Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Policing the Ranks (1 Corinthians 5)
Date: October 1, 2023
Do you remember your parents’ punishing you for various things when you were a kid? What was that? You were being held accountable for the house rules. You may not have liked or agreed with those rules, but as a kid, you probably didn’t get much of a vote. As I told one of my boys the other day: “You are living in a totalitarian dictatorship and I’m the dictator.” That kind of accountability likely didn’t feel very good either. But if they got it right—and not all parents get it right—you are probably grateful now for the boundaries you hated then. Discipline is often like that. In fact, it’s almost always like that. And this is not something new. Almost 2,000 years ago, one of Jesus’ followers who wrote a letter that today we simply call “Hebrews” made this observation that is just as true today as it was back then: “No discipline seems enjoyable at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”
We often think about being disciplined by parents or coaches or teachers or even the government depending on the severity of our offense. Basically, whatever group we are a part of has some sort of disciplinary mechanism as part of its basic and healthy functioning. Whether these mechanisms are formalized or mostly informal, they help to keep members on track with the behavioral expectations of the group. Without these kinds of measures in place, a group cannot maintain its identity for long. It will eventually devolve into chaos because we are sinful people and that’s what sin does. Of all the places we are comfortable thinking about discipline like this, though, where we are sitting right now isn’t one of them.
This morning finds us in the second-to-last part of our teaching series, Nuts and Bolts. This has been a long but fruitful journey so far. For the last several weeks now we have been talking about the church and how to get it right. We started things off way back in August by clarifying exactly what the church is. The church is the people of Jesus called out to be His body on earth. We are to be doing the things Jesus would have been doing if He were still physically present on earth. After getting to experience together what some of these things are, we had a conversation about church membership. I tried then to make clear the fact that you really can’t be a faithful follower of Jesus apart from the church. To put that another way, you can’t follow Jesus well while at the same time disengaging from His body. It just doesn’t work like that. Over the last couple of weeks, then, we have talked about discipleship and leadership in the church.
Well, being a part of Jesus’ body comes front-loaded with some expectations. Because of a lack of understanding on this point, though, some churches have made the grave error of giving their people whole lists of do’s and don’ts. That’s not how the church is supposed to work. That being said, following Jesus doesn’t look the same as not following Jesus. And if the members of the church are all supposed to be following Jesus together, there has to be some kind of a way of helping each other to do this and do it well. Well, God has given us a mechanism for getting this. It’s called church discipline. This morning, I want to talk with you about church discipline, and how it can help us to get being the church right.
Helping us get our minds and hearts around this idea is going to be something the apostle Paul wrote to the church in ancient Corinth to help get them on track with being the church God had designed them to be. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to 1 Corinthians 5 and let’s take a look at this together. In 1 Corinthians 5, we find Paul giving the believers there some counsel on how to deal with a member of the church who was most decidedly not living up to the standards of Christ. Look at this with me starting right at the beginning of the chapter: “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and the kind of sexual immorality that is not even tolerated among the Gentiles.”
Now, that’s kind of an eye-catching start to the chapter here, so let’s think about it for just a second. Paul is bringing the church there in Corinth up to speed on the fact that there is a member there whose behavior is so out of sync with the example of Christ that not even the pagan culture surrounding the church was willing to tolerate it. Simply having someone who was a sinner like this in the church, though, was only part of the issue. The issue was that this guy was a member of the church—someone whose faith in Christ and commitment to following Jesus had been affirmed by the church. This guy was way out of line, yes, but worse than even that is that the rest of the church didn’t seem to care. Stay with me in the text at v. 2: “And you are arrogant! Shouldn’t you be filled with grief and remove from your congregation the one who did this?”
Well, this is the point at which many folks are going to recoil a bit in shock and horror. “Wait a second, Paul! Kick him out? What are you talking about?!? The church shouldn’t be kicking anybody out. It’s supposed to be a place of love and acceptance, you know, just like Jesus demonstrated?” And to these concerns, Paul has absolutely nothing to say. He ignores them and goes right on: “Even though I am absent in the body, I am present in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who has been doing such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus, and I am with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, hand that one over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.”
Judgment and handing someone over to Satan?!? What on earth is going on here? Did somebody slip something past the editors that doesn’t belong in the Bible but rather in a judgmental diatribe from some nut job, religious crank? What are we supposed to do with this? Might I suggest we pay attention to it? I’ll grant you there’s a lot here to trigger our modern sensibilities. Maybe some of you were ready to drop your phone or Bible on the floor after reading those verses. Perhaps you were even considering making a beeline to the back before I have a chance to say anything else crazy. But as with most of the times when something seems wildly out of place in the Scriptures, there’s more here than meets the eye.
The man in question here had embraced a sinful lifestyle. What’s more, and as Paul has already indicated, it was a sinful lifestyle that was so far outside the bounds of acceptable that not even the broader pagan culture was willing to give him quarter for it. Today there are some lifestyle choices that are wildly out of sync with the Scriptures, but which the culture will celebrate with gusto. There were then too. This guy’s behavior, though, didn’t make the cut even with the culture. And, this wasn’t some one-time lapse in judgment either. This wasn’t Paul insisting the church there throw the book at a guy who had an “Oops” moment and was trying to get himself back on track. This guy had headed off down this path sometime before, stuck to it, and showed no signs of any kind of a willingness to come back from it. In fact, he wasn’t even really convinced he was doing anything wrong. And although maybe there were some folks in the church who were initially a little squeamish about his behavior, they hadn’t addressed it then—perhaps for fear of creating unnecessary conflict or hurting someone’s feelings—and by now, everyone had pretty much gotten used to it. It was just the thing they didn’t talk about. In fact, they were starting to pat themselves on the back for how welcoming and tolerant a place they had become. After all, that’s what Jesus did, right?
Besides, shouldn’t the church be a hospital for sinners instead of a museum for saints? I know I’ve seen that on a church sign…and a bumper sticker…and a social media meme. It must be true. Well…sort of. Yes, the church should absolutely be a place where sinners are welcomed in and made well from their sin. Sin is deadly stuff. If sinners can’t get help for it here, where else are they going to go? But if they’re getting help with their sin, that would imply they are getting rid of it. And, once they are healthy by being covered in Christ, they don’t go back to it. If you went into a hospital today with some kind of a deadly disease, and they surrounded you with love, and they told you how welcome you were to be there, but then they didn’t do more than say, “You shouldn’t have to feel guilty for having that disease; we affirm you in your sickness, and want you to know that we won’t judge you for it one single bit,” you’re going to find a new hospital. If you were in a hospital and contracted a deadly disease while you were there, and the hospital just kind of ignored it because they didn’t want to make you feel bad for having it, you’d find a new hospital because that one is clearly broken.
Are you with me? The church should be a welcoming place for sinners just like Jesus was. No question there. But if it gives credence to the idea that failing to live up to the standards of Christ is okay or not a big deal by not having any kind of a mechanism for addressing sin in the lives of its members so as not to be perceived as being judgmental or causing conflict, how is that being faithful to the example of Jesus or the witness of the various other New Testament authors who all made abundantly clear that sin is not okay and should absolutely have no place in the life of a follower of Jesus?
Paul agrees. Come back to the text with me at v. 6: “Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little leaven leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new unleavened batch, as indeed you are. For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us observe the feast, not with old leaven or with the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” What Paul is saying here by drawing on imagery from the Passover celebration is that by tolerating sin in one member of the congregation, the church was threatening to poison the whole group. Sin doesn’t stay in one place. Once it wedges itself in the door, it goes about making itself at home eventually ruining everything it touches. When there is sin in the life of a member of the church, the church has to have a mechanism for dealing with that.
But isn’t taking this path going to make the church live down to its negative reputation in the culture for being a horribly judgmental institution? Not if we get it right. Look at the rest of the passage here with me starting in v. 9 now: “I wrote to you in a letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. I did not mean the immoral people of this world or the greedy and swindlers and idolaters; otherwise you would have to leave this world.” Does this make sense? Paul had apparently told them before to stop engaging with sexually immoral people. They assumed he meant people outside the church and acted accordingly. But he didn’t. He was talking about people inside the church. If the church was supposed to cut off ties from sinners in the world, we would have to go into full hermit mode because they’re everywhere. And if we did that, to whom would we be proclaiming the Gospel? The Corinthian church misunderstood Paul’s instructions and we can’t understand him that way either.
Keep going in the text, though. Look at what Paul says next. This is where we need to pay close attention. “But actually, I wrote you not to associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister and is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or verbally abusive, a drunkard or a swindler. Do not even eat with such a person.” Paul isn’t worried about people outside the church and what they do. That’s between them and God. He’s worried about people inside the church and what they do. That’s between them and God…and us who are also inside the church because we are all part of Christ’s body. If one part of the body is sick, the whole body suffers. “For what business is it of mine to judge outsiders? Don’t you judge those who are inside? God judges outsiders. Remove the evil person from among you.”
A few years ago I had to get my appendix out because it had switched teams and was actively playing for the other side. When all your parts are healthy, you get regular checkups to make sure everything is okay, and that there aren’t any hidden issues that need addressing, but you otherwise leave them to do their thing. When they start to go bad, though, you first try to fix them. Then, if they refuse to cooperate, you operate to remove them. You never want to do that, and it causes the whole body to be a little weaker because of the removal, but leaving them in place will eventually kill the body, so you remove them. Absent the part that was sick and hurting the body, the body eventually recovers and gets strong again.
So, does that mean every time somebody does something wrong, we kick them out of the church? We’d pretty soon wind up with nobody here. That’s actually a pretty significant misunderstanding of how healthy church discipline should work that, honestly, the devil has used to keep churches from practicing it at all, leading many to wind up exactly where the church here in Corinth was.
Think about it like this: When you see your child starting to run toward the street to chase a ball while a car is barrelling down the road she doesn’t see, what do you do? Do you say quietly to yourself, “Well, I don’t want to judge her and make her think she has to fit my mold in order to get along in life”? No! You shout at the top of your lungs and with as much emotion in your voice as you can: “STOP!!!” Why do you do that? Because you hate her? Of course not! It’s precisely the opposite. You do it because you love her and are committed to her thriving in life. Now, maybe she looks back at you (and doesn’t see the car pass because of it) with tears in her eyes because you were so mean to her in the moment. But the truth is, you saved her life. And, if you have already established a strong record of love and commitment to her best interests, she’s far more likely to understand why you used the amount of strength you did in that moment. And in the end, she’ll love and trust you more for it.
Healthy church discipline is not some tyrannical embrace of a hyper-legalism that seeks to control every aspect of the lives of people. Healthy church discipline is the means by which the members of a church help to lovingly hold each other accountable for their mutual pursuit of Christ. When a church gets it right, the whole body is built up in love and formed more fully into the image of Christ together. But what about these verses? Well, what Paul outlines for us here in 1 Corinthians 5 is the extreme end of the process. Breaking fellowship with a member like this isn’t something that happens until a long process has been followed during which time every possible outlet to encourage repentance on the part of the erring member is pursued until they are all exhausted. In the end, it has been made clear to all parties involved that the person has chosen to pursue his path of sin instead of the path of Christ and in spite of the church’s repeated and sincere attempts to convince him otherwise. Finally, the church takes the unfortunate but necessary step of making official what has already happened unofficially: the man has withdrawn from the church to a sufficient degree that continuing to call him a member doesn’t make sense. It’s dishonest. The church is saying, “We don’t recognize this man as a follower of Jesus anymore, and while anyone is welcome to come here, only followers of Jesus can be members here.” Disfellowshipping like this, though, isn’t the goal. The goal and hope and prayer is that this dramatic step gets him to finally recognize the gravity of his sin, repent of it, and reconnect with the body.
Again, though, all of that is the extreme end of a long process filled with multiple repentance offroads. At the first sign of repentance, the whole process stops. Indeed, the goal of church discipline like this is always repentance. Jesus once said that a person in this situation will “be like a Gentile and a tax collector to you.” And that sounds really harsh at first glance. But then you stop to think a minute about how Jesus actually treated Gentiles and tax collectors. He loved them without condition and sought to woo them into an embrace of the Gospel by His love. Then He died for them.
The church is indeed supposed to love everybody and that still applies here. We love people who are not members yet by receiving them just as they are and letting them experience the goodness of God through us. We show them the compassion of Christ when they struggle. We hold their hands and walk them into God’s kingdom. We love members of the church, on the other hand, by gently holding them accountable to the standards of the kingdom. To put that another way: They’ve signed up to follow Jesus, so we help them follow Jesus. This hopefully keeps them from running into the streets of sin and getting hit by a passing truck in the first place. If they refuse to listen, though, we make clear that we are letting them go. And then, when they’ve been hit by that truck, we go back to them with the love of Christ and help them pick up the pieces, showing them by our love why life in God’s kingdom is better than life in the world. And the goal of all of this is the building up of the body of Christ in love. Getting church discipline right makes the body of Christ stronger.
It gets stronger because everyone in it understands more clearly what the expectations for following Jesus are so they can better hold them. Think about it like this: Would you want to be a part of a club in which there were no clear expectations and yet people still occasionally and randomly came by to let you know you were doing it wrong? Yet how many churches operate exactly like this?
Healthy churches, though, are clear together on what following Jesus there looks like. These kinds of guidelines will, first and foremost, be deeply informed by the Scriptures. Depending on the exact culture of the church, the group may decide that a handful of other things are important enough to them to be considered membership expectations. And that’s okay as long as they don’t elevate these things over the points that do come directly from the Scriptures. These expectations can then be written down as a kind of church covenant. This covenant can serve as the starting point for church discipline. New members sign this covenant as a part of the membership process (and if it is introduced after the church is already in operation, all the former members renew their membership as well by signing it), and the membership becomes defined as those people who are following Jesus and have covenanted with this particular church to join with them in pursuit of the mission God has given them in Christ. By this, the formerly amorphous membership that didn’t actually mean anything goes away, and in its place there now exists a membership that can actually be the life-giving thing God always intended for it to be. Getting church discipline right makes the body of Christ stronger.
Okay, but when does the church start kicking people out? Hopefully never. When membership is a really healthy thing, ideally, we never get there. Instead, let’s say that Joe and Frank are members together in the church. One day, Joe notices that Frank hasn’t been around for a few weeks. He also remembers that as part of their membership covenant, they were both committed to being in worship consistently. So, Joe calls Frank up to check on him. He says, “Frank, I just wanted you to know that I’ve missed you lately. Is everything okay? Is there anything I can help you with or be praying over for you?” For his part, Frank is honest. He says, “Hey, thanks, Joe. No, I’m doing okay. The family has just been taking a bit of time away. We recently made it through a pretty busy season, and we’ve just been taking some time off from everything.” Joe says back, “Man, I’ve had those kinds of seasons too when a rest was just what the doctor ordered. But you know, I’ve found that there’s just something about connecting with my church family that has a way of filling up my soul when I’m tired even better than taking time away from everything including the church does. I’ll be praying for you guys. I hope I get to see you soon. The pastor was just talking this past week about a new teaching series starting this Sunday that sounds really good.” Later that evening, Frank says to his wife, “You know, honey, we’ve been out of church for a few weeks now. I got the most thoughtful call from Joe earlier this afternoon. We should get back this Sunday. I really have been missing the folks there.”
Do you know what that is? That’s church discipline in action. Frank wasn’t living up to the expectations of membership, his friend Joe reached out to gently and lovingly remind him of those, and Frank made the change to get back on track. Now, if Frank doesn’t do anything about Joe’s call, things gradually get more lovingly insistent and formalized from there, but ideally, this one phone call takes care of it. That’s church discipline. And the church will be stronger for it. Getting church discipline right makes the body of Christ stronger.
So, what do we do with all of this? Well, we don’t start looking for opportunities to kick anybody out. Once again: that’s not the goal. We want to follow Jesus together and make sure we are all growing in Him together as we do. We start by taking some steps to make membership meaningful here again in a way that goes beyond just emotions and relationships. Those things are important, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not the most important. Growing in Christ together is. And, to repeat something I said a few weeks ago, membership at First Baptist Oakboro right now doesn’t mean much more than that. We have literally hundreds of “members” here who haven’t darkened the door of the church in years. And we don’t really hold anyone to account for anything when it comes to following Jesus consistently and well. Listen: That’s unloving of us.
Friends, God is doing some really powerful renewing and building work in this church. As a part of that work, we need to seriously consider together taking a fresh look at making membership here meaningful. The place to start this is by assembling a new church covenant whereby the members of this church come together and say, “Yes, as members of First Baptist Oakboro, we are going to covenant together to do these things.” And then we set about holding each other accountable to it, delighting in the fact that we are surrounded by a group of people who we know beyond a shadow of a doubt are as committed to our growth and development in Christ as we are to theirs; who we know are committed to helping us when we struggle with that just as we are committed to them. And when we can rely on that fact without fear or hesitation, we are able to turn our efforts outward and start reaching more intentionally into our community and beyond with the Gospel message, growing God’s kingdom as we go. Getting church discipline right makes the body of Christ stronger.
Now, is any of this going to happen overnight? No, it won’t. This isn’t something we fix or adjust with the waving of a magic wand. This is a long process. But if we are going to be fully the church God created us in Christ to be, it is a step we need to take. We need to take it for the glory of God because we owe Him our full devotion and this is a significant way to help us give that to Him. We need to take it for each other because we love each other too much to let anyone slip through the cracks of righteousness and fall away from their faith because of it. We need to take it for a lost and hurting and broken community around us that needs the church in its midst to be strong. We need to take it for the next generation because they need a church that will last and prepare them well to withstand the test of culture that is coming their way without losing their faith in the process. Getting church discipline right makes the body of Christ stronger. Let’s commit to being stronger together.