Hey, my friends. We're talking about Matthew 18, not just in general. We're talking about that

Matthew 18 versus 15 through 17. The part that talks about what you're supposed to do when a

relationship with somebody gets busted up, somebody sins against somebody else. You're trying to

deal with things in another person's life within the church within the family of faith that is

screwy, destructive, even sinful. And it's not as simple as just follow these three steps because

all three of those steps have pretty big implications, but also maybe it is just as simple as follow

these three steps. Whatever the case, let's pick up where we left off yesterday and keep working

it through. So behind each of these overt steps that Jesus is putting in place to govern conflict

resolution and even overt sinful behavior in the community of faith, behind each of these there's

the implicit assumption of humility on the part of the individual implicit assumption number one is

if somebody sins against you, you don't actually have to go and work that out. You could just take

it and forgive them and move on and chalk it up to a bad day and that's that implicit assumption

number two is that both parties want to get it right and implicit assumption number three is at

those two or three witnesses will just tell the truth and everyone will be loyal to whatever the

truth is and that the moral right way healing way to respond to whatever it is that went down will

be evident once the facts are in place, which takes us to step three in verse 17. If they still

refuse to listen, tell it to the church. And if they refuse to listen, even to the church,

treat him as you would have pagan or a tax collector. Well, yikes, that ends rough. We'll get to that

in a minute. So now the implicit assumption behind the text is no, we got a belligerent here.

This person is not bought into the values of the kingdom. This person does not care about the

factual testimony of other people who saw what went down. They don't care about the correction

of other brothers and sisters. They're running their own equation here. They're doing their own

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