00:00 Introduction and Holiday Greetings

00:05 Reflecting on the Past Year

00:41 Thanksgiving and Being Thankful

00:58 Humorous Sermon Anecdotes

02:06 Discussion on Denominational Affiliations

04:16 Church Leadership and Oversight

07:54 Daily Bible Reading: 1 Corinthians 5-8

09:26 Addressing Sin and Church Discipline

12:36 Guidelines for Church Discipline

14:11 The Importance of Community Groups

14:52 Paul's Teachings on Marriage and Singleness

16:05 Clarifying Paul's Instructions on Marriage

17:47 Believers and Unbelievers in Marriage

19:33 Paul's Guidance on Divorce

25:02 Living in Unity and Loving the Weaker Brother

26:25 Concluding Prayer and Final Thoughts

Find out more about Compass Bible Church.

Learn more about our Bible Reading Plan.

Questions or Comments? Email us podcast@compassntx.org

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Church Discipline: How the Church Protects the Name of Jesus by Jonathan Leeman

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Introduction and Holiday Greetings

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Hey everybody. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Merry Christmas. It is that time of year.

Reflecting on the Past Year

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Yeah. It goes by quickly. Here we are last month and more quickly every year. Yeah. Yeah, somebody says the days are long, the years are short. Something like that is the older you get, I don't know, but it's Sunday, so hopefully you are either at church on your way to church or you were with us and, you're enjoying the Lord's Day.

Thanksgiving and Being Thankful

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And we're, talking about Thanksgiving this Sunday. I know it's a little late since Thanksgiving's over, but, we're gonna be talking about. Being thankful people and why Christians should be the most thankful people on the face of the planet, not just one day a year, but every single day outta the year.

So hopefully you're planning to join us or you already have, and, we're looking forward to. It should be a great day. Yeah.

Humorous Sermon Anecdotes

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Yeah. And I thought I could just break the neck normally, or I could pick it up and swing it around my head like a lasso. And so I'm glad I went with the lasso approach too. I can't wait to see how the internet responds to this sermon. This is gonna be so good. It should get us some eyeballs. Much like, you know, you suggested the other day you sent something to us that said, Hey, somebody preached a 97 hour sermon and you said, I think we should break it.

Yeah, I mean, we get pretty close every Sunday, so I figured you might as well just go the extra minutes Sunday, every Sunday and just beat the records, beat it, and then we get the Guinness and then the newspapers are gonna show up. I just feel like that would be such a good way to get our name out there.

It would be a way to get our name out there, that's for sure. A good way. A good way. People would be like, oh, that's a church that takes preaching. Seriously, man, I don't know if people would still show up anymore. I think that pastor was an Assemblies a God pastor too. Was he? So we gotta show those age years that semi reformed baptistic.

Discussion on Denominational Affiliations

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Sometimes people say, Hey what denomination are you guys? And we're non-denominational, but we can't decide really. It's what it led up to. We're just like, uh, I'm not really this, I'm not really that.

Yeah, not quite Presbyterian, not quite Baptist. But we do share a lot in common with the Baptist Baptistic faith. Southern Baptist in particular. Yeah. And the Assemblies of God too. And Foursquare. I mean, you know, less than Pleasure of Christ and the Unitarian Universalists and Presbyterians too. You wanna throw them in there?

Might as well. You know, why not? Why not? Yeah. No, we are not a, denomination per se. But. We do share a lot in common with some of the denominations like Southern Baptist. I mean, even just, the high view of God, the Presbyterian church. I think the conservative branch at least does a very good job of that.

Yeah. And we're also not the kind of people to say no creed, but the Bible either true. We are okay with creeds. Yeah. We like creeds. I don't think we're a Creo church by definition. That is, we don't define our ranks by the creeds that we subscribe to, but we're not opposed to them. In fact, maybe, I don't know, PPJ, maybe you could talk just briefly before we jump into our reading for today.

Yeah. Maybe a difference between denominational affiliations versus non-denominational affiliations. Why we do what we do as opposed to saying, Hey, we're gonna be SBTS people or Southern Baptist people because I mean, we give to them. Mm-hmm. We are associated with them. Mm-hmm. I'm gone to their seminary.

Your control as a local church, and so you're gonna carry the baggage of whatever the denomination is carrying. And so that's one reason. But I would say mostly in scripture, there are no denominations. I mean, that's clear. But we see an emphasis on the autonomy of the local church.

And, that's an important model for us.

Church Leadership and Oversight

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And so what we do is we pursue leadership with our elders, with yourself, pastor Ron, myself and Pastor Mark. And, we see that as the charge in scripture to be those that are tasked with the leadership, the shepherding of the local church.

So, it's a choice to be free, to pursue what's and shepherd the best way that we know how, without the oversight necessarily of Big Brother and big Sister in a denomination. So do you have any oversight then? We do, yeah, we do. We do. We have an external board. In fact, this is board season right now.

Over the last year, think about what's coming up this next year and help us, make sure that we're doing things in a manner that is fiscally responsible. The other things they're gonna do is they're gonna help us make decisions as far as, counseling, guiding, what's best for us as far as pursuing a facility in the future.

Hiring, staffing, things like that. They're really there to per provide a lot of that wisdom and insight for us, which we're thankful for because they've been a great resource for us. It sounds like the extra has a lot of oversight. They do though, not with regard to the on the ground ministry, and that would be an area which is different.

So in other words, they're not handing down, Hey, we want you to preach this sermon series. They're not saying You should do this ministry, but not this ministry. They're not saying, this is how you need to shepherd. This is how you need to be involved. They're really there as accountability and a safety net on the bigger ticket items that, really aren't.

Okay. So we function like a denomination in many respects. Yeah. But we're not a denomination. Right. We have an oversight board. People who are. Respected and wise and can help us make decisions on the ground. The elders of this church are you, myself, and Pastor Mark, and we're different. Right. What would, is there a biblical role that you would describe to that oversight committee?

That board, are they deacons? Are they are just friends? How would you qualify there? Quantify them biblically. Yeah. I don't know that I would, I don't think they're deacons because they're not serving in the context of our local church here. Maybe. A close parallel since we just went through the book of acts together, or we're going through the book of Acts still, would be the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 when the apostles go back to the Jerusalem council to seek some guidance and input there.

Okay. They they provide input. Yeah, that's a good example too. There's there's help there. There's oversight, there's accountability. Yep. But it's not in the same, they're not, they don't have a church office. They don't have badges. They can't just come to our office anytime, open the doors.

They don't have a key, no keys. Right. So it's a limited access, but it's a very helpful, 30,000 foot view of oversight. On our church so that we can be sure that we have, godly men and advisors who can help us direct and steer the church Yeah. For the future. Yep. Yeah. We're thankful for them, for sure.

Yeah. If you guys have more questions on that, again podcast@compassntx.org, send those in. We'd be happy to discuss that more attention, pastor pj. Sure.

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Corinthians 5-8

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And so in chapter five, he's gonna go after, them for, tolerating. A pretty bad situation, that he describes as a form of immorality not even tolerated amongst the pagans that is amongst those that are unchurched. And so he's gonna basically instruct them without getting too much into the details of this, of saying, you need to put this person out of the church.

This is church discipline. And the reason is. And it's in the context that from here he goes on in chapter six to talk about lawsuits one against another. He's really concerned about, we're gonna see this even more in a couple of days here when we talk about spiritual gifts. We saw it already at the beginning of the letter.

He's dealing with a lot of this as far as the sinful divisiveness and immorality taking place within the church saying, we need to purge this and get this outta here because this is not helping you be the type of church that God wants you to be.

Addressing Sin and Church Discipline

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So I'm reading this and I'm not a pastor, just, average Joe or Jane and I go to church and I care about these things. I want the church to be pure and holy. What's my responsibility here? 'cause it seems like Paul is operating as apostle, maybe operating as founding pastor of this church, and he's saying, here are the directives that I'm giving for you to do at the church, and here's how you guys should conduct yourself.

And then I'd say second, we need to be, we've talked about how church discipline is something that we. Should find happening in a healthy church. So I think all of us as Christians have a burden to care for one another to the degree that we would be zealous to see sin and confront sin when it's there.

Now we did talk about there's situations where there's gonna be some offenses that we're gonna overlook, we're gonna let love cover over those things. But if there's something like this going on, then as a, I need to speak up about that, I need to say, Hey, this is not right. What's going on? We need to confront this.

We need to get rid of this. And we need to be likewise buran, like we read about in the book of Acts too, that are saying, are we doing things biblically? Are we doing things the way they should be doing? So I think those that aren't necessarily pastors or elders in the church still have a big role to play in the overall unity of the body by caring about the body and caring about the holiness in giness of the brothers and sisters.

If he or she is guilty of sexual morality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler, don't even eat with this person. Does this mean that I can't go to coffee with this person and say, Hey, I want to talk with you about some of the things that I'm seeing. It sounds like I should really just no longer talk.

I'm gonna shun them. I'm no longer gonna talk to them. I'm going to do everything I can to make them feel like they're not part of the flock, because at least according to Paul, they're probably not. Right. Yeah. It's not as much that as much as it is. You can't carry on. Normal fill up body life with them, the way that you would carry on body life with somebody else that's not in that grievous sin.

For example, let's say that this is a man in the church and we're dealing with somebody who's a woman in the church. I don't think it's appropriate for that woman to invite that man for coffee and say, Hey, I'm gonna confront you on your sin in that, it's wise. And so, yeah, for her, I think, yeah, her relationship is gonna change with that person in the sense that she's probably not gonna have fellowship with that person.

Her husband might, or some other men in the church might to pursue them, to call them back to repentance. But outside of that, their fellowship with the church as far as body life of like, Hey, how are you? What's going on? Why don't you come over and have dinner that is interrupted and potentially even severed, depending on how they're gonna respond to everything.

Yeah, that's really good. I read a book by, what's his name?

Guidelines for Church Discipline

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Not Mark's guy, not Mark Dev, the other guy, Jonathan Lehman. Jonathan Lehman. He talks about the church discipline and this chapter is rife with all of these situations. But here's three things that he gives that I think are really helpful when you're trying to consider whether or not to pursue church discipline.

If it's significant, I think taking all three together would give you a really good answer to that. Cool. So the first one is significant, the second one is repeatable. It's ongoing, it's unrepentant. There is evidence that this person is doing the thing and it's not just one time. It's not every now and then it's, this is a kind of a.

Common occurrence. It seems like it's becoming unrestrained and more of a problem in their lives. And the third one is it has to be observable. And this is where it gets tricky, but also helpful. Because if you see someone and you say, oh man, they're filled with pride. They're just so arrogant. You might be challenged by someone to say, well, what do you mean by that?

Well, just the way they carry themselves. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, when they talk to me, they use a certain tone of voice. What do you mean by that? Right. You can keep going. What we're trying to get to is you really don't know someone's heart. What you can see is their actions or behaviors.

Before you decide to go out there and say, I'm gonna start church discipline with this guy or this gal, because she's. Acting in certain ways.

The Importance of Community Groups

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So significant unrepentant and observable. Some kind of objective, observable behavior that you can identify. Yeah, that's great, man. That's super helpful.

Yeah, as Jonathan Lehman, by the way, and that's. What we're talking about saying that things like that should be happening within the church body. We should know each other well enough, to have that happen. Which again, not to be a broken record, but the best way for you to have those kind of relationships is to get into a community group.

And that's something that we hope and pray that you guys are already doing, or that you're considering doing. But that is gonna be the place where this can happen most effectively for you. Don't. Rely on your spouse or your, you know, your in-laws that go to church with you.

You need to be around the body of Christ who are gonna be able to know you this well, to get in your kitchen that way.

Paul's Teachings on Marriage and Singleness

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Paul is for marriage though he is also for the effectiveness that someone can have if they choose to remain single. And so Paul's going to even suggest, I wish that all of you were like, I am. And we know from just his own testimony in church history that Paul was single and the reason being is he says he's able to be far more effective because he's not concerned with the cares that come along with being married or having a family.

Not necessarily bad things. A husband should care for his wife. A wife should care for her husband, they should care for their kids. But Paul's saying, as somebody who's single, I can be anxious only for the things of the Lord, and that makes me far more effective and useful to him. But he does give concessions to say, if you're gonna be married, these are my instructions to you.

And he gives quite a few in here, as far as how people are to conduct themselves and live towards one another, even before marriage. When it's appropriate to get married. If you're burning with passion, even talks about there, get married quickly, don't have a long engagement.

Clarifying Paul's Instructions on Marriage

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And so pr Any thoughts or questions that you want to throw out here to clarify what he's talking about in chapter seven at all?

Yes, both of those things. Let me just start back really quickly here to point something out that I think married people need to see, and that's verse five, chapter seven, verse five. Please read that and realize. That is a command of the Lord through the Apostle Paul to say that this is a right Yes. That comes along with marriage.

Yes. So please don't forget this. This is one that a lot of people can overlook for different reasons, and I just want you to see that. So I'm just gonna leave it there. Okay. Let's ask some clarifying questions here. Sure. Because it gets really confusing. Paul says, in verse 10 to the married, I give this charge.

Not I, but the Lord. Okay. What's going on there? What's, it sounds like he's saying, I'm charging you to do this and it's not really me, but it's Jesus. Is that about right? I give the shard, not I, but the Lord. Yeah. Because there's other times he's gonna say, I don't have this as confident, direct revelation from God that this is my authority.

Push back on that because I'm reading it everywhere. Verse 12 then when, so let me just make sure we're understanding you. Yes. So verse 12 to the rest, I say I not the Lord, and then he goes on to offer his command. Yeah. You're saying that this is Paul. Words, not the Lord's. This is not something that the Lord said in his earthly ministry and.

This is a binding statement of scripture. Yes. Even though it's not directly from Jesus. Yes. Okay, so let's talk about some of those qualifications.

Believers and Unbelievers in Marriage

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And he's talking about divorce, and it seems like he has two groups in mind. The married, who are Christians and the married who have a combination of Christian and non-Christian believer and unbeliever.

Do you have any commentary about that other than Amen? Yes, I agree. That's a good posture. Yeah. I guess one thing that continues to bubble up to the surface for me is really, it makes such wise sense to carefully choose who you're gonna marry. A hundred. Yes. Amen to that. Because this is it. Jesus says, once you bind.

Once you bind yourself to this person, it is a sin to break up that marriage except for very rare situations. And even then, those are concessions that are not God's ideal, but God's concession to say, okay, I'll let you do it, but not because this is the right thing. It's your hardness of heart, essentially.

And they need to love Jesus more than they love you. You need to find somebody that is a Christian and marry that person. Normalize that expectation from them for the time that they're little before they're even thinking about marriage. When it's still gross to them to see mom and dad kiss. Talk to them about man, when you grow up, you need to be.

Lord willing, a believer, and you need to marry somebody who's a Christian because that's the way it works. Yeah. There's no guarantees though, right? True. You can still think things can still happen. There's can be. There could be trickery, deception, self-deception, and a whole host of other things. So you can't control everything, but you should at least peripherally pursue that to the best of your knowledge and ability to marry a believer that's mature.

Okay, great.

Paul's Guidance on Divorce

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Let's talk about this exception. I know lots of people are. Not concerned about this, but they're certainly interested. Paul says it's possible that a believer can be married to an unbeliever, and if the unbeliever wants to separate from them, they can go, yes. They can let them go.

Yeah.

I mean that one's difficult because I don't know that I've ever seen this as him contradicting Christ as much as, for example, one of the reasons why Jesus says. Somebody who commits adultery is because it's one of the greatest perversions of the unity between a husband and wife, right.

This is how God designed it from the very beginning. The two shall become one flesh when a man or a woman goes and joins herself or himself to another individual. That way it's the greatest perversion and slap in the face of what marriage is supposed to be. Mm-hmm. And likewise, I think when somebody.

Refuses to live with their spouse. When somebody abandons that person that they are walking away from, they're abandoning that relationship that God has intended, that God has brought together. They are in effect separating though they're not maybe filing the legal paperwork of divorce papers.

This is not somebody that's gonna be subject to the same form of pursuit from the elders and everybody else that a believer would in that situation. So that adds another wrinkle to this. So that's how I would say, I think this is the same concept, Paul's after the same heart that Jesus is saying here it's a different.

Application. It may not be the letter of the law, what Jesus was saying, but I think the spirit of it is the same. I would agree with you. Paul is certainly not saying, Hey, just be nilly willy with your marriages. I think the biggest distinguishing factor between what Jesus says to his audience versus what Paul is saying to his audience is that he's talking to a different set of people.

Yes. Again, there's believers that Jesus is talking to and he says, for believers, if you marry a believer, you two are in it together. There's no dissolution here except on this particular circumstance, and even then I'd like you to still stay together and reconcile. That's always the goal. Yeah.

There's not a lot of space. So Paul is speaking to a very specific group believer and an unbeliever. And this, because of that scenario, gives them a lot more latitude. This actually makes more sense to me now. With Ezra chapter 10, where Ezra allows them to divorce their pagan wives and even in this case to put away their kids.

Now, I don't know all the particulars and how that worked out, but that's a similar situation, believer unbeliever. Mm-hmm. When that situation is taking place, you have a whole different calculation as to what a marriage should do and how that functions. And if the believers called to peace with their unbelieving spouse, that peace would even extend here, as Paul says in second or first Corinthians seven, is even to allow them to separate, which is again, to speak about divorce.

Yeah. Yeah. And there, there's so many layers to this. I think the longer we're in ministry we're learning this, we're figuring out that there's a lot of layers. Even talking about what it looks like for, what does it mean for an unbelieving spouse to separate what is entailed in that?

And I guess here's something that I took away from this, and it's that what Jesus says to believers is really not the final word about divorce. It is an authoritative word, and it's a clear word. It's a really helpful guiding light. But as Paul chimes in here, there's. Situations that Jesus isn't speaking to that take on a different calculation.

It's not that you disregard what Jesus says, he's always the guiding light. He's always telling you the goal and the spirit of it. But there are situations now that as you learn more about life and how these, and how sin interacts and are rather disrupts a marriage there's a lot more to take in consideration.

Right. But I do know that there are situations where for some families, this is brought up pretty quick and we want to advise against that. This is not. Choice number one, right? Or two or three, or four or five, or six or seven. Even for Paul here, I'm sure that he would tell the believing spouse, Hey don't give up too quickly.

You might see your spouse saved by your life. Yeah, that's what he says. And you talked about that recently in First Peter, chapter three. Yep. Yes. Yes. Remember that sermon that you talked about? Yes, I do. I remember a particular illustration that you used. Listen, everybody. I'm, how about Annie I and pancakes?

I'm really sorry that I riled up so many people. It was not my intention. I apologize. Mea culpa. I didn't bring it up. I know I'm ready to preach another sermon. I just wanna get another one under my belt so we can just move on, which apparently today I did. So hopefully I didn't say anything today other than breaking the turkey's neck when I swung it around my head.

Living in Unity and Loving the Weaker Brother

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In chapter eight, Paul's gonna be talking about how we live with one another as fellow believers, brothers and sisters in Christ. And again, remember his focus on so much of First Corinthians is on unity because that's what was at stake. That was the threat, that he was addressing with the Corinthian church is there was so much disunity going on.

There was fracturing, there was divisiveness. They weren't loving each other well. And so here in chapter eight, he's gonna talk about how you can love the weaker brother well, and the weaker brother argument is one that's always. Prevalent in the church to say, well, if this person's conscience is offended, who's the person that needs to grow up?

Is it me or is it them? And in, in some ways it's kind of, it's both. But for this instance, he's talking about food sacrifice to two idols and he's telling the people here, Hey, you know what if this is going to cause somebody to stumble, don't eat the food. Yeah, it's true. There are no gods but one God, these idols aren't true.

Paul's gonna talk about freedom in the coming chapters here and we're even memorizing that verse that in one Peter two 16. Live as people who are free. Not using your freedom as a coverup for evil, but living as servants of God. That is a guiding principle for us here, even in this conversation of whether we eat food, sacrifice to idols or not.

Amen. I was gonna say that.

Concluding Prayer and Final Thoughts

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Alright, well let's pray and then we'll be done with this episode. God we read chapters like one Corinthians seven and others and we just confess that we need wisdom to be able to navigate these things and wisdom to be able to understand the text in a way that is helpful to bring the correct interpretation application out of it and to be good berean of the scriptures.

And so help us to do that, Lord. Give us wisdom to know. What Paul meant. What you meant, what the spirit intends for us to understand. And we're thankful that we have the spirit to be able to do that. God I do pray for the unity of our churches. We're talking about that in this letter.

See you. Bye.

Bernard: ​Well, thank you for listening to another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast! We're honored to have you join us. This is a ministry of Compass Bible Church in north Texas. You can find out more information about our Church at compassntx.org. We would love for you to leave a review, to rate, or to share this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on, and we hope to see you again tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast.

PJ: Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said