Tell It To The Church

This morning, I've chosen to step away from our study of the book of Deuteronomy to address the issue of church discipline. It's not the sort of thing that comes up very often. And yet, over the last couple of months, we've had occasion to announce two excommunications here. And I think that it's good for us to take time to consider what the Scripture says concerning this issue. So the title of this morning's sermon is, Tell it to the Church. That's taken from Matthew chapter 18, where we find that phrase in its context. And my goal this morning is to explain how church discipline functions and why it's important. My hope is that God will use this sermon to help each of us fear sinning ourselves and when we sin, to be quick to repent so that Satan doesn't have occasion to harden our hearts and to lead us astray further from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord from Matthew chapter 18, verses 15 through 20. This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true.

If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, that if two or three agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by my Father who is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. You who are parents,

Do you like disciplining your kids? You who are children, do you like your parents disciplining you? No. Little kids say, no, daddy, I don't want spanking. No, mommy. Sounds like this from parents. Don't do that again. If you do that again, don't make me. There's sort of this idea amongst all of us that discipline is repugnant. We don't like it. We don't want it. And yet, what's the child who's without discipline like? What are your children like? What are you like, kids, when you don't have discipline? Are you happy? Nope. Are the people around you happy? Nope. It's unpleasant for everyone involved. And the trouble that we have is that sin's unavoidable. And since sin is unavoidable, it means that discipline is also unavoidable. There will never be a kid that doesn't need to be disciplined, that doesn't need to be corrected, that doesn't need to be instructed. And the reason is because they sin.

And so our passage starts out saying, if your brother sins. And I went looking to see if if was a good translation. Because it seemed out of place to me for it to say, if your brother sins. It seems much more appropriate that it would say, when your brother sins. The word is if, but it carries with it the context of when. It's a dependent statement, but it assumes the condition. If your brother sins, when your brother sins, sin is here. And this whole passage tells us that sin must be dealt with. That there's no avoiding it. There's no escaping it. If your brother sins, it doesn't say ignore him. It doesn't say pray for him. It doesn't say go tattle on him. It doesn't say mock him. It doesn't say abandon him. It says go and show him his fault in private.

And so the first instruction here is that sin must be dealt with. And this principle carries throughout our passage. When someone sins, as Christians, we have an obligation to go deal with it, to go identify it, to go reason with them. What this doesn't mean is becoming the sin police. Some of you may be familiar with that term, being a sin police, someone who just goes around and is just like, you did that wrong and you did that wrong. Maybe you had a sibling like that. Maybe you were that sibling. Maybe you were that parent who's always pointing out the fault and the failure and the shortcoming and the not good enough. It's possible that that person would be right in their pointing out every single time, that's a failure and that's a sin and you shouldn't do that and you should have done this. And yet that's not what this passage is getting at. Because it tells us what we're supposed to do. It doesn't say go and condemn him. It doesn't say go and judge him. It says go and show him his fault. And that presumes that the one who's sinning doesn't see it.

or that they see it and they're not doing anything to repent of it. So when a brother is to go to another brother, the conditions of it from this passage are that your brother's sinned and he's not doing anything about it. He's not repenting of it. You think there's unfinished business. And this principle carries throughout our passage, that we should go, that we need to deal with it, but not in an overly scrupulous or critical way. but that we would go to one another in love, in forgiveness, reasoning with and showing them their fault. Another way of saying this is this passage is not discounting or discrediting all of the passages of Scripture that tell us to bear with one another, to love one another, to forgive one another, to be tenderhearted toward one another. All of those things happen in the context of sin and often sin against us. We're to go to our brothers.

When they sin. And we're to point the things out. And you'll notice that it says in private. Before we come to it being in private, I want to point out who it says to go to. It says to go to your brother. It doesn't say to go to your stranger. It doesn't say to go to your enemy. It doesn't say to go to the unbelieving world. It says to go to your brother. And that presumes that there's going to be sin amongst brothers. That the failures are here. That none of us are standing here going, well, I can go confront sin because I don't have any. Here we are, every one of us in the church, sinners, having failed. And not always in small ways and not always in one-off ways, but oftentimes in consistent ways, in habitual ways, in repetitive ways. And those sins have grown over time.

Because we weren't fearful of sinning and we weren't willing to repent in the early days. This is the temptations that Christians face. And these are the types of sins that Jesus came to save us from. And yet these are the sins that we struggle with. This is the way our sinful nature looks when it's being put to death. Sin is not small in our lives. And coming to church or being baptized, growing up in a Christian home, being a member of a church doesn't prevent any of this. And so we go to our brothers. And I think there's a danger amongst the church today that we would make it our point to point out the sins of the world, the sins of those out there, the sins of the unbeliever and the sins of the left and the sins that don't happen to be ours. But this passage instructs us to go to our brothers. And what I would say is don't waste your time.

going to those outside the church if you're unwilling to come to your brother inside the church. If you don't love your brother enough to confront him, it's not love that's motivating you to go to anyone else. And so we start with those closest to us, those whom we love, those whom we're joined to, those whom it's painful to go and see and to confront. You'll note also that this passage says that this work, if your brother sins, should be done in private. This may be one of the... most common parts of this passage that's misunderstood, okay? If sin is confronted publicly, whether that's in a church or online or something, someone said something or did something and another comes and says, that's wrong and that's sin and you shouldn't have done that, the question that will inevitably be asked, the issue or the objection that will always be raised is what? Did you go to him in private first? Well, here's the question in response to that. Was his sin private?

If his sin wasn't private, then his correction doesn't need to be private. But if his sin was private, then it should be dealt with privately. At first, anyway. You remember when Peter and Paul got in a scuffle, so to speak? Paul had this thing where he would have conflict with other Christians. Two examples. One is with Peter. He tells us about when they were in Antioch. Antioch was a Gentile city, meaning they weren't Jews. And Paul's there, Peter came, and they're eating with the Gentiles. Well, there's different customs regarding their meals and all these sorts of things that the Jews who were upholding the law would not have been able to participate in. But these aren't just Gentiles, these are believers. And the ceremonial law that would have kept the Jews from being able to eat with or commune with them didn't apply. So Paul and Peter are there and they're eating with these Gentiles. Well, then the Judaizers come.

Meaning those who were coming, the Judaizers were just a group of presumably believing Jews or those who were trying to uphold the Jewish law. And they came and said, we're Jews, you can't do that. Now, they didn't have to say it. Everyone knew who they were and everyone knew what their commitments were. So they show up and you've got Peter and Paul and they're sitting there and they're eating with these Gentiles and the Judaizers are there. And all of a sudden, Peter's like, wait a minute, they're not going to like what I'm doing. And so Peter quietly and slowly sort of backs away from that. He starts to create distance between himself and the believers. My first question to you is, was Peter's sin, and it was sin, public or private? It was public. He was doing it in the group of, like, we're having a community meal together. If he's refusing to eat with some people or to eat their food, this is a public action. So what does Paul do? Does Paul go to Peter privately and say, hey, Peter, you need to stop with all of this? No. What Paul...

tells us he did in Galatians, is that I opposed Peter to his face. I opposed Peter to his face. And he did it because everyone watching was learning from Peter. And they were learning the wrong lesson from Peter because Peter was sinning. His sin was corrupting the congregation, the assembly. And so Paul had to address Peter's sin from the get-go publicly. because the sin was public and because of the nature of it being public means that it was being observed and that if it wasn't opposed then those who are watching it would have followed in it so from the very beginning he went to him publicly and said no what you're doing is wrong there was a conflict it was tense you ever had a have you ever had a fight break out at a family meal Thanksgiving or Christmas, some sort of tension. Someone gets huffy and storms off. It's that sort of thing. Maybe not for such righteous reasons, but we've all had it. So when it says that sin has to be, you go to your brother in private, it presumes that his sin is a private sin. Meaning that it's not well known or that it wasn't done in public for everyone to see. In that case, you go to your brother and you go to him in private and you confront him one-on-one, just the two of you, you go and you talk to him.

If it was a public sin, then for the sake of the other people, it ought to be dealt with publicly from the beginning. The end of that section says, if he listens to you, you've won your brother. Here you find the goal. The goal is winning, winning your brother. It's not just, hey man, what you did was wrong. Yeah, yeah, I know. The goal is winning, winning them over. Winning them to what? What are we winning them to? We're winning them to Christ. We're winning them to repentance. That's actually the objective. It's not enough to simply go and say, hey, what you did was wrong. It should be pressed further to, and we need to repent of this. If you confronted somebody about lying, they told a lie, you heard it, and you come to them and say, man, that's not true what you said. You knew it wasn't true, you lied. What would winning look like in that situation? Would winning look like your brother saying, you're right, I lied. I shouldn't have done that. That's not winning. Winning is then pressing further and saying, brother,

Go to the one you lied to and tell him the truth. And tell him you lied to him. That's very different than the offending party simply acknowledging what they did was wrong and saying, no, repentance means going and acknowledging your fault to the ones you've sinned against. That's what it means to win your brother. And I'm making that point to say I want to set the bar higher than simply pointing to it and saying there's a problem there. It is both saying there's a problem there and this is what needs to be done about it. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. The goal is his repentance. Listening, in this context, does not mean anything less than him turning from his sin and repenting of it, acknowledging it and making it right so much as he's able. And scripture also tells us in Luke 10, 15, that there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. That when you push through that discomfort relationally with your brother,

and you win him, that there's joy in heaven as a result of it. And that there isn't joy in heaven if you don't do it, because there's not repentance. And so our obligation is to go and to win our brothers, to speak with them, to reason with them, to warn them from scripture, to exhort them from the word. What do you do if he doesn't listen? Jesus continues, if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every fact may be confirmed. This again drives at the point that repentance is necessary. Their repentance is necessary. And so we have to resist the temptation to back off if our first effort was stiff-armed. Generally, you can get people to leave you alone if you make confronting you miserable enough. Like if you're just incorrigible and grumpy and rude and obnoxious, people generally will leave you alone. Not because they like you, but because you're just unpleasant to be around.

And often people who are confronted with their sins can become that way. They assume a defensive posture. They assume an accusatory posture. And they're like making the situation miserable. And your temptation then is to go, I'm out of this. I'm not dealing with that. This is no fun. But what you've left on the table, the business you've left undone, is their repentance. You said, you know, my comfort is more important and a higher priority than their repentance. Hebrews 12 tells us that all discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful. Yet to those who've been trained by it afterwards, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. I believe that if we read that passage and if you know it, we always think of that in terms of the offender, the one who's sinned, that it's not joyful for them, but it's sorrowful for them. And that once they're trained by it, then they will have the peaceful fruit of righteousness. I'll tell you that every bit of that is true for the person who confronts them. It is not joyful. It is sorrowful. And once you've been trained by it, then you will,

You will have a harvest of righteousness. And that you don't get those things if you won't go through the sorrow and the discomfort and the agony of confrontation over sin. No one wants to discipline. And no one wants to be disciplined. And yet Hebrews 12, just a few verses before that, says this. It is for discipline that you endure. Like, you're still here so you can be disciplined. That's what it means. It's for discipline that you endure. Why do we have to keep putting up with this? Why do we have to keep being told yes and no and do this and not that? Why? For it's for discipline that you endure. But know this, God deals with you as sons. That in discipline, God is dealing with you as a son. And the rest of the passage says, for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? Which one of us is going to go through life without being told we've screwed up? Being confronted?

And being further confronted when we push back. We might fancy ourselves as those who would not do that. But in our membership process, one of the questions we always ask is, today, you read the membership thing and you read the rules of church discipline thing, and then one of the questions we ask is, how do you think you would respond if the pastors and elders had occasion in the future to come and confront you about your sin? And it almost seems like a silly question. It's like talking to engaged couples about fighting. They just don't believe it'll happen. And it's like, well, but when it does, then what will you do? If you become a member of the church, we'll ask the question, what do you think you would do if the time comes when the elders have to come talk to you about your sin? How do you think you would respond to that? And everyone inevitably says something between.

their heart skipping a beat, and they say, I hope that never happens. Oh man, that would be the most awful thing in the world. Like, I'd die. That's one end of the response. The other end of the response is, that's sort of the emotional kind of like, aware of themselves, kind of worried, want to please people response. At the other end, they go, I hope I'd listen. They just go, I hope I'd listen. And I have more hope for both of those responses than for the one that says, I'd listen to them. I trust you guys. Because the first two examples I gave you, both of them realize there's a propensity that they may not want to do what they're told. But the third example doesn't realize that yet. And there's more danger for that one than there is for the other two. It's for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? Think about Jonah. Jonah, I want you to go preach to Nineveh. Uh-uh. I'm going down to the sea. I'm jumping on a ship. I'm going to Tarshish. Are you now?

Did God let him walk away and abandon the work that he had called him to? No, he did not. Pursued him to the bottom of the sea in the belly of the fish to bring him to repentance. That's discipline. That's pursuit of God. He pursues his children and he disciplines them. So we shouldn't be surprised by it and we shouldn't be resistant to it. And so if our brother doesn't listen, then what we do is we come with more testimony. More witnesses. One or two. Bring one or two. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is, accusers aren't always right. Why does Moses require us in his law, which is all that is being referred to here, why are we supposed to have two or three witnesses? Well, so that one person can't just accuse another of a sin or a failure and have him convicted on that grounds.

You actually have to be able to prove it. You might be mad at your neighbor and you might be tempted to lie about something he did or spin it in such a way that the charges are trumped up. So we need two or three witnesses. We need people who have saw the thing but who are not so involved in the situation that they may be biased. Can say, this is what's happened. This is what was said. This is what was done. And this is what we do when going one-on-one doesn't work. That's meant to guard against false accusation. But there's another reason there's supposed to be two or three witnesses. It's much easier for the accused to say, you're wrong, you know what you're talking about, when it's just one person coming to them. But when more than one person comes to them, all of a sudden they're like, oh. And this, it's like a script. You can just write out what will happen next. You know what happens next. When it's one person,

the offender just acts miserably and may be accusatory. But when there's two or three offenders, what's likely to happen then is that they will start saying they're being bullied and picked on. And this isn't fair. No one understands. Me against the world sort of approach and mentality. They'll end up saying that they're a victim. And it's not always the case, and it's not always said that clearly. But in my observation of my own heart and in my work as a pastor, this is typically the storyline that goes along with this scenario. So Christians are not allowed to live as victims, to blame other people or God for their actions. They're not allowed to live as they please without facing the consequences and the judgments that their actions deserve. Here's the sweet thing about having brothers.

or other Christians come and confront you. The opportunity to repent is still available. You can still be one to repentance. But if you resist your brother and your brothers and on up the chain of command and you say no the whole way through, and then it comes time for you to stand before God, the day of repentance has passed. And there's no longer an opportunity to repent. Though at that time you may be much more motivated to repent, the opportunity is gone. And so it's an incredible kindness to have brothers and churches that give you opportunity to repent before that opportunity is gone. So far from being attacked or judged or ganged up on, it is love that motivates a brother, a Christian, to go to another and say, what you're doing is sin. I remember early, early on when I was a Christian and Vanessa and I were dating.

and we went and sat down with the pastor, and I wanted to get married. I was like, I've been a Christian for a few months, and I love her, and I would like to get married. And Vanessa had grown up in a Christian home, and the pastor liked me. The pastor's wife didn't. And we go up to a meeting about what to do. How do we go about getting married? I never had a dad. I've never seen a marriage. I don't know how this stuff works in the world, let alone in the church. You ask a question, you get an answer. The answer was, you guys are awful for each other and you need to break up. Your relationship is just a mess. Not the counsel I was expecting. It was painful. It was hard. And at that time, I didn't even regularly attend that church. I still lived in Chicago. I was just down visiting on the weekend to running into this buzzsaw. And the pastor and his wife stood by their counsel. With tears, they stood by it. And I got back in my car and went back to Chicago.

with an appointment on Valentine's Day a few days later to call Vanessa and sort out if we were going to listen or not, whether we were going to break up. So I went home. I think I was just me and my mom. And she's not a believer. I'm brand new Christian. Like, we're counting weeks, maybe a few months. And I tell my mom what's going on because I'm just an emotional wreck. And my mom is furious, I mean just furious, that the church would say something like, that they'd say, you're trouble. It's what I was told, your trouble. And she was so angry that anyone would say something like that to me. And had choice words about the people who had said it. And here I am, this crying, sad, brand new Christian mess. And what are we supposed to do? So we get on the phone and what do we do? We break up. Because it made a bunch of sense to us because we rationalized and it all seemed like the right thing to do. It didn't feel like the right thing to me. There was lots of crying.

A lot of crying. At least I was crying a lot. I don't know how much you were crying, but I cried enough for the both of us. And then I'm left sitting in Chicago, a brand new Christian, without really having much of a church home. And having this church down in Bloomington that had said, you know, the pastor and his wife of this church said this very difficult thing to me, really for the first time in my life ever. And I'm like, what is my life? I'm 21, brand new Christian. I've got a good job. What am I supposed to do with myself? I just broke up with my girlfriend. Life's pretty miserable. And what was clear to me was that I could either just go back to the life that I led before, which was gambling, weightlifting, and fornication, or I could continue to follow the Lord in the face of that difficult counsel. The counsel was not apologetic. It wasn't like, we're so sorry we have to say this to you. We know you're a nice guy, but it wasn't that.

There were things said like, if she was my daughter, I don't care if you're a Christian or not, I would not let you near her, given your history. It was not a pleasant counseling session. And I was left going, so what am I going to do? What are we going to do? I don't like what was said to me. I don't have a light. My life's all in pieces, and I'm a brand new Christian. What am I supposed to do? What I did was talk to Vanessa, and we broke up. And then I wrote a letter to the pastor and his wife, thanking them. And what was clear to me in that moment was not only that they loved Vanessa, which we could all get on board with, but that they loved God because of the difficulty of the things they had said to me. And I thought, I reasoned that there was no other reason that someone would say something so heavy and painful to me unless they loved God and cared more about protecting his people and his truth than they did about what some punk from Chicago thought of them.

which is what I was at the time, and it made me love them. And so we broke up, and eventually, a few months later, I moved to Bloomington because I thought, you know, I reasoned out in my mind, there's fathers here who take care of their children, their congregation, and that's what I need. I didn't have a dad. That's what I need. So I moved to Bloomington. We were broken up. I didn't know if Vanessa was coming back to school the next year or what. Why did I move to Bloomington? Because I wanted to get Vanessa back? I mean, yeah, I suppose. But really, I moved to Bloomington because I finally found a church. Not that I'd been to really any other churches before that, but I found a place where there were men who loved me and were willing to say hard things to me. And I thought, this is what I have to have. I'm hard-headed, I'm stubborn, and I'm full of sin. What I need are people who are strong enough and love God's word and trust him enough to stand up to me. Because I can be a force to reckon with, especially if I'm upset. So I moved to Bloomington.

They came and they confronted me. And they did all of that with us. And Vanessa wasn't even a member of the church. You'd just been attending there for a little over a semester. That was love. That was discipline. And the fruit of that love in our lives? Priceless. So if you don't listen to discipline, you're really rejecting an incredible harvest of righteousness and a blessing from God. And yet some still do. They don't listen to their brother. They don't listen to the witnesses. If more come, instead they say, I'm being attacked, I'm being judged. And they say, no, you're being loved. You're being loved. The goal is to get to the bottom of the situation and repentance. If even after the brothers come, the man refuses to listen, then Scripture teaches us that we should tell it to the church. What does it mean to tell it to the church? Does it mean to start gossiping at men's and women's groups or at youth group or whatever? Hey, did you hear? Did you know? Did you find out? Did you see on Facebook or wherever? That's not what it means to tell the church. What it means is that the lower courts, so to speak, the courts of personal relationship, the courts of brotherhood, have not remedied the situation. So now you come to the court of the church. You come to the elders, the pastors. That's what it means to tell the church. There have been times,

where we've had occasion to have people come and say, man, such and such did something, and I think you should know about it. And my response to them, our response to them is, have you talked to him about it? I mean, why are you telling me? It's not because I don't care, and it's not because I'm unwilling to get involved. It's because I'm asking, do you love your brother? Have you gone and confronted to him? Or are you just the cat that brings the dead mouse and lays it in front of my feet every morning? Like, you go deal with the hard stuff. You go love your brother. It'll be good for him and for you. But if that doesn't work, Scripture teaches us that it should come to the church. It should be told to the church, and then the church is involved. This is often where formal process or church discipline is initiated. There's been many steps that have been pursued and have failed. And so now it comes time for the church to get involved. And it's also worth noting that at any point along this...

process of brothers and then multiple brothers and then coming to the church. Repentance is the off-ramp. Repentance defined as those who keep watch, though, not repentance as defined by those who are in sin. Another way of articulating this is to say that this sort of discipline, by the time it gets to formal process, it may be a surprise to those who are not involved, but it is no surprise to those who are involved. It's been building. If the formal process doesn't work, which is typically short of excommunication. It's usually barring from the table or a censure or a particular rebuke. If that doesn't work, if the person still will not turn from their sins, then the church makes a judgment. And this passage articulates the judgment in this way. Let them be to you as a tax collector and a Gentile. Well, what is a tax collector and a Gentile? It's an unbeliever. It's an unbeliever. The judgment is that the person's life is not...

does not agree with Christian faith. They're not living a Christian life as judged by the church, by the elders and by the pastors. It means that that person, so far as the church is judged, is not a Christian, that they ought not to claim to be a Christian, and most painfully, that if they die while under that discipline, that the offender should have no hope of entering heaven. That's heavy. That's the sort of thing you'd like to avoid. That's not pleasant. And then Jesus adds, What does this mean? What it means very simply is that the judgments that elders and pastors and the church make, that God honors them. That those aren't just the judgments of men.

but that those men have been appointed by God and that those judgments are binding, not just on earth, but shall have been bound in heaven. Most of us, if we ran into some sort of conflict or some sort of discipline somewhere in our life, at work or in a family, we just kind of get up, dust ourselves off, and go, well, I'll just carry on with life. Many people do that with church discipline. But their negligence to attend to the discipline does not erase the discipline in God's eyes. It doesn't erase the discipline in the church's eyes. The judgment stands. and stands and stands. And if there's no repentance, may well stand through eternity. Now, who wants to be an elder? Does it sound like fun work? Easy work? Glamorous work? Sleep well at night work? It's a blessed work, but it's a hard work. It's hard to tell those that you love and have loved and still love these things. Are these judgments of the church infallible? No, they're not. Could a church err?

Or be wrong in the judgments that they make? Yeah. Has the church been wrong in the judgments that they've made? Yeah. The question to you, though, is do you want to hang eternity on whether you're right and they're wrong or the other way around? When the thing being confronted is often very simple. Church discipline is not the sort of thing that is enacted when you've stumbled into some sin. It's the sort of thing that builds and grows and metastasizes. over weeks and months and perhaps years? Are you willing in the face of all of that to say, I'm right and I'm wrong and I'll stake eternity on it? That's quite a gamble. The stakes couldn't be higher. And so no Christian should want their eternal destiny hanging in that balance, betting on themselves and against those that the Lord's raised up. Jesus concludes his passage by saying, again, I say to you.

If two of you agree on earth about anything that they ask, it shall be done for them by my Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in my name, I'm there in their midst. And this is God putting his seal, his stamp on the work, on the fallible work. He honors it. And so the question is, if God will honor the fallible work of the men he's raised up, shouldn't we also? Would it be so bad for someone to say that we've sinned, and require things of us that are not sin, and for us simply to heed what they say? Would it do us any harm? The answer is almost exclusively no. It would not do us any harm to do what we're told, even if they're wrong. You remember in Hebrews where it talks about fathers disciplining their sons, and he's making an argument from earthly fathers to heavenly fathers. And he says, we had earthly fathers who disciplined us as they saw.

fit, as they saw best. And what he's doing is leaving room for the fact that our fathers didn't always discipline us perfectly right down the line accurately. And yet they disciplined us as they saw best. And we would have done well to honor our fathers when they were wrong about the stuff. When they missed some detail, when they didn't understand, we would still do well to honor them and to obey them and to be careful to do what they say. If you want to know why dads and husbands don't lead in their house, It's because they're screw-ups. And they know it. And they don't want to screw anything else up, so they just take their hand off the wheel and go, well, I just won't screw it up that way. And yet they make a worse mistake by doing that. Fathers make mistakes. Pastors make mistakes. Churches make mistakes. Congregants make mistakes. We all sin. And yet in the midst of all of that failure, God gives us his word. He gives us his church. He gives us sinful men to lead us and keep watch over us and direct us.

And he honors the decisions that they make. And every bit of it except for God is prone to fail. And yet somehow God blesses it and glorifies himself through it. If we step out of that process and say, no, no, I know better than all of that. Where is Jonah? If God honors the fallen authorities that he raises up, then we should as well. In the home, in the church, and in society. In the end. Church discipline should be a very sobering topic for us, not something that we take lightly. It's also not something that we should be scandalized by, surprised by, oh no. And the reason we shouldn't be scandalized is because Christians still sin and need to be discipled and need to be told no. That discipline, that disciple, discipleship, is a sign of a healthy church. We must always remember that a little leaven leavens the whole lump.

And so we should be on guard against leaven in our own hearts and in our families and in our churches. That's what the elders are doing, if they're doing their work faithfully. And so we should be thankful for the men whom God raises up to keep watch over our souls. And if we disagree with them, we should honor God by submitting to them, knowing that they will give an account, not for our behavior, but for their work in watching over our souls. I asked you just a minute ago, who wants to be an elder? Dan, do you want to be an elder when you found out what being an elder was? Abram? Did you say, sign me up? Actually, what Abram said was, I thought I was going to be a deacon. I was a deacon in Bloomington. Can I be a deacon? He didn't quite say it that fervently, but he was like, uh. It's a weighty work. And the men who keep watch over your souls have big shoulders and do their work manfully and by faith. And not perfectly. But what have you ever done perfectly?

You know what the best part of being an elder and a pastor is? It's not the discipline. It's the joy of receiving back the son who wandered. And we've had occasion to do that. And as we have disciplined this discipline case and disciplined cases in the future, they'll arise, they'll come about. Someone in this room today will end up under church discipline in the future for something. Okay? Someone in this room today will end up under church discipline for something. And it's a joy to receive your brother back that was lost. And so we hope and we pray to that end and we ask you to do the same thing. Let's pray.