Sermon Tone Analysis

Recently, I have been teaching Kylie how to ride a bike with no training wheels.

She likes learning how to ride a bike so it does not matter how hot it is outside or what the weather is like she is constantly asking me dad can we work on riding the bike again.

Dad can we work on riding a bike again.

She begs me to work with her on riding a bike.

In teaching to ride a bike, what if I never told her anything she done wrong?

What if I only told her to do right.

The other day she had the peddle and her foot was pushing down on it to apply the brake.

She was trying to move forward but the brake was applied.

I had to tell her that she had to take her foot off the brake and move the peddle around.

Most everyone is familiar with riding a bike so there are times in this teaching process that you have to show a child what they are doing wrong.

It can be positive to point out the negative.

In 1 Corinthians 5 Paul addresses the negative.

Pray

I am confident that it takes an immense amount of love to help people understand sin in a Christ like manner.

Paul has addressed them in a loving tone and called them brothers and children in the previous chapter

So Paul continues to address them in a spirit of love and gentleness.

So this guy is sleeping with his step mother.

If it was his mother then Paul would have said so.

But whether it means that the offender had seduced his step-mother, or that the woman was divorced from his father, or that the father had died, leaving her a widow, is not clear.

This sin that is happening Paul says is not even tolerated among the pagans or Gentiles.

This is a sin because God says it is a sin in His word.

How do we know what sin is?

We find it in the Word of God and if scripture calls it sin then it is sin.

Notice he says the kind of sexual immorality that is not even tolerated among the Gentiles.

Scripture lays out other kinds of Sexual Immorality and a quick search of scripture brought out some of these and as Paul writes to the church at Corinth I thought it would be helpful for us this morning to understand other types of sexual immorality.

Incest: Leviticus 18:6, Genesis 19:33-36

Adultery: Vince spoke about this sin last week 2 Samuel 11:4, Jeremiah 23:14, Hosea 1:2

Prostitution: 1 Corinthians 6:15-16, Judges 16:1, Hosea 4:13-15

Fornication: Numbers 25:1,6 1 Samual 2:22

Homosexuality: Genesis 19:5, Judges 19:22

So we know it is sin because the word of God says it is sin.

This sin that is being dealt with here in 1 Corinthians is not a sin because not even the pagans or Gentiles will put up with it but it is a sin because the Word of God says it is sin.

Paul address the negative.

He addresses the attitude of the church.

He says they are inflated with pride, instead of filled with grief.

Pride gives us the ability to believe the ways are men are better than the ways of God.

What we think is right is better than what God’s Word says is right.

Pride causes us to think we know better than God.

You are inflated with pride, instead of filled with grief.

Turn over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh

To be expelled from the church accordingly is to be delivered over into that region where Satan holds sway.

It is a very forcible expression for the loss of all Christian privileges.

One sees ‘the flesh’ as the lower part of man’s nature, and takes the passage to mean the destruction of the sinful lusts (so NIV, that the sinful nature may be destroyed; cf.

Redpath, he ‘is to be given over to Satan until that principle of yieldedness to the flesh is ended’)

The other view is that ‘the flesh’ is to be understood as physical, the reference being to sickness and even death.

The difficulty is in seeing how this could be effected by excommunication.

But Paul speaks of physical consequences of spiritual failings (11:30)

Paul sees the punishment as remedial: though the flesh be destroyed it is so that his spirit may be saved.

That this means saved in the fullest sense is made clear by the addition, on the day of the Lord.

At the final day of judgment he expects to see the disciplined offender among the Lord’s people.

This church had allowed the influence to the outside world to infiltrate the church and they did more than deal with the situation at hand.

They would boast about the sin that was present among them and in the same way Paul tells them to address the sin in their life of boasting.

Paul uses an illustration from the kitchen.

He says a little yeast permeates the whole batch of dough.

Clean out the old yeast so that you might be a new batch.

Go back to me teaching Kylie to ride her bike.

She is accustom to riding with training wheels.

You ever try to ride a bike with training wheels lately.

If the bike leans sometimes it is easier to ride it with leaning into one wheel or the other.

In order to ride without training wheels you have to do things differently.

In the same way when you come to the Gospel you have to do things differently.

Paul says you can’t have sexual immorality and you can’t have pride about the sexual immorality.

You have to get rid of the old yeast.

Christ is for believers what the passover was for the Jews.

Ancient Israel was commanded to remove all yeast before the sacrifice (Exod.

12:15; 13:7), and in Paul’s day a feature of passover observance was a solemn search for and destruction of all yeast before the feast began.

This had to be done before the pascha, the kid or lamb, was offered in the temple.

Paul points out that Christ, our Passover has already been sacrificed.

It is time and more than time that all yeast (i.e.

all evil) was put away.

v.8 The Christian life is a continual Festival

The verb to associate with (synanamignysthai) is an expressive double compound, used outside this passage only once in the New Testament (2 Thess.

3:14; see note in TNTC).

It means ‘to mix up yourself with’; Paul has forbidden them to have familiar intercourse with sexual offenders.

His point had been that they must not maintain intimate fellowship (the same picturesque word as in v. 9) with anyone who calls himself a brother, but denies his profession by the way he lives.

He is not really a brother, but ‘a fornicator’ or the like.

Believers are to have no intimate intercourse with people who continue in such practices.

Do not even eat will refer primarily to ordinary meals (cf. 2 John 10), not to Holy Communion, though that, too, would be forbidden.

But Paul’s main point, that the church must not tolerate the presence of evil in its midst, is clearly permanently relevant.