Tolerating Sin in the Church | Sermon 2/02/2025

Tolerating Sin in the Church and the Difference Between Judgment and Hypocrisy

All right, church, if you would, please turn with me and your Bibles to the first letter to the Corinthians. We've been in an expository series in 1 Corinthians. Going verse by verse. Learning what the Scriptures say in this letter.

And we've been in a pretty intense topic lately. And he's going to finish that out today. And so, if you missed last week, this will shed light on it. Just not in as much detail as the sexual immorality as we saw last week with the man of incest.

But we're going to be in verses 9 -13 of 1 Corinthians 5. 1 Corinthians 5. 9 -13. We're going to finish the chapter out. And the title of the sermon today is Tolerating Sin in the Church. Tolerating sin in the church.

So last week, we heard quite a bit about sexual immorality and how it not only affected the church at Corinth, but how it plagues the American church even now. All tolerance of sin is arrogance to Paul.

It is puffed up. Arrogance tells us, hey, sin isn't heinous. Sin doesn't taint the church. Sin doesn't jeopardize its moral witness. Sin is not that bad. That's what sin tells us. Hey, and as long as the so-called brother or sister isn't, quote, hurting others, and maybe even gives money to the church, maybe is a big donor in the church, then it's fine.

It's not hurting anyone. Just let them do what they're doing. Today, the world or worldly Christians even quote Matthew 7 to us. They say what? What's the Matthew 7 verse? Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Right? They don't understand the context of that judgmental hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees and Sadducees were saying, hey, do this. This is righteous. And then they weren't living that way.

And Jesus is saying, be careful, religious people, when you say live like this, but you refuse to live like that. So it's more about hypocrisy than an inability to make judgments. It's not about making judgments.

In fact, Christ said, in John 7, verse 24, judge with righteous judgment. Judge with righteous judgment, He says. We are told to make judgments. In fact, the entire population of this earth is kidding themselves if they think they don't make formal and informal judgments on other people every single day of their lives.

You could be walking down the street as a young lady and you could see a man and you're in a dark place of Salt Lake City and it looks like he's grabbing something in his coat and you might make a judgment as he grabs that out and make a decision to go the other way.

Whether you see something or not. You can make right judgments. You can make wrong judgments. Whether good or bad, we are told in the Bible to make judgments. This is different than a specific type of judging that God can do, okay?

We are to adjudicate or judge in the church, but that judge is a different way the world uses it. We'll go over the definition of what Paul uses today for judge. And that's what today's verses will lightly touch on.

Next week's section of Scripture in chapter 6 will be a full discourse on lawsuits. Yes, lawsuits were starting to happen in the Corinthian church. They were suing each other. It gets really bad, okay?

And he'll talk about what are we able to do in the church? Suing each other, judging outsiders, adjudicating things. We're gonna talk a lot about that next week, but today it'll lightly touch on it, okay?

Paul’s Previous Letter and the Command Not to Associate with Immoral People

So, go to 1 Corinthians 5 9. Let's read it and see what the Scripture says on what we're going over today, okay? Hear now the words of the living and true God. Verse 9, I wrote you in My letter not to associate with immoral people.

I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world or with the covetous and swindlers or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one.

For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. Thus ends the reading of God's holy Word.

Let's pray as we approach the Scriptures today as a church body, okay? Lord, as we approach Your Word, we want to be led only by Your Spirit and not by any interpretation of man. We want to know, Lord, what You mean in these texts and how they apply to our lives and what it meant for the Corinthian church.

God, it's a very serious thing to You from the Old to the New Testament that those who claim they are an Israelite, those who claim they are a brother or sister in Christ, but act contrary to that, You have very strict commandments on how we're to handle that, Lord.

And these are hard things. These are difficult things, Lord. Not everything seems black and white. Not everything seems easy or clear cut. But we know, Lord, that in the American church, the American Christian church has let sin persist.

And the church here in America has not removed evildoers. And people have lived in fornication and adultery and active homosexuality and all these things, Lord, in churches and no one ever approaches them.

And so, Lord, we want to be balanced as we approach Your Word. We want to know what it says because we want to love people the right way. And I know, Lord, that this is an expression of love. Hebrews 12 tells us that You discipline those whom You love.

That if we don't receive discipline in our sanctification sometimes, we're an illegitimate son. Our parents disciplined us, and if they didn't, they don't love us. And so, Lord, help us to see what we need to see here.

Lord, let me diminish here this day and let Your Word and Your glory shine forward. Pray this in Jesus' name, Amen. So in verse 3, the Apostle Paul said that he has already judged the man of incest. This man has committed incest with his stepmother, and he reminded them in the power of the name and presence of Jesus Christ, they have authority too.

When they are assembled, they must declare the charges that this man has done, and they must, as Paul said, hand him over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh. That's what it said. We talked about how in that time, when that man is led over, he's removed from the church, that he would be out in the world again.

But in that way, he's burned bridges with the world. He's no longer ultimately welcome in the world because he's told people he turned to Jesus. And it may sound trivial to you that today, someone could turn to Jesus, and then the next day, they could turn back to the world.

That's easier in our modern context. But if you turned to Christ in the first century and got baptized in front of people and said, Jesus is my Lord, and I go to worship services, and then you told your family, and they ostracized you, and they persecuted you, and be like, fine, you take your Jesus and your Christians who are part of the way.

If that happened, it would be hard to assimilate back into the world. Here, you could turn away from Christ, and you could probably go to your social media and announce it with a trumpet. And you'll have friends on your friends list going, good for you.

They're not good enough for you. You're better than them, right? It was different then. And so this man was handed over. He's not in the church anymore, but he's not really part of the world either. And so, stuck between two worlds, this man of incest who won't repent from his incest, stuck between two worlds, he is in his own sin.

And where he doesn't belong in either, may he turn and in his own wretchedness go, this isn't worth it! This sin isn't worth it! And may he turn back and come back to the church. And Paul says, so that in the day of Jesus Christ, his spirit may be saved.

May he find such a low point that he can only look up. That he would desire the destruction of his flesh, which means to say the carnal parts of him, the parts of you and me that want to do sin, he says may that be destroyed.

May he no longer want to do incest and may he come back. And that's what Paul is saying. And so, the goal of expulsion is not simply the expulsion itself. It's so that they return. Hand him over to Satan in hopes that he will return.

And finally, the Apostle Paul reminded us that the leaven from last week's dough can spoil in a jar. I told you, they would make bread with wild yeast, and so they would mix flour and water, and they would take some of it and they would reserve some of that raw dough and they would put it in a clay jar.

And then they would make their bread loaf. And that fermenting piece of dough in that clay jar would be for next week's bread. But Paul says, that bread of yours, which is the man of incest, it's gone bad.

It's spoiled. And for those of you who make sourdough bread, you've seen it. You open the fridge, you open the jar, you see there's mold everywhere, right? And so Paul says, clean that out. Clean out that old leaven.

Remove it. Because it's going throughout the whole loaf of bread and it's defiling it. In fact, I told you, God would not even accept bread offerings with leaven because of the fact that it potentially could go bad.

So God only accepted unleavened bread. They could eat it. They could eat leavened bread, but He was offered unleavened.

Okay?

And so remove this sinful man. Remove the sin from yourself. Because if you let a little bit of leaven that is bad or spoiled go, if there's a little bit of bacteria on it, it's going to spread through all the dough and it's going to go bad.

And so he says that with, if there's a man or woman like that in our church, and also individually, if there's a little bit of sin in your life, okay, I'll just let a little bit of this, a little bit of pornography, a little bit of drug addiction, a little bit of this.

If I just let a little bit of this, it's no big deal. No one needs to know. And Paul says, no, it's going to eventually defile all of you. It's going to take over everything. And he says, clean it out.

Christ is our Passover lamb. Christ died for us. And so that has made way for the possibility of a substantial change. Jesus is your Passover lamb. He says, because Christ died for you, you should be different.

You should be different than what you were before. And so in that transformation that Christ gives us, there can be a gradual, steady increase in holiness, only by God's grace, not by your works, only by God's grace, a steady increase in holiness.

He says, you're new. You're a new lump of dough.

You're new.

You don't have to be the leavened bread. You can be the lump of new dough that's unleavened. You're not taintable, he says. You are in a position now, God has saved you and the Holy Spirit indwells you and you could be in a position where you don't have to sin.

Hebrews, I'm sorry, 1 Corinthians 10 says, God has provided always a way of escape. We can avoid sin only by God's grace. And so anyways, Paul comes back to this point to the Corinthians and says, look, don't tolerate immoral people in the church.

The Church Must Be Separate from the World Without Withdrawing from It

Verse 9, I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. And so, Paul references a previous letter. If you notice, we're in what?

1 Corinthians?

So he says that there's another letter. A previous letter. And he says the same thing in 2 Corinthians. There's these additional letters to these Corinthians. And there is an understanding in the theological world that there are at least three letters to the Corinthians, but there are possibly even four.

God in His infinite wisdom and sovereignty decided to only give us two of the letters to the Corinthians in Scripture. And when Paul wrote these letters, it's possible in this initial letter that we don't have access to, he wrote a list of things that they should or should not do as a new church.

It's like, okay, hey, Apostle Paul, we're all from Corinth. We're all from Greece. Or some of us have come here from Rome. We were sent here after we fought in the wars. We were given a plot of land to stay here in Corinth.

And so there's a mixture of Greeks and Romans, and they're like, we're all here,.

And what do we do now?

We used to go to idol temples and sacrifice to idols and little images. We used to go to parties where there were orgies and debaucheries.

What do we do now?

And so Paul, as he is leaving the first time, it's possible he wrote a letter as soon as he left and said, oh, well, this is what you need to do. This is what it looks like now. And so he's referencing possibly this letter because they're in a place in Corinth that is surrounded by porneia.

And I told you that word means immorality, sexual immorality, porneia. They need to know what it looks like to be a Christian. So he says, do not associate with immoral people. Associate here is the word sunanamignustai, to associate with someone else with spatial proximity and or joint activity.

Doing something together and usually implying some sort of reciprocal involvement or relation. Sun in the Greek means with. Ana means up. Mignumi is mixed. So the word is mixed up with. Mixed up with.

The Bible is essentially saying don't come together with immoral people and get mixed up with them. It's like my daughter makes smoothies in the morning. She puts the different ingredients in, mixes it up, it becomes one new thing.

Don't become one thing associated with immoral people. And that's nothing new in the Bible, right? The Old Testament, God said to the Israelites, be separate, be set apart. The New Testament is no different.

Don't be mixed. Meaning, you can be surrounded by people of the nations, but one cannot claim to be a Christian yet be like the people of the nations at the same time. Those who claim that they are a brother or sister in Christ but act no differently than the unbelievers of the surrounding cultures have mixed.

They have mixed. Someone who says I'm a brother, I'm a sister in Christ, but they are in immorality. They have mixed with the pagan nations around them.

Okay?

They have neglected the moral boundaries that Christ set for us in the Gospels and the Epistles. Be set apart. And the Apostle John agrees. He says in 1 John 2 v. 15 -16, this is in your printout by the way, 1 John 2 .15, John says, "...do not love the world nor the things in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world.".

Associating with immoral people who have mixed with the world compromises the church. Just like in the Old Testament when they let Amorites or Canaanites or Jebusites or Philistines or Moabites or whoever mix with the community of Israel.

God said, the land is yours. It's your inheritance. Go in there and remove everyone.

And He warned them,.

If you don't remove the pagans, they will influence you. And what becomes the repeated problem in the Old Testament? Idolatry from the influence of pagan nations. Their gods. Chemosh, Molech, Ashteroth, Baal.

These false gods made out of wood and stone and metals. The Israelites worshiped them. It was divided from Yahweh, the one true God. And so Paul says, don't be influenced by the neighboring nations around you.

Do not be mixed up. Do not associate with pornos. Pornos means immoral people. People of immorality. So Paul talks about what ought to be the case. And now in v. 10, he talks about the reality of believers still being in the world, though not of the world.

Because even Jesus said to His Father in the High Priestly Prayer in John 17, what did He say? Father, I do not ask that You remove the disciples from the world or take them out of the world, but I pray that You would keep them from the evil one.

For they are not of the world, the disciples, just as I am not of the world. And so Jesus was not of this world, but He had to come and be in this world. And He says once you're saved, you're not of the world anymore.

You're heavenly. You're otherworldly. And so, when you think about it, the whole mission of the Gospel is that the otherworldly heavenly Savior who's not of the world came to save people who were of the world,.

You and me.

He took us out of the world, meaning we were no longer worldly, but He kept us here so that we, otherworldly people, would impact the people around us of the world. A lot of world there, right? But they come out of the world.

They come out of it. And that's His plan. Therefore, in their daily lives, the Corinthian believers are still going to have to rub shoulders with the immoral people of this world.

We will too.

We will have to rub shoulders with the people of this world. There's no way about it. You have to bring the Gospel to them. You can't create a bubble. We were not meant to. He says, I do not pray that they be taken out of the world but kept from the evil one.

That means you've got to be here. But that also means that we're tired of it, right? Paul says in Romans 8 that the creation groans for the redemption of the sons of men, meaning the creation cries out and says, when will Jesus return?

And sin will be over. And suffering will be gone. And that's what we long for, right? We long for as many people to be saved as possible. But we also long to no longer sin anymore. And so we have to be in the world, but not of the world.

Look at v. 10. I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world or with the covetous and swindlers or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. And so, listen, it literally says this.

Do not associate with immoral people, not at all meaning the immoral people of this world or the covetous and swindlers or with idolaters, since indeed to avoid them, you'd have to leave the world completely.

And so, Paul's essentially saying you're going to have to be around immoral people, but they better not be immoral people in the church. And I want to make it clear that this isn't a license to mix with the immoral people of this world.

In fact, he's not saying that at all. He's saying you cannot mix with immoral people of this world. You have to imagine this means two things. One, in this previous letter that he sent, he's demonstrating his intent was to keep what was happening in verses 1 -8 from happening.

Paul saying do not associate with immoral people in his first letter was to say you cannot let a man of fornication, a man of incest stay in your midst and act like a brother of good standing before God in the church.

And number two, it also means that they will not have a common bond with the immoral people of this world even though they're still of the world. They will be forced to interact with immoral people, especially when it comes to Gospel conversations.

But it's different in the church. Now the question is though, if he had already said this, and he's quoting himself again, why did they not understand this previously? It's possible the Corinthians were playing dumb, and that's why they kept this man who was sleeping with his father's wife in the church.

Maybe they were genuinely confused by some of what Paul said in his previous letter. But I look at the fact that he kept calling them arrogant. He kept calling them prideful. And that's hard to believe.

That they were just like, well, you told us not to associate with immoral people. We just thought you meant with people outside of the church. Immoral people in the church, they're fine, right? He says he's a believer.

Maybe they thought in their arrogance and their pride that hey, if this man who's sleeping with his father's wife does enough good works, if he gives enough to the church, if he's generous enough, then it's no big deal.

Keep him in.

His good will outweigh his bad. Whatever the case, Paul says it looks like I'm going to have to spell it out for you now. You've let this man of incest stay in your church, so here, I'm going to have to tell you what to do again.

Listen up. He will be very precise. In fact, he now even narrows the type of people. He goes beyond the men and women of Pornaea, immorality, and he addresses the covetous, swindlers, and idolaters too.

If anyone is like this in the church, this is a big deal, but he says you're going to see this outside the church. The covetous are those who have an insatiable longing for the possessions of others. You look at their houses.

You look at their cars. You look at their wife. You look at their husband. You look at their kids. You look at their stuff that God blessed them with and you go, I want it. I want what they have. It even comes from greed.

Okay?

They're never content. They always want more. What they have is not good enough, and therefore, they're also swindlers. The root word in the Greek for swindler is to snatch something away. So a swindler is literally a robber.

A thief. So the covetous see other people's belongings and they take something that's not theirs. They're swindlers. They're robbers. They're thieves. They're so covetous that in their self-love, they steal from other people and they even leave the impoverished destitute.

You know who it's easy to steal from? It's hard to steal from the rich. They have little castles, little mansions with gates and security systems. You know who it's easy to steal from? Poor people. And you take them.

These type of men and women took everything that the poor had, leaving them even more destitute than they were before in the ancient world. It's a desire to please self at all costs. And when you think about it, the place where coveting and stealing and idolatry come from is the same place where sexual sin comes from.

These are all sins that say, I'm God. I want to be pleased. I deserve the pleasure. So I'll take yours. I'll take your wife. And I'll take your possessions. And I matter most. I am my own God. It's all from the same place.

And when you think about it,.

Even from the Jewish perspective, idolatry was often called. What?

Adultery.

Idolatry in the Old Testament, especially in Ezekiel, in Hosea, God says, I'm like your husband. You were My bride. And He uses harsh words. He says, you've become a whore and a prostitute, Israel. You've turned against Me.

You've gone after other gods. You've given yourself to other gods. And so idolatry is very close to sexual immorality. Now these people, swindlers, the covetous, idolaters, the immoral, they make up the residents of Corinth.

These are the people that make up the residents of Corinth in the unbelieving world. Not in the church. Outside of the church. And so the only way to never associate with these type of people is to honestly leave the world completely.

You never want to have to rub shoulders with immoral people like this. You're going to have to leave this world. This is how distinct Christians are to be from those of the world. We are otherworldly.

We are heavenly. We are to be so clearly different of a different moral standard completely. We are to be so clearly belonging to God rather than to Satan in everything we do and say and think. We are to be different from unbelievers.

What does Christ say in the Sermon on the Mount? Matthew 4, verses 14 -16. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor does anyone light a lamp, but put it under a basket, but on a lampstand.

And it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven. We are to be lights in the dark land.

That we live in.

We ought to be shining out there. What happens when it's the middle of the night and you've got to go to the bathroom, especially you guys who are getting older, right? And you go and you fumble around for the light switch?

The light pierces the darkness. You and I are to be light out there in this unbelieving world. Such a stark difference. We ought to be shining among dark people.

And look at this,.

We're not called to consolidate the lights either. What would that look like? All the millions of Christians on the earth, we buy an island and we come.

And we live on an island.

And when you turn to Christ, you get to go to the island. Sounds like a cult, right? That would be consolidating all the lights. The rest of the world would be dark. And so if you think about it, if you were up in the space station, if it wasn't merely just spiritual, in a physical analogy, the rest of the world is dark, but one island is light.

We can't consolidate. We've got to be out in the world. We are to go to the nations with the Gospel of light. We are to be salt. Salt of the earth. Salt does nothing when it sits there alone. You look at salt on a shelf, it's like there's salt, right?

For something to be salty, you add salt to it. To meat, to vegetables, whatever. You must add salt to something. We're salt. Are you being added to people and things in this world? Are you impacting the flavor of things?

Are you changing things? Salt is also a preservative. It preserves what is good. What is right. Are you salt out there? Paul knows that there's a multitude of immoral people out there. They're surrounding them.

The church at Corinth is being surrounded by immorality, by immoral people. And it's surrounding us, even here in Salt Lake County, in northern Utah. But there is not to be a single immoral person, unrepentantly immoral, within the bounds of the church.

Not one. Not one.

Not one immoral person is supposed to be in unrepentance in the church. One commentator says, Paul's grievance is that they cannot witness to an unbelieving world when one of their own members is guilty of a sin that causes even the heathens to blush at.

I told you that last week. Even the pagan Corinthians would have looked at incest and gone, that's horrific. And so since they have not died, and because God fiercely detests suicide, and because Christ has not returned yet, the idea of currently at this moment leaving the world is impossible.

You and I cannot leave this world right now. We just can't. Only when God takes us or He returns. That's it.

We have to be here.

When you one day open your eyes and said, I think I've died and gone to heaven, and you see Jesus and angels and that statement would be true, number one, but that would be when you're no longer around immoral people.

When you die and go to heaven, or when Christ returns, you will no longer be around immorality then. And only then.

Okay?

That's when you can avoid the immoral people of the world. So it's like saying, you're going to have to be in the world among immoral people, but people like this cannot be in your assembly among you unless they repent from these ways and turn to Christ.

They cannot be both of Christ and porneia. Immorality, sexual immorality. It can't be Christian and immoral person. They don't go together. That's why it's an oxymoron when people say out there in the evangelical world, I'm a gay Christian.

That's an oxymoron. That's impossible. You cannot be both at the same time. You cannot be a porneia and Christ. Nor can you be of greed or thievery or idolatry as well. You can't say those things if you're with Christ.

Okay?

Church Discipline, Eating with a So-Called Brother, and the Limits of Separation

In fact, he states in v. 11, but actually, I wrote to you, not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler. Not even to eat with such a one as this.

You see, in this previous letter that Paul wrote to them that we don't have access to, it was probably not unlike the list of vices that we see in places like Romans 1, Ephesians 4, Colossians 3, Titus 3, Galatians 5, or even in our next chapter, we're going to see a list of sins and sinful people in 1 Corinthians 6.

You know what I'm talking about, right? It says immorality. It says these type of long lists of sins. Those types of lists are throughout the New Testament. Things that we ought not to be. And these lists are common to the apostolic teaching.

They're common to what Christ taught. These were things that were commandments in the law that Christ and the Apostles saw as timeless. That is to say, right morality, correct morality is Christianity 101 to them.

These guys, Christ came, He taught them for three years, He ascended into heaven, they went and they spread the Gospel, and these men are going, this is Christianity basics. Don't live immorally. That's part of it.

Of course, again, that's not how you earn salvation. It's that God saves the individual. He gives you a new heart. And now you have the capacity by His power and Spirit and renewal and cleansing to obey Him.

You could not obey Him before. We read in our catechism, we were by nature children of wrath, but Christ took you.

He saved you.

He took that heart of stone. Ezekiel says He put a heart of flesh in you. Something that's moldable. He put His Spirit within you. He cleansed you with fresh water.

New water.

Purified you. He said now, now you can obey Me. You couldn't do it before. You would have fallen in nature, but now you can. And so, only then, and by that way, can we obey Him. And that's a basic element of Christianity.

Christians are identified not just by their doctrines or professions or peculiarities to the world. We are identified by what we do. Not by what we do alone though, okay? Obviously, there's false religions who build houses for people and do great things.

The Bible says that if they do these good things for the poor and for the destitute, but they don't have the truth and they're doing it for a false god, so you have to have the doctrine and you have to do what's right after He saves you.

You see it here, right? In the church, there are those who only profess and they only speak. Titus 1 .16. This is this type of person. For they profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed.

James 1 .22. But prove yourselves doers of the Word and not merely hearers, only deluding yourself. In the early church, people were getting saved left and right. They were turning to Christ. They were doing the right thing.

They were living this way, but then there were people who acted like they turned to Christ. They were coming into the church. And you'll only know them by their fruits, because some of the trees look the same.

So you've got to wait for the fruit to come out. And if the fruit's rotten, then you finally know. That's the analogy that Jesus uses, right? And so, eventually, these people got found out. John even says they went out from us to show that they were never really of us.

There are people who call themselves Christians all over the globe, but many of them may not know Christ truthfully. If anyone in the church labels themselves Christian but is guilty of being actually one of these things on these lists, one who is just a professor and not also a doer, then they need to be removed from our midst.