Four Questions about Excommunication

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Let's continue to stand as we open our Bibles together and turn to the 5th chapter of 1 Corinthians.
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1 Corinthians chapter 5, verses 3 through 8.
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This is a continuation of last week's message.
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And so, we will read again the same passage.
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The Apostle writes, Let us therefore celebrate the festival not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
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Father in heaven, we thank you for your word today.
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We thank you for the truth of the word.
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And we ask now, Lord, that as we come to you, that it would be in spirit and truth, as this time of study is a time of worship.
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It's an act of worship.
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Father, I pray that as I preach, that you would keep me from error.
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I know, Lord, that such a message as this is one that could easily be offensive, harsh for the ears, and difficult to handle.
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And especially on a day like today, one that is probably very unexpected.
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And yet, Lord, when we go through the passages of Scripture verse by verse, we land where we land, Father.
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We get to where we get to because you have ordained it, and because you have guided us to this place.
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And Lord, we do pray that you would enlighten us to the truth of Scripture this morning, that you would keep us from error this morning.
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Especially me, Lord, as I am a fallible man and capable of preaching error.
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And I just desire with my whole heart to preach your truth, that your people might be edified, that unbelievers might be saved by the proclamation of the gospel.
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And I pray it in Jesus' name.
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Amen.
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Well, as we mentioned earlier in the service, today is Mother's Day.
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And yet, today will not be a message typical to that particular event, which is actually to some has been somewhat disturbing, to others has been somewhat a little humorous.
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My wife met with a group of ladies this past week who are all pastors' wives, and they get together once a month and encourage one another and sit and talk with one another.
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And obviously, the inevitable conversation came about, well, what is your husband preaching on right now, and are you doing anything special for Mother's Day? And my wife said, yes, my husband's preaching a message on excommunication.
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And so they thought that was a little different.
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But as most of you who have been here know, I am preaching through the book of 1 Corinthians.
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I've made the commitment at the beginning of the year that I wasn't going to stop, simply because the occasion might call for me to.
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I'm going to preach through until I'm done with this book.
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And that means that we do land where we land each week.
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And so hopefully you'll understand when we're finished why I've taken this to task.
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I believe that the word of God is to be preached, and I believe the whole counsel of God is to be preached.
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And one of the most dangerous things that we can do is simply have our pet passages that we jump back and forth between from week to week, and we don't ever actually dig down into the meat of the word.
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And what preaching verse by verse through the Scripture does force the pastor to do, and it's why so many don't do it, is it forces us to deal with the passages we wouldn't ordinarily want to deal with.
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It's easy if I were to preach this verse next week, and that verse the next week, and another verse the next week, to simply avoid the passages that people would find difficult or hard to understand or ones that they would not necessarily want to deal with.
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So we're going to deal with this today.
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We're going to go through the message together, and I pray by God's grace that you will be edified and challenged by what he has to tell us in his word.
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Now if you haven't been here, I'll give you a quick overview of where we have gotten.
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We've been studying through 1 Corinthians.
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Paul is challenging a church that has a lot of problems.
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The first century church was not a perfect representation of what the church is supposed to be, because even in the first century church, the church was made up of sinners saved by grace.
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And those sinners saved by grace had still the proclivity for going after the flesh at times, and Paul challenges the Corinthians about their proclivity for going after the flesh.
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One of the issues that they had in the church was the issue of pride.
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The people prided themselves on their leaders.
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They prided themselves on their social cliques and their divisions.
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They prided themselves on so many things that were ungodly.
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They prided themselves on their amount of worldly wisdom.
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And all of this pride made itself demonstrated in how they were behaving with one another, and Paul is writing to them because a group has come to him and told him.
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We learn about this in the first chapter.
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A group came to Paul and told him, Paul, there's problems in the church, and we need to deal with these problems.
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And so he's writing to them, responding to the report that he's been given.
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And when we get to 1 Corinthians chapter 5, we deal with the first instance of one particular gross sin which had made its way into the church, and the church was not dealing with it.
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Paul describes it simply as a man has his father's wife.
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And we defined that a few weeks ago as simply this, a man in some way or another has begun a relationship, an illicit affair in the church with a woman who had been married to his father.
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Not his mother, more likely to his stepmother.
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And this woman, who should have been off limits according to the law of God for any type of relationship, was now a woman who he was flaunting his relationship with in the church.
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And he was flaunting his sinfulness in the church.
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And the church was not dealing with it.
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The church had decided instead to tolerate it.
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And the Apostle Paul says in verses 1 and 2, he says that they were actually arrogant in their toleration.
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I don't think we think about that often.
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It is very arrogant to tolerate that which God does not.
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Do you ever think about that? Do you ever think about the fact that when God says something shouldn't be done, and we say it's okay, that what we're saying to God is we know better than you.
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When God says no, and we say yes, we have taken God off of His throne, and we have decided to seat ourselves in His place.
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That's the arrogance of tolerance.
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That's the arrogance of telling God we know better than you.
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And that's the problem, and that's the situation that had happened in the Corinthian church.
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Now, I mentioned a few weeks ago that what may also be happening is that the Corinthians are finding their pride and their personal feelings of aggrandizement or self-lifting up from their toleration.
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See, a lot of people take great pride in their tolerance.
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Well, we are much more tolerant than you, and so we are much better than you.
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People who find themselves greatly tolerant often make people who they consider intolerant to be considered monsters.
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You're the intolerant one, and I'm the tolerant one.
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You're the hateful bigot, and I am the open-minded person.
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And so not only are they allowing the sin, but they're celebrating their own tolerance, and thus increasing their own arrogance.
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And Paul says no.
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Such a thing isn't to be tolerated, such a thing is to be dealt with.
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This person who is in your midst, who is doing this thing, and by the way, he makes a point, he said it's not even tolerated among the pagans.
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If you go back and read ancient literature from this particular time period, you will find that even in Rome, where the grossest of sexual immorality was often celebrated in temples and things like that, but even they had standards, right? Everybody's got a line that they won't cross.
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Everybody's got a bridge that's just a little too far, right? And one of the bridges that was too far was incest.
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That was not allowed.
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And this was considered a form of incest.
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And so, this particular sin, Paul says, even the most rank pagan sinners aren't doing what you're doing.
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Aren't doing what you're allowing to have done in your midst.
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So in that sense, Paul is really giving them a heavy-handed rebuke.
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And he says, and we begin in verse 3, For even though I'm not there, I've already made a judgment.
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Now I know, I know that we live in an age where the only Bible verse people seem to know anymore is Matthew 7.1.
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Judge not, lest ye be judged.
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And I tell you, that's the favorite verse of the unbeliever.
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They may not know anything else Jesus said, but they know He said that.
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In fact, they might not even know He said it, but they know it's in the Bible.
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They may not know where it is, but they know it's there.
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And you'll hear them say, Judge not, lest ye be judged.
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Of course, they don't understand the context.
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They've never read it.
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They don't know that it goes on to say, For whatever judgment you judge others with, that same judgment will be used to judge you.
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So when you make judgments, make righteous judgments.
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Don't seek to take the speck out of your brother's eye without first removing the log out of your own eye.
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First remove the log out of your eye before you attempt to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
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You see, the whole idea behind Jesus' command not to judge is that we would not judge unrighteously or that we would not judge hypocritically like the Pharisees.
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See, the Pharisees lived one way and they commanded others to live another way.
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The Bible says they tied up burdens that were heavy and they laid them on other men's shoulders that they themselves were unwilling to carry.
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That was the issue Jesus is dealing with in Matthew 7.1.
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And if you don't understand the context, you might misunderstand Jesus to say we're never supposed to make any judgments at all.
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And let me tell you something.
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If you live a life where you never make any judgments at all, you are going to very quickly have destruction follow that life.
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If you never make a decision between right and wrong, but everything's equal, then you are not going to be able to get very far.
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And you know this, you make judgments all the time.
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Let me tell you something.
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If you went home tonight...
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Okay, and I caught it.
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Let me get my train of thought back.
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Everybody on the recording is going to wonder what just happened.
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Everybody who's listening is going to...
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What did he do? Knocked the flowers over is what I did.
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If you went home tonight and you saw on the news that someone had broken into a house, had stolen all the goods, had beaten the father, had assaulted the mother, and had injured the children, would you not at that moment have every right to feel a sense of righteous indignation? In fact, if you didn't have some feeling of righteous indignation at that moment, wouldn't that say something about your heart? That you could simply say, Oh, that's fine.
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No, it's not fine.
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Assault and rape and torture and murder are not fine.
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On September 11th, 2001, we all watched as men who hated our land flew airplanes into buildings out of sheer hatred for what we stand for as a nation.
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And what did you feel? Indignation.
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That's judgment.
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You made a judgment.
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That was wrong.
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What they did was wrong.
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And to say that we're not allowed to say anything's wrong, that's what Jesus meant when he said, Judge not lest ye be judged.
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That's foolish.
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To think that that's what Jesus meant when he said, Judge not.
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That's just outright inanity.
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The Bible is clear that there are certain things that are right and there are certain things that are wrong, and we should know the difference.
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We should actually have a better understanding of the difference than the world because the Bible says, we're given the Word of God.
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We're entrusted with the truths of God's Word.
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We have his written Word given to us that tell us the things that are and the things that are not right according to him.
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So yes, we are supposed to make judgments.
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Now, we're not supposed to be judgmental.
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You say, well, that sounds like you're equivocating.
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No.
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Judgmental people are always looking for reasons to destroy and to tear down and to lift themselves up by stepping on the shoulders of other people and crushing them.
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And that's not what we're called to do.
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We are not called to walk on top of one another simply to make ourselves feel higher.
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That's what the Pharisees did.
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And I do know that there are Pharisees in the church today.
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In fact, I would say there's entire denominations that built themselves on Pharisaical attitudes.
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Not going to get into any name-calling or mudslinging, but I know of places where if you don't dress just like they dress and you don't behave just like they behave, you are out.
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That's dangerous.
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And that's not what we're talking about.
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That level of judgmentalism, that type of judgmentalism is absolutely foreign to Scripture.
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Okay? But that doesn't mean that we can't make judgments.
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We have to.
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And Paul here says, okay, there's a man in your midst.
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He is sinning.
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It's obvious.
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Not a secret.
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Right? Not a secret.
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So it has to be dealt with.
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And what does Paul say? When you're assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present.
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I talked about what that meant last week.
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That does not mean Paul has some ethereal cloud that sits over them that's the spirit of Paul.
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No, what he means is he's made his judgment known.
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And so when the church gathers, they gather in accord with the judgment that Paul's already made.
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And what do they say? You are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
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That is Paul's way of saying this man who is in your midst must be removed from among you.
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And then he gives the illustration, verses 6-8, of the leaven.
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Now, what's the leaven? In the Old Testament, in the nation of Israel, when Israel was leaving Egypt, God commanded that they put no leaven in their bread because it wouldn't be time for the yeast to cause the rising of the dough because they were in such a haste to get out of Egypt.
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And so it became that they ate unleavened bread and the feast that went along with that was called Passover and it was also called the feast of unleavened bread.
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Because at that particular time in the year, every year the mother of the house would clean the house all the way and she would get all of the leaven out because they were supposed to represent that time by eating unleavened bread.
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In fact, during the Passover meal, a child would ask, why on this night do we eat unleavened bread but on other nights we eat leavened bread? See, Jews don't just eat unleavened bread all year long.
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That's a particular thing for a particular time.
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It wasn't as if they couldn't have yeast in their house at other times, but at one time a year they cleansed out the leaven or the yeast from their houses because that represented to them getting out of Egypt and represented to them cleansing their selves.
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So Paul uses that illustration here in verse 6.
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He says, Your boasting is not good.
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Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Here's the point.
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A little bit of leaven in a lump of dough causes the whole lump to rise.
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A little bit of yeast in the dough causes the whole mixture to be influenced.
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So this is the illustration Paul uses.
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He says, Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump.
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So he's saying, the leaven that's there, the yeast that's there needs to be removed.
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It's a picture of that Old Testament.
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This is why he talks in a second.
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He talks about the festival.
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The festival is a festival on leavened bread.
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And he says you need to get that out.
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So what's the picture? You got a guy in the church who's sinning and he's sinning grossly.
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He's sinning immorally.
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He's sinning in a way that's known by everyone.
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He's unrepentant.
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That's huge.
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And we'll talk about that in a little while.
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He's unrepentant.
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He needs to be removed.
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Just like the Jews swept the leaven out of their house, the person who is committing the sin in the church and he's blatant, unrepentant, and habitual needs to be removed.
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And we call that excommunication.
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That comes from the Latin, which simply means to put out of fellowship.
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Communication, where we get the word to communicate, to be in fellowship with someone.
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And ex means out, where we get the word exit.
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So to excommunicate simply means to remove them from the fellowship of the church.
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Now I know, and if you weren't here last week, I talked a little bit about the history of excommunication.
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There have been some really wild bad examples of this in history.
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We talked about the fact that there was once a king who was excommunicated by the Pope, so he made his way to the Pope and he bowed on his knee for three days outside of the walls of the place so that the Pope would let him in and give him the grant of repentance.
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Having been on his knees in the snow for three days, begging, that's not biblical excommunication.
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That is medieval Roman Catholic farce.
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And it's based on a misunderstanding of the church and a misunderstanding of the role of God's people and misunderstanding of excommunication.
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You see, the excommunication power was never given to one man.
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And the fact that it's given to the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church is an absolute misuse of that power.
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If you go back to Matthew 18 and you actually read it, the purpose, or the power, rather, of excommunication is not given to the preacher.
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I can't excommunicate anyone.
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It's not given to the Pope.
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He can't excommunicate anyone.
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But the power is given to the body.
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When the body is gathered, that's why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5, when you're gathered in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is with you, when you come together as the body, the body has the power, not the pastor, not the elders, not the deacons, not any individual in the church, but the body as a whole has that responsibility and it has that authority.
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Now, does that mean the whole church can't make a mistake? No.
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I told a story in Sunday school this morning about a church that I think really did it bad.
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I mean, they really made a bad call.
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They did not go through the process.
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They did not follow any of the biblical standards for it.
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They just did it, and I think did it in a wrong way.
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It happens.
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So I'm not saying every case of excommunication that's ever been done by the church has been biblical, godly, or proper.
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But I am saying this.
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Just because there are some places and some peoples that have done it wrongly doesn't mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater and say we don't need to do it at all.
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It needs to be practiced in a way that is in accord with what the Scripture commands.
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And if we do not follow the commands of Scripture, then we can know by the very fact that the Scripture is our standard that we've not done it right.
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So today I have four questions I want to answer about excommunication.
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That was our introduction.
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Let's now very quickly go through four questions about this subject, because I know when I talk about this, I have people all the time come to me and ask, well, what about this? Well, what about that? Well, what about the other? And I like to anticipate questions not because I mind answering questions, but because I know if one person asks me, there's probably ten that think about that question, but maybe didn't ask.
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So I'm going to go over four questions that I think may be on your mind this morning, and I'm going to give you the answers from Scripture.
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I actually forgot to print them this week.
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They were printed in your bulletin last week, and we just didn't get to them.
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But here's the four questions if you want to jot them down.
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Number one, what sins qualify for excommunication? Number two, what procedure are we given for excommunication? Number three, what is the ultimate goal? And number four, how does someone get back? How does someone get welcomed back? Do they have to stand outside the church in the snow on their knees for three days and beg my forgiveness? No.
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But that's an important question, right? Because excommunication isn't final.
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If a person is excommunicated from the church, that doesn't mean they're never, ever, ever able to come back.
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So how do they come back? So those are the four questions.
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Let's get to them.
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First, what sins qualify for excommunication? What sins qualify? Well, in 1 Corinthians 5, we're dealing with gross immorality.
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And he also describes some other things.
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If you look in 1 Corinthians 5, he'll say this.
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He says in verse 9, we didn't get to read that earlier.
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He says, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or greedy, or swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.
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But I'm writing to you that you not associate with anyone who bears the name of a brother if he's guilty of sexual immorality, greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler, not even to eat with such a one.
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So Paul gives a little list.
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Greed, idolatry, reviling, drunkenness, and swindling.
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And that might lead some people to think, well, Paul's putting sin on a scale.
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Paul's giving us a sin scale.
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There's some sins that are worse than others.
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And that's what happens in Roman Catholicism.
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If you go to a Roman Catholic church and you talk about sin, they will tell you that there's two types of sin.
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There's mortal sin and venial sin.
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Mortal sin causes you to lose your salvation, or what they call the grace of justification.
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So if you commit a mortal sin, like murder, you will lose your salvation.
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You lose the grace of justification.
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But if you commit a venial sin, which simply means lesser, a venial sin, then your sin is able to be confessed and forgiven by the priest, and the venial sin would be something like a little white lie.
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Those are venial sins, and those are not on the same scale as the mortal sin.
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Here's the problem with that.
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The Bible doesn't give us a sin scale.
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You know what the Bible says about lying? What's that? That's right.
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Revelation 21.8.
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For all liars will have their place in the lake of fire.
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So if you come to me and say, well, I've never committed adultery.
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Well, that's good.
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But have you ever lied? Jesus said, if you've ever looked with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart.
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Have you never, ever looked with lust? Have you never had a lustful thought? So we can be honest with ourselves and know right away that there is no scale of sin, because ultimately, all sin is a breach of God's law.
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Now, I'm not saying that all sin is equal in the same sense that I would certainly prefer you lie to me than murder me, but I'm not being so super simple that I'm saying that there aren't things that we understand as being heinous and gross.
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And Paul even points out, there's a sin among you that's not even tolerated among the pagans, indicating that this is a fairly gross type of immorality.
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But, here's the point.
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When we ask the question, what sins qualify for excommunication, I will tell you this, and I will back this up from Scripture.
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There is only one sin that qualifies for excommunication.
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There is only one sin that qualifies for excommunication.
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And the sin is impenitence.
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Or, more simply put, a refusal to repent.
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A refusal to repent.
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Here's two examples.
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You have a person in the church, he's engaged in a sexually immoral act, he's been called to repentance, and he repents and demonstrates genuine contrition and a broken heart over his sin.
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That man's not excommunicated.
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We may come around him, we may encourage him, we may help him not to commit that sin again, we may try to be a blessing to him in the way of counseling and uplifting, but if he's repentant, even if the sin was something we find repugnant, if he's repentant, he's not excommunicated.
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You understand, right? But, now there's a second scenario.
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Let's say you have a person who is a gossip.
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You say, well, gossip's not that big a deal.
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You know, if you read the list of sins in Romans chapter 1, when Paul's going through the list of sins, you know what gossip is next to? Hatred of God.
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By the way, if you just go through the list, gossip is right next to hatred of God.
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So don't ever think that gossip is a little sin.
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Gossip is how you kill somebody without killing them.
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Gossip is how you take the imaginary knife and stick it into their imaginary back.
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So let's say we have a person who's engaging in gossip, and that person engages in constant acts of defamation against the church and against others.
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This person is warned by one.
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They are then warned by the few.
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Then they are warned by the entire church, and they refuse to repent or recognize their sin.
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That person would be excommunicated.
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So it's not the sin as much as it is the lack of repentance for the sin.
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So that's why I say there's only really one sin that qualifies for excommunication.
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Impenitence, or the refusal to repent of sin.
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Beloved, I don't know about you, but I deal with sin every day.
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I fight a battle.
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And Galatians tells me this is going to happen.
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Galatians tells me that I have a spirit and I have flesh, and that there's a spirit and flesh that are battling with one another.
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And some days I win the battles and some days I lose the battles, but it's always a battle, right? And what do we know about repentance? We know that repentance is not perfect.
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Because I repent and then I battle the same sin.
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And then I repent and I battle the same sin.
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So that's the point.
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If I come to you and you're in sin, and I say, brother, you're in sin, and you say, I know, and I'm battling this, and we start praying together and encouraging you, that's different than I come to you, I say, brother, you're in sin, and you say, no, I'm not.
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What I'm doing is fine.
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And you might not think anybody's that crazy, but I'll tell you, I've walked to people and I've looked at them, and I've said, you are committing sin right now.
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And they've said, no, I'm not.
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You've left your wife.
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You've abandoned your children.
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You are living with a woman who is not your wife.
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What are you doing? I'm doing what I want, and God's fine with it.
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No, no.
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No, no.
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That's not the same.
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It's not.
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And if you think I'm exaggerating, I had that very same conversation.
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I know right where I was standing when I had that conversation.
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And I remember what the man said.
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He says, well, you're judgmental just like everybody else.
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I said, sir, I am not judging you.
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God has already judged you.
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And you need to repent.
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I wish I were exaggerating.
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So the sins that qualify for excommunication is only one, the refusal to repent.
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Number two, what procedure are we given? You know what? Am I going to have to go another week? I don't know where we're at.
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No, I'm good.
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I've got time.
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Oh, okay.
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I've got time.
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Hey, we've got this.
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What procedure are we given? I've already mentioned this, so I'm not going to belabor it.
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Jesus gives us a very clear procedure in Matthew chapter 18.
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He says this.
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He said, if your brother sins against you, you go and tell him alone.
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Right? You tell him his fault between you and him alone.
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And if he repents, you have won your brother.
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You've gained your brother.
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That's the first step.
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You know that step is so missed in the church.
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I can't tell you how many times people come to me first when they have a problem with somebody.
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Or one of the elders.
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Let me tell you something.
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The first person that should hear about your problem with somebody is not me, is not Richard Taylor, is not Jack Bunning.
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And later, not Andy Montoro and not Mike Collier either.
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And it shouldn't be the deacons.
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The first person that should hear if somebody has sinned against you is that person so that they have the opportunity to repent.
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And then it will be held between you and them alone.
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And you have gained your brother by that call to repentance.
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It is not my business if they don't know.
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You understand? This is the part that's often absolutely missed.
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Remember I told you about the church that I said did it wrong? The guy who got excommunicated didn't know about it until the church called him and told him about it.
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He didn't get the one person coming to him.
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He didn't get the group of people coming to him.
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He got a phone call.
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Come get your stuff.
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You're out.
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That'd be wrong.
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That'd be very wrong.
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The first step is always you go to the person individually, privately.
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Now, let me say this about that because I have to say this.
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Some people have circumvented that.
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And that's the situation Paul's dealing with.
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You notice Paul doesn't say in 1 Corinthians 5, one person go to him and tell him and then take two or three and go to him.
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Paul says you need to judge this person.
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Why? Because it's already public.
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If your sin is already public, if you've made it public, if you stand up in the middle of church and you say, Listen everybody, I'm living in sin and I don't care.
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The church has every right at that moment to excommunicate you.
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Now, I'm not saying we necessarily have to.
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But there is no procedure necessary anymore.
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Because you have stood up publicly and you've brought the body into it.
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You've done it to yourself.
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Now, that's not to say that the elders wouldn't come around you and counsel you and seek to try to save you from that.
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But at that point, it's no longer a private issue.
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And that has to be dealt with.
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So, that's where Paul's at with this.
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That's why Paul is not saying, Okay, one of you go to him and then take two or three witnesses.
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No, Paul says the next time you're together, the next time you're assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, you are to put this one out.
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You are to deliver this person over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.
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That's why.
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Because all the other steps in this sense have been circumvented by the public nature of the sin.
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So, what I'm saying is, it's not always cut and dry.
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It's not always just that pop, bop, bop.
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You're going to check every box every time.
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But there's always an appropriate way and an inappropriate way.
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That's why we have elders.
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That's why we have leadership, is to ensure.
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I've said this to people.
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I remember one time Byron Starkweather, I think, and I had this conversation when he was an elder before he moved.
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We talked about church discipline.
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And there was an issue going on.
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And he said, well, why don't we just start over? Because we weren't sure if we'd really been, if the things had been done right with the issue that had happened.
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He said, why don't I start over? Why don't one of us go to the person and talk to them and make sure? I thought that was genius.
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I was like, yeah, there's really, yeah, okay.
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That's brilliance, right? That's God working.
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Because, yeah, maybe it wasn't right.
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And maybe we do need to start over.
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So what I'm saying here is every instance where this happens, there has to be an attempt to say, okay, God has given us a procedure here and we should seek to follow it.
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Thirdly, what's the ultimate goal? I talked about this a little last week.
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What's the ultimate goal of excommunication? A lot of people would say the ultimate goal of excommunication is to win the person back because by exercise, some people call it tough love.
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I think it's a little oversimplistic.
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But, hey, it's Mother's Day.
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You ever had to exercise tough love on your kids? Right? You do sometimes, right? And I know some parents who've actually had to have their children separate from them because they were living in such a way that was so dangerous and so appalling to the rest of the family that they had to separate that child from the others because of how dangerous they were.
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And you might say, well, I can't believe a parent would ever do that to the child.
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You don't know the situation they were in and maybe you're not in that situation and you don't understand how somebody could get there.
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I have five children.
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Every one of them is a sinner.
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And every one of them I love and would die for.
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But I have the responsibility also of protecting my other children.
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If one of them became a danger to the others, there would have to be a form of separation that would occur.
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You understand? I love my children.
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I would give my life for all of them.
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But that's, we know that that can happen.
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I don't want to get into particulars, but every one of you has got somebody in your mind.
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You're thinking about, yeah, this has happened.
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I've seen it.
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It's terrible.
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It breaks my heart.
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But it's real.
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What's the goal? You say, well, I want that person to understand how much I love them and I'm willing to exercise some tough love.
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But that's not the ultimate goal.
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Your ultimate goal is the four other kids that you've got to protect.
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Right? The ultimate goal is the sanctity of your home.
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So when somebody says, what's the ultimate goal of excommunication? The purity of the church.
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The purity of the church is the primary goal.
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Now, out of that, if the person comes to themselves, repents and comes back, that's awesome.
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But the primary goal is the church.
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The primary goal is the family.
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The primary goal is the protection of the family.
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Here's what's not the goal.
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This is important.
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The goal of excommunication is never, ever punishment.
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Hear me, because this is important.
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We are not exercising discipline because we want to strike with the rod of punishment.
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I'm going to say this as a father.
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I have spanked my children.
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If that's offensive to you, I apologize for your offense.
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But not that I did it.
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Because the Bible says that that is a righteous way to sometimes have to discipline our children.
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And it says if we don't do it, it says he who spares a rod hates his son.
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So there have been times where I've had to spank my children.
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I never once enjoyed it.
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In fact, I always hurt more than they did when it was over.
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But we exercise that because it's part of the growth process.
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It's part of the necessary correction process.
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I've seen churches that I think really get their jollies in exercising discipline, exercising authority.
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If that's your mindset, then your mindset is punishment, and that needs to be repented of too.
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Because that's just wrong.
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The idea that we're going to exercise discipline because we so like to exercise authority, that's sick.
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It'd be like a father who enjoys spanking his kids just because it makes him feel like the leader of his home.
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No.
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Such a man would be a bad father and such a church would be a bad church.
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So the goal of excommunication is not that we enjoy punishing.
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It's not a punishment.
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It's a protection for the body.
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And it's a prayer that this person will be like the prodigal son.
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You know what got the prodigal son to go home? He found himself face down in the slop of the pigs, and he realized that there's a better place.
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And it was his father's house.
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You think he ever would have realized that if his father allowed him to stay in his home while he was living in his rebellion? He found it when he was in the mire.
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This is why Paul says, put them out for the destruction of the flesh, so that their spirit will be saved in the day of the Lord.
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We want them to recognize the situation and repent.
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It's like the story I told last week.
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Some of you weren't here.
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The pastor I know who said that they excommunicated a lady from the church because of immorality and sin.
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And two weeks after the excommunication, she called him and she said, Pastor, I need the church.
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I need my family.
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I am lost.
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She realized what she had abandoned in her love for sin.
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And there was repentance and restoration.
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And that leads to number four.
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So let's move on now to the final number four.
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So I don't have to belabor this another week.
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Number four.
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How does someone get welcomed back? As I said earlier, the beauty of excommunication is it's not final, right? If a person repents of their sin, they're welcomed back into the body.
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If the person has committed a heinous sin, and they repent, and the repentance is genuine and true, then they're welcomed back into the body.
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The prodigal son's father ran to him.
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You remember reading that? He was looking for his son to return.
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He was on the porch of his home, and when he saw his son afar off, he ran to him, and he put his arms around him, and he kissed his neck, and he took the ring off his finger, and he gave it to his son, and he restored him.
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That's what we want.
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We want that restoration.
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We want that person to come back.
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We want them, but we don't want them to come back while they're still in the muck, in the mire of the pig's slop.
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We want them to realize that there is sanctity, and purity, and holiness in Christ, and to desire that.
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And what would it look like? I think it would look like this.
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I think because of the public nature of excommunication, there would require a public statement of repentance.
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I don't think that it would be good for the person just to sneak back in under the veil of quiet.
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When you join the church, how do you join the church? You come to the front of the church, and you say to the church, I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
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I've received Him as my Lord and Savior through repentance and faith, and what? And I want to be a part of this body, and we welcome you as part of this body.
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If a person comes back after excommunication in genuine repentance and faith, and they say, I've repented of my sin, I recognize the church loved me so much that they were willing to exercise this biblical doctrine of discipline on me, and now I've repented of my sin, and I'm ready to return, what would the church do? We would be wrong to do anything except welcome them back.
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And so the church is not sitting with our hands on the door trying to hold them out.
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And I know that that leads to another question.
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Well, what about the legitimacy of their repentance? Well, that might not lead to that question for you.
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It led to my mind, because my mind is constantly asking questions when I'm reading, and my question becomes often, well, what about the legitimacy of their repentance? How do we know if they're truly repentant? Sometimes we don't.
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But I want to say this about that.
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Most of you came to this church on your word, meaning you came to me or one of our elders, and you said, I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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I've been baptized in the name of the Father and Son.
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Did I ever ask any of you for a baptism certificate? All we have is our word.
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Now, it's obvious in some cases, if you're living in gross immorality, if you're living in sin with someone, and you haven't stopped, then you haven't repented, right? So there's some obvious kind of things that we would deal with with that.
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But ultimately, though, if someone says, I repent, and they come to us in that repentance, we do take them on their word that that's true.
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That's all we have.
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And then we understand this.
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No one's repentance is perfect, right? As I said earlier, just because we come back and we're welcomed back in, doesn't mean that we aren't still going to fight a battle.
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And that's where the church comes in.
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We are in the army fighting the battle together.
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Is there anybody here who could honestly stand up this morning and say, I don't have any battles, I don't have any issues, and I don't need any help? I hope nobody would be so dishonest.
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I know what my issues are.
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I know what my battles are.
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I praise God.
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I have a Sunday school class I can come in and talk to.
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I have men that come on Tuesday nights, and we sit around and talk.
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And sometimes we talk about some really serious stuff, and we pray together.
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And I have elders that I can go to and I can talk to.
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And I praise God for that.
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Because I am not a perfect man.
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And when we talk about excommunication, we're not talking about perfect people living with perfect people.
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We're talking about imperfect people holding each other up and holding each other to account.
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And when someone flies off the rails, we don't immediately abandon them.
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We call them to repentance.
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In love, we seek to counsel them to repentance.
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In patience, we give them time to deal with the issue, and we encourage them to come to Christ in repentance.
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But if they refuse, and they're doing damage to God's people, then the church has a responsibility to exercise that most undesirable of decisions.
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And that is to deliver them over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that they may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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Again, I thank you for its truth.
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Such a difficult and yet important subject.
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Oh God, that we might internalize this.
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That we might trust that it is true.
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Not because I have said it, but because your word says it.
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That we might be confident, Lord, to seek the purity of the church.
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I pray it in Jesus' name and for his sake.
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Amen.