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.

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

and 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 word you know. You've broken your arm or your leg and you

go to an orthopedic surgeon and he sets it. Are there something wrong with your bite when you're

a teenager and your dentist sends you to the orthodontist? And although it might be expensive for

your parents you end up with a healthy bite but also a beautiful smile. You no longer need to be

embarrassed. And that's the atmosphere of Paul's word here. It's used outside of the New Testament

context in a medical context. It's a healing word, setting a broken bone, straightening something

...