We Must Judge

First Corinthians 6, 1 through 11, when one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?

Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases?

Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more then matters pertaining to this life?

So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church?

I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you who is wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers?

But brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you.

Why not rather suffer a wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud even your own brothers.

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived.

Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. Well, last week,

I think you heard Tyler do an excellent job of talking about the goodness and the mercy of church discipline.

Today, we're gonna talk about the absolute necessity of church discipline and how if church discipline is not practiced, then there is really no distinction between the church and the world.

We've seen this. I know many of you guys' stories are that you find yourself here through miscarriages of church discipline, which is to say no church discipline at all.

And I know that you come in here and that what there is is a hope. I know this because this is what

Tyler and I talked about on that first meeting that we had that he alluded to last week.

It's kinda like you say you're gonna do it, are you really gonna do it? And I think where we sit is we hope that we will in this place.

And it's difficult because I can see with this text this week why we don't do it.

And it's a huge danger in how we have been taught to handle

Scripture for I would bet most of you guys' whole life. And that is this, is that we mine

Scripture for proof texts to try to solve individual specific problems and we do not treat

Scripture as being literature. It's written in whole, there is context. And this particular passage this morning, if you read it, if you heard along,

I hope you found the two things that get ripped out of context all the time. Number one, this is basically a legal book to go decide whether we can sue somebody else in the church.

That's how this passage is used. Well, you're not allowed to do that because you can't have a lawsuit against another believer.

Well, does that extend to people that are in other churches? See, these are the wrong questions. Now, obviously this passage addresses that, but that's not why

Paul wrote this. That's not the point. And when you make that the point, you flatten this text into something that means one specific thing so that you will see, and I hope to prove to you, that we ignore what it really means.

And what it really means is far deeper and more disturbing to the church today. And I don't want to flatten all of the problems that we have in the modern

American church into one thing, but this is a big thing, and we see it this morning. And that is that church discipline is not practiced correctly basically anywhere.

You've probably never seen it. I've never seen it. I've been on the bad end of it, gone horribly wrong.

And so have some of you, okay? Either through neglect or through the kind where we don't have it out in front of a meeting.

We just destroy somebody publicly without them having a chance, and there they go, out the door.

And what has resulted from this is a church that is defined by treating conflict not in a manly, masculine way, where remember, who are the leaders in the church?

Paul will tell us, right? Do you not have any wise men? The men are supposed to handle the conflict, but when men don't handle the conflict, in the church we handle conflict like women.

And what that is is backdoor whisper campaigns, people leaving silently out the back door, not having the fight in front of anybody, but forming together in our huddle and having consistency.

Can you believe they would leave? And then we slime them. That is a distinctly feminine way to handle conflict.

Men, we must not do that. And so there's gonna be a call this morning, and we ask, and let me say it with really bright, bold letters.

Why do we not practice church discipline in churches today? It's because men have forgotten how to be men.

And when you are enslaved by sexual immorality, adultery, swindling, and greed, like the laundry list at the end of this passage, you will inevitably be a soft man because you're afraid, and you should be afraid to judge when you have that going on in your background.

But as Tyler really put it well last week, there is a way out, and the way out is great.

The way out is the core of the Christian faith. There was not one of us that were Christian superheroes.

There's not one of us that God needed, but God redeemed us. He washed us, and then he elevated our station, and that's what we've missed, and we've forgotten who we are because that is the next part of this passage that gets ripped out of context.

What we do is we take the hinge where he says, such were some of you, and we take that as an individual text to talk about how homosexuality's wrong, right?

And we've had an assault in the church in the last few decades about, is it okay to have same -sex attraction?

Is that okay? And we write books about it, and Crossway publishes them. This is a stupid question. No, it's not okay.

Well, I just answered it. Is it okay to have same -sex attraction? Let me write the book. No, it's sinful, okay?

You put it away. You kill it. You destroy it. You don't give it any mercy. You treat it like Aragorn told the hobbits.

What do you do with the ringwraiths? You run away from them. Don't get near them. They're evil. They're wicked. It's not difficult, but this is not primarily an individual text.

He's talking about the church, and he wants them to do something because of what they are, not post

Bible verses on Facebook with steam and coffee next to it and act pious. That's not what he wants you to do.

He wants you to act like the church. It's necessity. So here we go.

We start. Now, if that weren't enough, let me start with my flaming hottest point to start with here, and that is point number one, verses one through four, an abdication of duty.

The church at Corinth has neglected their duty, and they are at fault, and we see, and we will see as it goes on last week, that it is a hotbed of disaster, dissension.

It's a mess. It's a big mess, and the primary reason that it's a big mess is they have neglected to judge.

We must judge. That's the title of the sermon. We have not judged for a long time.

The only people we feel safe to judge are the people that we don't care about their opinions. We'll judge

Democrats all day long. We'll judge people outside the church all day long, but we won't judge each other, and that is our authority to judge one another.

We have to judge one another. Otherwise, we will start to decay and fall into sin, and we will have some of the worst behavior you can possibly imagine, and that is the

Christian world today. Terrible behavior in public, but I get ahead of myself.

Does any of you, when he has a case against another, dare to be tried before the unrighteous and not before the saints?

Can you imagine doing that? No, we do it all the time, right? So what would happen?

We have to look at historical context, and what's going on is that the courts at Corinth, you might have a hard time imagining this.

The courts at Corinth were stacked against the poor. Can you believe it? The rich could sway the judges, and amazingly, the magistrates would vote in favor of the people who had political influence and power.

Can you believe it? How could such a thing happen? That is what the courts at Corinth was like, and here's what's going on inside the church.

The people in the church trust these partial courts above their own brothers inside the body.

That is the state of things in Corinth. Why? Do they have good reason not to trust each other in the church?

Yes. Why? Because they have a man who is sleeping with his stepmother and just living life to the fullest.

I'm part of the church, and he's just bouncing among them proudly. So they're like, maybe we don't want to judge.

Yeah, it's bad. If you won't judge the obvious case of sexual immorality in your midst, then guess what's gonna happen?

You're gonna start taking your appeals to people outside the body, because you don't trust them. We know this, right?

We have the age -old story of the pastor sleeping with the secretary, or the choir director has his mistress on the side who's in the congregation, and everybody's just kind of like, did you hear about that?

That's what we do. That's what's happened in the church. Purge the sin from your midst.

Bring it in front. These are not hard questions, and Paul is not upbraiding them because they are having difficulty splitting hairs on third -tier doctrine.

They got amazing gangrene going on right in front of them, and what's happened is the failure to judge has led to a dangerous place for victims.

It's very dangerous. See, what'll happen all the time is if we throw off our church discipline, we're not gonna get rid of disputes, and that's why we throw it off, right?

We say, oh, I don't want to do this church discipline because we're gonna have this really awkward congregational meeting, and we're all gonna fight, and people might get their fee -fees hurt, and then they may not come back.

Oh, no! But what happens when you don't do church discipline? You just move all that stuff underground, and you empower people to sin because A, the person who is sinning recklessly is getting away with it in front of everybody, and B, everybody's whispering about it and talking about it and becoming malicious gossips.

See, throwing off church discipline will always lead to church discipline just done the wrong way because what'll happen eventually in the typical setup, you guys have all seen it, right, is it's gonna get to the big boss, me, and I'm gonna get annoyed, and I'm gonna call somebody into my office and just kneecap them, and they'll go out the back door, and then

I'll lie about why they left. This is the state of things, is it not? We are like Crete.

Things have to be put in order. You do not get to silently excommunicate people. You do not get to write people letters informing them they've been excommunicated.

That's not how this works, okay? If you throw it off, you're gonna reap the whirlwind of lack of discipline, and we all know in the household what happens when you don't discipline your children.

They're monsters. That's what's gonna happen. The lack of church discipline also leads inevitably to a distrust of the church, and that's where we sit today.

This is the battle that we have in front of us, friends, is that we have a culture that has tapped out the secular paganism.

It's not working for them. Religious pluralism is not working for them. They know it's stupid. They know it's a ball of lies, and it's not satisfying.

People are anxious. They are depressed. They are killing themselves. They have no hope, and what they do is they look at our soft, effeminized churches, and they go, that just seems kind of bad.

Why would I want that? That seems like more of the same thing that got us here, and they are right.

Lack of church discipline leads to a distrust of the church because here's the thing. Here's the thing you cannot escape about human nature.

We want justice, even if it's just for somebody else. We don't want justice ourselves, like when it comes to our transgressions, but we definitely want it when people sin against us.

Justice is inborn. We crave it, and nothing makes us angrier than a miscarriage of justice.

Okay, so what happens is when we have no justice, the trust is broken.

You don't trust leadership. You don't trust each other, and so you're going to try to go find an arbiter to get on your side so that you can be right because if justice is what we crave the most, being right makes us feel better than anything.

Does it not? Remember the last time you got in an argument, and the other person came to you, and you were like, you were right. Oh man, that made you feel good.

You want to bottle that stuff and sell it, right? That's the best feeling in the world. Imagine being mean when you always think you're right, and then nobody ever affirms, and it's like, man, that's just, it's kind of weak.

I don't like it. The only way to get out of this situation, and what Paul is reminding them of, the only way to get out of their abdication of duty to judge is that they are going to have to repent, and repentance is going to be hard for the church at Corinth because repentance is going to be to take on the role and the responsibility that God has given them that they have not been doing, and it's always harder to do something you have not been doing that you're supposed to be doing, because what you're about to do is go,

I've been wrong forever. We haven't even been acting like Christians. This is ridiculous, and now we're going to have to put the hammer down when you've been living this way, and all you can do is say, hey,

I apologize for the injustice we've done, but we're going to start now, and we're going to have this out. This happens in your home.

If you let your kids get away with murder for a month or two because you're upset, you're tired, you're going to have to repent to your kids, line them up and say, hey, listen, we're about to stop this, and it makes you look bad, but guess what?

You have to do it because you're going to look worse if you don't do that, and that is the church. We have to repent. We have to do what we're called to do, so look at the disrespect, okay?

These people in the church at Corinth, they have issues with each other. They're stealing money from each other.

Business contracts are going bad. There's a sexually immoral man right in the middle of them, in the middle of one of the more sexually immoral cities on the earth.

He looks just like the world, and they take him in, and so what happens is this church, they look and they say, you know what?

I trust these judges that I know were bribed above my own people that I'm worshiping

God with every Sunday. You guys hear that, how crazy that is?

See, they have demeaned the high calling of the saints of Jesus Christ because they have forgotten who they are, and when you forget who you are, you are going to grow more and more and more like what you used to be, and let's pull no punches.

What did you used to be? A minion of Satan. That's what you used to be, so if you pull yourself out of discipline, if you forget who you are by God's calling, you're gonna look more and more and more by degrees like what you were, and God, in his mercy, is often, for his people, gonna do something very drastic to pull you out of that situation.

He's not gonna lose you, but you might get some teeth knocked out because the discipline's coming, and it should come from inside the church because that is the safest, best place for it to come.

When it comes from the world, they're gonna take your house. When it comes from the church, they're gonna restore you, and you're back in the family.

It's an amazing thing. What does Paul do? He uses soaring language, and he says this crazy thing that I have to answer.

Tyler said that I give Bible trivia answers up here, so we are confronted with one right away.

He says, do you not know that we will judge angels? That just kind of leaves that there and moves on.

He's on this thread. Thank you, Paul. He's on this thread. He's gonna bring that back in a very clear piece of scripture in 1

Corinthians 11 that's not at all complicated, okay? He's gonna bring that back, and there is this thing.

We will judge angels. Now, what does he mean by that? He is not giving you some kind of Nephilim.

We're not talking about the divine counsel, so take it easy, David. He's not even in here. He'll get that later. What he's doing is he is talking about the unique position of the saints, people who are saved by grace, people who are saved by the gospel, and we get hints of it in Old Testament.

One of my life verses, it's in the chapter of my life, Psalm 1. It says, therefore, the wicked will not rise in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

But look at the opposite of that. That means that the righteous will rise in justice or judgment, and the righteous will be in their own congregation.

We will be gathered together judging. In the Eschaton, Daniel 7 .22, until the ancient of days came and judgment was given in favor of the saints of the highest one.

So the ancient of days came and judgment was given in favor of the saints of the highest one.

You are raised to judge, and this is important to understand that the angels have a different position than humans.

Angels are terrifying, immortal beings that every time you see them in scripture, the human beings who see them are very afraid and they cower, okay?

But we will judge over them because of this. Angels have an immutable state.

They had their one time of decision, and they are frozen in place. The righteous angels will never fall and the demonic fallen angels will never come back.

They made their choice, but they were not saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, okay? It's different.

They were ordained in a different way. And we know from scripture that the angels long to look into the mystery of the gospel.

They don't really quite understand it. They don't understand really in its fullness how the son of God can be the bridegroom to the church.

That's a bunch of people like what Paul's talking to here in Corinthians, right? That has to be a mystery to the angel, doesn't it?

You're married to these people, to this? Because Christ is the bridegroom to the church at Corinth.

These are our brothers and sisters. We will worship with them in glory and they will judge the angels. Paul tells them they will.

They will judge the angels because the blood of Christ is the dividing line and his fulfillment of the law means that those who are saved by grace we will look at our creator and we will say thank you so much that you have made us righteous.

But remember that you have been made righteous and to be righteous is to be able to dispense justice, okay?

So we have to remember that later. There is a hierarchical thing going on and what is happening is Paul is reminding them you are going to these people that don't understand justice at all and you've forgotten that you have the ability to judge because you have the word of God.

You understand what's going on. The theme of this whole letter, the theme of this whole letter is that when we're puffed up in pride, when we get puffed up and we start thinking that we are wise and we can judge, then we totally forget who we are and what we're called to do.

This is happening over and over again and there's an inversion. There's kind of a paradox in God's kingdom and it is this, in our pride we become powerless but in our slavery we will stand in judgment over terrifying immortal beings.

You understand that? When you think you are high, take heed lest you should fall because in our pride when we think that we are very strong, when we think we've got it all together, we are incredibly impotent but when we are slaves to Christ, we turn the world upside down.

It's because it's the message. It's because it's the power of the Holy Spirit. It's because it's the righteousness that we carry through Christ's power.

How dare you not judge? That could be how we frame up those first four verses. Do you agree?

How dare you not judge? You are defaming the gospel of Jesus Christ. You are demeaning the holiness of the church by not judging and you've gone to the world and you've made us all look like we don't really have a

God, that our God is weak, that he can't give us any ability to make decisions and why would anybody wanna be part of that?

Contrast that to Paul going to the synagogue and poaching off with the power of the gospel, the two leaders of the synagogue that come into the church at Corinth.

What was the message that Paul was preaching? Was it not the justice of God? Was it not the repentance that he offers, the ability to be right with him in his law through the work of Jesus Christ?

That was a powerful message but if you look at the church at Corinth allowing the sin, it doesn't look powerful at all.

Friends, do we look this way in the world today as the church? Why would anyone in the world marvel at what's going on in the church?

When we don't practice church discipline, they will never marvel and they will level their greatest criticism on us that I've heard my whole life.

We're hypocrites. You're hypocrites. But can you imagine the hypocrite going to his friend at work and saying this?

I have been acting like I'm a Christian. I've been saying it but I've been sinning and you've seen it and you've rightly called me a hypocrite and do you know what happened last

Sunday? My church called a meeting and I've been unrepentant and they told me that if I didn't repent of my sins that I was out of there and that I can't call myself a

Christian anymore and I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that I've had the name of God on my lips and I haven't lived it and my church gracefully was gonna put me out but I repented.

Can you imagine what the response of your coworker would be to that kind of testimony? They would be gobsmacked.

They wouldn't know what to do with that. They've never heard anything like that before. What's stopping us?

I'll tell you what's stopping us, disobedience. It's really that simple because here we go,

Paul gives no excuse. You are equipped to judge, equipped to judge.

Look at it in verse five. I say this to your shame. Is it really this way?

There is not one wise man among you who will be able to pass judgment between his brothers?

On the contrary, brother is tried with brother and that before unbelievers.

Actually then, it is already a failure for you that you have lawsuits with one another.

Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? On the contrary, you yourselves wrong and defraud.

You do this even to your brothers. Can you imagine treating your brother that way?

Boy, that's rough. Do you guys think about it? What is it like to betray your brother?

That's an awful thing, is it not? There's always an inner circle with everybody, right?

And there's human beings and there's one, there's a man that I know would never betray me and that's my brother.

He would never do that. But God has bound us together and we have to have oaths and bonds of trust with each other.

And it has to be like that. And through the Holy Spirit, it will be like that. And we can trust one another.

And when somebody says something, you believe it. And if they don't say, if they say something and you can prove that they were lying, that is a grievous sin because what it does is it disrupts the brotherhood.

We have to trust each other. We have to. And what Paul says by the negative is that there actually are wise men in the congregation and they've neglected it.

There were wise men in Corinth, but they were cowed into silence by the culture and by their fear.

And they put their wisdom on a shelf and it's a shame to the church. And let me ask you, are there wise men in here?

I know there are. I know it. If there are wise men in here, then we have no excuse.

Matthew 18, 20, another verse that often gets pulled out of context. We are in the right context this morning.

Jesus says, for where two or three have gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst. When God's people are gathered in his name, and that's either for church discipline, the

Lord's day, whatever. When we're gathered to do his work together, he is here. He is wisdom.

Is he not the mighty counselor? He is the one who provides the wisdom. And so where two or more are gathered in the name of Christ to do his work, you have wisdom.

Use it. Use it. A failure of church discipline is like I said in the intro, it is a reproach on the men of the church.

And we're gonna see it in the laundry list that's sent at the ending. There is one that in the translations I like, usually in ASB, it separates the word.

One, a lot of translations smash two words into being homosexuality. But in the Greek, there is a word for homosexuality, and then there's a word for effeminate.

Now, without getting graphic, in its literal context, that means the giver and receiver in that relationship.

But the receiver, that word malachoi, also means soft, velvety, weak.

So it is weak, it is wrong to be a malachoi man. Who gets popular in the

Christian church on the pastor stage today? Is it men that tradesmen wanna follow?

Or is it fat guys who have never worked a day in their life and they come out of their ivory tower scholarly booth and they say theological arcane things that make themselves sound smart and their hands are not calloused and they don't do anything, they are malachoi.

Is it any wonder there's no church discipline when we're ruled by that? It's a reproach on men.

It is the duty of men to not judicially tolerate sin in our midst.

I'm calling on you men. We can't tolerate it. We have to dare hurting somebody's feelings.

We have to dare getting pushback. But we also have to be careful and know that we are accusing or calling out sin, not things that annoy us.

That takes relationship capital. Calling out sin does not take relationship capital. That's just a weak excuse to not be wise.

But somebody talking too fast, let it go, unless they're your best friend and then make fun of them every time they do it.

The church who neglects church discipline by definition has put their trust in the world above the trust of their brothers.

We think we need more people. We think it's gonna make people upset. We think we're gonna get less money. We think we're gonna get blasted on social media by blue haired lesbians who are mad at us that we threw them out of the church.

That's what's gonna happen. And we're afraid of that. And so we trust the world.

We trust the world's opinion. And we're not wise. And what this does is when there's no church, man, test me on this, this is the world we live in.

When we neglect church discipline, this leads to something far more sinister. More sinister even than Christian brothers and sisters being hurt and having to leave their fellowship.

More sinister than that, it leads to public reviling between brothers. A hotbed of gossip, schisms, fractures, and ultimately we air out the dirty laundry of the church in front of the world.

If you dip onto social media for even a second, that is what you're gonna see in our day and age played out.

And it's because churches will not hold mostly their elders accountable to watch their mouth in public.

We do not get to disparage other Christian brothers in public. We can call out their sin.

But we're not popes. And we trust the local expression. And local expression, you guys have to hold leadership accountable, but you also have to hold yourselves accountable.

We have to be able to call out sin. And we have to not leave in a huff. We have to be a little tougher than that, men.

Are you being ruled by your wife? I can't stay here anymore, tough. We're gonna stay and fight it out because we made a commitment.

To use an idiom, that's what men do. Okay? Get a little tougher.

Rule your household. We need a little more of that. It's so bad, okay?

The church that lacks church discipline, Paul was gonna say it this way. This is going to sting many churches.

May, by God's mercy, it not be us. But here's the thing. This is what Paul says. The church that lacks church discipline is a failure.

They failed already. Can they repent? They're going to. Praise God, they're going to.

But this is a dangerous thing because unity takes guts. Unity takes guts. I just told you, you have to stay.

Honor your commitments. Honor the brothers. Have it out, even if it takes months.

Have it out. Have those grisly meetings where you know that you're about to fight over the table and you have about three minutes of small talk and then the gloves come off and you duke it out for an hour and a half.

It's not super fun, okay? It's really not. But we have to do it. We have to.

It takes guts to have unity. You have to understand this. You have a desire for justice and that desire is put in you by your creator.

But get the distinction. The desire for perfect justice is going to inevitably cause schism.

You will not get perfect justice here. God is the only one who gives perfect justice because he is the only one who knows all thoughts of man.

He is the one who knows the hearts and can judge that way. See, here, we have to pursue justice.

But Paul gives a disclaimer, remember? He gives an out and that is this. We should rather be defrauded than be used to bring disgrace upon Jesus.

At the end of the day, if the case is aired out and you still don't think that you have justice, you just got defrauded by a brother and you trust

Jesus on that. You should rather do that than continue on the path of trying to get perfect justice.

You're obviously not gonna get it right now, but who knows what will happen in five years. Have you ever had things that come back into your mind years later and you think, man,

I was way off on that? Maybe I even need to call somebody from the past and say,

I am so sorry I did that years ago. I was wrong. Does it not bless them?

Does it not bless you? Why don't we be patient? John 13, 35, you've heard it, but you don't let the full weight of it rush over you.

Let it. Jesus says, by this all will know that you are my disciples. If you have love for one another.

Love for one another. It is a tolerance for one another, but never tolerance for sin.

Love for one another is a practical application of the law for the benefit of each other. Romans 13, eight, owe nothing to anyone except to love one another.

Would the church be defrauding each other if they owed one another nothing except to love one another? No, it's impossible.

He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. You want to be righteous?

Love your neighbor. You want to be holy? You want to be sanctified? You want to be set apart?

Love your neighbor. You want to be known as a great Christian, as a godly man? Love your neighbor.

And love your neighbor is not being a weak -kneed coward. It's about applying God's law. We love our brother and we don't tolerate sin because we love them.

We know how to do this, men. We do it in our household all the time. We don't tolerate sin from our kids.

Why should we tolerate it from each other? Are we not more emotionally stable and mature than children?

This is to our shame that we don't have church discipline. We must trust one another. Romans 13, 10, love does not work evil against a neighbor.

Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. I think Paul was working on something there. You want to fulfill the law?

Love your neighbor. Do not work evil against your neighbor. When you allow your neighbor to sin and you don't say anything about it because you think that it might hurt your relationship, you are working evil against your neighbor.

You should get uncomfortable when no one has rebuked you in a while because I know you're not perfect and I know

I'm not perfect and I need people that can call out the things that I don't see. Fortunately, I do have a wife who sees a lot of the things that I don't see but we also have friends who see things that she doesn't see because Kelsey does not know the perfect bar of masculinity that I'm supposed to live up to but other men in my life, they know that better and that's why brothers are made stronger by being with brothers and sisters are made stronger by being with sisters.

There are differences. And then he gives us this last thing. Take heed, it's often the one who is crying the loudest about being defrauded who is currently defrauding someone else.

That's the parable of the unforgiving servant, right? You get forgiven $10 trillion by the judge and then you go try to collect lunch money from the guy that borrowed from you last week and then you slap him down.

That's what we're like. We defraud, we are unjust to people and then when somebody does the slightest injustice to us, we scream to the rafters and the reason why is because we are in sin and sin makes you blind.

Sin makes you stupid. Sin wants to get in there and stay and the way it does is by cloaking, by making you feel self -satisfied.

I didn't do anything wrong. Can you believe what they're doing to me? It's a dangerous trap and when you start thinking that everyone else around you has got these things that they can't see, brother, it's probably you that can't see.

Quit screaming about it and get somebody to speak into your life. Last point, we must judge to avoid being the world.

So I'm gonna try to get very practical here in another verse that's used out of context. Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Be afraid, friends. The unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God. That means they're out.

If these things characterize you, you're out and this is not an exhaustive list, but it's a list that's peculiar and specific to the church at Corinth.

Do not be deceived. A lot of people are deceived. A lot of people do think that they can be unrighteous and be

Christians. They can't. You cannot be unrighteous and be a Christian. There has to be sanctification.

Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ. And get this, this is very important for the later part of Corinthians. And in the spirit of our

God. You have to have the spirit. He indwells you, he empowers your righteousness.

He is here among us right now. He is working in mysterious ways.

See, we were something, but now we're something else. And that's a mystery.

And without church discipline, what happens is that we open the gates for invaders. Think about it.

That's the Big Ten idea, right? This is where the American church has gone off the rails. What we've done is we've decided that what we have to do is get a bunch of people in the church so that they can get an invitation to come and accept

Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. Sounding familiar? And we play softly and tenderly

Jesus' calling five times through while we're having people come up and say a prayer. Or, did you pray that prayer?

Raise your hand. You've all been there. That's not what this is for. That's not what this is for.

That's your job and my job in the world. Here, here, we are to hold each other to discipline.

We are to admonish each other, rebuke, encourage, exhort. And see, when we open the gates for invaders, we had already given away the farm because then we can say, how can we judge them?

They're not even Christians. Well, they're in here leavening the loaf every week. Sometimes teaching

Sunday school classes. It's insane. It's out of order.

But what we have to have is we have to have fences where those who are not

Christians should feel very uncomfortable in here because this is not for them. And I want them in here, but not to become leaven and not to feel comfortable among the fellowship.

They have to come into the family. But the more dangerous thing is not the invaders coming in. The more dangerous thing is it allows an easy path back to what we were away from what we are.

And that's the reminder that Paul is giving. See, the church is not a place for any of these things. And we look out, and it's easy for us in the

Reformed Church, especially in the conservative Reformed Church. It's very easy for us to look out and go, oh, Elka, those crazy

Lutherans. Oh, the Methodist flying the rainbow flags. Why are they flying the rainbow flags?

I'll tell you why. It's because we did not want to upset the apple cart when the pastor was sleeping with the choir member.

We accepted it. You accept a little sexual immorality, it's not gonna stay there.

When you can have church leaders who are addicted to pornography, it's not gonna be long before the flag is flying.

If you accept it, it's going to grow. You are cultivating it. Don't be deceived.

If you are enslaved to these things, don't be deceived. If you stay there, you will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Why do we have fraud in the church? This blows churches apart. Why do we have fraud? Well, it's because we did not publicly rebuke the greedy elder who was just worried about his paycheck so that others would fear.

And we know him. This becomes a career. And I'm not arguing against that. It is a vocation.

It should be. It should be a vocation and a career. However, you and I both know that in the

American conception of the church, this has become a really plush gig for a lot of people. You make a really good upper middle class.

If you can grow your church big enough, you can make a really good living. And then what you're doing is you are trying to pad your nest with yes -men around you.

You're trying to solidify your holdings. And what we do is we see the signs, we see the smoke, and we know there's fire, and then we never call it out publicly so that they would fear.

We cannot let that. It is not loving to elders to let them get away with that.

And that's why we have fraud in the church. If the leader is here just for money, what do you think the

DNA of that church is gonna be? Why do we have idolatry in the church?

Well, it's because we don't call out the softness in one another in seeking the approval of the world. Idolatry was always about trying to fit in with those in the world.

Your gods will be my gods, so we can all be together and quit fighting each other. God says no. God says no.

Why do we have drunkards? Well, because we think in our reformed freedom that it's hilarious when so -and -so got drunk the other day.

It wasn't funny, it wasn't hilarious, and that's how we tolerate the leaven in the loaf. Why do we have revilers?

And we have many of them, many revilers. Why? Because we did not rebuke inside or mark in a void when men constantly seek to destroy

Christians in the name of discernment. Discernment is not about blowing up Christians and disparaging their character.

Discernment is about understanding sin and rebuking sin in the way that we are prescribed to do it.

Friends, we have to get the house in order, and the first step to that is understanding that in here, we're not special, and we will bow to the waves of culture, and what

I mean by culture is Christian culture. We will bow to those waves if we don't actively fight against the disorder that we've seen our whole lives.

We are blind and foolish if we don't think this is our predisposition. The first temptation we're gonna have when we have a big, unrepentant sin is going to be to sweep it under the rug.

I promise you that. We will have that temptation. We will want to do it. We will say, we will justify, well, are we just kicking against the goads here?

Do we really wanna cause a conflict over this? Friends, I have to resign if we don't do it. I have to.

I've painted myself into a corner here, and I'm gonna paint it even further into the corner. You guys rise up and throw me out of this church if we sweep this stuff under the rug.

You can quote it. You can timestamp it. Use these words against me. I am not fit to be here because this church is a failure if we're not distinct from the world.

We cannot have backroom church discipline. We cannot have discipline that's based on preferences and opinions, but it has to be based on the explicit commands of God.

We cannot puff ourselves up when we get out of order, and we then, when we puff ourselves up over reformed theology, we neglect the weightier matters of the law.

Church discipline is a grace, but church discipline doesn't lurk in the shadows. Last thing.

Understand this. Church discipline, if and when it happens, look, I trust, and I know,

I know there have been the early steps of church discipline in this place. I know that, and that is a great thing.

That is not a shameful thing. That is an amazing thing. Do you understand? We have to get out of that mind frame.

If you are a sinner, which you are, and if you are in a church, which you are, there will have to be church discipline going on all the time, and I know there is.

We have not had the large blowout formal one yet, but we will. We will, and what we're afraid of is that it's going to cause a tremor in the family fellowship because it's gonna be uncomfortable.

You know it will. There will be witnesses called. It's gonna get crackling with tension in that member's meeting, but that tremor is going to build trust, and it builds the fellowship stronger because we all know that we need lines and accountability.

Do we not? Everybody I've ever talked to says, yeah, I want accountability. Of course you want accountability.

We don't want to be autonomous libertines out doing whatever we want because we know that whatever we want is horrible.

We need accountability. Being married is good structure. Paul's gonna tell us in chapter seven.

It's good structure to keep us out of a lot of terrible things that we would find ourselves in. Having children is good accountability.

Being in a church has to be good accountability, but it won't be if we're afraid of the world and we're afraid of hurting each other's feelings.

There are worse things in the world than having your feelings hurt. You will wake up, and you will live, and it will move on, and maybe you'll be tempted to think badly of that person.

Can you believe they said that to me? And our thing is you've got to go to them and say, how dare you say that to me, right?

And you go, oh, this one we probably need to have a coffee over, and it may get a little bit out of control. That's okay because we always know and understand this.

I keep going on. Last thing. If you know that you can have that hard conversation and that there's gonna be another hard conversation after that, that's a relationship.

That's a relationship. If you think they're gone if you bring this up, let me give you a news item.

You don't have a relationship, so what are you afraid of losing? It's not real.

It's not there because the people who love you will always come back and try to reason together, always.

There is no end to the rope. You're never dead to me, never. That applies to every person in my life, especially every brother, right?

Test me on it. Test each other on it, and pray to God that he would give us the humility to use our wisdom.

Let's pray. Father, thankful for this scripture. It can feel like a task that is so big.

Lord, many of us have never seen it. We've seen it gone astray. We've seen it neglected.

We've seen overreach of authority to break people, but Lord, many of us have not seen the safety and the love of a family in church discipline.

Father, we know that our temptation is gonna be to continue down the path that the

Church of Corinth was doing, Lord, where they want to not upset each other. They would rather have the stealth campaign and then smile at each other on Sundays.

Lord, protect us from that. Lord, would you make us faithful? Would you give us trust among your people so that we'd trust each other?

Trust each other to rebuke, to encourage, Lord, to live life together and to help each other.

Lord, we know that that power comes from you, that it is a gift of the Holy Spirit to unify your people. Lord, we need you.

It's not a self -made effort, but it is one of the ways that we are sanctified is that we are pulled apart, given a love of the law that you have put into us as you changed our heart, and that love of the law makes us love our neighbors.

Lord, help us remember who we are. We were washed by your blood. We were sanctified, set apart as a chosen people, that we were justified, that our sins were paid for by your perfect substitutionary sacrifice.

And today we walk as your people. Help us to put away those things that we once were and to embrace the things that we are, the robes of righteousness that you garb your people in.

Lord, help us to judge and to judge rightly and that that would honor you. It's in your name I pray these things, amen.