Church Gone Wild

All right. Good morning, guys. How you doing? How you doing this morning? Thank you.

All five of you who clapped. Praise God. Praise God. Hallelujah. All right.

Glad you’re in church this morning. Kind of a transitional period in our church where we lost our past location. Those of you who are online, we’re so thankful that you’re here with us today. I do want to say this. There’s a lot of empty seats in here.

There’s a lot of empty seats in here, and there’s a lot of families that are missing today. So, number one, I want to encourage you guys to get back to church, get back in church, get back in person. We need to be together. It’s a pivotal time that we should be together. As I shared last week, there’s power and presence.

Yes, we love having an online service, but I’m missing a lot of you. And as we go forward, I want us to be together, to experience God together. So come on back to church, guys. Come on back to church. And those of you who are guests, come on to church.

You know, we’re welcomed. You’re welcome to church. You’re welcome to salt church. Everybody is welcomed in the house today. Amen.

Amen. So just a few things before we get started in our next part of First Corinthians is. Is number one, we have our men’s gathering this coming Friday. So all you men come on out, and it’s going to be at my location. And so everybody come out like we did.

Yeah. Yeah. Amen. So I want every man there. We need to get together.

Men. Iron sharpens iron and fellowship. So that’ll be at my place. Also, next week is Super Bowl Sunday, and we’re gonna celebrate. Oh, yeah, forget that.

You know, we’re tired of seeing the Chiefs in the Super Bowl. I’m just playing. At one time, it was the Patriots. Now it’s now it’s the Chiefs. So they’ve taken that spot.

Yeah. Yeah. We’ll see what happens. Chiefs will probably win again. All right.

Yeah. So we are next week. We are next week celebrating with baptisms. We have a few baptisms next week, and we’re going to. Going to celebrate.

So I want. So, again, those of you who are not here today, you need to be here. So watch your family get baptized. Amen. Right?

Right. Amen. Hallelujah. I know we’re bouncing around. I know we’re.

But there’s free parking here when we thank FFX for allowing us to meet here for the month of February because we thought were going to be out in the streets. And they’ve accommodated us, praise God. And I know it’s, you know, it might be a little different where we put the kids and things like that until we get to where we need to be, but praise God, we’re still able to meet on Sunday mornings. And going forward, we’re still trying to figure out what they need in this location that we’re going to. It’s over off of Birdneck, over in Birdneck General booth.

It’s called Sun. What is it? Sunset Horizons. Is that right? Courthouse Horizons.

Courthouse Horizons, yeah. I’m sorry. It’s a very challenging name. I even told them, hey, y’all need to pick a better name so we can remember this name. Courthouse Horizons.

And a small venue there that we’ll be able to meet in. And there will be some flexibility even about, you know, what we do there and how we do it and during the week and things like that as well. So we’re working out the details of that. Still trying to get some. See what needs to be done.

We had a great meeting this past week with them, and they’re really excited for us to be there to worship. And this is an opportunity, guys. This reset is very important and pivotal for us. I think it’s a God thing that we reset. It’s a new year, and we need to reach people for Jesus.

Amen. We need to be salt and light in the world, and this is an opportunity for us to. And we, as a leadership team, have been assessing everything in our church. What we’ve done well, what we haven’t done well, and where we’re going from here. And as I shared last week, and I was very vulnerable with you, but the vision can only be reached or become a reality when everyone in the church is involved.

When every person that says, I am a part of Salt Church is involved. Maybe you’re like, I don’t know if I’m a part of Salt Church or not. That’s fine. We’re actually developing a membership class you can come to. Next month.

We’ll have our first step, which is a guest connect where you can find out more about the church. And we’re also developing a membership class in which you can actually go deeper in what we are and what it means to be a part of a church so that you don’t have any confusion about what it means to be a part of the family of God. Amen. And we love the family of God. Family of God is a good thing, and that’s why we’re In First Corinthians, talking about the family of God.

What is expected of the family of God? So if you have your Bibles, go to First Corinthians. Do I hear those pages? Pages moving. Okay, okay.

There are some pages moving. That’s good. That’s good. I’m glad, I’m glad. And if not, pull out your phones.

It’s not working. Is it recording? Oh, okay. Sorry, sorry. People online.

It should be on because I set it for it to launch today. I double. Well, anyway. All right, all right. I didn’t ask you to go to the app, though.

I asked you to go to the Bible. So go to the Bible. Go to the Bible in First Corinthians. You can go to the Bible doc if you haven’t downloaded that. And we’re going to look at the next part of scripture here.

Alright? It opens up like this. And I bet people who heard what I was going to preach on today is like, I don’t know if I want to be here. Or maybe I do want to be here today. Right?

And it says this. It starts like this. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and. And the kind of sexual immorality that is not even tolerated among the Gentiles. This is some serious stuff here.

A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. Okay. Welcome to Salt Church today if you’re new with us. I know this is probably a weird week, but we preached the whole counsel of the Bible. We’re walking through this and this is the next part in chapter five.

So if you remember, from the first week, we talked about 1 through 4, chapters 1 through 4, which dealt with church division. Now we’re entering into this area regarding confusion about sex, and we are entering into February. So over the next few weeks. What is wonderful about First Corinthians is that it talks a lot about relationships. So we’re going to talk about marriage and divorce.

Some of you have questions about marriage and divorce. We’re going to talk about singlehood and we’re going to talk about all those things that First Corinthians deals with that we all have, you know, those questions. You know, relationships are difficult and we have everything we need here. And as we talked about, Corinth was a very immoral, notoriously immoral city. Lots of people from different parts of the Empire had located there.

So as you can imagine, there were all kinds of issues with coming into that, all kinds of belief systems, all kinds of philosophies, and even there were many, many temples to idols, particularly those that supported and encouraged prostitution, which was a way of worship to many of these fertility gods. So as you could see, this was probably very difficult for these young Christians. Many of them were very young Christians coming in to the faith, trying to figure out, how do I, in this culture, how do I be? How do I operate as a Christian? How am I to be a Christian in this culture?

But this goes way, way beyond just sexual immorality. It says even the type that not even the pagans, not even the people who aren’t believers, would want to participate in. So what is wrong with the church here? What is going on? Some scholars say it’s probably a stepmother they’re talking about when they mentioned sleeping with your father’s wife.

But regardless, if you call a woman mother, that’s way too far. Okay, so we’re talking about real heavy stuff going on here. So those of you who glamorize the early church and say, wow, the early church, they were so amazing, don’t. Okay? Because you think our issues are bad.

Telling you, these guys were deep in it. They weren’t perfect people by any stretch of the imagination. And Paul says, don’t tolerate this. Even pagans don’t tolerate this. And you know it’s bad when your pagan neighbors are looking at you saying, gross.

This is disgusting. But rather than mourning, Paul says, you are arrogant. You were arrogant. You’re to be mourning, but you were arrogant. Why were they arrogant?

Why weren’t they dealing with this situation? There might have been a few thoughts of whether they should even be. You know, it’s current, right? What happens in current stays in current. I don’t want to shake the boat.

It’s none of my business. I don’t want to get in other people’s lives. It’s just how culture is. I’m sure a lot of them were like that. And others were like, well, we’re free in Christ.

We can do whatever we want to. So it’s none of your business what I do in the bedroom. I can do what I want, when I want, how I want, because I’m free. I don’t have to any longer follow the law of Christ because I am in the grace of Jesus Christ. And according to Paul, the church knew it was wrong.

And Paul knew that the church knew it was wrong by the way he’s writing to the church. And the reason the leaders are not dealing with it overly is because they didn’t want to rock the boat. These Christian leaders in the church. Let’s not. Let’s not dip into this.

Let’s not poke the hornet’s nest. I don’t want to offend somebody. I don’t want to. I don’t want to go into that. And maybe for some reason they didn’t want to talk to this individual.

Maybe they were an influencer in the church. Maybe they were a high tither. We don’t want to shake up the high tithers in the church. Right? They’re giving, they’re giving.

We don’t want to offend them. It’s easier to leave well enough alone. How many have you been there? Like when there’s times where you have to approach or have to address truth. I don’t know if I want to rock the boat.

I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what happens if I shake that person up. But Paul says, guys, this is your brother and your sister here. This is somebody in the house. This is somebody who is going through tremendous sin.

This is somebody you need to be mourning for. That’s why he says mourning, you know, you need to mourn for this. This is, this is a. It’s killing them. They’re dying.

Why are you not addressing these issues? As, as believers, as congregation, we should be concerned with the spiritual health of our people. And why aren’t you dealing with these. And then Paul says this radical statement. Let him who has done this be removed from you.

Let him who has done this be removed from you. Wait a minute. Whoa, Pastor. Whoa, Paul. I mean, we’re kicking them out of the church?

What’s going on here? Here’s the truth. What about. And some of you are asking, what about unconditional love? Aren’t we supposed to love everybody?

Yes, we are supposed to love everybody unconditional. But fellowship is conditional. Who we fellowship with is conditional. I thought were open, embracing community that welcomes everybody in. Yes, but our primary calling is to represent Jesus family.

That’s our primary calling. What do we look like? What is the world seeing? And then it goes on. And let me just say this.

Jesus welcomed all kinds of people. He welcomed the people with problems. We want to welcome people with problems. We want to welcome people with sicknesses. But I mean, he welcomed Paul.

He welcomed Mary Magdalene. He welcomed people who had real issues. But the difference between them and this particular situation is that they were willing to turn and repent and follow Jesus. And at some point, a person has to make a decision. Am I going to follow Jesus?

Am I going to follow my own ways and my own desires. There’s not two ways. There’s only one way to follow Jesus. And they confessed, they repented, they turned, and they. They follow Jesus.

And then he goes on to say this. Not only are you to put them out, you are to deliver this man to Satan for destruction of the flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Wow. Can you imagine a more strongly worded statement that you can make about someone? Paul says they need to be delivered over to Satan for destruction.

Not only do you remove them from membership in the church, you deliver them to Satan. What does that mean? Well, here’s a good explanation. And Paul talks about that in the next few verses. The church is like a covering, the family of God.

When you come to church, when you’re in the family of God, it is a covering from the world. It’s an umbrella of protection from the sin of the world. It’s an umbrella of protection from the curse and judgment of sin. And it shields us from a lot of sin’s effects. Believe it or not, some of those are practical, some of those are supernatural.

And Paul says to remove them from that umbrella of protection so that they can experience the pain of their sin. And his hopes would wake them up, that they would confess their sin and turn back to God because they are withheld from that covering, Withheld from that protection. And Paul uses the imagery of the Passover. If you remember, back in Exodus 12, we see the Passover take place where Egypt is rebellious and God is giving or putting plagues on Egypt. And one of those plagues was that he would send a death angel.

And some commentators would say that it was Satan himself over Egypt on a prescribed night, a certain day and night, and that the firstborn would be put to death. Basically, they would die. They would die right there in their house. I couldn’t imagine hearing the moans of the people who lost their firstborns as the death angel came over and this happened. But the thing about Israel is they were under this curse of sin too.

So what had to happen? So God prescribed that they sacrifice a perfect lamb and put over the doorpost the blood of this lamb, so that they had an umbrella of protection from this death angel. It’s symbolic of the church. It’s symblomatic of what God does in the church that we have an umbrella of projection under the blood of Jesus Christ. We are covered, we’re protected from the sin of this world.

And when someone in the church is willfully obedient to God. He’s saying you should put them out from under this protection into the world to experience the pain of their sins so that they might perhaps wake up and be clear about what’s going on and turn back to God and ask forgiveness. So this excommunication happens. But it only. But it only happens.

And I want to be clear about this. This excommunication, if you want to call it that, only happens after every other attempt of reconciliation is made, that we’ve done absolutely everything to reconcile that person back to Christ. We call it the Matthew 18 principle of conflict resolution. And I’m going to go through this real quick. If you want to put your finger on the passage there and turn over to Matthew 18, 15 and 17, and it will give you a method in which we handle conflict in the church.

He says in verse 15, Matthew 18, 15, if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you have gained your brother. So what he’s saying, first of all is that when you have a conflict between someone, if there’s sin going on in someone’s life, if you sense that something’s off and you need to approach that person, do you go to the pastor and say, hey, pastor, you need to handle that situation? No, it’s called private correction. You have this step one, private correction that takes place.

This is, and this is really simple. You meet with that person in private, you have a conversation with that person, you tell them what you see, and perhaps between you and them, resolution can happen. Maybe they would come to their senses and see their sin and change their ways. But in verse 16. But if he doesn’t listen, take one or two others along with you.

That every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. This is group clarification. So if that person says, no way, I’m not listening to you. I’m not. And they’re just.

You take two or three people along with you, maybe somebody close to your unit, your small group, or people that know you best, bring them together and talk to this person about this sin that you see in their lives. But if they still don’t confess and change their direction, we go to verse 16, the second part of verse 16. If he refuses to listen to them, then you tell the church. So this is church admonition, meaning that this is where the church elders get involved. So if there’s somebody who is continually in disobedient sin, rejecting Christ, and it’s influencing the church and you’ve gone through all these other methods, then we have the elders and the pastors get involved and meet with this person to come to some resolution that they may see clearer what’s happening here.

And it puts heaviness, it puts a sense of seriousness and gravity behind the accusation. And it also helps the others see the situation clearer, too. Am I looking at this situation properly? Am I understanding what’s going on? Am I in the wrong?

But if they still don’t, then this is where church exclusion comes in. This is when they have to be freed into their own imprisonment. I guess you would say it like that. Not literally free, but not under our covering or our umbrella. This is where you remove someone from church membership.

They’re no longer a part of the church. You put them outside the church and expose them to sin, the sin of the world, the activity of Satan, in hopes, again, that they come to an understanding that what they’re doing and where they’re going is not good for them and it’s not good in the eyes of Christ and they would turn from their sinful ways. That’s our hope, that reconciliation would come. Now, this doesn’t mean they can’t come and sit in church and listen to a message or whatever. Now, big churches, that’s easier to do because you can kind of float in and out.

In a smaller church like ours, that might be another issue. You know, are they causing division? Are things said and done and is there one side and another? You make those judgments based on the context of your environment. But ultimately it’s not that we are throwing them out into the world, cutting them off like there’s no hope for them at all.

We certainly believe there’s hope for everybody. Amen. We believe that everybody can come to the understanding of the sin in their lives and confess their sin, and God can rescue them. And I’ve seen people in terrible places, people who others said, there’s no way. There’s no way that person can come to Christ.

There’s no way that person will ever believe what you believe, that have made that life change, have surrendered their lives to Jesus and found hope in Jesus. I’ve seen it, and I know it can happen. So that’s the method we see there now in First Corinthians 5. If you want to jump back there, let’s flip back there and look. It says, and anyone who bears the name of brother, if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed or idolatry or a reviler or drunkard or Swindler, not even eat.

Underline that. Not even eat with such one. So he gets a little more deeper in what we need to do when we put somebody out of church membership. He says not to even eat. Now.

You’re like, well, what if I see him in a restaurant or we’re at a party or something, or there’s a big event? Do I just choose another table to eat at? Or whatever? No, that’s not what he means. He means eat as in fellowship with that person, as if they were a family member.

You aren’t to be together with that person. The surest sign of fellowship is when you have a meal with somebody. And Paul is saying to avoid doing things that imply that they are still a part of the family, as if you’re enabling that person or you’re just okay with their sin in general. He’s saying, don’t do it because you don’t want to imply anything about whether you approve of their sin. So he says, don’t even fellowship in that way with people, believers that have gone wayward.

And I want to make clear before moving on, okay, this happens, this excommunication, this removal of the church, only happens at this final stage, when every attempt of reconciliation has. And I’m not talking about watching too much TV or being grumpy in the morning. Those aren’t things I’m talking about, you know, that move somebody into church. We’re talking about people who are defiant, persistent, blatantly unbiblical, someone overly denying or overtly, rather denying Jesus Christ, denying and defiant of his authority. So now that we see how to do it, you may ask, well, why do we do this?

What are the reasonings behind this? From a spiritual standpoint, why would we ever want to remove somebody from the church? And I hope we never have to do that. We haven’t had to do that as a church. Praise God.

Things have always been reconciled. If there’s sin in people’s life. We always been loving and open and had these discussions, and people have been healed. People have grown in their faith as a result of it. But, but why, why do we remove someone?

Number one, for the sake of the sinning brother or sister, if you want to put it there, in verse five, it says, so that his Spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Our hope and our goal is always that person be saved. I know I sound redundant there, but that’s our hope, that the pain of removing them from the blessings of the church would bring them back to repentance. Healing and restoration. But the second thing is, it’s not only for the person, it’s for the believers.

It’s for the believers. Look, what Paul says in verse six. Do you not know that a little leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump as you really are, unleavened. What does that mean, to be leavened and unleavened?

Leaven is basically yeast. And when you put a little bit of yeast in bread, what happens? The yeast rises. The whole yeast, the whole bread rises. Just a little bit of yeast, just a little bit of fungus in the bread, and the whole bread rises.

And the Bible uses this as a picture of sin. It’s just a little bit of sin. A little bit of sin. An ongoing, persistent, willful sin in the church can cause an unhealthy situation in the entire church. And we need to remove the leaven, is what he’s saying.

We need to remove the sin so that God can grow and produce and the yeast can be healthy, unleavened bread without yeast in it, like a healthy one. In fact, in the Passover, as a symbolic or emblematic of this God, you know, the Passover festival, God asked the people to put the leavened bread outside of the house as a sign. Don’t look back to Egypt. Don’t look back to the sin of Egypt. Get it out of the house, be purified.

I think of it in a contemporary example as a cancer cell. A localized cancer cell can be treated very easy. Did you know that melanoma is the easiest curable cancer out there? Most curable cancer out there. It’s very localized.

You can get rid of it, but if you don’t catch it in time, it’s the deadliest because it will easily go in the blood and metastasize through the rest of the body. That’s sin. Sin’s like a cancer cell. If we don’t deal with it while it’s localized just that little bit, it can turn into a big mess. And that’s why we deal with sin.

This is why Paul says, you’ve got to deal with the sin this way. Another example illustration that someone shared is if you have a family that has children and one of the older children go off to school and then come back from school, and they’re living at the house, and they begin drug and alcohol habits, and they’re not really pursuing a job, and they’re just kind of around. They start bringing shady people in the house. But you love that Per, you love that child, right? We love our children.

No matter how wayward they’ve gone, we love them. But unconditional love says, I’ve got to release that person from my house. I got to release that child from my house for the sake of everybody else in the house. I’ve got younger children that are seeing this. I got younger children that are experiencing this.

So in the same way, it’s not unloving, it’s actually loving to remove someone or some type of sin out of the church so that they can find health and wholeness and that our church is healthy as well. And number three, for the sake of Christ. Why do we remove someone like that from the church or sin from the church? For the sake of Christ. It says, for Christ, our Passover land has been sacrificed.

Okay? He’s restating that something they already know, like the sacrifice has been made. Remember that he paid for your sin. Why are we tolerating sin that Christ has already paid for? Why are we allowing already take care of that.

Let us therefore self, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Christ died. Paul says to get rid of sin. Why are we inviting it back in? Let’s be clear and free of sin is what Paul’s saying.

Don’t tolerate it. And Paul says that believers, when they come to worship, should get rid of those things. That’s why it’s saying the word. Lift up holy hands. Right?

Lift up holy hands. In fact, give us clean hands and give us a pure heart. And when we come before the Lord, we. We should have clean hands and pure heart, confessing, repenting of any sin that we have in our life. Because before a holy, righteous, mighty God, we want pure worship.

Amen. To encounter God, we have to have pure worship. But this doesn’t mean two things. So I want to be clear on this. It doesn’t mean the unbeliever can’t come to worship.

Okay? Again, we’re talking about believers here. We’re not talking about unbelievers here. We should welcome unbelievers in worship and they’re going to encounter God here. Amen.

Because we’re people of God and we don’t apologize for that. But at the same time, we want an environment where unbelievers come into this room and they participate and they list because they’re searching. Amen. And if you’re an unbeliever today, you’re welcome here. No we love, we have a seat for you and we’re glad you’re here.

And if you’re exploring this thing called Christianity, trying to figure it out, we want to offer an environment in which you can do that. So you’re our honored guest. But an honored guest is different than a member of the family. The second thing is, it doesn’t mean that you should be problem free. Okay?

When you come to worship, some of you are like, leon, you just said I need to have no sin in my life when I come before God. No, if you have problems, that’s all of us. Okay? All of us have problems. Like, you’re not going to be problem free coming into the house.

We invite the sick, we invite the lame. We are a church. The church should be a place for sick people. Amen. The question is if there is a spirit of repentance towards sin or if there is a spirit of defiance about.

That’s the question. Where is the heart? And Jesus talks about this man that this Pharisee and this tax collector that walk into the courts and they’re going to God. And the tax collector is on the ground, he’s kneeled down, he’s repenting to God. Lord, I know I’m a sinner.

I know I’ve done wrong. Lord, forgive me. And the Pharisee comes in, oh, I’m good. I pay my taxes. I do this and I do that.

There’s no wrong in me. I stand on the course. What’s this man doing here? What’s this tax collector doing here? And Jesus said, I’d rather be in the house with the tax collector than in the house with a hypocrite.

Jesus does not like a hypocrite. You see it in Scripture. Nothing made him more angry than the Pharisees who were full of sin, yet pretended like they weren’t. So we do it for the sake of Christ and then fourthly, for the sake of the outside world, that we are a testimony to the outside world. We need to give the outside world an accurate picture of Jesus Christ.

Most of the world will never read the Bible. They just won’t. But they read Christians, they look to Christians. And we want to represent Christ well, by the way we live, by the way we fellowship, by what we tolerate, what we don’t tolerate. People are looking at us.

They’re in search of something. And the question is, are we Christians who show off Christ? Are we? Are we people who point to Christ? They learn from us about our God by the way we act, by the Way we worship, by the way we give, by the way we love.

When they learn how glorious he is and how worthy he is, by how passionately we worship him. That’s why I got. That’s why sometimes I get an attitude when people don’t worship him passionately. It’s like, guys, God has done so much. He’s so big, and.

And the world sees that. Why would I want a God who. You’re just sitting there like, I don’t want to be at church today and I’m tired, you know, whatever. Why would I want a God like that with the frowny faces in church? You know, who are you?

You know, don’t sit in my pew. By how we passionately worship God. They see that, and they see how we love and they learn how Jesus loves. They see how serious we are about sin, and they understand that there’s a God who’s serious about sin. And if we’re not serious about sin, then they see not a God that we serve and follow, but a God of this world.

So Paul says, for the sake of the outside world, takes sin very seriously, take these things very seriously so that they can get a right picture of Jesus. We’re representing Jesus well. And that’s the four reasons that we go through the hassle and the pain of dealing with these problems, with dealing with these messy situations, right? But there’s something really powerful that happens when we begin to do this, when we participate in this type of disciplinary actions and helping people through these painful situations. It’s painful for us.

It’s painful for them. Paul tells us that Christ shows up in a very special way, that the presence of God shows up. Many of you know this verse where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am with them. Now, we would usually use that when we have a small group and nobody shows up, right? Like, we have two people, we have a church service, and it’s low intent.

Well, you know, there’s only two or three. Well, two or three are gathering in his name. There he is also. But in the context of this scripture, he’s talking about in the muck of dealing with situations like this, that when two or three come together and we practice this disciplinary stuff in the church, that God Jesus is supernaturally with us in a way, in a powerful, powerful way, that we encounter the presence of God in this. And amen.

I want that in our church. Hallelujah. I want to experience the power of God in our presence. So let me switch gears just for a second as we Begin to close chapter five. There are some common objections about these things.

When people read these scriptures, Christians, unbelievers as well, they ask these questions. This just seems really heavy, Pastor. This seems really heavy. But aren’t we supposed to be friends to sinners? Wasn’t Jesus known as a friend of sinners?

The answer is yes, for sure. Paul makes it clear. He’s not talking about separating yourself completely from unbelievers. He’s not telling you to go out and be a monk. He’s not telling you to go to a monastery somewhere and separate yourself from life.

You have to live in the world. You’re around them all the time. You work with them, your neighbors. He’s not in this situation talking about unbelievers. In fact, if you go to verse 10, he says, I do not mean at all separating yourself from the sexually immoral of the world, or the greedy, or the swindlers, or the idolaters, and on and on.

But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name brother or sister, that you are not to associate with somebody who says, I am a believer, I am a Christian, and are living another way. That’s what he’s talking about. We’re not supposed to separate ourselves from the people of the world. Of course, lost people act like lost people, and we get frustrated with it when we see that sin is damaging their lives. But he’s talking about people inside the church who bear this name, brother.

Who bear this name, sister, bear the name of Jesus. Because cancer outside of the body isn’t a threat, is it? It’s in the body when it’s a threat. So by all means, we need to reach out and befriend sinful people and love sinful people, because otherwise there’s no reason for us to be here. Why are we even here?

Here, another objection. Shouldn’t our church be a hospital for the sick? Yes, yes, of course. Of course it’s a hospital for the sick. We’re not talking about excluding people who struggle.

Christians struggle all the time, including me. We’re people who struggle. But what Paul is talking about is defiant, unrepentant people who name Jesus as. As their Savior. They deny the authority of Jesus over their lives.

Well, another objection. You only pick on certain people with certain sins. You only pick certain sins. That’s true. It’s been known in the church to do that.

Unfortunately, conservative Christians as well as progressive Christians have done it. We pick out the sins that are bad and. And the sins that we want to attack. And we let go of the sins that. That we feel is okay.

And a lot of times we make big deals out of. Out of sins that may not necessarily be. Of course all sin is bad, but we miss out on the real issues because we’re focused on those issues. But look at the breadth of Paul’s list. When he says, but now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed or is idolater, reviler, drunkenness, or swindler.

The point is not pointing to the kind of sin that’s committed. It’s the posture of defiance towards that sin, their heart. Or is it? What about judging? Aren’t we not to judge somebody?

And Paul in verse 3 says, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. He’s like, I’m not even there and I’m already judging them. Right. And that doesn’t sound right. I thought Jesus said not to judge.

That’s the most quoted verse in the Bible. You know, everybody knows that. Judge not unless ye be judged. Let’s not judge people. But is this really what Jesus meant?

If it is, then Jesus is contradictory because he was correcting people all the time. He was judging people all the time. He was telling them of their wrongs. So in context of Matthew 7, he’s talking about sitting in judgment over someone as if you are God, that you have no sin. And that person that you look at and say, oh, they could never.

They will never be in this church. They will never be in this family. They will never. There’s no hope for them. And you write them off and say, you know, and compare them to yourself, you know, they could never be like me says, judge not unless you be judged.

Be ready to be judged yourself. Look at yourself where you stand. Are you standing in the place of God when you say that? Someone never stands a fighting chance of knowing God. There’s always hope for people.

And the Pharisees in that day when Jesus was looking at him, judging, not unless you be judged, he was talking to them because they had written off the tax collectors, they had written off the prostitutes, they had written off the common people who didn’t know the law, like they knew the law and reacted to the law the way they did or performed the rituals the way they did it. And they said, there is no hope for these people. That was the way the Pharisees were looking upon the people who were far from God. And Jesus looked at them and he saw hope. He saw people in search for a sheep, a shepherd, rather.

They were sheep in search for a shepherd. The final question I would say here. Objection. Is, but does this actually work? A lot of people say, does this actually work or does this push people further away?

Isn’t that a common question? If we get this heavy with sin, will it not push people away from God? Well, first of all, it does work. I’ve seen it work. But it.

But we don’t obey Scripture because it works. We obey Scripture because God said it. That’s why we obey. We shouldn’t be shocked, though, when it does work, because God’s way does work. So I don’t know if this has been clear or not today.

This was kind of one of the harder chapters to talk about, to be honest with you. But. But thank God it’s over. Amen. I can get through this and the sexual immorality part.

And even if it’s weird and it’s easy to skip over it, if you. If you’re here and you’re. You’re not a believer, I want you to know that we don’t pass judgment on you, that you are welcomed and we love you and we don’t want you to know that. We do want you to know. We want you to know that we take sin seriously because we care about you.

We care about your life, we care about your soul. And there’s no mistaking that you’re here today. That Christ, Jesus Christ, went to the cross bloody, tortured to death on the cross, not just so that we can allow sin to persist, so that we could be rescued, we could be restored, that we could be made new. We want you to see that your sin puts you in great danger. If you’re an unbeliever, puts you in danger of hell and eternity away from God.

That’s why Jesus came. That’s the good news of the gospel. That when were yet sinners, he died for us. John 3:17. God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might live, might be saved.

That means that Jesus stands before you now not as a judge to condemn you, but a Savior that extends towards you. He opens his arms, he opens his heart to you. And those of you who are believers, whether you’re struggling with sin, whether you’re trying to figure out how to navigate church life and brothers and sisters in the faith and dealing with sin, it’s all in the name of love, right? It’s all in the name of Jesus Christ. Number One that you would, you know, first repent of your sin.

If you’re going through anything, that you would seek hope and help and mentorship and be self aware and look at your own heart. If you’ve gone from church to church, from ministry to ministry, and the same issues are with everybody else, there might be a problem there, right? So perhaps look and see what’s there and allow God to heal you. But you know how heals you through the church. We don’t do this to judge.

We do this to give you hope. But let God do the judging. Amen. And we know what that means in Jesus Christ. That every judgment that is placed on you is made right in Jesus blood.

Would you pray with us, Father? We thank you, God, for your word, Lord. We thank you for the scripture, God. We don’t take it lightly, Lord. We don’t speak, skip past places that are hard to talk about.

We don’t just offer cute and cuddly periods of time where everybody feels great. But sometimes you challenge us, Lord, when we look at Scripture, sometimes you look deep into our hearts and pull those things out, Lord, to have us view him clearly so that we can make the decision to follow you and not just know about you, God, but to fully follow you. Like Paul did on the road to Damascus. He turned from his evil ways and he says, I surrender today, Lord. We surrender every part of our being, every part of our soul, every part of our lives, Lord.

We surrender. God, we don’t want to be half in. We know that’s not pleasing to you. What’s pleasing to you is fully devoted followers of Christ, people who follow you with all their heart. So today, God, if there’s anybody here that doesn’t know you, Lord, I pray that they would confess their sin to you.

Lord, I. I give my life to you. I confess my sin to you. I receive your blood over my life. For those who have gone wayward or those who are flirting with sinful things in the world, Lord, I pray that they reach up to you, Lord, forgive me of my sin.

Cover me with your blood, God, once again turn me towards you, God. I give my life. I rededicate life. I give it all to you, Lord, because it really is not about our lives, God. It is about the life you lived to bring us to our true purpose, our true identity.

You that you bring us to that place where we fully know who we are in you, Lord, that we can live in this world with hope and joy. Know you fully, experience you fully, Lord, we love you so much God, we thank you in your name. Amen. Amen. Hallelujah.