God Centered Church Discipline - False Narratives And Restoring The Brethren

God Centered Theology

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, said the following, that sin demands to have man by himself.

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It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him.

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And the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation.

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Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed, it poisons the whole being of a person.

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In confession, the light of the gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart.

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The sin must be brought into the light. The unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged.

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All that is secret and hidden made manifest. It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted, but God breaks gates of brass and bars of iron.

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The subject and vitally important topic of church discipline, God -centered church discipline, is one that has many false narratives surrounding it, many so which that many avoid the topic altogether or don't talk about it or don't look to it or don't understand it or even seek to understand it.

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I have just a couple of false narratives I want to cover with you to begin so that we can spend the bulk of our time looking exactly what

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Scripture says about this vitally important topic, specifically since it is our

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Lord Jesus Christ that is speaking on this. Well, right away, one of the false narratives we find in our world, and I can, if I wanted to, could give you very specific examples of this particular false narrative, but church discipline is not a means of punishment.

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It's not a hammer to drop on those who quote -unquote don't get in line.

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It's not a tool for dictatorial leadership to drag people in front of a church and expose what they have determined to be their sin, and in some cases,

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Scripture doesn't call it the same. So if leadership or anybody in a church were to operate that way, that would be sinful and would need required repentance.

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Now this would be a sermon for another day. Some sins naturally will require immediate action.

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If you have some type of sexual sin or some type of embezzlement or financial sin, something that is really egregious, it may require an immediate action of, in some cases, calling the police.

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There's criminal activity going on, or immediately removing that person from some place or something.

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There are certain times when that may be required, but when it comes to the actual process of church discipline, it is not a means of punishment.

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Another false narrative you will hear is that, you know, Jesus never turned anyone away.

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The idea that Jesus would turn a blind eye to sin is completely counter to everything

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Jesus is. If you remember, He had nails ran through His arm, or excuse me, through His hands to pay for sin.

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Now Jesus never turns away a repentant sinner. It is by grace and mercy that we are all saved, and there is not a single person that seeks that grace and forgiveness that would ever be turned away from Jesus Christ.

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But the idea that discipline should not be engaged with because, after all,

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Jesus would never turn anyone away, that's simply not true. Well they say nobody's perfect, everybody makes mistakes.

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My friends, someone having an accidental cross word with someone is not a means for necessitating church discipline.

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Church discipline is not about creating super, now I love Superman, but it's not about creating super holy

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Christians that never do anything wrong, because after all, sinless perfectionism in this life is not scriptural.

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We remain in sinful flesh, our flesh has not been redeemed. If you want to know if the husbands in the room sin, ask their wives.

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Sin happens. It's not about creating super holy Christians that never fall short, it's about cultivating a culture of repentance.

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Husbands, if you want to leave your homes well, be the chief repenter in your homes.

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A pastor should be the chief repenter in any body. We will lose people if we engage in discipline.

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Seems no matter how many times I say this, it always comes up again, and usually somebody will look at you cross -eyed,

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I'm sorry if this comes as a shock to you, but we are not in the game of numeric growth.

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We're not. God controls that. Because if you're in the game of numeric growth, you'll do whatever it takes to achieve that end, meaning you will ignore and tolerate sin, and holiness cannot flourish in a place that tolerates sin.

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The goal is scriptural submission and spiritual growth.

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And every time I talk about this, I always remind people, it is my firm belief that a healthy strong church,

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God will send His people to find those places, thus producing numeric growth.

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Our written documents and bylaws and things don't address that. I have no idea if ours does or not,

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I've never read them, but my friends, the bylaws and the constitution are not the final authority in the church.

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They have a place mostly for legal American reasons, but scripture is the final authority in the church.

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Scripture is the thing by which all things are tested, so for those of you who may be super bylaw lovers, if anything in your bylaws is in contradiction to scripture, guess what we follow?

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We follow scripture. It does not mean that they don't have a purpose and a place, but we must never forget that it is scripture.

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If it addresses it, that's all that matters. Now those are just some, there's a whole host,

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I could sit up here for the next 30 minutes and just go over countless of these false narratives and things that, well

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I think this, or well I think that. Well, what does scripture say? When Matthew chapter 18, we see four things brought out to us that clearly define and exposit for us what true, genuine church discipline is about, and I think you'll be shocked to find that the whole process that most people are familiar with, which can and hopefully would never lead to having to publicly expose a sin as a last resort and not a first choice, is not the thing that is primarily in focus here.

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The first thing we see that God -centered church discipline will have proper humility, proper humility.

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Matthew 18 verse 1, it says, at that time the disciples came to Jesus and said, who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

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And the disciples had a lot of issues with this. They were constantly wondering who was going to be the greatest.

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And I have no doubts that we have certain struggles in our day and time.

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Many churches specifically, and we're not one of these, but in dying churches you'll see this type of mentality is rampant.

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It's about who has the most money, or who's been there the longest, or you know, my daddy built this church, or you know, whatever it is, great, we appreciate it.

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That's not why we're here. The disciples were missing the point, and this comes on the heels of the transfiguration.

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Jesus tells them, I'm about to die. And all they're concerned with is, am

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I going to be the greatest? Am I the coolest? It's me, right? Come on. Jesus, you can tell me, right? We're just friends here talking.

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Pride is hated by our Lord Jesus Christ. Pride neither gets you into the kingdom, or even makes you worthy of it.

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Who then is greatest in the kingdom? They had prideful, self -seeking, sinfully ambitious motives.

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We have to divest ourselves of selfish, sinful motives like that.

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One of the greatest things I ever heard spoken about my grandfather, who was a pastor for over 40 years.

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I don't remember who said it, it's just one of those things as a child, you have certain core memories that you know you're there, you remember things.

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Just one of the things I remember hearing him said, they said, you know, that Bill Burr, when he's around, you know without a shadow of a doubt, he has no agenda.

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My friends, if you're like me, you can sniff out an agenda a mile away when somebody's talking to you, or if they're trying to gain power, or get a certain position of influence, you can tell if it's coming from an actual humble place of service, or if it's because they want to be seen, they want to be known.

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It's sin, it's wrong, and the disciples that were engaging in this here were wrong.

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And so Jesus takes this opportunity to remind them, he says, he called a child to himself. Now this word translated child in the original is a word that would refer to a very little child, perhaps in some cases even an infant.

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So he uses the extreme form of a child to make his point.

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And they were, most likely could have been at Peter's house here, this would have been, you know, maybe one of the children or one of the infants around, he brings a child to himself and sets them before the disciples.

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Jesus would love to use illustrations to make a point, and that's what he's doing here.

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He says, truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

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Now, he is not saying you must literally become an infant. This is very similar to John chapter 3 when he was with Nicodemus, and he says you must be born again, meaning you must be born from above, you must be born spiritually.

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And Nicodemus is like, huh, you're telling me I've got to go back into my mother's womb?

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You realize I'm a little bigger now, right? And Jesus is like, oh Nicodemus, you missed the point.

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He's using a point, it's figurative, he's not literally saying become an infant, he's pointing to the humility of the infant.

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Think about it. If you have a baby, if you've ever had a baby, I have one that's 13, going on 14 now, but she was once a baby.

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They can't do anything on their own. They need you for everything. You've got to feed them, you've got to clothe them, you've got to put them down and pray to God to actually take a nap.

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All these things that go on with babies, they can't do any of it. If left to themselves, depending on what situation they're in, they would die.

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The question of whether they would die would not be in question, the question of how long it would take them to die would be the question.

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And if you're a good Baptist in America, you'll recognize this phrase, the childlike faith is what

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Jesus is looking at here. And that childlike faith comes from a place of humility, not pride.

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It is the humble person, the one that knows they need a Savior, the one that knows they're a sinner, those are the ones that enter the kingdom of heaven.

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And this word here, it says, unless you are converted, this word in the original means to turn. You're going one way, you change direction.

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And what's interesting, it's in what is called the passive voice, it's a passive voice verb in the original, which means that the subject is being acted upon.

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So, the one that is converted is not the one converting himself, but he is being converted.

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It is Jesus Christ's spiritual life that we need. We cannot produce it,

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I cannot raise myself to spiritual life, Jesus Christ raises us to spiritual life.

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And he says, whoever then, verse 4, whoever therefore will humble himself as or like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

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Now, oh boy, we found the trick, right? Here's the trick to being the greatest, we just have to pretend like we're humble.

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That's not what he's saying. What he's saying, remember he's still making a point here, he's not saying you're going to be the greatest because being the greatest is not the point.

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He's saying whoever is the greatest in heaven is actually the one that knows they're not the greatest. You know there's nothing special about you, nothing that makes

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Jesus be in a position where, oh, I guess I have to let them in the kingdom. After all, look at them, look how great they are.

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No, it's, look how woeful a sinner I am. Look how wonderfully full, wonderfully a sinner

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I am. So that in like fashion with my grandfather, you are divested of agenda.

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You're not here to make a name for yourself. You're here to make much of the name of Christ.

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And he alone, secondly we see, first it requires proper humility, but then it requires self -discipline.

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And my argument to you this morning, my friends, is that probably somewhere around 99 percent of all

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God -centered church discipline is self -discipline. It's where we get the whole foundation for our

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American government on. American government is based on the idea of self -governance. If you have a people that cannot govern themselves, you can have all the military in the world and you'll never have anything but chaos.

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Self -governance. Notice here in verse 7 it says, woe to the world because of their stumbling blocks.

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And this is on the heels of when he says, look, you see this child? If you, whoever receives one of these children, meaning a new infant in Christ, a newly saved person will receive them as we would have received

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Christ because they are now part of our spiritual family and the family of God. But if you cause them to stumble, it'd be better for you to have a heavy millstone tied around your neck and drowned at the depth of the sea.

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Say, well, okay, make that make sense. Well, these millstones were in some cases several hundred pounds.

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So if you put one of these attached to you and put yourself in the ocean, I don't care if you're Michael Phelps. You're not swimming out of that situation.

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You're going to the bottom and you're going to die. And Jesus says it would be better for you to die in that fashion than to stand before me having severely despised or caused one of these spiritual babes in Christ to stumble.

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What's being said here, it's saying that we need mature, self -disciplined saints to model holiness for newborn babes in Christ.

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I've been in situations growing up and as an adult where you sit in churches and you wonder, where are the mature ones?

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Where are the self -disciplined ones? Where are the ones that know, man, I really want to say that, but they don't?

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The ones that say, I really want to gripe and complain about this, but they don't. We need that.

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This word stumbling, which is stumbling, stumble, stumbling blocks, woe to the world because of the stumbling blocks, for it is inevitable, inevitable, inevitable,

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I try saying that word three times fast, that stumbling blocks will come, nevertheless, woe to the man through whom the stumbling block comes.

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It means simply a cause of sin. This is a snare, a trap, some way of causing someone to stumble into sin.

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Don't be a stumbling block for another Christian. That's a sermon from the other day, sometimes you can keep yourself from being a stumbling block by refraining from something that's not necessarily sinful, but you know that by being around that person, if you engage in it, it may cause them to sin.

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Whole level deeper discussion there. But notice here with self -discipline,

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John Newton has said, when people are right with God, they are apt to be hard on themselves and easy on other people, but when they are not right with God, they are easy on themselves and hard on others.

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We all know what it's like to do this. I don't think anyone's exempt. When we tend to get in our feelings and get prideful, we think, everybody else is wrong, and they must acclimate themselves to what

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I currently need. Or you know, there are a bunch of dirty, rotten sinners sitting on this side, but these righteous folk over here were nice to me this morning, so they're good.

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That's not how it works. We spend so much time focusing on everyone else, we don't ever think about ourselves.

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And my friends, you will see this when we look at the process later, you are not equipped to even engage or initiate the process of church discipline and showing someone else their own sin until you've dealt with your own.

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This is the essence of Matthew 7. The Bible does not say don't judge. It says we don't judge hypocritically.

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So if you are a thief, you have no business telling someone else not to steal until you stop stealing.

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You look at the plank in your own eye, not the speck in the others. You need to be self -disciplined so that if there comes a time in which you need to show someone their fault and restore them back to holiness, you'll be in a proper place to do so.

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And that's why Jesus uses a wild overstatement here. He says if your hand or foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.

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Now once again, thankfully, he's not speaking literally, otherwise we'd have a whole bunch of handless people in here, and footless people, and a bunch of people missing eyes.

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But my friends, if there's some sin in your life that I can't think of one, and if I could

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I probably wouldn't name it, but if somehow one of your feet or hands or your eyes or whatever it is, something you look at, let's say there's something you're looking at and it's sinful and it's causing you sin, you can cut out your left eye all you want, your right eye is still going to look at it.

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Cutting off physical body parts will not remove from you the capacity to sin, the ability to sin, or the willingness to sin.

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He's making a hyperbolic statement. It's designed to be overstated, to make the point.

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He's saying if there's any relationship, any habit, any situation, anything in your life that causes you to sin, get rid of it!

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Forsake it! Don't let it be a cause for you to go to hell, repent, forsake it permanently, self -discipline.

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If we would spend just half the amount of time on self -discipline that we do on focusing on other sin, most of our problems would go away.

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This goes true for individually, in the home, at work, in the church, everywhere. Says your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out, and then an important factor here before we move on, verse 10 he says, see that you do not despise one of these little ones.

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This word despise means thinking down on as if inferior.

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Now I have seen this and encountered this in my life, and to be honest with you,

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I've been guilty of this sin before. Look down on someone's wealth, they're not to my level yet.

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They'll understand why I sinned against them one day, but they just need some training.

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My friends, one of the greatest sins in the body today is that we tend to think of ourselves as superior to our fellow

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Christians. We need to stop that. We need to discipline ourselves.

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A self -correcting church is a strong and healthy church, and it is that church that the gates of hell will not overcome or be able to withstand.

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Number three, we see that it's motivated towards restoration. Verse 12 through 14, for time purposes

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I'm not going to read through these verses, they're very familiar verses to you, but I'm just going to draw out the point.

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It's the verses about the shepherd, he has the 99 sheep or the 100 sheep, and one gets away and he leaves the 99 and goes and finds the one.

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The last few sections here, there's going to be a whole lot of quickly correcting misinterpretations we have, and I'll try to be quick with those, but there's always this, oh yeah, that's about salvation, yeah,

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God's going to leave the 99 Christians and go find me. It's not about salvation, it's about church discipline.

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We interpret normally in the proper literary context, and beginning in Matthew 18,

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Jesus started speaking about church discipline. He has not changed topics here. So these verses come in light of church discipline, so what he's saying is, a shepherd with his flock instinctively knows his flock, and he's going to know, it's not going to come as a surprise to him, if one of them has wandered off, or is sick, or is hurt, or is in need of care or restoration.

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He's not going to sit there and wait, like you know, old sheep number 63, he's a knothead, he'll come around eventually, no, he knows the wilderness, he knows all the potholes, he knows all the places that could cause that sheep to fall and get hurt and get in trouble, so he's going to leave what he's doing, meaning he's setting aside something to make that one sheep that is in need, his primary focus for restoration.

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He's not going to go find the sheep and kill it, he's going to restore it, he's going to take care of it, he's going to nurture it, he's going to help it heal.

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God -centered church discipline is not about punishing your fellow believers. It's about restoration of your fellow believers, and just in case it should go without saying, but just in case it doesn't, it means sometimes the restoration of you.

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Don't be like the disciples and think you're unneedful of something like that. So with that in mind, our last stop this morning,

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God -centered church discipline trusts the biblical process. Verse 15, now if your brother sins, go and show him his fault.

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Now there is a textual variant here in the manuscripts, some text will add if your brother sins against you, and some just have if your brother sins, either way, nothing changes, the same point's being made.

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You go and show him, or reprove, expose, bring to the light his sin.

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Remember our quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, sin loves to remain unknown, sin loves the cover of darkness.

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So expose it, deal with it, bring it to the light. But if he listens to you, you've won your brother.

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There is a level of deep, spiritually speaking intimacy that can come between believers and friends if you have to go to someone and say, look, and this is done with humility and meekness and love and care,

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I could be wrong here. I hope and pray I'm wrong, but I think there's some sin in your life, and here's why

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I think that. If that person repents, therefore no other type of discipline is needed, there's no need to make it public, it's just a private, the first confrontation here is completely private.

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There's a warmness and a love and a great union with Christ that you too can have because of this great disciplinary process.

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But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed or established.

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This is a quote of Deuteronomy 19 .15. This is establishing the two or three witnesses, which once again is the basis of our

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American government, having to prevent people from being falsely accused.

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The reason you go by yourself to begin with is that hopefully this is a matter that can be dealt with pretty easily.

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And I will say this, any person that's aware of the sin can go to someone else and tell them.

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However, I would argue that wisdom would say you're going to have a much better success rate if you already have an established relationship with that person.

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If I know someone very well, they're more apt to listen to me versus somebody

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I don't know from Adam, and they're like, who is this person coming up to me and talking to me about this? So just keep some of them things in mind.

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But those two or three witnesses protects the sinning person from false accusation, because yes, a person that's going to do church discipline could be sinning and just wanting to falsely accuse someone.

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But also, the two or three witnesses, if you have to go back with two or three people, those two or three people can say yes, he righteously rebuked, righteously brought the sin to light, and called for repentance, and that way the person initiating the discipline can't be falsely accused.

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Whole sermon for another day, but the two or three witnesses applies to accusations against elders. It says you shouldn't even receive an accusation against an elder or pastor except on the basis of two or three witnesses.

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This is to protect elders from frivolous, false accusations. So we see this principle repeated in scripture, and it's used here.

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And then finally, not as a first choice, but as a painstakingly last resort.

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If he or she refuses to listen to them, meaning the person and the witnesses.

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So this is a completely stubborn, exposed, unrepentant sinner.

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Then, at that point, you make it public. Bring it to the church.

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Now this word church is not like organizationally official term, it just simply means bring it to the body.

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Bring it to a more public environment. And the reason it says bring it to the church is because we do not take things to outside councils.

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We don't worship or take orders from the pope, or cardinals, or some organizational structure.

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A local body of believers is beholden to scripture, and we need to keep our stuff in -house amongst us.

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But you tell it and make it public. And at that point, if they are unrepentant and refuse to listen even then, now keep in mind at this point the church is not punishing this person.

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The church is not coming down on this person or despising them, looking at them as inferior. They're trying to love them and be meek and humble with them.

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They're begging them, please repent, scripture says this is sin, please stop, it's harmful for you.

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They refuse to listen, then at that point, you would need to exclude them. Send them out, let them be as an unbeliever.

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Why? Because God takes holiness seriously and we must protect the purity of the body of believers.

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I've never been in a situation where I've experienced or seen this happen. Now there's probably been times

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I had no idea because I was younger, but I'm sure there's probably been times where I've been in churches where it probably should have happened.

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I don't know. It's possible. There's probably times in this church's history where y 'all probably should have done it, maybe didn't.

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There may be times that I, this is the easy one, I can tell you all kinds of stories of times it happened when it shouldn't, it was used in the wrong way, but you need to trust that process and you need to trust that if you're self -disciplined and you go to people in the right way, and they're truly saved, that God, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, will break gates of brass and bars of iron in their heart, they'll repent and be restored, and you can rejoice and go to Bojangles and have a

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Bowberry and celebrate because that's what you do when you celebrate. Lastly, before we close this morning, we're going to cover the authority about this and there's two wildly misinterpretations that we find in the world today about these, but we're going to put a bow on this by looking at the authority behind church discipline.

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Jesus says, truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.

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Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth about anything that you may ask it shall be done for them and my

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Father who is in heaven, or for them by my Father who is in heaven. These two verses are not teaching that God's power is bent to man's will.

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You cannot say I decree and declare it and God has to do what you say. It boils my blood when

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I hear this. Jesus has not changed subject matter. It's still about church discipline and what he's saying is if you faithfully, meekly, and humbly with love and care in your hearts for your brothers and sisters have to engage in church discipline and it does, very sadly so, get to the point that you have exhausted every possible way you can to restore them and they just simply will not repent and you have to exclude them, he's saying

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I will act spiritually with you in that matter. You have heaven's blessing.

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You have heaven's permission to do what you need to do to exclude them at that point.

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That's what's being said here. It's saying if you have to bind or loose or whatever it is you have to decide at that point which you would hope would never come, he says you have the authority of heaven to do so and you're doing right by doing it.

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That's what's being said here. And then lastly, and this one's more ha ha ha ha, it's okay, we all get what we mean when we say it kind of thing, but it gets said wrong a lot.

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For where two or three have gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst. This is not a verse saying that if you go to a

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Wednesday night prayer service and two or three people show up, well we know Jesus is here. Jesus is omnipresent, y 'all.

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There's not a shred or atom or molecule in this universe where Jesus Christ is not present. Gathering together even if you only have two people there is not a way to say well we know

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Jesus is here. No, he's always there. You have two people, two thousand, two million, the number's irrelevant.

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He's omnipresent. You have to take this verse out of context to get to that meaning. This is still about church discipline.

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What Jesus is saying here, two or three, where do we hear that? Two or three witnesses.

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What he's saying is if you have to go back with two or three witnesses with you to make sure everything's established, make sure everything's done right, make sure you're not being unkind, make sure you're not looking at them as inferior, and you have to go that far, and you do it faithfully and right.

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Jesus says I want you to know I'm there with you in your midst doing it too. You're not doing something outside of my will.

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You're in my will. You are doing what I want you to do in that moment.

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So we have to trust the process. And I will tell you it's been my experience, both having been on the receiving end and on the end where I've had to go to people and say look, and mostly when you're talking to me and you say look, man, you need to tighten up.

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You know, I can't say with 100 % certainty that this will be the number, but it's my view that somewhere around 99 .999999

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% of all God -centered church discipline never gets past the first step, private love and care for your brethren.

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Not to harm them, not to punish them, not so you can get some sort of glee from exposing their sin, but recognizing they're a sinner like you.

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They needed a savior like you did. And you want them restored to walk in holiness and righteousness.