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We don't exercise church discipline because a church member sins, okay? We exercise church discipline for the church member who fails to repent of sin, who's living in habitual sin that will not repent of it, no matter that we go to them privately, carry another brother with us, no matter that the church itself reaches out to him and tries to restore this brother.
And so the end of church discipline, excommunication, is even in itself a method of bringing restoration to this brother.
One, two, three. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community.
For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member.
We are here to provide for you some biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life. And we're going to today get back to an old series. Well, old because it is part number 41 in a series that we last touched on back on May 10th of 2023.
So, I always told people we'd return to the series. It just took me a lot longer than I thought. This will be discussing the topic of the church, part five. What we're doing is going through the doctrinal statement at Striving for Eternity.
If you want to check that out, just go to strivingforeternity .org. If you're having trouble spelling that and it's just way too much typing, you could cheat and just go to sfe .bible. That'll get you to the same place.
Go to the About section under there. You're going to see what we believe and open up the paragraphs or the section on the church. And so, it has been a while since we've returned to this. I will say that if you go to that page that I just directed you to and you go to the bottom, there is a link that will take you to all of the episodes in the series.
And therefore, if you missed one or you will say, hey, I want to get back to the last one because it's been so long, you could do that. That'd be a great place to go. So, strivingforeternity .org. Go to the About section, click on what we believe, and you will be able to read along with us and hopefully study along with us as you open your Bible.
What? We open Bibles here? All right. So, with that, I want to introduce my guest co-host that is with me today, and that is Wade Lentz, and he is from the Patriot Pastors Podcast, one of the others that is on the Christian Podcast Community, one of the other like 50-some podcasts that we have.
Granted, I think I have 10 of them is what everyone makes fun of me about, but that's okay. So, Wade, welcome to The Wrap Report.
It is a joy to be here with you, my brother. I have looked forward to this ever since you invited me a few weeks ago, and it's just a privilege to be on here with you today.
Now, everyone immediately recognizes right off the bat that you have like the great radio voice, you know, that nice deep voice. So, I recognize just with the voice alone, you sound so much better than me.
Well, like some folks say, I have the voice for radio, but not the face for TV. So, I would say that's true of me.
Yeah, I think I have—I don't have either. So, why don't you introduce folks who may not have been listening, I don't know why they aren't, but to your podcast. Introduce yourself. You're a pastor where you're pastoring.
A little bit about your podcast, what you do on your podcast, what's the purpose of it?
Yeah, I live and pastor in a big, big town in Arkansas called Valonia, Arkansas, and we have a population of about 2 ,000 folks. But I pastor a church where I grew up as a kid, and so that's a very unique opportunity for me to pastor my home church, and it's really a miracle how the Lord just opened up that door of opportunity for me.
And I've been there as pastor for over—well, almost 11 years, 11 years next month. So, the Lord has blessed in that. I'm married—I've been married getting real close to 27 years of marriage. We have four boys, ranging from age of 21 down to the age of nine.
And so I still have a ways to go before I get to that empty nest. Harold and I, Harold Smith, the co-host of the Patriot Pastors Podcast, we actually started this podcast four years ago this month. So this month is our fourth anniversary, and we started the podcast because of all of the turmoil and all of the chaos that was ensuing in our world and our nation during that time.
I mean, there was the George Floyd riots, the Black Lives Matter, the election between Donald Trump and Biden was really heating up. And we felt like that there were, you know, many voices out there that would encourage the church, but most of those voices were from big platform pastors.
You didn't have the smaller platform pastors, the guys that are pastoring the average Baptist church or the average church in America, which is less than 100 people. And so we felt like that maybe there was a need for that.
And we found out very quickly there was. And we have really, for a bunch of country boys like Harold and I, it's really amazing how the Lord has blessed that and really used it to encourage other pastors who are like-minded.
Yeah, I mean, those who are familiar with Striving for Eternity know the synergy that we would have there, right? I mean, as a ministry, we have seen the frustration when I was pastoring of all the parachurch ministries that people in church will be all excited about this ministry or that ministry.
I think everyone in church should be doing that. And a pastor, you know, for me, I was a pastor of what would be considered a large church in New Jersey, about 150 people. That's a large church for Jersey.
There are those few that are 1 ,000 plus, but very, very rare. The majority of churches in New Jersey are under 25 people. And so, but even at 150 people, it was just someone wanted to do this ministry or that ministry because they got excited about some parachurch ministry.
And what I noticed was the parachurch ministries, they're just dividing the church. And the tendency of a pastor, I know because it was my tendency, someone comes up and they're really excited about something.
In one case, I'm thinking someone got involved with prison ministry and felt everyone in the church should be doing that and was really upset that I wasn't promoting it every week. And I'm like, well, you have to understand, like, you want to do that.
That doesn't mean everyone's going to want to do that. And as a church, we're going to have different gifts. Crazy idea. Wait, didn't some guy named Paul write something about that? First Corinthians chapter 12, maybe?
Sounds familiar.
Yeah.
And we would use those gifts differently. And that is what I see parachurch ministries really are pulling people from church into their ministry. And the ones that struggle the most are the smaller churches.
The big parachurch ministries will not go to small churches. You got 25 people, they're not coming. And so at our ministry, we decided we were going to be a help to churches that are smaller. We target churches that are under 100 people.
And people are like, well, how do you afford to fly out to places and put together weekend seminars or conferences? You know, we just trust our monthly donors to do that because the churches can't afford it.
And that's a crazy idea for some of the people because it's just so foreign from the way parachurch ministries work.
Right.
So that's why there's a lot of good synergy there.
Yes.
Yeah, and we focus not just on, I know the name sounds like we focus on politics every podcast. That is not true at all. Though it is called the Patriot Pastors Podcast, we deal with a lot of local church issues that local church pastors have to face, whether that is difficulties within the church, doctrinal divides, all sorts of things.
So it's just not politics that we talk about. It is kind of the everyday struggles that the average American pastor faces today.
But wait a minute, pastor. Isn't there supposed to be a separation of church and state? You shouldn't be discussing those issues.
Oh, I have heard that more than once in my ministry.
I never see that discussed when it's like a liberal church. They can discuss politics all day long. It's only conservative churches that can.
I love how that works.
You can invite Joe Biden to come and speak, but if a Republican or a conservative church was to invite a Republican, then oh my, look out.
Well, you can have Obama's pastor tell people they have to go vote for Obama, and he's praised for it.
You try doing that with Trump and people are going to be outraged.
Double standard.
No.
See, I like how Dan Bongiorni says it's not that it's a double standard. People don't understand. With tyranny, it's their standard. It's not a double standard. And that's what we have now is tyranny for people that don't realize that.
So let us get into a discussion on the church. And you're going to be joining me for two or three episodes that we'll record and hopefully get through a paragraph at a time. We'll see. I think this section will be in for a while, because there's a lot we have here on the church.
But if you wouldn't mind reading that first paragraph that I sent you.
Sure.
It says,.
The Scriptures explain the importance of discipleship, mutual accountability of all believers to each other, as well as the need for discipline of sending members of the congregation in accordance with the standards of Scripture.
So this is something that, and again for folks who don't remember why we started this series, we started the series really because of the fact that we wanted people to understand how to write a good doctrinal statement, how to read a good doctrinal statement, but more so so that you see what's behind a doctrinal statement.
I get frustrated when I go to a church website, their doctrinal statement is one page. I went to one church that I was asked if I would candidate there. First thing I did is look at their doctrinal statement.
It was seven points, seven points. And my response was, what do you believe? And they were like, well, here, it's on our website. I said, yeah, that doesn't tell me anything of what you believe. A good detailed doctrinal statement is healthy and good, and people ask the question, but doesn't doctrine divide?
Yes, it also unifies. And if you allow the division in the church, you're just going to deal with problems all the time. So being unified in the church about having a similar belief or at least a willingness to accept.
I've been in churches where I may disagree with either the other pastors or things like that, but we have a position the church will hold, and I'll hold to that position when teaching. Because we're not going to agree completely on everything.
There's going to be minor things that we'll disagree, but do we have to fight over it?
So, but this section I think is really important. This is almost a lost art in the church is discipleship. And I think a lot of the reason is that when the church growth movement came in, a lot of the focus became about kind of discipling from the pulpit, where you grow the church and make it really big.
And I know of a seminary that just cranks people out, and they're only trained to preach, which works good if you're in a big church. But a lot of these guys go to small churches, and they just don't know what to do because they weren't trained to disciple.
They weren't trained to what discipleship really is. They know it only from the pulpit. Wade, what do you, in your mind, what is discipleship?
Well, discipleship, and if you go by what Jesus said in Matthew 28, that we are to go therefore and make disciples, I think one key thing is that we need to notice what it does not say. Jesus does not say, go you therefore and make converts, right?
We know that conversion itself is an act of God's sovereign grace, and we cannot bring about true spiritual conversion in others. The Bible tells us in John 3 that only the Holy Spirit can regenerate a sinner.
Only the Holy Spirit can regenerate a person's heart. Now, our role is to what? Is to faithfully proclaim the gospel message. But it is God who effectually calls and draws individuals to himself, as Jesus said in John 6, 44.
Now, whomever the Lord saves through our proclamation of the gospel, yes, Jesus commands us to make disciples. And I believe that this implies a commitment of ongoing teaching. It is a commitment of ongoing spiritual nurturing to that new convert.
And so while we may not be able to call someone to be born again, we don't have that power, we are called to teach. We are called to mentor and guide those whom God has birthed into the kingdom of God.
So, you know, you think about discipleship, it really is, and this is the way I think we need to look at it, discipleship involves lifelong commitment. And so if you see it as that conversion is the starting point of the Christian life, it is not the end goal of the church's mission.
Because we know that the real work lies in nurturing converts into mature believers through intentional discipleship. And this is something that me as a pastor, who, Brother Rappaport, I was a pastor.
I've been a pastor for over 20 years, almost 25 years. I know I don't look that old.
Well, I was going to say you married your wife when she was three, I'm assuming, right? Because you said 27 years of marriage.
Yeah, I've been a pastor for many years. And like what you were talking about earlier, I saw discipleship as just me preaching to the new converts that have been born again and failed to see the importance of one-on-one discipleship and teaching and nurturing these believers who are new in the faith.
And this is something that really has hit home to me in the last probably 10 years that I really want to and have been implementing into the local church. I pastor because I have seen the results of just making converts, per se, but not making disciples of Jesus Christ.
And I believe one of the reasons why we are in such turmoil in our country is because we have failed to do this as churches as a whole. And we have seen this programmatic way of methodology within the church that you have a long line of conversions and baptisms, but there is no investing in those conversions, in those people after that they are saved.
And that is a really big issue.
Yeah, and this is where I agree so much of the church is hurting because I think that a lot of what has transpired is that church has become something I go to and get entertained or church has to be something for me rather than I go to church to serve.
There is a major difference there. And so we are saying here the scriptures explain the importance of discipleship. Listener, that discipleship is for your sanctification both in being discipled and discipling.
It is not the pastor's job to do all the discipling in the church. It is the pastor's job to disciple those that the Lord has brought to him for discipleship. But your neighbor is for you to disciple.
That's the thing that I think people, because of this shift where people think discipleship is from a pulpit, there's been this change. And we have lost the importance of discipleship. And that's why we're including it in our doctrinal statement, but we don't just stop there.
It is important, and I'm glad that you brought up the Matthew 28 passage, Matthew 28, 19, and 20, because the way so many people read that is that the Great Commission is to go. We read in English the word go and we think it's a verb.
It seems like an action verb, like that's the imperative, the command. But that's not the way in the Greek. In the Greek, it's actually an adverb. So we should properly translate that going, make disciples.
The actual command is make disciples. So it's as you go about your day, make disciples. So I include evangelism as part of discipleship, the first step of discipleship, because if someone doesn't know Christ, I can't teach them all things Christ taught me until they first know Christ.
That's right.
So I think it's the first step. So I start there. So wherever I go, I'm looking to make disciples. For the unbelievers, I'm going to share the gospel. To the believers, I want to teach them what Christ taught me.
And at the same time, I'm looking to be discipled by those I come in contact with, that they'll teach me what Christ has taught them. That is a sanctifying type of relationship that I think is lacking in the Church.
And so many people just say, well, the commission is to go. So we'll pay people to, we pay the pastor to go. We pay missionaries to go. And I feel better because I'm supporting them. No, Christian, that command is for every one of us.
We are all commanded to go and make disciples or going make disciples. We are not commanded to pay missionaries and then not do our responsibility. And I think a big thing that it helps with is the more we are discipling others, the more we start thinking differently when we see newer believers or evangelize.
I do see a struggle. I don't know if you see this, Wade, but with people who just do evangelism, I know I'm in evangelism circles where there's, I do a lot of outreaches. I don't always have a way to contact those people.
I will give them my contact information. My gospel tracks have our website on it or contact information or something, and a few people will reach back out. And I kind of trust the Lord for that, but there's, I'm not as much of trying to get their contact information to follow up, and maybe I should be.
Some people have said, you know, I really should be. Okay, that's a fair argument. But we as individuals have to be seeing our role, especially within our church, of discipling one another and having relationships that are based around Scripture.
In other words, in a lot of churches, you can get guys sit around a table and talk sports all day or talk politics all day, but open to a Bible verse and they're looking at their watch going, what time am I out of here?
Well, that's because we're discipling in those other type of relationships. We want to teach all the stats we know on the sports teams or all the news we're paying attention to, but then we don't know how to talk about the Bible because we're not really studying it.
Well, when you start discipling someone, they start asking you questions, you're going to know how to study more because you've got to go get answers.
That's right. Yeah, what's interesting in one of the scriptural references in that statement of faith is 2 Timothy 2, verse 2, where we see something of a multigenerational process of discipleship. And there, Paul really instructs Timothy to pass on what he has learned to faithful men who will then be able to teach others also.
So Paul's talking about creating this cycle where the truth of the gospel is entrusted to new believers who then grow and become teachers passing on the faith to others. And so a biblical church, in my estimation, is a church that fosters a culture where discipleship is continuous and ensures that each generation of believers is equipped then to disciple the next.
And again, this is where I have failed early on in my ministry. I never saw the importance of it until recent years, but I'm trying to make up for lost ground there by the Lord's grace and invest in individuals, invest in souls, and not just try to create this number, play this number game that sadly so many churches do today.
Yes, and this is the thing of the importance of discipleship. And it's interesting because that passage that you referenced for 2 Timothy 2, you see four generations there. Paul to Timothy. Timothy, it says here, the passage says, the things which you have heard from me, so Paul to Timothy, in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men.
So now Timothy gives it to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. So the faithful men teach others. So you have four generations there. Paul, Timothy, faithful men, others. And that's what we have.
I love how you said that we need to have a culture of continuous discipleship. And I'm sure if we could find a C word for discipleship, you would have alliterated the whole thing.
I've been known to do a lot of alliteration for sure.
But one of the things that we're saying here, because a lot of churches will say, yeah, well, we believe in discipleship. But the second part of this is for mutual accountability of all believers to each other.
So when I started this series, when we've been going through this series, I always say I want you guys to see what's behind this. What this doesn't say is that our responsibility is to the leadership.
Do we have a responsibility to leadership, to obey leadership? Yes, Hebrews tells us that. But does that mean that it stops there?
I believe that we have a mutual responsibility to one another in the church, well, to submit to one another, according to Ephesians 5, where most people know about, where it talks about the wives submitting to husbands.
And what's interesting is the word submit or subject isn't there in verse 22. It says, wives to your own husbands.
In the Greek, to be subject or submit isn't there. Where does it get it from? Verse 21, where he says, and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ. Wives to your own husbands, and then husbands love your wives.
We are to submit to one another in the church. We are to have a mutual love and a mutual accountability to one another. Even if you're the pastor, Wade, as you are, you're the preaching pastor, you should be accountable just as much as I am to anyone else in the church.
So if someone comes up, says, hey, you know, I noticed you did, you know, you did this and that, you know, you're, you know, whatever. If they call you out on something you've done wrong, you should be able to receive it.
I'm very well known for, unfortunately, confusing words when I preach. And the really frustrating thing is I'm consistent with it. I once, I think it was seven times in one sermon, replaced Ezekiel, no, no, it was Zachariah, I replaced with Ezekiel or something like that.
And it was, it was like, I did it consistently. I gave the, you know, when Christ was betrayed, I had the 20, because I was studying with Joseph and his, the silver he was sold for, and I had the 20 pieces versus the 30 pieces, and I mixed them up.
And someone came up and corrected me on that. I didn't sit there and be like, oh, hey, I'm the pastor, you can't correct me. No, I'm like, thank you. And the next time I got to the pulpit, you know, I remember once where I had that happen, where I confused this one word with another three times in the message.
And one dear saint, she comes up to me and says, you know, I was looking at my ESV study Bible to see why you were, because my church knew that I did my own translation.
And she's like, why did you replace this word with that word?
I said, I did. I didn't notice. And someone else was like, I was looking at my MacArthur study notes and I didn't know why you translated this, this. And I'm like, I didn't know I did that. If I did, it was an error.
And then the third person came up. And so the next week I was like, some of you might be wondering why I translated this word that way. And I saw a bunch of head nods and I went, your pastor's an idiot.
Yeah. I mean, that's what it came down to, you know?
But we need that mutual accountability. We need to have, none of us is perfect. And wait, I don't know if you, there's a book called Superman syndrome for the pastors, this idea like where pastors feel they can't ever let anyone know they sin.
So it's like, we have to be bulletproof. We have to be Superman. We have to pretend like we don't do any wrong. And that always ends up leading to covering up sin, which is the very first qualification of a pastor is to be above reproach, which means they can't nail anything to us.
Well, that becomes a problem if we're trying to cover up our sin all the time.
Right? Sure.
So how important do you think, and what role does this mutual accountability have for believers is my first question for you. And the second is, why do you think, as I said, it's important to not say that we're just accountable to leadership?
Why is it important for us to be accountable to one another, not just leadership?
Well, who today wants to be held accountable? I mean, it just seems like there is.
Definitely not our politicians.
True, true.
Well, and that has spread over into our nation. It has spread over into our citizenry, and it has spread over into the church. Church members today do not want to be held accountable. But it's so key, and this is a part of discipleship that absolutely gets left out of when we're talking about this mutual accountability of all believers to each other.
And they do not have a good understanding of Hebrews chapter 10, that we're to spur one another on. We're to encourage one another. And it just goes on down the list. I wish I had those verses up in front of me.
But that is what this, I believe, the statement of faith is referring to, mutual accountability of all believers. You're encouraging that brother or sister who is hurting, or maybe the brother or sister has fallen into sin, and you need to hold them accountable.
And you're not doing that to belittle them, but you're doing that to spur them on into the gospel and sanctification. But today, people are so self-absorbed. They do not want anybody getting into their business.
However, you will never be the Christian that you ought to be by being a Lone Ranger type Christian. You need the accountability. You will do better in the Christian life when you have a brother or sister, a pastor, encouraging you, loving you, and doing that through holding you accountable.
It is very, very important. And again, it is one aspect of the church that we have sadly just let it fall by the wayside.
I think we do because a big part of the issue is we don't address the issue of pride in the church. This is where it really comes down to, why don't we want accountability? Because we want everyone to think that we're perfect.
We spot everyone else's sin, but we want people to think we don't sin. And yet, we end up seeing this. We'll look at it in a few minutes, Matthew 18. But so many people don't even realize how Matthew 18 starts.
What's the whole discussion that gets Jesus on this whole discussion? Well, in verse 1 of Matthew 18, it says, at the time the disciples came to Jesus and said, who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?
They are arguing over which one of them is greater than the other. They want to know what's the rank order. Who's going to be better than the other? And Jesus gets into a whole explanation of pride and humility.
And that's to a point where in verses 12 to 14, he's going to say, hey, what do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, what's he going to do? He's going to, you know, if one goes astray, he's going to leave the 99 and go find that one.
We wonder why did that person stop coming to church? Maybe because as they started to stray, no one noticed. And no one reached out to pull that straying person back in. They only waited until the person was gone, and they were not looking to come back.
All of a sudden they go, oh, maybe someone should have done something. And this is what mutual accountability helps with. You know, so many people think, well, it's the pastor's job. They should all be going out and making sure people are okay.
And that's not the way it should be. And, you know, so having mutual accountability is not just the church leadership's role.
It's all of our roles.
And that's what we had, the importance of it. Now, we don't just stop there, though, in this doctrinal statement, because we get to an issue that so few churches want to talk about, let alone practice.
And it says, as well as, so not just the mutual accountability, but as well as the need for discipline of sinning members of the congregation in accordance with the standard of scripture.
And this is an area where, oh, there's just so much confusion when it comes to this. Your social media, I don't know if you've seen this, Wade, in your comings and goings on social media, but someone disagrees with you, or you disagree with them, and the response is, who's your pastor?
Like, I'm calling you to repentance. You're in church discipline. Well, first off, dude on the internet, you're not in my church.
You know? Like, we're part of the universal church, granted. I think there's some principles we could learn from, you know, Matthew 18, 15 to 20. But I think that some people take that a little bit too far.
So part of what we're saying here is this is the context of a local church that we should be doing this discipline. Sinning members of the congregation. But there's a lot to that. It's not just, hey, we're going to, I'm calling you to repentance because, you know, you wanted a different color carpet for the church than I wanted.
You know, we have a thing, if folks want to look at it, they can go at strivingforturning .org, and on our website we have in the shop a card called A Process of Reconciliation. And it's a flow chart.
And the reason I created it is because so many people want to jump right to Matthew 18, there's a lot of questions to ask yourself before you get to Matthew 18. And when you're emotional, you don't always think through things.
So I thought a flow chart helps people to ask the questions one at a time, think through it before you go to someone and make a situation worse. And is it even a sin? Or just is it your preference?
Are you the one in sin? Crazy thought, but maybe that other person that didn't actually do anything wrong, you had the issue with that other person. Maybe there's bitterness in your heart, things like that.
Okay, they are in sin.
Do you have to go?
I mean, if you were to point out every single sin in my life, if you were around me 24 -7, and you were going to point out every sin in my life, how often do you think you'd be pointing things out?
Probably if you're like me pretty often.
Exactly.
Right?
We don't always recognize our sin.
And sometimes we end up finding that when we do do church discipline, we find out, oh, the person who said the, you know, if I go to you and I'm saying you're in sin, it may be me that's in sin, and that's what the witnesses help with.
And so, you know, one of the things, and I know that I have counseled hundreds of pastors, I think the reason being is because I travel around, I speak at a lot of churches, I meet with pastors, I sit with them, and a lot of pastors, for folks that, and I encourage you to go back to the episodes I did on what is a pastor, that series, especially how to encourage your pastor, but if you don't understand what life is for a pastor, a lot of pastors feel they've got no one in the church they can really talk to, especially small churches.
They have a church discipline issue, they don't have the counsel, who do we go to? So they go to people outside. So I come into a church to speak, and a lot of times I'm helping a church with their church discipline situation.
And I'll counsel the pastors, or I have friends who will just call me. I don't know a single pastor that gets sleep when there's a church discipline situation going on.
It is the worst thing for a pastor, and I think that a lot of people don't think through what church discipline is. And so I want to spend a little time kind of going through the process. What is Matthew 18?
How should it be done? And I know, look, for some people this may bore you. Well, okay, if you're bored with scripture, you've got a.
Problem.
But second, if you're so bored that you feel like you're going to fall asleep, then maybe what you need to do is go to strivingforeturning .org slash coffee and make sure to get yourself a good cup of Squirrelly Joe's coffee.
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Now, if you're just going, yeah, coffee's not going to help, well, then I'll suggest you go to mypillow .com and get yourself a good pillow. So if you're going to sleep, you might as well get a good night's sleep and then turn back on the podcast to listen to it.
But use promo code SFE, that stands for striving for eternity, to get your discount code there. They have great discounts there. They're running some great sales. So get a pillow. You can get slippers.
You can get robes. You can get towels. You can get bed sheets. You can even get a mattress they had on there. So mypillow .com, use promo code SFE. So as we look at church discipline, Wade, I notice over the years a lot of steps get missed.
It seems like the way, and you tell me if you've noticed this, the way most people think church discipline is Joe over here did something I didn't like. So I come to you and I tell you what Joe did to get you to agree with me.
And then if I feel like I got to go, you know, to do some, I take you with me and say, hey, let's go talk to Joe. And I gang up on him with you and maybe a couple others.
And then we say, well, pastor, we got to put him out of the church. Have you, you seen that experience in churches?
It sounds like that. You have been a pastor of a Baptist church.
Baptistic church, at least.
Yes, I have. But, but I've heard pastors, the Presbyterians and, and others who've run into this.
When we look at Matthew 18, one thing I want to encourage people is this is in the context of pride and humbleness. That's the whole chapter. People forget that. It's, it's talking about, I mean, just before this is the passage about leaving the 99 sheep to go after the one.
Just after this is, is going to be all about forgiveness. And, and Peter's going to ask, well, how often do I have to forgive my brother? You know, seven times? No, 70 times seven. And in between that is this passage we call, we refer to as church discipline.
So this is not saying you have to address every single sin. How do I know that? Because right after this, it says, forgive your brother 70 times, seven times a day. In other words, we should be looking to forgive.
So I think the context of this is when you have someone who not only sins, they recognize the sin. They don't care about the sin. They're prideful in their sin. And, and I think as we go through this, you end up seeing that because it says, if your brother sins, so this is not my brother said something I didn't like.
He offended me. He, he said something in passing that bothered me. The, the verb here that, that we have for if your brother sins, okay, this word sins is an aorist active. This that is being done regularly.
Okay.
It's a subjective, that ends up meaning the subjective mood normally presents the verbal action as, as being probable or intentional. So it isn't just something the person did that just happened to, you know, they just said something the wrong way.
It's, it's an, the idea of an intentional thing. And so some of the later manuscripts add the, the, have the word sin against you. The earlier manuscripts just say sin. And I think that becomes an important thing because a lot of people just say, well, you, you did something against me, but everything about the, in the Bible, we see, we shouldn't be thinking about us.
We should be thinking about others. When we're thinking about us, we're the very pride that started this.
Chapter, right?
Who's greatest.
It's that same pride issue. So I think it's, if your brother sins, this is back to what we just said, that mutual accountability, we're commanded. The word go and show are both imperatives in the Greek.
So you were to go and show him his fault. The fault is an imperative as well. But here's these next two words, Wade, so many people miss in private. Why, why is that important?
Well, I mean, it's, it's important because you're not putting something on public display that has, that is not public. It wasn't a public situation that has happened to you. It was something private.
And so therefore that being said, this is why Jesus said that you're to go to them in private. You're not to publicize this perceived sin so that you can shame them. At least, you know, you don't want to do that at, at this point.
You want to go to them privately, lovingly and not publicize it. This is to be taken. And you talked about how Jesus said, Hey, you're to forgive 70 times seven. Well, I believe that's what Peter was talking about when he wrote you are to, or when he wrote that love covers a multitude of sin, a multitude of sin.
So how many church altercations and or church arguments and infractions could be settled if we would just implement that scripture verse that, Hey, love covers a multitude of sins. And so if someone has done something to you privately and you, you feel like it is a sin, you don't necessarily, like you said earlier, have to go to them that you, you might can cover it by the love of Jesus Christ and go on and, and continue to serve with that brother or sister who has sinned against you.
If for some reason you, you can't let that go. If you, if you feel like that, it must be handled. Then you are to handle that privately at the beginning.
And I really like what you said, pursue perceived sin because they may not be in sin. It, you know, I had someone that, that came to me once telling me that I was.
Angry.
I'm like, cause, and the reason I was angry in a Bible study, cause I didn't.
Speak.
And I'm like, I don't usually speak in Bible studies because I could be very talkative and I have a lot of knowledge and I don't want to dominate. So when I'm not teaching, I usually don't speak. He's like, no, you were angry.
No, I wasn't. He's like, now you're lying. You're in sin of lying. I'm like, between you and I, one of us knows my, my motives better than the.
Other.
And it's not you.
Wow.
And so we can have those things happen with people where they have a perception. They think that's reality, but this does not say go to your best friend.
It doesn't say go grab two or three witnesses. No, it says go to him, show him his fault in private. In other words, I like what you said about the fact that we, we, we don't want to shame them. So we don't bring it up in like in a Bible study or something or, but go to them alone.
You don't bring it up with any others there. Now you did make the point of if it's, this is something that didn't happen in public. Cause there's different ways of handling public things because it's now public, but you go to your brother in private.
So you go one-on-one before you discuss it with anyone else. You go to him. That's step one. And it says, if he listens to you, you've won your brother. The assumption here is he's done it intentionally.
He, he knows the fault. He doesn't listen. So what do you do? Old Testament, you take two or three witnesses. Now here's the thing. It says, take one or two with you so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every fact may be confirmed.
So these witnesses are not there to pass judgment. It says they're there to witness, to confirm what? Well, that they're unrepentant.
Why?
Because of verse 17, it says, if he refuses to listen to them, you tell to church. And if he refuses to listen to the church, you notice the refusal. If he refuses to listen. So the idea here is those witnesses are to recognize that yes, he recognizes he's in sin and refuses to listen.
It's not, hey, Wade and I are coming to you and we both are in agreement. You're in sin.
This is a case where the, you know, the one case that I'm thinking of that I had to deal with in it with a church, a guy was shacking up with another girl. He was married, but he went and was living with another girl.
There was no question whether he was committing adultery.
That was clear.
He knew it. He admitted it.
He was trying to excuse why it's okay and why he doesn't get along with his.
Wife.
So like, this is okay. He was refusing to repent. So yes, that church had to go not only step one, but step two where two or three witnesses. So you don't tell your witnesses ahead of time what it is.
When I go, when I do this and I'm going this step, what I'll do is so Wade, if you're the one I'm going to take along with me, I would say, hey, Wade, would you be able to come with me and have just to be a witness of a situation for me?
And your common question is going to be, well, what's the situation? I'm going to say, well, you'll find out when you get there. Well, who's it with? You'll find out when you get there. And so I've done once where I just told someone, can you be in my office at this time?
And just said, okay, now we're all here. Here we have some witnesses. The witnesses should not be tainted. You shouldn't be telling them ahead of time. Well, you know, Joe did this. They are there to witness the unrepentance.
And it may be that they go, hey, brother, that's not a sin. I literally, I remember in a church, I had a woman who when I would lead the music, she was a trained musician. I am not. I'm not musical, but I was, but because when the pastor retired, I ended up taking a lot of the responsibility, some preaching, some of the leading of the worship service.
And I was kind of stuck. I'm not the best person for music. So I would wave, you know, like do as I see others do, wave your hand up and down as you're singing. But I wasn't doing it right. And she was convinced I was doing it on purpose.
She played the piano and she was convinced I was doing it on purpose. And she actually went and, you know, talked to not me, but the pastor. And so he called me in, had her come in, had one of the other pastors come in and we sat down and he's listening to it.
And he listens to what she's saying. And he's just like, you know, Andrew, you know, are you doing it? I said, I don't know what I'm doing up there. And he just turns to her like, sister, you got to just drop this.
It's like, it's not intentional.
You know, and sometimes that's a witness will do that.
So that's step two. So first one, you go to one-on-one in private. Step two, you take the witnesses. You don't tell them ahead of time. Step three, and this is a missed step with many churches, Wade.
I don't know if you've seen this, but they usually go from two or three witnesses. And it's usually a lot of churches go with two pastors or a pastor and a deacon. And then they jump right to the last step.
They jump right to put them out of the church. Well, that's step four, put them out of the church. Step three is in verse 17, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen, even to the church, in other words, you send the whole church to call him back.
That's back to what we were just talking about earlier, Wade, mutual accountability.
That's good.
There it is right there.
The church should all be keeping a sinning brother accountable. Because if someone is going to refuse the whole church, like the whole church, 25, 100, 3 ,000 people are all calling the person and saying, hey, we need to talk.
We need to deal with this. And the person is, everyone's recognizing there's a sin going on. It's like, hey, you're in sin. Let's address this. And the person's refusing that.
At that point, it says, if they refuse to listen, even to the church, let him be as a Gentile or tax collector. In other words, treat him like an unbeliever. What that's saying is that if you send the whole church to someone and they were refusing to repent after dozens or hundreds of people come to them, they're probably not a believer.
And so, now, this doesn't mean you excommunicate them and you never talk to them like Jehovah Witnesses or Mormons would do.
Treat them like they're dead.
If you're going to treat them as an unbeliever, you're going to be witnessing to them. It doesn't mean you cut off communications. It's just you assume that they're not saved and they need the gospel.
The whole idea of this is to restore relationships.
And so, those are the four steps of church discipline. Wade, anything with your almost 20 years of experience pastoring, I'm sure you've had to deal with church discipline, maybe once or twice in your ministry.
Yeah, what a difficult part of church ministry is dealing with church discipline issues. And like you said earlier, pastors who are dealing with that within the church do not sleep at night. I can promise you that.
Those who love their people, love their sheep, as Christ loved us, have a very difficult time with implementing that. But, yeah, it's so true. And one big misconception about church discipline is that we don't exercise church discipline because a church member sins.
We exercise church discipline for the church member who fails to repent of sin, who's living in habitual sin, that will not repent of it. No matter that we go to them privately, carry another brother with us, no matter that the church itself reaches out to him and tries to restore this brother.
And so the end of church discipline, excommunication, is even in itself a method of bringing restoration to this brother. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 5 or 6, he said, hey, let the devil, turn him over to the devil.
And being that it may be that he comes back into the fold after the devil has worked on him. That's the ultimate goal of it. But we do not exercise church discipline on people who sin. And that is what I have fought in many years of my ministry is so-and-so sinned and did so-and-so.
We need to take care of that. Yeah, we do. And their estimation of taking care of that is excommunication, pretty much at that point. But that is not loving at all. That is not at all what Scripture teaches about church discipline.
You're so right. And this is why we emphasize it. It's not, oh, every little sin has to be pointed out. We shouldn't be the sin police.
It's that we are, this is, think about the context that we have in this doctrinal statement. This is part of discipleship.
Mm-hmm.
That's what this is. This is part of our mutual accountability to one another.
So that is the context of it. And so I hope that folks have, that this is helpful. Maybe it's something new and you need to re-listen. And if this is the first time you've heard some of these things.
But this is important for the church. And a church must be doing discipleship, having mutual accountability, and practicing church discipline with the unrepentant sinner in their midst. That is what a church should be doing.
So I hope this is helpful. I hope that if you did think it's helpful, you would share it.
Do me a favor.
Just grab it and tweet it out to some people. Or, well, I guess you X it out to people now. But put it out on X or Facebook or whatever social media you're on. Text this episode to a couple friends. Hey, I was just listening to this.
This was really helpful. We had some changes that occurred with Apple Podcasts where they've made changes to the way they do things. And if you've listened in the past on Apple Podcasts, they actually were doing things where you have to make sure you re-follow.
If you stop listening for a while, they end up removing it, it seems. So if you are wondering, hey, whatever happened to that podcast? Maybe you saw this online and you're going, what happened to that?
Go and check, make sure you're following. We also have a thing where somehow within Apple, with my rap report podcast here, there's like three or four of them. We're going to be trying to fix that soon.
And so something happened within different, Spotify had this as well, where there was, you know, with the one podcast, we had a thousand listeners that Spotify had that were in basically an RSS feed that wasn't being updated because they duplicated it.
And so, and they couldn't merge it, which means I had a thousand in one and a couple hundred in the other. So they just said, okay, we'll make the one with a thousand the primary. Great. You may be in that situation where you're wondering what happened.
You might need to re-follow. So if this has been helpful for you, please do that. Also check out the Patriot Pastors podcast. You can find it on christianpodcastcommunity .org. If you're going, hey, that Wade guys, not only has a great voice, but some good content.
Well, yeah, that's why he was accepted as part of the community, but not just the voice, but the content. So go check them out. There's a lot of very, I'm going to put it this way, Wade, a lot of thought provoking discussion that you and Harold have.
Some areas where I've agreed with you and disagree with Harold, but Harold really got me thinking. And I went, oh, I got to think through that. So I tend to agree with you more than Harold when you guys disagree.
I'll be sure to tell him that.
I don't know if that's a good thing for you or a bad thing.
I don't know.
That's funny.
So Harold, thanks for coming on. We'll be back to continue with this section on the church. And I hope that you enjoy this and just remember to share this. Remember to study scripture because that's where we get our authority from, not from Pastor Harold or me.
It comes from scripture. So be sure to check that out. Until next time, that's a wrap.
This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.