Boundaries around Our Behavior

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I’ve mentioned to you before that years ago I taught school, and I mainly taught the older kids, because I can’t relate to them unless they can speak sarcasm. Little kids are not my spiritual gift in spite of me having several. But it was a small school, and so occasionally we would have to cover each other’s classes when a need arose. And there were a few times that I’d be on the playground with these kids, the younger kids, and it was like a pinball machine.

They’re just everywhere, just bouncing off the playground equipment and the fences. I mean, they’re everywhere. They would cover every inch of that playground.

And then some of you who were teachers are nodding your heads in agreement. You’ve seen this. It’s like every day is a full moon with sugar right after a holiday.

Anyway, I remember hearing that we were going to take a school-wide field trip somewhere or another, maybe a science museum. And after that, that we were going to take the kids to a city park that had a playground and let them run off some energy. And I remember thinking, this is a terrible idea because it’s hard enough to corral these kids in a fenced-in area.

Now we’re going to take them to a city park where there is no fence and there’s creeks and they’re just going to be all over the place. And so I was dreading this. And what I observed when we got to the playground was that these kids stuck really close to the playground equipment.

I was surprised. They weren’t wandering off. They weren’t out looking at the edges of the park and trying to run away from us.

They stayed pretty close to the teachers and pretty close to the equipment, and I couldn’t figure out why that was. I ran across a couple years later a study that had been done that talked about a school that removed their fencing from their playground to try to give more open space and less boundaries and let the kids feel more free and things like that that we try now and how the kids had done the same thing they had stuck close to the the middle of the playground and what they realized was without the boundaries the kids didn’t feel safe without knowing where the boundaries were they didn’t know where to go, so they just, I mean, not that they were cowering in fear, but they just huddled in one small area where they knew they were where they were supposed to be.

Now, I don’t necessarily tell you to go try that at home and take a bunch of first graders and turn them loose in an open area, assuming they’re going to stay put. I can’t guarantee that those results will happen everywhere. But for me, it was an interesting thing to realize how those boundaries affected the way the kids see the world.

And for you and me, we need boundaries as well to understand what’s expected of us, where we’re supposed to be. Sometimes we don’t like the boundaries, but the boundaries are not a bad thing. And as we’ve been studying through 1 Corinthians, we come to a place here in chapter 5 where Paul begins to talk about some of the boundaries on our behavior.

And if you’re a guest with us this morning, I give this disclaimer every week. Some of you probably know this by heart already. What I’m preaching on today is not because these are issues that are a problem in our church at the moment.

So if you walk in and think, what have I gotten myself into? What you’ve gotten yourself into is partway through a study of 1 Corinthians. We’re going piece by piece through the book, and this is just where we are.

So please don’t leave here thinking, what is going on in that church? I’m never going back there again. We’re just studying God’s Word, and what God’s Word says is what we’re going to say, and then we move on to the next part.

but Paul talks about these boundaries this is right on the the heels of what he’s just been talking about that we looked at two weeks ago we took a detour into acts last week but what we looked at two weeks ago were the issue of the man involved in an immoral relationship with his stepmother and for Paul saying to the church at Corinth even the pagan culture around you looks at that and realizes that is wrong and not only is he doing this but the church is turning a eye to it, all while trying to proclaim itself to be morally superior to the culture around it. He comes back after this and talks about some of the boundaries that need to be involved in some church discipline because he’s told them that the church needs to deal with this situation.

We’re going to look at some questions that I think arise in a lot of our minds as we mull over the concept that he introduced in the first eight verses of this chapter about the need to deal with sin within the church. And so I want us to read this together this morning, 1 Corinthians chapter 5. Please turn there with me if you haven’t already.

And we’re going to look at the last few verses of this chapter starting in verse 9 this morning. Once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. And if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find 1 Corinthians, it’ll be on the screen for you as well.

1 Corinthians chapter 5 starting in verse 9. He says, I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world or with the covetous and swindlers or idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.

But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one. For what do I have to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?

but those who are outside God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. You may be seated.

If you see the words remove the wicked man from among yourselves in small caps in your Bible or all caps, that is not because Paul is just really pounding his fist and saying this. In translations where that happens, it’s because it’s a quote or an allusion to the Old Testament. And there are several places in Deuteronomy that talk about removing the wicked man from among Israel’s midst, and Paul is leaning on that scripture there to make the point that as God’s people in the Old Testament, we’re supposed to put the wicked out from them, so God’s people in the New Testament are supposed to put the wicked out from among them.

And we’ve seen all through this, this has kind of been the theme of this study, is how do we as a church navigate trying to live for God, live in a way that honors God in a culture that is increasingly pagan and increasingly hostile toward God. Our society, unfortunately, absent revival, is becoming more and more like Corinth. And so as we figure out how to still shine the light and how to still live in a way that pleases and honors God in a culture that is becoming more and more like that, it’s been good for us to look at their example and look at the things that Paul said to them.

But we see that it’s trying to honor God amid a pagan culture will always be a challenge. If we expect it to be the easy thing to do, to be a Christian like it was a generation ago, like it was 50 years ago, not saying that everyone was Christian or that everybody lived like it, but our culture and our institutions were moving in that direction and it was a much easier thing to do. We are now living in a culture where we have to expect that living in a Christ honoring way is going to be swimming upstream against the culture.

It’s always going to be a challenge. We just have to prepare ourselves going into it that that’s going to be the case, and then we’re not going to be disappointed. I’ve started telling my kids that if you grow up believing the things that daddy’s teaching you to believe, life is going to be harder for you.

But it doesn’t mean that these things aren’t right. I’m telling you these things because I believe they’re right. So this passage here is to give practical instruction to the church on how to live out the holiness that he’s been calling them for the past four and a half chapters to live.

He’s been talking to them about the need to live in a way that was different from Corinth in a way that goes against their natural fleshly inclinations and instead live in a way that honors God. And now he comes to some practical application about how to do this. And here specifically, he calls the church to keep itself pure away from ungodly behavior.

And this passage that we’re looking at this morning from verses 9 to 13, it’s got kind of as its bookends on either side of it, this call to put out sinful behavior from within the church. He says in verse 9, I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. Now, Paul, in all likelihood, wrote a letter to the Corinthians before this one.

This is 1 Corinthians because it’s the first one that we hold as inspired scripture. The other one has been lost to history. Paul wrote other things that were not inspired by the Holy Spirit, just good advice.

But he says, in my previous letter, I told you not to associate with immoral people. The end of this passage, verse 13, remove the wicked man from among yourselves, that allusion back to Deuteronomy. And this practical instruction is needed because the holiness that God expects and that Paul is promoting here raises challenges and questions as he’s been telling them that you need to get rid of the sin within the church.

All kinds of questions arise. How do we do that? How is this supposed to work?

When does it happen? You and I probably have the same questions. These are things that I know I have answered, that I’ve had to talk through with people in the past about how we do this.

He’s telling them to be holy. Well, how? How do you get rid of sin in the church?

I mean, do we pull ourselves back from everybody that sins? Do we try to police each other and land on every thing, every nitpicky thing that anybody does wrong? How do we do this?

And Paul addresses two of these specific questions that were faced by the church at Corinth and that are faced by us today so that we can understand them. The first of those is how do we interact with a sinful world? If we as a church are called to embrace holiness, are called to walk in a way that pleases God, we’re called to separate ourselves from the sin of the world, how do we do that?

Does it mean that we have to completely and entirely shun the world around us. And Paul’s answer here is not exactly. That’s not what he’s talking about in the sense of saying, I’m not going to have anything to do with people out there because they’re sinners.

He says in verse 9, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. He says, I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world. We read this already with covetors, swindlers, idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.

What’s Paul’s point? If the church could not associate with immoral people out in the world, we couldn’t associate with anybody. We couldn’t do anything.

Now, this is a little bit of a pragmatic argument, and I don’t normally go for the pragmatic argument, but it’s inspired by the Holy Spirit, so it’s right. It’s a pragmatic argument of saying, how do you expect to do business? How do you expect to have a trade?

How do you expect to to live? How do you expect to engage with your neighbors to reach them with the gospel if you can’t be around them because of their sinful habits? This is not the church shunning everybody outside these walls who sins.

It’s getting really hard. It’s getting really hard to just, let alone individuals, it’s getting really hard to find companies to do business with that live according to our values, right? It’s gotten a lot harder, you know, and we look at some of these boycotts and things that happen, and I’m not necessarily opposed to boycotts.

I just think we have to be strategic about it. Kind of where I’ve drawn the line is, are you going after the kids? You know, at that point, then I’m not doing business with you.

But if I have to investigate, are you a drunkard? No, I’m sorry, you can’t fix my roof. It’s going to be hard because I’m supposed to shun my, you know, don’t be drunk on my roof, but he’s telling us you can’t avoid doing business with people out in the world.

You can’t avoid having some form of relationship with people out in the world. And here the problem was that the church at Corinth, not that they were being super holy, but that they were expecting the world to live up to a definition of what it means to be a Christian while not holding themselves to that definition. And that’s backwards.

We are supposed to hold ourselves to the standard of what it means to be a Christian. With the world, we still proclaim the standard, but we can’t expect them to live up to it if they don’t have Christ. They’re not going to be able to. By the way, we also fail.

It’s just that for us, there’s repentance. We repent and we move on. We’re not supposed to wallow in it.

But he says, I’m not telling you to go down in your bunker and not associate, not ever do anything with anybody who’s sinful ever. I ran into this when I was in college. I had friends there at OU who were Christians and and went to church, yet occasionally they’d have parties where they drank and drank too much.

And if I was at some kind of social gathering and the liquor came out, I left. I’ve mentioned before that we had kind of an informal ministry to some of the exchange students there, particularly some of the French ones, because I was a French major at the time. And so we would go and do things with them.

And I remember being at the home of one of the French exchange students one night, and there were several people there from France and Sweden and various countries, and the alcohol came out, and I didn’t leave. And one of my friends said, well, why didn’t you leave now? I said, because you know better, they didn’t.

I didn’t drink with them. You know, when they offered me something, I’ll just have water. Water, yes.

And we talked about the Lord a little bit, but my friend couldn’t understand that, and I didn’t have chapter and verse for it until studying my way through here. But even then, it seemed to me that to hang out with church-going people who were getting drunk and should know better was a little different from being around people in the world who were getting drunk and didn’t know better and still needed to hear about Jesus. What he’s telling us here is that we cannot hold the world to a standard that we’re held to, especially when we don’t always hold ourselves to that standard, and then shun them and withdraw completely from them when they don’t live up to that standard.

Because what happens when the church isolates itself from the culture? The culture grows darker. We’re supposed to be in the world.

We’re supposed to associate with the people of the world. We’re just not supposed to join the world in what it practices. But we go into business.

We go into education. We go into the political sphere and we take the light of Christ with us where we go. And we don’t shun the world because they don’t live up to what we’re supposed to do.

Instead, we lovingly point them to the holiness of God and call them to repentance and faith in Christ. But we can’t do that if we just shove them away at arm’s length. And this is a question that I’ve heard at various points in church over the years. How do we interact with a sinful world?

Are we supposed to just, I mean, can I have, I’ve heard people ask, can I have friends who are not Christians? Yes, just don’t join them in practices that don’t glorify God. If we don’t have any kind of relationship with people who aren’t Christians, how are we ever going to lead them to Christ?

And Paul even says here, For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church, but those who are outside, God judges. And we don’t compromise the word of God.

We don’t compromise his moral standards. We don’t try to change what he teaches to make it more palatable. But to the extent they’re willing to have a relationship with us, we have a relationship with them to be the light in their midst without becoming like them.

That’s how we interact with the sinful world. The other question that often comes up in these matters of holiness in the church and maintaining church discipline is how do we know when church discipline is appropriate? Here he comes to verse 11 where he says, but actually I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one.

Here’s the issue. Church discipline becomes appropriate and it becomes necessary when someone who professes to be a believer is involved in some kind of unrepentant public sin that contradicts scripture and brings reproach on the witness of the church. And I know that many times we will recoil at the term church discipline because so many of us have seen it abused.

I’ve seen churches where this faction didn’t like this faction and they were just looking for a reason to engage church discipline and remove people from the church and that should never be the intention. The intention of church discipline is always repentance and restoration. It is always to call people to repent, to restore the relationship with a fallen sister or brother.

And it comes about in a couple of ways. First of all, there can be, according to Matthew 18, there can be a personal offense between two believers. And the offended one is supposed to go to the offender and try to make things right.

And if they won’t hear it, they’re supposed to take somebody else with them. And if they still won’t hear it, then they’re supposed to get the church involved. Because at that point, you’re dealing with a very public, very deliberate unforgiveness, which is a sin.

And at that point, it’s become a public sin that the church has to deal with. In the other, there’s sin that is public and brings scandal on the church. Nowhere in here does he say, go investigate everybody around you and make sure they’re doing right.

The Apostle Paul is not calling you to get a church directory and go to everybody’s home at night and peep through the kitchen curtains and put a wire tap on their phones. Not that I’ve thought this through. Not to check on what everybody’s doing, but we’re talking about things that come to light.

And by the way, things will come to light if they go undealt with with the Lord long enough. When things come to light, they have to be dealt with because they start to throw a reproach on the church. This is what Paul said with the man that was in the relationship with his stepmother.

Paul was, I can’t remember now, 400, 600 miles away in Thessalonica, and word has gotten back to him. Word had spread all through Corinth, outside the church, even in the pagan world, and they were disgusted. These things have a way of getting out, and the pagans of Corinth were looking at the church at Corinth and saying, that’s who these people are?

They talk about this Savior who’s supposed to forgive their sins, and it leads to that, and that’s okay? And it begins to undermine the witness of the church. And so he gives us some examples of the kinds of things that call for church discipline.

Sexual immorality is one. He uses the word immorality here, but the word in Greek is pornoi. It means it’s where the word pornography comes from.

It means somebody who’s involved in sexually immoral behavior. And I mentioned that the three times that I’ve ever seen church discipline carried out, Two of the times were because of somebody involved in adultery. Sexual immorality is a mark on the witness of the church.

The world looks at somebody that openly is involved in sexual immorality, and the church turns a blind eye, and the world says, why would I want to be like them? Because in many cases, the world is okay with that without all the other obligations that come along with being part of the church. So if Christianity allows that, what’s the difference?

He mentions greed here in verse 11. Being a greedy person, he says covetous. It’s somebody that looks at what everybody else has and schemes for ways to get it because they want it.

Greed can be a reproach to the church. When the members have a reputation of being greedy, you know what, when the church leadership has a reputation of being greedy. And sometimes churches do get that reputation from the world that all we want is their money.

We can’t do anything that feeds into that. And there’s idolatry. In their day, there were people from Corinth who had been saved out of a pagan idolatry and still had this pull back to the old way of life that maybe they were tempted to go to the temples.

Maybe they were tempted to make just a little offering to the statues. What could it hurt? I don’t know of too many people in our world today who are worshiping statues, although I did hear of a young lady recently in town that said she prays to Thor.

There’s not as much of that that goes on, but people have idols just the same. Anything that we take and place in our lives in the position that God alone deserves to occupy, in the place of authority in our lives that God alone deserves to occupy, that becomes idolatry. And if people in the church are actively worshiping something that is not God, if we’re actively worshiping our politicians instead of God, it’s idolatry.

If we’re actively worshiping our sports teams instead of God, it’s idolatry. If we’re actively worshiping our own prestige, it becomes idolatry. Idolatry can be many things, and it has to be dealt with in the church.

Slander. He uses this word reviler, and it’s a word that doesn’t have a perfect translation from the Greek into English because it’s so packed with meaning. A slanderer, somebody that gossips, that makes out lies about people, somebody that tells malicious stories, tries to stir up trouble.

I think of this in general as just a very aggressive person. I think of what it says in Proverbs about those who sow discord among the brethren. That would be a slanderer.

And now having gone back and seen that, having seen that, I wish I could go back in time and deal with some things differently when people started to carry that out in the church. Not here, but elsewhere. It needed to be dealt with.

Drunkenness. A lack of self-control here. The Bible teaches that we’re to be sober-minded.

And if we’re getting drunk, I think we could apply this to other forms of intoxication and addiction. If we’re giving in to those on a regular basis, it can bring shame to the church. He talks about swindlers.

If the world recognizes somebody from our church as being a habitually dishonest person, it casts us and our faith in a bad light, doesn’t it? If you have a business and you’re known for being crooked with people, that kind of gives people a reason to doubt the claims of the gospel. I don’t know that Paul intended here to make a list of all the things that require church discipline.

It seems to me that this is a list of the kinds of things that require church discipline. But in circumstances like this, the church is obligated to withdraw fellowship from somebody. It says here, with such a one not even to eat.

Now, the reason for that is because eating together in their day was an intimate practice. I said this wrong a few weeks ago on a Wednesday night, and I don’t think I’ll ever live it down. I said, I don’t eat with just anybody.

And some of the people picked up on that and said, oh, you’re too good to eat with just anybody. No, none of us just, well, most of us, don’t just sit down with random strangers and eat. And if you’re eating at a restaurant today after church and somebody you don’t know comes and tries to join your table, just plops themselves down and starts talking without even so much as an introduction, they’re just there to eat with you, that’s not really something we do in our culture.

In their culture, you ate with somebody because you had an intimate friendship, a connection with them, a bond with them, just like we do, just like we bond with one another in our fellowship meals in there. He says don’t even do that. And the reason for that was because if they would sit down and eat with this person after they’d withdrawn fellowship, it gave the appearance to the world outside that they were condoning or they were approving or they were affirming what this person did.

And so part of church discipline is cutting the, not because we want to shun a person, but because they and the world need to understand that the things that are going on that are the basis for the church discipline are not things the church condones are not things the church approves. And by the way, I want to be clear here too, I don’t believe, when I’m talking about church discipline, I don’t believe the scriptures call us either to rush into this and say, so-and-so made a mistake, but we’re going to nail them anyway. Because what is the object of church discipline?

Repentance and restoration. And so we go to somebody and confront them. And if they repent, mission accomplished.

This is not, again, and by the way, if you’re a guest with us, please come back next week because I’m not sure how I’d feel if I walked in on a Sunday morning and the first thing I heard was on church discipline. We really heard just going through 1 Corinthians. But the whole idea of church discipline can sound so harsh if we don’t get the motivation right, that it’s about restoring people to fellowship and it’s about maintaining the purity of the church.

We are all sinners. Everybody in this room is a sinner. If you didn’t know that, I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you.

But I’m a sinner and so are you. And that recognition is why Paul doesn’t say, nab them for everything they do wrong. We’re talking about when things go unconfessed, unrepentant of.

They’re open, they’re flaunted, and they have an opportunity to bring scandal on the church. We have to make it clear that these things are not endorsed. They’re I want to show you a slide here that I put together.

I don’t know if you can see that real well. Some of you were in Dr. Michael Taylor’s Bible conference that the association held here last fall.

And he talked about chiastic structures in the text. And a chiastic structure is where you’ll see a repeat of things, of themes in the text, and kind of like a stair step, and then they go back. I noticed as I was reading through here there was a chiastic structure to the text, where he starts and ends by saying believers must separate from immoral people.

If you look at verses 9 and 13, I’ve already told you those are the bookends of the passage, and at both times he’s telling us that we as the church have to separate from the immoral person. He says, get them out of your midst. In verse 10, he talks about not making unbelievers act like believers. He says, I’m not telling you to separate from everybody out in the world.

He comes back to that theme in verses 12 and the beginning of 13. In the middle, verse 11, is the idea that believers must act like believers. I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or idolater or reviler or drunkard or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one.

And what Dr. Taylor explained to us about chiastic structures is that when you find the middle, When you find the thing in the middle that everything else revolves around, that everything else points back to, that’s the most important point of the passage. That tells me that the most important point that Paul is making in this passage is that believers must act like believers and the church exists for our mutual accountability.

It is so easy, it’s so tempting to throw a fit about the sin in our world and turn a blind eye to the sin that takes place in our midst. But that’s not what we’re called to do. We’re called to lovingly hold each other accountable because our job as believers is not to make each other feel good. Our job as a church is not to make each other feel good.

Our job is to love one another enough to help each other follow Christ faithfully. That’s our job. And again, I don’t tell you this this morning because I know, oh, we’ve got a drunkard and a swindler in our midst, and it’s coming up at the next business meeting.

But for me, as I’m studying this passage, it answers those questions. When does the church need to step in and do something? How do we deal with the world outside?

Answered by the basic premise that it’s the job of believers to act like believers. And the reason why, and I’m going to close with this, the reason why it is so important for believers to act like believers is not some legalistic concept that, well, you’ve just got to check all the boxes and do the right things. No, the reason why it is so important that believers act like believers is because our lives are a testimony to the power of the gospel for good or for ill.

Because the gospel we proclaim is not just the idea that we are saved and we have a ticket to heaven, but it is the idea that God takes sinners like us, people who have disobeyed Him, people who have worshipped things other than Him. God takes sinners who deserve to be separated from Him, and out of His goodness and His kindness, He has made a way for us to be forgiven and for us to be changed. And so because Jesus Christ came and took responsibility for our sins on the cross, and He was nailed to that cross, and He shed His blood and died to pay for our sins in full so that we could have the forgiveness that we could never earn or deserve.

Because He did that, we are not only forgiven and assured a place in heaven and eternal life, but we’re also indwelled by the Holy Spirit who begins to change us, who begins to reshape us from the inside out in what’s called sanctification, to make us holy the way God calls us to be holy. And for some of us, that takes longer than others. It’s like physical growth.</