And this is God's holy word. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife, and you are arrogant. Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body, I am present in spirit, and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother If he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler, not even to eat with such a one, for what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. Purge the evil person from among you. We read that far in God's word. A Christian sins. Not really a surprise, for we are all sinners saved by grace. But today, we study the response, the church's response to a Christian sinning. And we study which of these three is a good response to the sinning Christian. If the sinning Christian comes and says, number one, I did it, and I'm so ashamed. if the sinning Christian comes and says, I did it, and I don't think it's wrong. Or, step three, door number three, if the sinning Christian comes and says, I did it, and I'm proud of it. The book of 1 Corinthians exists because sin came into the church in Corinth, and these conditions I just described, door number one, door number two, door number three, Paul addresses in this, our passage. This first letter he wrote in order to deal with sins. We saw how in chapters one through four he dealt first with sins of division or disunity by returning to Christ crucified and risen again and by listening to Paul as apostle and even as Christian father. So now we turn to a new section. Chapter 5 is turning the page, a new topic, where here Paul deals with a second sin that came into the church in Corinth, the sin of tolerating sinning brothers or sisters, allowing them to stay within the church while staying within their sins. So it's interesting if you reflect on how the Nicene Creed is built, the words that we're familiar with, we say them typically about once a month on the Sunday of the Lord's Supper. Notice the first two sins Paul's confronting here in 1 Corinthians were characteristic sins against the church in its very character in the Nicene Creed. Remember we say, we believe in one, holy, Catholic, apostolic church. So one refers to unity, holy refers to our behavior, Catholic refers to the extent of the church, and apostolic whether or not it's consistent with what the apostles taught. So the first characteristic of the church is that the church is one. We believe the church is one church. It's a unified church. Since there's only one head of the church, the Lord Jesus, there can only be one body. and that is all of us Christians. One head, one body must be unified, not split up. The second characteristic of the church in the Nicene Creed is what he now addresses, the holiness of the church. We believe in one holy church. So it's also the topic of the Nicene Creed, what Christians have believed since the year 325. Holy, that the church is holy, that the people of God must be living holy lives. That God insists on holiness. Sin can't be allowed to stay. So that's the main point of the sermon because it's the main point of this passage across the top of your bulletin sermon outline. Christ gave his church clear instructions for how to deal with sinning brothers. Verses one to five publicly confirm no toleration of forbidden relationships. Verses six through eight focus on Christ's sacrifice with sincerity and truth and purge evil from the church. And verses nine to three, our third point, reach decisions about sinning brothers and leave others to God. So first, we cover in verse one how Paul started with the facts. He just jumped right into it. The public report that the Seventh Commandment immorality was happening in the Church of Corinth. That's a big deal, right? Certainly. And even though this was Corinth, known as Sin City, when the Holy Church of Jesus Christ is being built even within Sin City, Sin City being famous for violations of the Seventh Commandment, but still, it's wrong when it's in the church. But wait, would it surprise you that adultery was not the core sin issue that Paul's addressing? The core sin issue was tolerating adultery in the church. Verse one, look at it carefully. Paul showed who did not tolerate in contrast with those who did tolerate this sin. In fact, Paul went farther and then wrote how evil this variety of adultery was that was being tolerated. I'll let you read, I read it once already. I'll let you read down through that. The adults can figure out what I'm saying. It was so evil that even pagans would not tolerate this variety. And yet it was being tolerated in the church in Corinth. It was more than just adultery. Because simple adultery was tolerated among many pagans in Sin City, Corinth, as it is in our culture today. This was something worse than that, that was being tolerated in the church, which pagans in Sin City would not even tolerate. What he's probably referencing is public acceptance, but also maybe even referencing what the courts would say if a case were to come to them along these lines. So verse one lists what it was. You know, the idea to have is referring not just to certain activities in private between two adults, but rather this phrase to have refers to a commitment of marriage of those two. So the church in Corinth was changing the definition of marriage, of who can be married to whom. These two persons, a man and a woman, were living in a marriage that should not have been allowed because of how those two persons were related to one another. Here Paul showed clearly that the law of God revealed back in Leviticus 18.8 was still in force on New Testament Christians. Namely, that a wrong marriage that was ongoing and continuing to be allowed while those two persons, or at least the one, were members of the church remaining in good standing is something that could not continue. That Christ was being actively and perpetually dishonored and the church was losing its witness within sin city where God had placed them. Church was supposed to be more holy than Sin City in its behavior. And instead, the church was actually less holy than Sin City in what they tolerated. Thus, that's the big deal. Not the fact that there is an affair, but the fact that the church is tolerating it. That is the evil that Paul then confronts in the rest of the passage. an unholy church. So in verse two, he addressed another resulting sin. Tolerating sin resulted in an additional sin, the people of the church becoming arrogant. You see it in verse two? Again, here Paul used the word puffed up, that word that we've been noticing. Three times in chapter four he used that phrase. He's shocked by their prideful attitude regarding the unholy behavior within their church. And so now Paul added direct comments about their arrogant behavior. Instead of being arrogant, Paul instructed them what their attitude should have been in response to an unholy situation. It should have been mourning and grieving about unholiness in the church. But that wasn't all. Already here in verse 2, Paul instructed them what else should have been the response to the sin in the church to take action to remove the person from the church because the immoral person would not repent of their sins. And today we use the word excommunicate for this, which is easy to understand, commune means that you can have community in relating to other people, and in particular to commune at the table we call the Lord's Supper table. Those who are communing with one another are partaking together of the bread and the cup. So, external means outside. Excommunicate simply means to take a person out of the communing status, to remove a person from the privilege of being in the church in Corinth, from the prerogative of taking the bread and the cup. So then in verse 3, Paul stated his own verdict. on the case of this immoral man, and because Paul was an apostle, his verdict comes across as official. And Paul had authority there, even though he was far away when he was writing the letter back there, which he had revealed in chapter four, by referring to himself as spiritual father, and going all the way back to the start of the book, by referring to himself as an apostle. He had authority to render a verdict on the case, so he does so here. In addition, here in verse three, Paul underscored his authority by writing that he was present in spirit. He's not making himself out to be a god. He's simply saying that he cares and he's invested and he has relationships across the church in Corinth, and he understands the dynamics that are happening with this problem going on. So he's present in spirit in that way. And by his letter coming to them, from where he is physically and geographically to where his heart is. He's with them in spirit. He had already pronounced a verdict and it was a guilty verdict, a guilty finding. And this is Paul not even there physically, geographically. He was not even in the city of Corinth, of course, when he's writing the letter to the city of church in Corinth. So the narrow point that Paul's making was that this case of sin was so obvious that Paul could see it clearly from a great distance away. They couldn't claim that they had tolerated it because the issue was complex and ever so ambiguous. We just weren't sure where you would come down on this. No, they couldn't claim that because Paul, from a great distance, from the little that he heard, understood quickly and accurately what was happening. The man in the church in Corinth was sinning in an egregious and ongoing sin, and he wouldn't repent. And given that situation, he renders his verdict of guilty and tells them what to do. Furthermore, here in verse four, he gave them specific instructions for what to do when this letter arrived. They were to gather, The next time they gathered and assembled at the church in the name of the Lord Jesus, verse four, and with a power or character of the Lord Jesus as the driving factor, his holiness, his power, and on top of that, on Paul's authority as an apostle of Jesus Christ, they were to take action to do what Paul then wrote in verse five. As a church, they were to do, are you ready for this? They were to deliver that man, that sinning brother, over to Satan for the destruction of his sinful flesh so that his soul may be saved. To separate their brother from his sin. Keep the brother, get rid of the sin, but because they can't do it, deliver him over to God who has delivered them over to Satan so that the destruction of the flesh happens. That seems very strong to us. I mean, admit it. Doesn't it seem like overkill? Doesn't it seem to us modern American Christians as retribution that this action that Paul's asking for the church in Corinth to do to this man, this one, this case, lacks some gentleness to it? Doesn't that seem that way to us? You know why it seems that way to us? Because holiness within the church is a whole lot more important to God than we think it is. That's why it seems that way to us. And what we're being reminded of, what we're being taught here in this passage by this case and how this case is being handled by an apostle of Jesus Christ is just how important holiness is to God in his church. In fact, the church must be holy. You could use the word pure. The church must be pure for God because of Jesus, the character of Jesus, the power of Jesus as he's been referencing in these verses. In fact, purity in the church is so vital that a man who claimed he was a Christian in the church in Corinth but kept on living in sin would need to be turned over to the evil one Why? We're given the exact purpose. So that the sinning brother, while suffering under Satan's control then, would be shown the difference between the evil one and the holy one. That's why. There, right there, as the man is turned over to the evil one, that sinning man would need to cry out to the holy one if he's ever going to be saved from under the clutches of the evil one. for his own soul, from the sins in which he was stuck and the sins in which he was pulling the church towards him. Every week we pray, you pray together, we pray together, deliver us from the evil one. It's in scripture, it's Matthew 6, it's the Lord's Prayer, we have it printed in our bulletin and we pray it together as a worshiping community. Jesus taught us this prayer to pray daily And we, of course, pray it weekly as we come and worship together. It's part of the Lord's Prayer, deliver us from the evil one. We all pray that daily, deliver us from the evil one. So if this man in this case is to be delivered over to the evil one, he's to pray what? Deliver me from the evil one. And the Holy One is glad to do so, but he won't pray the prayer, or will he? We turn him over. No, Paul's not being harsh here. Paul's being loving here. Paul's not lacking gentleness when he instructs the church to take sin seriously and turn that brother over to Satan for his own soul's sake, not to mention for the sake of the best for the church, the holiness of the church, the honor of Christ's name. This is loving action. This is just action. It's the only right thing to do. in order to protect the honor of Christ and the holiness of the church and the only right thing to do in order to reclaim the sinning brother from his life-destroying sins. It was not just Paul who had a zero-tolerance policy for sexual sin in the church. It was Christ who had a zero-tolerance policy for tolerance of sexual sin in the church. It's a driving issue in the church addressed in this chapter. Verse four said they assemble in the name of the Lord Jesus. Verse four said they must excommunicate a brother in the power of the Lord Jesus, that it's the Lord Jesus Christ who's head over his church and he's holy. If you notice, as we read our doctrinal statement, a lot of it in there is built on this chapter. How we deal with sinning brothers in the church. We've built the entire structure of church discipline on these sorts of matters. We follow our head, the Lord Jesus Christ and his teaching in the Holy Bible. Christ died and rose again to cleanse believers from the impurity of their sin that's destroying them. And he will not let it destroy his church. And they could not look lightly on sin when it got into the church. that each of them were sinners. How could anyone remain in the church then? Should we just all usher ourselves out and lock the door? Of course, that brings us back to the gospel. It brings us to point two. Focus on Christ's sacrifice with sincerity and truth and purge evil from the church, including evil in me and evil in you. Verse six, Paul addressed their toleration of sin, which had led to their boasting of sin. How could they boast? A man has his stepmother and they're boasting? To illustrate the danger of toleration leading to the danger of boasting, Paul uses a word picture here. A metaphor easily understood. Yeast being added to bread dough. So the church is like a batch of bread dough. Yeast has been added. What happens next? Everybody knows, especially in the ancient culture, they all knew what happened when yeast or leaven was added to dough. The whole batch of dough was impacted. If yeast is in the dough, All the dough feels the influence of the yeast and rises. Everyone who's ever watched bread being made knows that. And everyone knew that, so Paul used that common knowledge to show his lesson here. He gets the point across. What's his lesson? What's his point? As soon as one person is tolerated in sin in the church, and that's not addressed, boasting about the sin is next. And then the whole church starts tolerating sin and the whole church starts boasting about it. And what could they do now? Is it too late? Has the church been ruined by this sin and by tolerating this sin, two sins, a third sin of boasting? Is the church ruined now? No, wait, the church could do something. Paul wrote that because Christ was sacrificed, there's hope. Because Christ was sacrificed, there's always renewal for his church. All they needed to do was to come back to Christ and start over with a new batch of dough. Don't allow any yeast into the new batch of dough, and the new batch of dough would not be impacted by the chemical reaction we know of as leaven or yeast. All they had to do was to start over with a church in which every member understands that he or she is cleansed by the Lamb of God, period. Every single member retains a place in the church, not because they have stayed clear of certain sins in their own personal track record on a certain short sin list that we don't tolerate, no. They've stayed in the holy church because of whatever sins they've committed. Jesus gives them conviction. Jesus gives them repentance. Jesus gives us faith. And because of Christ's crucifixion and because of his resurrection, each brother and each sister remains in a holy church. In the spirit of Christ, every Christian is without leaven. Every church is without leaven. Every church community is pure and must be pure. Whenever and wherever a church finds sin in the lives of its members, we all run back to the cross, and we find grace to cover all of our wrongs, grace to change us, grace to believe, grace to understand that the cross is sufficient for me, and the cross is sufficient for you, and for him and for her. No Christian has room to boast, well I never did that, and I would never. Or, I did that, and I got away with it, and I'll do it again. No boasting, either in righteousness or in unrighteousness. Nobody boasts in anything in the church of Jesus Christ. We're all just sinners covered by his blood. To do any boasting would mock the very sacrifice of the Passover lamb himself, Jesus Christ, which is where he takes us back to. Verse 8, he wrote, they came to worship with respectful celebration and joyful, pleasant lightness, a delight of full peace with God. They participated in the festival of simple bread and wine. What sort of bread? Not the bread made with the yeast of immorality. Not the bread made with the yeast of arrogance. Not the bread made with the yeast of malice. Instead, with the bread without any leaven, without any wrongs, the bread that was not duplicitous, not lying to oneself about what holiness is, about the holy God and how he looks at certain things. Instead, what he lists here is the bread made with the holy characteristic of sincerity. You see it? He lists that intentionally here in verse eight. The bread made with truth, truth I understand about myself, truth I understand about others, sincerity. They didn't have drab and dreary worship. We're all just terrible sinners and we really aren't allowed in here. That's not what he's saying. Understanding that's what I was, but I'm no longer. By faith in the Lord Jesus, I'm a child of God and I belong in here because my sins have been cleansed. The sincerity. not with the old leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. They celebrated God's holy character and his righteousness, his alien righteousness being brought to me as mine by faith, that my standing before God is right, and I worship him with my chin held high, with my heart rising, because God has made us holy in his church. How? By the sacrifice of Christ to remove our sins. our evils, our bad attitudes, or are all left humbled, we're all left sincere, and we're all left joyful. Focus on Christ's sacrifice with sincerity and truth, purge evil from the church we worship with joy. Brings us to our third point, the last section of this passage, reaching decisions about sinning brothers and leaving others to God. We know that Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. So what does this passage have to do with that? Jesus was evangelizing the world and he was evangelizing those tax collectors and sinners, right? And so it's Christ by his Holy Spirit that prompts Paul to write here in verse nine, not to associate with immoral people. Hmm, which is it? Christ or Paul? In verse 10, Paul clarifies. The previous letter he wrote, whatever letter he's referring to, was misunderstood. So he's clarifying it here. He did not mean, whatever he wrote, staying away from all immoral people of the world. For then, Christians would have to leave the world. I don't know if you noticed, there's a lot of immoral people around you. And it was true in ancient Corinth. They're everywhere. That clearly can't be what he meant. So the topic of Paul here is not the social circles of Christians talking with non-Christians in the neighborhood. What Jesus did, we can do. Eat with tax collectors and sinners, share the gospel, we send missionaries to talk to unsaved people. We talk to unsaved people. Of course, that's not what he means. What he means here, and the topic here is church unity and church holiness leading to church community and the expectations for those belonging to and operating within the church of Christ. So in verse 11, Paul explained the instruction was not to associate with immoral people who call themselves Christians. You see the difference? It's profound. It's instructive, it's foundational. The title of the sermon is Sinning Brothers on Purpose to communicate this. They're supposed to be holy brothers, not sinning brothers. Holy sisters, not sinning sisters. They were sinning and not repenting. Sinning we get, repenting we get, cleansing forgiveness we get, but if you're sinning and sinning and sinning and not repenting, Paul instructs, don't even eat a meal with them. Why? Holiness, that's why. Because one sin tolerated has the ability to deteriorate the moral sense of the entire community of that church, all of its relationships. Paul instructed them not to let one sinning person change their fellowship, change their stance against Sin City, change their beliefs regarding Christ and His holiness, change their conversations, change their unity. One sinning person's rationalizations become a shared virus that changes the way of thinking of an entire group. Soon his or her rationalizations become the rationalizations of everyone across the church. and they're all complicit in going in the wrong direction. They were not even to eat with one such person who will not repent. Certainly they were not to eat the bread of the Lord's supper together with a sinning brother or a sinning sister who will not repent. That's verboten to say it in German. That's forbidden to say it in English. You can't come take the bread and the cup if you're sinning and not repenting. So it's a short step from that to say I also can't have a meal with you. It has to do with the holiness of the church, the unity of the church, and the relationship of the church. Are we calling ourselves church, a sinning brother, a sinning sister, calling himself or herself a part of the holy church? How is that? The only way you're part of the holy church is if your sins are cleansed by the blood of Jesus. And because they must be careful not to recognize an openly wicked man or woman as a Christian brother or sister, as if the sin weren't happening. Now, who would enjoy the task of going to talk to the sinning brother, who's also, we're told here, a boastful fellow, that he no longer is allowed to partake of the bread and the wine of the holy sacrament per the apostle of Jesus Christ? That wouldn't be a fun assignment, conversation, and he, expects that of the church community. Verse 12, Paul showed that their job was not to judge the world's people, but it was their job to judge the people of the church. Interesting. Because they tended to do the exact opposite. Don't you find that in the evangelical church across America? We tend to judge those who are doing alphabet soup, L-B-G-T-Q. We love to judge them, but not evaluate carefully the lives of believers in the church. They wanted to band together around their own self-righteousness. We don't do that, we would never do that. We go with people who don't do that. Amen, high five. And to evaluate ourselves as good because we're comparing with unbelievers who are worse. Yeah, they're worse because they don't know any better. Instead, they need to say nothing about other people. Alphabet soup is in God's hands. Enough said. And do the task within the church of keeping the church pure by finding sin when we find sin and calling it sin when we call it sin because the Bible says it's sin. And together we run back to the cross of Jesus Christ. We find the joy of forgiveness. We find unity and holiness in the church. Verse 13, Paul showed that the immoral people of the world would not get away with it, don't worry. God himself will judge them. And Paul ended the chapter by again saying that the church was responsible for keeping itself pure and the way to do that is to remove certain persons from the church because they wouldn't be removed from their sins. What have we seen? Christ gave his church clear instructions for how to deal with sinning brothers. Publicly confirm no toleration of forbidden relationships. Focus on Christ's sacrifice with sincerity and truth. Purge evil from the church. Number three, reach decisions about sinning brothers and leave others to God. My conclusion is this, three words. Celebrate the festival. It's right in the passage, it's in verse eight. That's my conclusion. I borrowed it from verse eight. I drew it from verse eight. Celebrate the festival means not just in the Lord's Supper, although it's certainly there, not just in worship services, though it's certainly there, but in the whole of the Christian life, they were to celebrate a holy festival to the Lord. What you do on Tuesday afternoon, what you do at Thursday midnight matters. We're still celebrating the festival in the middle of the day and in the middle of the night. We're celebrating the festival that wicked sinners like us get all of our sins cleansed by the once for all death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our whole lives operate on that, and it's one giant festival. It's a festival to live as a Christian, and the best is yet to come. Celebrate the festival. We are ourselves consecrated to God. We are ourselves dedicated to God and we celebrate that fact all day and all night. We belong to Jesus. The Lamb of God was sacrificed for us. We celebrate our cleansing from sin and our closeness with God. Back in the Old Testament days, whenever the Passover lambs were offered, there was a feast that lasted seven days. How'd you like to stay in church for seven days? But for us, for the Lamb of God, the Lamb of God, once for all sacrificed as a death unto sins for us, there's a feast that never ends. It lasts our whole lives and it continues until when Jesus comes back for us. As long as we live, we enjoy being in this truth for all of our days, we exalt Jesus and seek to live like Him. only because we're cleansed by him. We have sincerity, as he mentioned, a straightforward clearness and openness, no covering, no hiding, no lying, no tricking. We're real. We mean what we say as believers in Christ. When we say we're Christian brothers and Christian sisters, we live that out. So sincerity is like a sunroom, you add, on the back of a house that has nothing but windows. Light shines right through and shows no flaws or discrepancies. Genuine Christians, sinners who admit their sin, and that's washed and cleansed by Jesus. Inwardly, we have this new moral condition. a new moral condition in which we respond to God's holy law and Christ's holy character with an eager compliance and conformity. We live holy lives by the grace of God because we want to live holy lives, and anytime we mess up, that's again covered and cleansed. We celebrate the festival. It's like a never-ending holy festival, and we don't find it boring at all. We find it to be the most exhilarating adventure that there is in the world. Why? Because in this we're walking close to the living God who created us and redeemed us, who we're going to see one day soon. Ephesians 2.13, now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Hebrews 4.16, let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in a time of need. James 4, 8, draw near to God. He will draw near to you. This is celebrating the festival. Let's pray. Father, may we