Many know the biblical ideas sin and repentance. We know that receiving Jesus is repenting of your sins and believing the gospel. But there’s another word the Bible uses a lot here, a word which might prove helpful as we explain the gospel to others and apply it more to ourselves: correction.
We don’t like correction. Who enjoys talking about something and then having someone prove you were wrong? Who likes it when you’re doing something and someone tells you that it’s bad? We hate being corrected.
Think about that feeling when it happens. Embarrassment mixed with frustration mingled with pride. We’re ashamed we were wrong, annoyed it was pointed out, and yet much inside of us wants to continue to do it our way.
The emotions we feel in those small moments of correction are a mini-picture of our universal problem. We live in a broken universe because we, as those created by God, have rebelled against him, doing whatever is right in our own eyes. Sin infuses our hearts, minds, words, and actions. So, we need correction, but we still hate it.
Refusing to Take Correction
The Bible connects taking correction with repentance towards God and faith in God.
For example, when we don’t take correction, it hinders our repentance:
“They refused to take correction. They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to repent” (Jeremiah 5:3).
They “refused to take correction” which equated to them “refusing to repent.” When we don’t want to be corrected by God, we won’t turn to him.
And it hinders our faith when we don’t take correction:
“Woe to her who is rebellious and defiled, the oppressing city! She listens to no voice; she accepts no correction. She does not trust [or ‘believe’] in the LORD; she does no draw near to her God” (Zephaniah 3:1-2)
The people accepted no correction, which connected to their lack of trust (or belief/faith) in God. It lead them to not drawing near to him. The lack of correction kept them at a distance from God.
In other words, in the Bible refusing to be corrected is no small problem. It’s the ultimate problem of the human heart. Pride makes us want our own way. We don’t want God to be God over us. When we hear there’s a God who is strong and knows best, even if he is called “loving,” we in our sin don’t want anything to do with him. We hate the fact that he’s God. We hate the reality that we’re wrong. We don’t want our thoughts, words, actions—our lives—to be corrected.
Accepting God’s Correction as a Christian
This is, however, a major part of what it means to be a genuine Christian. A Christian is someone who by God’s grace does accept God’s correction. The prophets who denounce God’s people for their pride and refusal to take correction also describe the person who does trust God as being “humble and contrite in spirit” (Isaiah 66:2). The opposite of refusing to be corrected is humility (realizing you are wrong) and contriteness (being sorry that you’ve been wrong so long in so many ways).
And it is here that we find repentance and faith. Accepting correction takes humility, but once we humbly accept it, we turn away from our wrong (unrighteous) selves, and turn to the correct (righteous) God. We repent. Then, turned away from ourselves and turned toward him, we trust him (no longer ourselves) and his gospel.
Receiving God’s Correction in Christian Living
Yet as we all know too well, we don’t accept this correction perfectly all the time. We still have the sinful, selfish nature dwelling in us, making us want to cry, “I’m right, I can do what I want.”
It’s beautiful, then, that God has supplied us help in our fight for correction. We will do wrong, and even as Christians we’ll often struggle with admitting we’re wrong. But God has given us his Spirit to guide us and convict us when we do wrong and his people to lovingly do the same. But especially, God has given us his word, which in the Bible is said to help correct us when we’re off track:
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that themas of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
The Christian life is not meant to be one of fear and slavery, where we’re always unsure of our actions, second guessing everything we do (2 Timothy 1:7). Yet we are supposed to be humble enough to admit when we mess up, and be willing to learn more from the Bible about ways we could be messing up. In love, God gave us the Bible “for correction.”
Which brings us back to being “humble and contrite.” The verse this phrase is taken from more fully says,
“But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2).
It’s no coincidence that “humble and contrite” is connected to “trembling at God’s word.” That’s the goal for us as Christians—for those of us who have been forever corrected in the gospel but who are striving to walk more correctly day by day. We go to our God in his word knowing he’s totally on our side, but also looking for loving ways he might correct us.
And it’s for our good and brings him glory as we seek to live more correctly.
