Why Is Church Discipline the Loving Thing to Do?
Ask the Pastor with J.D. Greear
J.D. Greear
4.9 • 624 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2022
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Show Notes:
Four reasons for church discipline from 1 Corinthians 5:1-13:
* For the sake of the sinning brother (5:5)
* The hope, the goal, is always that they wake up from their sin; that the pain of being removed from the blessings of the church wakes them up and brings them back to their senses.
* For the sake of other believers (5:6)
* The Bible uses the analogy of yeast. Just like a little yeast quickly spreads through the whole lump of dough, a little sin in the community quickly infects everybody.
* For the sake of Christ (5:7-8)
* Christ died, Paul says, to get rid of sin. So why would his church tolerate in their midst those things that put him on the cross?
* For the sake of the outside world (5:9-10)
* Paul says that these steps are important because we need to give the outside world an accurate picture of Jesus. Most of the world will never read the Bible—they read the lives of Christians. Therefore, we have to present Christ accurately.
And here’s a special promise: Jesus promises to be with us, in a special way, if we do this. Look at Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
The context of Jesus’ statement is when you choose to go through the messy process of lovingly trying to restore someone caught up in sin. He wants you to know that he’s with you. When you’re doing the hard work of being family, he says, “I’m there for that. In an unusually powerful way.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody. |
| 0:18.0 | Everybody, welcome to Ask Me Anything. I am Matt Love. And over the past 20 years, Pastor Jadie has |
| 0:23.8 | tackled lots of difficult questions from the pulpit that we then later cover on the show as well. |
| 0:30.1 | We have questions that we're processing through and we realize, oh man, Pastor J.D. has taught about |
| 0:34.1 | this before. And so we wanted to share some of that original teaching |
| 0:38.0 | with you here as a way to answer some of the difficult questions |
| 0:41.2 | that many of you are asking. |
| 0:43.1 | So today, Pastor J.D. is going to answer the question, |
| 0:46.0 | why is church discipline the loving thing to do? |
| 0:59.3 | Here's the four reasons why Paul says that we need to do this. |
| 1:03.9 | Four reasons the church must remove a willfully sinning member from its midst. |
| 1:06.8 | Number one, he says, is for the sake of the sinning brother. |
| 1:08.4 | For the sake of the sinning brother. |
| 1:11.3 | He says so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. The hope, the goal is always that they wake up from their sin, that the pain of being removed |
| 1:17.4 | from the blessings of the church wakes them up and brings them back to their sins. The goal is never |
| 1:22.3 | punishment or exclusion. The goal is always healing and restoration. That's number one. Number two, he says, |
| 1:29.1 | you do it for the sake of other believers. That's verse six. Do you not know? Do you not know that a little |
| 1:35.1 | leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you |
| 1:40.8 | really are unleavened. Now, leaven is not a common word for us. In fact, many of you are like, |
| 1:46.5 | I have no idea what leaven is. The word that we use for leaven in our culture is yeast. You may not |
| 1:53.1 | know this, and this might ruin your bread eating experience, but yeast is a type of fungus that makes |
| 1:59.2 | bread rise. It grows and multiplies really quickly, |
... |
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