All Scripture Is Inspired By God And Profitable #4

but all of Scripture, and that it comes with the authority of God. It doesn't come as a take it or leave it. It's not an a la carte endeavor. It's all or nothing. And so Paul taught us that all of Scripture was breathed out by God, was given to us. He taught us that we shouldn't prefer certain portions or passages over others, though some are easier to understand. This week we're going to be continuing at the end of this passage, verses 16 and 17, and this week we're going to be focusing on the utility of Scripture or the usefulness of Scripture. Why did God give it to us? What are we supposed to do with it? That's the question. Our text is 2 Timothy 3, verses 10 to 17. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Now you followed my teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience.

Love, perseverance, persecutions, and sufferings, such as happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra. What persecutions I endured, and out of all of them the Lord rescued me. Indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. But evil men and imposters will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of. knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated.

And so if we had to pick one word and say, well, what are we supposed to do with the word of God? Why did he give it to us? We would say, to turn a prophet. He gave us his word to turn a prophet. Now, you may be thinking, oh, you mean like the prosperity, like Joel Osteen and like T.D. Jackson. I say, no, no, that's not what I mean. What I do mean, though, is that God gave us his word to make us better, to teach us, to instruct us. And that's the prophet that he seeks. is that we would become more like him as a result of him giving us his word. That's the prophet that he's after. And so God gave us his word to bear fruit. And so we, it follows only, it makes sense then that we should want to grow and to bear fruit as we learn more about God, more about ourselves, more about our world, and more about our responsibilities. Now what I'm afraid is that in our day, growth is not the thing we pursue, but rather ignorance.

That we cultivate ignorance when we should be cultivating knowledge. Ignorance shouldn't be our goal. Or at least we shouldn't be content with ignorance. If someone asks us a question, or if we have a question ourselves about how to live or how to behave or how to think as Christians, we should not be content with saying, I don't know. If it can be known, we should want to know it. But I think too often we're content to say, yeah, I don't know. And we're happy for it to just kind of fade away into the rearview mirror and say, yeah, I'm not sure what to do with all that, but that's in the past. We don't need to worry about it anymore. That should not be how we behave. Ignorance shouldn't be our goal. In 1 Corinthians 10, 1, and again, just two chapters later, in 1 Corinthians 12, 1, I want you to hear what Paul says twice, just in a couple of chapters. He says, for I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea.

And then again, in 1 Corinthians 12, he says, Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I don't want you to be unaware. And we could go through probably a dozen passages where this phrase comes up. I don't want you to be unaware. And so why does it show up so much in Scripture? I don't want you to be unaware. Well, it's because we shouldn't be cultivating or content with ignorance. Paul, in numerous places, says, I'm going to tell you something because I don't want you to be ignorant anymore. I want you to know about our fathers passing through the sea, and I want you to know about spiritual gifts. And we could go through the Old and the New Testament and search out this idea, this thread that's woven through Scripture. I don't want you to be unaware. I want you to know the truth. This is what the Bible tells us we need. We need to know the truth. We need to not be unaware. To be unaware of the things of God is at best to be ignorant or agnostic.

Now, I don't remember the last time I've talked about Gnosticism or agnosticism in church, but I'll give you just a minute of explanation. The word that's in Greek that's translated unaware is the word that we get agnostic from. It's opposed to knowledge or without knowledge. And so Paul says we could... Translate this. I don't want you to be agnostic about these things. I don't want you to be without knowledge. I don't want you to spend your life denying the truth or being unaware of it. Ignorance is not what we should be committed to, but rather growing in the truth and knowing what God has said. Now I ask you, is being ignorant attractive to you? Or maybe a better way to ask it is, what is the attraction of being ignorant? I think many times the attraction is You don't have to do the work. You say, well, the attraction is I don't have to search these things out. But I think the unspoken attraction of it is we think, well, if I don't know, I won't be held responsible. You don't know what you don't know, and God wouldn't hold me accountable for things I don't know. But in Leviticus 5, verse 17, it says, Now if a person sins and does any of the things which the Lord has commanded not to be done, though he was unaware, he is guilty.

And she'll bear his punishment. And so ignorance doesn't lessen or remove our responsibility before God. Saying, I don't know, isn't an answer. If you were to take a test, and it was multiple choice, and there were four choices, and you didn't know, and the final one was, I don't know. Should you get credit for a correct answer if you marked, I don't know? No, you should get a big red X through it. You got it wrong, but you should know. that's what a test is meant to measure, right? How much do you know? And so we ought to be curious. Our minds have to be engaged in our pursuit of God or we'll just end up being ignorant and not knowing when we're failing or when we're doing what we ought not to do. Now some of you, I'm anticipating right now that some of you are like, this is intimidating. You're telling me I have to become like a theologian and I'm not wired that way. I'll come to that at the end because I know that some of you are sitting here going,

Yes, yes, I love theology. And some of you are sitting here going, no, no, no, tying heavy burdens up around my neck. We'll come to that in a moment, okay? But what I want to say to you is, however you're wired, you do have a responsibility to know the things of God. Will you know all of them? No, you won't. You spend the rest of your life. We've had millenniums of men in the church learning the things of God. And we haven't finished plumbing the depths. And so am I saying you'll know everything? No. But I am saying you should, over the course of your life, be growing in your knowledge of God, continually growing in your knowledge of God. Some of us will learn different ways, and that's fine. But I want it to be clear to you that it's not God's will for you that you would be ignorant concerning the things of God or that you wouldn't have an interest in them.

When Paul went and preached in Athens, he's on his missionary journey and he's going through and he's going through and he's going through. And he shows up in Athens and he's walking through this city and he observes all of these idols. And he's frustrated by it. And then he finds this altar to the unknown God. And he's got something to say about it. And so he starts preaching and they say, you need to come over here. So they take him into the Areopagus, which is sort of a hall, a big public gathering place. And so he preaches. And what he says to the Athenians, Is therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, which is like a shot to the heart to the Athenians. You're the ignorant ones. God, having looked over times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead. And so Paul, if we needed any more convincing, we have it here that an excuse of ignorance,

will not suffice in the day of judgment. And the reason that it won't suffice is because he's raised Jesus Christ from the dead. That's what Paul says. Because he's raised his son from the dead, we no longer can claim ignorance. There was a time and there was a season where he overlooked these things. He tolerated the ignorance of the nations, but no more. No more. So how are they to go from ignorance to knowledge? Through the word of God. first written down and given to them, and then from then on it being taught and us becoming disciples of the word. This is essential for us as Christians. And I will tell you, sometimes I wish that we had church five days or six days a week. I would love to preach that much. I wish our lives were centered more around the word than they are. Our society is not such that we can do that.

And yet the responsibility to grow and to know the things of God is not lessened by the details of our lives. It's still supposed to be preeminent to us. And so you and I have to give ourselves to learning it, to studying it. If we took our time, if I could say one week, just no more social media. None. Read the Bible for that. I get these little reports on my phone every week. I don't know how or why, but it tells me how much time I've been on my phone this week as compared to last, and it gives me a percentage increase or decrease, and it tells me how much time I spend on my phone. You don't like that? My phone tells me that. I don't like it either. You know when it tells me that? 9.07 on Sunday mornings. So I know right before Sunday school starts every week how much time I wasted. How much time do you spend on your phone in a week, in a day? My phone tells me how much time I spend on my phone.

And it's usually between an hour and two hours, talking or whatever I'm doing. So here I am, and are you better than me? That's how much time we have. No time for devotions, no time for prayer, no time for learning, no time to turn a profit for the Lord. Really? If we're honest, we say, ah, there's time. There's time, and I don't make use of it. And so the time of ignorance is gone, and we're not to be unaware. Which is all of this is just another way of saying we are to turn a profit for the Lord in our knowledge and our understanding of him. That's why he gave us his word. That's why men during the Reformation bled and died to give the word to the people so that they could know what God said. And the people wanted it. There was a time they couldn't read.

the mass or the worship service was in Latin. None of them spoke Latin or very few of them spoke Latin. And so they would come to church and they would just participate in this thing they didn't understand. Could you imagine if I was up here speaking some language none of us knew? And you'd come because you were convinced this is what I'm supposed to do to go to heaven. But God was good through men like William Tyndale to give the people the word, his words, so they could know them. So they could read them, so they could study them. And we ought not to take for granted that mercy and that kindness. Because there's not one of us here except maybe the youngest children among us who can't read yet, who don't have constant access to the whole Bible. And if we're going to turn a prophet the way the Lord wants us to, we have to make use of it. Then Paul tells us how we're to turn that prophet.

what's it going to look like? Now, I've been making a case that you study the scripture, that you read the scripture, and that you pray. And now I'm going to come back and say, if that's all you do, you won't get nearly the benefit out of the word that you need. There are particular things that it's given to us. There are particular things that are to be done with it. The first, Paul says, is teaching. It's profitable for teaching. And so the word ought to be taught. And we ought to learn from it. As we are taught, this is what the Bible says. This is what it means. Here's what God did and why. All of us, every day of our lives, are being taught something. Whatever it is you spend your time doing, you're educating yourself or being educated, whether it's active or passive. Whether you're reading old books or whether you're scrolling through Instagram, you are being taught. You are taking things in. You are learning.

And so the question is not, are you going to learn? It's, what will you learn? And here Paul says that we ought to be taught the things of God. We need to be taught the things of God. We will always be taught, and not just taught, but if you go on in this list, reproof, correction, training, you're always receiving all of these things. You're being told, you can't say that. That was wrong. Don't do that again. That's not nice. That's not loving. You'll lose your job if you say that. We're always being corrected. We're always being reproved. We're always being trained. And so all of these things are givens, and the question is not whether we'll be taught or corrected or reproved or trained, but where will we receive? What school will we go to and learn from? Do you pride yourself on learning from the school of hard knocks, from experience? That's not crisis school. Do you go to the school of the PR department, or the HR department, rather, at your employer?

That's not Christ's school. They'll teach you. They're very clear. They'll tell you what you can say and can't say and what you'll do and how it's going to be done and what will happen if you don't. If you transgress their rules, they'll let you know that too. Maybe you like politics and you pay attention to these things. Are you not being taught? Are you not being trained? What to think, how to think, how to express yourself, what you can say, what you can't say, what's worthwhile and what's not. We're forever being taught and corrected and shaped and molded. And that's what God gave us his word for, so that we would be taught and shaped and molded according to his word, not according to our society or our politics or our employer, but his word. Now, I could go on and talk quite a bit about the sorts of pressures that you face as a Christian in society, the sorts of trainings that I've alluded to, the sorts of teachings, the sorts of corrections you receive in the world. And if you work out in society, you know what I'm talking about. You see it.

But I don't think that's the place of most danger, of greatest danger for us. I think that when these things happen in the church, that's where we face the greatest danger. Meaning I would much rather have you work for a company that celebrates Pride Month than go to a church that won't teach you about homosexuality. One of them will be far more destructive than the other. And so we will have to endure the pressures of living in this world. They're constant. And we endure them, and we oppose them. But how we're supposed to do these things, the training that we need to know how to, what do I do when my company celebrates Pride Month? What do I do when my job's on the line? Where are we supposed to get that training? Where are we supposed to be corrected when we fail in that area? That has to come from the church.

And so the greatest danger we face is not the pressure that we'll face from the world, but the lack of teaching and training and equipping that we receive from the church. And so I want you to think for a minute, how is the word of God commonly used in church today? How does it get used? First of all, I'd say in many churches, it doesn't get used. It's like the scrolls in the time of Josiah. It's buried away in the corner somewhere, and it doesn't get used. It doesn't get talked about. It certainly doesn't get opened up and explained. How else does it get used? It gets distorted. It gets manipulated. It gets cut and pasted. Remember earlier I said that the gospel is supposed to turn a profit, and I made a joke about the prosperity gospel. That's one of the ways it gets distorted. And it turns out it's really attractive to a lot of people. Maybe you guys are familiar with the phrase, the therapeutic gospel.

Do you know what the therapeutic gospel is? If you don't, that's fine. You may be better off if you don't know what it is. But it's where we take the gospel and we say, this is Jesus coming to solve all of your problems and fix all of your hurts and shore you up where you're weak. It's meant to be like therapy to all of the hardships and wrongs that you've endured in your life. Does Jesus do those things? Yes. Is that all he does? Is that all he has to say? No, no, no. And if we leave out the rest of what needs to be said, hearkening back to last week's sermon, we do a great injustice and damage to our souls. How else is the word commonly used? I mentioned last week we elevate the red letters of Jesus over the rest of the counsels of God. We extol the positive or the easy aspects, grace and mercy, while suppressing the unpopular or harder truths. We hide them. We bury them. But God said,

all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching. And so when we get taught the word of God, we should expect in our churches to be taught the whole counsel of God. And there's so many ways we can fail at this. We could react to the sort of cheap grace movement and just come over and say, all we're going to talk about is wrath and judgment and hell and never speak of grace and never comfort those who are weaker, who are struggling. But that's no better. We're to teach and to learn and to be students of all of Scripture because all of it's been given to us by God. People do weird things with Scripture. Some of you who are nerdy theologically probably know what redemptive historical preaching is. And it's just smart guys trying to figure out what to do with the Old Testament because they've gotten their shot in the arm of everything needs to be about grace and everything needs to be about Jesus. And then they're like, well, what about the Old Testament?

And so they say, redemptive historical preaching. What we will do is find Jesus in every passage of the Old Testament. And every sermon will be about Jesus, even from the Old Testament. That's what I think of it. Not every passage in the Old Testament is about Jesus directly and explicitly. Yes, there's imagery. Yes, there's typology. Yes, there's metaphors and similes and all kinds of literary stuff going on in the Old Testament that points forward to Jesus Christ's first coming, to his second coming. But it's profitable for us to be taught what is going on in the Old Testament without having it always be tied to, and this means that Jesus will save you from your sins. I've told you guys, I often feel this pressure. I felt it all the way through 1 and 2 Timothy. I haven't preached a good gospel sermon in like years. Because 1 and 2 Timothy aren't, you know, chocked to the gills full of, Jesus came to save you from your sins. It's in there, and we have touched on it.

But it's different subject material. And things that we need to hear and be taught. How many months did we spend talking about church government and church officers? More than one. Because that's what just kept coming up in the passages we were working through. All of scripture is profitable to us for teaching. And so our work is to teach the truth. Our work is to learn the truth. When it's hard or when it's difficult, our responsibilities don't change. When you run into a passage of Scripture and you go, ooh, that response doesn't absolve you of having to believe the truth. It means bearing with the difficulty of saying and doing hard things, unpleasant things, in love. And too often I think that we think, well, if I'm going to have to say something hard, I might as well say it aggressively. Huh? Been there. So one of your elders will admit it publicly. He's been there, as have I, and as have many of you.

You remember I said at the beginning, being a Christian is hard. There are costly things, difficult things. Conversations, you go, I don't want to say that. I don't want to do that. But sometimes that's exactly what you have to do. And you have to do it in love and by faith. There are many things in life that we end up having to do that are difficult for us. We go, I don't want to do that. I had a phone call I had to make this week. I won't tell you what it was about. I had a phone call I had to make this week. I was going to do it last week. There was no reason I couldn't do it last week, but I decided I'm going to wait until next week to do it. And so I told myself, I'm going to do it this week. Now, I could have made the phone call last week. I could have made it Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. I could have made it any day. You know why I made the phone call? Friday afternoon. Because I told myself I would make the phone call this week. Now, why didn't I make the phone call? Because I was worried it was going to be uncomfortable. That was it. That was it. I just thought,

This person is not going to want to hear what I have to say. So I'm just not going to do it. And I thought, well, I don't have to call them. And I just thought, you're a coward. Just call them. And so I did. It doesn't take much more pressure than that for us to be like, I don't want to do what's hard. And yet many times you have to do just exactly what's hard. I thought it would have been a moral failing for me not to call him on my behalf. Because if I had been in his shoes and someone needed to tell me what I told him, I would have been angry if they hadn't called me first, even if I didn't like what they had to say. And so I thought, I have to call him. And so I did. And so when things get difficult in scripture and you say, well, that's a costly truth. I say, that may be true. It's a costly truth, but a truth nonetheless that has to be believed and has to be taught. Now, here's a question. In our society, when someone fails, let's say if someone commits a crime.

What caused them to, the root cause, or maybe a better question is, what is the solution to the fact that they caused the crime? How can we keep them from committing another crime? What do they need? They need education. This seems to be the answer to every problem we have. We need more education. They did that because they didn't know. And what we need to do is make sure they know. So we just teach. And we just teach. And when they screw up, we just teach some more. I want you to know that's not true. People don't only need teaching. That's not the only way. God says all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching and then what? For reproof. Now what is reproof or correction? They're really similar words. What are they? That's what happens after you've been taught. You do have to be taught. But then after you've been taught and then you fail, the answer is not more teaching. The answer is you failed.

If you train your kids at home to do chores or whatever responsibilities, you can know that they will not do it perfectly the first time you tell them. Or probably the tenth time. There's going to be this process that's going on that can be much longer than you would like it to be. And if all you ever do, you know, if you teach them to wash the dishes and you're forever having little hard chunks of stuff on your forks, you know, and the bottom of the plate's still greasy and... And you teach them, and they can't do it. And then you teach them again, and they can't do it. At some point, you realize you have a different problem. The problem is not that they haven't been taught, right? What's the problem? The problem is they don't care to do a good job, or they're distractible. But it's not a failure of teaching. It's a failure of follow-through. And so what do you do with the child that has failed to do what they've been taught to do?

You reprove them. You rebuke them. You correct them. At my house, what that meant this past week was that one of my kids, who was sound asleep, when my wife and I realized his chores weren't done properly, hey, buddy, get up. You've got to get up. Go wash the dishes. What? Oh. No, get up. Come on. No, I know it's 930 at night. We'd all like to go to bed. You need to come finish your chores. He had woken up for 20 minutes. What am I doing? Teaching him? No, I didn't stand there and walk, you know, he's been taught. Vanessa's a good teacher. She's taught him how to do the dishes. He just didn't care to do a good job. So he got to do it again. That's correction. Get up, do it again. This is training. This is your school, son. And we'll get to do it again and again and again until you do it well. And we all need this kind of influence in our lives. We need to be taught. Then when we fail, we need to be told, that's not right. Do it again.

And this is repetition. It's just repetition and repetition and repetition. And there are other areas of our life where we realize we need this constant reinforcement, right? If you're a gun owner, if you have a handgun, what do you have to go do? You have to go shoot. Now, you may well enjoy going to shoot. It's fun. It's enjoyable. It's expensive these days. But you think this is great. Now, is your enjoyment the only reason you go shoot? No, you go shoot because you have to keep up your skills. You have to maintain them. You have to practice. Or you should stop carrying a weapon. You have to practice. You have to have someone say, you're not doing that right. Do it like this. We submit to these things in all kinds of areas of our lives. We ought to submit to them as well when it comes to the word of God. We need to be taught and corrected and reproved and trained. Do it again. Do it 10 more times.

And if we won't do that, then the word of God will not bear profit. It will not bear fruit in our lives. It will not. Teaching is, I think the reason that we return back to teaching so often is because the teaching is the easiest of the four things that Paul says here. I'm going to teach you how to do it. And we say, okay, I'd like to learn how to do it. But then when the teaching is over, then if we have to come and say, you didn't do it right, well, that's a whole other conversation that's difficult in a whole other way. And it turns out that both pastors and elders, as well as congregants, none of them like it, the process. None of them enjoy it. We all have our reasons and our excuses for skirting these responsibilities. I want to read to you a section from Calvin's sermon on this point, talking to pastors and talking to the people about this work and the intensity and the difficulty of it. He says, so the work of a pastor is not simply to say when explaining scripture,

There you have it. He must also be insistent and sharp so as to give power and energy to God's word. Accordingly, in another place, the apostle declares that pastors in the church must be forceful to the point of importuning their hearers. They must not merely urge what is right, but reprove and rebuke. True, we are told that they are to do so in a gentle and kindly way and with patience. Nevertheless, chastisement is required. and no one should say, this is too much to bear. You shouldn't go on like that. Let those who will not be reproved go and look for a teacher other than God, for they do not deserve to hear one word from his mouth. Of course, we would like to be spared, and we have sensitive ears. There are many, as we know, who are incensed with threats and punishments, and there are many who are incensed when threats and punishments are employed. Look here.

Is this any way to teach? Win us over by gentleness. Is that what you want? Then go and teach God how it is to be done. These are thin-skinned people who cannot bear to hear one word of rebuke uttered against them. Why? We want to be talked to differently. Go off to the devil's school then. He'll oblige you handsomely, but to your own loss. Believers, on the other hand, should quietly accept what is taught and should humble themselves, being ready to be reproved and admonished when they have done wrong. Let their sins and offenses be revealed and let the knife be produced to lance the boil so that the pus can come out and they can be cleansed and properly healed. This, I say, is what is involved if we would be truly instructed in God's school. Now, if you're here normally, you know that I almost never quote long passages, but I just thought that was a gold nugget.

Okay? And so those of you who love theology and think Calvin's just great, read his sermons because that's what you find in his sermons. Wasn't it deep theologically? I didn't seem to think it was all that deep theologically. I thought it was just pastoral. And so this is what's necessary for us if we're to turn a prophet and be fruitful for God. None of us like to be told no. None of us like to be told we failed. None of us like to be told do it again. Many of us didn't receive that sort of basic instruction in our homes. I certainly didn't, not from a father. There was never a man to tell me, you did that wrong, son. Do it again. And so God was merciful to us in giving us the church to shore us up and to strengthen us and teach us where our parents may have failed. And we ought not to make our parents' failures into an excuse for our continued rebellion. Many of us have come from places that were less than ideal.

with fathers who we may think may well have given us a stone if we ask for a loaf of bread, but not our Father in heaven and not the church. So will you submit to being taught, to being corrected, to being rebuked, being told, no, it's still not good enough, and you say, but I tried, and I say, that's good, I'm glad, that's, yes. Again, all of this so that the man of God may be adequate, or in other translations, perfect, or well-rounded, sufficient. equipped for every good work. That we might be adequate and equipped to serve God in every way is the reason he's given us his word. There are generally two types of people in our church when it comes to the Bible. This is what I mentioned earlier. There are those of you who are conscientiously reformed. You love theology. You like reading about it. You like studying it. But most of all, you like to argue about it. Studying to win the next argument is not why God gave you his word. Do you hear me? It's not so you can win an argument.

Yes, you should be able to know it. You should know it. You should be able to defend it. But he gave us his word to make us whole, to restore his image in us, to fill out the areas where we lack as a result of sin. And those of you who are inclined to argue about scripture, guess what part of the knife you don't need to sharpen? The arguing part, the fighting part. I was talking to a pastor this past week, and I asked him, how's your church going? What's it like? Church planter. He says, well, I said, what difficulties? Because, of course, you're not going to, you know, oh, it's going great. Okay, well, you know, you've got to ask, well, what are the difficulties you're facing? And so I asked him, and he says, well, my church is full of these theologically-minded guys, and I've got, you know, half a dozen of them, and all they do is sit around and argue about theology. Now, this pastor can hold his own in that regard, but he's not naturally inclined to do that. And he's like, I'm not really sure what to do with them. And I thought, I've dealt with that.

And I told him, I said, you know, generally my counsel to those men is, shut up. Go love your wife. Go take care of your kids. Go provide for your family. Stop arguing. But no, I mean, I'm not the oldest guy in the room, but I'm older than most, and I've been married longer than most of the people in this room, and I can tell you with some experience behind me, you're wasting your time. This is not what you need to spend your time doing. You need to go love your wife and your kids. Because that's what this pastor was saying was the trouble. The kids of these men were not well-behaved. Their marriages were not A-plus for strength. But boy, oh boy, they loved to argue about theology. Those men were not turning a profit. They were not becoming more adequate, equipped for every good work. They were neglecting the good work that they should have done in favor of arguing about it. And so if we're to be made adequate,

You have to look at where you're weak, where you're deficient, and you have to say, these are the areas I especially need God's word to instruct me and where I need to especially submit to rebukes and corrections and trainings because these are the areas where my strength gives out. And it turns out those are the areas where we don't want addressed. Those men would love to sit around and talk about arguing about theology, but when you want to talk to them about their marriage, you're like, well, what? She's happy. I want to introduce you to a word that you may not have learned in your theology books. It's called countenance. And your wife's countenance is not happy. She might be quiet, but that doesn't mean she's happy. So you who are conscientiously reformed, love to read and study the scriptures, good. Pay attention to the places where you're weak and give up arguing. And submit to the older men in your life when they tell you just that. I said there were two types in our church.

The conscientiously reformed and the other I would just simply describe as the simple Christian. You'd not describe yourself as a student of scripture, yet you know the basics of the gospel and you believe them. What I'd say to you is, don't aspire to be the person who can win theological arguments. That's not why God gave you his son. And yet you need to seek to grow in your knowledge of him. Not because you're losing some sort of theology race, but because you love your savior. And when you fail and you think, I've not done what God wanted me to do. and everyone else does it better than I do. It may well be true that there are those around you who are more godly than you, but only because God's been merciful to them, and he's been merciful to you too. And so persevere in your pursuit of him. Seek to turn a prophet, right? Some people are given five talents, and some people are given two talents, and some people are given one talent. If you, when you look in the mirror, think, I've only got one talent, don't do what the wicked slave did with it and bury it.

Do what the one with two talents did, which was turn it into four. He said, well, it's still less than what the other guy started out with. And I say, they both received the same commendation from their father in heaven. Well done. You've been faithful with a little. I'll give you much. That's turning a profit with what you have. Don't spend your time looking around and what everyone else has and what they do and how much you want to be like them. Seek to turn a profit for the Lord with what he's given you. The Christian life is not a... a competition with those that are around you. All that does is feed and bolster our pride. Serve God. Love him. Trust him. Seek to turn a profit with what you have. When someone comes to you and says, that's not going well, praise God. The strong doesn't like to be told that any more than the weak. In Hebrews, it says what? All discipline is not joyful, but rather sorrowful. But once you've been trained by it,

Right? The discipline, the discipleship, the teaching, the correction, the rebuke, the training. Once you've been trained by it, it produces the peaceful fruit of righteousness or a harvest of righteousness. If that's what you want, then submit yourself at the points where you go, no, no, no. Now, I'm not saying if someone's telling you to sin, then you say, no, no, no. But if someone's saying, I think you got this wrong, I've never been harmed in my life by listening to older godly men say, You're headed down the wrong path. And every fiber of my being was convinced that they were idiots. And I bit my lip and did what they said. And within a short time, less than a year, if you think that's a short time, it's a short time, I was thankful for their counsel and thankful for their corrections and thankful for their rebukes. And all I want for you is the same thing. And so don't be too proud into thinking that you know better than God or better than the men who he's placed over you.

are given to you in the church, don't set yourself up as the judge. You'll be miserable. You'll be alone, and you'll be ungodly, and you won't produce a profit for your king. So submit yourself to the Bible as it's taught. When you're rebuked and you're corrected, do what the godly men and the tightest two women tell you to do. They love you. I'll end with a story of this. And some of you probably know this story. When Vanessa and I first got together, she was living down in Bloomington. She preceded me by a year down to Bloomington. I still lived up in Chicago. And so we went down there. I went down to visit one time. And we ended up in a counseling session. And it was the most painful counseling session I've ever been in for me. Everyone was just bawling their eyes out except for the pastor. His wife was. I was. Vanessa was. It was just awful. Painful. I don't mean awful. No one was mean.

It was just painful. The things that were being said hurt. It was true, though, but hurt. And so the council was, in a nutshell, a couple of hours long session, but the council was, you guys need to break up. Your relationship's a mess. You need to break up. I still live in Chicago, so I'm supposed to go get back in my car and drive back to Chicago and figure out what in the world we're supposed to do. And so I went back home, and we did end up breaking up. We said we'd talk a few days later, and we did. We broke up because that's what they told us we should do.

And they were right. And so then I'm sitting there trying to sort out all by myself in Chicago after having gone through this excruciatingly painful counseling session. Why in the world would they say that to me? I'm not even a member of their church. They don't know me. And I concluded first that they said the things they said to me because they loved Vanessa. And as much as it hurt me, I was thankful that they loved her. Enough to say the hard things. That made both of us sad and both of us cry. But as I thought about it more, I thought it's not just that they love Vanessa. It's because they love God. And they fear God. And they care to tell us the truth, even when it's costly. And it was because of that meeting that I quit my job and moved to Bloomington. Because somebody had finally corrected me and told me the truth about myself in a way that nobody ever had. And I'm forever thankful for those men and those women.

in that conversation and many since who've loved me that way. And you should be too. For the men and women who are willing to love you in those ways, they're solid gold. They're the most valuable thing you can have as people who will help make you more like Jesus. That was the result of that conversation. And I'm indebted to them and thankful for their faith, for their desire to trust, you know, for their trust in God's word and their desire to see it bear fruit. bear fruit. And you're a fool if you run away from that. I don't know, I could call you worse things, but we'll leave it at fool. You're a fool if you run away from that. Now, maybe you won't face that today. Maybe after church today, somebody's not going to come to you and say things that make you cry. But at some point in your life, that will happen. And what will you do? Will you submit to it? Will you hear it? Will you heed it? Will you shun it? Submit to it. By faith, submit to it. That's your calling.

That's your calling. That's it. Let's pray.