True Churches Practice Discipline
The True Church
*Excerpt from a sermon entitled, “The True Church Practices Discipline”, on Sunday, June 14.
https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermons/61426165496862
The true church disciplines because it cares about souls and purity
In vv. 5-8, we see two motivations for church discipline: 1) Concern for the soul of the person committing sin; 2) Concern for the purity of the church. The true church cares about both of these things.
Verse 5 says: “I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.”
True Christians care about the souls of people inside the church, and outside the church, though we are only required to judge those inside. We desire to see people saved from the bondage of sin and from the damnation of hell. Love your neighbor as yourself is ingrained in our new nature. One of the reasons Paul delivered the incestuous man over to Satan was for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. There are two meanings for “flesh” in the NT: the flesh of the human body (skin and blood and bones), and the sin-loving principle within us that is aggravating and troublesome in the believer but enslaving and all-consuming in the unbeliever. I believe is the latter meaning Paul has in mind. The man has a sin-loving problem that must be dealt with for his spirit to be saved. Ending his life while he was in a state of unrepentant sin would not save his spirit. But the destruction of his sin-loving nature through salvation would save his spirit.
This doesn’t mean that church discipline always saves those who are subjected to it. But if they are to be saved, it will come about this way. It will not come about by the church looking the other way and tolerating it. That will only cause the sin to grow and become more hardened. If the church in Corinth had continued to look the other way, the incestuous man would have never been brought to repentance. If the man must be delivered from his sexual immorality, the church must confront it and make it clear to him that his immorality was incompatible with true salvation. If he doesn’t learn that from his church, where is he supposed to learn it? Sin must be confronted and rebuked if there is to be any God-given repentance. Leave people alone in their sins and they will remain in their sins. But if the church at Corinth had looked the other way, continued to welcome him into fellowship, and simply kept teaching him correct theology, then they would have turned him into an even greater monster than he already was. Then he wouldn’t have just been a pervert, but a theologically correct, doctrinally precise pervert who could talk the talk quite well and possibly wow the ignorant with all the sublime things he knew.
The second reason for church discipline – purity – is addressed in vv. 6-8: “Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? (7) Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. (8) Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
A little leaven – which refers to the leaven of sin – leavens the whole lump of dough. It’s an analogy from the world of baking, but it fits the spiritual realm as well. Just as leaven spreads through dough until it has no more dough to leaven … it keeps advancing, keeps going, keeps traveling until the whole lump is leavened through and through – so it is with sin and a church that tolerates sin. It will not stop with the man committing the sin of incest. It will spread to others until the entire church is leavened.
What does that look like? It doesn’t mean that in due time everyone is practicing incest or even another kind of sexual immorality, though other instances of immorality will certainly emerge in due time. But the leaven has more immediate effects. It means that everyone will have made a deal with the devil not to be bothered about sin. You have to make that deal if you’re not going to pursue church discipline. You have no choice. You either confront sin or you tolerate it. That’s the only two options. And if you choose to tolerate it, you cannot help but become desensitized to it. If an immoral man is accepted by the church, and you are a conscientious person in the church who is troubled by this man’s behavior, but no one else seems troubled by it, what are you going to do? Will you be able to remain firm in your opposition to this man’s sin, or will you eventually wear down? Will you alone stand firm in your resistance and remain aloof from him, while the leadership and everyone else laughs with him and eats with him and fellowships with him? No, you won’t. You’ll cave. You’ll eventually wear down and accept it because you can’t carry out church discipline alone and if you try to disassociate from this man, you will simply look like a mean person in the midst of a church of “loving and accepting” people. You will become desensitized in due time. There is no way to prevent it except by leaving that church.
Bad company corrupts good morals. Good company does not improve bad morals through osmosis. No, bad company corrupts good morals. The Corinthians were already being leavened. They were already being corrupted. They were boasting about their permissiveness. That’s the leaven at work. When Solomon married foreign wives, he didn’t influence them positively, though he was the wisest man on earth. They influenced him negatively and he compromised. The same with the Israelites. They were to wipe out every one of the Canaanites in the land. When they failed to do so, what was prophesied in Joshua 23:12-13 came to pass: “For if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know with certainty that the LORD your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you; but they will be a snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the LORD your God has given you.”
Proverbs 22:24-25: “Do not associate with a man given to anger; Or go with a hot-tempered man, or you will learn his ways and find a snare for yourself.”
We are warned of this over and over again. Bad company corrupts good morals. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. Clean out the leaven or you will be leavened. The church was chosen to be holy and blameless. Eph. 5:25-27 says: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.”
In 2 Cor. 11:2, Paul says, “For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy; for I betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin.”
Of course it is the Lord’s purpose to have for Himself a pure church, a pure bride -- not one that winks at sin and coddles it. And what that means is that there is no question that church discipline is a mark of a true church, and that a church which has developed a settled pattern of not practicing church discipline is no church at all – regardless of how many people attend there and regardless of how much religious activity there is and regardless of how much doctrinally precise head knowledge their acquiring.
Thankfully, things were corrected in Corinth, but a church doesn’t have years to work this out. Leaven doesn’t take that long to work through the dough. And once that happens, it is practically unheard of that a church will start practicing church discipline when it hasn’t been doing it for quite some time. Where do you start? Where does it stop? You now have a “church” full of people who have been desensitized to sin and are fully acclimated to it. They’ve made their deal with the devil. All those who cannot tolerate this laissez-faire attitude about sin have already left that church. You try to start practicing church discipline now and you’ll have a firestorm on your hands usually. If a new pastor of a different breed somehow mistakenly gets hired there and tries to implement discipline, he won’t last long. No unless God does a miraculous thing. If there are elders, you can be sure they aren’t qualified to be elders. And they won’t support it. They’ll be mad if you go down that road. And it’s called church discipline, not elder discipline, for a reason. Elders should lead in it, but the congregation must be part of it. The whole church is to put the unrepentant offender out and collectively disassociate from him. But a congregation that has never practiced church discipline (and usually never heard of it) will fiercely oppose such an action because they are not offended by sin, and they will also worry that they might be next.
A “church” that hasn’t practiced church discipline in years (for many, it would be never) is a thoroughly leavened church. It cannot be otherwise. And if it is fully leavened, then it is a gathering of religious people who aren’t offended by sin and don’t care about souls being in bondage to it and don’t care about purity. Now I ask you? Is that a church? Is that what the Bible means by the word? Is that a group of believers who have been regenerated, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who love God and love others, and live for His glory? I don’t think so.