1 Corinthians 5:9-13 Limited Jurisdiction

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsick preaches from his sermon series titled 1 Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in.

Unity in Christ and the Danger of Misreading the Passage

Good morning and welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsick. I'm the lead pastor here. And I want to start with just kind of a word from the Lord here. King David of Israel wrote in Psalm 133 .1 this phrase, Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity.

Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity. I encourage you to look around you. We come together this morning in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in unity in Him.

And it isn't some kind of a cheap and thin unity made up of an allegiance to a football team. Go blue. But we come together in a unity of hope and love and peace given to us by Jesus Christ our Lord. That's our unifying factor.

We're not gathered like a homeowner's association that all live in proximity under the same rules. Rather, we are gathered under a common king. So look around this morning as you get an opportunity during connection time to even those of you that are more introverted still take in the group, still take in the crowd, still take in that you are not alone.

Be glad it is pleasant when we dwell together in unity, church. And I could just say as having had a front row seat to the history of this church going on 14 years of history here that we have experienced an awesome and glorious God-given, it's sweet.

The unity that we've experienced here together has been amazing. And I've been a part of other churches in the past that didn't feel quite so unified and I am grateful for the unity that we experience here.

Our text this morning is one that could mess that up if we misunderstand it. So I start with unity because it could be in jeopardy by some very simplistic misunderstandings about our text. We could walk away from this message more guarded and more private and more like an island than ever.

You see, we could walk away from this text of Scripture with a wariness that I don't believe is meant to be there. We are going to be told directly by Paul in 1 Corinthians that we are to judge those within the church.

He's going to say that definitively. We are to judge those within the church. And how many of you know that we live in a society that says don't judge anybody?

Raise your hand if you know that.

Like we live in a culture that's a no judgment, no judgment, no judgment. And Paul here is going to say there is a jurisdiction in which the church has the call and the requirement to judge. Well, I would suggest to you that this is going to hit different people in different ways this morning.

And for the ones who are humble and aware of our sins, we will be tempted to fear the implications of this text. When is the hammer going to fall on me? I can hear some of us thinking, I deserve rebuke, I deserve correction, I deserve being purged from this gathering of saints, those who are much better than me.

While others less in touch with the reality of their own depravity could take this text the other direction, ha, ha, ha, finally warrant to judge. Finally, a passage about correcting all of those really bad sinners.

Rather than unity, we could become a judgmental church, right? You could take this the other way. An unsafe place where everyone feels judged all the time and we're always casting sideways glances at one another going, is he going to judge me?

Am I supposed to be judging him? Because some will gladly appoint themselves to be the police of recast church. Some of us are built that way. We like laws and rules and just tell me where to go and I'll get it done.

So we're going to seek to stay in balance, church. We're going to seek to stay in unity in Christ. We're going to seek to continue to love and continue to reach out and continue to be involved in each other's lives in beneficial ways.

We are called to unity, church. We are called to a brotherly love that bears up with one another, bears one another's burdens. We love by meeting needs, by mourning with those who mourn, by rejoicing with those who rejoice, by encouraging the faint-hearted, by praying for one another, and yes, even by rebuking one another when it's needed.

We are called to enter into real-life relationship with one another, church, which includes successes and failures and highs and lows, victories, and yes, even to the degree of working through dealing with sin with one another.

Our text is pretty direct in the way that it comes to us. Paul could very well have written what he writes here in this section of Scripture to recast church, and the passage would barely hit any different than it did to that church.

2 ,000 years ago, because it's quite direct to church application, despite the fact that it was written to a specific church 2 ,000 years ago. I mean, sure, there are some differences in the ramifications of putting it into practice.

How many of you know that if you were...if you leave a church in Matawan, say you were just to walk out these doors and never come back, how many of you know that there's other.

Churches to go to?

In Corinth, there wasn't. When this was originally written like that, the ramifications of the need to connect in community and to work through problems was there in a way that it's not there today,.

Right?

You guys get what I'm saying? So, there's some differences, but Paul's main goal of setting the boundaries on the jurisdiction of the church was vital for them, and it's vital for us here in 2023. And he sets the boundaries of our jurisdiction at the church.

We are not called, in this passage, it's emphatically clear, we are not called to judge outsiders. We are rather called to judge within the church. This has been so misunderstood that I'm actually very glad to slow down and preach just a few verses this morning for the cause of making sense of what I see, what I believe.

All passages are important, but this one is one that I think our culture at large does not understand, and therefore our church culture also does not quite get. Let me just add in a generic way that it seems quite contemporary that Paul utilizes the sin of sexual immorality as his case study on how we deal with sin within the church and the world at large.

You may just find that this passage and this sermon answer some specific questions you have regarding sexual immorality, the culture at large, the church, and judgment and how all of those things come together.

So, let's open our Bibles, if you're not already there, your Scripture journal, your device, however you're going to access the Word of God this morning, to 1 Corinthians chapter 5. We're going to finish the chapter out starting in verse 9.

So, 1 Corinthians chapter 5, 9 through 13, recast God's good, holy, precious, life-transforming word that we're going to take in right now. 1 Corinthians 5, 9 through 13, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of the world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.

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 have I 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's pray. Father, this can be a tough passage.

Even just in the reading, the way that it concludes seems harsh and direct and difficult. I think all of us, if we're honest with ourselves, would assess ourselves as having evil in us, the possibility and the potential day by day and moment by moment to do evil and wicked things, things that are in opposition to you.

It is so important that we understand the grace given to us in Christ, but also the.

Call to walk with you.

Father, I pray that you would allow this word to hit each person in the way that it needs.

To hit.

For those who are weak and are fearful and timid but belong to you, I pray that they would be encouraged in this to lean into relationship, to lean into accountability, to lean into the love that you have provided through community, and that we would be able to see even to the end of this passage your grace reaching out to people, your great love shown in calling us back and continuing to draw us into holiness, into purity, into a right understanding of the wickedness and the vileness of sin, and your great holiness.

Father, I pray that your holiness would be pressed on us even now as we get an opportunity to sing songs to you, not just singing songs to our chum or our bud, but singing songs to you who are holy and high and exalted, the righteous one, the glorious one, the one who has steadfast love, the one who has mercy and boundless, boundless grace and justice and wrath towards sin demonstrated by the sacrifice of your Son for us.

So, Father, I pray that as those who were under such a heavy condemnation, such a heavy burden, release now and set free through the blood of Jesus Christ that we would rejoice now and our voices would mingle together in gladness and in joy this morning.

In Jesus' name, amen. Yep, go ahead and be seated, but if at any time during the message you need to get back up and use the restrooms, those are out the double doors down the hallway on the left-hand side, and there's more coffee.

I don't know if there's more donut holes back there. I'm guessing there are, but you can take advantage of that as well. And then please reopen your devices or your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 5, 9 through 14.

We read that earlier.

That's the text we're going to be walking through. Start off with a statement. When we get our jurisdiction wrong, we find ourselves policing the wrong areas. And for the church at large, I think we've often been so wrong at this very point that we have watered down a very potent and powerful gospel message of hope and forgiveness to a very weak message of social reform.

What does the world at large think that the church has to offer? Do's and don'ts, a list of ways to behave. If we take up the mantle of policing the world, when will we find time to proclaim the remedy that is Jesus Christ?

When will we find the time to finally get the conversation over to Him? The world thinks that moral reform is the answer because the church has spent a century standing over them in judgment. And now, those statements might sound like I'm standing over the church in judgment, but I think I've seen it in myself as well, and I don't know if you have experienced that in your own heart and in your own upbringing as well.

The first half of 1 Corinthians 5 was taken up just to set the stage because it's been a while since we've been here. We took a month off and we're in Haggai. Now, we're back to 1 Corinthians. And the first half of Corinthians chapter 5 was taken up with a very specific situation in the church in Corinth, a pretty dire situation.

Paul has been made aware of a situation of incest where a man is sleeping with his stepmom. And that's going on in the church in a fairly public way, and the church hasn't done anything about it. Well, he even goes so far at the start of chapter 5 or in the middle of the beginning of chapter 5 to say, this is something that not even the pagans do, his word.

The world doesn't even accept that. The world doesn't accept this. I mean, he's in Roman context in all of their diverse sexual morals, and even the Romans were like, no, you don't do this. Paul was incredulous.

And he told them in no uncertain terms to remove the man from their fellowship, and now he's going to back that up a bit. He acknowledges that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Yes, this is going to be that kind of message.

You're going, what did I get here for? It's this passage. A bad apple will spoil the bunch is the adage that we would use today. And now our text serves to correct what he hopes was a misunderstanding among the Corinthian believers.

He thinks that maybe something that he's told them prior is being misunderstood. And we get a bit of a shock right off the bat here in verse 9, finding out that Paul has already written to the Corinthians prior to this letter, leading a lot of scholars to believe that there's a 1 Corinthians out there floating around that we don't have access to.

That means that 1 Corinthians, the book that we have, is not the very first correspondence between Paul and this church in writing. And for whatever reason, God has seen fit to give us just this one phrase from it.

And in that prior communication, Paul had made it clear that God calls his church to.

Purity.

He told them, do not associate with sexually immoral people. The word associate needs some definition for us to understand what to do with this. And so does the concept of sexually immoral people. Both of those need to be defined before we're going to be able to really wrap our minds around exactly what he is saying here to us.

So, let's start with associate. Associate is a word that has mix or mingle at its root. It's a word that can be used and is used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament in many passages to define the relationship of Israel, that is God's Old Testament people, to the pagan nations around them.

Every place that you see in those passages where it says, do not mix among the peoples, do not intermarry with them, do not have this kind of familiar kind of relationship with, they were to remain a distinct people.

Holiness matters to God. They were not to blend their society together with the Philistines or with the Amorites or with the Moabites or any of those other ites. Now, if we consider both that this is written corporately to a church, Corinth, and that association is more a formal mixing, we see that Paul's exclusionary command here in the text is more formal in nature.

Who is in with the unity and togetherness of worshiping God within the gathering? We are called to a standard regarding sexuality as a church. Our culture bristles at the notion, but Scripture has absolutely zero qualms and zero apologies for defining for us what holy sexuality looks like in human relationships.

That comes to the second phrase needing definition in our text, and that is sexually immoral people. What does Paul mean by that phrase? It's those who are active in sexual expression that is outside of the God-ordained gracious confines of protective covenant commitment marriage between one man and one woman.

That's according to his design, according to his beautiful plan for male and female, his design. Again, let me just say that again. Sexually immoral people are those who are active in sexual expression that is outside of the God-ordained gracious confines of the protective covenant commitment that is marriage.

Full stop. The entirety of Scripture would lead me to add a subtle and important note to that definition, and I can get to the point by asking you some questions to get our minds thinking. Was David, King David in the Old Testament, was he a sexually immoral person?

I don't want you to answer.

I don't want you to answer. It's a bit of a trick question. We know that he committed adultery with Bathsheba. He did a wicked act. He went outside of the boundaries of God-ordained sexuality, taking another man's wife.

Let's modernize it. What about a man who got with all the ladies in college and has since repented and turned from that way of life and is now living a monogamous life with his wife? Or what about a same-sex attracted woman like Jackie Hill Perry who has forsaken a life of lesbianism in exchange for a life of honoring her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

Is she sexually immoral? Is the person who's repented and turned to God and is confessing and is warring against sin, are they defined as a sexually immoral person? You know, this is an important question.

Some of us know it's personally important, right? I would say to you the Scripture is clear that the definition of a child of God is never found in any sin. Your identity is never wrapped up in a sin if you belong to Jesus Christ.

Amen?

You are not defined as a liar. You are not defined as a sexually immoral person. You are not defined as a conniver or a cheat or a gossip. That does not define you if your sins have been paid for at the cross of Christ.

That is a glory. That is amazing. We should never get beyond that. We should never be able to just kind of rationalize and just kind of think through that without an emotion welling up within us of gratitude and thanks that my sin need not define me any longer.

Amen?

Nobody in Christ is defined as a sexually immoral person. Nobody in Christ is defined as greedy, defined as a swindler, defined as an idolater, defined as a drunkard, defined as a reviler. Words that the text is going to go on to use.

Nobody's defined like that if they are washed by the blood of Christ and warring against their sin in the power of the Holy Spirit. Then their life, their life of sin does not define them. This is how we can have hope in Christ despite our ongoing struggles and battles with sins, which is something that I know that is true of every one of you here if you love Jesus.

You're fighting it. You're battling. You're in a battle. I know that for sure. You're in a battle, but it's a question mark of whether you're fighting it or not. That's where we're getting down to here.

Let me tell you how this hits me personally. I am, I do sin, but my sin doesn't define me. I am not defined by sexual immorality. I'm not a liar. I'm not a swindler or a greedy man. I am a redeemed man.

I once was many things. Now I am a redeemed man defined by the work of Christ and his sacrifice for me. Still tempted, still prone to sin and sinning, but quick to repent. And I use a phrase up here often, and I wonder if it hits you guys at all, but I'll use, this is what I mean when I talk about and use the illustration of God keeping me on.

A short leash.

I pray that God will never let me go far down the road of sin. Never, never get far from him without calling me back and conviction to confession, to repentance and to a restored relationship with he who is my kind and gracious Lord and savior.

I want to walk close with him. And I have no problem with his yank in that chain from time to time. I go, get back here, get back here. Do you guys know what I'm talking about?

Does that seem unfair?

Or do you relate to that?

Raise your hand if you relate to that.

You're like, God, I want you to hold me close. I want you to keep me close. I don't want to go so far away from you. I don't want you to leave me to my own devices and to my own self and to my own wishes and my own desires, my own passions, because they will take me far from Jesus.

You know what I'm saying? So hold me close and do what it takes to this flesh to draw me back into you when it's necessary. Even if that's a good swift yank at the leash. No, that's not healthy for you to eat.

That's not healthy for you to go do. You know what I'm talking about. Paul told the church previously, according to verse 9, to refuse to mix together with those who would be defined by their sexual immorality.

But that's been open to misunderstanding in the Corinthian church. If that's the instruction, then they say, well, who do we even associate with? How in the world do we live in a world if we're not allowed to rub shoulders with, buy from, participate in activities with those who are sexually immoral, then what do we do?

And so they're like scratching their head going, we're just not going to address it.

At all.

We're not going to deal with it because we don't know how to manage this. The question would be from the Corinthian church, where do I buy my groceries? Can my kids play Little League? What about school?

What about eating at restaurants? I'm confident that we're going to be participating in the homecoming parade. I hope that many of you are able to participate in that. We're going to be passing out popcorn, invites to the church, and kind of just having a float there, pulling a wagon, pulling a trailer, and going along and just trying to bless our community and invite people.

And I'm confident that we will walk the parade route through Matawan, inviting many who do not share our sexual and moral values. And we're going to invite them to come to Recast. And so we need the clarification that comes in verses 10 and 11.

We need some clarity to this, some understanding, some correction in the way that we might think. And this is going to form the heart of the passage, verses 10 and 11. Here Paul limits his goal in writing this is to limit our jurisdiction.

He told the church to avoid the sexually immoral, not meaning those sexually immoral people of the world. And he adds a smattering of other sins to add breadth and width to the limitations. This is a substantial, momentous, defining text regarding the mission of the church.

I cannot overstate how important this is for us to grasp in this time and age that we live.

In now.

How do we define this? We are not called, church, to be the moral police force for the world. And I hope by the end of this message that that is a relief to most of us. To the degree that the church has taken on this responsibility is the degree to which we've gotten off track in our mission and our calling.

And by the lack of evangelism in America and the fever pitch of moral outrage on the part of the church and Christians at large, I would say we have by and large lost our way in focusing our attention in the area that he has given to us to work and to live and to move.

This is not a passage about evangelism. You don't see the word in there. But it certainly comes up against it by excluding what I would say is a huge gravitational pull on the church away from the central calling to proclaim rescue and salvation.

By grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, as revealed in Scripture alone, for the glory of God alone. What mission?

That mission.

Without this passage put down in writing here for us by Paul to the Corinthian church, we might be tempted to think that our role is to get everyone to shape up. Stop doing naughty things and start doing nice things.

How many of you grew up in a context like me where that was inadvertently taught to you? Where you really kind of walked away from your upbringing thinking that the primary thing in the Christian life is just do good and stop doing bad, and then you're okay.

Right?

Stop doing naughty things. Start doing nice things. Then Santa's going to bring you a present. I don't know. What do we really think is going to happen there? But Paul is so clear that we are called to live in the midst of a broken and busted society without disassociating from people.

Without disassociation with the world. And he even makes a funny but bold comment at the end of verse 10. And I think, you know, to say that Scripture never has a sense of humor, I think he has a bit of a sense of humor in the end of verse 10.

He's just kind of, what he says is kind of ludicrous. If the call on us was generally to not associate with sexually immoral, greedy swindlers, idolaters out there, then we would need to depart planet earth.

But why?

We got to go. Where would you live?

Who would you shop with? Where would you go for, who would be waiters and waitresses? And who's going to, you know, all of these things, right? Who are your kids going to play sports with? And on and on and on.

The logical question is, where can one go to avoid sexual brokenness? Where can one go to avoid the worship of that which is not God? Where can one go to avoid self-centered, egotistical narcissists?

By the way, that's my definition, but it really is the coupling of two Greek words, greedy and swindlers, that go together in the text that are two very, very harsh and very heavy.

Words coupled together.

Self-centered, egotistical narcissist is the idea. Where can you go to avoid those who live these lifestyles?

Heaven.

That's about it. Kind of limited options. You would need to go out of the world, says Paul. But Jesus, in His high priestly prayer, prayed for His followers saying, I'm about to depart and Lord, would you be with them?

And would you not take them out of the world, Father? But instead, He prayed that the Father would protect us from the evil one in the midst.

Of this world.

We are not removed from the world and its systems. Instead, we remain here and we remain here as two specific commodities. We are salt and we are light. And the tasteless, drab, flavorless, decaying society around us needs the salt of the good news.

The salt of the good news that we have to offer. The flavor and preservative that we have to offer is not law. It's not rules. The flavor and preservative we have to offer is the good news that sins can be forgiven, that eternal life can be received, and Christ will gain a kingdom under His crown one life at a time as people come to embrace and to be embraced by the one who died for them.

We are also called to be light, shining a light on the glorious one, not shining a light on laws and rules and regulations that merely heap on more guilt and more self-righteous effort to the world, but shining a light on the one who died, shining a light on the one who was buried, shining a light on the one who lived a perfect life and then was raised a new life and now is seated at the right hand of the Father in glory, even interceding for you and me.

Shining a light on Him, making much of Jesus in your day-to-day walk, in your workplace, in your neighborhood, in your family gatherings, wherever you can glorify Christ, lift Him high. Paul is basically looking at us saying, silly church, you cannot disassociate from all sinners.

The world is full of sinners who can't do anything else. Sinner's going to sin, says Paul.

Sinner's going to sin.

Paul is commanding the church to, still there's a proactive statement here, he's commanding the church to not associate, to not mix or mingle with anyone who would call themselves brother or sister if they are guilty of sexual immorality, greed, or they are an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler.

We're now looking at a category of person that's quite specific and nuanced. First, this is one who calls themselves a brother and sister in Christ. They claim that they have turned from their life of sin and asked Jesus Christ to guide.

And to lead them.

They claim to choose Christ over sin and desire Him more than sin. Secondly, this is a person still walking in sexual immorality. They're walking in greed, idolatry, reviling, or drunkenness, or swindling.

There's a sin that is defining them. There's a sin that is owning them. They claim the new life without showing any signs of sacrificing that old life. No turning away from sin, no accountability, no confession, no repentance, and even according to the previous section of chapter 5, in context, even boasting in the freedom that they have to keep doing these things.

Christ died for that.

I can keep doing it. That's the mindset in Corinth. And if we're not careful, that thought can creep in to our own hearts and into our own.

Fellowship as well.

Paul says, don't even share a potluck together with someone like this. This passage is even to some degree correcting my notions of how far church discipline goes. I've been relatively cavalier, just in the history of our church, we've had to do this a couple of times, but relatively cavalier about our ability to disassociate with someone who has clearly and perpetually chosen sin over Christ.

By the way, I've, on a couple of occasions, had really chilling events where I've sat in my office with an individual who was, yeah, committing sexual immorality very definitively, even admitted it, and I said, do you choose this relationship or do you choose Christ?

And I had somebody look me right in the eye and say, I'm going to keep doing this. I said, are you going to choose that then over Christ?

Yes.

How many of you know that's a scary place? How many of you know that's a wicked place? That is a terrifying place to be. Matthew 18 is our roadmap for church discipline, and we follow it. If you catch a brother or sister in sin, by the way, we've had, I would guess that there have been hundreds of bouts of church discipline initiated at our church, very few that I'm even aware of, because it's step one.

If you catch a brother or sister in sin, go to them one-on-one, call them to repentance, and if they repent, end of story. If they refuse after some time, then bring another and call them to repentance with a witness.

If after some time they refuse to repent and keep that sin instead of choosing Christ, then lastly it's to be told to the church so that person can be called to repentance by the many. The idea is to slowly larger circles of people calling to repentance.

If after a season the person still refuses to choose their sin over Christ, then they are to be removed and treated as a tax collector or a Gentile, the text tells us. That's what Jesus said. I've always taken this last phrase to be more gentle than our passage in 1 Corinthians indicates, because verse 11 tells us to not even eat with such a one.

Well, one thing that does need to be softened here in our understanding is that eating with someone is much more casual in our day than it was in theirs. When a gathering of people ate together, they were demonstrating a solidarity that we don't regularly assume in that act today.

And so Paul is not full on, I don't believe he's full on shunning them, Dwight Schrute style, you know, shun, unshun, reshun, shun, unshun. I don't know that that's exactly what he's going for, but there is obviously a social pressure that is put on one who chooses Christ, I mean, chooses their sin over Christ.

But there's an intentional exclusion from the routine graces of church communal life. That's the intention behind this passage. They certainly are not to participate in the Lord's Supper, a meal reserved for those who are saved and rescued from sins by faith in Jesus Christ, filled by the Spirit for conviction and guidance day to day.

I'm convinced that that defines the majority of us, that most of us are actually asking God to routinely convict us. And when He does, we're saying, I'm sorry and I'm going to fight this. The problem is I'm not sure that we use all the tools that He's given us to fight that, and we'll talk about that here in a minute.

But if a person in the church would readily say, I'm a follower of Christ while refusing to follow Christ in regard to their sexuality specifically from this text, God is saying the church must take steps to get to the bottom of that.

Does that make sense? You've got to get to the bottom of it. You've got to figure it out. God wrote this a couple thousand years ago, which relieves me from the accusation of cherry picking verses to attack our culture.

It's just in here. I'm going through the book of 1 Corinthians.

Here it is.

This passage, I would suggest to you, helps us understand how to process the LGBTQ plus revolution that's going on around us. I don't mention it much up here. As a matter of fact, that might be the first time that I've ever said that acronym from up here.

But many may have questions answered here this morning that have been burning on your hearts regarding how the church and how the world and how sexual immorality and how the LGBTQ plus stuff interfaces with us as a church.

Can a person remain in an active homosexual relationship and be a follower of Christ? The text says don't associate with one who calls themselves brother while remaining in sexual immorality. Can a man leave his wife or another woman and remain in the church in good standing?

Don't associate with one who calls themselves brother while remaining in sexual immorality. Can a man maintain a laissez-faire attitude towards porn, only on the weekends, and remain a part of recast church in good standing?

Don't associate with one who calls themselves brother while remaining in sexual immorality.

Do you see it?

Do you see it in the text? Raise your hand if we're all a little uncomfortable right now.

It's a little heavy.

It's God's Word.

It ought to hit us.