We've been talking about the Bible these past few days, and we kind of landed on Paul's

words in 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17 about the scriptures being God-breathed and thinking of them,

as Jesus did, as the mouth of God

from which He speaks to us.

And we noted how Paul emphasizes that the scriptures are profitable or useful for us.

They teach us doctrine, they reveal our sinfulness, they reprove us, they show us our failures, and lead us on

to turn back to the Lord and turn away from our sin, in a word to keep on living a life of repentance.

But Paul also tells us scripture is useful for other things, and one of them is what most

of our translations call correction.

To be honest, that word always makes me wince a little.

I suppose because when I was in elementary school, we always spoke about our teachers

correcting our exams.

And I felt more or less that the word correct was the same as the word reprove.

Correcting my exams meant there were crosses in red down the side of the page and something

had gone wrong.

And I could hardly be further from understanding what Paul means when he speaks about correction.

I'm glad therefore that I know some Greek because the Greek word Paul uses here is a completely

different atmosphere about it.

It's a wonderfully positive word. It's the word

epanorthosis. Did you hear the word orthos there, right in the middle? Even if you don't know

any Greek, you can guess what that means from the English words you know.

You've broken your arm or your leg and you go to an orthopedic surgeon and he sets it.

...