A Community of Holiness

Two things guaranteed to get any pastor in trouble are preaching on Money and Church Discipline. So lets take another offering, and you give enough money and we can skip it! (Kidding)

Main Idea: Because God does not Give up on His Children, neither can we.

English Standard Version Chapter 18

10 “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. 12 What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? 13 And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. 14 So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

English Standard Version Chapter 18

15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. 18 Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 19 Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”

So there are alot of opinions on what we call “Church Discipline”, and very few of them positive. Alot of that comes from a complete lack of understanding.

When we get this concept in our head, we think maybe of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”. If you haven’t read that, the main character is branded as an adulteress with a Scarlet A that is pinned onto all of her clothing, to shame her for her sin.

Or maybe we have seen bad situations of this in the past. Abusive pastors or church leaders using this passage as a way to manipulate church members. Unfortunately, this happens more often than we would want to admit.

But before we can even get into any discussion of “Church Discipline”, we have to go back to last week.

Because if Sin is not serious, and as a community of believers, if we do not see Sin as serious, we will never see the need for this passage.

We live in a culture that prizes independence and privacy. And that has creeped into the church. We increasingly have a view of our relationship with God as something inherently private, something between us and God.

But that view is completely foreign to the Scripture. Completely antithetical to authentic Christian Community.

The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power.”

You see, Biblical community is not surface level community. It is not a Christian veneer that overlays the reality of sin scarred lives. And if we create this type of “Sweep it under the rug, pretend like it isn’t there” Christianity, we will never ever be able to do what Christ calls us to in this passage.

Bonhoeffer wrote “He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone.  It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness.  The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners.  The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner.  So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship.  We dare not be sinners.  Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous.  So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy....Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian brother, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned.  The sinner surrenders; he gives up all his evil.  He gives his heart to God, and he finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother. The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power.”

We allow sin to keep a hold of us when we try to keep it out of sight. And if Christ’s words from last week are to be heeded, and we have to cut that from our life, we have to get serious about our sin, and about our brothers and sister’s sin.

Look at Verse 10. “See that you do not despise one of these little ones”. Remembering from Mike two weeks ago, these little ones are believers. So automatically, any attitude that we could have that looks down on a brother or sister in Christ is foreign to this passage. Any Scarlet Letter type shaming is forbidden right at the offset.

Why can’t you look down on your brothers and sisters? Because you are every bit the sinner that they are. We are all Saved by the same grace.

Romans says “None are righteous, no not one.” Not one. Not your brother in Christ, not your sister in Christ, not you. Not one. And because we are all on the same level of sin, we have no ability to be haughty when a brother or sister has fallen into their own sin.

Now look at what Christ bases this commandment in. He says “For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven”.

This passage has been used to support the idea that each believer has their own “guardian angel”. Unfortunately, we can’t say that definitively. What we can say is that God has charged the Angels with the protection of His people. Notice Jesus refers to the angels as belonging to the believers.

says

English Standard Version Chapter 1

14 Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?

Wayne Grudem has said that it is more likely, to use a basketball analogy, that angels play a zone defense rather than a man to man.

But the statement is clear. The value of Christ’s children is so great, that the angels in Heaven, who have direct access to God himself and see his face, are supporting figures to Christ’s little ones.

Christ continues this point with the parable. And for the sake of time, we aren’t going to go in depth with the parable, but the bottom line is that Christ isn’t willing to let any of His sheep wander off into trouble. He pursues them until he finds them.

And this same pursuit and protection that Christ has of His Sheep, we are to have with our fellow sheep.

So what we have here is the age old End/Means conversation. One of the common distortions of the doctrine of predestination is that because God chooses His children, and what God has decreed will come to pass, that means we don’t need to tell people about Jesus.

And of course, that’s patently false. We are the means by which God draws His children unto Himself. God’s sovereignty does not excuse our disobedience if we fail to tell others about Him.

In the same way, it is true that “God has began a good work in you, He will be faithful to complete it.” God will hold onto His Children. But this does not excuse us of the responsibility we have to keep each other from sin. We are the means by which God protects His Sheep from wandering.

Take a look at verse 15.

English Standard Version Chapter 18

15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.

Now we have to talk about the beginning of this verse. We have a textual variant here at the beginning. Some of the manuscripts that we have read this as you see it. “If a brother sins against you”, which would limit the passage to sins between Christ’s Children.

But we also have older manuscripts that just read “If your brother sins”. Which would include a variety of sins that could be harming a brother or sister.

Usually in a textual variant, we can come to a pretty good idea of what the original text said. In this case, we cannot. Most scholars who attend to these things have the words against you in brackets, which is a way of saying they are likely inserted by later scribes.

But regardless of the reading, the effect is the same. We go to the brother or sister in sin first. And it needs to be pointed out here, that this is sin we are talking about. Not personal preference, not personality trait, not pet peeve. Sin is the only reason for this confrontation. Sin as defined by the Bible.

What I want to do is to use this parable of the lost sheep as we go through this process.

So if we see that a brother or sister has fallen into sin, we come to them. So to use the picture of the sheep, if we were in the pasture, and we saw a sheep that is caught up in the briars, we go directly to that sheep to pull them out. It does the sheep no good if we walk the other way and go tell a bunch of other sheep.

Look at the end of verse 15. The purpose of going to your brother or sister is to gain them. Every single step of this process is to win your brother or sister back. This is not the checklist on how to get rid of people. This is the checklist of how to make sure you don’t lose anyone.

So then on to verse 16

English Standard Version Chapter 18

16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

So now, we have gone to the sheep, and tried to pull them out of the briars, and either they don’t see the danger they are in, or they are unwilling to be unstuck.

So we go grab another sheep or two, and we come back, still trying to dislodge the sheep from the briars.

Now the typical reaction here is “THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DON’T WANT!”

Some people see this as bringing people to gang up on the wayward sheep. But two things here:

One, the effort here is to keep the circle as small as possible. And these are not believers brought along to help smack down the sinful believer, but to witness the confrontation. It may be possible that the believer isn’t really in the briars, but is just munching on some different grass. The matter is brought up in front of witnesses so that the truth of the matter can be determined. No room for he said/she said situations here. The stakes are too high if Sin is that serious.

Look now at verse 17

English Standard Version Chapter 18

17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

So we tried to pull the sheep out of the briars, and they don’t think they are in danger. So we grab one or two others to help us convince them of the danger, and they still think everything is fine. Now we need to enlist the whole flock.

It is especially at this level, that people who prize privacy start to lose it.

“You mean to tell me we are supposed to trot out this brother or sister in front of the entire church and tell their sin? I thought you said this wasn’t “The Scarlett Letter!”

And again, we need to take into consideration two things here

The seriousness of sin necessitates that we do everything we can to free our brother or sister from its grasp. We cannot claim to love one another and be willing to let each other walk away into sin

The stubbornness and unwillingness to listen to counsel by the offending party is the reason we get to this point. Maybe you disagree with a brother or sister on whether an action or attitude or teaching is sinful. But when two or three agree that it is so, and we still refuse to recant or repent, we are choosing our sin over our brothers and sisters

And so we tell the flock of the sheep in the briars. And the flock all testify to the danger, and still, they refuse to be removed from the thorns. They refuse to see their situation for what it is.

Jesus says if that is the case, then let them be as someone who is outside of the Covenant. This is excommunication. But even here, this is not punitive. The point of this isn’t “you messed up, so you gotta hit the road jack!”

To remove someone from the covenant of the church is a weighty thing. And that’s exactly the point. If we exist in the koinonia that we are designed to exist in, to be removed from that fellowship should be devastating.

This is a last ditch effort to show the wayward sheep the gravity of the situation they are in. When they won’t listen even to the flock, the flock leaves them to their predicament, and perhaps then the sheep will understand how stuck they really are.

And we see here in verse 18-20 that we have been given the authority from the Father to deal with these matters.

Christ says that what the body binds on earth will be bound in heaven, and what we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

Again, this shows the utter seriousness of sin. Christ shows that unrepentant sinners are not true believers in Him, and so if we find ourselves outside of the fellowship of the local church, it should be yet a greater warning that perhaps our standing before the Lord is not what we think it is!

Christ’s sheep desire to please the shepherd. We desire to please Christ. And if our brothers and sisters show us how we are displeasing Him, and we are flippant about it, refusing to listen and repent, our actions are revealing an inward issue and we need to work out our salvation as James says, “in fear and trembling”

So we want to understand this morning that our pursuit of each other’s holiness matches Christ’s pursuit of us. We pursue one another because of each of our worth as children of Christ.

We have all been the sheep left on the mountainside, and we have all been the sheep in the briar patch. Why? Because sin is deceitful!

says

English Standard Version Chapter 14

12  There is a way that seems right to a man,

but its end is the way to death

When we think we are fine but are stuck in the briars, we need brothers and sisters to show us our fault so that we can be redeemed.

But this type of support and accountability doesn’t exist if we are commited to the veneer of “everything is alright”. Nothing in history has ever been solved by ignoring the issue. This is the most seductive lie we have in our relationships. Its so much easier to just pretend.

But God’s Word doesn’t allow us to do that. So let me ask you this morning, who knows you well enough to point out sin in your life? Who loves you enough to show you your sin and keep you from the briar patch? If those people aren’t here, aren’t part of this body, then we have work to do.

Christ’s love for His sheep drives the sheep together. We should be leaning on each other, sharing our faults, praying and holding each other accountable. The Holiness of God’s people depends on it.