When should someone be church disciplined?

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That is a really good question.

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First of all, I know every guy is going to say that church discipline has to be dealt with patiently, and it is a very long process.

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I have personally seen cases where we confront a man who is openly in sin, admits that he's openly in sin, he's even sat down with the elders and says,

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I do not want to repent. I'm going to pursue this. We could have at that moment just done church discipline, but we said, look, we're going to pray for you, we're going to give you time, and sure enough, we gave him a month, we prayed for him and no change, gave him another month, tried to meet with him individually, and praise

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God on month three, he repented. We didn't have to go to that final step and bring it to the congregation.

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Now, unfortunately, I've been in situations where the exact opposite is true, and you do that same process.

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I think the difference of it is, if someone is unwilling to acknowledge that they are trapped in sin and unwilling to repent after multiple times of being gracious to pray with them, confront them, show them from Scripture, I think if you've encountered it, and they are obviously being self -destructive in their sin, it's publicly well known that everyone around them can see that this is the case.

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I think you have to have that conversation with them. Do you understand that what you are doing is so damaging to yourself and to your faith and that it's destructive in nature, that the best thing for you is to understand how serious this is, that we're going to have to, one, remove you from the table.

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That's step one. And then after that, if you still aren't willing to repent, then we're going to need to remove you from fellowship so that you understand the seriousness of this.

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This should never be out of anger, out of judgmentalism, out of how dare you, because as Galatians 6 .1

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says, that when we confront someone in sin, we should be careful that we too, ourselves, don't fall into sin.

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That's how I would initially—I know that both of you guys have thoughts on this. So, that's how I initially think, if you look at it from Scripture, you have to look at, comparing everything there is about church discipline, along with Galatians 6 .1,

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you will see that this is a long, painstaking, gracious time, that it should not be done quickly.

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Yeah. I mean, I would add to that, one of the clearest places that we see in Scripture where church discipline takes place is in 1

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Corinthians chapter 5, and that's an extraordinary case where you have a man in the church who is committing a heinous sin—in that case, it was sexual immorality—but what you see is that it was like this flippant,

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I don't care about what I'm doing, I don't care about who I'm hurting, and so what you have is

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Paul, the apostle, also the planter of that church, coming in and telling the elders, the overseers of that church, to discipline that man, to remove him from the midst of the church because of the damage, not only that it's going to cause him personally, but it's also going to cause the greater church.

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So, like John said, each case has to be handled with extreme care. I don't think that there's going to be a single answer for every case, but once you start to see this high -handed, flippant, rejoicing in my sin rather than repenting of it and turning to Christ, I think that's when the elders of the church have to step in, not only for the soul of that individual, but also for the care of the larger flock of sheep.

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That sin spreads like poison, and when people begin, in the

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Corinthian case, they were even openly celebrating this guy's sin, and that's what

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Paul's great concern was there. Now, I think that one of the—maybe, perhaps, to put the question in somebody's mouth—is, what about the person who kind of has that damaged conscience where they feel like, well,

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I'm always in sin, and there is a difference between somebody who struggles with their own frame in a

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Roman 7 sense. Somebody that's struggling with, man, the things that I want to do,

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I don't do, and the things that I don't want to do, I keep on doing. Who will save me from this?

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Certainly, we're all there. Church discipline is not about who's crushing it in the

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Christian life, but church discipline is about more so the individual, the person who is, by their actions, going to destroy or bring harm to the body.

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JP, I think you wanted to say a few things as well. Sure. To pick up on 1

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Corinthians 5 that you mentioned, Jimmy, I do think that's the clearest passage that we can go to. Jesus obviously has some words about this in Matthew 18 that are helpful for us as well.

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The reason that Paul rebukes the church in Corinth—and I think he's rebuking all of them—to

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Jimmy's point, and to kind of expound on that up for just a moment, is the fact that they should have been grieved by this man's sin, but instead, in verse 2 of 1

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Corinthians 5, Paul says, but instead, you are arrogant. They are, in one sense, seeing this as an appropriate expression of Christian freedom, and they are boasting in what this man is doing, rather than being grieved and seeing that this sin would not only destroy this man, but it could bring harm upon the entire church and needed to be dealt with.

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Paul is very clear in the context of 1 Corinthians 5 that the goal of church discipline is restoration.

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I think we all need to approach church discipline with that in view. This is not a blunt instrument to be wielded around this kind of bludgeoning people with.

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We want to be very precise in how we do this. We want to be gracious. We want to be careful, and we want to make sure that the point of it all—and we communicate this to the church as we try to lead the church through it—is to see this individual restored and to see this individual flourish in Christ.

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I do think that the big difference between—to Marissa's question, maybe pointedly—at what point is this not a struggling sinner anymore, like the

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Romans 7 reality, the Galatians 5 .17 reality? When does this become a case where church discipline is necessary?

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I do think the sin needs to be clear. It needs to be demonstrable. But then, to use some of the language

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Jimmy used, I wrote these same things down on my whiteboard here. It's a kind of high -handed sin. It's hard -hearted, and it's unrepentant.

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What that means is an individual is in sin and will say two or three things.

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Well, yeah, I'm sinning, and I just don't care. I realize it's sin. Not bothering me.

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Not worried about it. Who are you to tell me how to live? I'm going to continue doing what I want to do. Don't care.

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Or it might be a posture like this. Yeah, God's word seems pretty clear that this is sin, and I understand that the teaching of our church and the teaching of our pastors is that this is sin.

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But I don't think it's sin, and so I'm just going to keep doing it. That's also a high -handed approach, and also just this kind of ongoing unrepentant posture over the course of not like days or weeks, but we're talking like months and months, where it's just obvious that this kind of hard -hearted posture is enduring.

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I think that's just very different than the person who is grieved and bothered by his or her sin.

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Now, none of us are ever grieved as we should be. We're never bothered as much as we should be. But there is something in us as redeemed people, and because we have the spirit and it's our inner man, we're bothered by our sin.

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There's this constant cycle where we do transgress what God says is good.

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We sin, and then we acknowledge it. We own it, and we repent, and we cast ourselves anew, in one sense, upon the mercy of God in Christ, in submission even to the doctrine and teaching of the church.

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I think that's the easiest way that I know to answer this, and it's something that I know we've practiced in our context, and it's hard, and I know

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John, you have, and Jimmy, I trust you will in your church. It's always very sober and heavy, and it's something that the

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Lord does, though, use for good in the life of the church and in the lives of the saints, even of those of us who are not being disciplined at the time.

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It's a sobering reality where we're all like, man, if it were not for the grace of God, there go I, and Lord, may that never be me, and we're praying for our brother or sister that he or she would be restored.