CHS Downtown sermon | Mike Massey

Thanks, Cole. You guys can have a seat if you like. You're welcome to Church of the Holy Spirit Downtown. We do things a little bit different here, which you may have noticed since we're all seated at tables. One of the things that we do that's really central is that we're gonna share a meal together, a meal of bread and wine. And I forgot the bread tonight. So we have it. I ran home and I got the bread, and so we have bread. But just in case, if you're the kind of person who sometimes completely screws up the central thing of what you're doing, you've come to the right place. This is sometimes just what happens. So if I seem sweaty, but we have bread, and I didn't sweat on your bread. But we're really glad that you're here.

I'll explain how we go through this in just a minute. Mike Massey is gonna come up. He's gonna join us. Mike is Cole's dad, the gentleman who just led worship. Mike's gonna spend some time in the scriptures with us. We're gonna have a chance to listen to him. And then you guys are gonna get the chance to discuss what it is that Mike is talking about as we share a communion meal. I'll explain this meal that we share that commemorates Jesus' death and resurrection and looks to his coming again. But we're really glad that you've come here. We hope you'll enjoy a little bit of fellowship around the table, some time in the word, the teaching of the apostle, as we say. We're gonna spend some time in prayer. We look forward to doing this sharing this evening with you. So with that, Massey, come on up, brother. Glad you're here.

Good to be with you guys. So I've not been here before. Does this rise? I'm a little too tall for this, but anyway, that's all right. It was cool watching—so we started a Bible study in our home in 2008 that was not something we planned. And Cole led worship there since he was in eighth grade. And so it's just been—I just love ministering with my boy. Like it's just such a proud moment to see him loving Jesus like that. And so it feels like a Tuesday night, except we don't have cool tables in this cool venue. We've got to maybe renovate our home, honey. That's what we've got to do, make it look more like this, like a bar in our house. But every Tuesday night what we do is we start the evening by just saying, I believe that when two or more are gathered, he's there with us. But we just always start the evening by just saying, we want to invite him to speak and move and breathe and that we're gonna be available to whatever he wants to do and say. And we're gonna remove anything that's prohibiting or inhibiting him from speaking in our lives.

So just if you want to stand, kneel, sit, I don't care. I like to raise my hands. You don't have to do that. But just let's beg, plead, ask the Holy Spirit to fall in power. Amen?

Father, we're just asking tonight that you pour out your presence in this place. Pour out your anointing here, God. We want to hear from you. We want to hear you speak. We don't want to hear my words, Father. We want to hear your words. And we wanna be available to what you wanna do and how you wanna whisper in our ears and how you wanna present change to our lives, Lord. And not just the kind of speaking or teaching or talking that tickles our ears, father, but real transformative change where you, the Holy Spirit, indwell us, move in us, and change us, and speak to us. Can we say that in agreement? Amen. Amen.

God's Correction and Wisdom

Alright. So Proverbs 1:23. The word here says:

If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you. I will make my words known to you. — Proverbs 1:23

And then Proverbs 3:11-12 says:

My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof. For the Lord reproves him whom he loves as a father, the son in whom he delights. — Proverbs 3:11-12

So we're in a series called Proverbs: Living Wisely in God's World. And Proverbs talks a lot about the wisdom of listening to God's correction, adhering to it, listening to it.

So let me begin by saying, I am not an expert on correction except to the degree that I've been corrected a lot in my life. Right? God's correction has been ever present all the time. And I have to confess that I have not always seen God's correction as good or something that I want or desire or need and I often fight it with every fiber of my being. I'm a stubborn, headstrong Enneagram eight—that equals jerk. That's my enneagram and I'm headstrong. But what I do know is, I've been loved by Jesus and I'm falling more and more in love with Jesus every day, every year. And I've come to love—not always like, but come to love and desire and be desperate for God's correction.

As a result of godly correction, there is a change in our behavior when God steps in. But do you think godly correction is primarily about fixing the sin in your lives? No. So what do you think is the primary reason for God's correction?

The heart. What about the heart? To change what in the heart is causing the sin to go away from you. What else? Relationship. To glorify him. What do you mean by that?

So I want to give us a new vision tonight about what godly correction is. I think most believers, most Christians—and not always wrongly so—we think that correction is all about us fixing a behavior, changing a sin, bringing something that's hidden out in the dark that we're doing sinfully or horribly. But what if that's really not the primary goal of godly correction? That's a symptom. God does want our behaviors changed. He does want us to live free of things that are holding us in bondage. But I would suggest that the primary goal of correction is to correct our vision—that he wants us to have a realignment or an alignment with him.

Because the goal of your and my life in Jesus as followers of Jesus is not to arrive at death safely. Americans, can I get an amen? The goal of our lives in Jesus is for your and my freedom.

Galatians 5:1 — for freedom's sake that you've been set free.

And so to that end, God's correction is not about just fixing a behavior because we could do that on our own. The Pharisees did that. God's goal is to correct our vision so we're aligned with him so that we live lives understanding that our stuff is not our own, our lives are not our own, our possessions are not our own, our families are not our own, our time is not our own—because we have been set free to set others free. Because the gospel has liberated us to go liberate others. That is the goal of correction: that we would be the powerful, effective ecclesia.

Understanding Proverbs 1:23

With that in mind, Proverbs 1:23, the primary verse we'll look at. The context of it is there was a woman by the name of Wisdom, and she was crying out in the streets to the people and she wanted them to heed her voice. She was crying out and she still cries out to us today for the people to listen and turn. But for what? What did she want them to listen and turn for? She was wanting them to turn at correction and live in the right direction with their eyes fixed like flint.

There are three things about correction that I want you to understand. One is that a willingness to listen and turn is the essence of correction. To continue in the right direction, we must constantly be open to correction. And your direction is always tied to godly correction. Wisdom comes along and gently says, "Listen, turn at my kind correction."

But how many of you guys like correction? I've been married twenty-seven years. I love my wife's correction. Right? None of us like correction. My wife doesn't like it. I don't like it. None of us like it. I don't care how kindly you say it. We bristle up, we get defensive. We don't like correction. Why is it that we despise correction so much, especially from the Lord? Why do we fear it? Why are we always waiting for the shoe to drop?

Here's what I believe: I believe our view of correction all depends on how we view the heart of God. I want to give you two if-then statements.

If we have a proper view of who God is, who we are as a result—that we are not our own and our lives are not our own because of him—then we will be actively listening for his call to turn and we'll have a willingness to receive his good correction.

The second if-then statement though is: if we do not understand the truth of who God is and his good heart towards us, then we will live in fear and control and we will hear his call to correction as punishment or judgment, not his love.

Let me show you a video clip as an illustration.

I gotta tell you, I'm so offended that some people tell me I look like Michael Scott. I'm just so offended by that. It just irritates me. But listen, when we watch that, we think what an idiot, don't we? Yes. But are we so different? I mean, think about it. Are we really so different?

Like Michael, I often miss the call to turn because I'm not willing to be corrected. And then just like Michael, I blame the GPS voice for leading me astray, or as the cause of my consequence of going in the lake. All because I'm not willing to humble myself. And that unwillingness leads to consequences that are not punishment from God—I can't say that enough—but are a direct result of my unwillingness to listen to sound and godly correction.

Like Michael, I will always miss the right turn if or when I'm not willing to be told how to drive. Gosh, we so badly want to drive, don't we? Why was Michael and why am I and why are you sometimes so unwilling to trust the voice of the GPS and turn at its correction?

I believe, as I said earlier, it's when I stop trusting that the heart of God is good. And not just good, but good toward me. That he's not just good, but that he's for me, that he's toward me. See, if I do not trust that God's heart is good, then I'll always see correction as an obstruction to where I think I want to go or what I think is best for me. And that thinking can get really dark.

Like when God comes along and he says, "Hey, Mike, I want you to walk in this direction." And maybe it has nothing to do with hidden sin. Maybe it's just you've been doing this ministry for a long time, and I want you to go in this direction. Or, "Hey, I want you to change a job. Or hey, I want you to go start a thing or whatever it might be or pull sin out in the light"—immediately we start to kinda go, I don't know. This is risky. I have a lot to lose here. This isn't safe. And we've used the word safe in this culture as a trigger word to just manipulate the situation to get what we want.

Safety is not the goal of our lives because we start to say, "God, you're taking me somewhere unsafe. It's out of my comfort zone. So I'll be a Christian. I'll go to church. I'll show up at a cool venue on Sunday night, but I'm not moving to India. I'm certainly not gonna walk up to some stranger and talk to them." I mean, right? We just do that. And then we wonder where the power of God has gone. And we wonder why he doesn't show up when we cry out to him and ask him to move.

See, we gotta get honest with ourselves. We gotta get really honest. We say we want all of God and we'll go where he says go, but our pride and our need for an illusion of control and safety creates in us an unwillingness to turn at his voice, which will cause us to get off course in life. And again, I'm not talking about just sinful behaviors that are in the dark like lust, pride, greed. I'm talking about other things like fear and control.

There's a godly fear—awe, reverence, wonder—but there is a fear, an afraid fear that is crippling the body of Christ. We keep giving it room to breathe and it's a cancer. We keep telling each other that our fears are okay and we affirm one another in them because we understand. But it's crippling the body of Christ. We are intended to be the fearless bride, and if we're not willing to be corrected by God and live without fear—and I'm not suggesting we don't have fear, but to step in spite of fear.

Just the other day, I was at the Y and I was in the gym. I was working out and I looked over at this woman next to me. I'm a 54-year-old man. I try to keep myself in shape, but I'm a 54-year-old man, right? And there's a young woman, maybe 25, 26, working out kind of right over here. And I look at the top of her phone and I think I recognize a speaker that she was maybe listening to—a Christian speaker. And I thought, oh, interesting. And I started to turn to do my set and I felt like the Lord said, "Go give her a word." And I was like, give her a word? I don't know what to say to her. I mean, I've done this before, but what's the word, Lord? "Just go over there and just start to speak to her." I'm like, Lord, she's a young African American woman and I'm a 54-year-old white man and we're living in BLM culture. She's gonna freak out and run out of the gym. She's gonna think I'm a creepy old man. I'm not going near her.

But the Lord said, "Are you gonna listen? Are you gonna trust?"

So I stepped over. "Hey, excuse me, ma'am. What's your name?" She told me her name. I just saw what I think—is that... and she said, yes. And she said, "I listen to him, you know."

Hey, I have a word for you. Well, you know, she was like, "Word? What's a word? What do you mean?" I'm like, I got a word for you—a word from the Lord. And pretty soon, I'm stepping over, invading her space. I'm laying hands on her shoulder. She's crying. I think people at the gym thought I was nuts.

Am I more afraid of being rejected or disobeying God's correction? We gotta be willing. See, believers are terrified and afraid of good correction because we often think God is only out to expose our hidden shame or our sinful behaviors, or that we will end up looking foolish or rejected. We've got to change this way of thinking. We've got to change our perspective.

Satan's been whispering about this perspective about God—that he's not good. He's been whispering about it since the beginning of time in the garden. Think about when Eve and Adam were in the garden. Satan goes over and says, "Hey, Eve, God isn't for you. He doesn't want you to be like him. He's hiding his best from you. Don't trust him." When in fact, God had made them just like him in his own image, and then he gave them access to everything in the garden. He walked with them in the garden where they were like little kids, completely and totally naked, free, unafraid, with zero shame.

And you know the rest of the story? They chose the lie instead of the truth. And then that lie goes further because we're told growing up that the wrath of God—he cursed them and sent them out of the garden. That's not true. Go read the story. The word "cursed" or "curse" is only used as it relates to the serpent. There were natural consequences to Adam and Eve's choice, but not curses. Because God never cursed them, he loved them. God's correction is love. It's love. And then God made them leave the garden because of love, not because of curse.

The big three huddled up together and they said, "Hey, there's a problem. Man and woman might now eat of the tree of life and they might now live forever in these beautiful, never-aging bodies, and they'll become like cold, beautiful, bloodthirsty vampires—and they'll get worse and worse and worse, remaining in those beautiful eternal bodies. We can't let them do it. It will be horrible for them. Therefore, in my love for them, in my grace, in my correction, I'm gonna send them out of the garden. And the consequence will be physical death and aging bodies in order that they will once again truly live. And I'm gonna send the answer—and it's Jesus."

God is so good. He is so good. Do we believe it? Do we believe it?

Stepping Out in Confession

When we start accepting, willingly accepting God's correction, we start to step out in the light with him. But sometimes we can hear the prompt of his correction and we don't activate it or act upon it. So there's a second piece to hearing his correction, to listening and turning. There's a second piece, and it's that we gotta step out in confession.

And I don't mean confession like groveling, wallowing, rolling around and saying, "I'm sorry." Because often when we say "I'm sorry," we're really saying we stink. I'm talking about the kind of confession that steps out and says, "I'm bringing this out in the light. I'm gonna walk with you."

If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all our sins. — 1 John 1:7

When we step out in the light in confession, speak it aloud, bring it to somebody, step along somebody with it—tell them that God has told me to go do x, y, z, so now I've got an accountability to go do it. Or whatever the change of direction might be. Because when there's real correction, there's a change of direction.

So that confession, walk out in the light, and that koinonia—fellowship—there's a real intimacy that starts to happen. And in that real intimacy, the blood of Jesus cleanses everything. Wow.

And what is confession for? Why do you think we confess to each other? What do you think is the reason?

Healing. Where do you get that from? Yes. James five—gold star. Right? It doesn't say confess your sins one another so that you can find redemption or forgiveness or anything else. It says confess to one another so that you will be healed, made whole, living in the right direction.

So tonight, take some time. I know you're maybe at a table with strangers. You might be with people that you know and love. And I'm not suggesting you're supposed to bring out all your darkest, deepest stuff, but take a moment. Where has God been inviting me into correction? And maybe I've not been listening. Where is God even now saying, Mike, Sheena, there's a new direction I want you to take?

Step this way with me. Are we then willing to bring it out in the light with others, be honest with ourselves, and be honest with the Father?

So just take a moment and start to discuss. All right? Go.