Love One Another - How to Restore Others After Moral Failure, Part 1

How many times have you heard, Judge not lest you be judged in a conversation?

Now let me ask you, is there ever a time when we as believers are supposed to judge? You want to know the answer to that question? Stick around, you might be surprised. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Our mission is to inspire Christians to be genuine followers of Jesus and to empower them to be active disciple makers in our world.

We're in the middle of our series Love One Another. For the past several broadcasts, we've explored how to embrace those who are different, encourage the discouraged, and forge lasting friendships. Now to catch up on any of these enlightening topics, check out the Chip Ingram app or livingontheedge.org. But today Chip tackles the complex issue of rebuilding someone who sinned in a significant way, revealing what scripture says about the balance between grace and tough love.

If you have a Bible, Chip will be in the book of Galatians chapter 6. So go there now as we begin Chip's message, How to Restore Others After Moral Failure. Few things in all the world will tell a church as much about where its heart's at and how mature we are than how we respond. Ready for this? To open blatant sin in the camp.

Now let me repeat that. Few things in all the world will tell a church about where a church's heart is and the level of maturity in that church as to how the church responds to open blatant sin in the camp. I mean when there's something happens in the life of the church, I don't mean different perspectives and could this be right or maybe, but I mean it is black and white, you know it's wrong. How a church responds to that really tells you a lot about it.

In fact I'd go one further. I'd suggest that how you respond and how I respond to open blatant sin in our relational network among other Christians will tell you a lot more about your heart and your own maturity than maybe you ever want to know. See what I've observed over the years and you know you meet with pastors all over the place, you meet with people, you read. When it comes to something that happens in the life of a church where I mean it's bad and people make some big bad decisions that reverberate through a group, there are normally two responses. In fact usually they're extremes.

Exhibit A I call passive indifference. I remember being a young Christian, I was in West Virginia and you know a little church and there was a real key leader. I mean everyone looked up to him and out of the blue is one of those classic stories, but I've only been a Christian couple maybe three years at the most and he left town with another woman and left a wife and a couple three kids and I mean it was one of these slam dunk just whoa.

But no one ever said anything. You know people would talk about it here and you hear people talk about it in the halls over here and someone else would say something here. And you know I'm kind of naive and kind of dumb and only been in the Bible for a couple years so I thought well I'll just go to the people we're supposed to know and so I went to one of the leaders and a pastor said you know I kind of hear second third fourth hand this guy that we all really respect. Now is that story true that he just kind of bail on his family and is involved in immoral affair with another person?

Said yeah that's true. I said well kind of what do you do about that? And I'll never forget this leader pastor they just sort of shrugged their shoulders and said it's a shame isn't it? And I thought to myself you know I'm not the most mature guy and I've never even heard the word church discipline and I have no idea what the right godly response ought to be to those kind of situations but I just have an inkling that I didn't hear it right then either.

The opposite extreme I call exhibit B instead of passive indifference it's painful insensitivity. This happened in a small little town in Texas and a similar situation not near as dramatic or drastic but it was outside the clear moral boundaries a little iffy. But I mean to tell you there's a lady that became the object not only of a churches but of an entire communities scorn and wrath.

I mean if you wanted to if you wanted to write a movie about let's make Christians look as ugly as mean as heartless and doing something completely not out of love. You could have seen it here. I remember a couple three years later sitting with this woman in a coffee shop type setting with a small group of other people and I asked her about this situation and she was the one.

They did everything but kind of brand the letter A you know scarlet letter on her chest and that wasn't the case. And she said you know I would walk in a drugstore I would walk in the grocery store and people would give me the kind of looks and they would turn away in such a way that I have never felt not like I've done something wrong. But like I was the devil incarnate. Now I don't know about you but it seems that those two extremes are probably not God's way to deal with people that have fallen. You know we all struggle we all make mistakes and and we're in a series talking about what did Jesus say how do we love one another. Well one of the things you have to figure out if we're really going to love one another is not only how do you love people when they're well. How do you love people when they fall.

I don't mean a little bit when they just flat blow it. What's the response. And so rather than those two extremes.

Let me ask you if you haven't already to pull out a little teaching handout. And what I'd like to do is walk through what Jesus would say. In fact what he did say about these situations. Once you go through the steps of conflict resolution you really try to preserve the unity but the people you know they go south they just won't hear of it follow the biblical guidelines that Jesus said in Matthew 18.

Because instead of exhibit A passive indifference and instead of exhibit B painful insensitivity. Here's the way Jesus said we should handle the situations. Step one is a private conference when you know or if whether I know someone who has really dropped the ball has fallen. It says if your brother sins against you go and show him his fault just between the two of you. If he listens to you you've won your brother 90 percent of the time that's all it takes. 90 percent of the time people who who make a mistake and they're moving in a bad direction a close trusted loving friend.

It's amazing what that will do and it's also amazing how rarely we do it. Second step if you go to them and there's no movement step two small group confrontation. But if he will not listen take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. Now notice the legal terms there testimony and witnesses. This is not get a big group of people to gang up on someone to kind of guilt them into doing what's right. This has the idea of testimonies witnesses objectivity establishing the credibility make sure that this is exactly what happened. Make sure all the facts are correct.

Make sure that all parties agree that this is in fact the data in question. Third if after the small group confrontation doesn't work there's public disclosure verse 17 first half. If he refuses to listen to them tell it to the church. In a real small church like where I came from in West Virginia you know the church is a 30 40 50 maybe 100 people. If anyone does anything that has any kind of public notice everybody knows about it.

Because half the people are related anyway. And so tell it to the church would probably mean take it to that group because that's a sphere of influence. And you take it with a heart of love and compassion that says hey you know Bob or Mary or whoever it is you know they're involved in this situation.

It's clearly outside of God's will for them. I want you to pray for him. I want you to care for him. As you see him in the grocery store if you have a personal relationship with him go to him. Tell him you love him.

Tell him you care. Urge them. Encourage them to do what they know is right. If that doesn't work then the final step is public exclusion.

Verse 17 second half. And if he refuses to listen even to the church treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. And the idea here being is withdraw the support the underpinning of love. The relational network the care. It doesn't mean you know you don't treat unbelievers in a harsh rude negative manner.

But you don't have a moral responsibility to move in to meet the needs of their life. It's the apostle Paul says it well first Corinthians chapter 5 there was a man who was involved in sexual immorality with his mother-in-law. And the church kind of started out with passive indifference and saying well you know I mean guess you know who are we. And the apostle said you're the church. In fact he talks about boy don't judge other people outside the church but inside the church you have a moral responsibility. And then Paul said something very unusual there.

As though the church provides an umbrella of protection and grace and concern. He says I've removed that one and literally turned him over to Satan that he might be buffeted. The idea turn him over to the world system let the consequences weigh on his life.

And like a velvet vice let the consequences come and bear down to the point where he says you know something that was a dumb thing. I know that's not God's will. But all this is done with one purpose to restore. And so that means it's always done in truth and it's always done in love and those things balanced. It may be very firm but it's never with a in your face.

It's never with a pointing finger in the face. It's a look you know this hurts us as much or more than you. We long to see you restored. We're not going to go away. You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. And before he continues our series Love One Another.

Have you ever questioned your life's purpose because your job talents and personality don't quite match up? Join us after the teaching as Chip introduces a resource that we have that will help you appreciate how God's designed you. And show you how to harness the exceptional gifts he's blessed you with.

Stick around to learn more. Well with that here's Chip to continue today's message. Now here's the good news. The good news is when we do that God's way not passively saying oh well you know what the heck we just lost another one. Or not with this self-righteous you know thumping people in the face. But when you do it right, when you do it lovingly, when you don't give up on people.

Here's the good news. God's way works. The great majority of disciplined situations end at steps one, two or three. When done in love and gentleness God uses the testimony and concern of his people to jar us out of our deceived state and return to Christ and his people. See when people end up in situations like this often they just start kind of messing around. It's kind of like a big river and there's a rapids in the middle and the current is strong.

But you know there's little coves and the water's not very deep and you know it's okay here and you start walking over here. You know then pretty soon you're playing and you don't pay any attention and you know I'm just flirting. I'm just goofing around. I mean I'm a married man. I'm a Christian. I'd never do that to anyone because there's no way because I knew you could really get in trouble if you ever did that and pretty soon you're in the current.

And that's the picture. There are people who are caught. People who are surprised. People get sucked in and they realize oh my gosh what have I done. But if you catch them early and if you do it biblically a great majority of the cases people oh thank you. It's like reaching a hand or throwing a life preserver and you pull them in before they get caught in the current and go over the falls and do something really bad. What am I saying?

I'm saying when you do it right, when you do it God's way, when you love him, when you care, when you meet him, you pray for counseling if you need to, you go to whatever extent. You know what? People repent. They turn.

Now here's the question I want to ask and answer though today. What do you do? What do you do with that person and let's make it the sexual sin because it gets so much press. What do you do with the person that has stepped out and is involved in immorality of some kind? What do you do to the person who has made devastating decisions, who have broken apart families, who's done things that are you know you just say how in the world did you get involved in that? And people are disappointed and people are disillusioned and there's consequences and the ripples.

How do you restore them? How do you bring those people once they say hey I see the error of my way but man I'm on the rapids going toward the waterfalls or I'm at the bottom of the waterfalls, I've already crashed. How do you restore those kind of people and what does God have to say about it? The answer is in Galatians chapter 6 verses 1 and 2.

That's what we're going to look at today. It says brothers, notice it's written to a group. If someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently.

When you discover that that's a situation he says you know as a group responsibility the spiritually mature in the group should restore this person and notice how it should be done, gently. Verse 2, carry or bear one another's burdens and in this way you will fulfill the law of, and add the word in your notes, the Christ. In the original text there's an article there. The law of the Christ. What was the law of the Christ?

What's the singular law that he made? It's John 13. A new commandment, a new law I've given to you what? That you love one another how? Just as I've loved you. So he's saying that when we restore someone, when we take someone's life who's been shipwrecked, they've done what they shouldn't have done, they've blown it, they know it's wrong.

Everyone else knows it's wrong. When you can restore, bring that person not only out of the situation but to a point of fruitfulness, he says you have fulfilled the law of the Christ. You've done for him what Jesus did for Peter. Now here's the deal. Now and then we take the Bible, and I didn't grow up reading it, and since I didn't, there's times that it's helpful.

I wouldn't wish that for my kids, but sometimes when you get so close to something you miss some of the points. We kind of sanitize it. We kind of make some of those Bible characters nice, pristine, wonderful little people. Hey, that's not who the heroes of the Bible are.

Most of them had to be restored. Moses was a murderer. He wasn't kind of a nice guy who shot a slingshot or a BB gun at someone and said, oh gosh, I didn't mean to do that.

This is a guy out of anger who maliciously killed a person, and it was wrong. And yet God put him on a program where he would be the law giver of the Ten Commandments and be greatly used. You know, Peter, sometimes we think of Peter, oh yeah, Peter puts his foot in his mouth, and oh yeah, that night he did kind of betray Christ.

Do you understand what happened there? See, we get these sexual sins way up here. I'll tell you what, in the eyes of God, I don't think he has the same ranking that we do. I think spiritual adultery and spiritual idolatry is probably a little higher on his list if he ranks them than some of the sexual sins. You know what Peter did? He committed spiritual adultery. That very night he said, Lord, I'll tell you what, I'm loyal. I'm with you, man, no matter what.

If I have to die, you can count on me. But later on, he's cursing. He said, I never knew the guy. And if you want to put it in context, imagine, if you're married, imagine how Theresa would feel. If someone comes in my face, I say, well, I don't know her. Those four kids must be hers, I don't know. House payments, they're hers, man. And you'd imagine Theresa looking at me and saying, what about that?

Have I met you before? That's what Peter did. And Jesus took him out on the beach and he restored him.

David was a double dipper. He not only committed murder, he committed adultery too. And he's the author of the Psalms and he's a man after God's own heart.

Why? Because he did terrible things. No. But what I'm trying to tell you is that God uses imperfect people.

God is the God of second chances. Now, in all those people, did he just wave a magic wand and take away the consequences? No. Did they go through a heartache? Yes. Did they ruin relationships and have just years of rebuilding? Absolutely. But were they restored? Were they used?

Yes. Before we look at what Galatians 6, 1 and 2 means, I want to ask you to do a little mental work with me. I'd like you to think of someone in your relational network that you might describe as a fallen Christian. Who do you know that used to really walk with the Lord that's not now? Who do you know that had a moral lapse?

Who do you know as someone who just went off the end of the waterfalls? Because I want you to listen to this with ears about how God may want you to be a part of the solution of restoring him. And by the way, if that person happens to be the person who's in your seat, listen to him with those ears. So what does it mean?

You got the person in mind? What's it mean when it says we're to restore those who have fallen? Here's the situation. The situation in this is a fellow Christian is caught or overcome by sin. Now the word caught there, it's a decent translation because it's trying to capture a thought, but it doesn't really capture the one. When we think of caught, what do we think of? We think of opening a bedroom door and going, ah, gotcha. That's not it.

That's not here. The word caught here literally means to come upon, to take unaware, to be overtaken. It means it's caught as in something catches you. It means to be surprised, literally.

It's a picture of that person who is moving out toward the rapids, and as he moves out toward the rapids, once he gets into the rapids and realizes, oh my gosh, I've done something I never dreamed I would do, he's surprised. The apostle Paul in Galatians 3.19 uses the word trespass instead of the word that's translated here for sin, and they're different words. In 3.19, it means God draws a line in the sand and says, thou shall not, and you say, you want to bet, and you walk across it. The word here for a fault or sin is a different word. It was used before the New Testament in the papyri to mean to slip or to blunder unintentionally. In the New Testament, it has the idea of sinning, but it's a sinning that's more like a blunder. It has the idea that you've crossed a moral boundary, but it wasn't with willful, volitional, angry intent. It's like that person who finds himself caught or overtaken by sin only to say, how did I get here?

It doesn't mean your heart might not get hard and you defend yourself and go into denial, but it means you're caught, you're overtaken, you're surprised. This is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram, and you've been listening to part one of Chip's message, How to Restore Others After Moral Failure, from our series Love One Another. Chip will be back shortly to share some helpful application for us to think about. We live in a very divisive, disconnected society that impacts our workplaces, homes, and even our churches. But what if we truly embraced Jesus' command to love one another? Imagine the transformative effect this mindset could have on our families and communities. In this timely series, Chip explains how this instruction can become a reality in our world. Hear what the Bible says about loving others and the practical ways we can live this principle every day.

Don't miss a second of this series. Chip's back in studio with me now, and Chip, in this series we've been highlighting your book, Your Divine Design, and how it's helping Christians discover their spiritual gifts and put them into action. In fact, anyone who gives a gift to Living on the Edge this month, we're sending them this book absolutely free. I'll tell you more about that in a minute. But first, I thought it'd be good for our listeners to hear the real-life impact of this book. Can you share maybe a quick story of how this resource has changed someone's life?

Oh, I sure can, Dave. You know, early on when I was a young pastor, I didn't think much about spiritual gifts. I didn't teach much about it. And I thought, you know, they were kind of nice, but I really didn't have a conviction or understand how important they were. And then I assumed that people that are pretty mature, walking with God, they probably have all that down.

And I learned just the opposite. In fact, I remember a man who was a mentor to me. I mean, super successful businessman. I would meet with him like two, three times a month, learn about leadership. He helped me with the church. And, you know, we were talking one day, and I started talking about spiritual gifts. And because he was a business guy and because he was good with money, he always ended up in churches where they put him on some committee about, you know, a building fund or finances.

And it wasn't a spiritual gift. His spiritual gift was giving, and his spiritual gift was leadership. And he always felt like he was over in the corner doing something that people put him in a label, like this is what you do because that's what you do for a living. We worked on this together where he began to use his gift of leadership and his gift of giving, and he developed all of our new members. Then he developed a whole system for everyone in the church to discover their spiritual gift. And the joy that he had, and when he would share that in those groups, he would just go, you have to get this. This changed my life. And he told me he always felt like I really love Jesus, but all my service for him was ought-tos and got-tos, but there wasn't passion behind it.

And I never understood it was because I wasn't functioning in my gift. I just cannot encourage people strongly enough to get Your Divine Design, this resource that will help them discover what the gifts are, what theirs is, how to develop them, and then how to put them into practice. It is well worth the time.

It absolutely is. Well, as you've listened to Chip talk about the impact of this resource, if God is prompting you to be generous and give a gift to Living on the Edge, we'd love to have you join us. And when you support this ministry, we'll send you a copy of Your Divine Design as our way of saying thanks. Learn more by going to LivingOnTheEdge.org or by calling 888-333-6003. That's 888-333-6003, or visit LivingOnTheEdge.org. App listeners, tap Donate, and thanks in advance for doing whatever the Lord leads you to do. Before we go, here again is Chip. When we started today's program, I began with the question, judging, is it ever right?

Well, what do you think? Is it ever right for a believer to go to another believer and say, I see something in your life that is wrong, that violates Scripture, and that you need to address? Well, Matthew 18 makes it very clear that Jesus taught us to do this.

It's very unpopular. And what I find in the body of Christ is passive indifference, we kind of shrug our shoulders and say, gosh, boy, it's terrible what he or she's doing. Or people get on these self-righteous hobby horses and nail people and often do it publicly and do it without ever privately talking to the person. My plea today is that we in the body of Christ would take Matthew 18 seriously, that we would follow Jesus' prescribed method when there is a problem, when there is sin, when people have a moral failure and we know about it, we would step one, go to them in private. Step two, if they don't respond, take a friend, a godly person, and the two or three of you go and lovingly express your concern and show them where their lifestyle or behavior violates Scripture, pleading if necessary the pain it will cause them and what is causing damage in the body of Christ. Third, if that doesn't work, then take it to the church, it becomes public, take it to the leaders, take it to the elders, and then let them handle it from there. When we operate God's way and go through this process, in the great majority of the time, people repent. And so I plead with you, follow Matthew 18. Let's restore people who have fallen.

Let's not talk behind their back about what they've done. Thanks, Chip. As we wrap up, if you want to go back and listen to any part of this study, check out the Chip Ingram app. It's an easy way to listen to our latest series or get plugged in with a few of our helpful resources. We long to see every Christian living like a Christian, and the tools available through the Chip Ingram app can help. Well, thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Next time, we'll continue Chip's series, Love One Another. I'm Dave Drouie, and I hope you'll join us then.