Ecclesiology is our theme this year. Ecclesiology is a study of the church, seeking to build on our foundation and be a healthy church. Well, this is our 10th month talking about this, so you may wonder, are we healthy yet? Are we getting there? Is this doing something? Well, we hope so. We always want to be growing, never maintaining. A healthy church is made up of perfect people. Is that right? How would we do? Obviously, that's out of reach. How about this? Can we say a healthy church is made up of healthy believers? That seems more attainable. And yet, how many of us are able to confidently say, I'm a healthy believer. Yep, I qualify. we'll be a healthy church because we're okay in that department. Well, I hope we are, I trust we are, but then again, the life of the Christian really is often characterized by struggles and ups and downs and defeats and even doubts. And so, you know, maybe it's a little more accessible if we could say a healthy church is made up of hopeless sinners because we can identify a little better with that. And yet, That doesn't quite sound healthy either, does it? And so how about one more try? A healthy church is made up of sinners, but sinners who have been redeemed, saved from sin's penalty, and are humbly helping one another to grow toward Christlikeness and to reach the lost so that we might help them be saved and grow toward Christlikeness by the transforming grace of the Holy Spirit, for the eternal glory of God the Father. That's better. There's grace there. There's hope there. And yet there is a standard there that we're striving toward and walking with the Lord to try to be in concert with. And it's complex isn't it there a lot of working parts within that and it can feel messy at times But fortunately the church is not we have to remember the church is not a museum for Perfect saints to come together and congratulate each other on how perfect we are It's a crime scene Where we're working to identify where sin bred death and working to make things right. It's a hospital for our spiritual wounds. It's an oasis for our thirsty souls. It's a meeting place with God where we come to bring our gifts and express our corporate worship. The church is a military training ground where we prepare for the battles of spiritual warfare. It's a team practice where we come together and push one another and lean on one another so that we might better accomplish our calling and our commission. in ways that we could not have done alone. So we've been really exploring the implications of the idea of the body of the church, an illustration that comes to surface several times in the book of Ephesians, that we are, as an interdependent organism, a corporate entity, if you will. So what this means is that your spiritual growth and service always benefit the church. That's really good news. That's how a body works. When one part does really well, that contributes to the health of the whole. But the more sobering news is that this means our unconfessed or unrepentant sin always harms the church. And that's where we're gonna focus this evening. avoid thinking of the church as if it's separate from the individual sinners that compose it and have some idea that the church could remain healthy and be doing okay regardless of the sin of the individual members as they drift in unconfessed or unrepentant error. Remember the Old Testament example in Joshua 7 of Achan's sin, one man's sin that affected the whole nation. And in some way, it's this way for us in the church. So we want to talk this evening about accountability of a healthy church, how, as we saw in some of our distinctives, that we do answer to God, but we do also have a responsibility toward each other. for accountability, to keep one another accountable, and to be accountable to one another, to thrive as a healthy church. It's crucial that we form the regular practice of confessing and repenting, because we're not perfect people, not even always healthy believers. We are, as long as we're on this earth, though we've been saved by grace, if you've trusted Christ as Savior, admitted your sin and looked to Jesus' death on the cross and resurrection from the grave as your basis for forgiveness and new life, If that's you, we go forward in our struggle and we still struggle with sin, but we confess, we repent. This begins vertically toward God. Proverbs 28, 13 says, he that covers his sins shall not prosper, but he that confesses them and forsakes them will have mercy. First John 1.9, if we confess our sins, he's faithful, he's just, he'll forgive us our sins, he'll cleanse us of all unrighteousness. Bring the sins to him, don't try to cover them up, don't try to fix them up, don't try to clean them up, just confess, come to Jesus, and then yes, he helps us to make it right. But this confession, it does continue on a horizontal level as we come to each other for accountability, in part because we have blind spots. Proverbs 21.2 says, every way of a man is right in his own eyes. Part of the reason we need each other is because I can feel like I'm doing just fine when I am, in fact, overlooking something very important or allowing something very detrimental. but we also confess horizontally because we sin horizontally, we sin toward each other. In Matthew 5, Jesus explains that if you come to the altar with a gift and you're worshiping, you're praying, but you remember that there is a rift between you and a brother, that it's appropriate to leave that gift, to leave your worship and to go reconcile. There's confession, there's accountability, there's reconciliation. So if we're gonna thrive as a healthy church, We have to combat the hypocritical, superficial type of Christianity that threatens to dominate our gatherings. What I mean by that is we can walk in and try to look right and talk right and smile right and answer right and really lack any accountability because we're all pretending to be perfect people. or healthy believers when in reality we are struggling sinners being transformed by God's grace. Accountability works best when it's voluntary. And so that's where we want to start. And then we're going to move to when it's not voluntary and there has to be an intervention. But it works best if it's voluntary. James 5.16 is we know the second half of the verse very well that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous person has a great impact. It avails much. But the context of that is in confession of sin horizontally as we confess our faults to each other, spiritual healing can take place because prayer makes a big difference. Do you wanna see victory and progress and growth in your sin struggles? Scripture tells us that mutual accountability is a vital ingredient, an effectual, impactful ingredient in that recipe for growth. But I feel we've just, I don't know, really drifted away from this. And we can give prayer requests about our jobs and our works and our health situation and our neighbors going through a trial or something like that. Obviously we don't come to church and just you know air out dirty laundry in front of everyone But the smaller the group the more detail we can give and admit our Weaknesses and ask each other for prayer and for help But tonight I want to focus specifically with the rest of our time on the final expression of that accountability which is not the voluntary level but the intervention level, what we call church discipline. What is yeah, so I put accountability of the church in the bulletin if I put The church discipline in the bulletin. Would you come back tonight? Hope you don't come or not come based on what's in the bulletin But we do want to talk about discipline in a year where we're talking about ecclesiology if you're visiting tonight I just want you to know this is not what we're all about but with 52 Sundays in an ecclesiology year it is a topic that is helpful healthy for us to address and What is church discipline? What does it look like? What's the purpose of it? Do we have to go there? Does it do any good? Is it judgy? Is it harmful? And what sins would necessitate it? Well, I'd invite you to 1 Corinthians 5 in your Bibles, one of the two main passages, though there are several that show that it is a biblical idea and even a biblical necessity when a situation requires. We're gonna zoom in and look at this one example in 1 Corinthians 5 that gives almost kind of a worst case scenario. And then we'll come up and zoom back out and say, okay, what do we do with this since we're not facing something this extreme, but how can we be ready? How can we be safeguarded? How can we use this in our daily lives and struggles? I said this is one of two main passages. We're turning to 1 Corinthians 5. The other main passage will be on the screen. We've looked at this, other contexts. Matthew 18 is the other, verses 15 through 17, where Jesus says, if your brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone. "'If he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.'" So notice there's this accountability, there's this confession that takes place, there's reconciliation, and it never had to escalate, it stays very private. "'But if he will not hear thee,' verse 16 says, "'then take with thee one or two more, "'that in the mouth of two or three witnesses, "'every word will be established.'" So something that can be witnessed, that's observable. "'And if he shall neglect to hear them,' verse 17 says, "'tell it to the church, The church is where the authority resides for discipline to take place according to Jesus. But if you neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican. That's where the discipline of expulsion or being disciplined out of the church, sometimes called excommunication, is what Jesus is talking about in verse 17. So when we fail to confess our faults to each other and to God, and instead we tolerate sin or we conceal sin or we ignore sin, then the accountability of the church takes this form. 1 Corinthians 5. It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles that one should have his father's wife And ye are puffed up and have not rather mourned that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you. For I verily as absent in body but present in spirit have judged already as though I were present concerning him that has so done this deed. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, in my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such an one unto Satan, for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out, therefore, the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote unto you in an epistle not to accompany with fornicators, Yet, not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous or extortioners or with idolaters, for then must ye needs go out of the world. But now I have written unto you, not to keep company of any man that is called a brother, be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner, with such in one know not to eat. For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? Do not ye judge them that are within, but them that are without God judgeth. Therefore, put away from among yourselves that wicked person. I wanna give just several observations from what is a case study here that just, as Paul deals with this under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, really gives a model, a pattern, several principles that can be drawn from this. And there's one in just about every verse, and some with two, some without. So you probably won't keep up if you try to write these down, but just by kind of piecemealing or mosaics of several principles that we kind of draw from this, it's gonna do a lot to round out our picture of the biblical definition of discipline, the situation that would necessitate it, and the purpose of it. Why would we do this? Verse one says it's reported commonly. So here's a situation that was known. So we see here first that church discipline addresses sin that is observable. It's a threat to the church's testimony. It's reported commonly, so this is known. Jesus said there would be witnesses of this, something that can be verified The sin in this case, it's an incestuous relationship. Paul uses the word fornication. Okay, so from this verse, we're also gonna take the idea that church discipline addresses sin that is serious, the type of sin that would be a threat to the church's testimony, yes, because it's observable, but also to the church's purity, number two, because it's serious, immorality in this case. The Corinthian church was a proud church and they were proud even despite this flaw or maybe even proud of this flaw. That's hard to imagine. So there are churches today that really advertise and celebrate the embracing of immoral people in the name of toleration or love. So verse number two talking about how they were puffed up. When they're corrected for that shows us that the sin church discipline addresses sin that is unrepentant. in that number three, it threatens the offender's faith profession. So if someone says, I'm saved, they're admitted to church membership, and then they live in a way that an unbeliever would live, and there's no repentance, no true repentance, to the degree that you would have to kind of question that person's faith profession, this is a serious sin. It's an observable sin, it's a non-repentant sin. Even among the Gentiles, this was, it's commonly reported something that wasn't even named among the Gentiles. It seems to be the case that even those outside the church probably were aware of what was being tolerated here in Corinth. So one more point here from verse one is the idea that church discipline is for the offender. It actually is in the best interest of the one who has done wrong that the church intervene. But it's also for the church, It's also ultimately for the Lord, but even at some level, it's for the world. Because if the world sees gross sin, sin that is observable, serious, and unrepentant, tolerated, and even harbored within the church, our testimony is damaged. Why would someone want to come to a church that has nothing that they don't? It is no different from they, Rather than being puffed up, the Corinthian believer should have mourned. That's verse two. You should have rather mourned. Okay, so from that, number five, we want to see that church discipline really ought to be a humbling, sobering, sorrowful necessity. This isn't something we're eager for. It's not a witch hunt where we're kind of relishing the idea of being able to intervene in someone else's life or, you know, going around in an inquisition, trying to figure out what everybody's doing in private. But verse 2 does say that that person should be taken away from among the body. So we would say number six that in worst cases church discipline involves removing the offender from membership. And I say in worst cases because remember in Matthew 18. In the best case, all you have to do is mention it to the person and they repent and it's taken care of. It doesn't need to go any further. Or maybe with two or three people there, then they listen to a reason, they repent, and it doesn't need to go any further. Or the third best case is it comes to the church and finally the person listens and repents and it needs to go no further. But the worst case scenario is when they won't even listen to the church and have to be removed. When you're gathered together, verse four, in the name of the Lord, and Paul is there present in spirit. He's had a lot of influence of this church in Corinth, and it's the power of Jesus Christ, the mention at the end of verse four that forms the basis, the authority. Number seven, we'd say that church discipline is the jurisdiction, the authority, the responsibility of the congregation. All right, and it's important that we make that distinction. I hope you're still with me here, okay? It's the church that does the disciplining. There's not one person, like a pastor or some other church leader, that's in charge of saying, oh, you know, this person needs to be disciplined or so forth. It is the church that votes someone into membership or vote someone out. There's. An apostolic kind of really a scriptural authority there. Verse four. This is number eight church discipline is the exercise of scriptural authority. Paul writes and says this is what you are to do. He says he's present there in spirit and even as we have this recorded inspired preserved scripture from him, there's this apostolic scriptural and ultimately Christological. It's Jesus that. is here in our midst and lends us authority to give the church this right and responsibility. But then verse five says that this person's being delivered to Satan. And this isn't as churchy and as kind of warm and unifying sounding as a lot of what we've been going through in Ephesians. But what we wanna understand ninthly here from verse five is that church discipline really is delivering the offender out of the spiritual oversight of the church and over to the sin that they have chosen. And the realm of the world, Ephesians tells us chapter one and two is Satan's realm in a sense. The church is a place of spiritual watch care, protection, accountability, growth, To be disciplined out of the church is, ought to be a sobering thing that causes us to take pause and be here for each other and watch our lives, our walks, our testimonies, our spiritual well-being. Delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. Wow, it's teaching that church discipline allows the offender to really suffer the sting and the consequences and the corruption that comes from their behavior. And a lot of times that is physical. And all the times it's spiritual. The person is allowed to taste God's judgment on some level as a consequence of their sin. And the church discipline is part of that. And then being out away from the spiritual watch care and spiritual nourishment of the context of the church is a sting. There's a taste of, if that person is a genuine believer, this is the taste of the punishment that God gives against sin that a believer who's walking with him ought to always be spared. But verse five ends on a hopeful note. It's so that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Okay, so spiritual church discipline is not to get back at the person. It's not to take vengeance on them. It's not to make an example of them. It is actually for their benefit. That one who is doing wrong needs the church to intervene if that wrong has escalated to such an observable, serious, and unrepentant level. It is in that person's best interest that an intervention take place, and if they won't listen, it's in that church's best interest, or that individual's best interest that the church has tried so hard to get their attention and turn them away as a last resort. You're being turned over to this sin, but the hope is that that sting would bring them back, would show them the end of their error, would allow them to taste enough of that corruption that they want to be away from it and back into fellowship so that there might be a redemptive, reconciling outcome, the salvation of that person's soul. their spirit might be saved, verse five says, in the day of the Lord Jesus. This is for their ultimate spiritual benefit. For someone to continue in sin and believe that they can remain in good standing in the church is actually very dangerous for that person's soul. Okay, so it's healthy for us to know that church discipline is a biblical, Resort when we get way off track. It's that's helpful for us to know that to know that that guardrail is there It's not healthy to have the idea well I can go kind of off the reservation and so wild oats for a season and Come back to the church and they'll have me back and it'd be as if nothing happened That's really dangerous to think that way church discipline is here so that we can know there are boundaries, their expectations. God calls us out to be holy and that needs to be maintained. Number 12, a little leaven, verse six says, leavens the whole lump. Church discipline preserves the walk of the vulnerable. The 11 illustration is the idea that it's not exactly yeast, but it's kind of like yeast where just a little bit affects the whole ball of dough. So it is, if sin is tolerated in the church, just that little bit of sinful influence can be cancerous and contagious and start to affect and infect those around the sinner, those in contact with the unrepentant sinner. So the vulnerable person, can look at someone whose sin, whose gross sin is being tolerated and say, well, I guess there aren't really guardrails, so I guess I could live that way too and nothing really bad would happen. But when church discipline takes place, now that vulnerable person sees, wow, there actually are measures in place that would seek to keep us on the right track. 1 Timothy 5, 20, them that sin, rebuke before all that others also may fear. When church discipline takes place, it ought to be a benefit to the church body to see, wow, I don't want that to be me. Lord, I need your grace. Keep me, bring me to the right path. Keep me on that right path. Ignoring or tolerating sin emboldens the wayward. publicly rebuking sin when necessary warns the wayward. It's preserving the walk of the vulnerable. So then verse seven says what ought to be done is that that old leaven ought to be purged. Okay, so it's clear by this point, number 13, that church discipline protects the purity of the church. Something that's there is not supposed to be and needs to be purged out. And then some sins are listed. We wonder what sins would necessitate disciplinary action. And fornication is mentioned. Verse 11, covetousness is mentioned. That's interesting. A person whose life is characterized by greed, that's an observable, serious, and if it's unrepentant, disciplinable sin. An idolater, a railer, someone whose speech is characteristically harmful, a drunkard, an extortioner, someone who's swindling others. So one reason for the state of the health of the church in our country is I think that sin has really been tolerated. in a lot of church bodies, even Harvard. Remember the indictment in Revelation 2 against the church in Thyatira. They suffered that woman Jezebel who caused God's people to stumble into immorality and taught lies and claimed to be a prophetess. The whole church is held responsible for that compromiser's continued influence to be tolerated in the church. The church as a whole is responsible accountability wise when sin is taking place. This kind of sin that threatens the purity, the testimony, the. The the faith profession of the offender. It has a responsibility. Jesus says I have a few things against you because you suffer that woman Jezebel. Jesus. actually takes issue with the kind of church that would not practice discipline when it's necessary. It's a mark of an unhealthy church. Know not to eat with such a one, verse 11 says. So point 14 is church discipline restricts fellowship with the offender. Okay, this doesn't mean that the person is to be shunned, ignored, act like they're invisible, or that you are rude to them, vicious to them, vindictive toward them. It means a fellowship has to be restricted. So you can't just go out for dinner and act like nothing happened. We still pray for that wayward brother or sister. We still love them. We seek to bring them back. But that's the nature of our relationship now, is one that seeks to bring them back, not one that is open fellowship. 2 Thessalonians 3 helps with this. Verses 14 and 15. If any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, have no company with him, that he may be ashamed. yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother. Okay, so how do we have no company with someone and yet admonish them as a brother? Okay, the difference is that we're not going to see them as an enemy. We can't see them as a brother in close fellowship. We see them as someone who needs to be admonished. So our relationship with that person who has strayed from the Lord, strayed from the church, or been disciplined from the church is one of admonishment. We want to bring them back in. 15th is from verse 12. This is concerning them that are within not them that are without so church discipline is for members of the congregation All right, so we ought to remember that we don't have any business kind of confronting our unsaved neighbors or co-workers if they behave like unsaved coworkers and neighbors. Our goal toward them is not to seek to turn them from immorality or hatred or substance abuse or vulgarity or things like this. We just want to share the gospel with them, you know, try to point them toward Christ. But when it comes to the fellow believer, well there our responsibility is to try to address the immoral behavior, hatred or vulgarity or those sins. We don't have an accountability where one-on-one you're accountable to me. But we have an accountability where one on the rest of us, you're accountable to the church. And the individuals of the church can be the ones to instigate that accountability as we watch over each other. But it's interesting, the language Paul uses in verses 11 through 13, talking about, well, I'm certainly not talking about judging those that are without. Let God deal with that. But the implication is, yes, we are to judge those that are within. Now, it's not, Again, something where we're going around looking under every bush, you know, trying to find out each other's wrongs. When something comes to the surface that's observable and serious and unrepentant, we owe it to one another to step in. Okay. Tracking with all of this you're kind of making sense. We're making a mosaic to get a picture of you out here I kind of see what what the discipline accomplishes what its goal is it is to protect the purity of the church. It's to preserve the walk of the vulnerable and it really is for the Offenders good to get their attention and really allow them to suffer a sting but the hope is to bring them back Um, this is not a intervention message. We praise the Lord. Okay. We're not dealing with the first Corinthians five situation in our church body and let's pray. We never do. Okay. That can be a one takeaway from this is, um, pray that the Lord protects us from ever needing to get into this, that hopefully message like this will can be preventative instead of interventive and pray for each other. Lord, I pray for my brothers and sisters in my church for their testimony that this week, that as they face temptation, that you would keep them pure, that as some of them are up against something that threatens to draw them away, Lord, protect. It ought to be our intercession for each other. Okay, so if it's not interventive and we're not facing this, and we hope never to, okay, what do I do with this? Well, let's look at some other takeaways. First, we can remember that Christ marks the church for holy living. Walk worthy of the vocation you're called, but with which you're called. That's our focus in Ephesians as we come back to that here soon. Sin is a killer. The devil's looking, lurking, waiting to devour. Sin lies at the door. Our testimony, our purity, don't ever say, well, I could never do any kind of one of these sins that you're talking about. No, we're at most risk when that's our attitude, but we're always at risk apart from the grace of God. So remember, there is a standard, there's a holiness that we're marked off to represent God's glory through our conduct, both as individuals and as a church. How about this takeaway? Let's normalize corporate accountability and de-normalize this superficial spirituality. Let's stop coming to church and pretend that everything's fine in our spiritual lives and that we're experiencing all wins and we don't have any struggles. And it is okay around a small group table setting to share a personal prayer request regarding a sin struggle, not explicit details that would cause someone else to have wrong kinds of thoughts or ideas, but Certainly as we confess our faults to one another, we can pray to one another so that we can be healed. Third takeaway, be willing to receive gentle correction, humble enough to receive accountability from a fellow church member. And then along with that, be willing to provide where necessary, gentle correction or accountability to a fellow church member. Next takeaway, be humble, admitting your own faults, and assuming the best before ever addressing the faults of others. Remember what Jesus says, notice the beam in your own eye instead of looking for a speck in someone else's. Galatians 6.1, brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye that are spiritual, restore such a one in the spirit of You know what it is, a spirit of meekness, you know, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. And what you're struggling with, I've struggled too, or I could struggle with tomorrow, but let's work on it together. If every time I send the church member showed up at my house, that's all we'd ever do. Okay. So this is not, this isn't that kind of microscope. We're, again, talking about sins that are observable, serious, and unrepentant. So, oh, well, she was rude to me. Well, that's not a matter for confrontation in church discipline. That's a matter for love covers a multitude of sins, so get over that. We're a body. This is a church family. Pray for them, be kind, turn the other cheek, and move on. Next takeaway, be open enough about your struggles that the accountability of the church serves as a real safeguard. I'm afraid a lot of times accountability is just kind of a theoretical idea, but you're so guarded with your struggles, or you're so unapproachable with your kind of front that you put on, or you're so good at making it look like everything is all right that the accountability is never gonna do you any good. If you could fool your doctor into thinking that you're healthy, would that be in your best interest? No, we never do that. If you could fool your church into thinking you're spiritually healthy, it's not helping you. If the church's accountability is no real safeguard to you, you're not being vulnerable or open enough. Recognize that your spiritual integrity strengthens the church's purity and impact. While your sin harms it, yes, as you face temptations this week, the purity and impact of the church is influenced by your conduct. And mine. Abstain from partaking of the Lord's table if there is an issue of observable, serious, unrepentant sin. Paul will warn us in this epistle not to partake in an unworthy manner. Last time we observed the Lord's Table together, we noted how as much as it is communion with God, it is also communion with his body, our fellow believers. Just as baptism is the initial sign of the covenant, the Lord's Table is the ongoing sign of the covenant. And I am saying in my partaking to all those around me that I am pursuing closeness with God. I am not tolerating observable, unrepentant, serious sin. It is a testimony issue. And if that's not you, it is a sin against the church body and against God to partake in an unworthy manner. And you might wonder how this is connected. I'm not just hacking this on because we're observing communion tonight. It's actually an organic connection that Paul brings up here in verses seven and eight. Purge out therefore the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you are unleavened. For even Christ our Passover is sacrifice for us. The Lord's Table is the New Testament church equivalent of the Old Testament Israel's observance of Passover, verse 8. Therefore let us keep the feast. Well, how do we as a church keep the feast of Passover? It's through communion, partaking of the bread and juice that represent the body and blood of Christ. Neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. It's just a little bit cryptic for us, maybe we haven't worked through this before, but what Paul is saying is the bread, let's take the bread, the bread is the unleavened bread, it's that part of the Passover feast, it's part of our Lord's Table observance. Jesus says what as he breaks it? This is my body. The bread. Is. Jesus Christ. Is the church. Right, because the church is his body. And when the Old Covenant Jew was preparing to celebrate Passover with this unleavened bread, there was this serious de-leavening, not just of that bread, but of the whole house. There was this ransacking of the house to make sure no leaven was anywhere in sight because under no circumstances could there be leaven in this bread. What's the big deal? It's just bread, right? No. This picture is the body of Jesus. So carefully, Guarding its purity is of utmost importance. No leaven allowed. When the lamb was given, it must be what? No blemish found, not a spot or an imperfection. Why? Because this pictures Jesus in whom is no guile, no iniquity, And this is why we practice church discipline. Because even as the bread is Jesus, body is the church. In the church, no unrepentant sin can be tolerated. Because we, like that bread, like that lamb, are to picture Christ. And so as we partake of these elements this evening, we proclaim to one another that we are part of this covenant. That we are spiritually sustained by the body and blood of Christ even as someone is physically sustained by food and drink. That we are in fellowship with a body of members with whom we are mutually accountable. that we are seeking to, even as we remember Christ's sacrifice, live as those who died with him, rose with him, and the lives we now live. We don't live to the flesh. We don't live to fornication. We don't live to extortion. We don't live to covetousness. We live by the faith of Christ Jesus, who died and gave himself for us. So let's pray, we'll sing a hymn, and we'll observe the Lord's table this evening.