Biblical Church Discipline

1 Corinthians 5:1-13

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. ^2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this? ^3 Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. And I have already passed judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present. ^4 When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, ^5 hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature^a may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.

^6 Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? ^7 Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ^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.

^9 I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— ^10 not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. ^11 But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.

^12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? ^13 God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”

We are always grateful for our worship teams who lead us every week. Sometimes the worship teams try to match the message with their song selection. Obviously you want to sing songs about the resurrection on Easter Sunday—that kind of thing. This past week Deb Larrington was kind enough to call and ask about this week’s Scripture to see if any songs could be matched to it. So I told Deb that the passage was 1 Cor. 5 and challenged her to find songs that especially matched verse 13—“Expel the wicked man from among you.” Maybe we could put this verse to the tune of “A Mighty Fortress”.

Expel the wicked man from among you

For he has slept with his father’s wife.

You just can’t put this kind of passage into a song. I am not making light of this beautiful hymn nor am I demeaning this Scripture. It illustrates that this passage about church discipline is not a pretty message—it is messy and perhaps a bit frightening. After all, how many of you have memorized any of this chapter? When you are discouraged, have you ever turned to this passage? How often do you meditate on the topic of church discipline? Last year Christianity Today had a six-part series called How Church Discipline Died. I was talking with someone about church discipline a few years ago and they said, “Churches don’t discipline people anymore, do they?” Truly, church discipline has died a silent death.

Abuses of Church Discipline

If you were to pick up the newspaper and read the obituary about the death of church discipline. Many of you would slap the paper closed and exclaim, “Good riddance!” Why do we have such a negative reaction against church discipline? In part, I think the negative connotations are present because church discipline tends to represent all that is wrong with the church. We immediately conjure up thoughts of painful excommunication from the church. Think about the word ‘excommunication’. Some would put this word in the same column as torture and terrorism. When we think of church discipline we imagine such horrors as the Inquisition by the Roman Catholic Church or the Salem witch trials by the Puritans. Recall last Fall I told you the story about the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, who along with his amazing contribution to the gospel, also ordered that two men be executed by drowning for holding to the doctrine of believer’s baptism. According to this verdict, practically everyone in this room should be executed. Many hold John Calvin responsible for the burning at the stake of Michael Servetus.

You don’t have to go back several centuries to find abuses of church discipline. There are abusive leaders and abusive churches sprinkled all over the globe right now. Let me read two quotes about present-day abuses of church discipline.

In the book, Churches that Abuse, the author quotes one abusive pastor. "You need to trust God through me; I know what's best for you. People in this church, don't you say anything about each other. I can say anything I want. I can call you anything I want because I have the responsibility and the accountability according to God's Word for each and every one of you. I can say what I want. You don't have that responsibility and accountability. I do". [1]

A similar quote about another pastor is found in the book, The Cult Church. "If you needed to travel, you needed to ask him if it was God's will. One time when I needed to go to a family get-together, he reminded me that I hadn't asked him first and that I could possibly get into a car wreck or something. He did give me permission to go," she says, "But only after I backed down in my spirit to submit to his counsel."[2]

What British historian Lord Acton said is often true, “Power corrupts, and absolute power absolutely corrupts.” Obviously I am giving you multiple examples of abuses of church discipline so I am the first to admit that there have been and continue to be serious problems with church discipline. From the front end of this series I want you to know that I know that church discipline is a scary—and terribly misunderstood—topic. I want you to know that I know there are problems. But my goal over the next three weeks is to wipe away the negative connotations and convince you from Scripture that church discipline is absolutely necessary to create a healthy church. In other words, without a Biblical understanding and practice of church discipline, no church can be a healthy church. We will be spending at least three weeks on this topic because this chapter represents only a small slice of the total picture of church discipline. I want to present the entire package—the bulk of Biblical teaching on church discipline. At this point you may not believe that Biblical church discipline is necessary for a healthy church. You may think that I am foisting a power structure of abusive authority into our church. Church discipline is a difficult topic, so as we start I only have two requests of you. Number one: please listen carefully to all that I say, and if you miss a message in this series, please take time to read it on our website. This is one topic spread over several weeks so it is very important for you to understand the whole. My second request is this: after listening carefully to me, don’t take my word for it. You need to search the Scriptures yourself. Like everything we hold to be true, you need to be personally convinced from Scripture that church discipline is a Biblical and practical necessity for every church—including Grace Church. Is that fair enough?

Church Discipline and Church Health

The best place to begin our understanding is with a definition of church discipline. What is church discipline? Mark Dever is pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington DC and also the founder of the church health ministry called “9 Marks”. The 9 Marks ministry isn’t about Mark Dever and eight other guys named Mark, but it is about the nine marks, or nine necessities of a healthy church. Before I show you his nine marks, let me remind you that our denomination has ten essential principles for a healthy church which are called the ten leading indicators.

This past March most of you filled out a church survey using these ten indicators. The survey showed that Centrality of God’s Word is our highest indicator and that Fruitful Evangelism is our lowest value. My purpose is not to delve into these principles, but to compare them to others. Our church has eight indicators of church health that we call our core values. I have put them alongside the ten leading indicators so you can see the similarities and dissimilarities.

Now let me compare our Core Values with the 9 Marks. They don’t overlap perfectly, but please notice the most striking differences.

In this comparison, which differences stand out most clearly to you? Because we are talking about church discipline I imagine you keyed in on that one, in addition to Biblical Understanding of Church Membership. Mark Dever is absolutely convinced that church discipline is a Biblical necessity for a healthy church. I have never in my life seen church discipline held up in such high regard and importance. Did you notice where I placed church discipline in comparison to our core values? I put it right alongside Authentic Spirituality and Loving Community. Why did I do this? Because without Biblical church discipline we cannot have a loving community or authentic spirituality.  

Let me give you two quick examples from Matt. 5 and Matt. 18. In Matthew five jesus said that of you are offering your gift at the altar—in other words if you are going to worship the Lord—and remember that a brother has something against, Jesus tells us to leave the gift at the altar; we are to cease our worship and first go and be reconciled with our brother, then we can return to our worship. In Matthew 18 we get just the opposite scenario. If we a brother in the Lord has sinned against us, has hurt us in some way, we are to go only to that offending brother to show him his fault. These two passages are like bookends of Christian reconciliation: in the first another believer is upset with you—perhaps you have sinned against them—and in the second another has sinned against you. In both cases we are to go directly the person involved and begin the path of reconciliation. This is Basic Christianity. These are the ABC’s of a loving Christian community and the building blocks of authentic spirituality. As important as these are—and we will delve into these two passages in more depth later—this is not the only way that a lack of church discipline harms the church.

Let me ask you this: what is the number one accusation against the church by unbelievers outside the church? Hypocrisy, right? The chief complaint you hear is that Christians are just a bunch of hypocrites. And what is the opposite of hypocrisy? Clearly love and authenticity are the opposite of hypocrisy. But if we do not practice church discipline, then we will not be known for our love and authenticity. In other words, without Biblical church discipline, we are more hypocritical and our efforts at outreach and evangelism suffer greatly. What was our lowest score from the church health survey? Evangelism was the lowest score. Hmmm—are you starting to see any connection here?

Aren’t We Forbidden to Judge One Another?

As I teach, I like to imagine what you might be thinking at any given time, and right now I think that some of you are a bit confused. Many of you have associated church discipline with the most extreme form of excommunication or the other abuses I mentioned earlier, so you are probably wondering, “What in the world does church discipline have to do with evangelism? I just don’t see the connection?” Before we go any further, let me answer the most common objection to church discipline—that we should not be judgmental. Jesus did say, “Judge not lest you be judged” and he also said that we should take the beam out of our own eye before we look at the speck in our brother’s eye. These are stern warnings that should be heeded by every Christian, but they are not absolute statements against any kind of discernment and judgment because of they were, they would contradict other parts of Scripture, such as vv. 12-13 where Paul wrote “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked man from among you.’” Parts of this chapter are not easy to understand. What exactly did Paul mean when he said he was going to hand this man over to Satan? What was that and are we still supposed to be doing that today? This question will be answered in a later message and it is a little less clear, but you cannot get more clear than verses 12-13. Are we allowed to make judgments about fellow Christians? Not only are we permitted to do so, but Paul commanded that we do this very thing. We are not supposed to judge those outside the church, but we are supposed to judge those inside the church. Admittedly, this passage is not a complete text on church discipline in the local church. This is only one small slice of the totality of church discipline. This chapter does not tell us how to carry out the discipline—it does not present any kind of process or policy—it does not tell us what attitudes we should have during the process—but it does make clear the Biblical necessity of Christians making sound judgments about other Christians. “Are you not to judge those inside the church?” The answer to Paul’s rhetorical question is a resounding YES!

Now here is the point we get things turned backwards. We are commanded to judge those inside the church, but our gut level reaction is to judge those outside in the world. When we look at the world we fret over the gross amount of immorality and sin all around us. Our tendency is to separate ourselves from the world and enter into our safe little cocoons we call the church. When we move from the sins of the world around us into the church, it’s like going from a blistery, blowing wind into warm house sitting by an open fire. We gather around the fireplace, sip our mugs of coffee and cocoa and say, “Ah, this is so nice, isn’t it? In here we are safe from the storms of sin raging outside.” Now to a certain extent this is the way it should be. The church should be a haven of rest and a beautiful place of warm Christian fellowship, but far too often we have a fortress mentality and boil all of our problems into an overly simplistic phrase—“Outside BAD, inside GOOD.” But Paul is saying, “Christians, while you are sitting around sipping tea and wearing Christian t-shirts, you are completely unaware that there is an adulterer sitting next to you. We judge the sins of the outside world as bad and ignore the sins of those inside, and this has a terribly negative effect on our evangelism. In the church in Corinth, there was a sin so heinous that Paul said that even the pagans would not do such a thing.

Let’s stop for a moment and imagine we could do a church health survey in first century Corinth. What if we could send you back two thousand years to the streets of Corinth in 50 AD. You could stand on the street corner holding your clipboard and stopping passersby. “Excuse me sir. Could I have a moment of your time? We are doing a little survey on the spiritual health of Christians in Corinth. On a scale of 1-10, please rate the authentic spirituality of Christians in your city.” Then your survey respondent suddenly gets wide-eyed and says to you with a very animated voice, “Are you kidding me? On a scale of 1-10, I would rate those Christians a zero! There’s this one guy I know who is sleeping with his father’s wife. Those so-called Christians know all about it and think it’s perfectly fine. Listen, I’m what you might call an old-fashioned worshipper of the sex goddess Aphrodite, but even I would not sleep with my father’s wife!” OK, so how likely is this guy to become a follower of Jesus? Granted, this is an extreme example in this chapter, but the principle applies across the ages—a lack of church discipline is harmful to Christian authenticity and therefore it is harmful to Christian evangelism. A lack of church discipline is doubly troubling because it weakens the church from within and keeps people from without. I hope that you are starting to see that church discipline is necessary for church health at many levels.

Rich Maurer

August 29, 2006