Deliberate Discipline

If you open your Bible to Matthew 28, we are going off script a little bit because I told you we were going to eventually get to Romans. Before we got to Romans, I was going to try to go through the law of God. But after last week when Alan was here giving us Christ's vision for the church, I was a bit inspired, I guess, to preach about the church a little bit.

And I thought for, in fact, whenever a guest preacher comes, except Mike, so when Paul came and Alan, they always say, well, what do you want me to preach about? And I said, well, preach about the church or membership or something, Because I think this is what we need to understand is how to function as a church. And so for the next few weeks, we are going to look at specifically church discipline, which a lot of us have a wrong understanding of because we only think of church discipline as the end point of excommunication when that type of thing occurs. and so what I want to do is I want to go through church discipline and I want us to understand some things about how a church ought to function for the health of our church so it won't be quite so verse by verse as we've been used to and although we are committed to that the sermons will still be expositional so some of you that probably raised a red flag you can be expositional without being verse by verse.

You simply are expositing the text. The question is whether you just do the next verse next week, right? But I think it'll be edifying. And I want us to have a good foundation of how we are to really behave within the church and how some of these things relate to our lives. and I think you will find it helpful. So in Matthew 28, I want to start out by reminding you in verse 19, no, I'm sorry, verse 18.

Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. So we're not going to exposit that section, But I want to remind you that everything that we do in this world, but particularly functioning as a local church, is under the lordship of Jesus Christ, who is the head of the church. And so when we talk about, well, how should we do church?

How should we interact with one another? How should we structure the service? How should we do the meal? What building should we meet? everything falls under the headship of Jesus Christ. This is why, in some sense, it's why we're Protestants, because Protestants believe Christ is the head of the church and not the pope, or as some Protestant churches function, not the pastor or pastors.

In fact, we are committed to what I call congregational church leadership. And I said that there's a leader who's leading, But my job as the pastor and as we bring in more elders is for the most part to lead with truth and to but not to boss people around. The goal of the biblical pastor is to actually execute the will of the congregation in areas of preference.

And then, of course, to lead by the leading of the word of God, which is simply to say to lead as Christ would want them to lead. So Christ has appointed under shepherds to the position of leadership. But in in every respect, the under shepherds are simply doing God's will if they are telling people what they ought to be doing according to the will of Christ.

Which is why the congregation has a obligation to hold leaders accountable. In fact, I don't want to get into too many details. But one of the reasons Jason and I and our wives really didn't want to stay at our last church was we actually didn't see a mechanism to hold the leaders accountable. That was what you would call more of an elder rule kind of church.

And there was no recourse if you disagreed with the elders. Somebody could argue that a little, but functionally there wasn't one. Let me put it that way. but if you turn to Matthew 18 we're going to look at the classic church discipline passage there is there's been plenty of ink spilled about this there's been plenty of people who have said this is what it means or this is what it doesn't mean and I will clear all those things up in the next five weeks for you I do have what I believe is a four part series and so with Mike preaching next week we're looking in about five weeks and then on our birthday in early August we will hopefully start the next thing unless I decide to continue with church things if or if people have questions and it says well hey maybe we should go into more detail but so a couple things for you kids to remember so you can help me remember I thought it was really funny last week when Alan told the kids to remember his points because I didn't tell him to do that and I don't think he over his listen to me preach, but I do that too.

And we were noticing all weekend how many similarities there were between Alan and me with some of the things we said and did as dads and husbands But so church discipline starts with a D right Discipline starts with a D Church discipline is deliberate, it's discreet, it's directed, and it's desperately needed. And so this week we're going to look into the fact that it's deliberate. And then in two weeks, hopefully we'll talk about it being discreet.

We'll talk about it being how it's directed. What is the goal of church discipline? Is the goal just to kick people out that don't think like you? Or is there more goals? And why is it desperately needed? And that is something that you'll have to wait apparently about a month to get to.

But each and every one of us in this room who has committed to membership at Covenant Bible Church of Ohio agreed to these statements when we joined the church. We agreed, this is from our covenant, that each one of you at least read on that day, hopefully read in advance to the day you became a member. But you said, you will work and pray for the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

You said you will walk together in brotherly love with one another as becomes the members of a Christian church you'll exercise an affectionate care and watchfulness over each other and faithfully admonish and entreat one another as occasion may require. And you promise that you will not forsake the assembling of ourselves together nor neglect to pray for ourselves and others. and there's a about three times as many total statements in our covenant that you also agree to but these ones in particular i want you to think to yourself how do you walk together in brotherly love we looked at first peter and peter told us to have a humble mind and and to have tender heart and sympathy and brotherly love how do we how do we perform this how do we walk together in brotherly love well tells us in our covenant faithfully admonishing one another and entreating one another as the occasion may require so looking at Matthew 18 church we're going to read let me read Matthew 18 15 to 20 this is the well-known text on church discipline. 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. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. if he refuses to listen to them tell it to the church and if he refuses to listen even to the church let him be to you as a gentile and a tax collector truly i say to you whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven again I say to you if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask it will be done for them by my father in heaven for where two or three are gathered in my name there am I among them one of the first things I want to point out about this passage is that Jesus Christ is speaking and he is responding to some things that happened in the end of 17 and the beginning of 18. So it would do you well to review Matthew 18 at home and to understand that this is not a little passage I just read that's in a vacuum.

What that means, it's not separated from the context, the text that it's with. It's not separated from the parable of the lost sheep, which precedes it in temptations to sin and the apostles asking Jesus, which one of them is the greatest. And so this all this whole section on discipline and ultimately forgiveness is predicated upon the question the apostles are asking about who's the greatest. they are concerned for their prestige they're concerned that their pride will be fed and jesus uses the example of a little child to talk about the type of faith and humility that true believers are going to have in him so i do advise you to read through the first 14 verses maybe a couple times this week but in this passage what we see secondly the second point i want to make about the passage excuse me this is what happens when you like change what you're going to do last minute when you're preaching so probably shouldn't have told you that because maybe you didn't notice but the second thing i wanted to do was i wanted to tell you something i thought was really neat the word here for church when jesus says if he refuses to listen to them in verse 17 tell it to the church and if he refuses to listen even to the church let him be to you as a gentile and a tax collector the word here and you can correct my pronunciation bert is uh ecclesia or some people say ecclesia i think it's ecclesia though and and this this is a word that if you do a search on it in a greek bible only appears in matthew 16 where jesus says i will build my church and then in Matthew 18 and then it doesn appear again until the book of Acts and it was kind of interesting reading some of the commentaries on this section and one person said well Jesus couldn't have been talking about the church as we know it because it didn't exist yet and yet two chapters earlier Jesus was clearly talking about the church as we know it which, as we know, existed in a different form at the time.

You know, the elect have always been the church. But I do think that although there was no body at this point where they would say, OK, here's our pastor, here's the guy that we're going to go talk to, and here's the group of people that meet on Sunday and do churchy stuff. Although that hasn't occurred yet in Jesus's time, I do think that Jesus's instructions here are particularly applicable to us in the church.

I don't think Jesus was somehow telling the Israelites, here's how I want you to handle an erring brother. And it didn't apply to that which is future. In fact, I would say it not only applies to the church. I believe Jesus was speaking about his church, his bride. so 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 church discipline is deliberate if your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.

This is deliberate. You have to actively be seeking to go and talk to your brother. Turn to Proverbs 27. Look at verse 9 and verse 17. Proverbs 27. In verse 9. we're told oil and perfume make the heart glad and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel so when the when especially in the proverbs and you see this a lot it's like a hebrew way of writing there's a lot of comparisons made so especially in proverbs you'll see like part of a sentence and then the second part, and it's comparing two things.

And now no analogies or comparisons will be perfect in every detail that you could come up with. But oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel. One of the things that I was thinking about with perfume is, one of the reasons we wear perfume, I say we, one of the reasons hopefully only the ladies in the room wear perfume, is basically because you stink. and let's face it, you're not wearing perfume because you smell so good on your own, right?

So maybe I'm taking the analogy too far, but your friend's earnest counsel is designed to help cover up, say, your stinkiness. So while each one of us, you know, oil is used to anoint us when we're fasting, Jesus said, you know, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, but anoint your head and wash your face when you're fasting so that your fasting would not be seen by others. The design of the oil in this case is to provide you with to look better than you really look.

It's one of the reasons we try to take care of ourselves, especially as we age, is most things that we do are just to make us look a little younger or to not look as old as we feel like we're getting. and so oil and perfume make the heart glad these are wonderful things that give us some physical enjoyment and a little bit of a cover up of what we really are physically and the sweetness of your friend comes from his earnest counsel it's your friends counsel to you that actually helps you to cover up what you really look like spiritually so if you have a friend in your life who deliberately will open his or her mouth to tell you things that he thinks you need to improve on. If you have a friend in your life who will let you know, hey, here's an area where you're erring deliberately, that's a true friend. If anybody in this, you know, husbands and wives, if your husband was getting ready to walk out the door and you knew he was stinky or he had cream cheese on his face or whatever, it happens to be, you'd say, oh, let's just clean that up before you go out and present yourself to other people.

And similarly with a good friend, a good friend will open his mouth and tell you spiritually there's something wrong and I want to help you clean it up before you go out and get exposed to other people. And so that's friendship. And so if you have So this is where we have to get serious as a church now with being deliberate. If you have a friend and the friend will not tell you something that they disagree with or that frankly is wrong with you, you don't have a friend.

You have an acquaintance or in some cases you may have a lackey and a subordinate. in some cases maybe you're that person who's afraid to open your mouth with certain people because oh well they'll bite my head off maybe or I don't want to sound critical so I'm not going to open my mouth to tell them this truth that actually maybe concerns me and so it's I think applies to more than just if someone sins against you but in particular in Jesus admonition to the apostles in Matthew 18 it was referring to if you recognize someone sin against you how to resolve that But there other ways that we see someone as a friend and we realize well maybe they didn sin against me today but I'm noticing something about them that you think you need to address. And so this is where it starts to get a little bit ugly. and this is where it can become difficult and I think this is probably where a lot of churches have really just ended up failing and this is the cause of a lot of division you can have a critical spirit you can in fact be sinfully judgmental of others you can also be overly passive and you can be so uncritical that you would not even tell your brother or sister, I think you're in danger because of your sin. Or maybe it's not even sin all the time.

Maybe it's just a little personality thing where you want to tell someone, hey, like, I don't think you're sinning, but maybe you could just change the way you talk a little bit in certain situations. Right. So I preach. Right. And I'm not preaching as much. I feel more talkative now than preaching.

But but it's not appropriate for me to preach every single time. I'm speaking to someone that would become very offensive very quickly. And I would need to know if that was happening. So when you when you're thinking about being deliberate with church discipline, I want you to remember that church discipline is not just the excommunication at the end.

Church discipline begins with brothers and sisters dwelling in unity. And how do you dwell in unity? How do you have that Psalm 133 unity that we want? is it 133? That's right, right? Behold how good and precious it is from brother's full immunity. How do we have that unity?

The only way you're going to have it is if somehow, supernaturally we were all gifted with the same exact mind, or if we work together to build that unity, recognizing that you will be sinned against, and you will sin against others, simply because we are a church filled with men and women who are still struggling with the flesh. The idea that somehow we're going to spend time together and we're going to worship together and we're going to have meetings and we're going to go to the food place and we're going to make the food and we're going to clean up and we're going to play games. The idea that somehow we're going to continue to develop unity together and we're never going to simply sin against one another is absurd.

You're committing the error of believing in sinless perfectionism if you think that now if you don't go to church very often or you just show up on sunday you do the thing in here and then you leave yeah you might get away with never really offending anyone of course you'll offend us by leaving if you did that if you never be on sunday get on a phone call with your brothers and sisters from church if you never have a book study if you never try to do a men's breakfast you could probably get away with it but if you want to be in relationship with the people at your church which you ought to want that you will eventually rub each other the wrong way and i i will too we're all just individual sinners fighting the flesh if you look at verse 17 of proverbs 27 says iron sharpens iron and one man sharpens another and this applies to women as well this would apply to children believing children even non-believing children they sharpen another one way maybe not always for good but we are designed to be in relationship with one another in such a way that we're going to bang into one another we're going to experience conflict and you have to resolve in your mind that you are prepared to actually deal with conflict and that You want to do it in a godly way. So a couple pointers. First of all, remember that you're both saved by the blood of Jesus Christ alone.

If you're in a conflict with a brother or sister, you have to have the humility to recognize that both of you are lost sinners apart from the grace of God. And that should help you to be excited about the fact that this is someone that God dearly loves. That as angry as you may be at their offense toward you, that God in his wrath towards that offense already punished his son for it.

And you need to recognize that when you're dealing with a brother. That they can truly say against you and you only have I sinned to God. And you need to be able to recognize that just like you want your children to get along, even when they're not getting along. because they're both your children that God even more so desires that we would get along with one another.

If every time your kids got in a little fight and you were disgusted by it or annoyed by it or just fed up with it, if you thought to yourself how much more God hates when his children fight than you could ever feel about your own children, it may make you want to be in more unity with your brothers and sisters. Second of all, you want to recognize that for your brother or sister. So let's say you're the offender for your brother or sister to come to you.

And to open their mouth and to try to tell you this is something that I've seen in your life. That is very, very difficult. That they take a big risk that you are going to be angry. that you are going to point your finger back at them and say, well, what about you did this? So I want you to recognize the humility and the love that it takes for one brother or sister to go to another in Christ and to say, I have this thing against you, either something they've done, or I've noticed something in your life that I want to address.

It's a little bit interesting because I get to just preach about this stuff. So I can get up and I can just pick a topic and kind of preach at everybody. But we need to be addressing each other one-on-one. And sometimes if you're the person on the offended side, you need to be able to understand how difficult it is for that person to hear. The reason why you're noticing something in that person's life very often is that you have a godly friend who's striving for holiness and there's something that they don't see.

If they saw it, they'd have already mortified it. I realize there's people that are running rampant with sin and there's a jesus addresses how to deal with those people in the church i'm talking about your brother or sister who genuinely desires holiness who genuinely loves the lord jesus christ and they have a blind spot and you can see it and when you go to them you need to be ready for the fact that they may be defensive which is not good but you need to be able to be patient patient with them. Turn to Galatians 6.

Another text. It's amazing actually how many texts address all these things. People in the church getting along with one another was something Jesus predicted would be extremely difficult, even for saved people. What's the big criticism the Roman Catholic Church has of us Protestants? You're so divided. you know there's 50 000 denominations they say right yeah i don't know if there's 50 000 there's at least five or six uh that are pretty distinct though yeah we're very divided as protestants right we have brothers and sisters that we love and actually think are christians and i would never go to their church if i thought they were going to sprinkle a baby that day right so we're very divided as Protestants and Jesus Christ has given us ways to deal with this Galatians 5 26 leading into this Paul says let us not become conceited provoking one another and being one another so the basis again of confronting your brother is your humility okay take the log out of your eye recognize yourself as a sinner and then go to your brother and Paul says brothers if anyone is caught in any transgression.

You who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. We'll sandwich it between humility verses. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. So again, in a sandwich of humility bread, Paul says, you go to your brother if you caught him in any transgression.

It doesn't say if your brother sins against you, go to him and if he repents, forgive him. That's not what this passage is saying. This is saying, if you catch your brother in any transgression, that has to be deliberate. You have to be engaged in people's lives. you have to be actively seeking their good and their holiness it doesn't mean that you're just trying to be a fault finder but we recognize that God has put these scriptures here for a reason and what I'll tell you is that if we are trying to do church correctly we are going to experience fault finding because we all have faults God has designed it so that we don't do church alone so that you will have to confront somebody one day about something you see in their life.

He has designed it so that you will be confronted and you will have to choose, am I going to be defensive right now? Am I going to point the finger back at the person who is noticing something about me and is trying to help me? Or am I going to simply say, thank you for bringing that to my attention. Let's talk about it. It may be that the person is mistaken It may be that the context of the situation means that the way you were doing something wasn as sinful as they thought But if somebody comes to you with enough love for you and enough fear of God that they would open their mouth to try to help you with your sanctification, the correct response is gratitude.

Because you have a lot of people that you call friends right now who won't ever do that. And they're not your friends. They're just people you know. It tells us how to help people. It says you who are spiritual should restore them in a spirit of gentleness. So one of the first requirements of going to your brother, which is an echo of what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 7 in the Sermon on the Mount, is that you must be spiritual. you don't go to your brother to tell him what he's doing wrong if you yourself are actively engaged in the same sin and behavior now you may go to him and say maybe we can hold each other accountable and help one another but i think you're going to end up with the blind leading the blind paul says imitate me as i imitate christ and i i think that that wasn't paul's way of saying hey, I'm a loser just like all of you, but hey, if you ever notice me doing something right, follow.

I think Paul's trying to say like, look, I imitate Christ. I'm trying to be a model of how to live a Christian life. And if he, you know, he meant a humility, but there are people who are further along in their sanctification than you for one reason or another, or in one area or another. And so we cling to those people and we learn from them and we grow with them.

And if the requirement for somebody to help you with your sin is that they have suffered the same sin that you have suffered. You just made Jesus unqualified to help you with your sin. It's the guy who has conquered that sin, who has overcome it, and by God's grace is continuing to mortify his flesh and isn't falling into the same errors you are that you want to follow.

It says restore him in a spirit of gentleness. this applies to parenting as well. When you go to your brother or sister, you need to recognize that the Lord has been abundantly kind to you. And he has been abundantly gentle with you in your sin, or you would have been crushed by it. If the Lord had revealed to you all your sin the day that he saved you, you would have dropped dead.

This is why as you grow in your Christian walk, you keep finding more things that some of them you're like, I didn't even know that was there. And you know what? It's usually something that you proclaim that you don't do. So the moment you say, well, this is something I'm just not tempted by, watch out. A lot of times God lets you know, hey, you can be tempted by just about anything.

But go to your brother in gentleness, recognizing that it may be very hard for them to admit what you have seen. that at first they may not agree with you. In fact, they may get angry. They may add sin upon sin. That's why I'm advising both sides of the equation here. Because I want us all doing this. It's very uncomfortable.

It's difficult. But it's part of how we dwell in unity. It's part of how we grow together. And so you go in gentleness because you care. If somebody comes to you and just yells at you and tells you how wrong you are about something, And you just, you don't even care what they said half the time. Right?

Because you're like, well, I know the person doesn't really care about me. They just want to argue and they just think they're right. Right? This is why there are some ways to approach people that even though you know the truth, expresses it in a way that is more persuasive to them. Persuasive speech is spoken of in Proverbs a bunch. so it's difficult because we go to the Planned Parenthood we preach the gospel we say hard things to people so we want within the church to be able to say those hard things and if you go to someone and you try your best to tell them here's the thing that I think maybe you need to consider is sin in your life here's the scripture that describes this as sin and here's the behavior I've observed outwardly and I don't know your heart but I'm afraid maybe this is something that you need to address because I noticed it and if If the person says I don want to listen to you because you didn say it nice enough well I don know what would help them so we need to all have the humility that if somebody comes to us imperfectly and they imperfectly communicate to us without a spirit of gentleness or maybe we don't think they're so spiritual maybe we don't think they're qualified to do Galatians 6.1.

It doesn't matter. If somebody comes to you with truth and love and tries to help you to be more conformed to Christ, why wouldn't you listen? That was rhetorical, but the answer is because of your pride. Though it's not really rhetorical. The reason you don't listen is because of your pride. Because you don't want to believe for a moment that that other guy knew something you didn't know or that other lady had something figured out that you didn't have figured out or that somebody saw something that you weren't seeing.

And so if we start with the humility to recognize that we're all in this together and sin has blinded us to so many things. There will be times that you talk it through and maybe you can explain, you know, why you don't think it was sin. And you may get to a point where you're at a bit of an impasse where there's no agreement. And Jesus gives us ways to handle that, right?

So if you haven't won your brother, if between the two of you, you haven't resolved the situation, you bring in two or three witnesses, right? And we'll talk about that under discreet. But two or three witnesses doesn't mean you find people who saw it happen. It doesn't necessarily mean that you go and you tell everybody everything you think. the point is that you bring godly people with you in the hopes that where there's two or three or four people Jesus Christ is there and the pronouncement that is made by the people that are really praying for his will and really trying to live under his headship is actually his pronouncement we'll see that in Matthew 18 we'll get into that a little more next week how that when discipline occurs there is actually a belief that we're being told by God what's happening through the agents that he's using.

Not in a supernatural, Pentecostal way or anything like that. But Paul tells us, keep watch on yourself lest you too be tempted in Galatians 6. When you go to somebody about their sin that you want to help them with, keep a watch on yourself that you don't also get tempted to sin. not only in the same way and fall into it with them, but even in some other way.

So turn to Hebrews 10. We'll close with Hebrews 10 today. So church discipline is deliberate. We actively are deliberately seeking to love one another by opening our mouths to share truth with them, even when that's difficult. We are actively seeking other people's opinions of us. We are asking people things like, hey, do you, maybe inviting, do you see anything in my life that you think I'm not seeing?

That's hard to ask, but that may be the open door somebody else needs to share with you, somebody who is afraid that maybe you'd react poorly. and if we get to the point where we think someone's hypercritical we'll deal with it but church discipline is deliberate in hebrews chapter 10 verse 24 god writes i was going to say paul but we're not sure of that he says and let us consider how to stir one another up to love and good works. This is deliberate. Helping stir one another up to love and good works goes right along with helping people understand their sin that's blocking them from those good works.

Their sin that may be blocking them from loving others. And then the key verse here, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near We going to look in more details at Hebrews 10 26 to 31 in a couple weeks We talk about how church discipline is directed, what's the goal of it. But for today, what I want you to understand is that Jesus Christ is the head of the church. so when we look at passages that tell us how to interact with one another, when we look at passages that tell us to go to your brother if he sins against you, and to be prepared to have hard discussions with him, to be prepared if you're not one of those brothers to maybe be brought into a circumstance that you didn't really want to be brought into, and ultimately to, if need be, as a church, cast someone out from our midst, these are all things we've committed to when we joined Jesus Christ's church with him as the head.

And we don't get to rewrite how to do things. We don't get to decide that we are nicer than God and keep evildoers among us because maybe they're not so bad because, well, we're bad too. We don't get to decide that we want to do things a different way. one of the things that's deliberate that I didn't mention as we went through the passage is that you go to the brother that's in error you don't go to other people that's more next week under church discipline is discreet but you love people and we work together towards this And I think that the faith that God expects us to exercise since he's granted it towards us is that he will do things in these situations that you don't even think were humanly possible.

The faith is knowing that as much as that brother has offended me or I've offended him, and maybe it goes back a few decades or maybe it goes back a day. or maybe you're sure that guy won't agree with you, whatever it happens to be, the faith is that by doing things God's way, he will work marvelously. And he will do things that we couldn't have conceived of, no matter how many TED Talks we watched or how many motivational speeches we got or how many Urban Meyer videos that we thought were motivational. you do things God's way and God will I hate the phrase but God will show up I know when people use that phrase poorly but that's what God's saying wherever two or three are gathered in the disciplined passage of Matthew 18 he's there he's omnipresent so when he says he's there among them there's something unique that he's telling us and so we trust that he will be there and he will guide his church Father in heaven thank you for your word thank you that Jesus Christ will never abandon his bride his church thank you that he loves his church and he sanctifies her by the washing of water with the word we thank you the Lord that you have given us instructions and that we can expect you to do the things that you are faithful to do and we ask that you grant us the faithfulness to believe what you've said and to carry out your will on this earth. Please forgive us for how many times we have failed to do these things well and properly.

Please give us courage where past situations have we'll say burned us, made us think this system doesn't work the way we just studied. Help us as we prepare to go through the rest of this series to take seriously the importance of church discipline, even knowing that most people that describe the church will say a church that doesn't practice discipline isn't even a church. So help us to love your church, help us to love your son, and to do all things for his glory. grant us the humility we need.

Amen.