Grace Christian Fellowship: Teachings

1 Corinthians 5-6 "Slamming the Door on Sin"

When I was a boy my mother would warn me when I came into the house not to slam the door. You see she was baking a cake and slowly that cake was rising higher and higher, inflating from the inside. If I were to slam the door as I came in the cake would fall and we would have a pancake for dessert that night. Paul saw that the Christians in Corinth were also puffed-up. They were self-inflated and rising ever higher and higher in their own esteem. At this point of his letter Paul slams the door on their pride!

"It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality is not even named among the Gentiles – that a man has his father’s wife! And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you." (1Cor. 5:1-2)

Pride leads to a kind of blindness. It is possible in the church for someone to look so good spiritually and yet be involved in gross sin. Many people actually compartmentalise their lives into the spiritual and physical sides. But there is no difference at all between your spiritual life, your business life, your personal life and your sexual life. We must worship God with all of our life! It is possible to be blind to sin in your own life. This is one reason why we need to come to church and listen to the Word of God. Through the word the Holy Spirit will convict us of sin and what we need to change. It is also possible for the church to be blind to the sin of its members, denying that it is a problem. After all, we are such a good church! The worship is beautiful, the fellowship is sweet, the preaching powerful. No one wants to burst the bubble so the things that are not so good are hidden away or even worse they are simply accepted. Depending on the sins of the congregation you just don’t hear any messages on that subject any more. In certain churches in the American South you will never hear a message against smoking, because most of the congregation are tobacco farmers. I drove past a church in San Francisco this summer that had a sign on it that said that they preached the inclusive love of God. I am sure that you would never hear homosexuality called a sin in that church. There are churches in wealthy towns where plenty of messages talk about God’s blessing on the righteous, but there is little mention of greed and covetousness. Pride can lead to blindness.
I received an interesting e-mail this week. In it was a letter from a lawyer in Nigeria who informed me that a Japanese woman who had married a Nigerian man and passed away had named Tokyo Horizon Chapel as a beneficiary in her will. He wanted to know where to send the money, 250,000 US dollars. I was overjoyed but thought that it would be good to proceed slowly, just in case. After checking with a lawyer friend and researching online I found out that this was an example of a cunning mail fraud that cheats trusting people out of 100’s of millions of dollars each year. The lawyer from Nigeria wrote me back and explained that in order to avoid inheritance taxes it would be necessary to make non-profit status in Nigeria for our church. Of course to do this we would need to send 1,500 dollars for fees. As I researched online I found that the bank account that they wanted me to send the money to was that of a well known con-artist. I also read that after the first check there would be a long string of fees and requests for money with the promised money never actually appearing. Some people have lost millions to these con-games, and still believe that someday they will actually get the money that was promised. Their pride keeps them from admitting that anything is wrong. With each check that they send it is harder and harder to admit that they have been fooled. Paul wrote that what starts out as a little ends up being a lot.

Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1Cor. 5:6-8)

Just like a little bit of yeast will permeate the entire cake and cause it to rise, so too just a little bit of sin will puff up a church. The more sin, the harder the church will try to cover it up and make itself look good. The solution is to get rid of the sin. This does not mean that all of us have to be perfect. In fact just the opposite. If we try to be perfect and look perfect to everyone else then we will puff up all the more. The only solution is to realise that Jesus Christ gave Himself to be a sacrifice for our sins and it is only through Him that we can be made new. This calls for something special on our part. It means that we need to have the door slammed on us now and then, have our puffed up cake flattened and eat that pancake. Paul calls that flat pancake the bread of "sincerity and truth". We must be truthful about our sin, confessing it, turning away from it and asking Jesus to forgive us.
However there are some people who don’t want to turn away from their sins. They don’t want to be flattened by God, and they resent any attempt to show them the errors of their ways. Now Paul says two things about this kind of person. Look at verse 9, "I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world." There are many people who are walking in sin who don’t know Jesus Christ and we are called to love these people, to bless them and pray for them. Like Jesus we must open our hearts to these people or else we will never be able to save them. Jesus has not called us to come out of the world and isolate ourselves from sinners. We are called to be salt and light in this world which means that some of our best friends should be those who are still lost in sin. Paul continues, "But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person." For those who are outside the church, their sin is not our concern and it will not defile us. Often we must wade through some of the grossest sin in this world just to seek and save the lost. But those who are inside the church, that is a different story.

You see, if we allow the sin that goes on in the world to happen in the church then we are no different from the world. We are salt that has lost its flavor. The greatest witness that I know of the truth of the gospel are the lives that Jesus has changed. As I look around the church I see in the faces and the stories here the living testimony of Jesus Christ. He has the power to deliver people from the bondage of sin and give them a new life. If the people in the church are in bondage to the same sins as people outside of the church then that witness is lost. I do not think it is possible for a pastor or anyone to look into the heart of every person in the church and expose every sin. That is not what we are talking about. But there are certain obvious sins that we must expose and deal with or else we are denying the power of Jesus Christ.

In chapter 6:9 Paul gives us a list, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God."

Paul gives some very specific instructions for those who are in the church but continue in sin. He says in verse 4 of chapter 5, "In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." If a person continues in sin, but calls themselves a Christian and comes to church, we have to make a strong stand against them or else we are condoning their sin and we will all be guilty. The way this is done is not in secret but as a church. It is not just one person accusing another, or one group excluding another. Instead it has to be done by all in the power of Jesus Christ. The result is that the person is no longer welcome to come to church and fellowship with the body unless they repent and turn from their sin. Isn’t this unloving? No, actually it is the most loving thing to do. We cannot force anyone to obey. We cannot force anyone to repent. But we cannot let them continue in sin and drag down themselves and everyone around them.

Do not be deceived. Even though some might preach the inclusive love of God, sin is sin. It hurts the sinner, it hurts those sinned against , it hurts innocent people along the way and it hurts God. Sexual immorality of all sin is one of the most serious because it is one of the few sins that you take into your own body. The act that should join a husband and wife into "one flesh", is also capable of numbing the soul when repeated with many who are not really the one God meant for you. Not only that but our bodies are called a temple for the Holy Spirit, because God’s Spirit dwells in us. We would never dream of committing acts of lust in a church, how can we do it in the temple? Those who try to say that homosexuality is not a sin cannot be reading the same Bible that we are today. In fact here the Greek uses two words to make it especially clear. Both roles of homosexual practice are condemned as sin. All of the sins listed here are common in Japan. Idolatry is practised at every shrine and temple, drunkards can be seen near every station, and many young girls are so covetous of the brand name bags and jewelry that they see others wearing that they are willing to sell their bodies to get them. Paul writes, "And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of God." Those people who are lost in sin are all people that Jesus went to the cross and died for. They are all people that He would have made friends with and led into the kingdom of God. Jesus would not have left them there lost in their sin. He would have showed them how to walk in newness of life. If we can show them how Jesus has changed our lives then they too can be washed, sanctified and justified in the name of the Lord.

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