Your Responsibility to Church

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Welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the
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Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member. As we have been doing, we have been going through a conference that both
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Aaron Brewster, one of the speakers at Striving for Eternity, and I were at in upstate New York.
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This was at River of Life Church. We went through the sessions of the
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Rise Up Conference, the topic of the conference, Your Responsibility in This World.
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Today we have the fifth session, which is Your Responsibility to the
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Church, that is presented by Aaron Brewster. This is the fifth out of six messages that we had.
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I hope that this has been very encouraging to you. I hope that you've learned a lot. I just want to let you know, to remind you, we are sponsored here by Squirrely Joe's Coffee.
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Get the five -pound bags for church, maybe, but I hope you enjoy that. May this message from Aaron on your responsibility to church be a blessing to you, coming your way right now on The Wrap Report.
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One, two, three! Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.
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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.
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All right, well, it has been an absolute pleasure. I was running to Abel back there somewhere, and I said, all right, let's see if I can get through one last one without being a heretic.
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He goes, well, it is your last one, so this is the time to do it. I said, yeah, but I'm really liking you guys.
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I don't want to be remembered that way, so I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how much heresy we fall into today.
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This—and I was just talking to Serge. I just met him and was encouraged by him, but we were talking about the fact that this one, hopefully, is going to be a little bit lighter than the last one.
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There's still the heaviness and weightiness of, like, being confronted by the fact that I'm not doing it, and if I'm not doing it, then the conviction that I'm not doing it needs to bear on us because we need to want to change.
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But the teaching and the reproving stages of our ambassadorship generally don't provide the same glorious benefits as the next two stages.
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So, I'm excited to talk about that with you right now, and something just happened.
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Okay, we're good. My computer was weird for a moment. Technology is great when it's not possessed by the devil.
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Okay, let's do a quick review. Our responsibility. Your first responsibility is to worship
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God. That's why you were created. Your second responsibility to God is to worship him by being his ambassador.
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That is the primary reason you are here, but that is our second responsibility. As God's ambassador, you are responsible to communicate his word to everyone, believers and unbelievers alike.
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As you communicate God's word to everyone, you are responsible to teach everyone, and as you communicate
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God's word to everyone, you are responsible to reprove everyone. We don't get to say, well, that person isn't my responsibility.
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I will say this, a little caveat. There are people who it would be better for them to reprove a person than it would be for me to reprove that person.
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As an example, can I, by the authority of the scriptures, reprove
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Denise? Yeah. A better reprover in her life would be her husband.
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So, we have this tension of, do I reprove Denise? If he's not doing it, or do
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I reprove him to help him to do it? So, there's this unique tension, but I do want to say, I want to be fair, that, you know, it's not our responsibility to be everyone's watchdog.
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Parents should be the primary reprovers of their children. That doesn't mean that we're not allowed. It just means that they are oftentimes the best choice to do that.
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So, there is a little bit of a tension, and I don't want to leave here and make it sound like I'm just saying something
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I'm not saying. We just don't have all the time to get into all the nitty -gritty details. But, yes, it is my responsibility as a brother in Christ, or as a
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Christian to an unbeliever, to teach them and to reprove them, especially if no one else is, but even sometimes when somebody else is.
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So, now we also have—that was to everybody. Andrew focused in on unbelievers, our responsibility to unbelievers.
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So, I want to talk specifically about our responsibility to the church. Now, it's been sounding like I've been talking a lot about that already, and I have been, because the church is included in the everyone.
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But the teaching and reproving, you only have that available with the world.
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You cannot correct the world. I'll explain why in a moment, but the moment that you correct the world, they've become believers, and so they're not the world anymore.
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You cannot train the world. It's a common notion among biblical counselors that you cannot counsel an unbeliever.
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Now, what we mean by that is counseling, biblically speaking, is basically synonymous with discipleship.
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You can evangelize an unbeliever, and we do, but you can't really disciple them in Christ, because they're not in Christ.
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So, this is how it works. It's just like a parenting metaphor works well here, because we do this all the time as parents.
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You teach your child, and they don't have to participate in that teaching. You can just say things to them all day long, whether they hear it or not.
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You are teaching. You are imparting information. And you reprove your child, and they don't have to participate in order for you to be able to reprove them.
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Stop it. You're wrong. Cut it out. Stop doing that to your sister. Whatever. You can do both of those without their participation.
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Now, the more they participate, the more successful that teaching and reproving is, but you can do that without their participation.
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The same thing is true in the world. Andrew can stand up on a box and preach the gospel in New York City.
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He can tell people they're wrong. He can call them to repentance. And they don't have to participate for him to be able to be faithful in his teaching and his reproving.
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But in order to cross the bridge from reproof to what 2
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Timothy 3 .16 calls correction, they have got to accompany us as we go.
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So, when it comes to the church, they have the
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God -given ability to cross that bridge. They also have the demand by God to cross that bridge and to enter into correction and training.
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So, when I'm working with a believer, I go into it with an expectation that we can, by God's grace, get to training.
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That's 1 Corinthians 13, loving by hoping all things and believing all things. If you're a believer, I recognize the fact that we should get to that stage, and I'm excited to do it.
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But I recognize if it's an unbeliever, unless by the grace of God they submit to his truth and be born again, we obviously can't ever get to the correction and the training.
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I'll mention this later, but this is also a side note as to the difficulty that people have with that passage from Proverbs that says to train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old he will not depart from it.
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I don't know about you, but I've met lots of parents who have poured into their children, and their children have denied
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God and walked away, and they've said, you know, that verse must not have been a promise. It must have just been like a general truism.
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But that's not true, because we have to understand in the original language, just like actually in English, that there's a big difference between teaching and training.
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If I told you I were a classically trained violinist, then you would expect that I could pick up the violin and play it pretty well.
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If I picked it up, though, it could barely squeak out twinkle, twinkle, little star. You'd be like, I thought you said you were a classically trained violinist.
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I'm like, oh, yeah, I go every week to my instructor who shows me what
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I need to do. I mean, I don't ever do it, but I watch him do it. Yeah, I've got a trainer at the gym.
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Man, he's working out, I'm eating popcorn. It's fantastic. I know what to do when
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I'm there. I don't ever do it, but I know what to do. No, you're not training. To train for the
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Olympics requires that you do something. You're not just going to have someone with a slideshow going, this is what you have to do to be successful in the
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Olympics. You weren't trained. It says train up a child. Don't teach up a child.
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Don't reprove up a child. Train up a child. It assumes that the child is participating.
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And if it's a spiritual reality, the child can't participate but by the grace of God.
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You can't lose your salvation. If a person is born again, they are trained up in the things of God.
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They will not depart from them, at least not for longer than a season. So that verse actually is a promise and it comes down to our inability sometimes to, again, to read our own concepts and ideas into the scriptures without understanding what's really being said.
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So training requires participation. I got a little bit ahead of myself. Here we go.
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So I'm responsible to teach the church and reprove the church just like I am the world. But I'm also responsible to correct it and to train it.
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So we'll start off with the idea of correction. What is correction? There's a very wrong misconception.
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We think about how this is used in common parlance here in English. It's, you know, honey, go correct the children.
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And what are we imagining? When someone's correcting their children, what are we imagining is happening? Give me some feedback here.
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When you hear that phrase, someone's correcting their children, what do you think is happening? Yeah, so they're teaching them.
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Cut it out. Good, yeah. What else? Yeah, there's a consequence.
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Probably they're getting swatted on the high knee or getting grounded. They've been corrected, right? That's normally what we think.
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Which is funny because that understanding proves that our idea of correction is not used the same way as the scriptures is.
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Because what we just described was teaching and reproof. Consequences is part of the reproof stage.
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Telling them what they should be doing is part of the teaching stage. So what is correction? This word, in the
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Merriam -Webster dictionary, there are two general ways to approach the topic. One of them is to point out the errors or faults of and or discipline or punish for some fault or lapse.
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That's exactly what we just said. But this definition can't be accurate because then it's exactly the same as teaching and reproving.
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However, biblically speaking, the correction stage is very different. Now, before I discuss the other definition of Merriam -Webster for correction,
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I want to look at God's definition. So we need to take a step back. I can teach you and I can reprove you.
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But without your participation, I can still do it. But I need your participation to go into the next stage.
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Why is that? Because the idea has to do with returning to a state
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I should have never left. So here's the example. My child wants to take the boat out.
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We live in an inlet, right? And they want to take it out into the ocean. And they've been trained. They know what to do, right?
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But I teach my child, don't forget this, don't forget that. I warn my child, be careful of these things.
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And they head out. They don't turn back in time. They see the storm brewing, but they don't turn back in time.
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So I get on the radio. You need to turn back. You haven't turned back yet. You're not doing what
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I told you to do. Okay, that's my teaching and that's my reproving. I got nothing else
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I can do. Yeah, physically speaking, I can call the Coast Guard. I can get in my boat. I can go out there. I can physically drag them.
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But you know what? We can't actually do that when it comes to spiritual maturity. You can't force a person to change.
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We already established that. So this child says, needs to finally come to the place where they're like,
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I'm in trouble. I should not be here. I need to turn around.
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And when they do that and they start heading back to the safety of the harbor, they are participating in correction.
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They are correcting their course. And obviously, I can be a big part of that. They can be like, Dad, the waves are so huge,
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I can't even see which direction I'm going. And I'm on the radio saying, focus on the instruments.
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Trust the instruments. Head this direction. You know what you need to do. I can be part of that. But if they're not participating in it, they're never going to get back to the harbor.
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That is the biblical concept of correction. Now, I'm wanting to jump all over my notes in order to not accidentally go over time again.
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Wow, I keep starting this and it keeps stopping. I'm sorry. In order to not go over time again,
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I'm desperately wanting to be careful. Wow, that just happened. Like I said, technology is fantastic when it's not possessed by Satan.
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All right, here we go. I think we're in the spot where we need to be. All right. Out, demon. We just had a healing.
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All right. I'm sorry. Heresy. All right.
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Got it in. Yes. All right. All right, where were we?
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All right, okay. So because I'm jumping around, I'm going to get to something I probably need to get to later, but I want to cover it here.
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What is the process of—what are the first necessary stages of correction? And really,
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I break it down to a couple of main things that we can all do. The Bible is very clear, and I don't have all the passages for this right now, but we can talk about it later.
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The Bible is very clear that some things are necessary. Number one, I need to confess that I was wrong. You've reproved me, told me
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I'm wrong. And confession is simply to agree with God. That's all it is. I interpreted the situation incorrectly, you just reinterpreted it for me and reproved me, and now
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I'm saying, you know what? God's right. First step. Second step. There's no really good one English word for it.
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We tend to use words like I'm sorry or apologize. The thing is that actually we have a lot of confusion about confession, apology, being sorry, and repenting.
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We kind of look at them all as the same things or different things, and so I just want to clear it up right here. Confession is agreeing with God.
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Yes, I agree. I was wrong. That's all it was. And at any stage in this, you should, of course, be sorry.
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By all means, be sorry. But that is not it. If all that comes out of your mouth is I'm really sorry, the answer is actually no, you're not.
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Because being really sorry doesn't actually fix anything, and you can be sorry for the wrong reasons. So yeah, by all means, feel free to insert sorriness into this, but I'm going to throw that word out.
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It's not important right now. I agree with God. Confession. I like to use the word apologize.
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In apologetics, people know that that's not actually the right usage of the word, but I haven't actually found another one word that works, because really what
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I'm talking about is asking for forgiveness. That's our English equivalent. That's our replacement for the one word. But to apologize in the sense that I'm talking about is just to say,
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I recognize that I have sinned against you, and I need to be forgiven.
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These relationships are actually pretty simple. I don't want to oversimplify it, that we're like, oh, you've taken all the fun out of our relationships. But biblically speaking, the
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Bible says that I owe you love. I owe nothing to any man but to love him. If I've sinned against you,
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I didn't love you. I owe you love that I did not give you.
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And you know what? I can't ever go back and give you more. I can't be like, well, you know, this Saturday I don't have to love you, so I'll make sure to make up the love
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I didn't love you earlier on Monday. No, because I'm supposed to love you all day on Saturday, too.
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There's never a time that I can go back and somehow make up for the love that I owed you. So I have a debt to you,
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I sinned against you, and there's nothing I can do to repay it. Now this is the gospel in miniature.
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And so what do I do? I recognize when I confess I've sinned against you,
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I owe you. The only way that it can ever be dealt with is for me to say, will you please forgive me?
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I have nothing that I can bring to this. Please forgive me. Your participation is to say, yes, of course
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I forgive you. And at that moment, that sin is wiped away, that debt is wiped clean. Again, a mini example of the great truth of salvation that we get to enact with each other as part moving from the reproof stage to the correction stage.
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And this is them crossing that bridge. They start to cross that bridge by saying, you're right, I was wrong.
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Will you please forgive me for my sin? That's something that needs to be done vertically as well as horizontally. But then the other one is the repentance step.
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And we're really rough on repentance. We know that repentance is the idea of turning, right? We know that theologically, and it is.
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But how much can you repent in the moment? Like, I slapped my sister, I shouldn't have done that.
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Please forgive me. I'm not slapping her right now. What does repentance look like? I won't do it again.
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That's actually a really good start. I tell people the best first step of repentance is a commitment to it.
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To say, I sinned against you. Please forgive me. I want to never do that again.
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I want to grow in this area. I want to change. And if a person has made those three steps, they have successfully come over the bridge and are stepping into the correction phase.
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Because now they're in the right heart and mind to be ready for everything that's going to come next.
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So, with that said, let's jump into this. We'll look at some biblical texts here, as we did earlier, to understand what the
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Bible means by this concept of correction. Sorry, that first word was from our 2nd
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Timothy passage. This next one is going to be from Titus 2, 11 -12. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing, this is a
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Greek word that is sometimes translated correcting, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires, and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in this present age.
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This is important to us because this is the concept of correcting. But if we're not careful when we're reading our scriptures, we just think to ourselves, there's just this instruction thing.
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No, no, this has the idea of learning it and doing something with it. And what is that something we have to do?
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What is it to be corrected? Well, in part, to deny ungodliness and worldly desires, to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in this present age.
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That is our responsibility. That is their responsibility. Another part of our responsibility is to help them fulfill their responsibility.
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So, as we help them in correction, this is what we're doing. This is what we're working toward. This is an example of it.
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Among these are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan, so that they will be taught, this is our word for correction, not to blaspheme.
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There is a consequence there. We want them to learn from the reproof stage, so that by God's grace and the conviction of the
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Holy Spirit, they embrace that correction that will involve them doing something different.
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In this case, not blaspheming. Unfortunately, we don't know if either of them ever embraced that reproof and actually changed.
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I've gotten ahead of my notes. Give me one second here to catch back up. In Luke 23, 22, and he said to them the third time, why, what evil has this man done?
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I found no guilt in him demanding death, therefore I will punish him and release him. Again, interesting translation of this word.
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Not incorrect in theory, but this idea was that, the thought at the time, was that we do this thing to them, we punish them, and now they don't want to do bad.
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That's very much how our world thinks nowadays. Now, this is pilot talking. Okay, this is what happened. This is not teaching us that this is how we need to view correction, but this is to show his understanding of it.
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As long as I just put the fear of God in them, they won't want to do it again. But that's not actually good parenting.
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In fact, you have an awful lot in common with a terrorist at that moment. If I just do things that make you afraid of what will happen if you do that other thing, then you won't do it.
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Well, yeah, terrorists do that. It's not good strategy. I mean, yeah, consequences are real, and people have the right to be afraid of consequences, but that shouldn't be our main focus.
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This was a pilot not understanding that real correction doesn't just come because we beat people.
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2 Timothy 2 .25, This is that process of providing all of the necessary turning information, then
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God himself giving us the power to do so. And then Acts 7 .22,
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talking about Moses. He was educated. This is a word, again, talking about correction and the learning of the Egyptians, and was a man of power in words and deeds.
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Again, I want us to see here that this was, it was instruction that actually produced something. Teaching doesn't guarantee production.
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Correction does, because they're participating in it. He was corrected, he was educated in this, and his life proved it.
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The next word that we find that clearly fits under this category of correction is the word that we already mentioned, oftentimes translated as repentance.
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It's most often translated that. It has the idea of changing one's mind. In Luke 5 .32,
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it reveals one of Jesus' main goals for coming to this earth. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
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This is the goal. My friends, your responsibility on this earth to the church and to the unbelievers, obviously we wanted to reach them to that point, but then they become believers.
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But the whole point that we're trying to work toward is that they come to repentance. That was Christ's reason for coming.
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That needs to be our reason if we're being his ambassadors. 2
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Corinthians 7 .9 says, I now rejoice that you were made sorrowful. Okay, that's sorrow,
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I'm sorry, of being reproved. He says,
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I'm not really happy that you are sorry. Sorrow's a natural thing, great. I rejoice that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance.
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For you were made sorrowful according to the will of God so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us.
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He's saying this is good. I'm glad that you were sorrowful, not because I want to see you sorry, but because it did something in you.
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This is an interesting one. This is a word that's most often translated save in the scriptures.
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It has lots of different uses. It can refer to being made physically well, as in Matthew 9 .21, where the woman thought to herself, if I only touch his garment,
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I will get well. In a similar way, it can refer to being cured, made well, recovered, and the like.
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But more often than not, it's translated save, saved, saves, and saving. Of course, this saving can be a physical saving, like in Matthew 8 .25,
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when the disciples thought they were going to die in the storm. They cried out, save us, Lord, we are perishing. The change from one direction to another is very visible here.
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I'm sick, I want to be made well. We're dying, I want to be saved from dying, right?
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So it's a very clear picture. But the question always comes up at some point, well, salvation, is that something that we really can do for a person?
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And that's fair, because Matthew 1 .21, talking about Jesus, you will bear a son, he shall call his name
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Jesus, for he will save his people from his sins. Jesus is the only one who can ultimately save us from our sins.
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So what part of salvation, what part do we play in that, if any?
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So in scripture, the idea of being saved can refer both to justification, as well as sanctification.
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We'll look at a couple examples of this in a moment. But for that, though, we need to recognize that the idea of saving someone spiritually is not merely an act of God.
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Now I know, again, sounds like we're getting into a little bit more heresy here. Actually, it says that in my notes.
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I didn't realize that I planned to be heretical. Of course, God is the one who saves, and no one's gonna argue that.
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No one can save himself, and no person can save another person. But God does invite
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Christians into the process of saving other people. Here's some examples,
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Romans 10, 13 through 15. We read, whoever will call on the name of the
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Lord will be saved. But then Paul asks a very important question. How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?
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How will they believe in him in whom they have not heard? And the answer to his own question, he answers with a question, and how will they hear without a preacher?
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We learned before that the preacher is someone who teaches God's word. Specifically here, it refers to the gospel, teaching the gospel to an unbeliever.
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The point is a person is saved by God when he calls on his name, but preachers are an important part of this process.
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So Paul continues in verse 15. How will they preach unless they were sent? Just as it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things.
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So yes, God does invite us into this process of the salvation.
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Now again, we're not the one doing the saving, but again, we are his ambassadors. He uses us to speak the truth to the unbelievers and to speak the truth to the believers.
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Unbelievers to justification, believers continuing in their sanctification. But this is also shown to us in James 5, 19 through 20.
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This is in the sanctification side. My brethren, if any among you strays from the truth and one turns him back, those three words is a very similar concept, not exactly the one in the saving that what we talked about here, but it's a very similar concept.
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Helping to turn someone around, having to correct someone, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
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There's our word. So this process that we get involved helping to turn a sinner and the errors are away, we are helping to save their souls is a very big, real biblical concept.
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God wants us to participate in this. This is obviously an example of a believer straying from the truth.
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Another Christian engages in reproof. The sinning brother repents, and God says that the reproving Christian has helped turn a sinner from the error of his ways and saved his soul.
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Now, the correction stage that God requires his ambassadors to pursue results in the person we're evangelizing or discipling, submitting to our teaching and our reproof.
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But when they've confessed their sins and asked for forgiveness, they will likely need help putting off their sinful ways and putting on righteousness.
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Now, I said that moving from this cycle, it happens a lot in parenting, teaching and reproving, teaching and reproving, teaching and reproving all day long.
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It's all we can do because they're not changing. They're not crossing that bridge and engaging in correction.
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It's just teaching and reproving, and it feels that way with our unsaved coworkers too. We're teaching them the gospel.
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Andrew said that he's had that heckler for 13 years. I mean, honestly, if I had known Andrew for any longer than 13 years, he'd have someone who'd heckled him more than that.
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But the idea is this guy has not submitted to the truth, but Andrew keeps teaching and reproving and teaching and reproving.
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The real glory comes when they embrace that truth and they want to change.
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But here's the problem. This is where we drop the ball. They say, I have sinned.
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Please forgive me. I want to change. Good for you. Have a nice life. It seems easy.
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He who steals must steal no longer, but should give. But think about our boat metaphor.
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Dad, what am I supposed to do? Just turn around. Yeah, but Dad, the waves are so high in the wind and I'm scared.
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Dude, just turn around. How loving and helpful is that? The correction stage is a beautiful stage because it's an exciting stage where they've shown that they want to change, but they're going to need help.
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They got where they are because they proved they're not mature enough to make the right decisions in those moments.
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Praise God they recognize that. But now we need to be there to help them through this process.
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I call the correction stage, the reproof stage, I call the interpretation stage. The correction stage,
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I call the counseling stage because that's what it is. Let me pull out some difficult concepts here.
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I, unfortunately, have some family members that are practicing homosexuals.
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Let's say by the grace of God, and we're still working toward this, by the grace of God they recognize their sin and they submit. Awesome. So what do
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I do? Well, you know what you should do. Stop looking at me. You know, ah. But they're like, okay, but how do
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I, what do I do when this thought pops into my head? Or what do
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I do in regards to these people in part of my life? I'm trying to be delicate given our audience, but you understand where I'm going with this.
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There are a lot of difficult questions. They've built up habits. This is a lifestyle for them.
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It's just knee -jerk reaction to respond the incorrect way. What does real change look like?
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How do I stop doing this thing that's a sin? How do
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I stop giving in to the temptation? They don't know, or they probably would already be doing it.
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We need to be there with them, guiding them, instructing them to look to the instruments.
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God's word. Helping them to find that, remember I said earlier about application? The best application is only specific to them.
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Helping them to work to that precise application. There's nobody else in the world at that time that needs to go on that heading back to that harbor.
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Because even a guy over here is going to be on a slightly different heading. This person needs a heading for them. I need to take
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God's word. I need to know it. I need to know how to guide them through these difficulties that they're going to confront as they are working back to where they should never have left.
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This takes a big commitment from us. It's exciting. It's great to be part of the process because they're now participating and wanting to change, but we absolutely, listen
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Christians, we absolutely must not take our hands off. This is making disciples.
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Right here, this is where making disciples starts. This is what's commanded by God. Make disciples. We've got to be part of this process.
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We don't want to be part of this process. What we want is we want to be over here in the training stage. Do this, and they do it.
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Oh, good job. And now do this, and they do it. Oh, good job. See, we like the teaching and we like the training.
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I like the training more because now they're actually doing it, but this requires the least from us. Reproof is uncomfortable and correction is hard, but it's our responsibility.
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And it really does bear glorious fruits. And that's where we lead into our final point.
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God requires that we train the church. This is that process.
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If I can oversimplify it, teaching, telling them what is right and wrong, encouraging them to do it. Reproof, telling them that they were wrong.
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Correction, helping them turn from the wrong and turn to the right. Training, helping them stay in the right.
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It's the most basic way I can describe it. And of course, that's the glorious stage which every parent is working, every pastor is working, every disciple is working.
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That's where we want to get, but we'll never get there unless we work through these other stages first.
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Our fear and our reticence, for whatever reason, to do these initial stages will mean that we will never get to experience with that person, that training stage.
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Either they'll never get there like we read in the Ezekiel passage and they'll have the consequences of those choices and their blood will be on our hands, or someone else will have the blessing of getting them there and we never will be able to participate and fulfill our responsibility.
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I'm realizing that I never got to the second definition of correction in Mary and Wester. That one actually was a good one.
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I don't want to scroll back in my notes to find it, but that one actually hit on the idea and I think it's really valuable, especially if we're parents and we're talking about, we're using these biblical terms.
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Parents, please listen. Biblicize your vocabulary. Steal it back from the culture.
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Use love the way God uses love. Use correction the way
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God uses the words correction. It's really helpful for our kids when they see consistency. We speak a biblical vocabulary in our home.
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They know what we mean. We know that our ideas are lining up with God's ideas on this. It's really very important. So, we're calling our kids in that correction stage.
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We're talking about going and correcting the kids. Let's make sure we're doing it the right way. Anyway, moving on. Here we go, training. The first word we're going to look at, pretty obvious.
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This is the Greek word that had the idea of actually training for the Olympics. It was interesting because this actually had the idea of training naked.
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Now, that seems very awkward to us and probably inappropriate and rightfully so. However, please understand why they did it.
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They didn't have clothes that allowed them to run and throw and fight very well. You weren't going to run the 100 -meter dash in big flowing robes.
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And they wanted to do their best. So, they removed every encumbrance. Paul uses that exact same terminology.
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Oh, did I offend you? Fine. Keep your clothes on, everyone. The heresy was too much.
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Paul talks about laying aside every encumbrance. He was talking about technically, metaphorically, clothes in that example given the time period because that was a good picture of it.
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I'm not going to let anything stop me from accomplishing this goal. That's what this word, that's the
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Greek understanding of it. This word is oftentimes translated discipline.
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Actually, one time it's translated discipline. Trained three times. 1 Timothy 4, 7 through 9, we read, but having nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women.
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That's just unfamiliar because we made fun of them earlier. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.
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For bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things. This verse is interesting because it uses our word twice.
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Once to describe physical training and once to describe the training that results in godliness. This is the training in which we need to be helping our brothers and sisters in Christ.
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As they approach the weight bench of spiritual growth and godliness, we need to help them know which weights to use and how to lift them correctly.
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This is us teaching them the principles and helping them as we walk hand in hand, not patting them on the back and saying, hey, do good, but us hand in hand walking with them to do it correctly.
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It's not good enough for me to just do the bench presses for them, but it's wonderful when
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I'm there to help them be successful, to spot them, to help them really benefit from a spiritual workout.
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Instead of doing things the wrong way, maybe hurting themselves. These metaphors break down eventually, but you see how we need to be part of the training process.
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Consider Hebrews 5, 11 through 14. Concerning him, we have much to say, and it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing.
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For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God.
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You haven't been growing, you haven't been correcting, you haven't been training, you haven't been giving in to reproof, so all you get is teaching.
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For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.
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We'll talk more about this later, but spiritual training always results in maturity.
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If somebody, you think that you're training somebody, but they're not growing, well that means you're teaching them.
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And that's okay, they obviously need teaching. But don't delude yourself to think that you're fulfilling your responsibility of training them because they're not actually participating in the training because that's what training does.
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It produces maturity. We want to help our fellow members of the body of Christ to move from the milk of the word to the solid food, and it's not just the pastor's responsibility to do this.
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If they want to get off their infant diet and seek their teeth into the meat of the scriptures, we need to help them do it.
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By the way, some of you may have noticed the word teach in that verse. The author of Hebrews wrote, for though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you.
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This is yet another reminder that teaching isn't good enough if the individual isn't going to actually learn what it is that he or she is taught.
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They'll forget it, they'll refuse to live in the light of it, and they'll have to be reproved and retaught at some point in the future. We're back to that cycle.
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The last point I want to make about this verse is that once again, it reminds us of the source of our training. You have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God.
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Later in verse 13, the word of righteousness, spiritual training and growth will result in us and brothers and sisters in Christ being accustomed to the word of righteousness.
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I'll just tell you, I'm tired of Bible studies that have more of man's opinion than they have
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Bible. Where we get together, we read a verse, we talk about it loosely for a little while, and then sports.
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Is it wrong to talk about sports? No. But let's not fool ourselves that we're training in the word when we spend less time reading it than we do scrolling through Facebook.
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We spend less time reading it than we do watching videos on YouTube. We spend less time reading it than we're watching sports.
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You know why we can train people to play our favorite sport? Because we're good at it.
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You know why we're not very good at training people to know the scriptures and to sink their teeth into the meat of the word?
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Because we don't do it. We are infants who can't teach other infants.
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We need to be participating in the training process. In fact, to help to train another is to be trained yourself.
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Every teacher in this room has heard that to teach is to learn. The person in the classroom who learns the lesson the best is always the teacher.
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Because the teacher has done all of the work to learn it and to prepare it and to put it out there so that they can understand it.
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Of course, they're not listening. But when it's all said and done, the teacher, I've got it. You know, I really figured this out. So as you're training another, you are being trained yourself, at least you should be, which is another warning.
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If you view yourself as the sage, as the Obi -Wan Kenobi, as the Gandalf, as the
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Dumbledore, pick your poison, and you're always giving the wisdom that everyone else needs to feed off of, but you yourself aren't changing and growing and maturing, you're not fulfilling your own responsibility to God.
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We need to be humble. We need to recognize that we don't got it. And we need to invite people to participate in this process with us.
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This training, though, is not for the faint of heart. It's not a Sunday school experience. It's daily, arduous, often painstaking experience whereby we study
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God's word, resist temptation, stop leaning on our own understanding, that one's hard, and obey regardless of how hard it may be.
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This is why the author of Hebrews says in chapter 12, verse 11, all discipline, another here, a word that we're actually gonna discuss in a couple minutes, all discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful.
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Yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Once again, we see that the training results in the righteousness.
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It's not theoretical. It's practical. It will evidence itself in a person's life. But we also need to see that such discipline is often not superficially joyful.
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In fact, it may be sorrowful. That's for two reasons, but we'll get to that in a moment because our next word is often translated equip.
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This seems like a really comfortable word. It's nice to be equipped, right? This word refers to getting ready and to completing something.
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That's why it's translated complete, equipped, fully trained, made complete, mending, perfect, prepared, and restore in the
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New American Standard. In Luke 6, 40, Jesus said, A pupil is not above his teacher, but everyone after he has been fully trained, this is this word, not the other one, will be like his teacher.
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When you train someone, they should end up looking like you. Not outwardly, but if you're training somebody to play basketball, they'll probably play basketball the way you play basketball because that's how you're training them to play basketball.
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That, of course, should both scare us and encourage us because the person that we're training in spiritual maturity, do we really want them to be our level of mature?
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This is why we always need to be in the process of growing ourselves. But it also should excite you because the result of being trained is that they will be different.
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They will be more mature than they were. By the way, we can't ever train someone in something that we're not trained in.
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We can't take someone where we aren't going. All important lessons that we need to remember in this process.
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I also love that this word doesn't just talk about the process of being equipped. It also describes the completion of being equipped.
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Also, in 1 Corinthians 13, 11, we read, Finally, brethren, rejoice. Be made complete.
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Be comforted. Be like -minded. Live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you. Be made complete is one of the
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English equivalents of our Greek word. But Galatians 6, 1 shows us a slightly different facet of this word.
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Brethren, if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in the spirit of gentleness, each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted.
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I love that this goes along with the correction process. Excuse me. But that's, it sounds like the correction process, but that's really what training is in a way.
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It's an extension of the correction process. Whether it's the teaching stage or the reproof stage or the correction stage, if the disciple engages with the truth and is changed by it, then they're participating in the training.
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And that's one thing I haven't mentioned up until now. To teach is to teach. To reprove is to teach and reprove.
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To correct is to teach and reprove and correct. And training involves all four. Robust, biblical training is not going to stop teaching.
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That doesn't make sense. It's not going to stop reproof and correction. It's all part of the process. And that's why this verse fits so perfectly in this stage.
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But I did introduce this word by referring to it as equip and equipping. So let's look at that.
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Hebrews 13, verses 20 through 21. We read, Did you catch that?
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When Jesus equips us, it results in doing His will. And it works in us that which is pleasing in His sight.
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I'm going to continue hammering this because we can't afford to misunderstand it. We aren't training anyone unless the person is actually participating in the training.
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And I need to say, we are not in the training stage ourselves if we're not growing and changing.
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My friends, I know the temptation. It is so easy to plateau. I'm a martial artist, okay?
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There are lots of people that I could easily dispatch potentially without breaking a sweat.
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It's really easy. I mean, I got my first degree black belt when I was in Michigan. Michigan's silly, but I had to register my hands as lethal weapons.
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It's really easy to be like, watch out. I can take that guy and that guy over there.
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I can get him. I'm good, you know? But that's foolishness. There's always somebody better.
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There's always a group and a difficulty and a situation that I cannot overcome if I am not continually training and learning more.
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And despite how hard I try, there will always be people who can beat me. But it's easy to have this idea that I'm really good at what
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I do. Your pastor is a very talented man. He's put me to shame.
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Since we've been here, I mean, I've seen like 82 of his amazing talents, and he's good at all of them.
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I'm not saying that he's doing this, but I can say that it's really easy for a person like that who's just really good and potentially better than everyone else in the room to feel like, why do
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I have to try any harder? The problem is, we're not all really amazing at our spiritual maturity.
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We're all pretty moderate at it. And as long as we're all basically kind of like each other, then it's really easy for us to think that, well, we're kind of doing a little bit better.
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But everyone's doing that at the same time. This person thinks, oh, I'm doing a little bit better than everyone else. And this one's like, oh, I'm definitely doing better than they are.
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So we're all just kind of, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we all have this idea that I'm probably a little bit more ahead of where you are, and then we're all good.
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Why continue to change? And we get lukewarm. Makes God want to spit us out of his mouth.
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We lose our first loves. Hopefully we're igniting that a little bit more here this weekend to remind us of our responsibility before God.
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We can't be training others if we ourselves are not training. This is why
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Proverbs 22, 6, as we said earlier, talks about training up a child in the way he should go. And lastly,
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Ephesians 4, 11 through 12. And he gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service to the building up, okay, this is edifying, a word that we learned and talked about earlier, to the building up of the body of Christ.
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What I want us to understand from this is that the process of training someone is identical to the process of a preacher equipping his congregation.
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Both the pastor's congregation and our disciplery will result in being equipped to do the work of the ministry.
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What is the work of the ministry? It's our responsibility to worship
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God and to be his ambassador, to teach, reprove, correct, and train everyone around us.
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It is a cyclical event that builds on itself, helping us to do the job better.
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The pastor's equipping us for that work. We are participating in that work by speaking truth and love to each other, helping to build people up in that work so that we're growing in it and helping other people to spiral off off of us.
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This Greek word is used, oh, sorry, this next Greek word is used six times in the scripture and is translated discipline five times, training once.
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It's the mirror image of the first word we discussed that was translated training three times and discipline once. And of course, we need to look at our theme verse for this one.
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This is the word that shows up in 2 Timothy 3 .16 about the training in righteousness. It's not about righteousness.
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It's training in righteousness. And this is the exact word that Paul uses in one of the most famous parenting passages in Ephesians 6 .4.
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Do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. You may remember that our
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English word instruction in this verse actually refers to the reproof stage. It refers to teaching and warning.
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So we see that the biblical ambassador's main job includes reproof and discipline, big part there.
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But the word discipline is often mistaken by modern English speakers and they think about punishment and consequences.
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It can mean that, but it's also the word that refers to an individual that is personally disciplined, discipled.
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They have the disciplines of a disciple. Let's go back to Hebrews 12, starting in verse one.
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Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, my responsibility to God, and sin, which so easily entangles us.
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That's what we don't do. Let's stop all doing these things and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
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So the author starts the chapter with imagery of races and running and training. I've never run a marathon.
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I've never run a 5K. If I'm being honest, I don't run much of anything. I hate running.
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Running is wicked. But I know that it takes a lot of grueling work to prepare to run a race.
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So the imagery really is perfect. And this makes sense since he's using Jesus not only as the great goal toward which we are running, but also as the perfect example of how to run.
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He continues in verse 3, Like I said, it's hard work.
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And then the author starts reproving us a bit. He says in verse 4, And you have forgotten the exhortation, which is addressed to you as sons.
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And before we consider the words of the exhortation, I want to point out all the important ideas here. The author is saying that we haven't trained hard enough.
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We haven't yet shed blood the way Jesus has. And the author says that we haven't yet trained hard enough because we've forgotten an important exhortation.
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By the way, the word exhortation here was one of the words we discussed during the reproof responsibility that we have.
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So what is God's reproof for us? What's this exhortation that should lead us to train in such a way that we actually bleed?
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This exhortation comes from various places in the Bible. Job 5 .17 tells us, You see the reproof moving into the correction and the training.
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Don't despise it. Love it. Yes, the training is hard. We don't focus on the pain. We focus on the product of the process.
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We are thankful. I was talking earlier with a gentleman talking about those times in our lives where God had to take a sanctified 2x4 up beside our heads to get us focusing on what was right.
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Not comfortable. But man, when we respond to it, we're corrected and we're trained in it. We're so thankful for it.
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Proverbs 3 .11 -12 Those two words again coupled together.
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For whom the Lord loves, He reproves. Even as a father corrects a son in whom he delights. This is the warning
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God's given us. We need to delight in His reproof. We need to not despise His discipline.
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Reproof and training are good and valuable. And that's why Hebrews 12 continues in verse 7.
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It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as with sons.
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For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.
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Being a Christian is to train. This might be the hardest thing
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I say all weekend. If you are not training, it's potentially because you're not.
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You can come to church and you can read your
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Bible and you can pray and you can just kind of do the same thing all the time with no real growth in your
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Christian maturity and you can go to hell having done all those things. Remember the four soils?
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The rocky, stony, I'm sorry, the hard rocky and the thorny. None of them bore fruit.
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They all looked like they had life of some sort. Well, the second two did. But it wasn't until the soft heart, the one that actually bore fruit of repentance that truly was producing anything and truly was the example of a born -again believer.
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We've got to be in this training process. I think
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I left off somewhere. Yes, I did. The illegitimate children, that's right.
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We had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live?
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For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them. But He disciplines us for our good so that we may share
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His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful. Yet to those who have been trained by it afterwards, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
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Now we need to move forward. I've run out of time. I had so much more left to go. I'm going to skip some of my comments here and get to this next part.
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Let's look at verse 12. I guess
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I wish we had the time to actually work through that list item by item but the main idea is that we need to roll up our sleeves and jump in.
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It's not good enough to talk about discipline and training. We have the responsibility to actually do it. Finally, I believe, this
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Greek word has the idea of being completed. Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.
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Be mature as your Heavenly Father is mature in the impossible calling and still our responsibility nonetheless.
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Praise God, He will do it for us in glory and when He will glorify us. Matthew 19, 22 -22, the young man said to Him, all these things
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I have kept, what am I still lacking? Jesus said to him, if you wish to be complete, He tells him to go sell your possessions but the young man heard this statement, he went away grieving for he owned much property.
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It's hard. He didn't want to do it. 1 Corinthians 14, 20, do not be children in your thinking yet in evil be infants but in your thinking be mature.
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These are all related to this training process. We proclaim Him admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom so that we may present every man complete in Christ.
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Some of these passages I've read and it might be easy for us to go, well Aaron, that's not exactly a direct command to me to be training that person.
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You're right, hadn't gotten there yet but this is one of those examples where we have this responsibility.
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We need to be teaching and admonishing so that we can present them so like that person at the end of James 5 who helped turn someone from the error of his ways, like a man washing his wife with the water of the
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Word to present before Christ a clean vessel. We are participating in this process. We need each other's help.
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So allow me to finish in James 1, 25. But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, yes,
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I'm sorry, that just seemed wrong to me. I was thinking five, chapter five, this is chapter one. There we go.
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Now my mind's in where it needs to be, sorry about that. We're facing, we're staring at that law of liberty.
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We're not being a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer. This man will be blessed in what he does.
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That is what I want for River of Life Church. That is what I want for each of you individually.
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That is what I want for each of the people that your life touches. That you will help them to stare into the perfect law of liberty.
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They will be blessed as they submit to it, that they give God the glory and the worship that he deserves.
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So, your first responsibility to God, to worship him. Second, to be his ambassador.
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As you are that ambassador, communicate his word to everyone. We have to do it. This is going to mean to teach everyone, to approve everyone.
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By God's grace, if that person's unsaved, they submit to the Holy Spirit, we're able to take them to the next category where we're correcting the church, the brothers and sisters in Christ, and we're training them.
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And this is where we see healthy, amazing churches that turn the world upside down like the first apostles and disciples did.
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Time is over. If you did not have the opportunity to scan that code, you can do that now or do it back at the table.
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I really appreciate your attention. It has been an honor for me to be here with you this weekend. Your grace, your kindness.
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I got a gift basket. The head cheese curd's in it. How'd you know? I may have eaten most of them.
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Anyway, well, listen, I can't take it back on the plane. There was too much delicious food in there. What am I going to do? I have to eat it all now.
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But you have been so loving and kind and gracious. I appreciate you taking the time to learn from this complete stranger.
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I hope that I have been challenging to you, a little irritational. But also, I hope
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I have been a blessing and inspirational. Let me pray and pray and ask God's blessing on this body as we now recognize our responsibility.
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Now, we have another session left, one more. But we're now having a full complete picture of the responsibility that he gives us.
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Dear Lord, as I prayed earlier, we do not deserve this privilege. And yet, even though it is an amazing, infinite privilege that we do not deserve, we so often run from it.
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And we do that because we're sinners. We do that because it's uncomfortable to deny ourselves and take up our crosses and follow after you, to be your ambassador to this world, to be that salt and light, to actually get into the trenches and help people to correct and to help people train.
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But Lord, when we see it for what it really is, it is amazing. And we thank you for it.
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We thank you for the process that we're in. And we thank you that we get to be part of other people's processes. I pray your blessing on this church,
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Lord, as they are your ambassadors, as they recognize their responsibility to you and their responsibility to others.
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Lord, bless them. You've promised to do so. We know that you will give them the strength they need.
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You will grow them and you will grow their impact for you. Give Pastor George wisdom,
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Lord, as he works individually and as they work individually with each other to have precise application, to be in the trenches, to do the life -on -life work of the ministry, equipping everyone to continue doing that work of the ministry as long as you have gifted us this earthly life.
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And Father, we look forward to the day that our responsibility on this earth will be over and we get to spend eternity in heaven with you.
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But I pray that there will be many people there, Lord, who are there in part because we were filled our responsibility to you on this earth.
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And I pray this in your name. Amen. Are you tired of pillows that go flat? Or every couple of years they smell bad and what are you going to do with them?
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You can't wash them because that ruins the pillow. They don't stay in that same shape. Well, MyPillow is the answer.
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Get a MyPillow. These are premium pillows that never go flat. You can wash them as many times as you want.
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And best of all, they're made right here in the USA. Go to MyPillow .com.
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Click on the radio listeners and use promo code SFE. That stands for Striving for Eternity.
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Or you can call 1 -800 -873 -0176.
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That's 1 -800 -873 -0176 and use promo code