1 Corinthians 5 -- What We Dread, We Often Fail To Do

Paul tells the Corinthian Christians in no uncertain terms that there is real danger in allowing a Christian who habitually practices a sin that is publicly known to remain in fellowship with the church.  There are several reasons for dealing with such a member, according to my commentary:

1)       The church cannot retain its holy character in the eyes of the world.

2)      The Holy Spirit will be grieved, and His work will be hindered.

3)      The church might become proud of its tolerance.

4)      The church might become more interested in numbers than in holiness.

Paul wants them to understand that they were not sufficiently shocked by sin.

Also, it wasn’t just sexual sin that Paul felt was deserving of this discipline.  On the same level, he put greed, theft, idolatry, verbal abuse, drunkenness, and cheating others. 

They were to put such members out of the fellowship.  “This discipline of believers is always calculated to bring about their restoration to fellowship with the Lord.  Excommunication is never an end in itself, but always a means to an end,” my commentary said.

Paul uses what to them would have been a vivid picture of sin:  yeast in a batch of dough.  “If they tolerate a little moral sin in the church, it will soon grow and expand until the whole fellowship is seriously affected.  Righteous, godly discipline is necessary in order to maintain the character of the church.”  In this illustration, Paul reminded them of how, “on the first day of the Passover feast, a Jew was required to remove all leaven from his house.  He went to the kneading trough and scraped it clean.  He scrubbed the place where the leaven was kept till not a trace remained.  He searched the house with a lamp to make sure that none had been overlooked,” my commentary added.  WOW!  If we would all only do that in our own lives with our sin, there’d be no need to exercise godly discipline in the church.

Paul lets us know that “we are not to judge men’s motives because we are not competent for that type of judgment.  But the word of God is equally clear that we are to judge known sin in the assembly of God so as to maintain its reputation for holiness and so as to restore the offending brother to fellowship with the Lord.”

When and if a believer must ever be removed from fellowship, a public announcement is called for, made in genuine sorrow and humiliation and should be followed by continual prayer for the spiritual restoration of the wanderer, according to my commentary.

Father, I pray that our church – particularly its members – will deal gently but firmly, and in a private way, whenever sin like this if first discovered, in order to restore one of Your children to fellowship.  I pray that we will never be proud of our tolerance, and that we will not fail to love a member enough to confront early on, so that we may prevent these drastic steps from ever being needed.

Your Brother In Christ,

Gary Ford