Well, in recent weeks, we've considered the subject of love by working our way through 1 Corinthians 13. And I told you the story, I think, of one of my mentors years ago who told me that if you ever have a period of time where you're not exactly sure what to preach on, the subject that you ought to default to is love. And 1 Corinthians 13 is probably the best of all texts on that subject, or at least one of them. In verses 4 to 7, the Apostle Paul, you remember, gave us a list of characteristics and behaviors that love does and that love doesn't do, kind of a positive and negative perspective on love, a list of virtues, as it were, that love manifests, and also sins that love avoids, both the positive and the negative. In verses 8 to 13, Paul turned our attention to another aspect of this greatest of all things called love, namely its permanence. And we saw that it is unsurpassed by any virtue and is permanent and unending in duration. In fact, love never ends. Love never ends. And last week we began to conclude this series by considering the theme of love recovered and restored in Matthew 18. where we considered three things. First, in verse 15, the recovery of love is necessary whenever a perceived offense against someone is not resolved or restored. Second, in verse 16, your effort to recover and restore love with a brother who has sinned against someone, it might be rejected. and require assistance from others. And third, in verse 17, the recovery and restoration of love sometimes requires participation from every member of a local church. This familiar but often neglected portion of scripture deals with the subject of recovering and restoring love between Christians when sin has threatened to destroy or injure relationships and unity within the body of Christ. And that happens, doesn't it? It happens. This passage in Matthew 18 provides us with the means, think of it as the means whereby love can be recovered when it has been lost because of sin. and therefore properly applying this teaching of Christ is one of the most important duties I would suggest to you that you have as a believer, or that I have, and will profoundly impact your spiritual life and health as well as the life and health of the church. So this morning, or actually last week when I finished the message, I went home and I thought to myself, you know, I'm afraid that what may happen is people hear the message from last week, but we didn't get down deep enough. We didn't get down and drill down deep enough to really get it into our hearts. Maybe it got into our ears, but I'm not sure it gets down to the deeper level of our heart. And so I wanted to make sure or try and attempt again this morning to make certain that what we covered last week is going to get to a deeper level today than it did last week. The fact is that most Christians and most Christian churches don't practice Matthew 18. We've read the passage. Most Christians and most Christian churches do not practice or implement these principles. And Jesus himself gave them to us, right? Wow. And perhaps confusion about exactly how this recovery and restoration effort is supposed to be done is a question that is in my mind and perhaps in yours. So I want to take some time this morning to kind of walk slowly through verses 15, 16, and 17 before we get to the rest of the passage. The first point we made last week was the recovery of love is necessary whenever a perceived offense against someone is not resolved and restored. Look at verse 15 again very carefully. If your brother sins against you, Jesus is speaking to his disciples. By way of inference, he's speaking to you as his disciple. If your brother sins against you, and you can think of this as kind of in the church community especially, if your brother sins against you, go, go, you go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. Now you can think of verse 15 as the first of three steps that God designed for the recovery and restoration of relationships damaged by sin. It is the private, one-on-one confrontation between you and the person who sinned against you. None of you have ever had anybody sin against you, right? No, okay, you get it, right? I mean, this happens all the time, right? Let's be honest. James says, in many things, we offend all men. We do. I offend. Ask my wife. You know who you offend the most when you're married? Your spouse. I can confidently say that the person that I have had to ask forgiveness from more than any other person is my wife, because I'm with her all the time, a lot of time. Think of verse 15 as the first of three steps that God designed for the recovery and restoration of relationships damaged by sin. It's that private one-on-one confrontation between you and the person who sinned against you. intensifies the effort to recover the damaged relationship with your brother by adding one or two others to your company who were witnesses of your brother's sin against you and who can testify and establish by evidence the charge you're making against your brother. That's step two. And then finally, verse 17 informs us of the third and final step that God designed for the recovery and restoration of relationships damaged by sin. If the private confrontation and the addition of one or two witnesses to accompany you fails to recover and restore the loving relationship between you and your brother or sister, then Jesus says, oh boy, here it comes, tell it to the church. Ooh, that's escalation. That refers to every member of the particular local church. Ekklesia, the Greek word, means the called out ones, the gathered ones. It's a reference to the local church. tell it to the church. Now that's not to every church in the world, right? But to every member of the particular local church where the sinning brother resides and is a member, from which we learn that a true church of Christ is known by its involvement in the process of recovering and restoring love between its members. That's what this passage really is at the heart of it. This is a recovery program that Jesus gave us in Matthew 18. because he knew sin would come and what, fracture, injure, jeopardize, wound our relationships with one another. And this is how you fix it. And if you don't do this, if you don't follow these commands and directives, it won't get fixed. If you sweep it under the rug, and you don't deal with it the way Jesus prescribes, it won't get healed. The relationship will stay fractured. The hurt will remain. The distance from your alienated brother or sister will continue to be there. Each member of the body is a treasure. Remember from last week, a treasure. And if damaged by sin, every effort must be made to recover and restore that treasure. Now, we're gonna do a little exercise. I want to take you, and Bruce, could you come up and just take these and distribute those to everybody? I wanna take one verse this morning, 15, We're going to have a little Q&A time. I want to involve you in this kind of Sunday school style, as it were. I want to drill down deeper into the subject by asking 10 questions that are on this two-page outline and giving you opportunity to answer them. Keep in mind we're talking about one verse of Scripture, 15. This is where the process of recovery and restoration begins. It is vitally important. You can't get to 16 or 17 or step two or three. You have to start with step one, right? And it's in verse 15. Okay, so real simple, who spoke the words Matthew recorded in verse 15? Who spoke them? Who wrote them? Matthew, right? Who spoke them? Jesus, okay. Are these directives and commands optional or are they mandatory? They're mandatory, of course, right. Who is identified here as the one who sins against you? Who is it? Look at verse 15. Who is the person? What's he called? Your brother, meaning he is what? A Christian brother. He is a believer. This is especially in the context of Christian relationships or the church. Number four, if your brother who sins against you doesn't come to you and confess his sin, then who else is responsible to initiate the recovery effort? Who? If your brother who sins against you doesn't come to you, you give him a little time, you give him a little slack in the rope, he doesn't come and confess his sins, then who else is responsible to initiate this process? You, the offended, the one who's offended. You are responsible. You go and tell him his fault, Jesus said. Gets us right out of our comfort zone, doesn't he? We don't want to do this by nature, but we can do it by grace. Number five, what constitutes a sin or a fault that makes it necessary for the offended to go and tell the offender his fault? Anybody want to take a stab at it? What constitutes a sin or a fault that makes it necessary for the offended to go? You know, I mean, really, this is important because, you know, if somebody had a hangnail on their finger and you said, oh, that's a hangnail, you're sinning against me, that might scratch me. Well, come on, be reasonable, right? It's gotta be something more than that, but what is it? What constitutes a sin or a fault that makes it necessary for the offended to go and tell the offender his fault? Let me read to you my response. By the way, I'm going to give you, or you have the outline, so you can kind of follow along if you want to. And maybe I should have just gone through this without giving you the outline first, but let's go through it anyway. Legally, all sins stand as equally offensive before God. Like one sin, if one sin happens, it breaks the whole law, right? James says that. If you break the law in one point, you have broken it, what? You've broken it all. Okay, so legally all sins stand as equally offensive before God. On the other hand, some sins are worse than others and that they have more harmful consequences in our lives and in the lives of others. In terms of our personal relationship to God as Father, they arouse His displeasure more and bring more serious disruption to our fellowship with Him. Moreover, those sins that are done willfully, repeatedly, and knowingly with a callous heart are more displeasing to God than those that are done out of ignorance and are not habitual. We are all indeed guilty of sin. but we must also recognize that there are some sins that are so blatant, ongoing, and harmful to the church that they must be dealt with directly by the process of church discipline. This distinction is crucial so that we do not neglect all discipline, nor exercise discipline for every single instance of sin. So there's the balance. That's a good statement. The distinction is crucial so that we do not neglect all discipline, but we don't exercise discipline for every single instance of sin. Number six, if your brother sins against you, how long should you wait until you go and tell him his fault? Don't look at the answer. Anybody got a thought? How long do you wait? Like somebody sins against you and you go right then, get in their face? Probably not, right? Don't go right away and tell them it's fault. The Lord in Genesis 3, 8, when Adam fell, gave us a great example of that. It was a serious infraction that Adam committed, but he went to him and he sought him out in the cool of the day. That means later in the day. The day went by and God waited, as it were, before he confronted Adam and Eve. We should probably never go immediately to tell a brother of his fault against us. in the heat of the moment, right after it happened, since we're then often hot with emotion, right? Or angry and hurt by his or her sin against us. So give it a little time, but go. Seven, does this command require you to make a wise and righteous judgment as to whether or not your brother has actually sinned against you? Well, here we are asking ourselves, what are the implications of going and telling him his fault? Or if your brother has sinned against you, that means that in your from your perspective and in your personal judgment, the person has sinned against you. You have to make that judgment, right? You have to. And you hear people all the time, oh, judge not that you be not judged. Well, wait a minute. Jesus said in John 7, 24, don't judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment. We want to be those who judge in a right way, with right judgment, because you have to make judgments in order to do even this, right? This process in Matthew 18 is vitally important to the health of the church of Jesus Christ. In fact, it'd be safe to say that if this isn't ever going on, if this 15, 16, 17, if this passage, if the directives that Jesus gave here aren't happening in the church, it ain't healthy. It's going downhill. It's getting nowhere fast. You have to make a judgment. You have to interpret, has this person sinned against me? Is it really sin that he or she has committed? And is it serious? Does it require confrontation? Number eight, is confrontation sometimes necessary to heal a relationship damaged by sin? Well, yes. To go and tell them it's fault requires confrontation, and by nature, we don't want to confront. I don't like to confront. Do you? Anybody here like to confront? Well, no, but Jesus says we need to learn how to confront. We need to go and tell him his fault. That's confrontation. That's difficult. Number nine, why do you think Jesus said that you should privately go and tell your brother his fault between you and him alone? The answer, sin should be kept as private a matter as possible between two people unless the effort to recover the relationship that it damaged requires more people to be involved in its restoration. And I made a note, the exception to this is if the nature of the sin is criminal. You know, I mean, if what the person did to you is a criminal sin, as it were, a criminal wrongdoing, then that may require that you go to the police, right? I've had on occasion over the years, I've had people come to me and they've said, well, I'd like to counsel with you, but what I'm going to share with you, you can't tell anyone else. And I go, well, I can't assure you of that. I may have to tell someone else, right? If the nature of what you tell me speaks of a criminal act or an illegal kind of act that requires judicial involvement, then I may be compelled to have to go. So you need to be careful before you say anything to me. Right? So it's the same principle here. Number 10. What is the goal of confronting your brother with his sin against you? Gaining your brother means to gain or to win back your brother's alienated affections and to restore and recover your damaged relationship. Love is essential in relationships between believers and therefore the recovery of love is necessary whenever a perceived offense against someone is not resolved or restored. Now I made a note at the top of page one on your outline that you know, we could probably add many other observations or questions to the 10 that are listed here. But I would suggest to you that this is a getting back to Andrew's presentation some time ago on studying the scriptures. This is a great way to study the scriptures is to ask questions about a verse And in this case, we've come up with 10. I'm sure if we took time now, you could probably come up with even more questions that I didn't ask, but which would be appropriate to ask in order to better understand the implications of verse 15. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. A simple few words, but a lot of information that is packed into it. Any thoughts or observations on this? Yeah, please. Excellent. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Very good. Anything else? Okay, let me go on to this. The essentials of asking for forgiveness. At the heart of all this is this This responsibility that becomes ours whenever we have committed sin, we need to ask for forgiveness. And there are two essentials. The first one is that you must go to God and ask for his forgiveness for your sins. Anybody think of a place in scripture that would hint about that? I thought of Psalm 51, David's song of penitence after he committed grievous sins with Bathsheba. and murdered her husband Uriah. In Psalm 51.4, David addressed God and said, against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. What's he saying? Against you, Lord, you only have I sinned. Well, didn't I sin against Bathsheba? Didn't I sin against Uriah? Didn't I commit adultery with her? Didn't I murder him? Well, that's true. He did, right? He did those things. But in a relative sense, David recognized, first and foremost, I've sinned against God, right? Against thee, or you. You only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So David recognized that although his grievous sins were against people, He recognized in the first place that his sins were against a holy God. And so are ours. Think of any sin that you've committed. Think of even a grievous sin that you've committed. We often tend to be looking horizontally, don't we? We're just looking horizontally at who that sin hurt. when in fact we should be looking vertically, because our sin is against God first, our Maker, our Redeemer. Secondarily, it's against people horizontally, like Bathsheba or Uriah. And therefore, that psalm of repentance that David wrote, it's first directed to God, recognizing him as the source of all cleansing and forgiveness for sin. Purge me, he said with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins. Blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. David went first to God and asked him for forgiveness for his sins, and so too must we do the same. Of the second essential for asking for forgiveness, now that we get this part done, the vertical part with God, is we must go to the one whom we have offended and ask him or her for forgiveness for sin. And if you fail to do that in a timely manner, then expect the one whom you've offended to come to you, right? That's what this passage in Matthew 18 teaches. The relationship with your brother or sister has been damaged, it's been broken by sin, and confession of that sin and asking forgiveness for it is the way to recover and restore that relationship. However, confessing sin and asking for forgiveness is not a strength for most Christians. It is not a strength for most Christians, at least most of the ones that I have known. Even their best attempt at it sounds too often like this. If you think I offended you, then I'm sorry. How many times have you heard something like that? Well, if you think I've offended you, then I'm sorry. That isn't asking for forgiveness. It really isn't. If you think I offended you means you may think that I did something wrong or sinful, but I really don't. But if I offended you, then I'm sorry, which again isn't asking for forgiveness, but simply tells me how you feel, right? Perhaps you feel sorry that what you said or did got you into this messy, uncomfortable situation where someone is accusing you of sin, so you warm out of owning and confessing your sin and humbly asking for forgiveness by saying, well, if you think I offended you, then I'm sorry. You know, if I never heard those words again, it'd be too soon. Christian, those kinds of words won't recover or restore your relationship with anyone. In fact, those words don't constitute a proper apology or an act of asking for forgiveness. Instead, you must go to the one whom you've offended and actually ask him or her for forgiveness of your sin, and I think if you can kind of visualize that they have something of value and worth that you need to get from them, you need to go to them and ask them for forgiveness. Let me illustrate with my wife, Leslie. We've been married for 38 years. Is that right? Oh, wow. I was close. Okay. Let me demonstrate. Leslie, do you have something of value in your pocketbook? Yeah, okay. That something of value is what? Show me what you have. Oh, yeah. So that represents what? It represents forgiveness. I've offended her. I've probably offended my wife more than any other person alive that I know because I've lived with her for 38 years and you know you just have a way of offending people that you live with all the time. Now if I've offended her, And that $20 bill represents forgiveness that I need. I need her forgiveness. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come to her and I'm going to say, honey, regarding what I said yesterday. That was wrong. I shouldn't have said that. It was sin. I've asked God for forgiveness, and I'm coming to you now, and I want to ask you for forgiveness. Will you please forgive me for having said what I said to you yesterday? Now the forgiveness is mine. Right? I possess the forgiveness now. I have it. She gave it to me. That's called, I like to call it, transactional forgiveness. There's a transaction. She's got something that I need, forgiveness. I go to her and I ask her for it. I'm not just saying something like, well, if I did something, if I did something or if I offended you in some way, then I'm sorry. No, it's not that at all. It's I've asked God for forgiveness for my sin. Will you please forgive me for my sin? And she says, yes. And then I take the $20. Hey, we should do this more often. but we're gonna have to wait because our time is gone. And I've got more to share with you, but it'll have to wait till next time. You get the idea? If you didn't get anything else, I hope that you got this right here. Because this is the kind of forgiveness that has to be transacted between believers. when sin fractures their relationship. We can't sweep it under the rug. We can't avoid it. We've got to go to the person who we sinned against and we've got to ask for the forgiveness. And hopefully The answer is gonna be yes, I will forgive you. And then the forgiveness is transacted. Again, I'm beyond my time. I wish I could go to step three or two and three, but we'll do that next time, okay? Let's pray together. Father, We've probably read this verse a hundred times or many times in our lifetime. Words that Jesus spoke, important words that are crucial for restoring and recovering relationships that are broken by sin. And we want to put feet to these words. We want to act upon them in a way that honors you and that truly leads to restored relationships. Would you help us, Lord, when we sin? against someone else to come first to you and to make our sin known to you and to confess our sins before you. Against you, you only, have we sinned in a sense. And then to go to the one whom we have offended and to sincerely ask for that which is so valuable that they have, which is forgiveness for us for our sin. And may there be a transaction. May that $20 bill go from their hand into ours. May forgiveness be transacted so that relationships can heal and mend and strengthen. God, help us not to neglect the words of our Savior here. This ought to be happening in our relationships with one another, in our marriages, in our church, and especially between believers. So help us to practice verse 15 this week, maybe today. And perhaps there's several here today who need today to ask their spouse or another member of the body of Christ for forgiveness and transact it today. I pray that we would be a people submissive and obedient to the words and commands of Christ and that the result of putting these principles to work in our relationships and in our church would lead to its peace, its prosperity, and its unity. And we ask that these things would be so for Jesus' sake and for our good. In Christ's name, amen.