When I was young my parents repeatedly worked with me on how to receive correction. We would work through the book of Proverbs. We would talk about it. We would practice.

The reason they worked at helping me learn how to receive instruction and correction was because they knew I needed it. But what I didn’t know as well growing up, as I do now is that we don’t only need help learning how to receive receive correction, we also need help knowing how to give it.

I by nature am not a very good corrector.

I tend to avoid it.

My wife's father once told me about a time when he was building a home for their family in Alaska. He was putting the roof on it and had asked one of his friends to help him. After spending the whole day working, he looked at what they had done and realized they hadn’t done it the right way. He looked at his friend and said, 'I can’t believe we have spent this whole day putting the roof on this way because I can see now that we should have done it completely differently.' His friend looked back at him, shook his head, and said, 'I was wondering when you would figure that out.'

I can be a little like that.

If we need it, we need to do it

While we may not like correction we need it and so do others. People aren't loving me well if they don't correct me, but I am not loving others if I am unwilling to offer correction when necessary. The Bible expects us to be willing to help each other through correction.

Think about what it means to disciple someone. Discipleship by definition involves helping someone else change. Helping someone else change implies that they were doing something they shouldn’t be doing and they need to start doing something else. If we are going to make disciples we need to be willing to correct.

One of the words the Bible uses when it talks about correction is the word admonishment and when you look at the way the Bible describes a biblical ministry, you see that admonishment or correction is a big part of it.

Paul describes his own philosophy of ministry in Colossians 1:28, “We proclaim Christ, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom.” When he describes his ministry to the Ephesians, he says in Acts 20:31, “remember that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.” He clearly thought that elders were to have this kind of ministry in the local church as well. That’s why he says in 1 Thessalonians 5:12, “We ask you brothers, to respect those who labor among you and admonish you…” In case you think it's just pastors, he tells the church in Romans 15:14, "And concerning you, my brethren, I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able also to admonish one another."

We all need people in our lives who care enough about us to help us change in the specifics and one of the ways they help us change in the specifics is by correcting us when we are wrong.

Good correction is a gift

While it is tempting to avoiding correcting and reproving and admonishing others, it’s not biblical.

It’s not helpful either.

Good correction moves us forward.

When I was young I was extremely shy. I didn’t like to speak with people. So my parents had to do a lot of correcting. For starters, they wouldn’t let me describe it as shy. I had to say it was the fear of man. They wanted me to put a biblical label to it. I am glad they did. Because I can’t imagine where I would be if they hadn’t gotten involved and showed me where I was wrong and showed me how to do it right and stuck with me until I responded better to others as a habitual kind of lifestyle. Obviously, I am still not who I want to be but I am not who I was either because of the way they corrected me.

I would guess you can look at your life and say the same. If we think about times when we really changed and grew, there usually was someone in our life who was giving us good correction and instruction. And yet at the same time, we all can think of times when we were corrected poorly and where the way in which the person went about trying to correct us made it more difficult for us to grow and change.

Yes, but how?

Not all correction is good correction.

It is possible to correct others in a way that is positively unhelpful. Even if you are right, you can be wrong in the way you seek to correct someone else. Proverbs says the tongue of the wise makes knowledge acceptable. That means the tongue of the fool can make it very difficult to hear.

If we are going to love others well, we need to correct them and if we are going to correct them, we need to think about how to do so in a way that honors God and is good for them.

And over the next couple of posts, I want to give you several questions to ask yourself that can help you do just that. But let me start with one of the most basic.

Am I a Christian?

When someone else does something we think is wrong, we usually spend most of our time focusing on them. That response comes naturally. Biblically, it’s much more important to begin by focusing on yourself.

Are you a Christian?

While this question may seem too simple a place to start, what I am really asking you to think about is what it means for you to be a Christian.

Being a Christian means you have new spiritual life that has been given to you by the Spirit. It doesn’t just mean that you grew up in a Christian home or you go to church and you read my Bible. To be a Christian is to live by the Spirit. It means you have been taken from being spiritually dead and made spiritually alive by a supernatural act of God’s Spirit.

If you really are a Christian that is what happened to you and if that is what has happened to you, then you have a responsibility to walk by the Spirit. You need to live in a way that matches up with what the Spirit wants from you. Quoting Paul, "If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit." (Galatians 5:25)

That's important to remember because when somebody sins or gets in your way, it’s easy for your old selfish desires to get all stirred up again. When those selfish desires get stirred up, they like to come and tell us what to do. They want to control our response. We can easily become conceited, and begin provoking one another. We stop trusting God and start wanting to take matters into our own hands. But before you attack the other person or avoid that person or whatever self is telling you to do, you need to ask yourself, are you a Christian, seriously, are you a Christian, because if you are then you need to tell self to shut up. You have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. You are not who you used to be. You have a new spiritual life given to you by God and if that’s true, then you need to live like it. You need to stop focusing on what self wants you to do, and start focusing on what the Spirit wants you to do.

In other words, as you go to correct you need to make sure that God's priorities are your priorities. If not, you may be right about what you are correcting the person for, but you are sure to be wrong in the way you go about correcting them.