Sermon Tone Analysis

God’s love for us in Church Discipline

So many of you guys know that Alyssa and I know that we have embarked on a journey towards foster-adopting children in the foster system.

We started this process right around the beginning of this year.

We had hours of training, hours of paperwork, trips to the doctors, trips to the DMV, several house assessments, and making fixtures in our house so that our place can be a safe place for children, and thankfully we were cleared and foster-certified a couple of weeks ago.

We are now in the process of looking through profiles of children and prayerfully discerning whether to pursue and continue with some of the profiles that we have received.

But throughout this process we have been slowly trying to prepare ourselves and discussing how we would lovingly parent these kids.

We know that they are going to be children with different needs because many of them come from traumatic experiences and broken homes.

We’ve been discussing our specific roles when the time comes [who’s going to cook the meals, give them baths, do the dishes, etc.] We’re excited in thinking about how to lead the children to love the Lord and to make spending time together in family worship together.

One of our main discussion points where we really have to be sensitive and strategic about is how we are to correct and discipline our kids.

We know that there are certain aspects that parents would find as a common activity in disciplining their children that we are not to do as foster parents.

But one thing we know, is that we are still to correct and discipline them.

To all the parents here, whether your children are still young or whether you have raised your children to become grown adults we know that when we start raising them we provide our children with specific ground rules that are there for their protection.

We do not just let them run amok and for them to do whatever they want to do.

We take some type of stance whether to put them on time out, or spank, or other forms of discipline, and parents, hopefully the reason why you discipline your children is because you love and care for them.

We provide rules for them to follow because we care for them and that disobeying certain rules is not helpful or beneficial to them:

Rule #1 do not touch the stove [child can burn their hand]

Rule #2 Respect and obey your parents [teach them virtues of respecting others, and obedience when they are young]

Rule #3 Curfew [because we care for them, and want to protect them]

But when these rules are broken, their are consequences to disobedience and children are disciplined and corrected so that they can learn and grow into obedience.

Parents, hopefully you guys agree with me that discipline is a necessary part of raising your children.

And it’s the same for the Lord, as God’s children, God has established discipline for us to love and correct us.

We see here that God’s disciplining of us is out of His love for us as God the Father.

But we also see some warnings for us if we do not heed God’s discipline.

God is showing to us that discipline is necessary for us as we continue in the Christian faith and walking the race that is set before us.

But somewhere along the way our thinking has changed.

For many of us here, we see the necessity of disciplining our children when they are young, but when it comes to us getting disciplined, that is a different story.

Disciplining your children is seen as a loving act and protecting them, but when it comes to correction in our own lives, or people confronting us on sin in our lives, for many of us it is seen as invasive, judgmental, and unloving.

When people correct us we say things like “who are you to talk to me like that? who are you to judge me?”, “what about your sin?” “I am a grown man, you can’t talk to me like that?”.

Sadly this is one of the reasons in why many of the churches in American evangelical Christianity do not practice church discipline in their congregations.

They say things like “it is too messy, and too difficult”.

They see that church discipline is not welcoming and the goal for them is to have pews filled and have the service filled as much as possible.

“The church today is suffering from an infection which has been allowed to fester…As an infection weakens the body by destroying its defense mechanisms, so the church has been weakened by this ugly sore.

The church has lost its power and effectiveness in serving asa vehicle for social, moral, and spiritual change.

This illness is due, at least in part, to a neglect of church discipline” [J.

Carl Laney]

Imagine this church: It is huge and is still growing numerically.

People like it, The music is good.

The people are welcoming.

There are many exciting programs, and people are quickly enlisted into their support.

And yet, the church, in trying to look like the world in order to win the world, has done a better job than they may have intended.

It does not display the distinctively holy characteristics taught in the New Testament, Imagine such an apparently vigorous church being truly spiritually sick, with no remaining immune system to check and guard against wrong teaching or wrong living.

Imagine Christians, knee-deep in recovery groups and sermons on brokenness and grace, being comforted in their sin but never confronted.

Imagine those people, made in the image of God, being lost to sin because no one corrects them.

Can you imagine such a church?

Apart from the size, have I not described many of our American churches?

[Dever, 9marks of a healthy church]

CBF, we understand that taking correction can be difficult.

Our sin is exposed and it does not feel good.

But we correct each other out of love.

Look at

CBF we are are striving to obey the Bible faithfully and the best of our ability.

So for the rest of our time today, I want us to have a greater grasp and understanding of God’s love for us in church discipline.

So as we focus on our text today in we are going to try to look at the formal steps of church discipline that Jesus lines up for us.

Then hopefully expand that to help us understand how discipline is actually God’s way of loving us and using us to love each other in this church in a greater capacity.

What is church discipline?

Who is involved in church discipline?

So let’s read again.

The first step of church discipline is found in

How do you practice church discipline?

First and foremost, in the first verse we get one of the goals and purpose of church discipline at the end of v.15, which is to “gain your brother” I want to get that out in the open so that is on our radar, we practice church discipline so that we can gain and restore our brother and sister in the Lord.

When do you practice church discipline?

We see that the 1st step of church discipline is to confront a sinning brother and sister by yourself.

Go to him and him alone.

So there is a textual issue in the original translations on whether the phrase “against you” is in the original text.

So you can read v.15 as “if your brother sins” or if your brother “sins against you”, but this general first step can refer to if a brother or sister is in some type of sin that may or may not affect you.

Still one thing holds true which is the brother needs correcting.

Why do we practice church discipline?

Jesus seems to be saying that the first thing the believer should do is to try to get the offender to see his sin for what it is.

Jesus doesn’t say to wait for the person caught in sinning to come to you to confess the sin, but Jesus says to “Go”, meaning we take the initiative to confront the person and rebuke and confront them on their sin.

Some of these questions we will answer very briefly, and for some of them we will take a deeper look into the question and will take us a longer time.

But first lets focus in on the WHAT

Jesus says to do all this by yourself.

Revealing to us that there should be no attempt to bring this out into the open, it is a matter between the offender and the person who is rebuking them.

The privacy of the first and initial contact allows the sin to be dealt with without and need for a wider awareness or for public scrutiny.

We as a church want to protect the dignity of our fellow church members, so if there is sin in an individual church member’s life we want to lovingly confront them on their own.

This means we do not ask others advice how we should talk to the person, or talk to others about the person’s sin before confronting the person.

This means confronting the person first as an act of love that will best serve the other person.

Church family in speaking to another person in confronting them of their sin we must zealously guard and protect their character for their good, that is why the first initial step is to speak to them first on your own.

The more a person’s sin is known and discussed by others, even if the people who know the information mean well, the easier it is for the person in sin to feel resentful and hurt and it actually becomes more difficult for that person to repent and for restoration to take place.

Church family if you have an issue with another person who sinned against you, or if you suspect them to be in unrepentant sin, do not beat around the bush or sneak around searching for informtion.

Speak to that person directly.

Love the brother & sister enough not to talk to the whole world about it.

So we know that we should confront an individual in person and on our own, but what attitude should we take in talking to a person?

First, we restore others in a spirit of gentleness.

This type of attitude keeps up with the goal of “gaining our brother back”

In confronting someone, we need to be reminded that our speech needs to be used to build each other up, so that they can hear the grace-filled words and receive this grace.

We are to be kind to one another, tender-hearted, and willing to forgive one another.

We read this text and people use this verse to say “See Jose, we aren’t suppose to judge each other”, but this verse isn’t necessarily saying that because immediately after Jesus says that in order for us to take the speck out of our brother’s eye, we are to take the log out of our own eyes.

Meaning we do not have precedence to pronounce final judgment on someone to say that they are eternally condemned, but we have precedence as Christians to correct our brother and sisters actions and let them know whether their actions are sinful or not.

But note what Jesus tells us in doing so, when we confront our brothers and sisters in their sin.

Jesus says to not focus first on their speck of sin but first examine your own heart and take the big logs of sin in our lives, so that we can think clearly in our rebuke of our brother and sister.

So we see that we check our own lives first, and repent of sin in our own lives, then we humbly and with a gentle spirit confront our brother and sister in sin in private.

This is in right thinking of

We test and examine our own selves, and similarly to we ought to watch our selves lest we fall into sin as well.

This is step 1 of church discipline, we are to confront a brother and sister in sin in person in private.

Here is the thing about step 1 of church discipline, it happens all the time.

When we live in community with one another, our relationships are going to grow and we are going to know each other in a more intimate level, but here’s the thing, we’re all sinners and that we are going to eventually offend and say something that will hurt one another, and we can fall into sin.

So step 1 of church discipline is going to happen, and what’s great in the type of environment that we are trying to cultivate is that we should be ok with others speaking truth into our lives and correcting us.

CBF member, are you too prideful to not think that that you need correcting?

Aren’t we all trying to help each other finish the race of faith and walk the Christian walk alongside each other to pick each other up when we fall down?