to share that story. God's job in that is the miraculous side of it. We cannot bring salvation to anybody. You can't even bring sanctification to other people. You can be a tool that God uses in order to build someone else up, but in order for someone to have an actual change of heart that comes through the work of the Holy Spirit through the blood of Jesus Christ, through the words of the Father, and that is His job. Our job in all this is to be obedient. We cannot be the ones to perform the miraculous. That is only God and it's only His work. And we cannot be equipped without correction. Part of a successful marriage that I am learning and will

still be learning, I'm sure, 40 and 50 years from now, is that marriage is an ongoing cycle of correction. And I was thinking through this analogy and trying to figure out what is a good way to describe the process of being corrected in marriage. And not necessarily from my wife Kelsey, who I love dearly, bringing correction into my life, but reading scripture and correcting how I think about Kelsey as well. And the best example I could get, I just saw a blacksmith in an old blacksmith shop, think medieval, he's got a red-hot bar of iron. He has his hammer in his hand and he is hammering it over and over and over and over again until it begins to take the shape of a sword and he's banging out the imperfections and the shape defects of it as just happening over and over and over and over again. And I think the success to a one of once key success to a healthy marriage is

being someone who is willing to be subjected to the constant hammering of things in you that don't need to be in you anymore. The correction of your shape whenever you don't look the way you need to look that you're okay with that hammer coming against you and allowing it to hit you into the shape that you need to be. If you can subject yourself to that you will have a much healthier marriage and the same is true whenever we think about our relationship with God. This word, if you will allow it to be, if you will allow it to be, will be a hammer in the hands of God where He hits you with it over and over and over again in a loving way. I mean that's a violent example, right? Because it sounds like that would hurt and trust me sometimes it will. But here's the truth, we will either submit to God's correction or we are going to be subject to it. We are either going to willingly and willfully submit to God's correction by opening up this

word, by reading it, by allowing God to apply it to our lives by Him showing us the truth of what it means rather than us trying to tell God what it actually means and applying it to our lives. We can walk into that willingly, or if you are a child of God, He will impose it upon you, because He loves you and He doesn't want you to remain in the styles and the ways that you are living your life that are causing active harm to you. Sin is harming you, and this is one of God's ways of hitting that out of you. Sorry, microphone. So what are we choosing to do today? Are we subjecting ourselves to God's correction or are we running away from it? Are we hiding parts of ourselves that we don't want to expose yet because we're afraid of how much it's going to hurt whenever it finally comes out whenever we have to deal with it? This is the harsh truth but also the loving truth that that

thing you are hiding is going to be exposed. It is going to come to light and And we have the option of subjecting ourselves to that or being subjected to it. Because God is not going to allow those things that we hide, the things that we're afraid of, the things that we're struggling with, the things that we're doubting to remain hidden. Because He loves us too much to allow us to remain the people that we are. He is trying to make something new out of each and every one of us. And whenever we subject ourselves to that willingly, I tell you the process is so much easier. As someone who's done both, the process is so much easier whenever we subject ourselves and willingly walk into God's correction by walking in obedience to what his word says, than whenever it has to be imposed upon us. I don't know about you, but I was spanked as a child. That was a good thing for me. I needed it in certain times.

The times whenever I tried to hide when I had broken the vase or gotten an F, it was always much worse whenever my dad would bring correction than whenever I would willingly tell him. Because that willingness to tell him, it showed him that I did not, that I was repenting essentially of what I had done. I was saying, I did something wrong, I'm so sorry. And that communicated to him a wanting to change. The flip side of that is me hiding it showed him an unwillingness. And he would get the belt out. And he would bring correction. And he did that because he was a good dad. But this idea of correction can be really difficult for many of us. In fact, it's one of the things that our society struggles with the most. What is good correction? How do we actively apply correction, both as parents, and also how do we legislate correction? That's difficult to figure out,

and there's a lot of different opinions on that. But we have a good father who knows how to lovingly, effectively correct his children. So that's my challenge for each of us today. Submit to God's correction. And the first step that we each take in that as in by saying yes to Jesus, making him Lord of our life, by confessing our sins. That's the first correction God's bring is, that God brings is through his grace. Let's pray. God, thank you so much, Father, that you love us enough to correct us, that you don't want us to stay where we are today, but God, you gave us a means to be corrected, Father, through the reading of your word and by the confession of sins. And so God, for each of us, Lord, we have a step to take today. God, whether that is a confession, whether that is making you Lord of our life, if that's just to begin opening your word and reading it and applying it and allowing it to do

what you made it to do, God, pray that we would take that step today. Lord, as we sing this song, as we close today, Father, would you speak to each of us? Would you tell us, God, Father, not the things we want to hear? Lord what we need to hear from you today. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. You can stay seated during this time. It may be a song you're unfamiliar with so don't feel like you really need to sing along. I'd love if you guys would just reflect on this word though and if you need to make a decision with God take that time to do it now.

Thank you for this time you've given us to come here, fellowship with each other, worship you Lord and hear your word spoken God. I pray that as our week goes on God that you be honored and glorified through our actions and what we do Lord and your sins I pray. Amen. You guys are dismissed. Don't forget next week to come prepared to help out.