Whom To Correct

“He who corrects a scoffer gets shame for himself,
And he who rebukes a wicked man only harms himself.
Do not correct a scoffer, lest he hate you;
Rebuke a wise man, and he will love you.”
-Proverbs 9:7-8

Andy Stanley has written a book called The Best Question Ever. I hope you’ll buy it, and don’t mean to ruin the surprise, but the great question he raises for any given situation is “what is wise?” It’s often neglected. We hear the admonishment of Jesus to be “harmless as doves” but forget that He also taught us to be “wise as serpents.”

There are times when we take the right stands, even in the right spirit, but with the wrong people. The issue raised by Solomon in this Proverb is simple: why do you keep trying to correct the behavior of unwise, wicked people? To put it in a modern frame of thought – why do you keep attacking the behavior of people who act the way they do because they are lost?

I hear it from people who withhold love in the name of correction. They allow their kids to grow up with no sense that the Father loves them because their parents were always too dissappointed and frustrated with them to love them. I hear it from people within the walls of the church who tell everyone they know, “You just ought to be in church more” (as though church-attendance is the end-all, be-all of holiness). I hear it in those who use their public profiles as a bully pulpit to shun homosexuals, pro-choicers, and others with whom they fundamentally disagree.

Let me ask a pertinent question. Whatever happened to seeking the redemption of a soul before seeking a change in behavior? If we wer able to get the world around us to act moral, we would have accomplished nothing more than to make earth a nicer planet from which to leap into hell.

When you have an opportunity to speak for truth, do so, but do so in love. When you can give advice or correct a wrong thinking pattern, do so, but have as your ultimate goal the salvation of souls. Behavior always follows belief. Duty always follows doctrine. Want to change the way someone behaves? You’re going to have to influence their beliefs first.

As Andy Stanley would say, what is wise? Keep preaching correction to an incorrect world, or preaching Jesus to a lost world?