📖 Are you willing to rebuke sin?

I. The Word of God changes your life if you believe it.

Take perhaps the most famous psalm in the world, Psalm 23. Psalm 23 sounds nice, but it is powerless to truly impact you if you don’t believe it.

In verse 1, it states:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I have what I need.”

Do you believe that? Do you believe you have what you need in our great Shepherd? Or do you actually think Jesus is helpful, but without the relationship, job, or currently unfulfilled desire, you don’t really have what you need?

The rest of Psalm 23 shows how he leads us beside quiet waters (sheep need to drink), how he renews our lives, and how he leads us along right paths.

It even says we don’t have to fear going through the darkest valleys (verse 4) because he is with us. But note that it appears the dark valleys in Psalm 23 happen because we are following his lead (verse 2), and the right paths (verse 3) can apparently include dark valleys.

But if you don’t believe you have what you need in the good Shepherd, you’ll stray toward lesser things that cannot give you what you need.

The Lord is our Shepherd; he is what we need! What a God we serve. But these truths will only make a difference in our lives if we believe them.

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II. Christians are called to lovingly call out the sin of fellow Christians they are in relationship with. Jesus literally commands us to do so.

In Luke 17, he gives a dire warning to those who lead others into sin. Then in verse three he states,

“Be on your guard. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.”

Jesus here isn’t commanding believers to only recognize sin as wrong. He tells us to rebuke it, which means addressing it with the person doing wrong, so that repentance can happen and relationships can be healed.

The point of calling out sin is for your brother (or sister) to see the reality of what they are doing and to repent, so that forgiveness and reconciliation may take place.

Sin is real; its effects are devastating and lead to death, and it turns us and others away from Jesus.

Following Jesus, therefore, requires that we follow him in community with other believers who can help us better live out the way of Jesus.

Our faith is personal, but it is not private. And we are called by God to encourage one another in the way of Jesus, for our sake and also for the good of others.

John Piper on how true believers delight in the Lord:

“The most basic, most essential distinction between a Christian and a non-Christian is not new decisions of the will, not new deeds of the hands, not new doctrines in the mind, but a new delight in the heart. That’s my thesis.

I’ll say it again. The most basic distinction between the body of Christ and the world is not godly decisions, not good deeds, not genuine doctrines, but glad delights in the glory of God.”

This week’s question: Should you forgive someone who has not or will not apologize?

Have a Bible question, or a situation in your life you want a biblical perspective on? Submit it here to be answered in a future Bible Made Simple Newsletter edition.

Christian Ethics by Wayne Grudem

A book about Christian ethics and how to live out and apply the Bible to our lives.

This is the longest book I have read cover to cover (outside of the Bible) since seminary.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and benefited greatly from reading it. Grudem does an excellent job of grounding his principles and teachings in Scripture, and he shows his "work."

There were a couple of sections where it felt a little more like personal preference than a robust biblical position, but when you consider the breadth and depth of the topics covered in the book's 42 chapters, it is hard to find too much fault with that.

Not only is this work helpful in practice, but it also does a great job of demonstrating what it means to take positions grounded in the Bible. I also appreciated the sense of humble confidence Grudem possesses. He is charitable yet firm in critiquing positions he believes are unbiblical.

On a few occasions, he also disagreed with other biblical scholars on matters of interpretation, sent them drafts of the chapter for review, and then included their responses in the published chapter.

It's hard to rate a book like this because, on average, very few people will want to read something like this cover to cover. However, it is still a great resource to have if you are curious about specific topics or want to reference them in the future.

Therefore, no rating, but I would highly recommend it if you are interested in something like this.

This week on Thinking Biblically, I discuss 6 Mistakes People Make When Reading the Bible. This episode will help you read the Scriptures more clearly.

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P.S. Brent always takes things too far…