When you think about church discipline, what word comes to mind? After our message last Sunday morning, after our discussion in the afternoon service? Discipline? Love, all right. The word that I think we used most often was the word messy. It's messy, it's difficult. You think of any other words? What? Restoration, good. Separation, okay, we'll talk about that. So, it's intense. Even when we understand the process, step by step, that Scripture outlines, it's easy to see why some evangelicals would rather just forget about this subject. I mean, why bother? And as we return to 1 Corinthians 5 this morning, that is the question we want to answer. Why church discipline? Why bother? And we will find more than one answer to that question in this chapter. So let's read again the entire chapter, all 13 verses, and let's see if we can find these answers. Reading beginning in 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 1. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles, that a man has his father's wife and you are puffed up. and have not rather mourned that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged, as though I were present, him who has so done this deed. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you are truly unleavened. or indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote to you in this epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world or with the covetous or extortioners or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother who is sexually immoral or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or an extortioner. not even to eat with such a person. For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? Those who are outside, God judges. Therefore, put away from yourselves the evil person." Why bother? Why church discipline? Well, the most straightforward answer is simple obedience. In Matthew, our Lord Jesus commanded that we handle sin in the church by means of this mechanism. And Paul reflects that divine demand here in this chapter as well. It's summarized in verse 13, put away from yourselves the evil person. No local church can claim obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ and simply dismiss these directions regarding church discipline. But when our Lord demands obedience, he often gives us additional motives for obedience. Our God often condescends to us to convince us that what he commands is actually for our best. And that's what we see in this chapter. God gives us three good reasons to obey these injunctions with regard to church discipline. Now we discussed the first last Sunday. And Gale hit it on the head. It is the restoration of the erring believer, the restoration of the erring brother or sister. Now, since we talked about this in depth last Sunday, I'm not going to repeat that material. But I do want to answer a question that was raised at the end of our discussion last Sunday afternoon. I think it was Terry who asked, what about once saved, always saved? And Terry asked that question in response to the fact that repeatedly last Sunday, we said that the exercise of church discipline ends up with regarding that erring brother or sister as unregenerate. They're acting on regenerate and so we put them out of the membership of the church and we treat them as unregenerate. and they are in very real danger of going to hell. Now, how can that be if once saved, always saved? Well, I begin my answer by reminding you that you have never heard me say, once saved, always saved. I actually think people that use that phrase confuse us. Now, understand, I do believe that a genuine believer, somebody that genuinely believes in Jesus Christ, is not going to lose their salvation and end up in hell. But normally, when people use that phrase, once saved, always saved, what they really mean is that once somebody professes faith in Jesus Christ, then they will certainly be saved in the end. And that is just not true. 1 Corinthians 5 is one of the texts that teaches us that that's not true. It teaches us that a person may make a profession of faith and they may initially display evidence of regeneration and they may join the local church, but then they may reverse course and live like the devil. And when that happens, the local church has a responsibility to judge that individual. And I use that word judge purposely because that's the word that we find in verse 12 and 13. We have a responsibility to judge that individual, to say we no longer see evidence of regeneration, of genuine salvation. Look to your soul, repent, run to Christ. And he will forgive you. And if we see evidence of repentance, then we will restore you. That's what we want. And here's the point. When a local church takes that step, We don't know if that person is regenerate or not. It is the response, it is the reaction to that discipline that will reveal whether that person is genuinely regenerate or not. Here's another way to look at this issue. A genuine believer is always going to repent of known sin. Let me repeat that. A genuine believer is always going to repent of known sin. Now, he may not do it right away. King David took a year to repent of his sin with Bathsheba, but the ultimate evidence of genuine salvation is perseverance. Perseverance of the faith. And so a genuine believer is going to persevere in repentance. A genuine believer, somebody comes to him and says, look, I see open, obvious sin in your life. What's a believer going to do? What did David do when Nathan said, thou art the man? David repented on his face, in tears. A genuine believer, when he's faced with his sin, when somebody says, I see open, obvious sin in your life, and I'm not talking now about the gray areas, okay? I'm not talking about Christian liberty issues. I'm talking about open, obvious sin. A believer's gonna repent. He's gonna say, you're right. Pray for me, help me. I repent. I mean, you can actually look at it this way. There's really only one sin for which a person can rightly be put out of a local church. And that's the sin of unrepentance. It's an unwillingness to deal with sin when it's pointed out. And that is not the mark of a truly regenerate person. So the first motive for taking the step of church discipline is the restoration of a brother who has fallen into obvious open sin. Restoration first to Christ and then restoration to the fellowship of the local church. But then the second motive to undertake church discipline is found in verses 6 through 8 here in 1 Corinthians 5. And we really did not discuss these verses at all last Sunday. The second motive is on the corporate level. So the first motive for undertaking church discipline is on the personal level. It is to restore that individual to Christ and to the church. The second motive is on a corporate level. It is on the level of the entire local church. Church discipline seeks to ensure the purity of the local church, the purity of the local church. Now Paul transitions to this second motive in verse 6 by quoting a well-known adage from that day. Do you not know, Paul says, and actually then we could put quotation marks after do you not know, a little leaven leavens the whole lump. So Paul explains, commends the purity of the local church through the symbolism of leaven. A little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough. Now, how many of you have ever baked bread? Okay, we've got a few. How many of you have ever baked bread without a bread maker? Okay, quite a few, all right. I mean, you make it with a bread maker, it doesn't count. It doesn't count. So, you know, this is not a real common occurrence. How many of you have made bread within the last month? Without a bread maker? Okay, we got three. Kyle? Wow! But you need to understand, this was something very common in Paul's day. Everybody would have been familiar with this. Certainly any female over five years of age. This is something that would have been done in every household, if not every day, multiple times a week. So everybody was familiar with what went into baking bread. Now, he's talking about leaven. Leaven is not yeast. Some of the modern versions use the translation yeast in this passage. And that translation skews the symbolism. I mean, how many of you ladies or gentlemen use yeast? Kyle has to raise his hand. Oh, Caleb raises his hand too. Good. Okay, you know, where do you get yeast? Yeah, at the grocery store. Okay, I can remember my mom, she always used Fleischmann's yeast, it came in the little yellow and red packets. Do they still make Fleischmann's yeast? Okay, everybody's, yeah, I think that's Fleischmann's, that's their whole business probably is making yeast. Okay, so you go to the grocery store and you buy that. That is not what this passage is talking about. Leaven serves the same purpose as yeast, but it's not yeast. Leaven is a piece of dough that was held back from the baking. And they didn't have refrigerators in Paul's day. They didn't have Saran wrap. They didn't have wax paper. They didn't have paper paper. So what did they do with that piece of dough that they held back? So it probably sat in a bowl on a shelf somewhere in the nice, hot, Mideast climate. And so for the next day or two, what happened to that piece of dough? It soured. It fermented. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Okay? And so then that lady would take that leaven, that little piece of dough, and she would make up a new batch of dough and she would work that leaven through it. And it would serve the same purpose as yeast. And what does yeast do? Yeast feeds on the sugars that are in the dough and that produces Come on, Engineer Kyle, you should be able to tell me, produces carbon dioxide, which causes the dough to expand and rise, which is what all you bakers are after, all right? So leaven, then, is a symbol of what? It's a symbol of corruption. and how easily that corruption spreads and expands. Now some of the commentaries say that a better modern equivalent of a little leaven leavens the whole lump is one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel. but that's not really modern either. I mean, how many of you guys get your apples out of an apple barrel anymore? I mean, you know, that's not really a modern illustration either, but it does make the same point. And that is that corruption spreads. Now, why is Paul talking about leaven here in the middle of this discussion about church discipline? What's his point? The point is that if a local church permits a member in their midst who is openly sinful, it has the same effect on the local church as that leaven does on the dough. That corruption spreads through the entire church body. To permit that person to remain in the body is spiritually detrimental. It's spiritually corrupting. I think actually a better modern illustration than a rotten apple is cancer. Tolerating open sin in the life of a church member is like knowing that you have a cancerous tumor, but refusing to go to the doctor and have it removed. I mean, what do you expect to happen? That tumor is gonna metastasize, it's gonna spread through your entire body, and it's going to kill you. It has to be removed for the health of the body. and that openly sinning brother or sister who is a member of a local church must be removed for the health of the body. Now, leaven was not just a common sense illustration rooted in the everyday practice of baking bread. It also hearkened back to the Old Testament, to the feast of Unleavened bread, okay? The feast of unleavened bread was to be celebrated each year in the first month of the year. It lasted seven days. And on the first day of the feast, each Israelite family was to clean out all of the leaven from their house. You know, the rabbis actually had regulations for what had to be done. A woman had to sweep the house and so forth. And by the way, at Passover, they still do this today in a Jewish home. And so all leaven had to be removed. And for the seven days of this feast, the family could eat no leaven. All they could eat was unleavened bread at pain of being expelled from the congregation of Israel. And this feast was a memorial of the exodus, of how the Egyptians let the Israelites go, actually expelled them, forced them from the land, and they left with their kneading bowls filled with unleavened bread. They didn't have time for the dough to rise. That's the idea. And so here in verse seven, Paul's thoughts transition to the feast of unleavened bread. He says, therefore, purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump. So Paul was directing the Corinthians to do something and he was using Old Testament terminology, but basically he was telling them, clean out the old leaven. take this openly sinning individual and put him out of the church. Now, like many ceremonial laws in the Old Testament, this practice of once a year cleaning out the old leaven also served a health benefit for the Israelites. And this isn't hard to imagine, is it? I mean, think about this. For an entire year, you keep breaking off a piece of that dough and putting it over on the shelf for a day or two and letting it rot, essentially, and then adding it to your dough. I mean, sooner or later, what's gonna happen? I mean, somebody's gonna get sick. Today, we know about things like germs and microbes. What a great word, microbe. You know, something is too small to see, but it sure can make you sick. But there was a very simple way to deal with this health problem. You just break the chain of corruption. You clean out all the old leaven and you start with unleavened bread. Now, think about it. If you start with unleavened bread and you break off a piece and you put it on the shelf, sooner or later that bread's going to start being leavened again, right? It's just a natural process. But you could break that chain of corruption by cleaning out that old leaven. And that's what Paul was telling the Corinthians, look, you've got to break the chain of corruption for the spiritual health of the church. This openly sinning brother must be put out of the membership. And then Paul makes one more comment based on the Old Testament feast of unleavened bread. He tells them to take this step since you are truly unleavened. Now, that sentence, or that part of that sentence, that can kind of be confusing, okay? I mean, think about it. Paul says, because you are unleavened, clean out the old leaven. What do you mean, Paul? That doesn't make sense. If we're already unleavened, why do we need to clean out the old leaven? Does that make sense to you? It makes sense to you if you understand the mind of the Apostle Paul. The Apostle Paul often wrote like this. The Apostle Paul often told us to become what we already are. Will you say that with me? Become what we already are. Okay? If you're a believer in Jesus Christ, then the New Testament repeatedly calls you a saint. The word saint means holy one. Because you're united to Christ, you have been separated from sin. You are set apart once and for all from sin because you're related to Jesus Christ. You are a holy one. That is how God sees you. That is your position in Christ. In fact, in one of the first verses here in 1 Corinthians, Paul says of the Corinthian believers, you are sanctified in Christ. You are set apart from sin. That was their position. But what Paul is saying is, look, if that's your position, if that's how God sees you, then in your practical everyday living, you have to be set apart from sin. You must become what you already are. And so when Paul here says to the Corinthians, you are already unleavened, he was talking about how God sees them. In Christ, they were already holy. They were already completely set apart from sin. And so Paul says, because that's how God sees you, because that is your position in Jesus Christ, On a practical level now, you need to make sure that you really are unleavened. You need to get rid of the old leaven. You need to take this sinning individual and put him out of the membership. You must become what you already are. Now, at the end of verse seven, Paul extends the illusion here even further. As I said a few moments ago, the Feast of Unleavened Bread extended for seven days from the 14th to the 21st day of the first month. But the Feast of Unleavened Bread began with Passover. So Paul could not really think of one without thinking of the other. They were bound up with one another. And so Paul also here speaks of the symbolism of the Passover. The Passover commemorated how God brought the Israelites out of Egypt with a strong arm by means of that 10th plague. Many of us remember this from our Sunday school days, sitting before a flannel graph board, Hearing that story about how the death angel swept over all of Egypt? And only those families who obeyed God and killed a lamb and applied its blood to the doorposts and the lintel, only those families would God pass over, would the death angel pass over and not kill the firstborn of both man and beast. And by the way, That applied not only to Israelites, but to Egyptians as well. By that 10th plague, there were some of those Egyptians that were getting the idea. And that's why a mixed multitude left Egypt. Think about that one. Read that story over again. It was a mixed multitude. That means it wasn't just Israelites who left. There were Egyptians by this point who said, you know, that God, he's got something. I'm gonna follow these folks. Now, the New Testament repeatedly uses this Old Testament feast, this Old Testament celebration of Passover as a type of Christ, as a foreshadowing of what Jesus would do for us. John spoke of this in John chapter 1. John the Baptist said, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The Apostle Paul here calls Jesus our Passover. Some translations translate it, our Passover lamb. And then Peter in 1 Peter 1 says, you are not redeemed with corruptible things like silver or gold from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. So the New Testament points to Jesus as the Passover lamb, but Paul here doesn't take time to unpack this truth, to unpack this type, and we're not gonna take time to unpack it either in this service. We're gonna dive into some detail in the second service today. I encourage you to stay for the second service, and we'll look at some of the detail about how Jesus Christ is our Passover lamb and what that means to us. But rather, Paul here just gives us one simple sentence, tells us that Jesus is the Passover lamb, and then leverages that to insist that we must clean out the old leaven. He says in verse 8, therefore let us keep the feast. So we as New Testament believers, we're supposed to keep the Passover, right? All of us need to become Jews. We're supposed to keep the Passover every year, right? Is that what Paul means? Some of you are confused now. That phrase, keep the feast, is in the present tense. Some of you know a little bit about the Greek language, the original language of the New Testament. And you can translate that, be continually keeping the feast. See, the Old Testament people of God, they kept the Passover once a year, on the 14th day of the first month. But we as New Testament believers who put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are to be continually keeping the feast, every day of the year, constantly, continually. Well, how do we keep the feast? Well, Paul tells us. not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." Now, I don't have time to dive down into a lot of detail here, but basically what he's saying is, you and I, if we have embraced Jesus as our Passover lamb, then we need to be serious about dealing with sin. We're first of all going to be serious about cleaning out the old leaven, the old life. Life BC, life before Christ. Now some people like me, I would say when I was five years old, I didn't have a whole lot of BC. But most of the rest of us have. There were things in our lives, and Paul says, that's all got to go. We're new creations. Behold, old things have passed away. All things have become new. And Paul's saying, look, if you're going to celebrate Christ as your Passover lamb every day of the year continually, then it's going to mean continually cleaning that sin out, cleaning the old life out. And then he goes on to say, But then we're also to have the unleavened bread of, what does he say? Sincerity and truth. And those two words are fairly specific. The words malice and wickedness are fairly general. Paul's just basically talking about sin, but those two words, sincerity and truth, pretty specific words. Paul could have said goodness and righteousness, that would have been general. But he used two very specific words. That word translated sincerity has the idea of transparency, of non-hypocrisy. You know what the word hypocrisy in Greek is? It's actually the idea of a cracked piece of pottery where the crack has been patched with wax. And how could you tell if it had been patched with wax? Well, when you held it up to the sun, you could see the crack. It was transparent. And so that's what this word means. It means not cracked. It means transparent in the sense that you can't see any crack. The word means really integrity. And the word truth has the same idea in certain places. It has the idea that what we say matches what we do. And so what the Apostle Paul is saying here is that there needs to be integrity in our lives as we celebrate the Passover. And again, I think this has to do with the idea that we won't sweep sin under the rug, both in the church and in our own personal lives. We won't deceive ourselves. We will be intellectually honest with ourselves, spiritually honest with ourselves, and we will deal with sin. Now, do you see what Paul has done here? He has brought in Jesus Christ and our relationship with Jesus Christ as a motivation for dealing with sin. If Jesus Christ is our Passover lamb, if it is his blood shed that cleanses us, that frees us from the death angel. If we have applied that blood, and Paul says there's only one way to celebrate what Christ has done for us, we need to make sure that we live our lives with integrity, with the unleavened bread, as Paul puts it here. That's the idea, the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Well, then verses 9 through 13 turn our attention to a third motive for church discipline. The first two motives are focused internally on the church. The individual in the church, that's the first one. The church at large or in general, the corporate body, that's the second one. The third motivation turns our attention outward to the community outside the church. Church discipline also serves a community-wide function, okay? It has to do with our testimony to the outside world, our testimony to the outside world. Now, Paul here issues two warnings regarding our relationship to the community outside of the local church, the outside world. First of all, Verse 9 says, Paul says, I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. And the word that's translated wrote there is in a tense that indicates that Paul had written a letter before 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians is this letter. We could call it zero Corinthians. So there was a zero Corinthians letter, but we don't have it. The Holy Spirit chose not to include it in the New Testament. It's not inspired scripture. But in that letter, the Apostle Paul basically told the Corinthians that they were not to keep company with sinful individuals. And he lists the sins in verse 11, okay? But the Corinthians completely misunderstood Paul. They completely misapplied what he wrote to them in 0 Corinthians. Instead of applying Paul's counsel to relationships with sinful members inside the church, they applied what Paul said to unbelievers outside the church. Now, by doing that, they apparently cut themselves off from a huge percentage of the population. I mean, think about those sins with regard to what the Corinthians would have found in the city of Corinth at that time. They would have developed a bunker mentality. I don't know if you could compare them to the Amish, but they must have been living somewhat like that. They must have kind of created their own cocoon, their own little bubble. And Paul here at the end of verse 10 kind of smacks him upside the head and says, look, in order to live like that, you need to go out of the world. You might as well be living on Mars. They had completely misunderstood Paul to mean that that kind of isolation from the world was God's will. And in verse 10, Paul makes very clear that that kind of isolation from the world is not God's will. Now this is an important truth for us. Many of us here come from fundamentalist churches. You know, we don't tend to use that descriptor much anymore. The media has made it such a pejorative, we don't even use that word much. But those of us who've come from very conservative evangelical churches, we believe in separation. You've probably heard that word, okay? Jim used it at the beginning of the service today. We believe in separation from sin. We believe in separation from the world. Now, separation is nothing but practical holiness. The word holy means set apart or separated. And so people in our churches, we believe, preachers, you'll hear me preach it, I believe in practical Holiness, practical separation, we're to be separated from sin, we're to be separate from the world. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. But here's the problem. When we're serious about separation, separation can end up being isolation. It's very easy for Christians like us to end up not knowing anybody that's not saved, or very few. We have our completely Christian church, and we go home to our completely Christian home, and some of us go to a completely Christian university, Some of us work at a completely Christian university. Now, you know, many of us have regular jobs, but we don't really have much to do with the people on the job. We kind of hold them at arm's length. They're not Christians. We don't have much in common with them. And our neighbors, it's the same. We don't really, you know, we don't really, they're not really friends of ours. And we can end up in a position where we basically have cut ourselves off from the world. And we really are in the same position as the Corinthians were when Paul wrote verses 9 through 13 here. And Paul kind of takes a two by four upside the head and said, that is not God's will. And then Paul gives a second warning in verses 12 through 13. in regard to how the local church is to relate to the larger community. Judging the world is not God's will either. Here's another way that it's easy for us as God's people to get things upside down. In verse 12, Paul says, for what have I to do with judging those who are outside the church? You see, it is just so much easier for us who are Christians to sit in judgment on people that are outside the church. I mean, we can see what's going on in their lives. Their lives are a wreck oftentimes. They have no hope. It's much easier for us to sit in judgment on people outside of the church than it is on people who are inside the church. But Paul reminds us here that it's not our job to judge people outside the church. Let me give you a tip. At the great white throne of judgment, God is not going to say to you or me, hey, come up here and sit next to me. Not gonna happen, not our job. But Paul says in verses 12 and 13, I can tell you what is your job. It is your job to judge openly sinful believers in the church. Now, we don't like to hear that because the people that are in the church, those are the people that are our friends. I mean, here at Midway Bible Church, we literally eat with them every week. These are people that we know well. These are people that we have had longstanding relationships with. And so we really don't want to have to judge them. Judging the people out there, no problem. We don't have much of a relationship with many of them, so it's not a problem judging them. Judging people in the church, no, I don't like that, not so much. And Paul basically says we have this completely upside down because that is our responsibility. When members of the church are openly sinning, when that sin is open and obvious, that is our responsibility, to call them to repentance, to call them back to a relationship with Jesus Christ and with the church. Now, if we will heed these warnings, if we will obey scripture here in regard to church discipline, it will have two results in terms of our impact on the outside world. Two results. Number one, it will address a common accusation that the world makes against the church. I want you to notice the phrase in verse 11, anyone named a brother who commits this sin or that sin. Some versions, and I think it's a better translation say, anyone called a brother. I think there's one modern translation that translates it, a so-called brother. And that's the idea. A so-called brother who commits open sin. Paul here makes clear that the church can contain people who call themselves Christians but who live in open sin and sometimes it's the people outside the church that know about that sin as opposed to the people inside the church. Are you following me? At times it's the people outside the church, the guy that's in the church, he doesn't have a problem letting those people know about the sin, but he wants to make sure that his brothers and sisters in Christ, his fellow church members, wants to make sure they don't know about the sin. So he kind of leads a double life. He leads a life for the people that are in the church, he leads a very different life for the people that are out of the church. And it's because of this that we at times hear the excuse or the accusation from people outside of the church, I don't wanna have anything to do with the church because the church is filled with hypocrisy. And you know what? A person who sees that kind of thing has a legitimate complaint. Because if there are Christians in the church who are openly sinning, then it is our responsibility to take action. Now, oftentimes we don't want to hear about that. But listen, if we come to understand that a brother or sister, somebody who's called a brother or sister within our congregation, there's open, obvious sin, and we're hearing about it out in the community, then we need to take that seriously. We have a responsibility to confront that person, to use the steps that we talked about last Sunday that are outlined in Matthew 18, Galatians 6. Say, look, there's a problem here, you need to repent. And if that person will not repent, then we need to put that person out of the church. People outside of our congregation looking in need to see that we deal with sin, that we're serious about holiness. This is one of the ways that we deal with that excuse about hypocrisy. And then if we do what Paul is outlining here in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, it will have a second result. And that is that it will cause us as church members to build bridges to people outside the church for the gospel. Now, I believe that that part of what Paul is saying here in this last section of 1 Corinthians 5 is actually built on some of the things that Jesus prayed in his high priestly prayer the evening before he was crucified. That prayer we find in John 17. Here's what Jesus prayed. I do not pray, heavenly Father, that you should take them out of the world, Jesus specifically prayed that the Father would not take us out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one. Keep them in the world, but keep them from the evil one. And then he went on to say, as you sent me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. This is the will of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And that is not that we would be isolated from the world, but that we would go into the world. Why? Why would Jesus send us into the world? For the same reason he was sent into the world, to seek and to save the lost. He wants us to be building relationships with unbelievers, building bridges so that we can carry the gospel across those bridges. Like I said, we tend to get this upside down. It's real easy for us to criticize and judge people outside the church. We don't really wanna have anything to do with them. And Jesus says, no, I didn't pray for the Father to take you out of the world. You don't live on the moon. You need to get into relationships with people who need Christ so that you can get the gospel to them. We need to refuse to become the Amish. We need to refuse to live in our own little cocoon. So let's recap. Church discipline, it's hard, it's messy, it's intense. But this chapter reveals three powerful motives to obey God's commands to undertake church discipline when there is a person in open, obvious sin. Again, we're not talking about matters of liberty. We're talking about obvious sins, sexual immorality, robbery, thievery, that kind of thing. Number one. to hopefully restore that person to Christ, to restore that person to fellowship in the church. As I said, if a person is a genuine believer and we face them with that sin, they will repent and we will see them restored. And if they're not a genuine believer, they don't belong in the church. The church is made up of regenerate individuals. And that's the second motive, we need to keep the membership of the church pure. And so a person where that's in question because of how they are behaving, we have a responsibility to put that leaven out of the church, to clean out that leaven, to keep the corruption out of the local church. And then finally, we undertake church discipline, even for the sake of those in the community, those outside of the church. They need to see that we're serious about dealing with sin. And we certainly need to be building relationships with them, befriending them, building bridges to them, so that we can carry the gospel to them. For me, I can easily tell you what the most convicting aspect of this message is, for me. I've been a pastor since I was 22 years old, in a cocoon. I work at Bob Jones University now while I'm a pastor, still in a cocoon. Very difficult for me. to even find ways to build relationships with unbelievers. And the Apostle Paul smacks me upside the head and said, no, we're not supposed to be going out of the world. We're supposed to be building relationships with people in the world so we can take the gospel with us. Now, I don't know what's been the most convicting part of what we've talked about today for you. Maybe it had to do with that issue of integrity, transparency, of really dealing honestly with sin in your life. I don't know. Maybe it's just a willingness to submit and bow the knee to God and say, yes, if there's ever a matter of church discipline, I will submit. I will obey. Whatever it is, I encourage you here as we close you would give your answer to the Lord. Is it yes or no? Will you yield to him? Will you say, yes, I will obey? Would you bow your heads and close your eyes? Just a few moments of silence. You respond to the Holy Spirit. You respond to God's word. You say, yes. Yes, I will.