142. Freedom In Finding A Church - Part 3 - Church Discipline

I do not mean to be mean. I do mean to be mad. Those that criticize this kind of preaching, they don't like authority! If you ain't got the King James, you ain't got... Hey, if you don't have a King James, you don't have a Bible. You'd be surprised. Son, don't go to sleep while I'm talking. Hey, hey, hey, don't you lay your head back. I'm important. I'm somebody. I love you. You know I love you. Have I convinced you I love you? You better nod your head yes, are you? Come on, put it out there. Stay awake and you listen to me. I still believe if you have a cold day and healthy, probably get my balance to a woman. I'm a preacher. When you got dressed today, you dressed deity. This is the For Freedom podcast. A podcast that is part of the RFP network that seeks to bring freedom in Christ from the spiritual abuse of legalism. And so fundamentalism is designed to unpack the idea of authority from Scripture. The problem with that is that that's not the defining principle in Scripture. It is a part of the Scripture. But the defining principle in Scripture is love. I found my freedom in you. I found my freedom in you. I found a joy I can't lose. And thank God it's true. You wrapped your arms around me. And heaven broke through. From the moment you found me, I found my freedom in you. Welcome to the For Freedom podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues. Now, here are your hosts, James Safer and Brad Martin. Welcome back to the For Freedom podcast. Thank you for being with us this episode. We are coming to you today. And we just got back from Nicaragua. And I'll tell you, we had a great time there with James and Lee and our different churches come together. Two churches that had never met each other. Me, Lee, and James were the only three in our group of nine that had talked before. And, you know, we've seen each other on a Zoom meeting. But these two churches come together. And we just became best friends. And we had a great week in Nicaragua. You know, it's funny that, you know, all, you know, people come to Nicaragua and they smuggle out prescription drugs. And here the Baptists are over here. We're smuggling out coffee and the best chocolate in the world. I mean, we're talking this is primo chocolate stuff. Maybe you can address that here in a minute, James. But as far as the coffee goes, the coffee is some good stuff. We were trying to save some for Christmas gifts. But it smelled so good in the cabinet that I told Emily, you know what, let's go ahead and crack one of these bad boys open. But I am thankful to be home. We had a great week. And I'm looking to report. We've got homecoming coming up this coming Sunday. And then we've got a revival through Wednesday. So I'm not going to report about our mission trip until the 29th at my church. James, when are you going to report to your church about the mission trip? We are scheduled to give a report to the church this coming Sunday, the 22nd. Our team is going to talk about the trip. I've got a video lined up to show them. And then we'll give a little message on missions, if time allows, and what that looks like. But excited about being able to present that. As you were speaking of chocolate, I was telling Brett before we got on, I am a dark chocolate-aholic. I love chocolate. I love any forms of chocolate. And we came across this coffee shop that had, and Lee said, this is some of the best dark chocolate you'll ever eat. So I went on, and I was like, I already got my coffee. I already bought my coffee for the road. And everybody else was coming back, and they have these chocolate bars. And he was like, it's so good. Don't eat it until, like, if you eat it at nighttime, you're going to be jacked and not go to sleep. Like, it's that good. And so I'm waiting. And finally, I'm like, okay, I'm going to go buy two bars of chocolate. I bought a 60% dark chocolate and an 80% dark chocolate. I got home. I cracked open the 60%. I had one little one inch by one inch, not even that big, half inch by half inch cube off of it. I ate it, Brett, and I almost threw up. It was that bad. Like, I don't know if it didn't have the sugar in it, if it was just chocolate. You know, when we eat chocolate, it's got sugar and milk, and it's all creamied up together. And maybe it's meant for baking. But I could not stomach it, dude. It was so bad. Coffee out of this world, but the chocolate, for some reason, at that place. And maybe it was on there. Maybe it was listed in Spanish not for do not eat, cook with, cooking chocolate. I don't know. But it was rough to stomach as well. That's crazy. See, I haven't tried any of it, but Emily did. And she did say it was gritty, but not that bad. But, you know, I knew it was different than normal. It wasn't like Hershey's or something. Yeah. No, it was not Hershey's dark chocolate. Or, as I showed you, a Toborone dark chocolate bar. We did have a great time. Man, we're excited about presenting this week. And can't wait to share with the church what happened and what's going on and how we can partner together and how we can do mission, not only locally, but globally across the seas. And so I think that's part of the church. I think part of the church is doing things locally, doing things nationally in a national level, but also finding a place outside of your own nation where you can minister and be a part and be a presence. And so I like that concept of having a personal person that we can talk with, that we can communicate with, and excited about the opportunity for us to partner in the future overseas in Nicaragua. If the Lord allows, it could be somewhere else, but right now we're just praying through what the Lord has for us. Every church should have the missions model of the Book of Acts. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost part of the world. Your community, your county, your state, and then somewhere else in the world. Every church should have that model. Churches shouldn't just focus on outside missions and ignore their back door, and you don't need to just focus on your back door and ignore outside missions. Every church needs to cover the full spectrum, and that's how we're going to reach the world with the gospel. Amen. That's such good stuff, and excited about that. So glad to be able to do that trip with you, Brett, and our church has been able to come together. That was the first time I've been in Nicaragua. It was the first time that our church and your church had ever been on a mission trip together, or a mission trip period, but also together. And just being able to serve with each other like that, the mix of guys and girls was perfect. The connection that our church has had together was awesome. And so glad to be able to be able to be down there and be able to interact with Lee and the organization down there. It was great. And I don't think Nicaragua has seen so many gingers at one time. And so that was probably the reason the world was changed while we were down there was because of the ginger overload. That's right. Hashtag ginger overload. We're excited about the future. Excited about, man, just a couple of weeks away, Brett, what do we got coming up? Oh, a couple of weeks away, we've got Ringgold, Georgia coming up. No longer Fort Ogle Fort. I can say Ringgold. We are going to Hope Church, Catoosa in Ringgold, Georgia. And we're looking forward to the RFP Conference, the For the Sake of the Gospel Conference. We're looking forward to being there with the RFP family and network of podcasts. And if you are going to be in or around the Chattanooga area the first weekend of November, swing by Ringgold, Georgia, swing by Hope Church, and come see us at the For the Sake of the Gospel Conference. We'd love to meet you, talk with you. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to do some, maybe some sessions and talk with some other podcast hosts. I know in the future here, we're going to do some crossover episodes. I'm looking forward to that. But I'm really looking forward to the For the Sake of the Gospel Conference this year. I do believe it's going to be three days this year. We're going to do Friday evening, all day Saturday, and into Sunday morning. But we are looking forward to being there for that. What do we got coming up after that? Well, speaking of that, have you been able to listen to the newest podcasts? I think they're part of the network. I'm not sure. I think they are. But Brian's new podcast, Text and Context. I followed the show, but I haven't had a chance to listen to the episode yet. Well, for all of our listeners, if you haven't listened to it, fantastic episode. Great train of thought there with Brian, Jason, and Josh. They're going through texts of scriptures that have been taken out of context and putting them back into context. And it's going to be a great show, great series going on. I enjoyed very much the very first episode. Been able to hear Jason's story, Jason Riddle, and Josh Owens' story. I think that's his name, Josh Owens. And so go and listen to that. It's going to be a great thing. And it's going to be some good stuff they're going to be hitting. And I can't wait to listen to more of what they have. But for us, coming up after that, that weekend for me, Brett, is an extremely busy weekend. We've got the RFP meetup. And then I come back. It's homecoming Sunday for us in November. And then the Monday and Tuesday is our Baptist State Convention. And so I've got like four or five days of just, bam, back to back to back to back stuff going on. So excited about what the Lord's doing. But we are after that. Right now, we got off the phone with our missionary just a couple of days ago. Our lady, our liaison there in Israel. And still planning our trip in March. But that may get pushed a little bit with just some uproars of things. And so we're still excited about it. We still want to do the trip. But we want to be as safe as possible. She said there's boots on the ground. People were there. People were touring the city. But we want to be as safe as possible as well. And so we're reexamining some of those things. May push it to the end of the summer or even the end of the year. But we're just looking at all of our options of what we can do there. But we are so excited about Israel. Can't wait to do it and go back and see the Holy Lands. I know it's going to be a great time. James, you still use a pager, right? A pager? I don't use a pager. How did that go? Oh, no pager? Okay, well, maybe that's a good thing. Oh, is that the bombing thing that happened? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think I saw one thing about that. One thing? Okay. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. But I watch very... I listen to news all the time, but I don't watch news at all. I don't watch... What I catch on social media is about the only news I get. So you've got an unbiased media source there. There you go. Exactly. Perfect. That's right. Well, Brett, we are in our church series. And we've talked about what is a church. We've talked about church membership. And this week, we're talking about church discipline and what that is. So let's get a quick clip. I've enjoyed playing these clips over the last couple of weeks. A clip of church membership and what that sounds like in the world that we grew up in. Let me tell you what, trim that 16,000 member mega church right on down to a good Holy Ghost local church. That's 10 minutes of a real pastor having real pastoral authority. It's regrettable. It happens sometimes. A man better have wisdom, be full of God. But 1 Corinthians 5 is in your Bible. And sometimes you've got to exercise church discipline. Put that in your tailpipe and smoke it while I shut that corner, brother. Hey, man, brother Brett. Well, what do you think about that when it comes to church discipline? And what we were taught church discipline is from our worldview. Oh, we just got to trim the 16,000. Got to trim it down, brother. It's too big. We got to trim it on down to a manageable number. That's right. You know, I've been going to church for a long time. And, you know, we had a conversation earlier about this. As far as church discipline goes, I have yet to see church discipline done in a biblical way. I've got a couple of stories that I could tell about how my pastor looking at the church just up one day. Just decided, you know, we've got some people on the church roll that don't come anymore. But they're shacked up. They're living together. So I'm going to grab a man from the church. And we're just going to ride around and tell them they're off the roll. And that's about the extent of it. Just nothing biblical about it. I've got friends. Also, I've got other friends that were dragged up in front of the church because, you know, they wore their hat wrong or they look cross-eyed at somebody just for nothing reasons. And so I've yet to see, you know, church discipline done the right way. I know there are churches out there that do it. I've investigated. I've read some things about how you're supposed to do it. And I've studied it for myself. But as far as actually seeing it, especially in the independent fundamental Baptist movement, I just haven't seen it done the right way at all. Brett, I would be scared to attend a church that someone was church disciplined because they looked cross-eyed at someone. Because as many of our listeners know, I am cross-eyed. I have a lazy eye. And so it would be every single week I would be church disciplined for looking cross-eyed at someone. There you go, brother. You need to repent. I do need to repent. Yeah. I have, I as well have heard stories. But I've yet to, like you said, be in a church that has practiced church discipline the right way. I've been a part of learning and this learning process. And that's sort of what we're going to go through today. But I did hear a story just a couple of days ago of a friend of mine I was talking to in Alexander County. And a pastor friend who's a dear friend of mine. Been at the same church for 25 years now. Celebrating his 25-year anniversary in just a couple of weeks. And he was telling me of how he was going through the old Bible, all the old minutes of the church. And I've got a book here of all the minutes of our church as well. And I've read through them. And it's interesting if your church keeps those minutes to go back and see how the church functioned 50 to 100 years ago. I mean, they're getting up and they're voting on spending a dollar somewhere. And it's like you're voting to spend a dollar. Like the church operated so much differently. But he said he was reading them back in 1950. A man was, in the summertime, was out doing some stuff. And had gotten drunk at a local bar. And was walking around town. And saw by some church members that he was drunk out in public. And he was saying some vulgar things. And doing some things he shouldn't be doing as a church member. And the church minutes reported that they went to the man privately and addressed the sin. And he was unrepentant. And so the next business conference, business meeting, they got up and they addressed the church. And said that so-and-so has been seen drunk in public. And we understand drunkenness is a sin. And so therefore we are going to church discipline him. And disfellowship and discommune with him. So that he won't be participating in the Lord's Supper. He's still welcome to come to church. But until he can be repented and restored, he won't be a part of our church membership. And he was like, dude, I've never seen this before. This was crazy. And so he continued reading. And the very next month, the report was business conference. This brother so-and-so recognized that he had done wrong, came before the church at the business meeting, repented of his sin, and asked the church for forgiveness and restoration in the church. And I looked at him and I said, Paul, that is something that our church is missing these days. Because that's what the church is there for. It's to build and edify one another up. And church discipline does that when it's done in the right way. I've said several times, and I'll continue to say it, that I actually don't like calling it church discipline. I actually like calling it church restoration. We're going to read a passage of scripture in a minute. And we'll see that the point of it is not to just discipline, to just throw someone out, excommunicate them. The point is redemption. The point is restoration. The point is to bring them back to God. Too many of us would like to gossip and backbite and tattletale and kick people while they're down. But the point of the whole process is to bring someone back to God, is to restore them. And we need to keep that in mind as we go through this process and see what the Bible has to say about it. Absolutely. Well, as we get started, a couple of questions we want to ask you to get your mind started is, is God's love incompatible with God's discipline? Oftentimes people will say, well, God is love. And how can God love someone and discipline them? Another question is, is if God allows pain in our life, does that mean that God hates us? And what the scripture we're going to start out with is Hebrews 12, 5 and 7. And it says this, certainly not, of course, this doesn't happen, but this is not God's love. But it says, and have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as a son? My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when you are reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves and chases every son who he receives. It is for the discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there in whom the father does not discipline? Here, God discipline is seen as an expression of his love. In fact, it's one of the markers that we understand that we're a child of God. When God disciplines, it shows us that we are his son and his child. C.S. Lewis once wrote and said, The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves is only insolutable so long as we have attached trivial meaning to the word love. God, as we continue this thought, God's love to us is much to simply leave us where we are. That's what the gospel is reflecting. The gospel is saying, we're not going to leave you where you are. We're going to bring you through the power of faith in the gospel to what God has called you to do. God's love is a holy love. God's love is what is best for us is not always to get our way. But you have to be aligned with his way. Brett, what's your thoughts on that? And help us understand this from maybe a parenting position. Well, you know, we understand this and things like parenting and education and coaching. And yet when we come to the topic of church discipline, many are quick to throw out this idea as unloving, divisive, unnecessary. We love to talk about the idea of God's grace and mercy. We like Jesus as Savior, but we struggle with Jesus as Lord. That to follow him means to deny ourselves. It means to pick up our own cross and follow him. If we love him, we will keep his commandments. Now, I will say that I've gone to Hebrews 12 many times in the past to talk about eternal security. Because, you know, if we could sin and lose our salvation, then there would be no need for him to chastise us. There would be no need for him to discipline us because we aren't his children. But we are his children. And God does care what happens to us because we are his children. We are adopted into his family. But people that are lost, God doesn't discipline them. He doesn't care what they do. But, you know, if I don't discipline my children, it's because I hate my children. But I discipline them because I love them. Because I want them to turn out right. I want them to grow up being God-fearing Christians. And I want them to be productive citizens. If I hated them, I'd ignore them. But because we are children of God, he does discipline us. He does chastise us. He doesn't throw us away. Back to our subject. No doubt there are real stories of church discipline being unnecessarily divisive and unloving rather than throwing out church discipline because of bad examples. We need to once again turn to the Bible to consider what it says. And I've seen this too where church discipline is just like it's taken to an extreme. It's very authoritarian. It's, you know, we're going to set you straight. You know, we're going to be mean to you in this process. We're going to, you know, scorched earth policy. We're going to make this as difficult as possible because we're here to punish you. And that's not the attitude we need to have. Okay. So what is church discipline? How many of us have seen church discipline before? We've talked about it already that, you know, we've seen this a few times done in the wrong way. You know, Brett, another way to look at that is how many of us have ever been taught anything while in church? Because we often think of church discipline as the negative. And there is an aspect to that. There is an aspect of the corrective side of it, of someone being disciplined in the corrective sense, where you go to someone and you work through some things we're going to talk about. But there's also the side of church discipline that we often forget that we're going to address first is the formative side. Part of me as a parent is forming in my children how to do the right thing. When my child does something wrong, it is telling them why they did it wrong because they don't even understand what they've done wrong. Sometimes my son will do something, Bertie will do something. And I'll say, Bertie, do you understand why you said that or did that? And he'll say, no, it's because someone at school said it. And so I thought it was fun to say. And I am teaching him, I am forming him to have the correct ideology, and I am teaching him something. And so in the formative sense, we're all under church discipline all the time because we're all learning and forming how we can be closer to God. And every church does this, and every church should be doing this in the right way. But not every church does the correcting and the discipline side of it. And so the most corrective discipline happens in a small scale of personal relationships. One friend begins to exhort another friend in love. Bert, I see you're doing something wrong, and I come to you because we're close and we're doing life together. That's the term that people in church want to use. We're doing life together, and so I receive correction in a small group setting. And this should be the normal and regular part of a Christian life. We should be going to one another, confessing our sins, living transparent and lovingly helping each other follow Christ. And this is important to start here because if this is not normal in our church culture, then taking the next step in the formal church discipline is going to be confusing and even unloving. Because if we're not loving in a small group, and we're not correcting one another in a small group, and I'm not saying, hey, Stephen, who's coming to church, man, this is wrong in your life. And I'm not correcting him on a personal level, and it's not part of normal church life. Then when we do this in a massive area where we've come before the church body as a whole, then it's going to look like, well, God's not love. This church isn't love. All they're doing is discipline people. But yet when we do it in the right way, we begin to show God's love as God is holy, and God cannot allow this. And so this is church discipline. And from here on out, when we refer to this, we're going to be talking about the formal sense. So it's got to start with the personal sense. It's got to start in a small group first. But then we've got to expand this into what the formal sense of it in the church as a whole looks like. And so, Brett, let's begin to transition this over to, you may have something on the personal side of it, but transition this over to the corporate side of Matthew 18. When it comes to the fact that, and I've said this before, God is love. Yes, God is love. But the fact that God is love doesn't diminish other aspects of his character. Yes, God is love. He's all loving, but he's also all just. And you can't just say, oh, well, God is all love, so I can, everything is allowable. He wouldn't do that because he wouldn't discipline anybody because God is all loving. He'll accept everybody because he's all love. No, yes, he's all loving, but he's also all just at the same time. And that, you know, God's love and God's justness intersects at the cross. So as we look into what the scripture has to say to answer the question, what is church discipline? We have to go to the word of God. So the first passage of scripture we're going to look at is Matthew chapter 18. We'll begin reading in verse 15. It says, If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you've gained a brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by the Father in heaven. Now, what I see when I read this passage of scripture is there's so many people that, especially pastors that are trigger happy on church discipline, is they just want to immediately drag somebody up in front of the church, and they don't want to follow the process that Jesus places in scripture, where Jesus says, okay, you need to go to them in private first. This needs to be a private conversation at their home or in your office. And then if that doesn't work, well, then you need to take witnesses with you. You need to have another private conversation with a few people. We don't need to be trigger happy and just drag somebody up in the church because we see an opportunity to flex our muscles. So here we have someone who is in sin. He's confronted in private, but he refuses to repent. Then two or three witnesses come in the next instance. Again, he refuses to repent. Then it's brought before the church, and he still refuses to repent. So then he's excluded or excommunicated, treated as a pagan or tax collector. And I also want, before we read our next passage, and then I'll pass it back over to you, I also want to see here that this person is given an opportunity to repent in private. So it's not like, oh, this thing has happened, so now we have to bring it before the church. No, the scripture says, if they don't repent, you go to the next step. If they don't repent, you take it to the next step. So the goal is repentance here, okay? So let's consider 1 Corinthians 5, verses 1 through 5. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans. For a man has his father's wife. Are you ignorant? Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body, I am present in spirit, and as if I've already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan, and for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. So right there we see the goal is, the ultimate goal is not to discipline them. It's not to kick them out of the church. It's not to excommunicate them from the fellowship forever. It's not to throw them away and flush them down the toilet. The point of it is that they might be saved. The point of it is the restoration of them. We're going to skip down to verse 11, read a couple more verses. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler, not even to eat with such a one for what I have to do with judging outsiders. Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. Purge the evil person from among you. Let me say one more thing about this passage before I throw it back over to you. Here in 1 Corinthians, the Corinthian church had several, several problems. Paul had received several letters condemning the actions of the Corinthian church. One of the things that the Corinthian church was doing is they weren't fellowshipping. They weren't having anything to do with lost people, with people in the community. They were sequestering themselves. And Paul's like, look, that's not what I'm telling you to do. I'm not telling you to stay away from everybody. But what you do need to stay away from is you need to stay away from the unrepentant brother. Because that is a danger. This is a warning to the church. James, you want to talk more about that? Yeah, I mean, this is where we get to the heart of the issue. And it really begins, you know, Paul doesn't give a lot of lists. But when he does give a list, I think it should be something that we take note of. And so we're going to take this list and sort of have a working definition for the rest of the episode. And our definition is this church discipline is the act of excluding someone who professes to be a Christian. That's where it starts first. They've got to know Christ. If they're a Christ follower, the Holy Spirit's within them and is leading and guiding and directing them. And they're going against the Holy Spirit. If they're a lost person, they're going to do lost things. And so it's someone who professes to be a Christian from membership in the church and to participate in the Lord's Supper for serious unrepentant sin. What are those serious unrepentant sin? It says those guilty of sexual immorality or greed, an idolater, a reviler, a drunkard, or a swindler. He says these are the things that are the unrepentant sin. They refuse to let go of it. And typically, this is what people mean when they talk about Christian discipline. They are excommunion or excommunicating. They are not allowing the Lord's Supper to be done with them in that sense. And so as we think through that, we've got to begin asking ourselves, okay, these are some serious issues. Sexual immorality, greed, idolatry, reviler, drunkard, swindler. These are the things that we need to aware ourselves with. And we begin to ask ourselves, okay, why should I even have church discipline? Why is this even a big deal? Why is this something that even should be talked about in the church? And I believe there's a couple of different reasons, five specific reasons from this passage that we just read to give us reason for church discipline. The first one I think is this, to expose sin. And verse 2 says this, Verse 5, We're warning this person. We're saying, hey, this is something huge in your life. We're trying to help you. We're trying to cause the sin that's in your life to be removed. Not only is it to expose or to warn, but it's to save. As we continued on, it says to save them. The aim of discipline is to wake a person up to the seriousness of sin. How often do we see someone who is, you know, right now I'm helping my son with football. And he's playing and he's out there and he's doing some things. And he'll do a couple of things in practice. And I'll call him to the side and I'll say, hey, Brody, you don't need to do that. Why not? Well, because that's a penalty. If you do that, you're going to get called for a penalty. And you're going to cause the whole team to suffer. Well, this is the same thing that we would do in church discipline. Hey, what you're doing is wrong. It's sin. Well, why can't I do that? Well, because you're going to cause the whole body of Christ to suffer. You're going to cause pain to come upon you and on the body of Christ. And so it's to deliver this man from Satan. And then it's to protect him. Verse six, it continues on. And it says, do you not understand that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? And so he's saying here, we, through doing this, is protecting the church. God's perfect plan for the world for redemption is the church. And we're protecting his bride. And then it's to preserve the church's witness. Notice again in verse one, the part of the shock that's in the church that it's even tolerating this. It says, is it actually reported that there is sexual immorality above you? Of a kind that's not even tolerated among pagans? I mean, Paul is literally saying here, listen, church, you're doing things that the wicked people say is wrong as well. And you're allowing this to happen. You're ruining your own church testimony because you're not disciplining those that are around them. The church task is to draw a clear line between the world and God's people and what was lost if they don't enact church discipline. Because we lose the purity of the church. We lose the preservation of the church when we don't enact church discipline. So let's think about this next question. What sins actually require church discipline? Is there a passage we can go through? It lists all the different sins that require church discipline. But rather than make a big list of sins that we should discipline, ones you should and ones you shouldn't, it's better to do this by drawing principles from Scripture to help guide us. After all, if we look in 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 12, it says, For what business is it of mine to judge outsiders? Don't you judge those who are inside? So in the church, we have to make a judgment call based on evidence. And while God knows all things, including the motives of our hearts, we are limited in our perspective. There's only certain things that we can see. As a result, Scripture talks about us looking at the outward fruit of someone's life. But even that, it's not an omniscient viewpoint. We don't have all the facts. As a result, a church should discipline for sins that are outward, serious, and unrepentant. That's a good criteria to go by when judging these things. So let's talk about these three. Outward, okay? A church shouldn't discipline someone every time they suspect that person is proud. Every time they suspect that person is greedy. You know, for us to judge, we must be able to hear, we must be able to see, in part. That's why Jesus calls for two or three witnesses. So it needs to be something outward. It needs, we call it public. It needs to be public. It needs to be seen. You know, we can't just assume that something's going on. We have to have hard facts before we act on this thing. And second, that second word is serious, okay? There needs to be a place in the life of the church where love covers over a multitude of sins, a multitude of transgressions. Now, when we say that, that's not to belittle sin. But it's to recognize it is a part of bearing up one another as we seek to follow Christ. Look, we're all going to mess up. We're all going to trip up. We're not perfect. You know, we sin every single day. You know, if we were brought up before the church every time we sin, this would be a 24-7 process. So it needs to be an outward sin. It needs to be a serious sin. And then finally, it needs to be an unrepentant sin. You know, as Jesus lays out in Matthew 18, it's when a person who professes Christ but refuses to let go of the sin that they are liable for church discipline. Okay? Whether or not the person is repentant is what the church needs to try and determine that lies at the heart of the issue. So this is an instance where you go to somebody who's a member of the church. They profess to be a Christian. And you say, look, you're doing this. And they say, you know, I'm not going to change. I don't see there's anything wrong with that. And so I'm not going to change. Okay? Well, that's when you bump it up to the next level, all the way up to the church. So these sins, they need to be outward, serious, and unrepentant. Yeah, absolutely. So, Brett, who leads this process? Who is the ones that should be doing this? I think it's the ones with the keys. Yeah, it's the ones with the keys. It's the church, right? We've got to have the church leadership, the church as a whole doing this. And so a lot can be said, but let's summarize it with these basic two ideas. The process ultimately should include as few people as possible. I think this is where the church has got it wrong so often. Because we have these little, how do we say it the nice way in the Southern Baptist, the South Baptist churches. I have a prayer request. Prayer request. Dear sister, I have a prayer request. Dear brother. And all of a sudden, we frame this in the form of a prayer request. And we tell everyone, we've got to pray for brother so-and-so. Because, man, and all of a sudden, now everyone in the whole community knows. And so Jesus says in Matthew 18, start with one. Let's make this circle as small as possible. Brett, if I've hurt you, don't go to your 17 pastors in your association first. Come to me first. And then if I'm not repentant, then bring a couple of people with you. And he's trying to say, get as small as you can. Keep it small. After that, if they're still not repentant after you've addressed them twice, then it goes to the church. But it's got to start small. It's got to start where as few people can be dealt with as possible. Because this is involving the needs of the process of protecting the reputation of Christ and the well-being of individuals. Now, again, don't hear what we're not saying. If it's an illegal or immoral situation, you go to the authorities. Like, this is not so-and-so has done something wrong with the teenage girl and you let them deal with it with one another. No, that's a serious issue. And we take that straight to the authority. We don't let that happen. But if it's something that's, like we just said, if it's outward, if it's serious, if it's sexual immorality, if it's something that's done in a sin but not an illegal thing, then we deal with it in the church. But then we also should allow the church leaders to lead the process. In Galatians 6.1, it says, Paul says, We should have seen some very challenging things in the life of the church. And so bring them alongside. And so the role of a church member should play ultimately this. We should strive to live transparent lives. We should speak truth into one another. That's where we have got to get back to living transparent and speaking truth and love. This also includes repentance and rebuking that involves this. We should inform the elders of things that are going on. You should go to your pastor and say, hey, I've dealt with Brett. He's not listening. I don't know what else to do. How can you help me in this? How can you help me navigate these waters? Let your pastor know. Let your leadership know. Let your elders know. Plead with the person that's in sin. They have an existing relationship with you. If you don't know them already, this is the time to start a friendship with them. Tell them they're in sin. Be honest with them. And then pray for them. Even if you don't know them very well, pray that God will work in their lives and grant repentance. And ultimately, like we said, restoration. I think it is so important that you brought up the issue of abuse and things that are legal in this process. Because this is something that's an issue in our churches. And that is we have to understand that the government is an institution that is instated by God. And there are laws. And the last thing we need to do is sweep sexual abuse or illegal things under the rug for the sake of keeping it in the church. When we are legally bound to report these things. And hiding abuse causes so much trouble and so much trauma and does so much damage to the church. So I'm glad that you brought that up. Which leads us into the next question. How quickly should we act? How long should this process take? Does this need to be something that drags on for six weeks? Do we need to do this next coming up Sunday? How long should it take? And the answer to that question is how fast a church should act depends on how long it takes to determine the characteristic unrepentance. So how long does it take to work that out? Let me give you an example. In Matthew 18, the process can take some time. I mean, we've got three different stages that we have. We've got to go to them once. And we've got to get two or three people together. We've got to meet. We've got to go. And so that could take some time. But we look at 1 Corinthians 5 and it seems there's a quicker pace going on here. Paul's pronouncing judgment. Calling, remove the man right now. Okay, so these two texts, they don't illustrate that the church has two different approaches for different sins. But more like it's describing the same process, but the two passages are dropping in at different time periods in the process. And so that's what we're seeing. Because, look, 1 Corinthians 5, this is a sin that all the church already knew about. Okay? One that they were even arrogant about. So the process of starting small and then adding warnings, it wasn't necessary in 1 Corinthians 5 because it was already public. It was already, you could already see the man was unrepented. That was clear. So Paul said, look, it's time to excommunicate. Now it's time. One other example in scriptures in Titus 3.10, Paul instructs, So the example in Matthew 3 has warnings. 1 Corinthians has no warnings. And here in Titus, we've got two. Paul's urgency seems to reflect his concern to protect the rest of the church. But again, the determining factor in this is how long does it take to determine characteristic unrepentance? Okay? Can a preemptive resignation avert discipline? Now I'm going to throw this to you because you had something to say about this. Yeah. So imagine someone's confronted with their sin. They've done wrong. They've seen this area and they think that it's okay. They think, hey, I'm good with the Lord. I'm okay with this. This is not wrong. And so the church begins to go through this process and they just say, you know what? I'm just going to leave the church. I'm just going to resign my membership, pull my membership, and I'm just going to leave. So how does the church respond to this? The other question I think and maybe even how to find the answer is, as you mentioned earlier, who does Jesus give the authority to the kings of the kingdom? In Matthew 16 and Matthew 18, the church has the keys to the kingdom. And so the church is still responsible. The church is still, in a way, we're going back to these points of we're trying to protect the body of Christ. We're trying to preserve the church's witness. And so in some situations, it might be that the church gets up and says, you know, brother so-and-so has left the church and we've been dealing with a specific sin issue. Maybe you don't go into detail. You don't need to go into detail. But there's been some sin there, and they were unrepentant, and they felt best for them to remove them. They opted to remove themselves from the membership. And so, therefore, this is the church, in this way, letting go of and disciplining to loose this person to say, hey, it's nothing that the church did wrong. It's what they are actively participating in in order for them to be let go in this membership role. And so the question we have to ask, and this is, Brett, sort of the last sort of thing we'll talk about, two different things, how to interact with someone after they've been church disciplined, and how do we restore someone after church discipline? Okay, so we've talked through the process of how this works and what happens, but let's say we've got this place. We've initiated church discipline. We've done what 1 Corinthians 5.11. I'm writing this now to not associate with anyone that bears the name of a brother of guilty of sexual morality or greed and idolatry, reviler, drunkard, or swindler, not even to eat with them. And so Paul is making some pretty serious things. He said, I'm telling you, don't even associate with them. Don't even fellowship with them. And so how do we make sense of this? How do we reckon this in our day and age? I don't think this means that we physically exclude the person from attending church. I think that excommunication here is barring the person from having the Lord's Supper together because this is intended to mark off those who are not repentant of sin. They're not trusting in Christ. But the church is gathering as an opportunity for them to sit under the preaching of God's word. We should welcome and even encourage in most circumstances. Yes, still come to church. Yes, still come and listen to God's word being extorted and expounded and preached and applied to our lives because that's what they need. But Paul is saying to not even eat with such a one. And I believe he's not saying here that we should avoid all of our non-Christian friends. I rather would say that he is saying to avoid the one who bears the name of a brother. He's not saying if someone's lost, don't eat with them. He's saying if someone who is a brother is living in open sin, then we should not be identifying with them because it's unrepentant. Love compels us not to act as if everything is okay and share a mirror with them. But love compels us as a person's soul is at stake that we should characterize the interactions with them as deliberate conversations about repentance. And I believe he's giving warning here. He's saying, listen, they're living in a way that is not honoring to God, is not honoring what the word says that you identify with. And there has to be some radicalness in our life of saying, listen, I can't even associate with you in this area because you're not living the Christian life. You're not living what Christ has called us to do, to be his light bearers in this world. And what if the question is, is what if I excommunicate someone that's my church family, that's my blood relative? And I don't think the words that Paul says here applies to that situation. Just as Peter and Paul would have categorized a living, if an unbeliever spouse, a shared meal with a spouse does not have the same implication as a shared meal with friends. And so I think it's a different category altogether. And we need to be careful with those things. But I think ultimately using discretion in loving and caring for them, and sometimes loving for them in a way that doesn't seem the way the world. The world says, accept everyone the way they are. Well, Jesus says, repent, and then you're accepted. And if we can't repent, then how can we have fellowship with one another? Amen. Our last question we're going to deal with today is, when and how do we restore someone from discipline? Look, just as discipline should take place when characteristic unrepentance can be determined, restoration should happen as soon as characteristic repentance can be determined. How long this takes will vary from situation to situation. But when it is determined, the church should restore the person and forgive with no talk of probation or second-class citizenship. Look, when we are called to restore, we are called to restore fully. One example of this is in 2 Corinthians 2, verse 5 through 11. Now, if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure, not to put it too severely to all of you. For such a one, this punishment by majority is enough. So you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love to him. For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs. You know, verse 11 is very instructive. There are times, whether individually or corporately, where forgiveness can be costly. It can be difficult. But Paul encourages forgiveness here, not only because, you know, we've been forgiven ourselves, but also because he doesn't want to be outwitted by Satan with unforgiveness, bitterness, and anger, and division. All of those things are soon to follow after that. All right. I hope that this has been helpful, and I hope that being careful in our church membership and how we practice church discipline will help us drastically. We not only tell the truth to each other about our standing before God, but we also tell the truth, and I think this is the most important thing, Brett, for us to take away from church discipline, is we show the truth of God's love and God's mercy and God's forgiveness and God's grace to the watching world. When someone's done wrong, and we welcome them back in with open arms, and we love them, and we care for them, and we forget and we move on. Man, that is so powerful to the world, because how often does the world hold on to these grudges? And we just, by through repentance and through forgiveness, because we've been forgiven much, and so we also should forgive much as well. We are opening up the door for the world to see a loving, caring God in a way that only He can show His love. And I'd also like to say, closing out, when it comes to this area of church discipline, church restoration, whatever you want to call it, it is so imperative that we don't fly off the handle and try to take this up on our own in this area. It is so important we go to the Bible. And I would suggest, every time this comes up, don't think you know what to do. Turn to these passages of scriptures. Open up the Bible. Read Matthew 18 every single time. Read 1 Corinthians chapter 5 every single time. Write the steps down, step by step, and take the approach that Jesus and Paul prescribed when approaching this subject. It is so super sensitive. That's why we need to let the burden of this fall on scripture instead of falling on us, because we don't have the authority personally. The church has the authority because it's been given by Jesus Christ. So we need to let the church and the scripture be our authority in this and let the burden fall on scripture. Yeah, we are the armor bearer. We are the flag bearer of Christ. The gospel is what's going before us. Christ has laid out what this looks like, and our responsibility is just to honor His name, bear His name, and go forth proclaiming His name. And by doing that and allowing the gospel to shine through, we allow Christ to be magnified in all these things. And so I think this is so vital for us. Church discipline is something we don't do. But I'll close it like this, Brett. If I know my son is doing wrong, and this happened this last week, Brett. We got home. We were in the vehicle, and Brody was just out of control. And so it hadn't happened in a while, but we continued to talk through him the whole way home. And we're trying to calm him down, but he was just causing problems. And we got home, and I said, Brody, go to your room. It's time for an adjustment. And I went in, and I looked at him, and I said, I love you, son, but I'm doing this because I love you. And I had to discipline him. And he cried, and we talked through that the way we do it in our household. But I did it because I loved him. I did it because I don't want him to act that way in any other situation. And I'm trying to do it for his benefit. I didn't do it because it was going to make me look good. No one was going to see that. I didn't go before the entire church. This is the first time I'm telling it out loud because it was an issue that was dealt with between me and him and our family. And he apologized to his mother. We dealt with those things. And that's how church discipline should be done. It should be dealt with small so that God is glorified, so that his name is lifted high, so that ultimately everything that we do is done for the glory of God. Amen. Brett, anything else? I'm about to cover it. Until next time, to God, not the pastor, be the glory. I found my new name. I found that good grace. I found that healing. And the tears fell down my face when I found my beginning that has no ending. I found that second chance. I found my best friend. I found my forgiveness. I found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. I found my freedom in you. Thanks for listening to the For Freedom Podcast. If you enjoyed our content, do us a favor by liking, subscribing, or sharing our podcast on whichever podcast platform you use. Be sure to join us next time for the For Freedom Podcast. For Freedom Podcast. The End

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