Doctrinal Training: Church Discipline

The Purpose of Church Discipline and Why It Is Necessary

So in these sessions, I try to keep introductory comments pretty short, but I don't think I can on this one. So tonight's topic is church discipline. We are going to go through the three steps. I don't want this to be very theological tonight.

I want this to be much more practical, like what happens when I see certain things? What is my responsibility as a church member? Where do elders come into this? Where do congregational meetings come into this?

So I'm going to read from our bylaws at some point, but one of the things that we have to understand is that in church history, if you read the New Testament, it does not take very long to figure out that a huge amount of the New Testament epistles are demanding discipline of some order in the church.

Talking about rooting out false teachers, talking about dealing with sin that would leaven the loaf. We're in one of those books right now where Paul admonishes the Corinthians to throw a man out who has been publicly in sexual immorality.

And throughout church history, it's been a given that it is a necessary part of the church and church health. And I've always thought that when we look at church health and the pillars of the church, what does a church have to have to be a church structurally?

So we have the sacraments or ordinances. If you do not have baptism or communion, you don't have a church. You have people meeting for a Bible study. There could be teaching there, that sort of thing.

But we have to gather to do the sacraments. There has to be officers. Now, many people interpret that differently. We at CBC, along with the 1689, see that there are two offices in the church, and that is elders and deacons.

And we don't mandate numbers, but we have to have those offices for a church to be healthy. There has to be a purpose for the church. Jesus gives us that in the Great Commission. Every church is about making disciples, teaching God's commands, baptizing.

And then the fourth leg is church discipline. Now, I want to posit a couple of things, and we will test. I hope to have time at the end of this, because I know that it opens practical stuff. I'm not counting on questions, but I would love to have questions as we get done.

But in order to prove this, I want you to understand that church discipline is inevitable in church. There is no way to have a church without there being church discipline. The only question is, is the church discipline going to be administered the way that God requires it to be administered?

Let me paint you a scenario. You guys know this. I'm sure that you have been in many churches that have very little perceived church discipline. You've never seen anything come up before the body. You've never heard of deliberative committees that did anything, any of that.

And so the way that we walk away is we say, well, that church has no church discipline. But what you don't see is the conversations that go on behind closed doors, often with pastors, where complaints are fielded, they're heard, and they're buried, and so people just leave.

The failure to enact disciplinary action for sin is church discipline. It's just punishing victims, and that is common in the American church. Because what we want to do in our perception as elders is that our desire is to, much like any public institution, is to make bad stories go away.

It's to keep them in the dark, to put time and distance between ourselves and the story that happens. But make no mistake, that is church discipline. And elders are enacting discipline by either not acting or by acting without proper process.

It's inevitable. You have to have church discipline. It will be there. Now, so what I want to advocate tonight, and the reason that we're teaching this, as I see this, as I've introduced here, this is fundamental to the church.

You might as well stop if you don't have a commitment to exercise church discipline. Because church discipline accomplishes many things. And I don't want to be pedantic and do a dictionary thing like Webster's Dictionary defines discipline.

But I will say this, when we think of discipline, most people think of two different avenues. They think of getting punished, or they think of training, disciplining yourself to stop eating junk food or to exercise.

Discipline involves both of those things. And what we know is, using the analogy of the body, the church is often called a body. When we think of the body, if the body does not have any discipline, the body is going to wither away.

Your muscles are going to atrophy, and you get prone to infection. If you have no discipline, you're weak, and the body gets weaker and weaker. If you don't discipline your mind, your mind gets weaker and weaker.

You are dominated by emotions and not thinking. So if we don't have discipline in the church, similarly, the church will be extremely weak. If there is no commitment to train, but also to enact punishment where necessary, then the church weakens.

And it also leads to persecution of victims. Because what often happens is, if someone brings up a case and it's not heard, then bringing up the case gets actively stifled, and presumably the reason the case is brought up is because someone has sinned against you.

And if someone has sinned against you and no action is taken, then the de facto action is that you're the one that's hurt as the one who's being sinned against. And then there's institutional approval of that sin.

And so there will be a culture of secrecy, persecution, weakness. And so when there is a weakness, there necessarily becomes division. When there's no discipline, there will be division. There will be a loss of purpose.

There will be a defiling of sacraments. Because people who are not disciplined, who should be disciplined, and I mean that in both sense, punishment and training, will come and gleefully take communion.

They will gleefully call themselves Christians, all the while advocating very publicly for anti-Christ ideologies outside of the church. And the American church is rife with this. But we're not special.

This has happened throughout all of church history. But the main reason, the main reason why we have to have church discipline is because it's commanded. So in Matthew 18, which is the text where, again, what I don't want to do is I don't want to swoop into Matthew 18, rip it out of context, and just teach you over six verses.

What you have to do is look in Matthew 18 at the discourse. Jesus is talking about stumbling blocks and those who would make others fall. And then he pivots to talk about how there is a parable of the lost sheep where the shepherd, the good shepherd, will leave all of the flock to go get the one who's lost.

And after he says that, he talks about a very practical way that the shepherd can leave the many to go recover the one. And that is the passage, Matthew 18, 15 through 20, that we always associate with church discipline.

And we're going to look at that in detail tonight. But then after that, Peter asks a question. How often shall I forgive my brother? And so what we have to understand with righteous church discipline is that forgiveness, seeking the lost one, and discipline are all hand in hand.

You cannot have proper church discipline without the desire for forgiveness, reconciliation, without the desire to go grab the one who is lost and to restore them and to reconcile the relationship. But also you cannot have church discipline without a clear idea of the bounds and the jurisdiction and the guidelines.

Our confession says in section 26, paragraph 12, the following, as all believers are bound to join themselves to particular churches when and where they have opportunity to do so, so all that are admitted unto the privileges of a church are also under the censures and government thereof, according to the rule of Christ.

So what that confession means is that Christians are compelled to be part of a local church. We know that. Some even in our country fight and chafe against that idea, but there is no way to look into historical Christianity and see outliers to that.

Christians need to be a part of a local expression. Christianity is a social community type of faith. We are called to be together. We're to admonish one another. We're to love one another. But when admitted into a church, you gain privileges of membership, lots of privileges.

There is a bearing of one another's burden with needs. There is accountability. There is love for one another. But with that comes a threat and a danger of censure under the government of the church. Now, the sad state that we are in, and I'm at nine minutes now.

I'm sorry, this is my last bit on intro. The sad state that we are in today, and many of you guys will have experienced this, is church discipline has fallen into such disrepair and such ignorance among Christians that when I hear of cases of people being excommunicated from churches, I almost always believe that the person has been falsely excommunicated.

And the reason why is because it is, I think, probably the rarest thing you can find in Christianity to find proper cases of church discipline in America today. It's just extremely rare. You guys have seen people railroaded out of the church without a trial or without being able to be cross-examined, without an examination of facts, for spurious, specious charges.

And that's where we go today. Because the first thing that we have to look at is we have to see that church discipline is for one thing only, and that is sin. I want to repeat that. It needs to be underlined.

Church discipline is for sin. It's not for hurt feelings. It's not for somebody raising their voice. It's not for disagreements. It's not because you don't like what they wore one day. It's for sin. It's for sin.

Why? Because we know. Jesus says in Matthew 18, if your brother sins, go and show him his fault. 1 John 3, 4 says, Everyone who does sin also does lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness. So in order for something to be sin, it has to be a violation of the law.

There are no exceptions for public looking at one another's sin. There is an exception in your personal life, and that's not what church discipline is for. Church discipline is for public, between two or more people, sin, and that sin is lawlessness, which is a violation of the law.

In order for it to be a sin, in order for it to be a violation of the law, it has to be connected to the law in point of fact. This is not like Kevin Bacon, five degrees of separation from the law. It has to be directly connected to the law.

So if you are going to follow what Jesus says and go to your brother who is in sin, you need to be able to name the sin and point to the violation of the law. How many of you guys have ever seen that?

We can already see, with point number one, I'm not even into the three steps. With point number one, you can see that the vast majority of what passes for church discipline today is about preferences.

It's about taking offense. It's about reading assumptions and motivations. It's about, I just don't think that they're doing that the right way. I don't like the way they said that. That's what church discipline gets into.

It gets into public opinions. You're not allowed to have that opinion. In fact, I saw a pastor today on X who said that if he had any members of his church who were involved in the patriot front, he would discipline them.

Now, here's the question. Where's the sin? That would be my first question. What sin are you trying to point to? Because the Bible gives us some categories, right? It gives us ten of them. I'm going to give you nine because I'm going to collapse one and two into one command, and that is there is a command against idolatry, against blasphemy, against dishonoring parents, against breaking the Sabbath, against sexual immorality, against murder, against stealing, against false witness, and against coveting.

If you are confronting a brother about sin, that sin will absolutely be directly connected to one of those commands. Now, does that mean you literally have to murder someone to be breaking that commandment?

No, Jesus says that if you hate a brother in your heart, that that's the one that you're guilty of. And so there are extensions to these, but you have to be able to point to the sin. And so here is the exception clause.

We know from Romans 14, 23 that there are sins against the conscience. Paul talks about with eating meat offered to idols, he says, he who doubts is condemned if he eats because his eating is not from faith.

And whatever is not from faith is sin. Let me say this right away. Sins that are proceeding not from faith that are a violation of your own conscience are not matters for church discipline. The only way we would even know about that is if you had already confessed your sin.

And in confessing your sin, you would be repenting of that sin against your conscience, and that ends the whole process because repentance at any step ends the church discipline process. Does that make sense?

So nobody should be going after you, trying to use their omnipresent vision to look into your brain to see if you're sinning against your conscience. And if we eliminate trying to church discipline people for sins against our own conscience, we would eliminate 90 of the cases I've ever heard about.

We're always looking for someone who's sinning against our own conscience. That's not a sin. Did you know that? Sinning against my conscience is not a sin. Me sinning against my conscience is a sin. My conscience is irrelevant to you unless you know about it, and then you want to help the weaker brother out.

Okay? So Matthew 18, 15 through 20, is about public sin. That does not necessarily mean that it has to be on the news. It doesn't necessarily mean it has to be blasted on social media, but it is public that it means that it is against someone else, or it's out in the open.

It's observable. Okay? So we're not talking about what you might have thought yesterday at 10 .30 p .m. before you went to bed. We're not talking about that. That's not church discipline. That could definitely be sin, but it doesn't fall under this domain.

Step One: Go to Your Brother Alone

All right, so pretty theological. We're going to get practical now. So there are three steps to church discipline. I want to tell you at the start that any of these three steps, except the last one, can be repeated many, many, many times.

The last one can't be repeated many, many times because it's a little bit different. All right, so step one. What we are supposed to do, if you see, remember the qualifications. They have to be sinning.

It has to be public or against you, and then you have to be able to tie it to a law. Okay, and so what you're going to do is you're going to go to your brother, not your pastor, the brother. You go to your brother.

And I have made mistakes in this arena as a pastor where I have allowed people to come to me too early in the process because the fact of the matter is, as soon as I get involved in it, it escalates big time.

Okay, it's kind of this idea going into the principal's office. I don't try to exude that aura or whatever, but the idea is the reason it escalates and the reason it gets out of control when you bring me in would be the same if you brought anybody else in because step one is go to your brother and go to him alone.

This is not arbitrary. Jesus is giving us the command and the road for how we are to deal with sins in order to gain forgiveness and reconciliation and to have holiness. That's what this is about. So, Matthew 18, 15.

If your brother sins, go and show him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. So what's the point of going to your brother? Did you hear it there? What's the point?

You want to win him back, right? That's the point. The point of church discipline is to win him back, to restore the relationship, to let this pass and be over with. So if you observe sin or are sinned against, what you must not do is go tell other people.

Don't go tell other people. Don't seek counsel, quotation marks. Don't make a prayer request about your brother to others on behalf of your brother. That is taking the Lord's name in vain to gossip. Let's just call that what it is, right?

When we make prayer requests about the sin that we observe someone else doing, that is breaking the third commandment and it's breaking the sixth commandment, which is thou shalt not murder, because the reason you're doing that is you are killing them in your heart and you are taking the Lord's name in vain to do it.

That's a very, very serious thing. So you don't tell anyone else. In fact, the huge thing is if we're trying to gather the lost sheep back, what we're also trying to do is we are trying to make it easy for them to come back.

Does that make sense? Church discipline is about making it easy for someone to repent of their sins and to come back and restore fellowship. And the more people that know about it, the harder it is for them to come back because they have to go make amends and make it right with a lot more people.

There is a principle in here that we get from Noah and his sons that Noah's two good sons, when they saw his nakedness, they covered his nakedness and they were blessed for that. And as Christians, we should take that principle.

We should be all about trying to not excuse sin, but to cover up the shame of our brother. We don't want to shame them. We don't want to ostracize them, but we do want to go to them with a goal of winning them back.

And so if you observe this sin, don't go tell someone else. Prayerfully search the scriptures to link what you saw to a sin that is a charge that you're gonna make. You're gonna say, when I saw you do this, I think that is a violation of this command and I want to help you.

I love you and I wanted to let you know so that you wouldn't sin against God. That's how that conversation should sound. Now, is that difficult? Let's not lie. Yeah, it's difficult. It's difficult. And the reason why is because we are fallen, sinful creatures.

And our first reaction to being called on something, unfortunately, is usually to get defensive and to get angry at the person who's telling us. That's me. That's you. That's everybody. And what I would tell you is if you are going to go to your brother, you have to understand that wisdom is extremely important in this whole process.

Wisdom is the righteous and right and timely and the proper amount of gentleness application of the law. So the severity of the sin matters. The depth of your relationship and the objectivity of the sin really matters.

The more severe it is, the more objective it is, the more urgent it is to go address. The more caustic it is to your relationship, the more urgent it is to address, to get your path straightened. But relationship does not trump the need to love your brother by confronting them in their sin.

And it often does. Relationships make this much more difficult. And I hope, friends, I hope that we have a very difficult time with church discipline in this church because of the relationships. And the stronger the relationship it is, the harder it is to go to your brother and to point out the sin because the relationship is something that's very valuable to us and it's something we don't want to lose.

But I will tell you, among Christians, this grows relationships. And it makes them even stronger because Christians are going to repent. They may not do it right away, but there has to be patience because the Christian is always likely to repent and ask forgiveness because that is the core of the Christian faith.

That's what we do. We ask for forgiveness. And we want to win that person back. And so you have to be ready when you point out your sin. You have to be ready to forgive them. That's why we've gone to them.

You enter danger every time, though. There's several ways that you enter danger whenever you want to go confront your brother over sin. The first way is that relationships will challenge your convictions.

That person might push back. And they might use Scripture to push back. And then it gets murky. It gets difficult for one person, especially for a person who's not really well-versed in the Scripture, who doesn't really understand that law.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't go. You don't have to become a theologian before you go to your brother and bring their sin, because there is another step. But there is a challenge, and Jude foresees it.

He says in Jude 22 and 23, on some who are doubting, have mercy. And for others, save snatching them out of the fire, and on others, have mercy with fear, hating even the tunic polluted by the flesh. That means depending on your relationship and depending on the sin and depending on the context, for some people, you're very merciful and gentle.

For some people, it's a violent jerk to try to get them out of the sin ditch they're in. And for other people, it's almost like an air bomb that you go to them because you don't want to get stained by their garment, because maybe you are very likely or have a propensity to fall into the same sin that they are in.

Very important that you have to be prepared. You cannot be self-righteous. You cannot be going to your brother because of an offense. You cannot have petty vindictiveness. You have to rid yourself of all this.

If you're vindictive about your brother, if you have taken undue offense, then it is not for you. And you need to pray. You need to release that. It's not for you to go to take the speck out of your brother's eye when you have a plank sticking out of yours.

And this happens all too often. Because remember, the reason that most people confront is because they're mad. Let's be real, right? The reason someone confronts another in their sin is usually because they're angry at them, because the sin affected yourself.

And you have to rid yourself of that. You have to be prepared. You have to be prepared. I would write it down, a clear definition of the sin, a clear tag to where it violates the law, and be able to explain that.

You need to prepare your heart. You need to prepare your heart to give respect. You have to prepare your heart and pray that you would be gentle, that you would not get angry, that you would not fly out of bounds.

And you also need to steel yourself that you're not gonna ambush this person. Tell them it's gonna be a hard conversation. Say, hey, can I meet you for coffee one day this week? It's gonna be a difficult conversation.

I think we need to talk about sin. That's what I would do. You guys can ambush me. I would prefer that you didn't. But you can ambush me. Please don't ambush one another, all right? That's part of my role.

People are just gonna ambush me. It's okay. Don't do that to each other, though. You have to be prepared. And then what you need to understand is this step one, the reason I've spent so much time on it, is because step one is the primary avenue of church discipline.

So if you ask, does your church practice church discipline? The answer is yes or no, based on how common this is. This is what church discipline, the vast majority of the time, is. And this type of church discipline, going to your brother to confront them in their sin, seeking their repentance and seeking reconciliation and forgiveness, that type of church discipline is going to result in the eradication of most public sin in the church.

It's far more powerful, far more powerful, than elders cracking knees in back offices. It's far more powerful than me trying to pressure people out of the church because I don't like the way they act.

Because the social pressure and the watchfulness of people who love their neighbor and are looking out for their brother, that is far, far more powerful than anything any one guy can do or any congregational meeting can do.

So it's going to eradicate. So what we need to do as a church to follow Jesus in step one is we need to remember what he's talking about. It's about forgiveness. It's about reconciliation. But it's also about the law.

And it's about real sin. And we have to endeavor to be soft-hearted. We need to endeavor to be on the other end of this, right? If we're a church that's looking for church discipline, you are likely going to be on both ends of this.

I've already been on both ends of this in this church. Okay? People will point out my sins. And I pray, and it's a prayer that I pray often, that I would be soft-hearted, not proud, that I would be not only ready for godly correction, but that I would be grateful for godly correction, that I would thank the person for their correction, and always thank God for the means that he employs to build our sanctification.

I have said since I was a little kid. I've said it in high school. I've said it in college. What would you want to be remembered as? My answer has never changed in 46 years, and that is that I want to be known as a godly man.

There is only one pathway to be known as a godly man, and that is sanctification. And the way God sanctifies people is through correction. You know what you have to do? You have to learn to love correction.

Because correction is the discipline of a loving father. Now, when I was a kid, I didn't love my father's correction that much. But when I look back on it today, and I see the fruit of that correction, I am thankful to God for it.

It makes our relationship better. It makes our siblings' relationship better. And you know what would happen to a kid that doesn't have correction. They become monsters. They're self-destructive. We have to love this.

The London Baptist Confessional goes on to say, No church members, upon any offense taken by them, having performed their duty required of them towards the person they are offended at, ought to disturb any church order, or absent themselves from the assemblies of the church, or administration of any ordinances, upon the account of such offense at any of their fellow members, but to wait upon Christ in the further proceeding of the church.

Here's why I read that. What often happens is, somebody offends you, you go to them, they disagree with you, so you just stop coming to church. Or you wage a shadow campaign to disparage their name, and now even if they did sin against you, now you've repaid evil with evil, and sinned against them, and you really both need to be called out on it.

And the bottom line, and the reason the Confession says this, is because of a problem. And the problem is this. If there is not another witness, it dies here. Did you know? You don't have more recourse if there's not another witness.

And the witness is not your buddy who's going in to get your back in a conversation with the person that you've seen sin. A witness is a person who, we know what this means, right? If you call a witness in court, what does the witness have to say?

They have material evidence in the case. They're not somebody that's just there to go along, right? They have something to say. And so what I'm telling you, and what the Confession rightly says, what it rightly says, is that we sometimes do not see justice on this earth, and we have to wait.

And we have to understand that justice is always served because God is a God of righteousness and justice. There is no sin that goes unseen. There is no sin that goes unpunished. There is no sin that does not have its consequences.

And we sometimes, hopefully, see justice in a temporal, earthly sense, and that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but sometimes we don't. And if we don't have a witness, the process dies right here.

And guess what you get to do? Eat it. That's what you do. It's a technical term. You eat it. You don't bellyache to other people. You don't talk about the whole scenario to someone else without mentioning the name.

You know what you're doing, right? We eat it. That is what it means when we bear each other's burdens. Sometimes we're going to get offended in the church, and sometimes we're going to get offended for good reasons.

Those good reasons, though, have to be actionable. First of all, they have to be sin. But second of all, it has to, if it's going to move down the scale, there has to be witnesses. It cannot be you against them.

Now, if they admit that they did the thing, they are a witness against themselves, and now we can have someone else come in to hear that. So we move to step two. Step two, you go to the brother with their sin.

They don't see their fault, and they say, get out of my face. What gives you the right? You're out. I don't care. And so, step two, bring a witness or two or ten. It just depends on how many witnesses there are.

The court case, and you have to understand that Jesus goes into legal language here. The Mosaic Law was administered upon the evidence of two or three witnesses. And the or three means at least two, and as many as necessary.

The more witnesses you have to the same thing, the stronger the case, and the more the pressure. And so it tells us right away, we can use wisdom in step two. You don't have to bring the whole posse of everybody who saw it.

You might want to be gentler than that and bring two people, and they both saw it, and they bring the fault. And if that doesn't work, maybe bring five more that saw it next time. There is a way to repeat these things.

Does it mean in step one, they don't agree with you, you just end the conversation, it's over. No, you can do it again. You can reason together. That's what that means. But you do have to take the warnings of Jude into account.

Don't get stained by their tunic. Jesus says, 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. I would highly urge at this stage, I would highly urge that you start writing stuff down.

Okay? We are at the stage now where when you have brought a witness with you, the facts are obviously in dispute. Step one would have ended it if the facts weren't in dispute. So step two means the facts are in dispute, and so what you do is you take another person or two more people with you who have knowledge of the sin and have them write it down.

And you need to write down what people say. And let's be smart here. It's step one. If you go to someone with their sin and they double back on you and they accuse you of saying things you didn't say, you know what you should probably do next time?

Record it. That's the world we live in. Okay? But it's also true. What's important in these cases is you have to know the facts. And what you say and what they say are competing stories that don't move the ball.

So witnesses have to have material knowledges, knowledge of what's going on. Sometimes they're elders. The reason it might be an elder that's a witness is just because of, for lack of a better term, knowing a lot of stuff that's going on in the church, but also knowledge of the application of the law, being able to divide the word, being able to see, hey, is this really a sin we're talking about here, or is it something else?

Public sins, understand that. Remember, it has to be a sin against you, or it has to be a public sin. And public sins have witnesses. People are going to see it. It's public. So the witnesses are going to listen to the claim.

They're going to listen to the examination, the cross-examination, and then they are going to confirm the facts. The witnesses are going to say, yeah, this is a sin, and we saw you do it. Repent, please.

Or, no, I don't think it is a sin. I think this is a mess. And if that happens, the person who brought the suit stops. It's over. Eat it. You lost. This step has several things about it. First of all, it increases the pressure, and it increases the clarity.

We're not talking about two people having conflicting battles anymore. We're talking about multiple people who can tell the story and hopefully have the facts to be able to tell the story clearly. It's always good to take notes here.

It's always good, after you take notes, to share the notes with everybody involved and say, is this an accurate reflection of what just happened and what was just said? Once that happens, this is in the record.

That doesn't mean you're going to broadcast it everywhere. It means maybe you're going to need it later if this didn't resolve everything. You have to check yourself here. Because this is going to increase the pressure, because we rarely see this, and the reason we rarely see this is because we don't do step one, but when this happens, we start to get worried now.

Like, what's going to happen to the church? Because we're talking about more people that know, and the pressure is ratcheting up, and if that person is in sin and is unrepentant, they're going to start getting increasingly aggressive, or they're going to leave.

Now, if they leave, we have another problem, because if the two confirmed, then that person now is officially fleeing church discipline. It has to be settled. Now, does that mean it's going to go all the way?

No, it doesn't mean that. We have to check again. Make a check with your witnesses and with yourself. Is this a personal vendetta, or is this a concern for holiness? Is it a concern for your brother? This step is going to make an escape from obvious sin more difficult in seeking repentance.

It's more pressure, more of an obstacle. This step can serve to harden the heart of the sinner even more. They have to harden their heart more. If there's multiple people telling them, I see it, and you did this, you need to repent, the way out is to repent or to get even more stubborn, and you're going to see that.

If there are not witnesses, remember, I shouldn't have to say this, but I will, if there are no witnesses, we don't get to this point. We don't. So we don't count on justice being here. What we do have to understand, now, don't you go back and say, if you're really tracking with me, you go, hey, Rice, didn't you say at the beginning of this, though, that if you don't have the discipline, then it hurts the victim?