WWUTT 1653 Forgive and Comfort the Sinner (2 Corinthians 2:1-11)

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The Corinthians had sinned and Paul convicted them. He wrote to them a rebuking letter so that they would be convicted over their sin, but then he forgave them.

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So he instructs the Corinthians they need to be forgiving also. When We Understand the

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Text. This is

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When We Understand the Text, a daily study of God's word, that we may be filled with the knowledge of his will.

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For questions and comments, send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study of the book of 2 Corinthians, chapter 2.

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We got into chapter 2 a little bit yesterday, the first four verses. I'm going to start in verse 1, and we'll just go ahead and read through the whole chapter because it's pretty short, just about 17 verses here.

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This is out of the Legacy Standard Bible. The word of the Lord through the Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Corinth.

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But I determined this for my own sake, that I would not come to you again in sorrow. For if I cause you sorrow, who then makes me glad but the one whom

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I made sorrowful? And this is the very thing I wrote you, so that when I came,

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I would not have sorrow from those who ought to make me rejoice, having confidence in you all, that my joy would be the joy of you all.

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For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears, not so that you would be made sorrowful, but that you might know the love which

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I have abundantly for you. But if any has caused sorrow, he has caused sorrow not to me, but in some degree, in order not to say too much, to all of you.

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Sufficient for such a one is this punishment, which was inflicted by the majority, so that on the contrary you should rather graciously forgive and comfort him, lest such a one be swallowed up by excessive sorrow.

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Therefore I encourage you to reaffirm your love for him, for to this end also

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I wrote so that I might know your proven character, whether you are obedient in all things.

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But one whom you graciously forgive anything, I graciously forgive also.

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For indeed what I have graciously forgiven, if I have graciously forgiven anything,

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I did it for your sakes in the presence of Christ, so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes.

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Now when I came to Troas for the gospel of Christ, and when a door was opened to me in the

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Lord, I had no rest for my spirit, not finding Titus my brother, but saying farewell to them

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I went to Macedonia. But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ, and manifests through us the aroma of the knowledge of him in every place.

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For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life.

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And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not like many, peddling the word of God, but as from sincerity, but as from God, in the sight of God, we speak in Christ.

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So we come back to, let me go over verses 1 -4 again. So remember that Paul has written a pretty strict letter to the

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Corinthians and rebuked them for something that was going on there, convicted them of their sin, and they were filled with sorrow.

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They grieved over their sin. And something that I said yesterday, we need to do the same.

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We need to grieve over our sin. It is good that we mourn over our sin. It's actually bad if we've sinned, but we don't mourn over it.

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That's not a good thing, because then we have not understood our sin rightly. We have not understood that sin separates us from God.

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And what we deserve for sin is wrath. We deserve hell for our sin, eternal hell, eternal fire, and separation from God forever.

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No hope in that place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. There will either be excessive sorrow forever or excessive anger forever on the part of those who sinned against God and would not repent.

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That's what we deserve for our sin against God, that kind of separation, that kind of judgment. And if we don't mourn over our sin, then we don't understand that that's what we deserve for our sin.

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We also don't understand that God is infinitely holy and we are not.

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And in order to have fellowship with the one who created us, the one against whom we sinned, in order to have fellowship with him, we have to be holy.

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The only problem is we can't be. We cannot be holy. It is

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God who makes us holy. We cannot make ourselves holy. It is the righteousness of Christ, as I talked about on Monday, clothed in his righteousness, white garments washed and made pure.

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This is all through Christ Jesus. And Paul is getting to this even in this letter, that heavy verse that I pointed to earlier, 2

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Corinthians 5, 21, For our sake he became sin who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

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So we need the righteousness of Christ in order to have fellowship with God. And we come into that righteousness when we repent of our sin and put faith in Jesus Christ.

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It's more than just saying, I believe in Jesus. Putting trust in Jesus means you're no longer walking in the way of this world.

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We're not of the world any longer. We're not children of darkness. We're not enslaved to our flesh, the passions of our flesh, and the sins that had previously ensnared us.

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If we're in Christ Jesus, we've been broken from those chains of bondage. We've been set free from the sin that we wanted, and now we hate that sin and we love the righteousness of Christ.

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And when we see Christ for everything he is, for who he is, seated on high at the right hand of the throne of God, having given his perfect life for us with his death on the cross so that whoever believes in him will be forgiven their sins and have everlasting life.

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When we see Christ in this way, it causes us sorrow in the first, because we regret our sin.

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We lament over it. We mourn over our sin. And it causes us joy in the second, when we realize that Christ has given himself to forgive us of that sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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And now we have fellowship with God by faith in Jesus Christ. We have his righteousness.

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We have a borrowed holiness that has been given to us by God. And so Paul writes a letter to the

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Corinthians to convict them of their sin, that they would repent of it and come back to the righteousness that they should have been walking in.

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And he doesn't come to them right away, doesn't come to visit them in Corinth, because he wants them to experience that sorrow for a little while.

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They need to be in that sorrow. And how easily we'll tend to try to relieve somebody of that sorrow, or even we ourselves.

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We don't want to feel bad over our sin. So we might find a way to distract ourselves watching

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TV, playing on our smartphone, or maybe you do something as crazy as going out and getting drunk, doing drugs, doing over -the -counter medications, just something to give you a buzz or take the edge off, take your mind off of things a little bit, because no one should ever have to feel bad.

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But we do need to. We do need to mourn over our sin. I think it was Vodie Bauckham who

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I heard say that sorrow or brokenness over our sin is the off -ramp that leads us to repentance.

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So say you're when you're in your sin, you're on a highway headed south.

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That's the direction I'm choosing because we think of hell as being down. Right. So you're on a highway headed south, and you realize that you're headed for your own destruction.

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When you realize you're sinning against God, and that's where you're going if you continue on that course, and you realize,

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I need to repent, and you mourn over the fact that you've sinned against God, and that takes you off that highway, an off -ramp, you pass under the bridge, you get back on the on -ramp onto the highway now heading north.

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You're now heading the opposite direction. So that sorrow, that regret, that mourning that you experienced over your sin, that was the off -ramp that got you turned back around, that got you repenting so that you're heading toward Christ instead of heading toward your destruction.

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That's good that you experienced that sorrow because it led to your repentance. Keep that in mind because these things come up as we're going through 2

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Corinthians here, even to a point that we feel a godly kind of sorrow that leads to repentance.

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Now Paul talks about an individual here, a guy that had to be disciplined because of something that he did, some sort of sin that he committed.

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So let's pick up in verse 5. Paul says, if any has caused sorrow, he has caused sorrow not to me, but in some degree, in order not to say too much to all of you.

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So there's a guy among them who sinned. He did something that he had to be disciplined for, essentially is what it comes down to here.

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Verse 6, sufficient for such a one is this punishment which was inflicted by the majority.

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So that means that this man was, the matter that he had done, the sin that he had committed was brought before the church and the church made a decision about it and they voted to remove him from the church.

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And it was not a unanimous vote because according to Paul, it was the majority.

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So whatever that would have been, two thirds of the church or something like that voted to remove this guy, to discipline this guy because he had committed this sin that he apparently would not have repented of because as the instructions go, as Jesus gives in Matthew chapter 18, beginning in verse 15, he says, if your brother sins, then go and confront your brother about this between just the two of you.

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And if your brother listens to you, then you've won your brother. So the first step we take in church discipline, where we see somebody who is in sin or has sinned against us, we go to them and we confront them about that sin.

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And if in that first one -on -one conversation they listen and they repent, then you've won your brother.

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But if he will not listen to you, Jesus goes on to say, take one or two others along that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

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And if he will not listen to them, take it to the church. And if he will not listen even to the church, let him be to you as a pagan or a tax collector, as a

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Gentile or a tax collector. So that moment that it comes before the church, then the congregation is voting to remove him.

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They witness the fact that this man has sinned. Here's what his sin is. He won't repent of his sin. And so now we're removing him from the congregation.

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And then if he won't listen to the church, if after that step, he won't even listen to what the church has had to say about his sin, then he's an unbeliever.

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You know, treat him as though he were an outsider, as a pagan or a tax collector. Now, that doesn't mean that you never speak a word to him again for the rest of your life.

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How do you treat a pagan or a tax collector? Just a pagan in general. How do you treat a pagan? You treat him as somebody who is lost, who needs the gospel.

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And so that's how you would regard somebody who doesn't want to repent. Somebody who's apostatized, you know, somebody who's left the church.

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Now this is not like the disciplinary action that Paul sets forth in 1

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Corinthians 5. That was with the guy that was sleeping with his father's wife.

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Remember that? His stepmother, in other words. Paul said, remove the evil person from among you, purge the evil person from your midst.

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In that particular circumstance, there's no go talk to him one on one. And if he stops his adultery, well, then that's fine.

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Nobody needs to know about it. That's not what Paul was saying there, because he outlined specific sins that if a person calls themselves a brother, but they're doing these things, then you need to remove them.

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That's a two -step process. It comes before the church and they get removed. And that's how that process is supposed to go with somebody who's in adultery.

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Somebody who is in some serious sexual immorality in that way. This doesn't appear to be that.

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Whatever this man was disciplined for in 2 Corinthians 2 was not like the sins that Paul was calling out in 1

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Corinthians 5. So this sin may have been something that this man was doing in opposition to the

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Apostle Paul somehow, because he says sufficient for one is the punishment which was inflicted by the majority.

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He has caused sorrow to me, not to me. Sorry. Okay. My thoughts are scrambled. Let me go back to verse 5 again.

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If any has caused sorrow, he has caused sorrow not to me, but in some degree, in order not to say too much to all of you.

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So this was a man who said something that was contrary to the Apostle Paul. Perhaps he had just not wanted to listen to him.

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He didn't want to believe that the words that Paul said were words that came from God. At the end of 2

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Thessalonians, Paul said to the Thessalonians, if anybody will not regard what we have said in this letter, take note of that person and have nothing to do with them.

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So you were to discipline a person who would reject the word that came from the Apostle, because that word that came from an

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Apostle was the same as the word that came from Christ. These letters that we read here, like 2

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Corinthians, these are every bit as much the word of Christ as the red letters that you read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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So this man would not receive Paul's word as the word that had come from Christ.

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So he was punished by the majority. The majority of the church voted him out or disciplined this man, however that looked, because he would not repent.

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So Paul goes on to say, verse 7, so that on the contrary, you should rather graciously forgive and comfort him, lest such a one be swallowed up by excessive sorrow.

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Now remember that Paul has written a tearful letter to the Corinthians, that was back in verse 4, out of much affliction and anguish of heart,

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I wrote to you with many tears, not so that you would be made sorrowful, but so that you might know the love which

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I have abundantly for you. He loved them so much to rebuke them for their sin and call them to repentance.

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That's love that we do that. There are people that say, you know, if you rebuke anybody for anything, you call somebody's, you call out somebody's sin and you tell them to repent, that that's unloving, that you're being pharisaical.

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No, that's not being pharisaical. It's being a Christian. It's being a brother or a sister in the

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Lord that we care about one another in such a way we've been called to be our brother's keeper.

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We are supposed to be that for one another. So Paul demonstrates his love for the Corinthians in that he had to write to them a tearful letter.

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They felt affliction and sorrow, anguish because of this letter that, uh, that, that Paul had written to them.

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Well, he said that he wrote it out of affliction, but it caused them sorrow, this letter that he wrote, but the sections that we looked at on Monday and Tuesday, Paul was, uh, was giving assurance to the

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Corinthians of his love for them so that they would not be burdened with excessive sorrow. He said,

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I didn't want to come to see you while you were in that condition where you were repenting of your sin because I didn't want to continue to burden you down with sorrow.

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I didn't want you to cause me sorrow. I didn't want to cause you further sorrow. I want to be able to come when we can rejoice in one another and build one another up in the

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Lord. You're able to demonstrate to me that you have repented and you're rejoicing in the fact that I had to rebuke you rather than being in a state of sorrow.

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Like, you know, they didn't want, he didn't want the Corinthians to think, well, here comes Paul, he's just going to make us feel bad again.

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No, he wanted them to get to the other side of this sorrow that they were experiencing so that they might walk in the joy of the

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Lord. And then Paul in the Corinthians could be a joyful encouragement to one another.

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So he reaffirms his love for the Corinthians in verses 12, chapter one, verse 12 through chapter two, verse four.

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And now we're talking about this other guy. And so when Paul says, graciously forgive and comfort him, lest such a one be swallowed up by excessive sorrow, recognize that he's just done that for the

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Corinthians. He just forgave and reassured and comforted them so that they would not be burdened by excessive sorrow.

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And likewise with us, when we have been disciplined by God, we're going to experience regret, conviction, sorrow, a desire to repent.

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These things the Holy Spirit does within our hearts whenever we sin and we recognize our sin and we know we have to repent of that.

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And we need to, we need to come back to the righteousness that we should be in, in Christ Jesus.

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God comforts us. We're going to experience sorrow over our sin, but God also comforts us. He convicts us of our sin and he also comforts us.

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That goes back to the way Paul started the letter, that he is our father of mercies and God of all comfort who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

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The same comfort that Paul has received from God, he gives to the Corinthians. And so as the

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Corinthians have been forgiven, they need to also forgive this other guy that he wouldn't be burdened with excessive sorrow.

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So Paul says in verse eight, therefore, I encourage you to reaffirm your love for him. For to this end, also

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I wrote so that I might know your proven character, whether you are obedient in all things.

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They disciplined the guy as they were supposed to do, but now also, are they obedient? Were they obedient to do that so far?

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Yes. Are they obedient also to forgive this man and restore him? Demonstrate that you are obedient in all things,

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Paul is saying to them. Verse 10, but one whom you graciously forgive anything, I graciously forgive.

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For indeed, what I have graciously forgiven, if I have graciously forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the presence of Christ.

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Remember that we go back to Paul saying that it's in the grace of God that we conduct ourselves in the world.

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That was in chapter one, verse 12. And it was in God's grace that Paul demonstrated his love for the

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Corinthians. Chapter two, verse four. And so we've graciously been forgiven by God.

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So graciously forgive this man, restore him to the body as we do all of these things in the presence of Christ.

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Verse 11, so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes.

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Boy, Satan loves to see the church divided. And he even, Satan, which is a name that means accuser, by the way, he loves to accuse us for our sin and he loves to see us utterly devastated and destroyed in excessive sorrow over our sin.

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He doesn't want us to know the grace of God. He wants us to believe, well, that's it,

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I'm damned, I'm condemned, there's nothing that I can do about this, I've gone so far,

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God can't possibly forgive me for this now. That's Satan, the accuser.

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That's the way he wants us to feel about our sin. But as we sing in the old hymn, grace, grace,

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God's grace, grace that will pardon and cleanse within, grace, grace,

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God's grace, grace that is greater than all my sin.

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Yes, indeed, the sin that we've committed against God makes us worthy of judgment.

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We're worthy to be eternally separated from God because of our sin. But God's grace is greater than our sin, that he cleanses us of all unrighteousness and gives us fellowship with God eternally.

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And so that even in this relationship we have with God, no one can snatch us away from it.

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That's how great God's grace is. Once we've been saved from our sin into the presence of God through faith in Jesus Christ, no one can snatch them out of my hand,

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Jesus says in John 10. That's grace. That's greater than all our sin.

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Be confident in that. Paul had talked earlier about having confidence in the grace of God.

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That's where our confidence is, not in ourselves, not in our own ability to do right.

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Our confidence is in Christ. Heavenly Father, thank you for this good word that we have and may that be our confidence.

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May looking into the word of God show us where we have sinned so that we may repent of it, be restored into this relationship that we have with Jesus Christ and continue to walk in holiness and righteousness.

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And when we stumble and fall in our sin, we know that we can ask forgiveness for our sins and you are faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness as we have in 1

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John 1. Help us to walk in this confidence we have in Christ Jesus.

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It's in his precious name that we pray, amen. This is When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes.

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There are lots of great Bible teaching programs on the web and we thank you for selecting ours. But this is no replacement for regular fellowship with a church family.

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Find a good, Gospel -teaching, Christ -centered church to worship with this weekend and join us again tomorrow as we continue our