Scripture and Correction
October 31, 2021
It’s a bit strange to think that God is shaping our lives through Scripture. Take yourself back to the church in Corinth on that fine Sunday morning they first received Paul’s letter. They gather in the room of the house, sing and pray. They sit and settle in for an encouraging letter from Paul. ‘He was so kind and generous in person! Since he’s left, we’ve been fed by the teachings of Apollos, and that great Apollos straightened us all out!”
As the letter gets read, they get less and less excited. They have to have a hard conversation with a member about sexual purity, and no one enjoys that. Paul implicitly accuses them of not loving one another, and that’s not fun to hear either. Paul lays out their sins, corrects their beliefs, invites them to change.
They read the letter and file out to have their Lord’s Supper meal. The rich stand up to go into the dining hall as they have for the past number of years. The reader of the letter politely coughs. The host looks a little abashed, turns to the slave he had sitting beside him, “As my sister in Christ, I have sinned against you by not breaking bread with you. Will you forgive me, and take the seat next to me at the table?”
At the table that week, there was a tangible difference. The seating arrangement was different and the table was more crowded, but that wasn’t it. There was a lightness to the proceedings. If you looked around the table, the light shone from the people just a bit more clearly, as if something had been covering the light within and suddenly been removed, as if there was some slag on the image of God they were formed into that had suddenly been burned away. The joy and hope radiated from their faces—this is the community God wants us to have, this is the people God calls us to be, this is life!
There’s a certain pain that comes from following God. We love who we are. If we didn’t, we would have changed to become what we do love. But who we are is also broken. We hurt others and are afraid to be hurt ourselves, so we put up walls and barriers to protect ourselves. We’re isolated, we’re safe, but the world is not safe from us.
Thanks be to God that he doesn’t abandon us to ourselves! Instead he speaks a painful word of correction. He speaks to us through the pages of Scripture and calls us to tear down our walls, because they’re suffocating the image of God within us. With the walls we’re safe, but we’re also dead. Without the walls we’re vulnerable, but we finally have life!
This is the choice before us whenever we open Scripture, whether it be the epistles or the prophets, the law or the gospels. Will we allow the words from God to shape us? It comes at the price of our lives, but we will find life there in submission to God.
—John Coffey
