Do You Not Judge Those Who Are Within The Church

Discipline in general, and church discipline specifically, is a topic that you probably haven't heard much about. And I hope to be able this morning to demonstrate the necessity and the goodness of church discipline, and that it is essential to the building up of God's kingdom. Where there's not discipline, God's kingdom perishes. And where there is discipline, it flourishes. We're going to be focusing on 1 Corinthians 5. Abram read a few verses from it this morning. I'm going to be reading the entire chapter as our main text. There will be some other passages that we consider as well, but our main text will be 1 Corinthians 5. And my hope this morning is that God will teach us the necessity of church discipline and help us, having heard this announcement and considering our own sins, that he would teach us to fear. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord? This is 1 Corinthians 5.

It is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. It is actually reported that there is immorality among you. An immorality of such a kind as does not even exist among the Gentiles, that someone has his father's wife. You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead, so that the one who has done this deed would be removed from your midst. For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this as though I were present. In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump.

just as you are, in fact, unleavened. To Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world. or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?

But those who are outside, God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, if I were going to take my normal approach to this chapter, we would probably have eight to ten sermons out of it. Because there's so much content, there's so much in it, and so much that we could benefit from having explained to us or filled out in a very thorough way. This morning, I'm going to not take that approach. I'm going to just sort of hover over the passage, mention a few things, and settle on a few different verses, because I think they're the ones that are most apropos, most important for us today. And so the first thing I want us to focus on is the reality that there is sinners in the church. Now, if you're here normally, you might say, well, yeah, we know that. We confess sin, and we talk about it a lot.

And yet whenever the sin is shown, we go, well, what do you mean? And there's this thing in us that's like, well, we all know it in theory, but when we see it in reality, we are still surprised by it. And so the first thing that we see from this passage is Paul, who is not in Corinth, right, as he's writing this letter, you understand, he's sending it from another place, that there are reports spreading of what's going on in their church. And the report is that there is immorality among them. There's immorality among them. Is there immorality still today in the church? Yes. Though with the way society works nowadays and the heightened levels of privacy that we have, we're able to hide it a lot more. We're able to do it behind closed doors and in the dark and where no one can see it or under a pseudonym or anonymously.

It's not as obvious as what's going on here, not to the public, not to the general population. But so long as there are sinners in the church, there's going to be real sin in the church. And so we have to work hard in our minds and in our lives to fight against our desire to look good, to present well, and ultimately to act as though we're not a sinner and we haven't done anything. that would be embarrassing to have anyone found out? Is there any one of us who, if our sins were known, wouldn't be incredibly ashamed and embarrassed to have our sins known? I wonder how the Corinthians, as they received this news, this report that Paul had heard about what they had going on, how much embarrassment and shame and crawling under the the ground that they would have desired, they would have wanted to. We have that same desire to hide our sins, to ignore the sins of other people, to go along, to get along, acting as though the sins that exist among us, if there are any, are small and insignificant and infrequent. But when we do this and we live this way, we don't do ourselves any good. We give no glory to God when we refuse to acknowledge our sins or the sins

that are present among us. And that's always the pressure when there's sin. If you took it out of the church and you took it into your family, how much of your discomfort or tension in family gatherings is simply that there's sin that's not addressed? And it's miserable. It's like, well, you couldn't say something about it. Isn't the same true in your workplace? Isn't a lot of the trouble that there's a problem Maybe it's a problem employer, a problem boss, or a problem customer, or somehow there's a problem, and everyone goes, we can't do anything about it. We can't say, hey, that's a problem, and you can't carry it on like that. A lot of our tensions in life are built on this idea that sin's not supposed to actually be exposed or talked about. It's all supposed to be kept hush-hush and behind closed doors and under wraps. If that were possible, It might be a better strategy. But it's not possible. What do you think? What would you have done if you were in the church at Corinth and you were an elder there? And you got like a weather forecast. You got notice that Paul was going to hear about what you had going on. You'd probably be pretty, you'd be like, oh no, what are we going to do? We're all inclined to hide.

To hide our sins and the sins of others. We all feel uncomfortable when we are shown the sins around us. We don't know what to do with it. We're not sure how to process it. What we have is this feeling that something's wrong, like something has gone wrong, and I'm not sure why I should know what I'm supposed to do about it. My goal is to actually help you understand why you've been made aware and what you're supposed to do about it. Okay? But all of that presupposes that you understand that every person in this room is a sinner. A real sinner. Not like that they just get kind of angry a little bit and wrinkle up their nose. But that they get angry enough to throw things, to hit things, to curse, to blaspheme, to threaten. Sin in our midst is not isolated in any way. It affects all of us. And it gives glory to God to have those sins confessed.

There's a passage, a verse I want to read to you in Joshua chapter 7. It says this, My son, I implore you, give glory to the Lord, the God of Israel, and praise to him, and tell me now what you have done. Do not hide it from me. Now, if you know the context, you know that this is a fairly offensive passage of Scripture. Because what's going on in the early chapters of Joshua is the Israelites have crossed over the river and are starting their conquest of Canaan. And they're given very specific instructions about what they're supposed to do. And one of those instructions is that they are to kill everyone. Not just the men, not just the men of fighting age, the men, the women, the children, the animals.

everything that's alive, they're supposed to kill it. And that's offensive. That's hard to accept, to say, yeah, that's what I would do. Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. We're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Another thing they're told toward the beginning is that they're not to take any of the gold or the silver or the houses or the vineyards, any of the wealth. Like you're coming in here and you are. Basically, you're supposed to do to this land what all of the plagues did to Egypt. You're supposed to just level it, just raise it to the ground. There should be nothing left. Well, there's a problem with this man that's being spoken to with Achan. Achan went in. Israel went up to battle, and they lost. And everyone's grieved, and they're like, well, look, here come all their temptations that they had in the wilderness. Well, look, the Lord just brought us out here for us to die. And the Lord says, no, no, there's disobedience in the camp.

Someone didn't do what I said. And so through the process of casting lots, they realized that it's Achan's family. And so this verse that I read to you is Joshua, the leader, going to Achan and saying, tell us what you did. Because we just lost this battle and all of our sons and brothers died in this battle because of what you did. What did you do? Give glory to God and tell us what you did. Do not hide it from me. So Achan tells him. This is what I did. This is what I stole. This is the money and the platters and all the things. And this is where it's hidden, over in my tent. And the people go and they run quick and they get the stuff right where he said it and they bring it back. And then what did they do? They took Achan. They took his belongings. They took his family. It says his sons and his daughters. And they took them out of the camp and they stoned them to death. And then they burned them. And then they...

piled up a heap of rocks on top of them. Now that's a tough pill to swallow because that's what God told them to do. What is that? That's them understanding or the Lord teaching them the very same lesson that we're having to face today, which is that sin among the people affects everyone. It's destructive and it has to, therefore, has to be acknowledged and disciplined and excised, cut off, put out. That was an excommunication back in Joshua chapter 7. God's people have always had sinners among them and not of the repentant type. And because of that, there will always need to be discipline for those people and for those situations. Unless you think that the sin that we're talking about in the church is somehow like tamed a little bit, it's X-rated sin.

An immorality of such a kind does not even exist among the Gentiles that someone has his father's wife. You who have claimed the name of Christ, Paul says, you who have been washed by his blood have come up with sexual deviancy that the Gentiles haven't even figured out. And you're proud of it. You should never be surprised when you hear that somebody has fallen into sin. You may be grieved by it. You should be grieved by it. That's what Paul tells them they should have done. You should have been grieved and you should have mourned, but you were proud. Grief is an appropriate response when you hear that people are in sin. Weeping and wailing and sorrow are appropriate. Surprise? No. And especially not if you're a student of Scripture. I don't know how we could read the Bible through and not see that God's people are not...

immune to any of the sins that plague us as a race, as mankind. We're not free of any of it, of those temptations. It's not like, well, we have the PG-13 sins in the church, but the world has these terrible sins. That's not what the passage says. It says you've got sins in here that even the unbelievers who don't know God, they couldn't come up with it, but you have. Now, somewhere in our hearts and our minds, everything I've said to you, you know is true. You know it by your own experience that when you became a Christian, all of your sins didn't go away and didn't turn down the temptations. Sometimes, perhaps, for a time, you have found freedom and praise God for that, only to find out that 10 years later, all of a sudden, something you were struggling with, you're like, why is this back? Where did it come from? I did not order this. And yet, here it is. And it's not any less explicit or mellowed out.

because you're a Christian or you've been a Christian for a while. It's hard to live in this world and to honor Jesus Christ because of how sinful we are. And sometimes the temptations, we cultivate them, and sometimes they just come and confront us. Nevertheless, this reality of having sinners in the church is inescapable. So what do you do to negotiate or to combat this difficulty? If the church is supposed to be a safe place, And the church is supposed to be a place of freedom and a place of redemption and a place of grace. What do you do with this reality of sin? Well, there's many things that the church has done. One approach is simply to redefine sin and to say, well, that's not bad anymore. That's okay. That's in the acceptable category.

Some churches have taken the approach of turning worship into an emotional experience. We're not going to come and deal with sin and righteousness and the judgment and the atonement and God's wrath and the cost of our redemption. What we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to experience God. And we're going to experience it with the lights and with the music and with the pastor and with the message. Everything's going to be this emotional experience. Now, am I standing here saying we shouldn't have experience of God when we come to worship? No, but we should experience him as he actually is. And when we see in Scripture people interacting with God, it doesn't look like what passes for a lot of worship today. In Acts 9 that Eric just read to us this morning, apparently when Paul ran into God, he ended up on the ground. Like, Lord, who are you and what happened? Like, fear.

So if we experience God in worship, we should be experiencing him as he is, not simply coming to have an emotional, cathartic experience of release and peace and calm. That doesn't last. I first came to church that would have been a megachurch, and that was it. We had good feelings, but we didn't have any righteousness. We had assurance that Jesus would accept us, but no idea of what. why or what we were being saved from. Churches can also take an approach of becoming a sort of a therapeutic place, a safe place. When I said safe place earlier, I wasn't saying it as though I'm like, yes, and that's what it should be. Nothing hard, difficult, or with a sharp edge should ever happen in church. It should be a safe place. I actually don't think that's how church is supposed to be. I also don't think it's supposed to be inappropriately abrasive or aggressive or harsh. I just think it should be honest and true to the scriptures.

And the Bible is not G-rated in terms of the stories and the accounts and the instructions that it contains. And so when you come to church, they can say, well, what we're going to do is we know people are sinners and we know they've got these problems and we know there's all this awful stuff. What we're going to do is, our whole goal is just to wrap our arms around them and tell them it's going to be okay. And that's a part of the gospel. There is a part of that that's true. Jesus says that he wished when he wept over Jerusalem, he says, like a mother hen, I wish that I could bend down and spread my wings and gather you all together and love you and protect you. But then he says, but you wouldn't have it. You wouldn't come. You wouldn't repent. If you knew what was about to happen to you, you would come but you won't. And so while comforting and binding up and healing are parts of the gospel, they are not the gospel in its entirety.

And the reason is that they presume that the person who needs the healing has had little to no responsibility in cultivating the environment that they're in. That they've not caused any of it. And so the only thing there is for them is to be healed. But when do we say, but how did this happen? And it doesn't mean it's all their fault. It may not even be mostly their fault, but the question needs to be asked. What was your part in it? Did you have a part in it? If that's left out, there's an essential part of the gospel and ultimately of healing and reconciliation that's missing. Other churches could do it with altar calls. Martin would be more familiar with this type of thing given his background. My family was just at a thing this last week. I wasn't there with them, but they were at a magic show, and there was an altar call at the end of it, an illusion show. It wasn't magic. It was illusions. He told us it was all fake.

But they went, and there was an altar call at the end, and so we were talking about what an altar call was, and I said, you know, in that environment, it's like, what do you do with the fact that people are sins? Well, you just develop this theology that says they must not be quite right with God yet. So what we need to do is present the gospel to them again and call them to do something to get right with God again, that we need to get right with God again. As many times as you fail or feel convicted or need the sense of needing to get right with God, well, we're just going to make a way for you to get right with God again.

but it never deals with the sin. Altar calls don't deal with sin, do they, Martin? Do you say we need to get down on our knees and we need to ask God not to strike us dead with a lightning bolt because you have made a terrible mess of your life? You can tell me I'm wrong. I've never done it, but I think it's a very, let's... There was time, there's a lot of things to it in altar college. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Excellent. There's this question of what to do, as I've said, with the sin of the people in church. And if the answer is simply getting saved, that does not have the gravity that it needs to actually deal with us. This is all sort of on one side of the spectrum. We can go to the other side of the spectrum and we can go towards sacramentalism. How do we deal with people and their sins?

we just focus on the sacraments, or we just focus on these works, or we just focus on our liturgy, or we focus on our doctrine. We say, these are the things that are important. Give all of our attention to this. I remember when we first planted this church, I had some friends, and they had moved up to, I think they were in Anderson or somewhere, somewhere in Indiana, but not too far away, but far enough to not come here. And they were going to this church, and it was a good church. It was reformed. It was theologically sound. It was all these things. And they wanted to become members of the church.

And the church, with no apology, looked at them and said, you haven't been here long enough. You need to be here for like a year or two years. And in the time, in this process of us getting to know you, you can't take communion. Because we practice closed communion, and we want to be really sure that you're a Christian, so you can come here, you can worship with us, but you can't actually be a part of the church formally until we're sure that what? Well, that you won't be the guy who's... Paul's writing about in 1 Corinthians 5. I think that's ultimately a lot of what's behind closed communion is we're going to build really thick walls, really tall with heavy doors, and we're only going to open them once in a while after you've stood out there for a long time. They won't let kids come to the Lord's table. This is very common in Baptist churches. They won't baptize young children. What they want to see is them get into the temptations of their teenage years.

And see if they're going to make it through it and if they really have love for God. As opposed to coming alongside of them and helping them through that. It's as though they think anybody's going to make it through their teens and twenties without some sort of falling off the horse. I realize I'm a pastor and I'm not supposed to say that, but I've never met the man or the woman who hasn't had a problem. In some way. That's the truth. And so can we please tell the truth? It's hard. And the church should come alongside people who are in hard situations and acknowledge it.

And not just say, well, we're not sure yet. You might still fall into sin later. So until we're sure, and even then it doesn't work. Churches that take all of these different approaches or ones I haven't mentioned have not sufficiently dealt with the issue and the reality of sin in the church. So what are we left to do? What are we supposed to do? Just, well, throw our hands up in the air, whatever. There's nothing to be done. No. Instead of denying this reality or accommodating it or redefining it, The church should simply commit to disciplining the sin when it arises. It's very simple. On paper, it's very simple. In practice, it's very painful. It's very hard. It's very costly. But in terms of like, how do you deal with this problem? It's actually quite simple. We look for a credible profession of faith to become a member of the church, to be baptized with the sign of the covenant, and then we police the ranks.

Now, by police the ranks, do I mean that we are scrupulous and we police the ranks in such a way as to almost communicate we expect you not to be a sinner? No. But you police the ranks in such a way that if someone seems to be falling away, if someone seems to be allowing sin to take root in their hearts and there's no remorse about it, no sorrow, no repentance, that then, yes, that would trigger a flag, and that would then be dealt with directly. Now, if it's so simple, and I would argue biblical, this is the example we have in 1 Corinthians. Paul says, there's sin amongst you guys that's so bad, even the unbelievers can't do it. And while I'm not with you right now, I have the authority of Jesus Christ, and I'm telling you, he's gone. That's my...

thumb-down summary of the first few verses of this book. It's pretty simple. We discipline people who sin. That's what happens. We don't try to create an environment where there aren't any sinners, and we don't ignore the fact that there are sinners in there. We simply discipline the sinners when they give themselves to their sins. The difficulty is no one wants to submit to that. I mean, who wants to be told what to do? Who wants to be told no? Paul describes himself As like not knowing sin until the law came in. This is in Romans. He said, I didn't know what sin was until the law came in. And what did he say about himself as soon as the law came in? Say it again. Sin revived. Sin revived and I died. All of a sudden he found this will, this sinful backbone inside of him that was like, as soon as I got told you can't do that, you're like, but I want to do that. You could have a kid at home having a very good day.

And you could tell them at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, honey, you can't have any cookies tonight after dinner. And you don't have to give the reason why or whatever. What will immediately happen to your otherwise happy child? Everything was going fine until they heard that there was a boundary. And all of a sudden, they have a hard time. And no one can figure out why. But we can figure out why. It's because they're sinners. Because as soon as you get told no, or you must, or you may not, we stand up and say, you can't tell me that. What you have to realize is, oh yes, God can. And when I say, oh yes, God can, I don't mean him directly to you all by yourself. I mean him through the church to you can absolutely say, no, that is not allowed. That is sin. And you may not continue in it. How much of parenting would be resolved, and all of the bad adverse consequences downstream of it would disappear if parents would simply say no. And then when their kids say, well, I'm going to do it anyway, the kid says, oh, no, you're not. The parent's like, you may not. You are not allowed to do that. Not without consequences. I mean, you can do it, but not with my approval and not with my passivity, not without my vehement objection to it, an active

pursuing of of opposing you in it if christians are unwilling to have their churches discipline them then what they've done is is they've they've taken god's glory and hidden it away and said that's not important it doesn't belong here and they've done it at the price of their eternal souls when someone falls into sin we shouldn't be surprised we should say that needs to be disciplined You see it in other places. You see it with children or with employees or you see it with citizens of society. And you're like, you know what they need? They just need someone to say no and mean it. And to pursue no. Pursue enforcing no. That's what they need. And they're going to fight it and they're not going to like it and it's going to be all these difficulties. But it's what's necessary. And so we have to stop assuming or expecting that the church is a place without sin.

What we need instead to realize is that the church is a place full of sinners and God's given the church the tools to deal with it. And those tools are discipline. And as Abram said earlier, formal church discipline when all the other stuff has failed. Paul says something very powerful, very weighty. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Right? We're not supposed to take oaths. We're not supposed to invoke the name of the Lord. Jesus warns us against it. And there's a couple of times in Paul's epistles where he does this. This is one of them. Another place when he's teaching Timothy, he says, I adjure you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, preach the gospel. He says, God is witness. Do this work. And he's doing the same thing here. As God is my witness and with the authority that he's invested in me.

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are assembled and I with you in spirit, with the power of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's weighty. That's heavy. And then he says, put them out. This is not a personal judgment of Paul's. And you could be confused for thinking it was because right after that he says, I decided. I have decided. Before he said, I have decided, he defined who he was. He was an apostle. He had the authority of Jesus Christ. So he wasn't exercising his own authority or his own personal judgment, but rather the Lord's. Making judgments always requires authority. And that authority is always delegated and given. It is never taken up on its own. In the parable of the vineyard owner who's gone away and sends his servants back to collect his portion, his due.

You have to ask the question, who are these servants? Like, by what authority do they get to go and demand of the workers the owner's portion? Well, it's not by their own authority. It's by the owner's authority. The vine dressers are supposed to treat those servants as though the vineyard owner was standing right before them. And in that story, they didn't, and it cost them greatly. That same sort of delegation is true with authority within the church. God raises up men to lead. To disciple, to discipline, to preach, and to teach. And we're not perfect men. We're very sinful men. Nevertheless, God raises up men to lead and to exercise his authority on earth in the care of our souls. And we would be fools to spurn it and cast it aside.

And so Paul says, I've decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of their flesh. This is excommunication. Where the Corinthian elders had failed, Paul steps in and says with authority, this is how it's going to be. This is what needs to be done. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. What people don't realize, is that there's a greater sin and a greater danger, something worse going on than this man with his incestuous wife. And you know what it is that's worse than what he's doing? It's worse that the elders are not dealing with it. Because when it doesn't get dealt with, it leaves everybody susceptible. What those elders at Corinth and many elders now today do is they say, listen, you're on your own. When it comes to protecting your soul, when it comes to fighting against sin, you're on your own.

We'll be here to tell you the gospel, but you're on your own. When it comes to the fight, we do not have your back. And Paul effectively says, by the power of the Lord Jesus Christ and with his authority, I have your back and I'm here to protect you because Jesus cares about you and he loves you and he wouldn't have you thrown aside to the wolves to be devoured. In Abram's announcement, he acknowledged that purpose of church discipline, that there would be protection for the people. If you have siblings when you were growing up or if you have young children, now multiples of them, you've learned this interplay of how they watch and they see. And if one person gets away with something, somebody's like, huh, maybe that's okay. They got away with it. That's a danger. And so who is the parent failing if they let the first kid get away with it and then the second kid?

you know, gets this idea. Well, they failed the second kid. They failed the first kid, but they failed the second kid and every other one that's watched it. And every other visitor that comes to your house and everyone else that's partied to it, they failed them. Because they didn't say, no, you can't do that. Don't do that. What happens to the second kid if they see the first kid get disciplined for it? They go, oh, we can't do that here. That's not allowed. That's really helpful. We would like to think we could draw those lines and have that reaction, that recoiling naturally, but we don't. Do we? Do we? Do you? Isn't it helpful when you see somebody you get disciplined? You're like, oh, thank you for helping me. That looked like it hurt. Part of me wonders if that man or his wife, his father's wife, part of me wonders if that family wasn't rich. At some point you have to ask the question like,

Why didn't they deal with it? Why didn't they deal with it? I don't know. Scripture doesn't tell us anything about the status of their families or anything like that. But as a pastor, I have an interest in figuring out what the dangers are that the elders and I are going to face. And it's like the Bible warns us against showing partiality to rich men. So I'm like, I wonder if that guy was rich. I wonder if there would have been a conflict that would have caused ripples or waves in the congregation if they had dealt with it. How helpful is Paul to not care about whatever was going on and only to care about the glory of God and the protection of the other people who weren't rich and getting preferential treatment perhaps. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. It's necessary to clean out the old leaven to protect the new. And then Paul says this sweet thing at the end of it. It may not seem sweet. It's sort of in the middle of a bunch of heavy stuff. He says, I have decided to, let me find it again.

I've decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh. And then he says what? So that his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. I think one of the most important things for you to realize is that when discipline happens, it's possible that it can be motivated by anger or frustration or disgust, as Abram mentioned, or some have some sinful motivation. But that's not Paul's motivation here. What does he want? Why does he see it necessary to put this man out? Well, so that he might be saved. He wants this man to be saved. He wants to see him turned away from his sin. Discipline, then, is good and necessary for our salvation. Another way of saying it is, if in your Christian life you have never had somebody confront you about your sins, one of a few things is true. Either you've never been around people who actually care about you, or you're a liar. Like, you're just unwilling to be known. Now, I'm sure you'd like me to say that a little more gracious, a little more gentle and soft, but here's what it is. It's lying. It's just lying. You're a sinner, and if no one in your life has ever realized that, you have lied to them. Or you have really bad friends, or really bad pastors and elders.

Does anyone care about my soul? Does anyone care about whether I'll stand before Jesus and be clean? These are the questions you should have. And when someone says, this is a problem, you can know that they love you. Because that's not an easy thing to say. Consider what it would take to get you to say that to somebody. All of a sudden you're like, well, I don't know. I mean, we're just going to pray for them. Do. Yes, please. Amen. Pray for them. And communicate your love to them directly by speaking to them. That's the premise of Matthew 18, isn't it? If your brother sins, go to him privately. If your brother listens to you, you've won him. It presupposes if you see your brother in sin, you will go to him and you'll say, hey, no. And if he doesn't listen, you're going to say, we say no. And if he won't listen, you say, elders, pastors, church, help him, love him, care for him. He's not listening. See to it that there not be among you any evil, unbelieving heart that falls short of the grace of God.

This is the process by which we see to it. Down toward the end of the chapter, Paul says, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. And I think it's probably one of the things that, I think that's a dangerous, it's not even a whole verse, but it's a dangerous phrase or idea to take out of its context. Because you can come away with this idea that like, okay, well, then I'm going to go to a place where there aren't immoral people. But if you read on, Paul makes it clear that that's not true. He categorizes immoral people into two categories, and the categories are those who are inside the church and those who are outside the church. And he says, when I told you not to associate with immoral people, I did not at all mean the immoral people of the world or with the covetous or swindlers or idolaters, for then you'd have to go out of the world. What he's saying is, this is unavoidable. You can't get away from this, this reality that they're sinners and they sin. You can't get away from it.

You would have to go out of the world. So will Elon Musk get away from it when he builds his rockets to Mars? No, because he's going to put a little seed of sin in those rockets and send them to Mars, and it's going to proliferate if it ever happens, right? He's going to send sinners up there. You can't even go to Mars and get away from it. sinners are everywhere. You're going to have to interact with them and their sins. If your plan is to avoid sinners because you think it will help you avoid sin, you're wrong. You're wrong for two reasons. First, they can't be avoided. And second, you're full of enough sin that secluding yourself from others won't prevent you from falling into sin of your own, like your own construction. Paul's not saying here that we should live as a worldling, that being immoral doesn't matter.

The Bible tells us to come out of the world and other places, to be holy, to be set apart, to come out of them. But even as we come out, we will still be interacting with sinners, and we shouldn't be surprised by it because it's unavoidable. That's how we're supposed to interact with the world. But in the church, it's a different story, Paul says. Sin is not supposed to be accommodated or accepted in the church as it is outside of the church. It's supposed to be repented of, and when it's not repented of, it's supposed to be judged. Carrying on with what Paul wrote, he says, but actually I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother. Not someone out in the world, but a so-called brother. Someone who says they're a brother, but isn't truly. I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one. So when a person is a Christian, when a person comes into the church, the expectations, the process by which you deal with sin changes.

It has to be dealt with in the church. It can't be accepted and just accommodated, not without an expense or a cost to all of the people around. Christians fall into sin. When their sin rises to the level of being heinous and scandalous and they're unwilling to repent of it, then the church must act. Paul ends this chapter simply by saying, remove the wicked man from among yourselves. Put him out. Tell him he is no longer welcome among. the people of God. And the reason is because he is not one of them. That's a hard thing to say. And it incites a lot of frustration on behalf, on the hearer, perhaps on their family or their friends, or even from other people in the church. We've experienced that before, where people get upset with church discipline. It's for our good that God would discipline us and would cut out the leaven, that we would have it.

exposed and seen and put away. I'll end with this. I've said this before, but I think it's been a while since I've said it. Church discipline is really the measure of, one of the most helpful measures in determining a church's faithfulness to Scripture. It really is. It's not original with me, but another pastor said one time, he says, when people are picking churches, they have all kinds of things that they care about and they're interested in and they're evaluating the church based on. He says, I always wish that they would go and ask the elders, when was the last time you had a church discipline case? And if they can't remember and don't know, and they're like, well, what do you mean? What they're telling you is that they don't have a practice of proactively caring for the people in their church, and you shouldn't go to that church because they're not going to care for you.

Because you, at some point, will need to be told no. You'll need to be pleaded with. You'll need to be warned. And what they're saying to you is, we don't do that here. And if they don't do that there, then you'll be the one who suffers for it. And that's way more important than the details of their theology or the type of music that they sing or the demographics of the church or the location or any of that. Do these people keep watch over the souls under their care? Do they see that as a priority? If they do, you can deal with a lot of other stuff. Because you know when push comes to shove, they fear God and they're going to try to do right by him and by you. And that's worth a lot. So pray for us. Pray for the Deetons. Pray for the Clausens, for their parents. Pray for Faith and Lane with hope that God will work. One of the things you don't ever get to see.

is repentance if there's never discipline. Haven't you had a child that's just been out of sorts and then you discipline them and then they're sweet? And it's like, praise God. Praise God. We get to see the benefit of it. And so that's what we should seek and desire in the days and weeks that come. Let's pray.