1 Timothy 5:20
20 Those who continue in sin, rebuke in the presence of all, so that the rest also will be fearful of sinning.
As we come to consider part 2 of our examination of scriptural admonition in reference to church discipline, I think it is wise to carefully remind ourselves, and by ‘ourselves’ I mean you and I mean myself, that it is our duty to lay aside preconceived ideas and notions and attempt to lay aside past experiences, especially personally painful ones, and strive to see clearly and only what the Bible says to us on this very sensitive and potentially explosive subject.
Now I have done two things very deliberately right at the outset, just to put everything on the table in order to ward off any temptation to pussyfoot and soft pedal the issue at hand.
First, I chose to use the word “Discipline” as my title for this two-part series because that is simply the reason we are doing this study, and secondly, although we will be looking at several scripture passages I chose to open this second part with 1 Timothy 5:20 because the idea of bringing an offender before the congregation is undoubtedly the most sensitive aspect of the consideration of church discipline and I wanted you to know that we aren’t going to tiptoe around that either.
Now it has been my observation as I have known preachers and listened to preaching over the years that there is a natural tendency in men, once they have studied and preached once or twice on a passage or topic, to stop learning in reference to that passage or topic.
I think it is a temptation that needs to be guarded against carefully.
The Word of God is a deep ocean and every time we plunge its depths, especially when we’re in familiar waters, we ought to attempt to dive deeper than the time before and find new treasure to come up with.
The preacher is commissioned to feed the flock. If I have not found fresh meat in my study then I have only old and stale stuff to give my listeners.
Typing these thoughts out I was reminded of my favorite scene from the movie “The Odd Couple” which starred Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau.
Matthau’s character, Oscar Madison, was playing poker with some buddies and he went to the fridge to see what was there for them all to snack on.
He comes back out of the kitchen, wearing an old shirt that is wet under the arms with sweat, and under each arm he has sandwiches tucked while holding several also in each hand.
He announces, “Ok, I have green and brown. Who wants what?” One of the guys at the card table asks, “What’s the green?” Oscar looks down at the sandwiches in his hand and says, “Either very new cheese or very old meat”.
The guy chose the brown.
Anyway, I don’t want to give you too new cheese, meaning I haven’t studied and prayed it through enough, or very old meat, meaning I haven’t bothered to go back to the text and found fresh stuff.
Because you see, when you think you know a passage or a particular verse of scripture because you’ve read it many times, and maybe you’ve used it as a side reference in other sermons, quite often when you go to it and really pay attention to the wording of it and the context in which it is said, you will discover that in only scratching the surface you have misapplied, perhaps only in your own thinking, the intent and the content of scripture.
The reason I’m telling you all of this is because in my researching this topic more carefully than ever before, since I haven’t seen a need in the past to address it this thoroughly, I was forced to tweak my own thinking a little in reference to church discipline.
RECAP
Let’s take a brief look back before we go on, just to have some main points from part 1 fresh in our thinking.
First we noted that Jesus was talking about relationships between Christians. That means two people who are born again. They have the Holy Spirit in them. The Spirit of Christ. This reminded me of something I read by J.B. Phillips.
Every time we say, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” we mean that we believe there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.
So when confronting a sinning brother we understand that we should go fortified by prayer, and being led of the Holy Spirit, humbly and in love, and trust the Holy Spirit to be the life-changer, not the strength of our argument or the weight of guilt we can administer.
Next we noted the steps that Jesus laid out in this process, which by the way is meant to be a reconciling process not an attack; of going privately, then with two or three witnesses, and finally before the assembly if repentance is not found.
In the event that the offending brother does stay in the fellowship but shows no sign of changing then he is to be related to as an unbeliever.
Jesus said to let the man be to you as a Gentile or a Tax Collector and my understanding of that was that we should treat them, not as the average Jew would have treated a Gentile or a Tax Collector, but as Jesus would have treated them.
I would probably get some resistance on that application from church leaders who would interpret that passage to mean to reject the person altogether. But I just don’t see Jesus teaching that kind of attitude, especially on the heels of declaring that it is not His Father’s wish that any one of His little ones should be lost.
DOCTRINE, FACTIONS AND WICKED PEOPLE
Ok, now let’s move forward and we begin by just reading several passages of scripture. I’ve included them in your handout in order to save the time that would be spent flipping pages back and forth. You certainly may look them up in your translation if you wish, or do that later in a time convenient for you.
Titus 1:10-13
10 For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, 11 who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of sordid gain. 12 One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” 13 This testimony is true. For this reason reprove them severely so that they may be sound in the faith,
Titus 3:10
10 Reject a factious man after a first and second warning, 11 knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned.
I Cor 5:3-13
3 For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present. 4 In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, 5 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. 6 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. 9 I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; 10 I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. 11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one. 12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? 13 But those who are outside, God judges. REMOVE THE WICKED MAN FROM AMONG YOURSELVES.
I chose these three passages to use in our study along with 1 Timothy 5:20 because they represent the primary church problems that I find being addressed in scripture under a disciplinary theme.
The first one has to do with teaching and false teachers.
It does not stand alone. In his letters to Timothy and to Titus Paul warned about false teachers with the admonition to rebuke and correct them for their own soundness in the faith and so they might cease their false teaching and get their own hearts right with God. Another reference for your study is
I Timothy 1:3
Note that this instruction is given directly to the pastor. His call is to protect the house of God with sound doctrine and sound leadership; gentle when possible and severe when necessary, always with the goal of winning the straying back to truth.
The second passage we read deals more firmly with the offender; the factious man.
We read verses 10 and 11, so I’ll back up just a little and complete the picture being addressed by Paul there. He is warning Titus to avoid certain things, and that word from which we get ‘avoid’ means to shun something. It is strong and emphatic. It means to turn directly away in order to avoid something.
So Paul says to turn sharply away from foolish controversies, arguments over genealogies and heated disputes about the Law. These very things must have been going on and Paul had gotten word about them and so he was counseling this young pastor to keep himself from being entangled in them
Have you ever known someone like that in the church? They like to pick one point of doctrine, or some recorded event in Scripture that they don’t understand, and every time you get around them they want to reopen the debate. They are getting a perverse pleasure out of riling the victim in front of them and, they think, making themselves look very clever and knowledgeable because they have found an ‘unexplainable’ passage of scripture.
Sometimes they’re just silly and ignorant. But other times they are undermining the authority of the teaching leadership of the church and causing trouble.
Well, Paul says to avoid the foolishness of people who don’t want to learn but only cause factions and strife with their ceaseless, mindless drivel.
Shun the foolishness, and after two warnings, he says, reject the offender.
Now that’s strong language! Reject him? In what way?
Well first let’s make sure we understand why we are rejecting him. We’re rejecting him because, according to verse 11, he is perverted, he is sinning, and he is self-condemned.
He is perverting the Word of God. He is perverting grace, because the factious man is always driven by legalism and condemnation; never by love and mercy.
He is sinning because he is destroying unity and because having his error brought to his attention twice he is continuing in his sin.
He is self-condemned just by virtue of his actions and his lack of repentance.
Now in case you are thinking that this sounds a lot like Matthew 18, which we studied last week, and therefore he should be gently loved to wellness as we indicated would be preferable, I want to point out to you that the difference is that this man is willfully causing friction and strife in the body. He is not just indulging some vice, not just mistreating one of the brethren with his words or his misdeeds. He is a poison in the body and the Holy Spirit, through the Apostle Paul says ‘reject’ him. He does not say to bring the man before the congregation. He doesn’t even say to go to him with two or three witnesses. Again, he is talking to the pastor, and he says to warn him twice and then reject him.
We’ll address this issue further when we bring everything together at the end. First let’s look at this third passage and understand what’s going on there.
It is the account of the man in the Corinthian church who is engaging in sexual relations with his father’s wife. Since it is worded that way it is generally assumed that this is a step-mother.
Now the background of this setting is that Corinth is a very perverse and wicked place. By Paul’s day it was common all over the regions around the Mediterranean, when referring to a sexually perverse or promiscuous person, to call them a ‘Corinthian’.
Then came the gospel, people were being saved in large numbers and the church was growing rapidly, and many of the hedonistic philosophies and practices of the pagan society were bleeding into the church.
The tone of almost the entire letter of I Corinthians is one of rebuke because there were so many fires to put out. Fortunately, we have II Corinthians and we find there that Paul has been encouraged by their spiritual growth and the Christ-likeness which can be seen in them later, and he commends them.
But here he is, addressing this very serious problem among them. And it is not just the fact of the sexual sin that is taking place that alarms Paul. It is the fact that the man is taking some sort of pride in the fact of this relationship, and worse, the congregation is applauding him!
Now maybe that was because they thought their tolerance of him was an expression of their freedom in Christ and their lack of legalistic attitudes.
Maybe it was because they hadn’t learned yet that as Christians they were to turn from their old practices.
Whatever their reasons were for being so accepting of the man, it was a danger to the church and an evil witness to the pagan society around them, and worst of all it was an affront to a holy God and an insult to the name of Christ.
We have no room for speculation on this one; Paul said REMOVE THE WICKED MAN FROM AMONG YOURSELVES.
If you read that passage from verse 10 you will see that he makes a point clear first. In a previous letter which we don’t have Paul says here that he told them not to associate with immoral people. Here he is clarifying that he wasn’t talking about those outside the church. He was talking about those who claimed to be brothers and sisters who were immoral.
We are not in a position to judge the sins of sinners, Christians, but we are instructed very clearly to deal with it when it exists in the body, among those claiming to be a part of the body.
So in one scenario we have brother sinning against brother, in another we have false teachers who are deliberately leading people astray for their own gain, in another we find the so-called brother who brings division to the body, and in the fourth one called ‘wicked’ by Paul, not called a brother at all, even though he apparently is calling himself a Christian, but he is living in blatant, open, perverse sin with no consciousness of wrong-doing and no repentance evident.
How do we deal with these?
DEALING WITH IT
On one of our walks Lynn and I were discussing this topic and I was bouncing some thought off her because I was in the midst of my research and contemplations on the topic.
She said something that reminded me of what I was taught in the Police Academy about the use of force.
She said that as we talked it seemed to her that the message of the New Testament on discipline in the church was that we should use the minimum action, or the minimum amount of force necessary to accomplish the desired result.
In the comedy move “Police Academy” that came out in 1982 one of the recruits, who is very badge heavy and loves his weapons, is walking down a residential street. A sweet little old lady is standing by the walk and as he approaches she says, “Officer, would you get my kitty out of the tree?”
He looks up, says “Sure, ma’am”, draws his gun and shoots the cat.
And thinking this through, I have to agree that when church leadership goes overboard in reacting to sin in the body that is proof positive that the Holy Spirit was not sought and He was not in the process.
When He is, there will be order, there will be peace, there will be sincere expression of Christ’s love, and the church will benefit.
Now let me just put in capsule form the bottom line of what I concluded from my study.
First, when there is conflict between brethren they are to handle it between themselves in brotherly love. If the formula given by Jesus in Matthew 18 is followed there will almost always be healing and reconciliation with the first meeting.
And here is where we come to the admonition to take them, if necessary, before the congregation.
The reason we balk at that is because we’ve seen it done wrongly, or we have this picture in our head of a sort of inquisition where the offender is made to stand up at the front of the church while he is verbally chastised by the Pastor then each of the Deacons in turn and then the Sunday School staff, then the choir, then he’s taken back to the nursery for the children to spit on.
Listen. If a brother or sister in Christ is so callous that they refuse to repent of a repetitious sin after two loving confrontations, there is a problem. There is sin in the camp and God cannot continue to bless and use a local church body that ignores deliberate sin in its midst.
The offender must be dealt with, and that is why I used I Timothy 5:20 at the beginning of this sermon. No matter how unpleasant or how uncomfortable it strikes us, it is the Bible, and we have to do what the Bible says or we may as well just go golfing on Sundays and forget all of this.
Having said that let me remind you that there is no mention of excommunication. If a sinning person is brought to a representation of the body, in a specially called meeting or the executive board or whatever, and if they are prayed over and talked to in love but out of firm resolve that their actions cannot and will not be allowed to go unchallenged, one of two things will happen. They will repent in shame or they will withdraw themselves from the fellowship.
One is obviously infinitely preferable to the other, of course. But in the end, the church family will have obeyed Scriptural admonition, and if they took each step in love and in a spirit of humility and concern for the offender, then they will have done well and God can take care of the individual.
Remember the J.B Phillips quote.
If we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, then we are saying we believe we have a God who is able and willing to change the human personality.
In the next two cases we cited the answer is simpler. The pastor was being addressed in both instances. In one he was being admonished to gently love the erring one to the truth. In the second he was being told to purge a poison from the body, in the form of a deliberate factious spirit which can very quickly destroy a church if allowed to operate unchecked. One warning, two warnings, three strikes and you’re out. It is made very clear.
In the fourth case it is just obvious that the person has no desire to live Godly at all.
Paul gives no instruction for warnings or for using the formula Jesus gave in Matthew 18. He calls the fellow ‘wicked’ and says to put him out.
So in the final analysis what I find is that the only time the church is instructed to dismiss anyone from the assembly is when that person has demonstrated that they are not a true believer and are behaving in a way that, if allowed free reign, would destroy a congregation.
In every other case what I see is encouragement to the exercise of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22, 23) in relating to one another and let God’s Holy Spirit do His healing work.
“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” - Dietrich Bonhoffer "The Cost of Discipleship"
In light of the things we have seen and heard from the Scriptures then, it is my recommendation that when we meet together to complete this task we’ve undertaken, that together we develop a statement that will make clear that with the help and leading of God’s loving Holy Spirit we will strive to follow all Biblical admonition and example to protect our fellowship from corruption, love all who come among us to healing and wholeness when possible, and remain always willing to receive a repentant into fellowship with no other conditions cited than that expression of repentance and the expressed desire for Christian relationships.
It is my duty to tell you what the Bible says. That is not always fun. It is not always pleasant. But it is certainly always the best plan for continued service to the Lord and health in the body of Christ.
