How We Discipline the Unrepentant, Part 2

The unrepentant man or woman is brought to choose either his union with sin or his union with the assembly.

A local church is never to allow someone to have both. We as a church basically demonstrate what is lost with that believer's relationship with God. What devastation a church does in the life of a sinning believer when we say, guess what, you can keep that sin and keep us too. Sometimes we're reluctant to help a brother or sister deal with sin. Maybe it seems unloving to get involved in confronting and dealing with the sin in another person's life.

Really though, the opposite is true. Being concerned enough to want God's best for that person and for the church is the loving response. Did you know that the words discipling and discipline come from the same Greek word? They're similar actions.

They both involve challenging, correcting, and helping a person to mature. Today, Stephen Davey challenges us to encourage and correct one another for the sake of the gospel, even when it requires confrontation. So I received a few days ago just another email from another elder in another church in another state who writes, we have a prominent man in our church who has been involved in immorality and he won't step down from leadership and he's taking the church, this little church, through the agony and demanding people take sides and side with him and that we're paralyzed by moral and decision and what do I do?

What do I do? Some would say that it isn't loving to privately or certainly publicly expose anybody. The opposite is actually true. It's actually unloving to put your blinders on and let somebody self-destruct, especially another brother or sister in the assembly. And I've used this illustration before, but if you walk past your neighbor's house, it's two o'clock in the morning, you can't sleep, you're walking a dog and you see flames licking up his living room curtains and you know there's a big fire and there's trouble and you've got a choice. What are you going to do? You're going to go bang on the door and yell and jump up and down and call 911 and maybe break a window or whatever you got to do to wake them up. Yes, it's going to be uncomfortable for them to stand in the street in their pajamas. It's going to be tough to hear the bad news that your house is on fire. It's not going to be comfortable. It's going to be awkward. It's going to be difficult.

In fact, life's going to change, but you know that's the right thing to do. Paul wrote to the Galatians, brethren, if a man is ensnared, if a man is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore them. That involves the confronting and the rebuking and the correcting and ultimately the restoring and the reconciling. Galatians chapter 6 verse 1, you who are spiritual do that.

He didn't say you who don't like the guy go after him or you who like to stick your nose in other people's business. This is a job for you. Now you who are spiritually minded do this. Others would say that the exposure of unrepentant sinners causes church problems. Can I say it briefly? It does.

It really does. And the smaller the church, the more trouble it brings. Can you think about it for a moment? Can you imagine for just a moment what this letter from John is going to do in this church? Can you just try to imagine that Sunday service?

It was the practice of apostles to write letters and for them to read the letters in the assembly in public. And Gaius would have shown up and said, I have a letter from John. And Diatrophes is thinking, man, how did that slip past me? And now he stands to read it. Can you imagine seeing Diatrophes over in the corner and the smoke curling up out of his ears? Can you imagine how awkward it would have felt? Can you imagine the hush in the assembly as he names him and calls him proud and wicked?

It sounds pretty public to me and necessary. It's messy. But the mess will lead to greater maturity and protection among the flock. In fact, the church that biblically and courageously responds will emerge spiritually stronger.

In fact, Paul told the church in Corinth in Chapter 11 and verse 18 of his first letter, this is really interesting to me and something to tuck away in your mind and for you to consider. The amazing thing that he says is this. He says, I hear that there are divisions among you and I and my part believe it. And you'd think his next statement would be to knock it off.

Stop it. His next phrase is, for there must be divisions among you in order that those who are mature will be made evident among you. That's startling, isn't it? In other words, instead of saying knock it off and you should never have any disagreeable issue ever again as a mark of maturity, he's saying actually divisive issues reveal those who are mature. So whenever a divisive issue happens, wake up, stay alert, just start looking around, start listening. Why?

Because leaders are going to emerge and individuals are going to be revealed in how they handle it. Now again, somebody will say to me, Stephen, but didn't the Lord say you should never judge anybody? Yes, the Lord said that in Matthew 7, one, do not judge lest you be judged. That is the favorite verse of the compromising church today. That's their favorite text.

Might as well write it on the sign. Do not judge lest you be judged. The problem is they ignore the context. Jesus is actually referring not to judging, but to judgmentalism.

There's a vast difference. These leaders who are like diatrophes, they're unaccountable and they're graceless and they're hypocritical and they're calling right wrong and they're calling wrong right. That's what he's talking about.

They love exposing how people are more sinful than them, but they never offer them any solution. Don't judge like that. That's what the Lord is saying.

In fact, Matthew 7, one doesn't end with verse one. There's actually a verse two and that verse two says, for in the way you judge, that is, if you're going to judge like that, you will be judged. In other words, don't judge others with self-righteous, censorious, hypocritical judgmentalism.

You're just going to build your own gallows. So with that in mind, is it ever right for inconsistent human beings to humbly and lovingly judge somebody else? I mean, who are we to judge, right?

Doesn't that cross your mind? Who am I to judge? Well, let me reinforce this by just showing you a couple of different passages where the Bible actually commands you to judge. One first is when you're judging someone who lives openly in sin. First Corinthians five, I referenced that.

Let me read a little bit more of that text. It's actually reported there is immorality among you and you have become arrogant. See, they thought they were tolerant. Paul calls them arrogant and have not mourned instead in order that the one who had done this deed might be removed from your midst. Now listen to this, for I have already judged him who has so committed this sin. Paul actually uses the word the Lord uses and he says, I've already judged him who's committed this sin.

All he's saying is I'm just telling you what he's doing is sin and I can judge that. There's no need to debate it. There's no need to vote on it.

There's no need to appoint a committee to discuss it. It's sin and I've judged that as sinful. It's right to judge someone who lives openly in sin. Secondly, it's right to judge our culture as we compare it to the Bible. First Corinthians chapter two and verse 15 is an interesting text. Paul writes this, he who is spiritually minded, judges everything.

Everything. And you do that as parents. You're judging things every single day. You're not being judgmental and being hypocritical. You're judging. You're saying to your children, no, that's wrong.

And that's right. No, don't go there. That's not a good thing. Go over here. That's a better thing.

What are you doing? You're judging based on how you know scripture, you're judging everything. And that's what Paul says.

The person who says you shouldn't judge anyone then just respond by telling them, well, did you know that the apostle Paul told me that if I'm spiritually minded, I'm supposed to judge everything. Really? Yeah. Compare that with Matthew seven. There's a balance within context. Somebody might say, but wait a second.

I'm glad you said that Steven, cause I've got you there. Jesus didn't judge the center. He hung around centers. He ate, he ate with sinners. Keep in mind, there is a world of difference between how you treat sinning unbelievers and how you treat sinning believers. Jesus hung around unbelieving sinners. He ate with unbelieving sinners, not because he needed something to do on the weekend and didn't want to be alone. He did that because he had come to seek and to save those who were lost Luke 1910. And you cannot win to faith someone who was an unbeliever unless you get around them so they can hear from you the gospel. So hang around them, invite them over, engage your life with theirs so that they can see and hear the gospel. But Jesus was very different from those who were supposed spiritual leaders. Just read, by the way, I suggest you read the Bible sometime, right? We have these committees to discuss issues.

How about a committee to discuss the Bible? So here's Jesus who takes religious leaders who are judging, like he says in Matthew seven, not to do hypocritically, sensoriously, condescendingly and what does he do with him? He doesn't eat with them. In fact, he calls them a bunch of snakes.

That's not very nice to do. He says, you are caskets filled with dead men's bones. In other words, anybody that gets around you becomes ceremonially unclean.

You're so wicked. He says, woe to you, hypocrites, blind guides. On one occasion, he said to them, if I can paraphrase it, he said to the religious leaders, your father isn't God like you think he is. Your father happens to be the devil. John eight forty four.

You see the difference? Someone recently wrote to me and asked, well, how do you decide what sins to deal with? I mean, we all sin in so many different ways.

Can I just give you a thumbnail of that? Just just deal with the sin that God brings up. OK, that's what you should do in your own life. I mean, how sinful are we? Our problem is that we don't see how sinful we are and we sin and don't call it sin. But if God's spirit brings to your heart a sin, do due diligence with that sin. And the church body is the same. We deal with the sin that surfaces. Now, if you study church history as you pay me to. So I study it. Love it.

Thank you for that. Cotton Mather and Old Puritan. He had his list.

He came up with in the early American church. It included swearing, fighting, stealing, idleness. A one list I found from church history included cheating on your taxes. We don't go that far. We get too far. Let me give you some guidelines we'll try to follow. And we have been we're going to deal with sins, first of all, that destroy Christian unity.

And dioceses was certainly guilty of this. And that's why John says, I'm coming. I am coming. And when I come, I'm going to deal with you.

Another category would be sins that entangle a person in immorality. First Corinthians five. We referenced that Paul very specifically said to deal with this.

In fact, he didn't even want them to deal with it when he arrived. He said, do it now. I'm with you in spirit.

I can't be there physically. I've heard the report. Deal with it. Another category would be sins that harm the testimony of the gospel. This is exactly what John is doing as he puts diographies in the entire church on notice. He's going to call attention to his deeds. They're harming the gospel.

They're certainly harming the church. And this will be embarrassing. This will be the service you probably want to skip.

This would be the time you want to stay home. Maybe I wouldn't encourage it. Go watch. See it happen. But it will be awkward. It will be painful. It will be exposing. There will be shame and guilt exposed.

Remember, many years ago, dealing with one individual who was eventually dismissed from the fellowship. And after we did that, a couple of days later, he called me over to his house and wasn't very happy, obviously, and had a speech ready to deliver to me. And he said, you, you, by doing that, as if the church didn't do it.

But I did it representing the church, obviously. You embarrassed me. You shamed me. You brought me pain. You have messed up my life.

In fact, he said, you've made my life miserable. And I said to him, we can fix all of that. We can fix all of that. You can be welcomed back with open arms and tears of joy and restored fellowship. You will be embraced. You'll be loved when you put away your immorality and you return to the fellowship of Christ and his church. And we can remove all of that shame.

In fact, we can start right now. What do you say? He chose to remain unrepentant. Listen, beloved, he chose, he chose. See, my friends, God has designed discipline to be a crossroads experience. The unrepentant man or woman is brought to choose either his union with sin or his union with the assembly. A local church is never to allow someone to have both.

We can't have both. We, we as a church basically demonstrate what is lost without believers relationship with God. We're not assuming he's lost, nor would we believe he lost his salvation if he's a true believer, but he has lost his fellowship. And the fellowship he's lost with God is played out physically and that he loses fellowship with the church. What devastation a church does in the life of a sinning believer.

When we say, guess what? You can keep that sin and keep us too. That would be like the, like the father of the prodigal saying, look, why don't you move those pigs back home with you? Move them on in here.

Bring that lifestyle into my house. No, he didn't do that, did he? The prodigal left the pigs and repentance coming back to his father. According to our constitution and bylaws, and there are copies, I believe out there, you're, you're looking at them, reading them, which is wonderful.

Let me just reinforce this. Whenever someone in the future is disciplined from this assembly, you need to know that members of the elder team or perhaps deacons or leaders or members of this church that know about it, again, this church is so large, most people don't, but those who do, that there will have been conversation. There will have been prayer. There will have been tears. There will have been an invitation to repent over and over. There's no time, you know, three months, six months.

They're just, every case is different. But if all our efforts fail and that unrepentant individual clearly wants nothing to do with the truth or the counsel of the elders, the elder team will dismiss them from this assembly. And I will publicly announce that individual's name. I'm going to basically do what John did in 3 John, the exposure of that individual to the body in Corinth. I'll publicly announce to you that this person has either left our church or no longer able to fellowship with this church because they've refused to repent. We aren't going to go into the details of the sin. In fact, as we've looked at all the passages as an elder team and as we've discussed this, the issue is never that somebody sinned. In fact, if everyone who's sinned this past week was not allowed to come and worship this morning, how many in here would there be?

Nobody. And this space would be empty too. The issue isn't that someone sinned. The issue is that someone persisted in sinning.

Even after being confronted and exhorted and encouraged and challenged and invited to repent of their sin, they persistently and defiantly refused. And at some point in time, those involved in that say they have made their choice. And so we'll tell that.

That's the issue. That's what we will tell you. Matthew 18 commands. What we will be telling you, the church, is that this person has refused to follow the counsel of the elders and they are no longer in fellowship with the church.

Got it? I want your ears to be trained to understand that when I say that, this is what this means. I'm not going to repeat this every time we do that. This sermon is now archived. You can go watch it as many times as you want.

I'm sure it'll be one of your favorites, okay? I'm going to say it now. So when I step forward and I say, and I'm probably going to do it around communion time because it represents the fellowship we have in the gospel, and I say their name and I will say something like this person has refused to follow the counsel of ultimately the elders and they are no longer in fellowship with the church. You'll know that a lot of conversation has gone on behind the scenes. A lot of prayer. In fact, you can begin praying for that person though you may not even know them. A lot of exhortation, a lot of inviting.

And to get to that point means they have refused and more than likely they've already left. And that language, by the way, is important when I say they are no longer in fellowship with the church. I won't say this church.

If I do, I'll be misspeaking. It is the church. See, the man disciplined from the church in Corinth didn't say, well, never mind, I'm going to go to Ephesus and join there. I'm going to go to Philippi and I'm going to join there. I'm going to move to Galatia. Forget you Corinthians.

No. To be out of fellowship with the church in Corinth was to be out of fellowship with the church in Galatia and Ephesus and Philippi. It was to be out of fellowship with the church.

That is why this is so terribly serious. We are we are effectively dismissing the unrepentant individual from the fellowship of the church unless they repent. And again, don't get your opinions from what your opinion is.

Well, I don't know if they ought to do it like that or I think they ought to do it this way or what about that way? Read the scriptures. Read 1 Corinthians 5. Read Matthew 18. Read Galatians 1 and 2. Read Titus 3 10. Read Matthew 18.

Read where Paul, if you think any church is harsh to do this, read where Paul told the Corinthians to effectively deliver that man over to the clutches of the devil. In other words, let him experience the full consequences physically of his loss of fellowship coming out from underneath the protection of God, as it were, being handed over to Satan, Paul wrote, for the destruction of the flesh so that the spirit might be saved. In other words, we believe he's a believer, but let him feel the consequences of what he's choosing. And that may indeed be the part that rescues him like the prodigal who finally came to his senses, not in the father's house, but where?

In the pig pen. In the far country he came to his senses. We play the role of parent warning the unbeliever that they're heading for grave danger. One final category would be to deal with doctrinal error. Paul told the church in Galatia that anybody teaching a gospel other than the gospel given to them by the apostles is to be accursed. That is a really strong word.

Not ignored or placated or let's put our blinders on and not worry about it. No, accursed. Dismissed because they could infect the rest of the fellowship with their false doctrine. I remember many years ago a man who was caught up in one particular doctrinal error. He was vocal about it. He would sort of abduct his Sunday school class with this.

Anybody he would have a chance to talk with in the hallway at the cooler, he'd bring this up. He was warned. That isn't in our doctrinal statement.

That isn't what we're teaching. And he refused to slow down. We weren't to begin. Eventually a few of us from the elder team met with him and told him that he was no longer welcome on our campus. And he couldn't believe we were serious.

We were very serious. We want to protect this flock from doctrinal error. Several months later I got an email from him and he said that he so terribly missed the fellowship of this assembly. He so missed the worship. He so missed the company of his friends here. He said, I am willing to set aside that doctrinal issue and submit to the doctrine of this fellowship and the council of the elders if I can just come back.

If I do that, can I come back? And we said, of course, absolutely. And joyfully welcomed him back. Public dismissal would have warranted a public reception back. In this case it would have been handled privately as a non-member. He was a non-member.

And he was privately welcome back. Welcomed back into our fellowship. That's the goal. I wish I could tell you I just have stacks of emails like that.

I don't. It's been wonderful to see a number of people rescued whose lives have effectively been on fire and some of you have exhorted them and challenged them. It's wonderful. It's wonderful to see individuals who reached that point and are warned and they are turned. This is something we must promise each other. We're commanded it, which means if we're commanded to do it, we ought to promise each other we're going to do it. And not just do it. That's why we've put the word welcome in there.

Did you get that? That's hard to do, isn't it? We welcome this. We welcome accountability to elders and members of this assembly through biblical discipline and discipleship. Let's promise to hold each other accountable so that ultimately Christ will be glorified and the gospel advanced and the church protected as we wait for the soon appearing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Sometimes God calls us as individuals and as the church to do hard things.

But because God commands it, it's something we commit to do. This is Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. Stephen's working through a series on the church called Upon This Rock.

Today's lesson is entitled How We Discipline the Unrepentant. There's never been a point in my lifetime when the church needed this teaching more than it does today. If you want to share this series with others who need it, we have it available two ways. You can download the audio files as well as Stephen's manuscripts. It's also available as a CD set. Information on both of these resources is available on our website wisdomonline.org or call us at 866-48-bible. And of course, join us tomorrow for more wisdom for the heart.