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Welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I'm your host Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member of the over 50 heavily vetted podcasts.
You will find something for sure to listen to at christianpodcastcommunity .org. And you can go to strivingforeternity .org if you would like to have us come to your church for a conference, even if it's just for your church.
Do a weekend seminar, this message is a message that was done for Upstate New York at the Rise Up Conference where one of our speakers Aaron Brewster and myself went to there to speak about our responsibility to the world.
This topic is session number three on our responsibility to others. So what is your responsibility to others? That is the topic that we will cover here. And remember this podcast is proudly sponsored by Squirrely Joe's Coffee.
If you want to get yourself a great cup of Joe, wake yourself up in the morning, go to strivingforeternity .org slash coffee to get to the site so that they know that you came from us. You can also, if you're a first-time buyer, get 20 off with the promo code SFE, stands for Striving for Eternity.
Remember, if you're getting 20 off, get as much as you can on that first order. That's what I did. So go to there, get a great cup of coffee. You're also helping to support a fellow Christian brother and his family.
So without any further ado, here's Aaron's message on our responsibility to others.
Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
Well, I'm glad to see a lot of familiar faces, some new faces here today. George, I don't have the TV here, and I'm needy. For those of you who were not here yesterday, my name is Aaron Brewster. I live in Brevard, North Carolina with my wife and my two children, my dog, and my parents.
We actually live in my parents' house. Yes, I am a 40-some-year-old living in my parents' house. But there's a good reason for it, I swear. My parents actually were hugely interested in helping me get my nonprofit called Evermind Ministries up off the ground.
And so when we were working at a boys home for at-risk teens in northern Wisconsin, when we moved from there to North Carolina, we landed with them, and we, as a family, a multi-generational home, have been doing everything we can to get this this nonprofit up on off the ground.
2020 ended up not being the best year to start a traveling ministry. I don't know. I thought it was gonna be awesome. But the Lord had different plans, so we're thankful for the opportunities that we have now.
A couple things. I didn't have a lot of time last night to talk about it, so a couple things to get to know me and my family a little bit better. Just some fun stuff. Andrew and I are actually both martial artists, so I'm not sure if that's interesting to you.
Some people think that's cool. Some people are like, what?
So,.
That's something that we have in common. We've never fought each other, but we've gotten close. We'll see. So I train my family in the martial arts. I've actually been doing the martial arts for over 30 years, teaching for almost 30 years the martial arts, and I have black belts in a couple different styles, something that I just always enjoyed.
I was homeschooled, and so when you need to get a PE credit, you know, sign up for the martial arts, right? That's what I did.
My.
Children are awesome and amazing. I love them. They are super cool. They're both second semester freshmen in college, and my wife has a really fun job. I'll show you pictures. I've shown a couple of you if you're interested in seeing it.
My wife, almost a decade ago, started a company, and she is a professional Disney princess impersonator. She's also a professional mermaid. Now, no, that doesn't make me some weird, wacko individual, but it just means it's, my wife is very talented.
She sings, and she does the performances, and she does birthday parties and things like that, so she brings a lot of joy to people's lives. She's doing it less and less now. She officially aged out years ago, but you never know.
You'd actually never know. To look at my wife, I got to that stage in my life where it's Aaron and his three kids. I'm like, okay, I get she looks young, but come on. That's a little unfair to me. It hurts, but, you know, it happens to all of us.
So, yeah, it's a fun thing that we have going on in Brevard. We're very thankful for it, and glad to be up here, have an opportunity to speak with you guys. One little piece of housekeeping, just thought I'd mention it first, because I might forget to mention it later.
There have been some questions, and this morning, there were some technical issues. So, I joked last night that all the resources that I brought were a lot lighter than the resources Andrew brought, because all of mine were digital, but probably some clarification is necessary.
If you purchase any of Striving for Eternity's bundles, the books and things like that, you get some of the online courses that I mentioned last night as part of those bundles, but there's a secondary step.
You need to see Yim, who will get you logged into the app, the Evermind app, and then will be able to give you access to the online courses that you purchased via the bundle. If you choose just to get the online courses and to not do it via the book bundles, you also want to see Yim, because you don't want to pay the price on the app.
This is a very special, super discounted price, just for this conference. One of those courses can normally cost $50, and you can get all three courses for $50. So, definitely don't do it in the app. I mean, if you want to, go ahead, but you don't have to.
See Yim, and she will get you all squared away, so that you have access to the online courses that you purchase either individually or through the bundles. That's the housekeeping stuff. Moving on. Yesterday, I got up here, opened Lord's book, and showed us His truth about why we are here, why we exist in this world, and by way of review, what was the one main reason?
I called it the secondary one, but the main reason that we exist, period, is to what? Someone help me out. So, read the Gospels, part of it. Glorify God, worship Him. Yes, we were created to worship Him, and the reason that we are here, right here, right now, is we worship God.
We glorify Him, in part, by being His ambassadors. There are two facets to that, though. There is the part that we have, the job that we have, to the unbelievers, via spreading the gospel, evangelism, but then there's the responsibility that we have to each other, what I'm going to refer to as the church, all of God's people in the local assembly.
Responsibility of both of those. However, I want to start today with our responsibility to both groups. Then, Andrew is going to talk about the responsibility to the unbelievers, and then I'm later going to talk about, in my last opportunity to preach, our responsibility to the believers, to the church.
Now, I love the… where we went after my sermon last night. Andrew then talked about our responsibility to the Bible. Very important, because if I am responsible to be God's ambassador, how do I do that?
What does that look like? The ambassador to the United States of America had probably better know what the United States of America is, what we stand for. We know that ambassadors from various areas, they aren't to go to that area and speak their own opinions.
They aren't to go and be themselves, speak for themselves. They are to go, and they are to speak on behalf of the institution or the individual they are there for. So, if we are here to be God's ambassadors and to persuade men, if we are here to persuade them that they are responsible to glorify God and how they think about Him, if we're here to persuade them that they are responsible to worship God in how they live, what does that look like?
In the exact same way that Jesus came to reconcile men to God, we too are responsible to God to be His ambassadors in this life. We are to appeal on His behalf, and we are to beg them on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God.
Now, this is where things we need to really start focusing in, start getting far more specific. And today, we are gonna get super specific. But before I take that jump, I want to answer the question, how we know how we can be God's ambassador.
We've all likely at some point in our lives met somebody, and they were very special to us, and we wanted to get to know them. We probably spent hours on a telephone or face-to-face asking questions, everything from the mundane to, what's your favorite color, to the deep questions that my future—I didn't know at the time that she was my future mother-in-law—but my future mother-in-law grilled me on.
Yellow or brown? Mustard. Milk or dark chocolate?
You know, the deep stuff.
We ask these questions because we want to know the person.
If I.
Were to tell you about someone, I were to tell you about my wife, and I were to tell you that she absolutely despises coffee, I were to tell you that she absolutely adores heavy metal music, I were to tell you that she was 6 '2".
You might think I'm describing my wife, but anyone who knows my wife realizes that I'm lying about all of those things. None of them are true. Am I really being a good ambassador for my wife if I come tell you things about her that are not true?
Obviously not. We know, I think, hopefully I'll see where I'm going with this. If I'm going to be God's ambassador, I need to know who he is. And I need to communicate who he is correctly. How do we know who he is?
That's what Andrew answered last night. Our responsibility to God's Word. God communicates himself through the Bible. It's through the Bible that we know, and Andrew, what Andrew said was also accurate, that yes, the heavens declare the glory of God.
That is true. But being able to have a relationship with him, to see that he is deserving of our worship, that everything in life needs to be lived for him because he is worthy of it, in order to see that and understand the only way that we can have a relationship with him through salvation, we have to read the Scriptures.
And I don't just get to say, well, Jesus, you know,.
He gets us.
Well, Aaron, what do you mean by that? That's a really good question. I'm kind of curious. Actually, I'm not curious what they mean by that when they say that. Does God get us? Okay, sure. Yes, to one degree or another, we could argue that he gets us, but not exactly communicating what the Super Bowl ads were trying to communicate.
The world has a lot of things to say about Jesus, and none of it is true because they're not pulling it from the Scriptures. They're pulling it from what they want Jesus to be, how they want him to look, how they want him to act.
They're not being his ambassador. In fact, the Bible has an awful lot to say about people who claim to be speaking for God, but who aren't. They're called false teachers, they're called false prophets, and there are a lot of condemnation poured on people like that.
In the Scriptures.
It is our responsibility to approach the Scriptures with the right hermeneutic. Hermeneutic is a word basically just about Bible interpretation. A lot of things that Andrew talked about last night. How do we come to the Bible?
How do we understand what God means the Bible to say? This is not a message on that. This is a message that's going to assume that we're already doing that or that we're growing in that. So, I just want to encourage you, you, I, Andrew, George, we all need to be growing in our understanding of the Scriptures.
How to read it, how to interpret it, how to understand it the way God intended it to be understood. It's very important. And there really is one way. Andrew and I like to jab with each other theologically.
We hang out with individuals who have lots of different theological persuasions, and they're the ones that are really important. Like, you can't be a believer if you don't believe that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, died on the cross, and, you know, that kind of thing.
But then there are disagreements that you're allowed to have. You know, people talk about eschatology. That's always the fun one. They like to argue about eschatology, like, you know, post-meal, pre-meal, all these other types of things.
And I always say in those conversations, you know, that reality is, guys, one of us has got to be wrong. You can't have a post-meal and a pre-meal guy having a conversation. They both be right. That's impossible.
One of them is right, and one of them is wrong. How do we know? Yeah, I don't know. Good people disagree on that one. But our responsibility as a Christian is to pursue that truth. If I am supposed to be an ambassador of God, I want to make certain that I am being accurate in my description of Him.
Otherwise, I'm failing to fulfill my responsibility here on this earth. And what a terrible life that is to fail to do the one thing that you were created and left here to do. So, assuming—obviously, none of us are perfect at this— but assuming that we are interpreting the Bible rightly, we're growing in our biblical hermeneutic of understanding it, that is where we know God, and that is what we have to use to be an ambassador.
How do we persuade people? In Ephesians 4, verse 15 through 16, which was the theme verse for my podcast, Truth, Love, Parent, we see, Speaking the truth in love, we, everyone who's speaking the truth in love to each other, are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body—this is the church— is being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies according to the proper working of each individual part.
So, basically, what it's saying is when we're all doing what we should be doing, speaking the truth in love, that causes all of us to grow in the body, building itself up in love. This is how God has decided.
Now, you know, lots of cool sci-fi. George and I are connecting over our love for sci-fi and lots of movies. You know, you've got creatures, whatever, that can communicate telepathically. Do you know God could have decided that that's how we communicate?
My family and I love the cartoon Home. Those little creatures, they communicate verbally, but their bodies also change color with their emotions. God could have decided that that's what we do, but He didn't.
He decided that we would use human language to communicate. It's very important. When we understand that God Himself speaks and that He commands us to speak, it puts a lot of weight on our words.
God has said the way that we are to be ambassadors, the way that we are to build each other up, is to communicate with each other truth and love. The old question that Pilot asked, what is truth? It's a really important question.
Solve 119, 160, a verse that Andrew didn't get to, so I'm finishing your message from yesterday for you. The sum of your word is truth. The sum totality of the word of God is truth. You want to know truth?
That's it. Every one of your righteous ordinances is everlasting. Praying to the Father, Jesus said, sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. So, God wants us to communicate, to persuade, to urge with our words.
We need to communicate truth, and that truth has to come from God's word if we are going to be His ambassador. Now, I like to refer to the multi-tool of Scripture. The Bible was specifically created by God to be everything that we need for life and godliness in this world.
Amen. Through the knowledge of Jesus Christ that we get in the Scriptures. The Bible is sufficient. We don't need things outside of the Bible. Now, I say things like that, and I was encouraged this morning to be careful not to make assumptions about what people think, you know.
Obviously, the Bible doesn't teach you how to change your, you know, transmission. The Bible doesn't teach you that two plus two is four, but the Bible does teach us everything we need for life and godliness in that whether I'm in math class or under my car, I can glorify Him while I'm there.
And that's the key. Everything that we need for life and godliness. Everything that we need to fulfill our responsibility on this planet is there in the Scriptures. So, God created the Scriptures to accomplish lots of different things.
I'm about to put a verse up on the screen that most of us are very familiar with, but I want us to think about it in a little bit different way. All Scripture is inspired by God, and it's profitable. It profits for four unique things.
The Scripture teaches, it reproves, it corrects, and it trains in righteousness so that— sounds a lot like Ephesians 4 .15— the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. So, the goal toward which we are working, speaking truth and love, so that we can grow up into the head who is Christ, is fulfilled speaking the truth of the Scriptures, but the Scriptures themselves were created for four specific purposes.
It teaches us, it reproves us, it corrects us, and it trains us, which means that if that's why the Bible was created, what it was created to do, and if I'm supposed to take the Scriptures and communicate it to people in love so that they can be persuaded of God's worthiness, then that means that the Bible can be and should be used by me in each of those four ways.
And we're going to see today, we're going to go through the New Testament pulling out different ideas. Now, I am not a Greek scholar, okay? I love language. I'm fluent in sign language. I'm semi-fluent in German.
I've dabbled in Mandarin. No, yim, I can't speak it to save my life, but I've dabbled learning in Mandarin. I love language, and I love studying the Greek, but I have to admit that I'm very limited in that.
But I believe it's important. Why? Well, because if the verses were written in Greek and there's a certain unique nuance about the word that God originally used to communicate this truth, then it behooves us to understand that.
Like, I'm sure you're all familiar with the fact that, you know, we have one word for love. I love my wife. I love my pizza. It doesn't turn out too well for the pizza. So what does love really mean? You know, well, in Greek they had different ways of describing love because they had different words, which all then get translated love in our English Bibles.
It's valuable for us to understand, well, this verse was actually talking about a different idea, a different concept of love, than this verse over here was talking about, and there's real value in us seeing that.
So we're going to look at some different Greek words today, and we're going to see, we're going to build out each of these concepts. If God expects me to teach and reprove everybody, and we're going to see today that He does, then what does that require of me?
That's where we want to start getting more specific in our application. My responsibility is to glorify God. My responsibility is to glorify God by being His ambassador. I've got to use His word to do so.
His word was designed to teach and reprove. God commands me to teach and reprove. So what does that look like as I teach and reprove you, and I teach and reprove people in my community, and I teach and reprove my family?
What does that look like? Like I said. All right. So what do we need to do? We need to open the scriptures. We need to see what God's word has to say about this. God requires the first half of this message today is going to focus on the teaching.
The second half is going to focus on the reproving. So let's zoom in on what God means when He tells us it is our responsibility to teach other people. The first word we're going to look at, and I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce these Greek words because I have heard from real Greek scholars that I absolutely abuse them.
If you know the pronunciation of these words, I encourage you to actually shout it out so that everyone knows what that word up there means. But if none of us know that, we'll at least enjoy our joint ignorance in how to pronounce it.
But this is a word that shows up in the Bible, in the Greek, that it's oftentimes translated to teach. That's not always translated that, but often it is. This Greek word has the idea of holding discourse with others in order to instruct them, to deliver didactic discourses, to be a teacher, to discharge the office of a teacher, to conduct oneself as a teacher, to impart instruction.
I'm doing this on purpose. This is what the Greek word, this is the idea that this one Greek word holds. So let's make certain that we understand when God commands us to teach, that we understand what that word originally meant when it was written to the New Testament church.
To impart instruction, to instill doctrine into the thing taught or enjoined, to explain or expound a thing, and to teach someone something. So to teach, as we all understand, is to impart information.
All of that should clearly explain why in the New American Standard Bible, the word is translated teach, teaching, taught, instruct, and instructed. Good words to translate this verse. Here's an example of the word in action.
In 2 Timothy 2 -2,.
It says,.
Now, we're not going to look at all of the examples in Scripture, but I pulled out some that are going to help us appreciate the nuances of what it means to actually teach other people. Another good example is Colossians 3 -16.
Let the word of Christ richly dwell in you. Okay? There is— There's a source of our teaching has got to go back to God's word. Let the word of Christ richly dwell in you with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
This is a command, my friends. God wants us to teach. You say, how do we teach? It's going to start with God's word, with the truth of God's word, sharing it with other people. It can look exactly like what I'm doing right now.
It can look like conversations that I've heard in this building already this morning. It can be an encouragement. It can be a Bible study. It's simply God's people speaking the truth of the Bible truthfully.
We're building each other up.
Now,.
Though it was written in Hebrew, Deuteronomy chapter 6 places the spiritual instruction of children firmly into the parents' lap and more specifically on the father's shoulders. So that's—I like to make application to differing groups here.
So men, in your families, you have a responsibility to teach, a weighty responsibility to teach that is a little bit different than other people's responsibilities when it comes to your family. Yes, lots of people should be involved in the teaching process of your families, but men, we need to take this seriously.
And when I go to different conferences and parenting conferences, you know, I see way more women there than I see men, and that's not because we're holding it during working hours. It's because a lot of times women are taking it more seriously.
But guys, shame on us. It shouldn't be that way. We need to be the leaders of our home. We need to take this idea of teaching seriously. I—it's actually part of this message rabbit trail, but Ephesians chapter 5, the very end, when it talks about husbands loving their wives, that relationship there, a lot of it actually involves the—it doesn't come out necessarily in this exact terminology, but the idea involves men washing their wives with the word.
It is that having that influence on her to help her grow in Christ. It's to Ephesians 4, 15, it's to do this Colossians 3, 16 in her life. Okay, this is a huge responsibility for us men. We've got to take it seriously.
There's another word we want to look at. As you can see, these two words are related to each other. Slightly different grammatical variations, though. This word appears in our theme passage in 2 Timothy 3, 16.
All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching. This is this word. Again, this is simply the noun form of the verb that we just talked about. In the New American Standard, this word is translated teaching, teachings, instruction, a total of nine times, but it's also translated doctrine and doctrines 12 times.
Here are a couple examples. In Titus 2, 7, we read, Why am I throwing this up there? Just to show in different ways that this particular word is translated? No, no, no. The reason we're doing this is this is the specificity we need.
God wants us to teach. What's one of the ways that we do this? We have to understand that that word—this is what it actually says— the word that's not there, that's there now, that word is actually talking about the same concept that I was commanded to do earlier.
In all things, show myself to be an example of good deeds with purity and doctrine. I cannot teach doctrine if I don't know doctrine. And if I'm not living doctrine, it's because I'm not believing doctrine, which means I'm a bad teacher of doctrine.
Your words aren't good enough. Why? If you tell me, if you come up to me in the old, in the 90s, you know, Coke versus Pepsi, you come up to me with a Pepsi hat and a Pepsi shirt, drinking a Pepsi, and you're like, Aaron, you should totally drink Coke.
I'm like, now I think you're joking. I'm not going to take you seriously. People say you really need to love God, but then they look practically at your life, and if God were like subtracted from your life, what would really change?
How different would you really be if this all-important God of yours were just removed from your life? And we wonder why people aren't more interested in our teaching. Let's say this is part of it. We've got to believe what we say we believe.
2 Timothy 4 .3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. Look, I'm not saying that we're in the end times. I'm not that guy. I don't know where we are, right? I know that we're here today, but I also know that there are people who do not endure sound doctrine.
They don't want to hear the truth of God's word taught to them. They want to have their ears tickled, so they accumulate to themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires. This is what the world wants.
They don't want sound, healthy, strong doctrine. And the vast, vast majority of the time the word is used, it's actually talking about spiritual teaching. It may be the false doctrine from heretical teaching.
It may have been talking about the doctrine conforming to godliness, but it's not merely talking. It's not just talking about passing on logistical information. It's talking about significant, deep, doctrinal truths.
Now, if I had subdivided this list of teaching words, I think we could have categorized them as such. The first section could be called the content of our teaching, the doctrine, the purity, the truth of God's word.
This includes the basic noun verbs of teaching. These words do a good job for us of defining the spiritual concept of our teachings. Now, the second group still has everything to do with content, but it adds a new layer to the idea.
This group may be called the authority of our teaching. And the first of these authoritative words oftentimes shows up as instruct. Now, it may not sound any more authoritative than the previous words, but this Greek word we're going to learn is defined as to transmit a message along from one to another, to declare, to announce, to command, to order, to charge.
This is not the typical public school teaching. I'm throwing this information out there with no expectation that you're going to get it as long as we get through the day without killing each other. This is, no, what I'm saying, you actually have to do this.
Thus saith the Lord. This is part of this word. It's translated many different ways in the English Bible. Instruct, instructed, instructing, order, charge, command, many more.
The,.
The passage you see there, Paul writes in pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus. Okay, pointing out these things, a good servant of Jesus Christ, what do you have to do?
You got to point out these things. Constantly nourished on the words of faith and the sound doctrine with which you have been following, but have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women.
On the other hand, by the way, ladies, it's not just all old women. The idea was old women who would fall for that type of a thing. I want to be fair. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.
For bodily discipline is of only little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds the promise for the present life and also for the life to come. It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance, for it is for this that we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers.
Those commands are fit for all of God's people. And if they are, then when God puts another person under my spiritual care as a pastor or a counselor or a discipler or a parent or a friend, I have the responsibility to teach those people under my care that they too should submit to these commands.
It's not a, you need to do this because I said so. It's, hey, we need to do this because God commands us to. This is why the very next verse reads, prescribe and teach these things.
Prescribe it.
You have to do this. Thus saith the Lord. The word teach is the first word we considered, but this information shouldn't just be taught. Paul is telling us that these are the commands of God. Therefore, you shouldn't just teach them as a good way to live, but you must prescribe them as the only way to live.
Our responsibility to teach everyone God's word that God brings into our lives will look like us telling these people what is right and what is wrong and charging them to do what is right and to not do what is wrong.
That's how I like to sum up this teaching of 2 Timothy 3 .16. Teaching is simply telling you, this is what God says is right, and this is what God says is wrong. Do this. Don't do this. That's a simple, that's all teaching is.
We need to make sure that we're being truthful to God's word, that we're living it out ourselves, but that's all that teaching is. But I do want to quickly discuss five other ideas that are all part of the biblical teaching tool.
We're going to move a little bit quicker through this. This next word definitely fits under the authority of our teaching. The next word is oftentimes translated to preach. Now again, this may sound like a form of teaching in which only a small group of people participate.
Aaron, that's the type of teaching you do. That's the type of teaching George does. But we need to recognize that the word translated preach has three main meanings. There's to be a herald, to officiate as a herald, to proclaim after the manner of a herald, so on and so forth.
There's the idea of to publish, to proclaim openly, something which has been done. It's also used at the public proclamation of the gospel and matters pertaining to it, made by John the Baptist and Jesus and the apostles and other Christian teachers.
So yes, pastors are supposed to preach. But actually all of God's people are commanded to preach as well. Now, quick caveat. No, I'm not saying that women should be pastors. I am saying that all of God's people need to preach.
There's a clear delineation there we can't dive into. I'll leave George to clean up that mess. But it is true, ladies, that we're going to see that the Greek word oftentimes translated preach applies just as much to you as it does to me.
In Luke chapter 8, Jesus had just cast out a demon. And instead of granting the man's wish to accompany his new Lord, Jesus tells him, return to your house and describe what great things God has done for you.
And the very next sentence says, So he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city what great things Jesus had done for him. He was preaching. He was proclaiming the truth of what God had done for him.
My friends, all of God's people need to be salt and light in this world. We're all commanded in Matthew chapter 5 to do that. 2 Timothy 4, 1 through 2 reads, Yes, we should apply this verse to our preacher boys, okay, but why does it not apply to the rest of us?
We need to be ready at all times, rising and walking and lying down to proclaim the word. We need to be ready all times to reprove and rebuke and exhort people our lives with great patience and instruction.
It's not just the pastor's job. In fact, I will tell you this, and it's again, I'm not just harping on you. This is true of every church. If you're going to leave the evangelism of your community up to your pastor, you will fail the community because he can't do it by himself.
You want to change your community for God? All of you need to be out there preaching the truth. Community will change a lot faster that way. That's how God intended it to work. I love this word too also includes the idea of communicating something with authority.
We need to preach God's word in his authority. Let's talk about the last word here in the authority category. It may actually surprise you because this word oftentimes shows up in our Bible as encourage.
It's just another example of the fact that it can be dangerous to read our modern understandings of English words into the scriptures. When we think encouragement, too many people are just like, hey, good job, buddy.
Can that be encouraging? Sure. Is that what this is talking about? Generally not. There are a couple Greek words that maybe translate as encourage, but I want to focus on just one of them. This word here is actually more familiar than you realize.
I'll talk about that in a minute. I'm going to skip over some of these notes here. It has the idea of calling to one side, comforting a person, striving to appease by entreaty, to console, to strengthen by consolation, to receive consolation, to strengthen.
These words, for the most part, I think align with most of our modern understanding. We like to think of encouragement as being comforting and uplifting and happy. But this word can also mean to admonish, to exhort, to beg, to entreat, to beseech, to instruct, and to teach.
This word can mean that in the original language. Though the word has been translated in our Bibles as encouraging and comfort, it's also been translated as implore, implored, imploring, to plead, to make an appeal.
Here's some examples. Hebrews 3 .12, Take care, brethren, that there not be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. Okay, so I'm potentially contrasting an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God, and the other side of that is what?
But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is called today, so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. This encouragement has got to be a lot more than, good job, if we're going to combat something that's going to potentially lead to us being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
For we become partakers of Christ if we hold fast at the beginning of our assurance, firm until the end. This is the same word used to describe the masses of people who would implore Jesus to heal them.
It's translated urge in Romans 12 .1. I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice. Exhortation is strong urging to do something. It's not merely just encouraging words.
But yet this word also is used to describe the comforter, the Holy Spirit. 2 Corinthians 7 .6, Paul talks about how God comforts the depressed. Oh, did put that one on there. And has comforted Paul himself by sending Titus to him.
So yes, it has lots of meaning, lots of understanding. But all of this meaning, all this understanding is packed into this concept that God's word was designed to teach us and we need to be teaching others.
Okay.
So far we learned about the two words that show up, show us that our responsibility to everyone, I just see what happened there, involves teaching that is packed with spiritual content. And we learned that our responsibility to everyone needs to be authoritative.
Now these last three ideas are going to be about the purpose of our teaching. Teaching is designed to teach, obviously. But what is the end goal of the teaching? We're telling everyone in our lives what is right and what's wrong, and we're imploring them, charging them, urging them to do what is right and to flee from what's wrong, but to what end?
The first one we're going to look at is this word that's often translated edify. This Greek word most often is used to communicate edification. It's most often translated either edify or build because it has that idea of building something up or to rebuild, to strengthen something.
It's used primarily of building houses and actually erecting buildings. Most of the times you see it in the scriptures it has nothing to do with interacting with another person. It has to do with actually building something.
But it's also used metaphorically to communicate founding something or promoting something. In 1 Thessalonians 5, 8 through 11, Since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation.
For God has not dusted us for wrath, amen, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we will live together with him. I include this context so that we see the bulk and the responsibility and the heaviness and the weightiness that comes along with what comes next.
Are we living soberly, putting on the breastplate of faith and love? Am I known by these things? I walk around in armor. People say like, that guy's in armor. Are you known by your faith and your love and the hope of your salvation?
And why should we have a hope of salvation? Well, because God has not dusted us for wrath. I'm reading this context on purpose. Don't just wash over it because we haven't gotten to the word we're looking for yet.
Therefore,.
Based off of all of that, encourage one another and build up one another just as you also are doing. Yes, that word encouraged is the word that we just learned, and I'm sure you can tell why these two are paired up together here.
Paul wants to urge our fellow Christians to live in a way he just described so they will be built up into the final product to which God is calling us. And what is that final product? The last word we're going to look at in this category is the word translated to make disciples.
In Matthew 28, Jesus commissions his followers using a singular Greek word, but we don't have one English word that really does it justice. So everywhere in scriptures, this word is translated. It's become a disciple, make disciples, made disciples, and that's exactly what it means.
We are to be intentional, premeditated, disciple-making ambassadors for God. Now, how do we make disciples? Jesus gives us our marching orders. He says, teaching them to observe all that I've commanded you.
I was actually just joking with George yesterday. We're fine with the evangelism and baptizing part. The church struggles with the discipleship part. The then the teaching part. We have a bunch of newborn babes in the word.
Praise God that they're saved who can only ever drink the milk of the word because they can't get into the meat of the word because they haven't been taught the truth of the word. And if they're in our midst, we as part of the church bear the blame of that.
For having not done our part to help them take that next step in their spiritual maturity.
That's the first half. I'm not going to spend as long on the second half, though I'd love to. God commands that we teach everyone. Evangelizing the world in discipleship with the church, we teach. This is what God says is right.
This is what God says is wrong. Dear friend, do the right. Don't do the wrong. What happens when they do the wrong? We all do the wrong and we know that everyone else around us does the wrong. Well, that's why the Bible is equipped to do something else.
And God requires that you also be reproving everyone. You see, if I really believe that God is worthy of your worship and I really believe that he says you must live this way and you must not live this way, but I see you doing this and not doing that, if I really believe that, am I going to stay quiet about that?
Oh, well, you do you, fam. If I do that, then I don't believe what I just told you. God, your creator, says do this. Don't do this. There are consequences for this. This is a big deal. And I see you not doing that and doing all these things and I'm just like, well, it's their life to live.
I've just proven through my actions that I don't even believe what I taught you. No wonder it's not helping you. Because you see that it's not even that important to me. But if I actually believe this and you're doing something that God says don't do, I have to say something about it.
Not because I'm a jerk, but because I love you. Anyone of these little people who are accidentally doing something, playing with something, that's going to get them hurt, the person who says, stop it,.
Is not a jerk.
They're a wonderful person and their parents would say, thank you for helping my child. But you know what? We grown-ups are arrogant. How dare you tell me not to live my life this way? Oh, seriously?
Really? We're going to be like that temper tantrum of a three-year-old? You should be thankful that someone loves you enough to step into your life and to say, my friend, my brother, I'm seeing what you're doing and saying, but I'm also seeing what God's word says and I love you enough to go, can we talk about this?
Can we please work on this together? It's not me versus you. It's not because I said so, but it's because our God is awesome and he deserves it and I need work on this too. Let's figure this out together.
And that bothers you? No, I get it. Most of the time it's not done that way, is it? It's that judgy thing. It's that talking behind people's backs. Obviously, I'm not talking about any of that. That's not reproof.
That's gossip and that's awful and people shouldn't do that. And no, people don't, I mean, yeah, sometimes you need to have that passion to like, come on, you know this, cut it out. You're just making excuses.
Yeah, tough love is oftentimes very appropriate, but most of the time it should be that, hey, you know, brother, sister in Christ, I love you. Let's talk about this. And it's not because I want you to do something.
It's not about me getting anything about this. It's because God deserves for me to obey him by teaching and reproving you and you teaching and reproving.
Me.
We have to do this, my friends. First word we're going to look at. Oftentimes, well, before we get to that, I forgot. This is an example. We see it all through scripture of reproof. You had the wrong motives.
That's all it is. Teaching is, this is right and this is wrong. Do it. Reproof is, all right, you just did something wrong. Let's rehearse. This is right and this is wrong. I call this the interpretation stage.
Everyone does what they believe is best. It's because they misinterpreted the situation. A child thinks that it's actually best for me not to obey my parents in this situation. A man believes that it's actually best for him to cheat on his wife.
They interpreted the situation the wrong way. And we need to help them see that they interpreted it the wrong way. That's what proof is. What you did was wrong. It's an example from the scriptures. Lots more I could show you.
Now again, we, sinners don't actually like to have their, uh, their sin shown to them. This word here, though, is oftentimes translated as convict or exposed to rebuke. In John 3 20, Jesus said, For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
He doesn't want to be exposed. By the way, this is most of the reasons that we don't reprove in the church. Because people hate to be reproved and it's scary when they get mad at us. And so we just, out of fear, don't do it.
But you know what that is? That's my take, my, my, me taking my responsibility to the other brothers and sisters in Christ and offering on the altar to self. I'm doing what I'm doing because I want to avoid the discomfort and the things that come from me when I actually step into someone's life and say they're wrong.
No, no, we got to take that and we have to offer it to God. Which is going to involve reproving in a way that pleases him. 1 Timothy 5 20 commands those who continue in sin rebuke in the presence of all so that the rest also will be fearful of sinning.
This is builds off of the the passage from John chapter 8.
No.
Matthew 18? Help me out here. They call it church discipline, but it's really about church discipleship. Was that Matthew? Yeah, Matthew 18. Yeah. I wanted to say John, then I threw myself off. We don't just start with you're in sin right in front of everybody, you know, that that is a process that sometimes we have to get to when the person says no, I don't care.
This is an example of that. Same Greek word used to describe the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes. He's going to convict the world. This is what we're commanded to do. We're supposed to rebuke.
We're supposed to convict people. This is the second time we're hearing that Christians are responsible to participate in the work of the Holy Spirit. It's interesting. Yeah, either we say that we are to comfort it as he does or that we are to convict as he does.
Obviously, we do it through the power of the Holy Spirit. And it's this convicting element of reproof that makes this responsibility the stage where oftentimes we have to give consequences. It's right here in my notes, Matthew 18.
One of the consequences for sin involves sometimes at the very end there, let him be to you as a tax collector, a gentile and a tax collector. If he's going to act like an unbeliever, we have to relate to him as an unbeliever.
That's one of the consequences of your refusing to accept reproof. This is the stage in parenting where the consequences come in as well in the reproof stage. Proverbs 29 .15 is a perfect example of how reproof and consequences go hand in hand.
The rod and the reproof give wisdom. But a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother. There's another word that oftentimes shows up as the idea of warning. This word is translated also as to show or to showing.
In Luke 12 .4 -5, Jesus says, I say to you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body. By the way, this is an encouragement for all of us who have a hard time reproving our brothers and sisters in Christ because it's scary.
Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you. Whom to fear? Fear the one who after he has killed has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.
Because Jesus loves his creation, he warns us of the consequences of our choices. Yes, reproof does often involve consequences, but it also requires that we warn everyone in our lives of the future consequences they will receive if they don't learn the lesson God has for them.
Now, I'm not necessarily reproving any of you individually because I don't know whether or not you're doing the reproof stage well. I can say if you're anything like me and you're human, you're not doing it well.
Let's just be honest. But what I'm doing here is part of that reproof. I'm saying, my friends, your church is not going to grow. It is not going to thrive if you fear man more than you fear God. We have to fear God and therefore up reproof as he commands us to.
The next word is admonishment.
Admonishment.
I don't know if some of you might be familiar with biblical counseling movement started by Jay Adams. It originally was known as nank. It was a the idea of euthetic counselors. He coined that term from this Greek word, which oftentimes shows up in the Bibles in monish, not as counsel, except for in Jay's translation of the Bible, he put counsel in everywhere we find in monish, which is not an appropriate choice for him to make because that's oftentimes what the word really means.
In 1 Corinthians 4 14, I do not write these things to shame you. Why am I writing these things? So that you feel shame? No, but to admonish you as beloved children. Colossians 3 16. Again, we come back to this.
Let the word of Christ richly dwell in you. What am I supposed to do with that word dwelling richly in me? Well, I should be teaching, but I'm also should be admonishing. I should be reproving you. Next word we see is oftentimes translated rebuke.
Rebuke. Again, these all fall into the concept. They're not all the same word that we saw in 2 Timothy 3 16, but they're all unique ideologically. They fall into the concept of the big group that is reproof.
And rebuke is one of those.
Matthew 16 20. He warned the disciples. They should tell no one that he was the Christ. This also has the idea of warning. It can be translated also to sternly tell or to rebuke. This word is frequently used to describe how Jesus rebuked evil spirits actually, but he also rebuked winds.
He rebuked a fever and he rebuked his disciples. By the way, if you are the tone police, do yourself and everyone else a favor and cut it out. The issue is not the tone. The issue is whether or not the person is speaking truth in love.
Love is not a tone. Love is wanting and working toward someone's best interest. And sometimes the best interest of the child on the edge of the Grand Canyon is, because that's what they need to stay alive.
It's the most loving thing we can do. And sometimes the tone necessary for that brother and sister in Christ who is living in their sin and who doesn't want to repent is sometimes very stern. Not unloving, but lovingly passionate enough to say, you are killing yourself.
God deserves your worship. Please stop. That is completely appropriate. This idea of rebuking involves the same type of rebuke that Jesus gave the demons.
And the winds.
Because it is a strong thing that we are commanded to do. When Jesus saw that the crowd was rapidly gathering, he rebuked the unclean spirit. We're told to preach the word, be ready in season and out of season.
And one of those things that we are commanded to do is to reprove this and rebuke. This word rebuke here is the word we're talking about. It is part of the process of being a child of God and an ambassador of Christ.
Because sometimes it has to be done. We don't want to do it. But if the person is not listening to the reproof, sometimes we have to bump it up to the rebuke level for them to see the error of their ways.
I'm going over time. I appreciate your patience. We'll be done shortly. In Matthew chapter 20, the crowd sternly told them to be quiet. The men who were begging Jesus to heal them. Same word. I share that one specifically to see that sometimes we have to be stern because this is something that is—we're actually— we believe in.
We're passionate about it. So I want to end today with this. Lots of notes that I skipped over. Big topic. I will say that.
The.
Biblical Parenting Essentials online course that I offer through the app, which you can get as part of any of the bundles that Striving for Eternity is selling, is a representation of the same information with different focuses.
I spend more time focusing on certain things, definitely applying it to parenting. I build out the concepts more, but I also don't go through all of the words like I did today. So these two things actually really complement each other.
If you are a parent, if that is the stage of life you're in, if you know about a parent, gifting them the Biblical Parenting Essentials conference would be really fantastic for them, okay? But I want you to know that there's overlapping information here.
It builds out in different ways. It's another way to dive deeper into this understanding of what God expects from me. I also have a series on the celebration of God, which is not coming to my head right now.
It's a podcast series that builds this out a little bit more. But I want to end with this. Ezekiel chapter 3, verses 17 to 18. And then also we're going to look at chapter 33, verses 8 through 9. God talking to Ezekiel.
Son of man, I have appointed you a watchman to the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth and my friends, we're not—.
Ezekiel—.
We're not speaking to the house of Israel. We're not getting words from God into our heads. We're in a different dispensation, a different time. We have God's completed word. And we do have lots of commands and scriptures that we've already looked at today and plenty more we could have looked at to realize that we have been appointed by God to be a watchman over our communities.
And when we hear a word from God's word, the Bible, we have the same responsibilities. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, warn them from me. He's saying, Ezekiel, this is how you're supposed to be an ambassador.
We're looking at how we're supposed to be an ambassador. This is how Ezekiel was supposed to do it. But here's the interesting thing. He said, Yes, they're responsible for rejecting God. But you are responsible for rejecting your responsibility to those people.
And my friends, I don't work with the people you work with. I don't teach the students that you teach. I'm not your kid's parents. I'm not your friend's friend. God has not given me the responsibility to be his ambassador in their lives.
So if you don't do it, who else is going to do it? Ezekiel 33, 8 -9. This is still true for us. Because you see that what the person spoke had nothing to do with the other person's reaction. They're either going to accept or they're going to reject.
Whether I speak or not, they're going to accept or they're going to reject. It had to do with my responsibility to God to be the ambassador that I'm supposed to be. And that's what will be held against me.
That I was not the person I was supposed to be. That I did not do my responsibility. I have responsibility all of you today. I believe the Lord is glorified in this moment and I pray that he's glorified as we move from here and I continue to teach and reprove.
But this is what we should all be doing for each other. We need to take some time to reflect. I'm going to pray really quickly and turn this over so we can be done with this section. Give it over to Andrew.
But lest we walk away from here and do that very natural normal human thing and just forget about all of this and start talking about things that don't let me focus on this. Let's try to meditate on this.
Let's try to look at our lives honestly and seriously, evaluate our relationships to see if we're truly teaching and reproving everyone in our lives, which is the responsibility that God has given us.
Dear Lord, I thank you for the privilege that it is to speak your word, but I must admit that it is humbling because I know that I do not do this as well as I should. It's very easy for someone like me to stand up here and to look like we're coming across saying, you have to do this because I said so Lord, but the reality is we all have to do this because you're worth it.
I need to do it and I need to grow in it just like the men and women in this room need to grow in it. We all need to do this better. It's not about comparing and contrasting each other. It's about giving you what you rightfully deserve.
So Lord, may we have a passion for everyone in our lives to teach them and to reprove them. Not because it's easy, not because it's fun, but because it's your truth and it's important and it's worth persuading people and it's worth doing the hard thing to see people come to you.
And it's worth giving you what you deserve. You're an awesome God. Thank you so much.