Sermon

1 Corinthians 5:1–6:8 — Church Discipline

February 2, 2003

1. What is the problem that Paul is confronting in Corinth (5:1)?

The problem Paul identifies is “sexual immorality (porneia),” a broad term that covers many things. He then gets more specific and says that the sexual immorality that the Corinthians believers were tolerating was something that even the pagans did not allow.

Finally, Paul says directly: “A man has his father’s wife” (v. 1). What does this mean? We do not know all the details but apparently a believer had entered into a sexual relationship with his step-mother.

It appears that in the common grace that God has given to all humanity, believers and unbelievers alike, there has been a prohibition against close marriage or intermarriage among relatives. God has put into humanity generally a recognition that this is something unhealthy for human families.

But even more specifically this is something prohibited in the OT law, especially in Leviticus (read 18:1-8). The point here seems to be that God would set apart his people from the surrounding nations in their understanding of this prohibition. The theme of Leviticus is “Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (19:2; cf. 11:44; 20:26; 1 Peter 1:16).

What may be more amazing is the fact that Paul is transferring to this rag-tag group of disciples the distinction of being God’s chosen people. He has already called them “God’s temple” (1 Cor 3:16). Now he is saying they are God’s set apart, holy people. The distinctions that belonged to Israel now belong to the church.

Aside from the sexual relationship with a close relative, there is also a possibility of disfavor for an intimate relationship outside of marriage (cf. Hebrews 13:2).

In v. 2 Paul takes them to task for their pride in tolerating this man in their midst. There is a tension that we are going to see over and over again in this letter. It is the tension between enjoying the freedom we have in Christ and recognizing the obedience and the disciplined purity that God continues to demand of his people. We run into this tension all the time, don’t we? On one hand we know that this faith is about grace and forgiveness. We see this in the popular slogan, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven!” Or we say, “Hate the sin, but love the sinner.”

It seems that the church in Corinth had not just tolerated this brother but had even celebrated his sin as an example of the freedom from the demands of the law.

Paul tells them that they should instead be filled with grief, and he tells them that they should have put out of their fellowship the one who did this (v. 2).

2. What does Paul urge the believers to do “when you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus”?

For Paul there are no personal peccadilloes. When we are bound in covenant as believers, our lives are bound together. I am responsible for you, and you are responsible for me.

Paul urges the church to come together in the Lord’s name and deal with this matter. Paul sees power in the church’s gathering. This is one of the places in scripture where we see the mandate of what we call congregational government. This is a matter to be brought before the body.

Jesus gave real authority to the church in Matthew 18:18: “I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

3. Church discipline always has as its goal not punishment but redemption.

In v. 5 Paul urges the church to “hand this man over to Satan.” What did Paul mean by that? In all likelihood, Paul meant that this man was to be excluded or excommunicated from the fellowship of believers. For Paul to be outside the fellowship of believer was to be in Satan’s territory.

This was an extreme option and to our modern ears it sounds very harsh and even “un-Christian.”

We are to assume that the preliminary options of Matthew 18 had been exhausted. This man had been confronted individually and by two or more witnesses but he was unrepentant. According to Matthew 18, the next option is “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a tax collector or a sinner” (v. 17).

We hear traces of this in other places in scripture:

In 1 Timothy 1:20 Paul tells Timothy to hold onto the faith unlike those who have shipwrecked their faith and he says, “Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.”
In Titus 3:10 Paul says, “Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that, have nothing to do with him.”
In 1 John 2:19 John says of those who were opposing the cause of Christ: “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going out showed that none of them belonged to us.”
Those are hard and frightening passages. For Paul, to be outside the fellowship of believers is to be unshielded. It is to be put in Satan’s territory without the spiritual shield of the believer’s prayers covering and protecting your life.

The analogy we might draw is with a parent who has to demonstrate tough love to a wayward child. Let’s say a child gets into drugs or alcohol. And they are repeatedly getting into trouble with the law or losing their job or forfeiting on commitments. After a time we can see how our forgiveness and support can actually be enabling a destructive way of life. And Paul says the ultimate loving thing the church can do is to remove this person from its midst. This is what Paul was speaking of in Ephesians 4 when he urged the believers to “speak the truth in love” (v. 15).

This is where we get to something very important to understand. The goal of this discipline is not punishment but redemption. If the goal was punishment, then it would merely be cruel. The goal is reconciliation. Paul urges this man’s removal, “so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.” You see for Paul the worst thing is not for the one in persistent sin to be offended in this world for receiving disapproval and discipline from the church. The ultimate unloving thing to do would be to look the other way and allow this one to have a false security in his life and forfeit his spirit for eternity on the day of the Lord.

Cf. Jude 22-23: “Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them; to others show mercy, mixed with fear-- hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.”

If we enter into discipline out of anger and to exact revenge and to punish, we have strayed into sin. The goal is always to win a wayward brother or sister back.

4. Is the modern church, as in Corinth, guilty of judging outsiders while looking the other way for insiders? Is this one reason why many see the church as hypocritical?

In vv. 9-13 I think Paul offers a very important word of caution on how the church is to operate in this matter of church discipline. One of the things Paul says clearly is that he does not think the church is to pull away from and separate itself completely from the world (read vv. 9-10).

Paul does not call us to enter into a “Christian ghetto.” He expects believers to be fully engaged with the world. We are to be resisting its corruption and offering to it a winsome witness to the counter-cultural way of Jesus. In v. 10 Paul says that if we were to avoid contact with sinners “you would have to leave this world.”

I admire those like the Amish who have withdrawn from the world and its ways to protect themselves from corruption, but this verse challenges that approach. We are to be in this world but not of it.

Maybe we do not take such an extreme option as the Amish but we as Evangelical Christians can slip into our own “Christian ghetto.” We can listen to Christian music, buy from Christian bookstores, wear Christian t-shirts, send our kids to Christian schools (or home school), and fellowship only with fellow believers, but Paul challenges that. I remember talking to Karen Helm when they moved to Waco, Texas and she mentioned how strange it was to be so immersed there in evangelicalism. You went into the grocery story and there was Christian musak playing. The parent flyer from her school had an article on parenting copied from Home Life Magazine. It is tempting to withdraw and prop ourselves up. But Paul says we cannot do that, and he does he expect believers to do that.

Paul hits on something that is valid to this day. Paul says we are not called upon to sit in judgement on those who are unbelievers. He does not tell Christians to avoid the sexually immoral, the greedy, the swindlers, the idolaters. This is the way we should expect people who are in the world to behave. They are unregenerate. They are lost. They are clueless. And so were we when we were where they are. We are not to judge these people, but we are to love them with the love of Jesus.

The problem with the Corinthians church was not their toleration and fraternization with unbelievers. The problem was that they allowed one who “called himself a brother” to persist in living as though he did not know Jesus and the demands Jesus makes. Note Paul flows in v. 11 nearly the same description of the so-called believer with the non-believer: sexually immoral, greedy, idolater, slanderer, drunkard, swindler.

I think Paul would call the evangelical church today on the carpet for the same things he busted the Corinthians for. They were judging outsiders and being non-judgmental with those inside the church, when, in fact, they should have been doing just the opposite. They should have been non-judgmentally loving sinners into the kingdom and demanding accountability and obedience of those inside the body.

What usually shows up on the top ten list of non-believers when they describe Christians? They say we are judgmental and hypocritical. And they are right. How do we rescue our image? The liberal church’s answer is to just be non-judgmental to both outsiders and insiders. That takes care of being judgmental but it does not dispel hypocrisy. The legalistic answer is to judge everyone, inside and out, harshly. This might take care of hypocrisy but does not dispel judgmental-ism. But the Biblical answer is to reach out in non-judging love to non-believers and then to demand a purity and holiness of life among believers that insures that the witness of their lives will not lead to the charge of hypocrisy.

Paul makes this abundantly clear in vv. 12-13: “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.”

The last word of chapter five is Paul’s exclamation point: “Expel the wicked man from among you.” Here Paul is quoting the Septuagint of Deuteronomy 17:7.

Now on a first reading that seems harsh. But when you recognize that Paul views the church as the legitimate covenant people of God who are called out of the world into a holy and set apart life. And when you realize that the discipline he suggests is not just to secure the purity of the church, but it also truly seeks the redemption of this wayward brother. Then it seems not harsh but faithful and right.

5. How does Paul view the local church’s authority to settle disputes among believers (see 6:1-8)?

In 6:1 Paul addresses another disputed issue at Corinth. Apparently some of the brothers were taking each other into the secular courts to settle disputes. Paul laments how this damages the witness of believers (v. 6). Basically, Paul says that a believer should never take another believer to court. What would this do to the judicial caseload of today?

Paul’s real point, it seems is to emphasize again the real authority of the believers bound in faith and covenant as the church. He reminds them that they will one day judge the world, how much less these trivial cases (v. 2). Paul says one ought to allow even men of little account to judge such matters (v. 4), or they ought even to allow themselves to be wronged rather than to injure the witness of Christ (v. 7).

I leave this passage with a deep impression of the awesome way in which Paul describes the nature of the church. The maintenance of its purity is so crucial. It has an authority and significance beyond our imagining and our human estimation.

Let me return at last to a few verses we skipped over.

In v. 6 Paul says again: “Your boasting is not good.” Again, he chastens the church for its pride in liberty that is not balanced by discipline.

Then Paul uses the analogy of yeast in vv. 6-8. He asks: “Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough?” (v. 6). Now in the gospels Jesus told a parable in which the believers were compared to yeast. Matthew 13:33: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” Though little and seemingly insignificant, they can have an impact far beyond their size.

Jesus also uses the analogy of yeast in a negative sense when he says, “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matthew 16:6). In the same way that a small pocket of believers can be salt and light and exert great influence on the mass, so a small bit of evil and malice can exert an influence out of all proportion to its size.

Here in 1 Corinthians 5 Paul uses the negative side of that analogy. He tells them to “Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast – as you really are.” The Jewish Christians would have understood completely what Paul was talking about. He was talking about the Passover when the Hebrew families would search through their houses to get rid of all the yeast. They would read the scripture from Exodus 12 about the Passover night when the lamb was killed and his blood put outside the doorposts of their houses and the unleavened bread, the bread made in haste, was eaten.

Paul then says, “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (v. 7).

It is his blood that has been put on the doorposts of our lives. His blood has been smeared over the doors of the church, whether it is a body of believers meeting in a storefront or a Cathedral or a 60’s plexi-glass and brick building. And woe to that man who is outside this protected place when the angel of death comes.

Paul says in v. 8, “Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

Paul was saying that to allow a brother or sister living in persistent and unrepentant sin is not a sign of the church’s maturity or it’s great love for sinner. It is a sign of weakness and duplicity and hypocrisy. Paul says, enough of that, let’s be real with each other. Let’s eat the bread of sincerity and truth. If there is one place in this world where we can be real with each other, it ought to be here.

Jeffrey T. Riddle
Pastor, Jefferson Park Baptist Church

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Sermon

1 Corinthians 5:1–6:8 — Church Discipline

February 2, 2003

Jeffrey T. Riddle Pastor, Jefferson Park Baptist Church

Jeffrey T. Riddle
Pastor, Jefferson Park Baptist Church