June15pmSermonText
15 June 2008CAMBRAY SERMON SUNDAY 15 JUNE 2008
The immoral brother 1 Corinthians 5: 1-13
Outline:
Dealing with sexual immorality in the church vv1-5
Old yeast, no yeast vv 6-8
Immoral people inside and outside the church vv9-13
Introduction
A flourishing church will have difficulties. A healthy church will have problems. Why? Because some of its longstanding members are still prone to sin and because through the church God will be reaching all sorts of people and they start the Christian life with a wide range of problems. In short it’s because no church is perfect and none of its members are perfectly holy yet.
And tonight we come to a problem that sadly has to be faced by many churches, from time to time, namely, what should be done when someone in the church is guilty of sexual immorality.
Every sin can be forgiven of course. That wasn’t really the question in the church at Corinth. The key question for them and for Paul who wrote to them was ‘What should be done about it?’
Dealing with sexual immorality in the church vv1-5
V1 Paul has heard that there is sexual immorality inside the church. How do we know that the NIV heading ‘Expel the immoral brother’ is right? Was the sexual immorality in the church at Corinth? Note what is said in verses 1 & 2: verse 1 says ‘there is sexual immorality among you’ (among you the Christians at Corinth to whom Paul is writing) and Paul’s statement v2 that the man should have been ‘put out of your fellowship’. Clearly and sadly the man with this sin belonged to the church – he was an insider.
Grieve and weep for what was happening. It was immorality v1 says ‘of a kind that does not occur among the pagans’ - not that it never occurs (it might occur there rarely) but the point is that even the pagans know how wrong and repulsive this kind of immorality is and generally they avoid it. So to have it inside the church is extremely embarrassing and tragic.
What was this immorality? We’re told at the end of v1: ‘A man has his father’s wife’, that is as his partner or wife. It’s not clear why Paul doesn’t say ‘A man has his mother’. Maybe she was his stepmother. Maybe the man’s father had died. We don’t know, but anyway the relationship and behaviour were wrong. In several OT places this is forbidden and condemned e.g. Leviticus 18:8 ‘Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonour your father.’
It was forbidden by Roman law too. It was widely banned but in the church tolerated! How terrible!
And the church at Corinth was even proud of its liberal attitude! Proud! V2
It should have filled you with grief says Paul v2; grief that a member has acted in this way, grief that God has been offended in this way, grief that Christian fellowship is disturbed, grief because it’s wrong behaviour, it’s disobedient to God, it’s such a disgrace, such a bad witness. And you should have put the man out of your fellowship end v2.
This is not something to be pleased about or to ignore and sweep under the carpet. It had to be faced when the members of the fellowship were assembled together (v4) for they are responsible for making key decisions about the local church to which they belong.
V5 ‘hand this man over to Satan’, back to your old master, whom you seem to prefer. Why? What good will that do? Satan doesn’t help Christians grow, does he?
Some indication of the purpose is given in v5: ‘so that the sinful nature may be destroyed’. It’s not clear how that would happen by being handed over to Satan. But it is clear that the purpose is that his sinful nature, or fleshly tendencies, should be controlled and ideally sinful practice stopped, in this life.
And there is a long term purpose: that his spirit will be ‘saved on the day of the Lord’ i.e. at the judgment after the return of Christ.
Let’s look at it like this. There is a break in fellowship – Christian fellowship has been broken by sin, let the guilty person feel it; don’t try to imply that nothing has changed; when it obviously has. Trying to carry on as normal doesn’t help them. Rather there should be church discipline. That is sad and difficult and is not pleasant. But it is right and necessary. This applies to other kinds of sexual immorality too like adultery, not just to incest.
What else does the NT say a church should do? Matthew 18:15-17 page 985
A church should not be hasty; maybe those involved can sort it out privately, (v15) with whatever repentance and forgiveness is needed. Sometimes it may be found, on private conversation, that the allegations were false, perhaps through some misunderstanding or through deliberate false accusation. But if there is guilt and a refusal to repent, then what? Verse 16: take one or two others along and check out the allegations through witnesses.
If he still refuses to listen, ‘tell it to the church’ (v17a) ‘and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or tax collector’, that is, one who needs to go on hearing the gospel until he is brought to repentance; not as someone living in fellowship with Christ and his church.
Some of the things Paul wrote to the Galatians are relevant here. He said ‘Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. (Galatians 6:1)
To restore a fellow Christian caught in sin, one has to communicate with them, to speak with them or write to them, with a view to restoring them gently. The aim is repentance and restoration, renewal of genuine fellowship. The aim isn’t simply to rebuke and stop there. If there is repentance, i.e. admission of the wrong and a renouncing of the behaviour concerned, then there can be forgiveness and restoration.
If there is no repentance of the sin, then restoration doesn’t happen – neither restoration of the individual’s fellowship with God nor of their fellowship in the church. And if there is persistent refusal to repent, further action needs to be taken – they should be put out of the fellowship (1 Corinthians 5:2). But don’t write off a brother or sister who falls in this way. They can come back, when they have a change of heart and mind.
The rules of Cambray Baptist Church try to follow what the Bible teaches. Here is rule 1(e) ‘Any member acquainted with the heretical teaching or disorderly conduct of fellow members shall report the same privately in writing to the Pastor or Secretary but shall not spread it abroad. In the event of disciplinary action having to be taken, it shall be carried out by the Pastor and deacons. A two-thirds majority of the votes cast by ballot at a Church meeting shall be necessary for:
- Suspension of membership
- Re-admission to membership upon profession of repentance.
We are very glad when this rule is not needed, but it is there in case it is. The position is similar to what we found in Matthew 5 regarding adultery and divorce – we don’t wish it to happen, we hope it won’t happen, but we realise it might, so it is helpful to know the teaching of Jesus.
Note the place for re-admission to membership, emphasising that the intention is to work for repentance and restoration. There would be much prayer for that to happen, for God to bring repentance and healing of broken relationships, in his grace and mercy, and by his Spirit.
Old yeast, no yeast vv 6-8
V6 starts ‘Your boasting is not good.’ It is perhaps hard to see what they boasted about! Were they bold and boastful about the fact that they let this immoral man continue in the life of the church without challenge or rebuke or discipline? To do so was shameful and ignorant; tolerating such behaviour could easily spread and cause more damage and dishonour, like a little yeast that spreads through the whole dough (v6) or like a bad apple that affects others. Yeast here represents sin or evil.
V7 ‘Get rid of the old yeast.’ Remove those who persist in sin and won’t repent. ‘Be a new batch without yeast’, without sin, ‘as you really are. For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed.’
In the Passover festival, Jews remembered the time in Egypt when they had to sacrifice a lamb, and remove all yeast from their homes, and make bread without yeast, and the destroying angel passed over the Jewish homes and then the people were freed from slavery. Well now, says Paul, Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. As you celebrate freedom from the penalty of your sins, purchased for you by Christ, get rid of wickedness, like bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth. There will not be sincerity and truth if you are tolerating sexual sin in the church, proud of it even, and seeking to get away with it.
To use Paul’s language elsewhere ‘You are clothed in the righteousness of Christ’ so become what you are. Through Christ you are freed from the guilt and penalty of sin; now live like that. God sees you as clothed in the righteousness of Christ, so become what you are. In fact keep the Festival, keep on celebrating, keep on being thankful, always remember and rejoice that Christ, the Lamb of God, has been sacrificed.
That should make us detest sin. Yeast represents sin – get rid of sin! No yeast!
Immoral people inside and outside the church vv9-13
At the start of verse 9 Paul says ‘I have written to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people.’ He hadn’t said this in the present letter, so there must have been an earlier one, that we don’t have now.
Paul says two things.
First, regarding people inside the church, ‘anyone who calls himself a brother’ (v11), don’t ‘associate with sexually immoral people’ v9 and again in v11. Don’t pretend to have warm fellowship when there is blatant, persistent sin and no repentance for it – that’s dishonest and implies to the guilty party that their sin makes no difference, whereas it certainly does.
Second, Paul made it clear that this not associating with immoral people, did not apply to non-Christians, those he calls ‘people of this world’ (v10). To avoid people who are immoral, greedy, swindlers and idolaters, you’d have to leave this world! And some of us saw this morning from Matthew 9 Jesus had dinner at the house of a tax collector, when many tax collectors and other sinful people were present. He mixed with immoral people – not because he liked their behaviour but to reach them with his love and to challenge them to change.
‘What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?’ asked Paul v12. God will judge those outside (v13). Thankfully, we are not called to judge those outside the church.
Are you not to judge those inside? (v12) Members may well want and need guidance from church leaders in this, but they can’t pass the buck to leaders and leave them to make the difficult decisions on their own. Those inside the church are our responsibility and sometimes we have to make judgments. ‘Expel the wicked man from among you.’ v13.
Suppose someone says the Bible is a bit severe at this point, a bit harsh. Shouldn’t we be patient and tolerant? Well, there is a place for taking time to investigate the allegations, to check the facts and to encourage the person concerned, if sin is found, to repent and thereby be forgiven and restored. But if they become settled in not accepting the teaching of scripture and the church, in time there should be discipline, such as excommunication if necessary i.e. not being admitted to communion and suspension of church membership if necessary.
You can say this is harsh, but it is not for us to pick and choose which parts of scripture we accept and which we don’t. If scripture goes against contemporary views, that’s a crucial time to make sure we follow scripture. It’s no good accepting scripture when it’s comfortable to do so but not when the cutting edge of scripture is involved. The Bible’s teaching about church discipline is there for god reasons. As we have seen, church discipline is not done in order to be vindictive but to be constructive, to work towards repentance and restoration.
Corinth was a port in Greece, well known for its immorality. How hard it was for those who became Christians to break away from that – they faced so many temptations. And likewise today in our society, in which many Christian standards are rejected, how easy it can be for a Christian to live a largely non-Christian lifestyle, even to make a break from immorality for a while, but go back to it.
So, in conclusion, let’s not be hasty and alarmist, seeing immorality amongst Christians everywhere. But let’s not be deceived either – it can happen amongst Christians and sometimes does, even with church leaders. If that happens, remember this and other passages. They tell us what to do: i.e. with a heavy heart investigate carefully, confidentially to begin with, always with a view to repentance and reconciliation, but be prepared to exercise church discipline if necessary.
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