Selected Scriptures

February 11, 2018

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

Download the bulletin.

Download the Kids’ Korner.

The sermon starts at 16:50 in the audio file.

Or, When the Church Can No Longer Affirm an Insider’s Forgiveness

Proper worship precedes proper expectations for relationships. Men do not know why they should treat one another in a particular way apart from knowing what God is like and how He treats His people. God is holy; He is patient but He does not wink at sin. He takes our sin so seriously that He sent His Son to die on the cross in place of all those who would ever believe. His mercy is a just mercy; He is both gracious and righteous. He loves relationship; the three Persons of the Trinity have always known eternal fellowship. But He will not buy relationship at the expense of truth. It is through our worship of Him and receiving of His Word that we know our priorities and practices for individual and corporate relationships.

How many misapplications of church discipline have occurred in church history? How many failures to discipline have soft churches neglected in history? How many cases of overextended discipline have harsh churches imposed? Not all leaders are godly, not all the godly are leaders, and not all godly leaders make all good decisions. This keeps us humble, fearing the Lord, and that is the only way to wisdom anyway.

The last couple weeks we’ve considered Paul’s instruction about discipline in the church from 1 Corinthians 5. A number of things are very clear from that chapter, but it seemed appropriate to take another message to address some as of yet uncovered application and some additional passages on the subject.

Let’s start by acknowledging that we live in a world of sin and that those inside the church sin, too. We cannot wish ourselves into the Neighborhood of Make-Believe where no one sins. And one of the first things we can and should do is cover sin. “Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). Sometimes it’s a sin to be offended. Sometimes we need tell Sister Bitter-heart, “Get over it.”

And sometimes we can’t cover it. The sin is a pattern, it’s public, it’s personal in a way that you can’t shake. Let’s also remember that even when sin must be dealt with, what we want is repentance and reconciliation, not retaliation and retribution. Whether or not a position of leadership can be restored is another related issue, but as regards individuals, we want them gained, not lost.

Jesus uses terminology about gaining in Matthew 18. The opposite of gaining is losing, and the loss is one of trust and joy and fellowship. Comparing it with Paul’s vocabulary in 1 Corinthians 5, when a man is removed and delivered to Satan and purged from the church, the congregation may gain health in one way but the so-called brother is lost.

As I said, we want our brother gained. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother” (Matthew 18:13). The next few verses describe what should happen if the brother doesn’t listen at first, but the implication is that if he starts listening at any stage, we gain our brother back. Paul describes the desired result of handing him over to Satan as the salvation of his soul. This is gain.

But brothers are not always gained, and certainly not gained quickly, and sometimes the gain seems impossible. None of that, though, changes the goal.

In between the loss and the possible gain things can be somewhat confusing, and in some cases downright brutal. We love our brother, and sometimes that “brother” is a spouse, a son or daughter, a used-to-be-closest kind of friend. While we pray and pursue and wait and want fellowship restored through forgiveness, what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to think? What is our attitude supposed to be?

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