God's Correction Tactics Part 1: full transcript and answers

▶ 0:01 Because God is slow in judging a people, a nation, dealing with them, believers and unbelievers alike begin to think God does not judge nor interfere in the affairs of men. In fact, some of our founding fathers believe that that God does not involve himself in the affairs of men, and today they even mock at that statement. I’ve seen it on the Fox News and other news channels where they actually mock the idea of God doing anything to punish people for sin. In Jeremiah 5:12 it says, they have lied about the Lord. They said it is not he, neither will evil come upon us, nor shall we see sword or famine. The prophets, the preachers, are but wind.

▶ 1:03 The word is not in them, so let what they say be done to them. For this reason, says the Lord, because you speak this kind of word, I will make my words in the prophet’s mouth fire, and the people wood, and devour them. I will bring a nation against you from [unclear], and they will devour your harvest, your food, your sons and your daughters, your flocks, your herds, your vines and your fig trees. With a sword they will destroy the fortified cities in which you trust. Yes, even in those days, declared declared the Lord, I will not destroy you completely. Why doesn’t he destroy people completely? Because his ultimate plan, we found last week, was to what? Restore. See, and if I want my children to grow up to be mannerly and well behaved, I have to correct them when they’re wrong, isn’t that right? See, I don’t throw my kid out because they’ve been bad. I correct the problem so that we can go on, and that’s the way God is. God does involve himself in Christians’ lives. He does bring things to punish and to correct us, and so.

▶ 2:33 In Joshua 24:20, if you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you after he has done you good. We get saved, he blesses our life, we get changed, and then we, you know, go back and start doing things we shouldn’t do. The Bible says after he’s done you good, he’ll do you harm if you forsake, if you turn your back on God. And so God brings these things to get our attention, this like a parent corrects the child to get their attention, to make their behavior and their speech and so forth better.

▶ 3:24 Ecclesiastes 8:11, if the sentence against evil, or those that do evil, is not executed speedily, the heart of men is fully set in them to do evil. You see, if there is no correction, then what we’re doing becomes the new norm, the new law. Though a sinner, now listen to this, this is a powerful statement, though a sinner, a flagrant sinner, doesn’t repent, never repents, though he does evil a hundred times and his days are prolonged, and as it says in Psalms, nothing happens to his herds, nothing happens to his flock, he never gets sick, uh, you know, everything just seems to be working right for him. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and his days are prolonged, and his life seems to be blessed, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God. Isn’t that beautiful?

▶ 4:28 You see, don’t compare yourself to the sinner out there that seems to be getting away with it. Because if you know the Scriptures in Psalms, Asaph said, I, Lord, I, I don’t understand why these evil people are just seemingly nothing bad is happening to them, until he went into the house of the Lord. It says in Psalms, and then his eyes were open that God had saved them for the end time destruction. How many don’t want to be saved for the end time destruction? You’d rather God correct you now. Let me see, show God your hand: Lord, correct me now. I don’t want to be pushed aside and just inherit eternal fire. And so this is a very powerful statement. So do not measure yourself by unbelievers, but realize what is the fear of the Lord: to depart from evil. If I live a life of righteousness, M, repent when I do things wrong, God is going to do good to me and going to do well for me, and in my in days I’ll look back on a blessed life. Amen, hallelujah. Very powerful.

▶ 5:36 Okay, and so correction is important, and we dealt with correction of sin last week. And here in Revelations 3:19 it tells us why God corrects us, what kind of attitude he has. As many as I love, Jesus said, I rebuke and chasten, I, I correct. Be zealous therefore and repent. As many as I love. Why does he correct his people? Because he loves them. Why does a parent correct their children? Because they love them. If you don’t correct them, you’re what? Not loving them. Why does a husband and wife correct each other? Because they love each other, and they want the marriage to be solid and strong and the family to be strong. So love is the reason for correction. You see, do we get this?

▶ 6:45 Now, rebuke. He says, I rebuke. Rebuke is to tell a fault, to convince. So the first source of his correction is to verbally come and say you’re messing up. He’s going to verb... that’s what parents do. Son, you can’t do that. You cannot stick your finger in an electric socket. It’s going to straighten your hair. It’s going to knock you 15 feet. It’s verbal. Son, you cannot go out and play in the street. The cars are going to smash you. You know, it’s verbal. And so God comes, comes verbally first. How many are glad of that? Yeah. How many would like a hearing ear to hear God verbally? Yeah, yeah.

▶ 7:39 And then he says, I will chasten, I will correct you. The word chasten is to train up, educate by discipline or punishment. Let me say it again. Chasten here is different than rebuke. Rebuke is verbal. Chasten is to train up and educate by discipline, by punishment. Say I do something that makes your life uncomfortable, and then you will straighten up. So in this verse we see there are two ways God corrects his people, besides, as we taught last week, our sin corrects us and our backslidings correct, correct us. Here God gets involved and corrects us verbally. He tells us we’re wrong, and this is why we need to assemble in Bible studies and, and church. Uh, we need to forget about the miracles and the flattering prophecies and the tongues and interpretation, and we need to go for the Word, because his Word will correct us. And I would rather be corrected by the Word of God than having him to come and punish me in some way, amen, because when God punish me, it also has a tendency to affect other members of my family or those around me. So it’d be better just to listen to the Word.

▶ 9:14 Physical punishment. The Bible says he gives you what you want, but he’ll send leanness to your soul. He can remove his presence, like King David said, not, don’t take your presence from me. If you haven’t touched his presence in a while, it could be, and it obviously is, God is saying you need to correct something in your life. He can correct by disease, war, famine, acts of God, acts of God, or floods, earthquakes, fire, hell from heaven and all that stuff. Depression. King Saul was a, had a depressed, angry spirit come upon him because, because of his sins, and God was correcting him. And I know Christians that are depressed all the time. They never know how to smile. They’re grumpy, they’re grouchy, and they’re angry and they’re violent. King Saul tried to kill his own son because his son disagreed with him, the anger, the lashing out. You can’t stand yourself. Saul couldn’t stand it, and he would, would bring in a musician to bring peace to himself, and people around him couldn’t stand it. And so God uses these things to correct us. Are you out there? We just need to what? Recognize it, get the problem solved and move on.

▶ 10:46 Now, how does God carry these things out? Well, he’s going to speak to you through the parent, through a friend, through a church. The Bible is not going to be an audible voice from heaven: David, stop it. He’s going to come and he’s going to use people. So we have the parent, the friend, the church, the Bible, and civil authorities that are verbally going to correct us. Now, if you’re a child this morning and listening to this lesson, God gave parents the responsibility to train up the child in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord, including punishment. Even a grown-up child may need verbal correction or advice from a parent. The sad thing is that some parents never let their kids grow up. They’re 30 years old and the parents are still telling them what to do, and uh, God help you if you got one of those parents. The Bible says in Colossians 3:20, to obey your parents in the Lord.

▶ 12:10 In 2 Chronicles 22:3, what if the parent is not a good parent? You see, it’s great that parents are given the responsibility to train up and be an example to the children. It’s great. Man, I wish it was that easy, but what if the parent isn’t a good example? What if the parent aren’t good parents? And in 2 Chronicles 22:3 it says, his mother was his counselor to do wickedly. See, his own parent gave him bad advice and was a bad example. You see, the child in this case is at the mercy of the [unclear] till they grow up and can think [unclear].

▶ 13:03 But the Bible says in Psalms 27:10, when my parents forsake me, when they turn their back on me, the Lord will take me up. Now, how does the Lord take them up? The parent, the church. See, the church has got to wake up to what it really is. You know, we are here to get the message out that there’s a better way to live, and we’re here to get the message out to children that there’s a better way to live. And so when the children hear, they come to church, you go out and you bring them in, and they come to church and they hear what is right and wrong, and then they go home and they know something’s wrong here. There was a, some years back I dealt with two sisters. They married two brothers, and both brothers were bad brothers. They were drinkers and horrible sexual permissiveness and everything else. But one of the sisters went to church and took the children to church, so when this father approached the 16-year-old daughter of his in the kitchen and grabbed her, and she knew that that was wrong and fought off, that.

▶ 14:26 But the other sister, who didn’t go to church, and of course neither of the men went to church, they didn’t know what was right and wrong, and they just thought, you know, well, this is this is life, and they gave in and had a child by the father and didn’t learn the years later that that’s wrong. You see, the church is important. Church, you are important to get the word out what is right and what is wrong, to save children from bad homes and to give parents in bad homes an opportunity to change their life. Amen. Are you with me? And if we, and, and it’s the Word that’s going to do that. We got to get the Word out. You got to be able to, you guys have got to learn, you are a witness of God’s Word. You can share the Word with people, and we’ve got to go out to the highways and the hedges and compel them to come in. They’re not going to come knocking on the door.

▶ 15:29 They’re not going to come knocking on your house and go, hey, hey, hey, uh, can you tell me how to find Jesus or improve my life or whatever? No, you got to go knock on their door. You got to go find them where they’re at. You got to invite them to hear the Word of God and touch God, and that Word then will change their life if they want change and receive it. It’s amazing how we help the homeless, how we help the addicts, the dropouts, and defend the rights of adults in America to live as they please, but won’t stand up for the rights of innocent children that these same adults are hurting, abusing, sexing, neglecting and raising up wrongly. And the church has lost its fight in America.

▶ 16:29 In the ‘90s the church spoke out openly for righteousness and justice, but after the ‘90s you don’t hear the church speaking out on righteousness and sin. You hear psychology and feel-good messages, and God, you know, want you, you self-esteem, God wants you to have self-esteem. Well, my, you know, come on, church, we need the teaching of God’s Word, amen, in right and wrong. The United States Department of Health and Human Services said 46% of teenage runaways 18 and under are physically abused, [unclear]% were sexually abused, that’s why they ran away, 38% was emotionally abused: you’re no good, you’re worth, you’ll never amount to anything, uh, no interaction, the kid just left alone. 60%, 66% of runaways had an alcohol parent, two-thirds of runaways were running from alcohol and the abuse and the problems that come with it. 25% are running from those parents who abuse drugs. That’s 91% of runaways in America, or throwaways, are drug and alcohol related. Are you there? And the church wants to argue about whether Jesus drank or didn’t drink. Folks, there’s something wrong in America. Now listen. You say, well, so what? Well, there’s 1.6 million 18 and under running away every year in America.

▶ 18:30 In 10 years that’s 16 million. Obama never addresses it, the Democrats never address it, the Republicans aren’t addressing it, no one is addressing it, and the church is silent. And yet we worry about the war in Iraq, and we worry about the border, and we worry about all a lot of these things, abortion and so forth, and yet 1.6 million of our young people are out on the streets every year. Does the church care, or do we just want to come in and enjoy the presence of God and hear an inspirational message and hear about us sending mission money to the mission field and feeding the [unclear] down here and the [unclear] that drops out and [unclear] and everything we are? Where is the church in this thing?

▶ 19:41 These kids are exposed to sex trafficking. They’re actually being sold for sex, sex for survival. They have sex just so somebody will give them a roof to be under and some food. And we’re talking about kids from 10, 11 up to 18 years old. One mother sold her own child for sex in South Carolina. All this sexual promotion in America, and if it feels good, do it. The mentality is, you know, sex is the thing, and sex is okay, and we, and we sell our kids. There’s some wrong when a mother who has a God-given protection button in her, you touch that kid, man, you just caught a tail of a wild cat, and that is changed and neutralized to where have my daughter, have my son, give me a hundred bucks. Are you there? And what is the church saying? We’re saying nothing. Either they get HIV and they get viral diseases and they go into prostitution, and it’s just embarrassing. It’s shameful what is happening to 1.6 million youth every year. And some of these kids are thrown out by their parent. They don’t want them anymore, they’re just in the way, and other ones are running away.

▶ 21:30 Matthew 10:36, Jesus said, a man’s enemies will be those of his own household, and that is exactly what’s happening in America. The source of America’s problems right now is the home, and no one is addressing it, and the church, in my research, including this one, has not stood up publicly and declared that this is wrong. What politician running for office hammers about these issues? None. See, they want the right for women to have abortion, they’ll hammer, you know, environmental issues, they hammer all kinds of things, and no one is going to the rescue of these innocent kids being thrown out or running away from abusive homes. The church is there. We are here. We’re not just people here to come in and sing songs and enjoy the blessings of God, but we’re here to be a source to straighten out troubled homes and comfort and encourage [unclear] neglected children, neglected youth, and we should be going out of our way to do that. We should have time to do that. Can I hear an amen?

▶ 23:11 You see, to do that we got to become a team. They’ve been talking about teams on Friday, you got to join the team. We’re having Super Bowl today, and every player has to play as this team player. They got to know their role, they got to know their part, they got to know the goal. The goal is to get that football in the end zone, and whatever it takes to get it there, we got to work as a team to do it. We got to protect our quarterback, we got to block for our runner. Are you there? The quarterback can’t go out there and hack the ball to himself and then throw it to himself. And church, look at you. You can decide today to be a team, because the Bible says it’s nothing for God to say by many or by few. But the key is we got to agree to work as a team and set a goal to get the Word of God out to these homes and get these, the Word out to these children and bring them in. That bus should be full of kids, because in no area have I been that there is such a high percentage of troubled homes in [unclear]. And I’ve ministered in a lot of areas in California. There’s a lot of troubled homes out there, messed up homes, parents who don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just self-centered, selfish, and accidentally had kids.

▶ 24:45 Now then, we got the friend, a friend, a close acquaintance, they can correct us. A man sharpens the countenance of his friend, Proverbs 27:17. See, as iron sharpens iron, we sharpen the countenance, the conscience, see, the person of our friend, and a good friend will do that. A good friend will correct you when you’re wrong. But what if that friend is not a good friend? Psalms 41:9, my own familiar friend in whom I trust, who ate my bread with me, has lifted up his heel against me. And a lot of your acquaintances are trying to lure you and seduce you into doing things that are against God’s word. We don’t have to go to church, it’s okay to drink and [unclear], they are seducing it. These kind of friends aren’t Bible friends. A Bible friend will verbally correct you. A worldly friend will lead you astray.