EPISODE 113 1 CORINTHIANS CHAPTER 5 " Shocking!"

Welcome to Share the Word, and welcome to those who are joining us for the first time. This episode focuses on 1 Corinthians chapter 5, where Paul confronts the church about a morality issue that shouldn't be tolerated. But what should the church be doing? The better question is, what is the church doing about it? Let's listen in. 1 Corinthians chapter 5.

Shocking. Here's a question for you. Does anything shock you anymore? I mean anything. Yesterday when I wrote this, I mean, a 14-year-old kid named Colt Gray shot 13 people at his high school in Georgia. Four of them have died, including two students and two teachers.

I'm sure you probably saw or read something about that. Did that shock you? Probably not. If you live in America, I say probably not because it's actually the 30th mass shooting in the U.S. this year, meaning it happens almost once a week on average. Less than a week ago on Labor Day, four more people were shot and killed on a train in Chicago. It's hard to get shocked over things, awful as they are, when they happen so often.

How about in the moral slash sexual area? Is anything actually shocking anymore? I've lived long enough now that I remember when things actually were shocking, when people did everything to hide and cover up immoral behavior because if the public knew, it'd be scandalous and they'd lose their job or their public office or their standing in their community. But things virtually everyone agreed were way immoral even 50, 60, 70 years ago have, in my lifetime, gone from being hidden and only talked about in whispers, to being tolerated as long as they were done discreetly, to being more openly practiced but ignored by polite society. To now being normalized and even celebrated. It'd be hard to find a story today in America anyway that people would actually be shocked to read.

We've grown shockproof, I think. But the apostle Paul was shocked to hear from Chloe about something that was going on in the church he planted in Corinth a few years before. What was going on? Well, listen to the first couple verses in chapter five. It's actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans. For a man has his father's wife, and yet you are arrogant.

Ought you not rather be grieving? Let him who has done this thing be removed from your fellowship. So this is another problem Paul has heard about infecting the Corinthian church. A church member is openly sleeping with his mother-in-law, his father's wife, in an immoral relationship. We can assume the woman was not part of the church because Paul does not call her out, and where the father is in this picture, who knows? But the man in question is apparently a member, still in good standing in the Corinthian church.

This activity and relationship was considered incest under Roman law and outside the norms, even as Paul puts it here, not tolerated by the pagans. But again, this is Corinth, and immorality was part and parcel of their culture. It reads to me like what this man was openly doing surprised Paul, but what was shocking to him was what the church was doing about it, which was nothing, indifference. He says even arrogance. I'm not sure what they were thinking, like what was there to be proud of in this? Were they proud of the fact they were so open-minded, as we would say today, so tolerant?

Paul's take was, This is so far out of line, you should be grieving over this. And that fellow I've heard about, he cannot continue in your fellowship. He can't be a member of your church and be doing this. Put him out. Wow. Does that reaction from the apostle surprise you?

What Paul is describing here is an official excommunication. As an apostle, he had the authority to order that be done, and he does. Listen as he goes on. Even though I am absent in body, I am with you in spirit, and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who is doing such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit present with you, in the power of the Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may yet be saved in the day of the Lord. Day of the Lord is a reference to when Christ comes back.

Paul is not consigning this man to hell. He didn't have the authority or the desire to do that. In fact, he counts him as a believer because he says, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. But he's saying he must be removed from the church as a member in good standing, and that this must be done when they are assembled, meaning in a public way. He is to be removed from God's people and symbolically pushed back out the door into the world as though he were an unbeliever, back out into Satan's realm of control. The intention is that such a public condemnation of his sinful behavior will not only purge and sober up the church, but hopefully wake this fellow up and bring him to repentance and to restoration.

Chances are very good that you have never seen anything like this happen. Am I right? I'm not talking about the immoral relationship, but what the apostle said the church's response to it should be. In my society, American society, people prize their independence and privacy more than just about anything. So the attitude is, whatever I do on my time in my private life is no one else's darn business. In fact, I think most Americans today, their most prized right, as they see it, is their personal autonomy, meaning the right to do what we want to do without being bothered by anybody else.

That attitude has really come to the forefront in this generation, as we are seeing before. Things that would have been shocking and even against the law in the past are now common, and much of our sophisticated society is largely okay with them. I mean, transvestite story hour for children at the local library, biological males in girls' locker rooms at your high school. Things have actually gotten to the point of absurdity. But once a society has thrown off God's ideals as the standard of what is right and wrong, kind of cut the mooring lines, if you know what I mean, and is adrift. And once even Christian denominations decide to jettison biblical ideals and go with the flow of our morally declining culture, both of which have been going on for some time now, we're descending into a place not unlike where Corinth was in the first century.

But here is the big idea, and this is what caused the apostle's clear and strong response to what he heard there. This cannot be what goes on in the Church of Jesus Christ. This cannot be normalized among God's people. Let me explain why. There are actually a few reasons. The most important one is it's very insulting to Christ.

In what way? Well, realize that the New Testament describes the church as the bride of Christ. This is Ephesians chapter 5, where Paul describes this analogy. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, he wrote there, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of the water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Hmm. That's a passage where Paul is making this extended analogy between husbands and wives and how it relates to Christ and his church.

As a man wants to see his bride as pure, as wholly devoted to him and so on, which we symbolize with the white wedding gown and with the spoken vows of promising faithfulness to each other, so Christ wants the church to be his pure and holy bride. After all, he laid down his life for us. For the church to tolerate the kind of gross immorality that was happening in Corinth, seen through the lens of that analogy, is like a woman shaming, publicly embarrassing her husband, publicly, by flagrant immorality before others. Just as no man wants to experience that, so Christ does not want to see things that bring him shame and embarrassment going on in a local church. Second, tolerating this kind of sin in a local church makes the charge of hypocrisy one enemies of Christianity love to raise what our enemy, Satan, loves to use to turn people away from the gospel.

It makes that charge ring wholly true. It makes that charge stick. Not dealing with open sin in our midst damages our church's testimony and, rather than shining as a light in the darkness, makes people scoff. Those Christians who talk about righteousness and morality, but look what's going on there. They're no different than us. And that undercuts our whole message, doesn't it?

Christ calls us to be the light of the world. He said to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount, Let your light shine before men in such a way that they see your good and glorify your Father who's in heaven. Peter wrote in his general epistle to early Christians, Remember that you are chosen people, royal priests, a holy nation, God's very own possession. As a result, show others his goodness, for he called you out of the darkness and into his marvelous light. So be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. Then, even if you are accused of doing things wrong, they will see your honorable behavior and will give honor to God.

Wow, that's the way it should be. But the Corinthian church was not only shaming Christ, they were destroying their own testimony, destroying their own believability by letting this go on. Thirdly, whatever twisted thinking led them to ignore this behavior from one of their members was, in fact, also a huge disservice to that man himself. We discussed recently, remember this, the instruction about having the courage and love to admonish one another. And if those in the wrong will not respond to admonition, then how it needs to become a situation for the church's leaders to resolve. And if they can't, then excommunication is the last step.

But saying, It's none of our business what those two people are doing in the privacy of their home, you know, when he was in fact a member of the church in Corinth, was showing callous indifference to a member, to a friend who is in spiritual danger. It's not love to watch people engage in things God hates and which will bring God's chastening in their lives. If you are unfamiliar with what I mean by chastening, the New Testament teaches that those who belong to God, who He regards as His own children, as a good father, He will discipline when they need it. We call that chastening. So getting involved in trying to turn this man around was what was the loving and right thing to do. And then there's a fourth reason, if we needed any more.

Paul says later in this chapter, Don't you know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? He's telling them that tolerating or excusing one situation like this will only lead to more, like a small bit of yeast permeates and soon affects an entire lump of dough. One thing leads to another, as we say. So Paul wanted this dealt with quickly, publicly, and strongly because he realized if it wasn't, this could lead to more abuses by others and this church body would be ruined. So can you even imagine when the leaders of that church in Corinth got these instructions from Paul? Can you even imagine when the next public meeting of that congregation occurred where this fellow was present?

Talk about uncomfortable. I bet you could have heard a pin drop because the leaders of that church had to let the guy know in a public setting he was no longer welcome to participate with the body of Christ, that he would not be welcome until and unless he ended this wrong relationship with his stepmother and sought forgiveness. And then the congregation was instructed to disassociate from him until he repented, to treat him as an outsider. And now for the other announcements. Not a fun day to be at church. It reminds me of what it might have felt like in the first church at Jerusalem when God's judgment fell on those frauds Ananias and Sapphira, remember?

Luke says in Acts chapter 5 that great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about it. I think we titled that lesson, Not to Be Trifled With, meaning God takes serious things that affect His church and His reputation seriously. When we don't, serious problems will result. The church today needs to pay attention to these biblical examples. For the most part, we are not taking seriously some of the things God takes seriously. We are not serious enough about being God's holy people, a people for His own possession, as Peter put it.

When there are obvious cases of flagrant sin apparent in the lives of members of our churches, churches that claim to be Bible-based, leaders have to be strong enough to deal with those problems clearly, honestly. Serious sin has to be isolated and cured like an infection, or things only get worse and the whole body suffers. The church's testimony suffers in the community and worst of all, Christ's and the gospel's reputation is damaged. Now, if you're listening to all this and you're not a Christian, you're just listening because you're curious about the New Testament and what it has to say, if you haven't clicked off already, let me clarify something for you that I definitely need to clarify. Paul continues in his chapter and writes this. This is important for you to hear.

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. I didn't at all mean sexually immoral people in this world, or greedy, swindlers, idolaters, and so on, since then you would need to go out of this world. But now I'm writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother, if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed or an idolater or whatever, not to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God will judge those who are outside.

So purge the evil person from among you. The instruction about putting this man out and disassociating from him because of his immoral behavior is because he is claiming to be a brother, a follower of Christ, one of the members of the church body. I'm not instructing you, Paul says, to judge and disassociate from non-believers. Judging them not only is not your place to do, and disassociating from them is impossible unless you want to move out of the world. God doesn't want us to do that. How could we be the light of the world?

How could we be fishers of men? Or how could we share our faith if we are judging and pulling away from people who are not believers yet? No, that's not our role. That's contradictory, self-defeating. It contradicts the Great Commission. It goes directly against what Jesus modeled too, who was a friend of sinners, we're told many times in the Gospels.

Paul wants the Corinthians to understand this distinction. Our responsibility is to judge those within the body who are openly flaunting God's rules, like this guy in an incestuous relationship, for all the reasons I enumerated a few moments ago. And as we'll see, with a longer range view of seeing him repent and be restored. But sinners acting like sinners, people who don't pretend to be Christians, that's not shocking. That's kind of normal. And judgment for those outside the body of Christ will be up to God.

It's not up to us. In fact, Christians should be looking for ways to associate with those who are unbelievers, just as Jesus did. So, if you're not a believer yet, not a believer at this point and listening because you are just curious about Christianity and the New Testament, rest assured no good church whose goal it is to live out the instructions in the New Testament of the Bible is going to judge you if you attend a service or an event they sponsor or otherwise associate with them. If they do, they are totally out of line with what the Scripture plainly is teaching in this passage. And if you have been made to feel judged or unwanted when you were just trying to explore for answers, I apologize for the ignorant Christians who made you feel that way and hope you will have a better experience at a better church. Some Christians are clueless, sadly.

But most of us get this distinction and would love to welcome you to our church and answer your questions and let you see what we're about. So, the primary application of this passage is pointed at those of us who call ourselves followers of Christ and who are members of a church or especially leaders in a local church. This is a straightforward challenge to take church discipline seriously and to keep our behavior personally exemplary and pleasing to Christ and so protect His reputation and the reputation of our church in His community. It's not a call to be a bunch of private investigators, but a call to be courageous enough to confront obvious wrongs, detrimental behavior in our church body if it appears. As Paul put it here, cleanse out the old leaven and let us celebrate the festival with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

By festival, I think he might be referring to the Lord's Supper in particular, or possibly just the times that their assembly gathered together to worship. When the believers came together and are purposely coming into God's presence to worship, to fellowship, to have the Lord's Supper and other things that went on, it's a celebration of being a part of God's family. And so it should always be a time and place of sincerity and truth, Paul says. Two big takeaways from 1 Corinthians 5. God expects His children to act like His children in the world, as lights in the world, not conforming to the darkness around us. As things get darker, we should shine brighter because of our goodness, he says, our authenticity, our integrity.

Never be one who makes your heavenly Father look bad or who causes unbelievers to doubt the truth and power of the gospel by your bad behavior. Second, God expects church leaders to be concerned enough and strong enough to deal with someone who is a member who openly flaunts that expectation. As overseers, that is their duty. Know the facts, act in love, but when necessary, act. Bring needed judgment to the body of Christ if it is infected with serious sin, which is damaging your church's unity and testimony in its community. This is Paul for Share the Word.

Thanks again, Paul, for your incredible insight and bringing out the big idea of this and all the other chapters. We want to remind everyone that Share the Word is a Great Commission project, and our goal is to share the good news around the world. Remember, in Matthew 28, our instructions are clear: Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. As Paul said, we need to shine brighter in this dark world, and when you shine, let them know who Jesus is. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.