“Immorality in the Church:
A Biblical Response—Part II”
(1 Corinthians 5:1-8)
Series: Chaos & Correction (1 Corinthians)
Rev. Todd A. Linn, PhD
Henderson’s First Baptist Church, Henderson
•Take your Bibles and join me in 1 Corinthians, chapter 5 (page 769; YouVersion).
We are preaching our way, verse-by-verse, through the book of 1 Corinthians and we began last week the first part of a 3-part message on immorality in the church. There was chaos at the church in Corinth and Paul writes this letter to bring correction to the chaos. The particular chaos we began to study last week has to do with public sin in the church that goes unchecked. There was a church member who said he was a Christian but was living in open and unrepentant sin. And the sin in particular was his ongoing sexual relationship with his stepmother.
Now, we got as far as verse 5 last time and we’ll go a little further this morning. I’ll begin reading at verse 1 and read through verse 8.
•Please stand in honor of the reading of God’s Word.
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!
2 And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you.
3 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.
4 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,
5 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.
6 Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
7 Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.
8 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.
•Pray.
Introduction:
We began last time by saying that an alternative sermon title for our study could be, “When Intolerance is Biblical.” Many in our day cry for so-called tolerance at every turn and we noted that there are many occasions wherein we live unquestionably with intolerant behavior.
A husband and wife practice intolerance by not tolerating any other man or woman’s entrance into their marriage. A hospital practices intolerance by not tolerating the use of unsterilized instruments in the surgical ward. A public school practices intolerance by not tolerating the use of alcohol and drugs among its students and faculty.
So despite our culture’s cry for so-called tolerance at every level, such a general expectation is unwarranted and simply foolish. We rightly practice intolerance every day in order to protect ourselves and in order to protect others.
And the same is true in the church. If we simply tolerate the existence of unrepentant public sin, we are no different than a wife’s tolerating her husband’s adultery by looking the other way when he brings home another woman, or a high-school teacher’s tolerating a student’s use of marijuana by allowing him to light-up in class. It seems silly even to illustrate, but is important because for too long Christians have assumed that it’s just plain wrong to judge another person.
And so we also took time last week to review the popularly misquoted passage in Matthew 7 where some say Jesus categorically denies judging another person. Someone says, “You’re not supposed to judge because Jesus says, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’” and we took about 10 minutes last time to read those verses more carefully—Matthew 7:1-5—and deduced that Jesus doesn’t deny the Christian’s sincere judgment of another brother or sister.
His point is, “Before you talk to your brother or sister about his or her fault, remember that you yourself are not without faults. Deal with your own faults and then you will be in a better position to deal with your brother or sister’s faults. Remove the plank from your own eye and then you will see clearly to lovingly remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
So Matthew 7 is not, “Jesus says you’re not supposed to judge.” It is rather a call for humility, love, and care in the sensitive matters of pointing out the sin of a brother and sister and then working together for loving and necessary correction.
So as we review verses 1-5 from last time we considered first:
I. The Problem Reported in the Church (1)
And the problem reported is in 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!”
The problem reported in the church was sexual immorality. We talked about that term translated sexual immorality, the Greek word, pornei÷a (porneia), from which we get “porn” or “pornography.” It is a general term to describe forbidden sexual acts outside of biblical marriage. So porneia includes adultery, fornication (which is sex before marriage), homosexuality, and other forms of sex outside of biblical marriage including lust, viewing or reading pornography in print or on a screen, texting sexually explicit words to another person, and anything else other than a biblical marriage between one man and one woman.
The specific sexual immorality in the Corinthian church, according to verse 1, was a man’s having his father’s wife, which is to say that there was a church member who was intimately involved with his stepmother. This was such a grievous sin, Paul says in verse 1, that it was not even known among the Gentiles, among the pagans.
So this sin of incest was the public, open, and unrepentant sin the church was tolerating. Paul says this kind of tolerance is unbiblical and therefore wrong. And he points out the Corinthians’ wood in their eyes, their inability to see this error, their inability to understand the gravity of this sin, by drawing attention to their prideful reaction. And that was point two from last time. We considered:
II. The Prideful Reaction of the Church (2)
Verse 2, “And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you.”
Paul says that the church is proud of their so-called tolerance and, rather, they should have grieved this man’s sin and done something about it. Because the man is clearly unashamed and unrepentant of his sinful behavior, Paul says at the end of verse 2, that this many should be “taken away from among you.” He is talking about removing the man from the fellowship of the church. That becomes especially clearer in the following verses as we’ll see in verse 5 where Paul says, “Deliver such a one to Satan,” and in the culmination of Paul’s argument, last verse of the chapter, verse 13, “Put away from yourselves the evil person.”
That is, remove him from the church. That’s what “excommunication” means, the Latin, ex, “out of” and communication, the community, or communication of the faithful.
And that’s the response Paul lovingly and carefully calls for in our third point from last time. We noted:
III. The Proper Response by the Church (3-5)
Paul says in verse 3 and following:
3 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.
4 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,
5 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.
What Paul is calling for in these verses is the exercising of loving church correction, frequently called church discipline. The unfortunate problem with that term, discipline, is that it is so terribly misunderstood by too many churches today. It is mistaken for the idea of unjust punishment or something that an evil parent does in mercilessly beating an innocent child. That is not what Paul is calling for when he writes about church discipline. He means discipline in the loving sense in which we live in healthy relationships today, a discipline that is at once instructive and corrective.
A parent instructs his or her child to do certain things: “Be sure and study, take out the trash, do it this way.” That is instructive discipline. And discipline is also corrective. If the child fails to study, for example, a loving parent corrects that behavior by perhaps his taking away a privilege, such as his or her going out for the weekend. The parent says, “You’re grounded! (I heard that one a lot!).” So that’s corrective discipline. But one would be hard-pressed to prove that a parent truly loved his or her child by never instructing and never correcting.
And so we discipline those we love. If I love you, I’ll warn you. If you love me, you’ll warn me. We’ll protect one another. We’ll exhort one another, we’ll rebuke one another, we’ll correct one another.
So Paul is calling for the exercising of loving church correction in these verses. He says when you are gathered together—which means that in these rare instances where you have a man who refuses to repent despite repeated attempts by church members to correct him privately—when you are gathered together as the church, “with the power (or authority) of Jesus Christ,” Paul says, verse 5, “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.”
That’s where we left off last time, right there at verse 5, with Paul’s calling for the church’s delivering the unrepentant man to Satan. Now again, before we talk about what that phrase means, note that this call for church discipline by the gathered church assumes a process explained by our Lord in Matthew 18:15-17, a process by which repeated attempts are first made in private. Christians who love one another approach one another privately. Jesus says in Matthew 18:
15 “…if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother.
16 But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that ‘by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.’
17 And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.
That’s Jesus speaking. If he refuses even to hear the church, if the person remains unyielding and unrepentant, treat him as you would an unbeliever. And that’s precisely what Paul is calling for here in verse 5, “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.”
To “Deliver such a one to Satan” means that when the man is cast out of the church, or excommunicated, when he is removed from the church fellowship, he is no longer under the protective care of the Christian community. He is now outside the sphere of God’s protection, outside of the church and back in the old world, over which Satan, the prince of darkness reigns. So the man is no longer part of the realm of those who are being saved, but he is back in the realm of those who are perishing (1 Corinthians 1:18).
Now again, this is the rare and unfortunate last resort. The church does this only when a church member is living in known, public sin, and is not dealing with that sin in biblical ways, but rather remains unyielding and unrepentant. If this happens, then the church is left with no option but that for which Paul calls in these verses, the public removal of his church privileges, removing him from the church fellowship.
So why should the church do this? Why should the church remove a publicly sinning member from the church body? Well, why do you remove a cancerous tumor from a physical body? You do so to prevent the cancer from infecting other body parts and spreading throughout the body. Similarly, one of the reasons a willfully disobedient church member is removed from the church body is in order to prevent the disease from infecting other parts or members of the church body and to keep the rest of the church body healthy—because sin that no one deals with becomes sin that everyone deals with. So one benefit of church correction is the health and purity of the church body.
When I was a parole officer, I recall having some convicted felons under my supervision who had been found guilty not because of their direct commission of a crime, but because of their indirect commission of a crime. Some were considered accomplices in an offense and thus there guilt a matter of guilt by association. That is, they knew what was going on and they did nothing about it. And when the church remains passive while one of its members engages in ruinous behavior, the church is an accomplice in the offense, the church is guilty by association.
So again, one benefit of church correction is that it preserves the health and purity of the church body.
Another benefit of church correction is that it is the best way to bring the sinful church member to repentance. The shame of his removal from the community of faith and the sober reality that he was now back in the realm of Satan’s dominion was conducive to awakening of his moral conscience. This seems to be the point in the phrase in verse 5, “Deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,” that is, for the destruction of his sin-bent orientation, his earthly, sinful outlook. The hope was that the sinful man’s fleshly orientation was destroyed and his spirit saved so that he would be safe on “the day of the Lord Jesus,” on Judgment Day. So his excommunication was for his own good, that it might better lead him to repentance.
When a man was cast out of the church 2,000 years ago it was especially effective in that there was no other church down the street where the church member could enter anonymously and cover up his sin. The church at Corinth was the church at Corinth. There was no other gathering of Christians. So it is helpful in our day for pastors to work together for the benefit of the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately, this does not always work as it should as too many churches simply look the other way when one of it’s members falls into ruinous relationships and harmful behaviors.
It is not our role to tell other churches what to do, but we are responsible for what we do. We are responsible for our membership here and responsible for the covenant we keep with another here. We have a church covenant that we trust is more than a sheet of paper in our church constitution, but rather is that which is kept in the spirit of our church’s founders 175 years ago when Henderson’s First Baptist Church was founded. We seek to glorify God by keeping our covenant vows and loving one another enough to both encourage and warn when necessary. That’s what a loving family does.
So the Apostle Paul continues in verse 6 by again rebuking the Corinthian church for their pride. He had said in verse 2, “You are puffed up” and now he says in verse 6, “Your glorying is not good.” In other words, just like many churches today who do not practice church correction, the Corinthian church gloried in a kind of false humility as if to say, “We’re far too loving to talk to anyone about church discipline, to talk to people about their sin. Who are we to judge? We just love everybody even if they’re unrepentant, we’ll just look the other way.” Paul says, “Your glorying is not good.”
And then he provides a powerful image that resonated with the Corinthian church, an image that strikingly pictured the need for the church to purge itself of the sinful man who was engaged in sexual immorality. What is this image? Look at verse 6 and 7:
6 Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
7 Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened…and stop right there for a moment.
The image that Paul uses is the image of leaven, or yeast. And this leaven illustrates the need for purging. Now that may not mean much to you right now, but let’s go ahead and put that point up on the wall and then we’ll study the verses that teach it, okay? So you’ve got three points already written down:
I. Consider the Problem Reported in the Church (1)
II. Consider the Prideful Reaction of the Church (2)
III. Consider the Proper Response by the Church (3-5)
Now, number four:
IV. Consider the Purging Required for the Church (6-8)
This is a purging for the church, for the church’s sake. Now, back to the image of leaven that illustrates this truth.
Leaven is a substance used in baking bread that causes the bread to rise; it’s a word understood as yeast is understood in baking today. That’s why other translations translate the word “yeast.” So yeast is a kind of leaven that works through a lump of dough, causing bread to rise during the baking process.
Paul reminds the Corinthians of the Old Testament teaching on the Passover. The Passover—mentioned first in Exodus 12—is that time in Israelite history when the Jews hurried out of Egypt. The word “exodus” refers to a mass departure, a “going out” of a people. We get our word “exit” from the same Latin verb.
Now, why were the Jews hurrying out of Egypt? Do you remember? God was leading them out through Moses, delivering the people from bondage and slavery in Egypt. And so God worked powerful miracles through Moses, including 10 plagues, so that Pharaoh would let God’s people go. After the final plague—death of the firstborn—Pharaoh let God’s people go.
So Paul reaches back to the Old Testament to illustrate what he’s talking about here in Chapter 5. This is why he goes on to say in verse 7 that, “Christ” is, “our Passover [who], was sacrificed for us.” See that at the end of verse 7: “For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.”
The Passover lamb was sacrificed by the Jews in Egypt on the night that God sent the tenth and final plague; death of the firstborn in every home. Because the Israelites had killed, or sacrificed, a lamb as a substitute for the death of their firstborn and had placed some of the sacrificial lamb’s blood on the tops and upper sides of their door frames, God “passed over” their homes and spared the lives of their firstborn children. And Paul reminds the Corinthians that Jesus Christ is the ultimate Passover Lamb, the One who died as a substitute for our sins, that we might be saved.
So after the final plague—death of the firstborn—in every home in Egypt, Pharaoh let God’s people go. And the Israelites left in haste, they left hurriedly, gathering up all their belongings quickly, hurriedly leaving Egypt in order to save their lives from the vengeance of Pharaoh and his fickle heart.
And the Bible says in Exodus 12 that the Jews left in such a hurry that they left before their bread was leavened, before the leaven had been added so the bread could rise. They were in such a hurry to “exit” that they “took their dough before it was leavened,” with their “kneading bowls bound up…on their shoulders (Exodus 12:34).”
So every year thereafter the Jews celebrated Passover, “keeping the feast,” by remembering what happened in Egypt so long ago. They remembered the haste with which they “exited” Egypt, fleeing so quickly from their homes that they had to leave before adding leaven to their bread. That’s also why the Passover meal is to be eaten quickly, standing up—the way many of you eat your breakfast on weekday mornings; standing up and with haste!— all this a reminder of God’s powerfully delivering His people from Egypt.
Now the Jews were forbidden to eat unleavened bread during the seven days of the Passover. So to prepare for the feast, they were instructed to remove or purge all leaven from their houses (Exodus 12:15). If a Jew failed to purge the leaven from his house and ate bread that had been leavened, then he was, “cut off from the congregation of Israel (excommunicated), whether…a stranger or a native of the land (Exodus 12:19).”
So leaven had become a symbol or an image of that which was considered unclean or impure. Unleavened bread, however, was a symbol for that which was clean and pure. It’s not that leaven itself was bad, leaven had become rather an image or symbol for that which was unclean or impure.
That is the Passover background Paul uses here in 1 Corinthians 5 to illustrate his call for purging the church of something that did not belong there, just as the Jews had been instructed to purge leaven from their homes. So let’s read again verses 6-7:
6 Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
7 Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.
Now, verse 8:
8 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.
So Paul uses this Old Testament teaching of leaven to illustrate the harmful influence and spread of sin throughout the church body. Just as “a little leaven leavens” or spreads throughout “the whole lump” of dough, so a little sin spreads throughout the whole body of Christ. The only way to prevent the spread of such sin is to remove its influence from the church the same way a Jew removed leaven from his cupboard.
And so another benefit of church correction is that it has the positive effect of preventing the spread of sin throughout the church and maintains the health and purity of the membership.
Now allow me to pause briefly in order to share three of the four reminders we introduced last time. Important reminders about church discipline:
Reminder Number One: Church discipline is not for those who are struggling with sin and are working through it in biblical ways.
People who are honest about their sin, repentant, and are actively working on their struggles—whatever they be— alcohol, drugs, pornography, marital issues, et cetera. These persons don’t need to be removed from the church; they need the church! They need those who will embrace them as a parent embraces a child in love and in a spirit of gentleness.
The man about whom Paul is writing is a man who is in continual, unrepentant, and public sin. The phrase back in verse 1 is, “it is actually reported,” so his sin is public knowledge, and it was ongoing. Paul says also in verse 1, “a man has (present tense) his father’s wife,” it was ongoing, unrepentant, public sin.
Church discipline is not given to those who are working through their issues in biblical ways. Church correction and church discipline is for those who are unrepentant and living in open rebellion.
Reminder Number Two: No Christian is without sin. Every one of us has our issues, right? Every one of us has private battles.
When we confess our sin, repent of our sin, and work through our sin, it leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. And when we confess our sin to those whom we have hurt, we are on the way to healing and church discipline is not necessary. Church discipline is required only when our sinful behavior becomes public and only when there is no confession and repentance.
Reminder Number Three: (this was the one I told you last time was so important). The whole point of church discipline is not punishment, but reconciliation and restoration. Church discipline is more redemptive than it is punitive.
Well, let me close by saying that I believe each and every member of Henderson’s First Baptist Church believes in the rightness of church discipline and I think I can provide a helpful illustration to demonstrate that belief, although I apologize in advance for the way it may cause you to recoil.
But imagine for a moment that your pastor has been caught in an adulterous affair. Imagine your pastor has knowingly and publicly been unfaithful to his wife. Everybody in Henderson knows about it. Pictures have been posted on Facebook and other venues. And imagine if I just showed up the following Sunday and continued on as if nothing had happened. Were someone to say something to me, I’d just respond, “Well, nobody’s perfect and I’ve sort of ‘fallen out of love’ with my wife, anyway.”
Question: Would you tolerate that behavior? I didn’t think so. And why not? Because it’s not biblical and it harms others. And so you would work in such a way as to bring loving correction to my behavior.
And I am grateful for that response and I agree with it. It is the same response and the same loving way in which we are to work together in order to help all of our brothers and sisters in Christ.
•Stand for prayer.
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