Church Discipline (Part 1)

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No Compromise Radio Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author,

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Dr. Mike Abendroth. Today on No Compromise Radio, we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the

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Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

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Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the Scriptures, verse by verse with no compromise.

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I regularly wonder, how can a solid Bible teaching church go liberal?

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Does this happen overnight? You have a good, solid, gospel preaching church and then years go by and then they begin to ordain practicing homosexuals in the ministry.

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How does that happen? How do you get from gospel preaching to, well,

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I guess it's okay for unbelievers to join the church and have a few unbelievers maybe speak once in a while from the pulpit.

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How do you get there? One day the

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Bible is preached forcefully, verse by verse, and then the next day, well, we can attract a better kind of crowd if we have drama in the church.

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Oh, by the way, as everybody's settling down and I'm trying to get my bearings, did you see the camel that was in the church for the

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Christmas pageant and then the camel fell over onto the people in the congregation?

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When the Bible preaching's not enough, nothing's enough. Camel was slain in the spirit, walking,

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I mean, if you're going to have a camel doing an altar call, you might as well get slain in the spirit. That's a better start.

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Okay, now I feel better. It's a ringing in the ear you just can't get rid of.

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Let's just get into the text. That'll make it easier for me. Turn your Bibles, please, to 1 Corinthians chapter 5.

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Why do churches start off good and then go south? There are many, many reasons, but one is when a church begins to tolerate unrepentant, flagrant sin, that church is surely on its way to liberalism.

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When a church says God isn't quite as holy as he is and man isn't quite as bad as the

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Bible says he is, you are on a slippery slide to liberalism.

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And similarly with how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How does a church go from Christ exalting to having bingo in their church?

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The answer is when you devalue God and when you exalt man, you have a lot of problems.

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It's a good time for BBC. It's a good season. We're trying to buy the land and trying to sell this building, but we want to be careful as well.

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We want to be careful that we don't become prideful, self -focused, allowing even sin here.

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We don't want to do that. And this morning as we look at 1 Corinthians 5, we're going to deal with this church discipline case, but also

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I think it's going to be important for you to see the principles that are in 1

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Corinthians 5 applied to not just church discipline, but your own life. It's going to be good.

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It's too easy to look at 1 Corinthians 5 to say this is about that unrepentant sinner and how the church handles that person.

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That's true and that's the primary intent of the passage, but it's also going to be good for all of us today as I've studied the passage this week to say, you know,

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I don't want to live an unholy life. I don't want to live a life full of pride, lack of sincerity, lack of truth.

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I don't want to have the sin in my life contribute to the negative aspects of the local church.

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And so today we'll look at 1 Corinthians 5, verses 6 through 8. And in my mind

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I keep saying over and over, so I'll say it out loud. I didn't know if I should say it out loud, but I will. This passage makes you buckle up to take sin seriously and not just to say, oh yeah, remember a month ago we had to discipline someone out of the church and isn't that bad and don't we feel sorry and how could all that happen?

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But you know what makes me feel that I want to live a holy life. In light of what Christ has done for me,

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I want to live a holy life. In light of what Christ has done for you and granted you great forgiveness, don't you want to respond with holy living?

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People struggle with all kinds of sin. This passage should help you when it comes to the inner man, the inner woman to deal with sin.

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So let me read you the first several verses to give you context before we look at the outline in 1

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Corinthians chapter 5. Verse 1 of chapter 5, it's actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and a kind that is not tolerated even among the pagans for a man has his father's wife.

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Now remember this is Corinth and Corinth had all kinds of horrible licentious sinful promiscuity.

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So much so that you'd have the temple of Artemis on top of this big mountain. By the way, it was fascinating to see that a few weeks ago.

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So there's this huge mountain, the temple's on the top, and then regularly the 1 ,000 priestesses would come down to commune, to worship with, to sleep with anyone who wanted to worship the god

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Diana. And so can you imagine having a city in such a gross place?

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It was actually a seaport as well and so you can imagine all the people that got off the ships and had just contributed.

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It was this kind of cesspool of sexual sin and then the

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Corinthians have been saved out of that. What does he say in chapter 6? You've been washed, you've been cleansed, you've been made different.

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And so the church is a group of people who are, yes, sinners, but they've been saved from their sins.

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They've been washed. They're different. They're new creatures in Christ Jesus. And now inside the church there's this horrible sin.

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And you'd think you'd have a funeral -like attitude for this gross sin in the church that's unrepentant.

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But it says in verse 2, the Corinthians were what? You are arrogant. Ought you not rather to mourn?

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Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body, I am present in spirit, and as if present,

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I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the

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Lord Jesus and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man who's in this unrepentant, flagrant sexual sin to Satan.

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Why? For the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the

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Lord. Now Paul does something very interesting. He puts this little illustration here.

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It's very timely and apt, and it's from daily life. And he talks about leaven and unleavened bread and Passover, verses 6 through 8.

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Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

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Cleanse out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened.

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For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 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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Let me give you, for our outline today, four ways you can stimulate purity in your life, for the church and in your own personal life.

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There's a lot of talk about stimulus programs in our economy, stimulus packages.

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I don't know if they'll work or not, but this stimulus program from the scripture I think will help you, especially if you're struggling with sin.

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Personal sin, or struggling with church sin in the church. Let me give you the first stimulus to purity, number one.

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Get this truth down pat. Sin contaminates. Sin contaminates.

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Look at what happens in verse 6. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

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Paul says you should know, everybody knows that. Church, don't you know that sin contaminates, sin permeates everything?

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It's toxic, and you're boasting. It's not like they said, well, you know, we'll just kind of acquiesce to it and kind of live and let live, let him without sin cast the first stone.

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We have to love people, maybe if we just love them, just kind of let it go. They didn't just say that, that would have been bad enough, but they're boasting.

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They're boasting, oh yeah, we're better than that, we can handle sin. It was probably sin in a leader too.

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And so this sinful leader is going on, and we're just going to boast about it, it's no big deal. Paul says when you deal with sin, you shouldn't snuggle it.

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Ever have one of your favorite little blankets? Kids have their favorite blankets. I was up getting all the

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Christmas stuff out of the attic, and I was opening up the boxes to see what were in them, and then I saw

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Haley's first blanket. And there was actually Luke had one of his special blankets up there too.

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I saw those and I go, remember those special blankets, and you want to get them so close and they just felt good, and you just kind of snuggled them.

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You're all looking at me like, that guy is sick. Sin isn't to be snuggled or embraced.

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Sin is to be dealt with, because sin contaminates. It's not something where you say, well

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I'll just see how close I can get to sin. And whether the sin is the sexual sin in a church where they will not deal with this person, or if it's your own sin.

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Maybe it's an obedience issue, maybe it's pornography, maybe it's whatever sin you're dealing with, you say, well you know, it's okay,

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I'm forgiven in Christ, and I can just kind of dabble with it a little bit. The church of Corinth was dabbling with this, and they should have been saying, red alert.

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The truck is backing up, you ever seen one of these big waste management trucks, and they back up, and it's beep, beep, beep, beep, and they're not dealing with sin.

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They should be on top of this. How conceivable is it for churches to somehow celebrate sin?

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It happens all the time. So what does Paul do? He uses a very common illustration.

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He uses a kitchen illustration. He uses an illustration right from the kitchen, very well known and familiar, and he talks about leaven.

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How much leaven does it take to permeate and transform the dough?

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A whole bunch, or just a smidgen? Just a little bit. And so Paul is saying, if you look down at verse 6, do you not know that a lot of leaven leavens the whole lump?

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What's he saying? Just a little bit, just a little bit of toleration of evil causes pollution of the whole.

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Leaven diffuses. Doesn't look like much. You might not even really be able to see it once it's in the batter, in the dough, but it contaminates everything, and you can see what

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Paul is doing. You're going to allow sin that's flagrant and unrepentant, and worse than what the pagans do, be in your church, it's going to corrupt other people.

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How many bad apples does it take to spoil the whole bunch, girl? Once a year the

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Jews would get rid of all their leaven, because it could contaminate everything else, and so they have to get rid of it.

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Garland said, a piece of bad leaven will pass on to taint the next batch, and so on. The only way to break the chain of baking bacteria laden bread was to ditch the whole batch and start afresh.

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Thomas Strayhorn said, souls to souls are like apples. One being rotten, rots another.

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Yes, you deal with sin, the person who's sinning in church discipline. You deal with them because you want them to repent, but you also deal with them because you don't want this sin to spread in the church.

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Maybe another metaphor instead of leaven, I'd use this metaphor. How about gangrene? Sin is like gangrene.

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The only way you can deal with a gangrenous foot is to amputate it. Yes, but you don't really understand.

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We don't want to be legalistic at the church. I've often been called a legalist, and I never want to be a legalist because legalism is just as bad as licentiousness.

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But let me ask you this question. If you obey the Bible, are you a legalist? In light of what

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Christ has done for you and you obey, is that legalism? So if you're going to deal with sin in the local church, are you a legalist?

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You're not adding anything, you're just trying to do what the Bible says. But other people look and say, you know what, that's legalism.

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The church, of course, is probably saying, you know what, we're so super spiritual because we've been taught by the super apostles that we can deal with this sin.

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Other churches might not be able to, but we can. We're beyond church discipline.

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We're more sophisticated. We're different. This sin won't affect us. We'll just kind of tell it to a small group, maybe deal with it over here.

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We don't really have to do the whole church discipline thing. Paul says, you know, it's going to corrupt the whole church.

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Show me a church that doesn't do church discipline and I'll show you a church that doesn't understand the corrupting, polluting influence of sin.

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And I'll show you a church that is arrogant. Because they have a better way than what the

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Bible says to do. Say, well, you know, that's not my love language.

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I have a different love language than kind of dealing with this. I think your love language should be in light of the cross, obey

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God. Sin isn't trifling. It's not minor. Think about now in your own life.

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You're dealing with a certain kind of sin and you think, well, it's not as bad as other sins. I don't do it as regularly as some other sins.

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There are a lot of other people who do worse sins than I do. Sin always defiles.

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It's never a trifling issue. And whenever I have a problem with sin,

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I realize I have a problem with my view of God. I don't know about the holiness of God like I should. God who,

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Isaiah 57 says, whose name is holy. God who is so holy, if he's around things, they become holy.

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The burning bush, the holy temple, holy habitation. How many sins did it take for God to kick

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Adam and Eve out of the garden? How many sins did it take for Moses to be excluded from the promised land?

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How many sins did it take for Elisha's servant to be leprous? How many sins did it take for God to kill

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Ananias and Sapphira? Just one. Just one.

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Sin permeates. Let's hear what Jonathan Edwards said. Almost every natural man that hears of hell flatters himself that he should escape it.

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He depends upon himself for his own security. He flatters himself in what he has done and what he is now doing are what he intends to do.

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Everyone lays out matters in his own mind how he should avoid damnation and flatters himself that he contrives well for himself and that his schemes will not fail.

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Now unbelievers do that when it comes to hell, but Christians do that with their own sin. Not that their sin brings them to hell, but sin isn't really that big of a deal.

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I'll just figure out a way that I can kind of live with this sin. Maybe I could put it this way.

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Fathers, when you go on a camping trip, do you tell the kids, now we're going to instruct you about the poisonous animals, and when we find one, we're going to go pick them up and kind of cuddle them.

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Let's go maybe finding the box jellyfish.

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I was looking at poisonous animals because sin is like poison. The box jellyfish has venom so powerful that most human victims in the water, when they get stung by it, die or drown in the water because of heart attack, they don't even make it to shore.

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So you know what kids, I know we've got the little kiddie pool in the back, but there's only one box jellyfish in here, it's okay.

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How about the blue ringed octopus? It's the size of a golf ball, has enough venom that it can kill 26 adults within minutes, no antidote.

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Okay, kids, let's go have a jacuzzi in the backyard. There's only one little tiny, cute little octopus there.

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The stonefish, venom that is so painful that people scream out if they've been cut, they've been bit in the arm, cut my arm off, it hurts so bad.

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Okay, let's have a little tub, Johnny. Hop in the tub, there's only one little stonefish in there. How about the poison dart frog?

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Enough poison on the dart frog to kill 10 adult humans or 20 ,000 mice.

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Come on, it's only one little frog, it's cute too, it's blue. I've been in different countries before and I always think if I go for a walk or some bike ride, what's poisonous?

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Avoid them. And if I do get bit, I just hope I can get my mouth to that part of my body to suck the juice out because what am

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I going to do? You get bit on the back and you know your days are done. Why is the local church, and I'm not saying we aren't because I think we're understanding the scriptures and God is maturing us as a church.

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But our attitude about sin should be like our attitude about poison. Oh, it's just a brown recluse,

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I'll kill it in the morning, no big deal. If that's what

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I'm about, I mean, I'm kind of afraid of poisonous things. So if I'm afraid of poisonous things, why would then

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I say, but when it comes to poison, spiritual poison, I want to get close. We ought not to experiment with sin, we ought not to lust after sin, we ought not to get close to it, we ought to kill it.

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As Watson said, Thomas Watson, be killing sin or it will be killing you. So for the church of Corinth, they needed to know that this sinful, unrepentant person could affect everyone, so deal with sin.

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I think a good application is for our own life. What about our own sin? Can't that hurt the local body too?

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Stimulus to purity number two. Number one was sin contaminates, don't forget that. Number two, now listen to me carefully because I've worded this precisely.

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Live a clean and holy life because you are clean and holy. Live a clean and holy life because you are clean and holy.

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Here's what Paul's going to do. He's going to say, you're a Christian, saved by the blood of Christ, confirmed by the resurrection, so act like it.

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You're washed and you're a new creation in Christ, so act like it. Be who you are. Have conduct befitting an officer.

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And so he says, basically, here you're a Christian, therefore act like it. Cleanse out the old leaven, verse 7, that you may be a new lump as you really are unleavened.

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You are spiritually clean, therefore act like you're spiritually clean. Paul talks this way a lot.

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And he says, you know what? Your position in Christ Jesus should motivate you to remove evil from the church.

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Cleanse it. This is where we get the word catharsis, to cleanse.

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And just as a Jew would go search around that house and make sure there was no leaven in the house before Passover, some, even with the tradition, would walk around with a candle to make sure there's no little bits of leaven around.

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He says, so too, Christian, get the candle out and look around the house of your life to make sure there's no little hiding sins there.

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Why? Because you're already a Christian. You're a Christian, therefore act like a Christian. That's what he's saying.

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Every crumb gone. The search to make sure no leaven in the house before the

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Passover lamb was slain. Act holy because you are holy.

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You're positionally holy, set apart by God, therefore act practically holy. Become what you are.

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I went through a list and found a few of these. Did you know if you're a Christian you have a new relationship to God?

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You used to be an enemy and now you're a friend. Do you know you're a new creation in Christ Jesus, therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new what?

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He's a new creature, so act like it. Christians have new appetites,

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Bible reading, new friends, new priorities, new goals, new destiny, new allegiance.

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Paul says everything about you is new. You aren't who you used to be, so act like a

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Christian. Cleanse out the old leaven that may be a new lump as you really are unleavened.

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Get rid of that old yeast. So for you, you say, how do I deal with sin?

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How do I deal with personal sin in my own life? The context is getting rid of this person who's sleeping with his mother -in -law.

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Stepmother. But in my own life, how do I deal with sin? Here's your homework assignment. Read Romans chapter 6.

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Read Romans chapter 6. When I have to deal with sin in my life, here's what I do too often. I just need to stop doing such and such and just stop it.

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Is it good to stop it? Yes. But the way you deal with sin as a Christian is you say,

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I have to stop doing the negative thing. I start doing the positive thing. So if I steal, then

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I ought to work. If I lie, I ought to tell the truth. If I'm selfish, I ought to be selfless.

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But I do it only through one instrument, and that is remembering who I am in Christ.

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That I can obey. That I have the power to obey. Romans chapter 6 is so good because I'm a to -do list guy.

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Since I've not been feeling well, my to -do lists are really short. They're basically, preach a sermon on Sunday.

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That's about all they contain. But I wish they were longer because I like to get things done. Don't you like to write things down?

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Remember, I have one of my children, and they have a list of things to do around the house.

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And then I go look at the list sometimes, and I want to check off that list. Okay, good.

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He did that. She did that. You know what one of my kids said the other day? Dad, don't check it off. I want to check it off.

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It doesn't feel good to check those things off, and you say, yes. And for the Christian, we're too works -oriented sometimes, even as Christians.

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If I just do this, this, this, and this, therefore, I can clean up my act. And Romans chapter 6 says this.

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Before you do anything, it's all about your mind and who you are in Christ. And do you realize that when

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Jesus died, you died with Him? Do you realize that when Jesus was raised from the dead, you were raised up with Him?

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It's all about your relationship to Christ. Or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.