Leaven Leavens the Lump

I ask you to remain standing in honor of God's Word as we read it together tonight. If you would turn with me to the book of 1st Corinthians. Tonight we come to chapter 5, 13 verses, and we'll read this chapter in its entirety.

1st Corinthians chapter 5 beginning at verse 1. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife and you are arrogant. Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body I am present in spirit and as if present I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you were assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you were to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are unleavened. For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world, but now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard or swindler, not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?

God judges those outside. Purge the evil person from among you. This is the word of the Lord. Let's go to God in prayer. Lord, would you open our spiritual eyes now that we might understand and believe your word? Would you soften our wills to submit to that word? And we ask that through the power of your Holy Spirit in us that you would use our time tonight to bear fruit in the lives of your people that are gathered here for worship now. We pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen.

You can be seated. Well, it's December 19th. Christmas Day is one week away and I'm preaching on excommunication tonight.

Merry Christmas. I debated veering off of our journey through the book of 1st Corinthians tonight just in order to focus on the incarnation given the season and all, but I knew Doug would be preaching on that very topic this morning and then coming up this Friday at our Christmas Eve service, so I thought I'd just stick to the series that we're already on and preach 1st Corinthians 5. But I do want to try to tie these two unlikely subjects together, the topics of church discipline and the coming the advent of Christ.

They're not entirely unrelated if we stop and think about it for long enough, and hopefully we can see and come to appreciate that connection. Maybe a bit more as we walk through our text tonight. I have a very vivid memory from way back when I was four or five years old. A movie that our family loved was scheduled to air on TV at the end of this particular week. Now young people need to understand this was before DVR and Netflix and Amazon Prime, back when you were entirely at the mercy of programming directors as to what you could watch and when you could watch it.

And so when a favorite movie was advertised, you had to plan your schedule around their schedule if you wanted to see the broadcaster, you'd miss it. Well that night finally came and I was so excited. The whole family had gathered on my parents bed. We had popcorn and coke. We were ready to watch this much anticipated movie. I was so excited I was bouncing all over the bed and making a nuisance of myself. One of my parents said, Eugene, sit still. You're gonna knock the popcorn over and ruin everything here. So sit still.

I did for a little bit. A minute later I was bouncing around the bed again and so another parent said, Eugene, sit still. Before long I was bouncing again and this went on for the entire opening of the movie until finally an ultimatum was given. Eugene, if you don't sit down you're going straight to bed.

Now that got my attention. So I sat perfectly still for like a lifetime. Thirty seconds later I was bouncing all over the place again just like I had been before, distracting everyone from from the movie.

This time, however, mercy had run out. I had overstayed my welcome and I was banished to my bedroom. My bedroom, by the way, shared a wall with my parents room so I could hear everything that was going on next door and I remember grieving as I fell asleep to the sounds of laughter and merriment next door, sounds of my family enjoying themselves without me, and it was disturbing to say the least.

I remember thinking to myself, why couldn't I have just sat still? Excommunication is not unlike the banishing of a disobedient child to his bedroom. It's the casting out of a Christian from the fellowship and enjoyment of the Covenant family so that the unrepentant sinner will feel the loss, will feel the missed opportunity and the devastation brought on by his sin.

It's not a happy topic to talk about. It's even less enjoyable to carry out, but it is a practice that is necessary and essential to a healthy church because its intended result is to actually rescue the sinner. Its intended result is to actually purify the church and ultimately its intended result is to honor the head of the church, which is the Lord Jesus Christ. As we walk through this passage tonight, we discover several important things regarding the exercise of discipline in the church. The first thing we have to acknowledge from our text is that church discipline is essential to a healthy church.

It's an essential part of a healthy church. Paul begins by saying it is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. That last phrase is an idiom that refers to a stepmother or a mother-in-law.

It doesn't refer to a biological mother. Nevertheless, it was a sin of such a vile nature that even pagans, non-Christians, unbelievers recognize this is a wicked practice. What then was the Corinthian Christians response? Verse 2, and you, while this is going on, Corinth, you are arrogant.

Now that's an amazing, interesting description. You'd think that a church tolerating heinous sin like this would maybe be described as negligent or careless, perhaps compromising, but Paul calls them arrogant. Later in verse 6, he'll call them boastful. Evidently a church that fails to exercise proper discipline is in some measure an arrogant church. I think we have to ask, what is so arrogant about failing in this matter of discipline? Well, think with me for a moment about why a church would neglect the exercise of discipline. Why would that happen? Why would Corinth or any church need to be reminded to exercise church discipline?

I think there could be any number of answers to that question. Perhaps we don't want to deal with sin in other people because we know that same sin is in us and we aren't ready to repent ourselves, so how dare we demand that someone else repent? Maybe we're ignorant of what actions deserve disciplinary process. Maybe we don't know how to carry out the mechanics of church discipline.

You know, I think it's quite possible in our southern genteel culture that we're sometimes more committed, perhaps, to social propriety than to spiritual holiness, and that may be the reason we're demotivated. We want to avoid this exercise of church discipline. We can't bring ourselves to confront someone with their sin because that's offensive. It's rude. It's taboo in our culture.

It's in bad taste. Whatever the reason for negligence in this area, the fact of the matter is God's Word commands holiness among God's people, and it instructs us to make use of the leverage of ecclesiastical pressure in the form of loving discipline in order to spur its members along in their pursuit of that holiness. And so when we give more weight to cultural sensibilities and social propriety than we do to the clear imperatives of Scripture, well, that's a demonstration of arrogance. To oppose or neglect the Word of God in order to accommodate our druthers or the social customs of the day is to put our wisdom above God's wisdom, isn't it? It's conceit. It's pride of the first order, and Paul calls it arrogance. Paul says in verse 2 that rather than allowing this arrogance, we ought to mourn over sin and the devastation that it causes. We need to take sin seriously.

We need to recognize and acknowledge the devastating consequence of sin that's left unchecked. When Meredith was about, my daughter Meredith was about a year old, she accidentally got a hold of a bottle of blood thinner pills, and we didn't know if she had swallowed any or not, so we called poison control for advice. They told us to rush her to the ER where they made her drink this disgusting charcoal powder mix, and then they pumped her stomach clean, and I remember Laura and me holding her hands as the nurses strapped her to this table in the ER so she wouldn't try to get away, and then they began inserting this tube down her throat, and she was screaming at the top of her lungs, and she just looked at us with this face of betrayal.

Mom and Dad, why are you letting these strangers torture me like this? She couldn't understand that what we were doing was for her own good. We were trying to save her life.

Well, she survived the ordeal and was fine, but we had to do what we did or else there could have been devastating results. We had to take this seriously. I think church discipline is a lot like that. It feels like torture. It feels like it's harming more than helping at times, and we can't ignore the effects of sin. We can respond with negligent arrogance like Corinth did, telling ourselves we know better, or we can mourn the sin of our brothers and sisters as we submit ourselves to God's wisdom and remove the unrepentant sinner, verse 2, from among us. There's no question then that for a church to be healthy and holy, there are times when it must do the hard work of exercising biblical church discipline.

Paul tells us as much. But then this brings up several questions. For example, how do we know when formal discipline is the right response? How do we carry out that discipline practically? What is the purpose? What's the objective? What are the end goals of this process?

And we can actually answer several of these questions as we study the situation that occurred here at Corinth. For starters, let's take the question of purpose. Why do we practice church discipline? What's the goal, the objective that we're after?

Well, Paul mentions at least three goals in our text. First of all, we exercise church discipline for the good of the sinner, for the good of the sinner. I'm afraid that oftentimes the prevailing attitude towards the sin of a Christian brother or sister is, let's get this over with. He's being too disruptive. This situation is causing too much bad PR, so let's rush to judgment. Let's burn the bridge. Let's move on.

Get this behind us. And if we're not careful to keep our own emotional reactions in check, we forget that when it comes to the discipline in the church, the goal is restorative, not punitive. Our own book of church order says, the power which Christ has given the church is for building up and not for destruction. It is to be exercised as under a dispensation of mercy and not of wrath.

The motivation behind discipline is restorative rather than punitive. So the goal of this process is to see an unrepentant sinner repent, to be restored, to come back to the Lord in full repentance, to see the excommunicated person restored to communion. We see this goal very clearly there in verse 5.

Paul says, you are to deliver this man who had committed a sexual immorality, deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. There is protection in the church. There are means of grace to be enjoyed in the church. There is the the moral reinforcement of encouragement of like-minded saints in the church, but being put out of this covenant community means being cut off from those very benefits. The natural effect then of being cut off from these benefits is that one's sins and the consequences of those sins are sped up.

They're accelerated, so much so that Paul refers to it as a delivering over to Satan. The impenitent person wants his sins, so let him have it, and in doing so we're removing him from all the restraining graces that he is spurning. The effect of this turning over to Satan, Paul says, is the destruction of the flesh. Now the word flesh is a tricky word in the New Testament.

Sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's negative, sometimes it's neutral. The word flesh here simply refers to the physical aspects of one's life. To say that turning someone loose in this regard is to destroy their flesh is simply acknowledging that a sinful lifestyle often has physical, temporal consequences. Consequences that affect your health or your abilities, your emotional state, your mental state, and so on. I may give myself without restraint to alcohol or promiscuity or to bitterness and and resentment or to anger and deception and greed.

Eventually those indulgences will begin to wear me down physically and emotionally and mentally. People can indulge in so much sin that they literally die from the consequence, from the effects of this indulgence. But Paul's hope is that the unrepentant individual who is given over to these lusts of the flesh will begin to taste enough of the misery and pain and ruin that comes with it that he will see his sin for what it is and he'll abandon that sin and return in humility and repentance to the faithfulness that he once forsook. The goal is punishment for the sake of restoration, not punishment for punishment's sake. Now before we look at another goal or objective of church discipline, let me point out an underlying assumption that's maybe easy to miss in this text, but it's very much embedded in this idea of removing a professing Christian from the church, delivering them over to Satan. If that is the action that is to be taken in order to reclaim a sinner, then it implies, doesn't it, that being connected to the church is of great value.

Isn't that the underlying assumption? If being cut off from the church is supposed to be devastating, then it must mean that being a part of the church is immensely important and of value, something to be treasured. I fear, however, that our modern attitude towards church membership and participation in the body is such that excommunication has largely lost its teeth. It's as if a parent tells a child, you better behave or I'm gonna not let you eat your broccoli.

If we don't like broccoli, if we don't see the value of eating healthy vegetables, we're not the least bit concerned about losing that privilege. When it comes to church discipline, I wonder if we've so downplayed the importance of our connection to the visible church that the threat of having that connection severed just makes us shrug rather than panic. If excommunication doesn't sting, then it probably confirms a disconnectedness from Christ, because you can't love the bridegroom and hate what the bridegroom loves.

To mock the spanking is to display an unrepentant spirit for the sin. All that to say, love for the church is an underlying assumption here when it comes to the practice of biblical church discipline. And if that's the case, then when we're in fellowship with church, we need to foster a love for the church, because if the time comes, God forbid, where we need to be disciplined by the church, we need to have fostered that connection so that excommunication, if it has to take place, can do its work. The first goal of church discipline then is the salvation of the sinner, leveraging his love for the people of God and the means of grace in order to motivate him to repent. But there's a second goal of church discipline.

Not only is it a practice for the good of the sinner, it's also practiced for the purity of the church. Look at verse 6. It says, Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened.

And then verse 11 says, I'm writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name brother if he's guilty of sexual immorality or greed or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, swindler, not even to eat with such a one. So what's all this talk of leaven? Well, leaven is yeast. It's an organism that has an amazing capacity to replicate and spread. And so bakers put it in dough to make it rise.

It's delicious. That's what it does. But in Scripture, leaven is sometimes used metaphorically to symbolize wickedness. Once wickedness gets into something, it's gonna spread quickly. It's gonna spread completely, thoroughly, just like leaven spreads in dough. The idea is that once you've turned leaven loose, there's no taking it back. There's not an undo button when it comes to wickedness. In the same way, once you allow sin to fester in your life, in your family, in your church, there's no undoing it.

It will spread quickly and it will spread thoroughly. In the book of Exodus, we read about God's deliverance of Israel from Egypt. And we read how on the night God would finally bring this magnificent deliverance to pass, he instructed each house in Israel to kill a lamb. And they were to take some of this blood from this slain animal and and paint it on their doorposts and across the lintel. They were to eat the meat after that. Well, that night, an angel came through Egypt, killing all the firstborn children. This was an act of divine judgment that Egypt deserved, and God swept through Egypt, killing the firstborn. This angel passed over, hence the name Passover, the homes that had the blood on the front door. That blood protected them. You're seeing the metaphor, right?

You're seeing the symbolism play out. Well, the commemoration of this historic event of Passover became an annual festival every year. Israelites would kill a Passover lamb.

They would put the blood on the front door, just like they had done in Egypt. But God added another part to this Passover ceremony. He told them that for seven days leading up to Passover, they were to clean out all the leaven out of their homes, all the yeast, and were not to eat anything that had leaven in it. And so Passover in the Old Testament is often referred to as the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Well, this Passover feast was doing much more than just looking back to Exodus. It was also looking forward to the Messiah, and the symbolism in this feast is made very clear, especially in light of the New Testament's frequent explanation of the symbols. Leaven represents sin. Christ is the Passover lamb. The blood on the door posts points us to Christ on the cross.

Egypt is the world. Canaan is the new heavens and new earth, and on and on the symbolism goes. So when we come to 1st Corinthians 5 and Paul begins to talk about the need to separate from unrepentant professing believers because leaven leavens the whole lump, he's saying that when we allow sin to go unaddressed, unchecked, and unchallenged in the body of Christ, we're not merely doing a disservice to the unrepentant sinner. We're also running the risk of that sin spreading and contaminating the whole covenant community. It's the principle of bad company corrupting good morals.

What we tolerate, we will eventually condone and embrace and become. And so the goal of church discipline is not merely to motivate the sinner to repent, it's also to keep sin from becoming normalized within the body of Christ through its tolerance within the church. The neglect discipline then is not simply a failure to love the individual who's sinning, it's also a failure to love the whole church because one of the intended goals of the disciplinary process is protection for the body from the leaven of unrepentant sin.

But then there's a third goal or objective to be pursued with regard to church discipline. Not only is it good for the individual and for the purity of the church, it is also for the honor of Christ. For the honor of Christ. Paul says in the latter half of verse 7, For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. So thinking metaphorically still, Christ is our Passover lamb. In other words, Christ is for believers what the Passover was for Jews.

The Passover demonstrated God's covenant of love for Israel and it distinguished them from Egypt in a thousand different ways. They belonged to God and so God would protect them and preserve them, but part of that protection and preservation was that God would also sanctify them. He would make them holy, unlike those unholy Egyptians around them. They were saved by the blood and so they were different and they were to be different.

They were set apart. They were holy in conduct and in creed. To claim the protection offered by the Passover lamb and yet disregard the prohibition against eating leaven would ruin the whole point. If the lamb saves you, he saves you all the way across, all the way down.

Brothers and sisters, this raises the stakes. If we toy with sin in our midst by prioritizing tolerance over purity or niceness over holiness, if we pretend not to notice what God tells us to reject, we're not only playing with leaven that will eventually overrun us, we are demeaning the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. We're essentially saying, thanks Jesus for getting us out of hell, but we got it from here. And this is the point where our text tonight most clearly bumps up against the Advent season in which we find ourselves. You know, there is a right way and a wrong way to celebrate the Incarnation, just as there was a right way and a wrong way for Old Testament Israel to celebrate the Passover festival. Now my intention tonight is not to ruin anyone's celebration of Christmas, but church, we would be hypocrites if we imbibed in all the festivities of Advent, all in the name of celebrating the Christ child, only to then turn around and forget that he came to mortify our sin through his death on the cross. You cannot sincerely celebrate the incarnate Son of God while giving a pass to the sin in your life. We mortify sin in our own lives. We mortify sin in the life of the church because the glory of Christ demands it.

If he is our Passover lamb, then we have no right to indulge in the leaven of sin through negligence or laxity as we fight sin. So however you celebrate the coming of Christ, do so in such a way as to acknowledge why he came and in such a way as to not be ashamed when he comes again. Well, we've seen that church discipline is important.

We've seen why it's important. Lastly, we see how church discipline is to be practiced. Paul gives us a very skeletal description of the process in verses 3 through 5. We have a much more comprehensive description in Matthew 18.

Let me just briefly highlight some practical aspects of the process of church discipline. In verse 3, Paul says, For though absent in body, I am present in spirit, and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. So notice first that an actual judgment is pronounced.

A verdict is rendered. This isn't some sort of informal slap on the wrist. It's an official apostolic declaration of guilt.

Verse 4, When you, plural, when y'all are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan. So notice from that that this is a very public process. This isn't happening in some back alley behind the church.

It's happening front and center while the church is assembled. Remember, the disciplinary process is intended for the benefit of the whole covenant community. Public sin is publicly condemned so as not to be publicly condoned. So in the case of the Corinthian man, church discipline was was definite, it was apostolically corroborated, and it was administered in public. If we head over to Matthew 18 just for a second, we find a more elaborate description of the process that Paul describes in 1st Corinthians 5. Matthew says in Matthew 18 verse 15, and you all know this this passage well, I think, If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.

That's very private, very informal, very personal. That's the starting point. But then if he rejects that informal admonition, Matthew says, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. So the formality of it increases, doesn't it? As the publicity of it increases, the formality of it also increases. If he still refuses to listen, Matthew says, tell it to the church.

Well now the scandal's gone fully public. You see how at each stage the discipline, at each stage of the discipline, the pressure to repent increases. But then Matthew's final step is where Paul took up the issue at Corinth.

Matthew says, and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. And that's the stage we pick up the story in 1st Corinthians 5. What we gather from Matthew's fuller description is that formal discipline of a church member is not to be administered hastily. We're required to take pains in charging a brother or sister with sin. We also see that there are varying degrees of formality of discipline. Sometimes the discipline is formal, as was the case with with Paul in the Corinthian, in which an official verdict must be rendered.

Other times the discipline is more informal, in which a simple appeal to a conscience is appropriate. Sometimes church discipline is private, other times it's very public, depending on how widely known the sin is. Matthew also insists upon the necessity of investigation and proof by the mouth of two or three witnesses, and this I think suggests some sort of judicial process by which evidence can be evaluated and corroborated or thrown out. We'll leave it there as far as Matthew 18 goes, but I want to highlight three important distinctions back in 1st Corinthians 5 that we need to keep in mind through all of this, and we'll end with these. First, there's a distinction between repentant and unrepentant members. A distinction between the repentant and unrepentant Christian.

Now hear me closely. Not all sin that I observe in my Christian brother or sister requires formal church discipline. Sometimes sin is committed in ignorance, isn't it? We've been guilty of that ourselves, right?

We just didn't know better. Sometimes it's committed intentionally, but the offender is grieved by it and is repentant. Did you notice that in 1st Corinthians 5, Paul, in addressing the Corinthians, identifies specific sins of which they are guilty. He's telling them to excommunicate someone, but he's also identifying sin in them, in the ones doing the excommunication. He says in verse 2, you're arrogant. So it begs the question, why is Paul ready to excommunicate Mr. Incest but not Mr.

Arrogant? Well, because formal excommunication is reserved for those who are demonstrably unrepentant. The principle to remember is that just because a person sins doesn't mean he's a candidate for ecclesiastical censorship. There is room for appropriate forbearance in the process.

So we don't want to be too slow to judge. That's what Corinth was doing, but neither do we want to be too quick to judge. I came across a quote by St. Augustine that I think is timely with regard to this passage.

Let me just read it. Augustine said, some people, Christians, not from hatred of other men's iniquity, but zeal for their own name, cover themselves with the shadow of stern severity. I'm going to be so spiritual and point out everybody else's sin. They pervert the correction of a brother's fault, which scripturally is to be done with moderation.

Instead, they pervert it into sacrilegious schism, and under a pretext of severe justice, persuade others to a savage cruelty, desiring nothing more than to burst the bond of unity and peace. Again, we have two ditches, don't we? We have two imbalances, and we want to stay out of both of those imbalances. We do well, I think, to remember that immediately following Matthew 18's instruction concerning the process of church discipline, we see Peter asking Jesus how forbearing we should be with those who have wronged us, and Peter says it's seven times good enough, and what does Jesus say?

No, 70 times seven. In other words, you absorb as much as you can. Admonish when you must, but even in our admonishing, remember you too are a sinner saved by grace. So, discipline is reserved for unrepentant professing believers. Secondly, there's a distinction in how we respond to the sins of believers as compared to unbelievers. Paul's very explicit about this in verses 9 through 11, and the underlying assumption here is that as Christians, we live in two kingdoms, the church and the world, and the practices and procedures by which we live in each are not always identical. There will be times when you cannot break bread with a professing Christian because of the scandalous nature of their impenitence and its reflection on the name of Christ, while at the same time you can and should break bread with an unregenerate pagan. That feels like hypocrisy sometimes, doesn't it?

But it's not. There's no inconsistency or hypocrisy in this because your purpose in separating from this unrepentant professing believer is the winning back of that person, a person who has already known the sweetness of Christian fellowship, and he needs to feel the poignancy of its loss. While your purpose in the case of fellowshipping with a pagan who's never known Christ is to win a person who's never known what that sweet fellowship is like.

He can't miss it because he's never had it. I think the parable of wheat and tares has special application to this principle. In fact, it might be a good idea to go home and read that parable alongside 1 Corinthians 5. Finally, there's a distinction between the temporal judgment of the church in ecclesiastical matters and the ultimate judgment of God in salvation. Paul acknowledges in verse 12, what have I to do with judging outsiders, unbelievers out there in the world? God judges those outside. Now, in the very next chapter for 1 Corinthians 6, Paul is going to acknowledge that there is coming a day when the people of God will judge the world, but that day is not here yet.

The church has authority now to excommunicate a professing believer who is not walking worthily of Christ, but it is not for us to declare an unbeliever elect or non-elect. From our vantage point in redemptive history, we can't know that. God can and may still change their heart, and so we witness to the lost, we warn the lost, we call them to repentance and faith, but we don't pronounce final judgment on them. That is for God to do in God's timing. Christian, you were saved by grace, but you were saved by grace unto good works. God wants us to pursue holiness and virtue. When we fail in that pursuit, we need to repent. When our brothers and sisters in Christ fail in that pursuit, they need to repent. When we don't want to repent, we need the mutual encouragement and sometimes the harsh rebuke of the body of Christ. So whether we are admonishing or being admonished, we need to remember that chastening, discipline, is intended for the good of the sinner, for the purity of the church, and ultimately for the honor of Christ.

Let's pray. Lord, remind us that chastening is an expression of your love for your people. May Grace Church be a body that loves what you love and that demonstrates that love through a consistent and gracious discipline whenever it is necessary. But Lord, make us a body of believers that also never forgets the grace that we have been shown in Christ. And it's in that name we pray. Amen.