Sexual Immorality must be judged

This morning's passage is a continuation on what Roger taught last week. When Roger was done, Pat came up and immediately asked some questions. He said, I'm going to be out of town next week, so I'm going to ask you my questions now about this passage. So hopefully I do a good job of answering his questions that he had, and the other questions that come up here.

What's funny is this is a deceptively short passage compared to some of the other stretches we've had. There is a lot of topical material here that is covering a whole swath of the Christian life that is actually pretty divisive. So I'm hoping that as we cover this, that not only is it clear, but it's encouraging and it also is reassuring of God's plan in the church and outside of the church as well. So I'm going to go ahead and read this first paragraph out, which is actually 1 Corinthians 5, 9-13. And then we'll dive into this first section.

I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with the idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves."

The first thing we should dive into on this is, he says, I wrote you in my letter, not to associate, and even though that's just an interesting sentence that you would normally just kind of pass over, okay, he wrote something in the past, we have to remember that our understanding is that at least one other letter was written before 1 Corinthians to the church in Corinth.

So we call this 1 Corinthians, but it's likely 2 Corinthians. And as far as the number of letters that Paul wrote, it would be the second letter, but it's the first one that we have. So we call it 1 Corinthians. But it's interesting that we can be reminded that his faithfulness to Corinth He has faithfully written to them, and he has faithfully visited them, and he has faithfully sent Timothy to make sure that they're okay and continue to feed them and bring back news of them.

And so the character of Paul as a spiritual father to them is reflected, or we're reminded of it, in just this little fragment. One of the things that I always looked for when I was younger when I was teaching was, is there an application here? And as it turns out, The direct application is between Paul and Corinth, but the indirect application for us as believers is that sometimes the Lord puts people in our lives who are, I'm going to call them wrestlers.

They're wrestlers with God's Word and they're wrestlers in spiritual growth. They really don't understand who they are in Christ and despite how much energy you put into them, they don't ever seem to get it. We don't question their salvation. We know they're saved, but they don't seem to get past sometimes fundamental issues.

And so I think of the Church of Corinth to be a larger group of wrestlers based on the fact that we have his other writings and the idea that he went to visit so much because of the wrestling. So we can take a look at that and kind of in our own frame of reference, we can look at it and say, Lord, when we're praying, remind me to pray for the wrestlers and care for the wrestlers and be communicating with the wrestlers. As it turns out, sometimes the wrestlers are faithful in our own lives and the Lord will remind us and use them anyways. So here he says, I wrote in my previous letter and we can be reminded that Paul was faithful with this wrestling church. But the thing that he wrote now is, we'll dig into some meaty material here, I wrote you not to associate with immoral people.

Alright, now I'm going to call out something Roger called out last week, but I'm going to word it in a different way. I think the translators have kind of whitewashed what's going on here by using the term immoral. Does anybody remember what Greek word Roger mentioned last week is behind this word immoral?

It's pornea. Mine doesn't say immoral. Okay, good. Which translation do you have? Mine says fornicator. Awesome. That's a better translation. I'm going to call out the NASB translators on this with all of the authority of a junior Sunday school teacher. But the reality that exists here is that the immorality is a sexual immorality. We want to make sure that we observe that context because it's very easy in today's modern culture to say immoral, think of somebody jaywalking and move on.

Right? That's what we do. We correlate in our minds often. We look for a fast understanding of a word. We don't dig deeper into it. And then we walk away thinking that, man, we should not hang out with people who jaywalk. And that's not the point here. We have people who are sexually promiscuous.

And that's always a fun thing to say when you've got young kids in the class. And they have crossed lines, and Paul has already called out earlier in this passage that these people have made really gross decisions, and the consequence of that is that they are polluting the body. And so Paul says, hey, I've reminded you of this before. He's written this, the previous verses, 1 through 8 in this chapter, He's written before that even that they should not have that involved.

And why does he keep coming back to this theme in Corinth? Why is this a big deal in Corinth? I think he's said in other letters or in other parts of this same letter that if you have somebody who is not walking according to the Lord and you have to challenge him, give him three chances. Well, yeah, the three chances is elsewhere, but definitely here, he's going to say that they should be challenged. He did last week, there was elements of that. But why does he keep coming back to this in Corinth?

Because it's steeped in paganism. Or reflective of behavior. In effect, I mean, the three great sins in John, lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Pride's equally as sinful before the Lord as fornication, but the consequences for the body are substantial here, right? Yeah. We take things into ourselves and it's a different kind of sin. The nature of Corinth, remember, they're at a crossroads. So all kinds of cultures and sin are all coming through all the time. People are inventing and learning new sins in Corinth. And so the culture of Corinth is surrounded by perversity.

And it is that very thing that Paul is saying, you've got to keep that out. Don't associate with that. Don't bring that in. And so the next thing to observe here is, these things are things that he's written about before, he's writing it again, he's been thorough, but the church doesn't seem to understand why. They're not getting why this shouldn't happen.

So he's going to go into it a little bit further and he's going to continue to explore this. When we reach chapter 6, he's going to come back to this topic and go into it in further depth. And he's going to use the same vocabulary. So hopefully, when we get to chapter 6, we'll find ourselves going, even more information on this. So I won't steal chapter 6's lesson by going into some of those details. You can take some of it.

But there is a lot of lack of vision or understanding why this is going to impact the church. So this morning we'll take a look at some of those consequences of ignoring what has been written here to this church. Let's talk about the consequences of acceptance of carnality in the church. We're going to broaden our scope here. We're going to say carnality because we're not going to concern ourselves with just one manifestation of sinful behavior. We're going to look at the broader perspective. What happens if we inclusively mingle with perversion inside of the church?

Invitation for further spread, we'll see. It spreads. What did we learn from Romans chapter 1 about, at the very end, the last verse, I believe it's verse 32. What do we see in Romans 1.32? It is 32. He says, and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but they also give hearty approval to those who practice them, or join in. And that's the problem. The consequence of the church not only accepting it, but intermingling with it and just saying, hey, that's a thing that people do, is that more people do it.

There's a behavioral pattern. And what's interesting is that once you've stepped past one line, what prevents you from stepping past the next line and the next line? The slippery slope argument can be used as a logical fallacy, although it is not by itself a logical fallacy. And the thing that our culture often does is say, well, you have to you have to give them some room and some permission and then that becomes normative and then you have to give them some more room and some more permission.

This is talking about believers. This is a church. I don't know if y'all remember this but Bob had interacted with a gay couple. lesbian couple and they were going to be married. Actually that story came to mind. And so we were invited, they told us that they would invite us to the wedding. Would we come? I mean this was sort of a challenge to us I think because they knew we were believers and we had befriended them and shared the gospel with them. And so we brought this up, Bob brought this up in Sunday school class and there were people who were very upset that we were even considering attending the wedding.

Yeah. But this is really interesting here because it's talking about don't associate with these people if they're the church. Yeah. But we felt pretty strongly if in fact we got an invitation if it worked out in our schedule we might go because what we were trying to show them is that we loved them anyway. Yeah. And they were outside the church and that All sin, we had told them, all sin is sin. Yeah, across the board. Across the board.

So anyway, but that makes me think of that story right here. Not to delay this further, but when we first met one of these individuals for the first time, they asked how Margaret met me, and I said, at a Bible study. An hour later, after long thought and consideration of what I said, she said, you must hate me. That was her next correspondence stuff. Wow. And we're just sitting across the table from her. So the wedding, as far as we know, if it happened, it happened without us. We weren't invited. We didn't go.

But anyway, Margaret makes a good point. That's verse 10, right? We'll get into that kind of issue here in a second. The quality of what's going on here is something where we We see that he's he's made a broad statement but it's going to then narrow it down for us into the specifics.

So let's not let's not get too distracted by the broad statement other than to say that. he did not mean the immoral people of this world or with the covetous or the swindler or with the idolaters or then you would have to go out of the world so this right here this verse singularly has been a stumbling block for most of Christendom throughout all the ages since the resurrection of Christ and the establishment of the church people have wrestled with this very issue What is the point of a monastery? To take the flesh away from temptation, right? Yeah, we're going to isolate ourselves from all the world so that we can live holy lives. What is the point of separatism and even what cost some of our ancestry in this country? They separated themselves. They kept pulling away. There was persecution. They kept separating themselves. One of the problems that we face in this country is that the amount of isolationism that the space of the country could afford before has changed. And as the culture has moved towards cities, laws and legislation, as we have seen in recent news, continues to make broad sweeping statements about legislated morality that are radically opposed to the views held in the scripture.

So Paul is going to really hammer out the importance of understanding worldly immorality and immorality that's going on in the church. So in 10, the immoral people of this world, and he lists off a variety of immorality or immoral behaviors, he did not mean that or else you'd have to go out of the world. Why is it that he doesn't want them out of the world? He wants us to be a witness to the world.

If you don't put a situation in your life where someone is a non-believer, you can't preach the gospel. And that's really important. As I was thinking through this, one of the things I think is highly problematic is that what if the only message that you ever learn as a believer is the gospel? How will you engage with those who are believers?

If every time I saw Tom, I'm going to pick on you for just a split second, all I said to Tom was, Tom, Jesus Christ died on the cross. and rose again on the third day according to the scriptures. And you're like, that's great! We talked about that last week. And the next week I come in and I say, Tom, Jesus Christ died on the cross and was resurrected on the third day according to the scriptures. You'd be like, awesome! What else have you been reading? Welcome to Fundamental Church. But there's a depth there and there's a need there for the message beyond the gospel for our spiritual growth.

But likewise, if I go into every situation and assume, well, they're probably Christians, and I don't ever preach the gospel, or engage or find out we have a problem. So there is a need for this really dangerous word that starts with D. And that D word is discernment.

It means I come in and I engage, and I know Tom's a believer, so I say, OK, we can move past the gospel. I know that if I come to Roger and I only have the gospel, he's going to be like, what are you doing teaching Sunday school? You are not prepared for this. I'm like, Randy, every passage is not the gospel, that's all I know. But there's a problem here where what he's talking about is carnality inside of the church and he doesn't want carnality inside of the church. associating with immoral people still has appropriate boundaries, but that's going to be spirit-led.

He's going to give us discernment. I can think of all kinds of weird situations going into the lion's den where you could justify and say, I was preaching the gospel. You don't go into centers of sinfulness and Just say, oh, I was just preaching the gospel. There's discernment. I can think of some examples, but they're really not appropriate to put in a recording on the internet.

I'll just say it that way. But what about your job? I go to work, and I work with Muslims, and Hindus, and atheists, and agnostics, and they're all in the same place. And I mentioned that I have to do something for church on Sunday quite regularly in conversations. Putting that out there. I'm not allowed to overtly preach the gospel according to corporate policy, but you will find out I'm a Christian pretty quick.

It's going to happen. But I don't separate myself. At my previous job, I actually accidentally separated myself a lot. I worked at home in my basement for 10 years. That was extra separate. I don't recommend it. But the principle here is that he says, I didn't ask you to separate yourself from the world utterly, because you'd have to literally pull yourself out of the world. That's a big deal. What is the consequence in the life of the believer if they pull themselves away from places where worldliness exists? Where can you go? Where are you able to go to? Your home, or to church, or maybe with another believer. But it doesn't allow people outside the church to really understand the Christian life. True. And one of the consequences that we have seen, though, is that we get this isolationism. And the problem with that is that you actually develop this self-righteousness. or self-righteousness.

What I was thinking of is this atrophy of the gospel muscle, if you will, to use that. When Peter writes, we need to be able to defend or explain our position, why we're believers, in 1 Peter chapter 3. Well, if it's never challenged, how do you know? And if you just have a memorized statement, how do you counteract the new thing that's come out since you memorized it 20 years ago?

There's a dynamic in this interaction that's involved. And the other thing that I think is really important to recognize is that as a believer, if the Holy Spirit is moving out through you and you're manifesting the life of the Bride of Christ in the world, That's going to look really different.

Yesterday I mentioned in prayer requests I was at an all-state kids competition and there's lots of parents there and lots of kids there and they're all various ages and various walks of life and there are some things that are just really obvious. And the Christian parents in our group, because we do a homeschool thing where once a week our kids come together with other homeschool kids, not all of them believers. The homeschool parents that are believers were really obvious in contrast to many of the other folks that were there because of their language.

I couldn't believe how much swearing I heard in front of children. That would have never happened when I was in school. That would have been highly frowned upon. Now it's commonplace. and things like that that change. So our kids have to be prepared for that, I guess. That's where you reflect on your citizenship. Yeah, our citizenship is heavenly, but our ministry is earthly.

So if Paul says you're not going to isolate yourself, we're going to circle back around to the list of sins in the next section, because he repeats them. But he says, but actually I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a viler, or a drunkard, or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one.

So, let's talk about so-called brother. Who has a different translation? I know that the Eccles have probably a different translation there than so-called brother. Would you mind reading that out loud? But now I have written unto you not to keep company if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator. So this is a brother presumably.

Well and that's the thing is that they're calling themselves a Christian but their life doesn't match up to this at all. Well are they believers then? Well that's the question. We have to look at the fruit and we have to ask ourselves If the fruit separates us, then that's a separation. But what he's going to say here in verse 13 is that God is going to be the one that is the judge. God knows if they're believers.

I have people who are near and dear to me in my life, whom I believe responded to the gospel, but have walked away into various sorts of either perversions or liberalities that I don't think line up with the scripture. And that's hard. People I love and care about, and when I try to approach them with their faith, they throw it back in my face and they say, that's not who I am anymore. That's hard. I don't like that.

I don't get to judge whether or not they're saved, but I do have to evaluate whether or not you need to be spending a lot of time with them. And we're going to go over nuances of this a bit more. Roger went over it last week a bit. This is part of one of Pat's questions. At what point in time do I draw the line and separate myself? What does that separation look like? Is the separation personal? Is the separation corporate? We're going to go into that. We have some revelation here that we can rely on that's clear.

But these are so-called brothers. And I want to point out that what we can address here with great clarity is people who call themselves Christian. The Greek underpinning is people who name themselves Christians. It doesn't mean that they're Christians.

It doesn't mean that they understood and believed the gospel. So in this case, Because Paul has outlined them as not understanding the gospel, we're going to operate with the idea that these people he's talking about are not believers. Because we can look at chapter 3 and see that there were people who were believers who didn't understand it. But Paul is calling out some things here saying that these people are behaving as though they name the church, but they behave as though they don't know at all what the church is.

Isn't it possible you've got two groups of people here, though? Right. Some people call themselves a believer, but they're really not truly saved. God will judge them in the end, right, if they're not saved. But there are people who get saved. That's the chapter three.

Sin nature is always there, right? Right. We reckon ourselves dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto Christ. But nevertheless, the sin nature is capable at any time to do anything. the spirit's not guiding that life, right? Right, and that's why chapter 3, when he talks about this burning away of the carnal things, what's left is still a believer. In chapter 5 here, when he's talking about this young man, he says, I give such one over to Satan, in verse 5, for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

The principle there being Listen, this person needs to go out and not be contaminating the church. They may be saved, or probably are saved, but this kind of behavior is not tolerated here. And we're going to unfortunately have to expel them from the body. This expulsion is a thing because we have to preserve the healthy sheep. There are principles of that throughout the whole Old Testament. In Israel, if somebody was caught in sin, you either repented, or in many cases, you were probably stoned. Because we can't have the wickedness of this variety sitting around Israel, because it is not part of God's righteousness. So they're not supposed to associate with so-called brothers.

So, associate in the Greek actually is a three-part compound word. I won't go into the whole nerdery of it, but that just made me kind of happy because it wasn't just a two-word compound word, which is Paul's normal creativity, but a three-parter. The thing that's interesting here is the idea of mixing or mingling with these people, and he says not even to eat with such a one. Let's take a look at these people that we're not supposed to eat with. So we have the immoral, the covetous, the idolaters, the revilers, the drunkers, and the swindlers. And on page three here we've got that list with some elements.

So the immoral or sexual sins, due to the way that the brain is wired, sexual deviancy is highly rewarding as far as the hormonal release is concerned, and it builds habits rapidly. and we need to not have those high habit-forming behaviors that lead to further sinfulness going on in the body.

There is biblical sexuality and this is not it. One of the things that my dad highlighted from Ephesians chapter 5 is that the biblical marriage represents Christ in the church. It manifests a witness to Christ in the church. This is the opposite of that. We don't need to manifest that in this case.

In 1 Corinthians 6.18, Paul writes, and Bob alluded to this earlier, that this is a kind of sin that is not just external. There's a lot of sins that are external. that the manifestation of them is external, but this is an internal manifestation as well. So, it has no home in the church. It has no place to compromise marriages and cause all kinds of harm. Covetous or greed-based sin? I think greed is probably one of the most fascinating sins because it's culturally acceptable.

It's part of the American dream, right? That you go out and get more stuff. And if you don't have enough stuff, you should be embarrassed. Or the politicians, they'll even come in and say, you know what? Some people have some stuff and you need it too.

We have a funny experience that Bonnie and I This was maybe 20 years ago. We went over to a friend's house. There was an old girl. She maybe was four or five. The family was better off than we were. They had more stuff. So she, in the course of conversation, she says, well, you don't have this and you don't have that. She named four or five things we did not have. She says, what else don't you have?

It just, it just rocked, it just immediately just kind of fell on the floor, almost laughing. That's the best. We were saying sweet jokes and we didn't really want to have those. I would have thrown it at the bombshell and said, I guess I don't have envy. Yeah. That's a good comment. That's a four year old might not have gotten with that. You don't have a Tesla, right?

And it wasn't that we were trying to be, that wasn't necessarily our witness not to have stuff. We just had some of the stuff she was mentioning. It wasn't that big a deal, but it's just funny the way you just sort of like, In her mind, everybody should have these things, because I have these things, and she was kind of amazed that we didn't have these things.

This has manifested itself in a really terrible way. The health and wealth gospel, the name it and claim it groups, have really, really caused quite a bit of harm inside of bodies. For example, how many of you are familiar with various preachers saying things like, oh, whatever you give, God will pay you back.

X-folds. Sometimes tenfold, sometimes a hundredfold. And then, what do people do? They take that check and they mail it in. Or now maybe they just donate online. I don't know how the swindlers swindle. But the reason people are being motivated to do it is the greed. Well, if this person has the gold-plated package on their car, or the house that's nicer, or whatever else, One of the issues here, Randy, is what kind of metrics are we putting on this behavior?

Somebody may have an alcohol problem, be a sincere believer, but need help, right? In terms of the application, which you alluded to earlier, It's a little tough sometimes, and you have to depend on the church leadership to be dealing with these issues. This is outside the church behavior in this context. I kind of took it, and maybe that's where Bob was heading too, with the so-called believers. As far as the leadership and the rest of the body of Christ in a local group, if a person says he's a Christian, we accept that. We may, in the back of our minds, have questions, but when they But just like the previous verses, when a man has blatant sin and it is widespread, then it's incumbent upon the leadership and the rest of the body to do something about that, not just to say, we're just going to sweep it under the carpet. So I think that so-called, it doesn't actually make it any easier within the body, because when a person says I'm a believer and is blatantly doing some of these things, We're going to have to deal with that.

And Paul's talking to the body, the leadership as well as the people in the body. We're going to get into the consequences inside the body in just a second. We're just kind of hitting the topics. But I don't disagree with you at all there. But we have greed, idolatry, and the funny thing with idolatry is we think, well, thank goodness that's not in first world America. Except for It is.

And cults and religious ceremonies. How many people are familiar with the idea that in a Catholic church in Plano they have a sanctuary to the communion wafer in the cup? Where people go worship the communion wafer in the cup here in the United States. spiritual ceremony, this thing that God put for us to remember Christ's work on the cross, to remember with communion, is now a worshipped thing. Today, here, I went down to Santa Fe a couple weeks ago and they have the oldest mission in the United States, it's still active, and there's a special hallway or stairway where people have been healed, so-called, and people go there and they go to worship at that place because it's extra special.

Those kinds of things exist today. Or, what if we look at the issue of humanism or the issue of atheism and agnosticism. We don't think of atheism as idolatry per se, but it puts man in God's place. I have decided I am man and I know just enough to make this appropriate statement.

How many of you are aware of recent archaeological research where they have found a unicorn skull? Literally, I'm not joking. There is a horned creature that looks like a unicorn that we had never found before. And before we found this archaeological thing, everybody was an idiot if they thought there were unicorns. Haha, Christians are idiots, because in the King James Version, there happens to be one version of King James that had unicorn in it. But here's the thing.

Man, as the decider of all that is true, is idolatry. We've put ourselves in the position of God. So, idolatry really has no place in the Church. If man gets to decide what is true over what God has said, that's idolatry. That's putting us in the position of God.

Randy, very briefly, back to the church versus the non-church here. Are you suggesting that just fornication within the church is the only thing that is a concern here? No, this whole list is a concern. You appropriately said that verses 10 through 13 really apply to the the body outside the church, the non-church body, right?

No, he's mixing them. That's mine. I was just making sure how you were interpreting it. Oh, no, no. I'm just saying in this case where he's talking about the association, these are so-called people in 11. In 12, he's speaking to the church about their actions inside of the church and how they should be regarding things and 13 is talking about worldly things. 13b, if you will, is God's statement about judging worldliness inside the church. So we'll cover that. So idolatry, revilers, people who are basically using verbal abuse inside the church or outside the church and behaving in a way that does not reflect godly character with their mouth and emotionally damaging folks.

Drunkards, this one is extra special because the issue of addiction is something that most people who have an addiction face the rest of their lives. And so addiction being what it is, not everyone... I've met lots of folks who said, I used to be an alcoholic, I got saved, and I never wanted to drink again. I've met many more people, unfortunately, as a ratio, who became believers and said it was still something that the Lord had to work with them through and deal with. And that's, I think, part of what you were speaking to earlier, Bob. But if the alcohol defines who they are, if the alcohol is master, that's a problem. And if they don't seek whatever kind of counseling or dealing with the addiction, that's a problem.

Ephesians 5.18 says something I think is very relevant to the issue that the church is facing.

In Ephesians 5.18 he says, do not be drunk with wine, and do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, or wasted energy, but be filled with the Spirit." And then he goes on in the interactions that should be happening with the church there. When we get into 1 Corinthians chapter 11, we're going to see that the church in Corinth was really good at the getting drunk with wine at church services.

Kudos to them on that one, right? And then last on this one is swindlers. And I actually think about the idea of a con man. How many of you are familiar with the term con man? Con being short for confidence. A confidence man comes in and totally gets you to believe them and says, I am who I say I am, bilks you for material goods, whether it's money or other sort of things, and then takes off.

I happen to have somebody in my life who I don't believe is a believer, but they get suckered into sending out or parting with their cash all the time. It seems like this, like, again? You know, and then another two years later, again? And it'll always be something like they bought somebody a car. And I'm like, thousands of dollars. Poof. Gone. Well, I thought they would be good for it. Again? How many cars are you going to buy for a stranger?

But they come across as not a stranger. The swindler comes in and they gain your confidence. And so this particular situation with the swindler I think is really important because this is one of those opportunities again for the body to be observing one another and have an intimate relationship with one another. Because a con man comes in and they look for a target. I think this person I'm thinking of has been an easy target, right?

They have the same thing over and over again. But there's nobody else in their life that is close with them to help come alongside and question, hey, you know, this person's pretty sketchy. Look at their track record. Look what they're doing. Look at all the damage in the way. So this is Paul's list.

So he says, don't even eat with such a one. And why is it that inside the church, whether these people are believers or not, they shouldn't be eating with them? Why is eating important in the church? It's not because some people are gluten-free. Although, we should be careful. The Lord's table. One of the things that's not uncommon is that it's when we're eating that we tend to let our guard down.

When we're eating, we're having conversation, and we're talking about ideas, and we're sharing ideas. And if somebody comes in, and remember in Corinth, there's lots of people coming in. They're all passing through town, and they come in and say, hey, you know, I heard this one guy, and he was talking, and he said this one thing, and it was really kind of interesting, but it totally contrasts the scriptures. If you're sitting there eating and you're thinking about it, and you're mulling on it, and you're talking about it, and you're entertaining it as a probability, that's the crack in the door, the crack in the foundation. And so eating with people that are involved in these sorts of behaviors, it's not just that you're eating, the problem is that you're entertaining the ideas and you're taking on the behaviors, just like we saw in Romans chapter 1. So let's talk about the judgment part of this, because that's really the question we've been asking all along without using that word.

What do we do with those who call themselves Christians? We've got to use that terrible judgment word, and I say terrible not because it is terrible, but because it's one that causes people so much consternation. So what does it mean to judge? How do we define judgment? Okay, we have a standard which is God's standard. And you're always comparing it. In today's world, the word judgment is really politically incorrect. We're not supposed to judge anyone else's, that's their life. There's no standard.

When we are evaluating someone's spiritual rooting, their maturity, or their source of motivation, it is actually important for believers. That's that discernment element. We're looking for that deeper understanding of where somebody is motivated and what's going on, and then taking a look at things in context. It's not myopic.

It's not naïve or optimistic, it is a real evaluation of the real problem. I have to return to use discernment and perception based on scripturally based discernment, right? Judging is not casting people to hell, right? I mean, but judging is just getting a sense of what's of the Lord, what's of the Spirit, what's not, right?

So here's another brief personal story. was at the gas station on the way to Santa Fe on this trip I was telling you about and I was getting gas and this guy came up and I knew right away money was going to be requested like there will be a transfer of funds if he wins right so he comes up and he says hey man and I said hey did you want to hear about Jesus because that's my go-to anymore I'm going straight to the gospel because that causes a lot of people downtown to turn around no I did not and they walk away so The dude goes, I love Jesus, I'm from Texas. As are all Christians, right? So, you know, I love Jesus, I'm from Texas.

And I was like, I don't have any cash. And he goes, cool, and walks away. might love Jesus, but that's really not indicative of what... Because the thing is that if he'd engaged with me on anything that was spiritually rooted, I could have discerned whether or not he was actually in love with Jesus. And guess what? If he was, I had money. I'd have to go to the ATM and get it, but I have cash somewhere that I could get to. And if my brother's in need, I might take care of him.

But his interest was not in Jesus. I don't know what he's going to spend that money on, but he wasn't interested in Jesus. That's what he said he was, but as soon as I didn't have cash, he was out. I didn't say, I don't have cash for you. I didn't say, I don't have cash anywhere. I just said, I don't have cash on me.

And that's all he needed to know, that he was going to go look for the next person and ask for cash. Which was hard. Because I was ready to talk to him about the gospel if he was... if we could do that. And it wasn't there. But this judging outsiders principle, the idea of judgment, is that we put forth careful contextual observation, we might review some scriptural truth, and then this is the part that I think we all have been coming to and coming back to.

Let's turn to Galatians 6.1. This is how a believer is going to respond to another believer walking in the flesh. He says, Brethren, if anyone is caught in any trespass, that could be any of the ones that we just listed, whether it's immoral sexual sin, covetous, greedy sin, idolatrous sin, reviling sin, drunken sin, or even swindling, If anyone is caught in trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, each one taking or looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted."

But guess what? They now have an action that they get to participate in. They get to either choose to abide, or not abide. Then, as Roger pointed out last week, if they're choosing not to abide, you're probably going to come to another brother or sister. You might go to the elders. That's what I would recommend personally. Go to the elders and say, hey, guess what? There's something not right here. And I tried to restore this person, and they kind of blew me off. And guess what?

The elders really don't want to have to deal with that as much as you do. They're all busy, but they love the body here, and they're going to. And they're going to come alongside me and say, hey, we want to talk about this thing where there seems to be a problem.

And then, and Roger alluded to this as well, then it may be time to say, all right, this person is not taking any correction. And we go before the body and we have to unfortunately say in the larger group, this person is not taking correction. We need to not involve them in body life.

That's hard. Nobody loves that. I'm not suggesting that this is easy, and everybody loves the social interactions of expulsion. This is fantastic. Let's all shun such and such a person. Which is not like the Jehovah's Witnesses. They do a different kind of shunning.

But that judgment is, for those inside of the church, it's to restoration. That's the purpose. The Holy Spirit is bringing some issue into light, that judgment comes together, and it may be between me and one other person, or it may be in a larger public context, and then that gets addressed. But it's unto restoration, and it's unto eternal spiritual life focused living, not carnality. Restoring people back to fellowship. This matters for lots of reasons, but one that I wanted to really emphasize is that we're not long for this world.

If the rapture happens, awesome. But if it doesn't happen, I have a 13 year old and a 10 year old that desperately need all of us to leave behind a church that they get to marry godly men in. so that they can raise up their family in a church that has godly people in it, so that they can raise my grandkids, and my great-grandkids, and my great-great-grandkids, and Allie, you too, not just my daughters. We need those things. We need godly men and godly young women to be the next generation, and if we are constantly letting perversity or sinfulness reign in the body, that's not going to happen. We don't get to go visit the church in Ephesus. None of us have gone to the church in Ephesus and fellowshiped with all the believers in Ephesus. Because they didn't maintain it. They didn't carry that faithfulness that Paul writes to Timothy about.

When Roger and Mike and my dad are elders and they're doing their job, the next generation gets an opportunity to teach, to learn, and grow, so that when the Lord decades from now, take some home. There's the next generation, prepared up, ready to go. And that is why this judgment matters. It's not judgment to be jerks. Nobody wants to be Jesus' personal judge, to be a jerk and make everybody's life and the body miserable. That's not the purpose here. It's for clarity. Because who makes the decision on salvation? Mike Doyle. No. Who makes the decision on salvation? God does.

And so Paul articulates that with 12 and 13. He says, for what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? So it's our job to evaluate what's going on so that we can follow through corrective procedures. And then in verse 13, but those who are outside God judges. But in a way, if you think about it, if the leadership is doing its job, God will be judging inside the church, too. So we shouldn't forget that.

It's not that the elders are particularly smart. It's because they're responding to what Scripture has told us to do, and God will judge that inside the church, too. Yeah, but I would say in this context, Paul's energy is focused. I don't disagree with you, but his energy, or the thrust of his...

And the thing is that the Holy Spirit is going to be doing the very thing where he says we should be judging the inside, inside the church. That's the Holy Spirit in us, giving us discernment, teaching us. And I know the second bell rang, so I'm going to say the last half of 13. We'll talk about that briefly, and then unfortunately we'll have to close out. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. If you go through the book of Deuteronomy, you will find multiple places where sinfulness is gotten rid of.

It's not acceptable. It has no place inside of God's people. A belligerent attitude to sinfulness does not belong in the church. Paul says that principle carries on in the New Testament. It's not something that we all look forward to as a regular occurrence. Man, I really hope we get to kick somebody else out of the church. That's not it. But instead, we recognize that there are sins that are wicked that people will be stubborn about, and they will be belligerent about. And if they call themselves Christians, and they do not respond to biblical discipline, They need to be removed.

The good news is chapter 3. They might get into heaven naked and smoking, but they're in heaven. So we're not talking about a loss of salvation to those who are saved. We're talking about those who need to be disciplined and how they respond to it. But we can't let sin fester. That's not what's part of the church. And I'm over time and I should stop because it's 10 o'clock.

Heavenly Father, we ask that you would continue to teach us about spiritual discernment and our interactions with one another. And Lord, teach us more and more about abiding and beholding and walking in who we are in you, because then these issues don't matter. Help us to come alongside in gentle and encouraging and loving ways when we see those opportunities. And Lord, thank you for Paul's teaching on this so that we have clarity and not just shooting from the hip. We thank you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.