"Sacred Roots: Nature of the Church: 'Assembly of the Saints' vs. 'Hospital for Sinners'"

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

This is Strength to Strength, and welcome here this morning. A verse that stood out to me this morning from Scripture as I was listening here in Matthew 26 says this: Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping.

Has that ever happened to you? And Jesus said, "Couldn't you men keep watch with me for one hour?" He asked Peter, "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."

And so we're together here this morning to challenge each other on this journey with God in our world today. Our title is going from is Strength to Strength, which is the idea of getting stronger and stronger. And if you're like me, we need that daily challenge, weekly challenge. We need all the graces that God has given us to be faithful in our day today. There's many things that want to draw us away just as the disciples, just for them, same 2000 years ago, same today. So thanks for joining us here on this call this morning. And also to our listeners, thank you for joining us. Our talk for today is a continuation in our Sacred Roots series.

It's our 14th talk. And the title is Sacred Roots, Nature of the Church, Purist Assembly of the Saints versus Hospital for Sinners. And David, it's good to have you back on here. I believe this is your fifth talk in this series. And David has also helped us create this series as well, build this series. And so he's been quite involved with it as well. Our title for this morning goes like, I mean, I'm sorry, the description is goes like this. What kind of community did Jesus intend the church to be? Is it a place for the pure or the penitent, a gathering of saints, or a hospital for sinners?

These questions are just as much alive for us today as they were in the time of the apostles. Join us as we explore how the church has wrestled with these problems in the past and how we can engage with them today.

David, do you feel like we should have some prayer before we have you jump in? Always.

Would you like to have you have quite a big project here, a big job in this talk, but a very pertinent talk.

Many of these, I find, as we've gone through this series, you know what the church was wrestling with 2000 years ago or 1500 years ago, 1000 years ago, in so many ways is the same wrestling of today. And so I'm excited for you to have this talk this morning, David. Let's just bow our heads for prayer.

Father, we thank you for this opportunity to be up and about here this morning. We thank you for strength and health. And Father, I pray a special blessing on David. As you mentioned, he woke up this morning not feeling top notch. And so Father, I pray that you would just strengthen his body and that you would ward off any bugs there. And Father, we pray too that you would give his mind clarity as he brings this talk. No doubt, this talk is so important. It was then and also for us today. And so Lord, fill him with wisdom and help him to share with conviction. And Father, also for us, for the listeners, for those of us who are just here, listening to this talk, Father, I pray that you would, our hearts would be soft and our spirits open to your Holy Spirit, that you would just guide us in this discussion, help us know how to apply this to our own lives and in our own churches today.

Father, most of all, we thank you that we can be your children. We thank you for reconciliation through your work, the new covenant through your blood. Father, we thank you for that, the giving of your life so that we can have life. We rejoice in that reality this morning that we are adopted into your family. And so Father, may that realization go with us today as we move about in our communities. And most of all, may we be a light for you today, be your voice, be those who bring life to those around us.

So go with us, we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Well, thank you for that. All right. God bless you, David. Thank you. Yeah, good morning, everyone. So I want to open up with just a few questions that are rhetorical questions. So what do you do when someone in your church who's baptized and committed just absolutely blows up their life, falls into sin, and things get difficult, or someone starts dividing the body with false teaching?

These kind of are sub-questions of the broader question is, is the church a sanctuary for the broken, or a term you might have heard, a hospital for sinners, or is it a fellowship for the faithful? Or somehow is it both?

A few more questions. What about if you realized someone who baptized you was actually a hypocrite their whole life and they've never been faithful? Does that mean your baptism is valid? What if a brother's spreading division online or gossiping? What if a longtime member's gossiping in addiction? And again, the overall question is, how do we deal with sin in the church?

And this question, I hope it all rings as very pertinent for us today. It's a question that it seems like all of our churches have to navigate and figure out a way to be faithful in. But these questions have also been a part of the church since the very beginning. I hope that a quick reading of the New Testament, and especially the epistles, will kind of disavow someone of the belief that everything was absolutely perfect and it was the 100% amazing, perfect church, and then everything's gone downhill since. Just even reading First and Second Corinthians should be enough to show that it's been a work in progress where God's people have been ministering to God's people.

And these questions have been alive throughout church history as well. This is part of our Sacred Roots series. And as such, I want to dive into two of the biggest moments where the church had to wrestle with these questions. And this was in the third and fourth century, so the 200s and the 300s. They've already dealt with Gnosticism, are still dealing with Gnosticism, this kind of false teaching and threats from outside of the church. But what about people that have the same doctrine but are wrestling with what to do with sin?

And so there's two controversies that are really important. The way this talk's going to work, I'm hoping, is to briefly go over these controversies and what's at stake, and then actually in a different pattern than sometimes I usually do, to really pivot sometime mid-talk and then just go to the scriptures to help give us a framework for how we can at least start to navigate some of these issues. But I think these controversies are helpful because these are real ways that the church has struggled with these issues in the past. So the first controversy is called the Novation controversy. This was named after a priest or elder named Novation.

And this happened during what is called the Decian persecution. It's one of the first very intense persecutions of the church. There've been persecutions going on, but this one starts to kick things up a bit. And so all of that to say, people were forced with the confrontation of, "Am I going to sacrifice to idols, or am I going to lose my livelihood, my property, my family, my life? Am I going to be tortured?" These really serious questions that believers are facing.

And in light of this, many people lapsed. Many people lapsed under the persecution, and they denied Christ or they sacrificed to idols. And it was a really difficult time for the church. But the persecution didn't last forever. And so once that persecution was over, there were a lot of Christians who had lapsed in the faith, who now that the persecution was over, wanted to return back to the church. And that was the issue at stake.

That put it this way, what do you do with someone, not just who has sinned or had this shortcoming or failing, but who has actually denied Christ himself and has decided, "Now I want to come back." And so Novation, here, I'll put the contenders here.

Novation believed that the church didn't actually have the authority to forgive certain of these sins. He's thinking about the passage where Jesus says, "If any man deny me before others, so will I deny him before the Father." And so for these grave sins, especially of apostasy, Novation believed that only God could forgive these sins, and the church actually didn't have the authority to. And so people who had done that wouldn't be allowed in the church. They could live a life of penance, they could live a life of repentance, they could pray and hope for God's mercy, but they weren't allowed back into the church in the course of their life.

And his opponents were wanting to let people back in with varying degrees of severity of penance that you have to show sorrow and show fruits of repentance for what you did. And some didn't even require that. And so there's this controversy stirring.

And so I'll get to some of these other contenders, but some of the main issues in this controversy was that of the authority of the church to forgive sins. Do we actually have that authority? What does Jesus say when he means what does Jesus mean when he says that if you forgive any man his sins, his sins are forgiven, and if you don't, they are not?

The other question, and this really flows through the early church, it even flows through some of the early Anabaptist communities in the Reformation, is this idea of rigor versus mercy. What do we do about the demands of the faith that seem so stringent and are so stringent? And what do we do when the scriptures are also calling for mercy? It seems like this impossible balance to walk, and often we find ourselves in one extreme or the other. And so it's interesting, Novation's followers actually started to go on and include other sins beyond just apostasy as things that the church not only shouldn't forgive, but actually couldn't forgive. This would include fornication, murder, adultery, idolatry.

And this poses a real problem when part of the church is saying, "We cannot let these people back in," and part of them are saying, "We can." And so, as you can imagine, there was a church split over this, and the unity of the faith was broken over this and this different understanding of how do we deal with sin in the church.

And notably, the church was still wrestling with this. They hadn't really dealt with things to this degree before. Because even before, there's a document, some of you might have heard, I won't go too into depth, but Shepherd of Hermas, it's an early Christian document, and you can see it wrestling with this. It's talking about post-baptismal sin, that if somebody sins once after baptism, they might be okay, but any more than once, you're actually not going to be admitted back in. You've crossed the line. And there's other documents pastorally that are suggesting the opposite. And so the church really hasn't dealt with this issue this intensely until now.

There's also another issue going on with this controversy. You can see that there's two other contenders going on. And again, this is all the historical section. We're going to get to the scriptural section too. So depending on where your interests lie, bear with me.

There's two more contenders. One of them are one group is called the confessors slash the laxists. And this one's interesting. So a confessor was somebody who was not killed for the faith, but who did suffer for the faith. Perhaps they were tortured. Perhaps they had lost significant property, holdings, status in society that they have genuinely suffered for the faith.

And so there were lots of confessors throughout this controversy who did suffer for the faith and came back to their communities. And because of this, some of them, not all of them, took it upon themselves to really become these charismatic individuals and saying that while some of these elders and bishops had escaped the persecution, we stayed strong in the midst of it. And so we actually have more authority than those bishops who kind of ran away and came back. So you can see this tension between formal leadership, people who are formally ordained to be shepherds over the flock, and charismatic leadership who have suffered for Christ and who now, because of that, have taken it upon themselves to carry out.

How do we deal with sin in the church? Well, me of all people should know because I've suffered for Christ. And interestingly enough, these confessors, at least one group of them, were very much on the laxist side of things. They wanted to admit people with little to no penance, fruits of repentance at all.

And so finally, we have a church figure you may or may not have heard of him. His name is Cyprian. He finds himself caught in the middle. He is trying to simultaneously hold off against the Novationists and say, "No, there is room in the church for forgiveness." But he's also trying to hold off on the other extreme to say, "Forgiveness isn't just a cheap word that you pronounce over somebody. It's something very deep and spiritually meaningful." And forgiveness, at least in the church's standpoint, requires repentance. To come back into the church, there has to be some notion of fruits of repentance and acknowledgment that what you've done was wrong and willingness to take those consequences.

And so Cyprian himself is caught in the middle.

And so he finds himself walking this tension. Eventually, the church goes along with Cyprian's position. He's articulating these arguments left and right. He's very insistent against the confessors and laxists, not only that people need to be penitent to come back into the church, but that also authority shouldn't be in these charismatic individuals, but should be in the actual leadership, in the elders and in the bishops. And he saw that if this wasn't the case, the unity of the church would be threatened. And so that's kind of a prelude to what becomes a bigger controversy. This is the most well-known of these early controversies that deals with sin in the church and similar circumstances. This is the Donatist controversy named after a bishop, Donatus.

And so, again, the context of this is another persecution. This is the first empire-wide persecution, if I'm not mistaken. Feel free to check me on that. All of a sudden this morning, I'm making it. Yeah, feel free to check me on that. But it is the most severe persecution up till this point. It starts with the burning of churches and forcing church leaders to hand over scriptures to be burned. And so this is empire-wide that if you are a church leader, Roman officials would come pretty much knock at your door and say, "Hand over the holy scriptures, or there will be consequences." And those people that handed over the scriptures were known as traditores.

Traditores. And so you might imagine where that word evolves to. This is actually the root for our word for traitor. It literally means someone who hands over. And so those who handed over the scriptures were viewed as betraying the faith. Interestingly enough, this is also where we get our word for tradition, something that's handed over, handed down, passed down through generations. So all this goes back to traditore.

So we often think of the persecutions as heroic and the martyrs as just this norm and this crop of the greatest Christians ever to live. And indeed, these were some of the greatest Christians to ever live. But these martyrs were often lifted up because they were extraordinary, because people looked at them and said, "Wow, this is the way to be. These people are, I don't want to say above average. These people are extraordinary witnesses to the faith."

There were a lot of people who weren't. It was a messy situation. There were many Christians who had families and jobs and didn't know how to walk this. And maybe if I could just bend the rules a little here or there, or there were a lot of Christians who weren't sure what to do and how to react. And so there's only one record of a bishop in this time period who says he has the books but will not turn them over. And so this kind of heroic stance of faith, like, "Hey, I do have the books you're looking for, and I will not give them."

And he is persecuted. Some actually handed over heretical writings. So when the people came and knocked on their door, "Give us your scriptures," they actually found some of the heretical writings and they gave them over. And that was fine. One of them actually surrendered a medical textbook. And so he was hoping that the person couldn't read, and he actually got away with it. And so like, "Oh, yeah, here's the scriptures. It's just a medical textbook." And they went away. And so it's like, "Is this heroic? Is this wise? Is this practical? Is this deceptive?" And this is where the nitty-gritty pastoral implications of all this comes to play.

Some did, however, capitulate, and some even threw the gospel texts in the fire themselves. And so it was this very difficult time in the church's history. So again, when the persecutions stop, the question arises, "What do we do with those who are returning?"

And interestingly enough, this took on a new twist with this controversy that there was a bishop after this that was ordained. His name was Caecilion. You don't need to know his name. But this bishop was ordained by someone who people thought was one of these traditores, someone who handed over the scriptures and betrayed the faith. And so the question arises, "Was this ordination valid?"

If he was ordained by an apostate, is he actually a bishop? Is he actually an elder? Is this ordination valid? And the Donatists, again, named after this bishop named Donatus, said that this ordination was actually invalid because the bishop administering the sacrament was compromised.

Excuse me. And so this begs the question about sacramental theology. And you don't have to consider yourself, quote, a sacramentalist to have this really hit home. Think about baptism. What if the person who baptized you 15 years ago was later found out to be a prolific sexual abuser his whole life, a hypocrite? He never believed in the faith.

Does that mean your baptism is invalid? What about the people that you baptized? Are their baptisms valid? And so you can see quickly how this controversy has a lot at stake. Do the sacraments or the ordinances that we carry out as the church, are they dependent on the purity and the holiness of the minister doing them, or are they dependent on something else?

So that's one of the issues at stake. The next issue at stake is the nature of the church. Is it pure or is it mixed? Is the church for those who are holy set apart and righteous, or can it include sinners as well? And if so, to what degree? And if the church becomes compromised, should the pure split away? Is that the faithful thing to do or the unfaithful thing to do?

Whoops. Okay. And so the contenders here, primarily Donatus, and then later, about a century later, Augustine, and he's going to be writing against a guy named Cyprian in his own day, but the only guy you would need to remember and not even is Donatus. And so these are the contenders. And so about a hundred years later, there's been this church split. And so every city you go to, especially North Africa, you walk down the street and there's two churches in every city, the Donatist church and the non-Donatist church. And that's pretty much it. You might have a few Gnostic groups here or there, but as far as emblems and visible examples of the faith, believing in the triune God and all of the doctrines that we believe in, you have two churches literally in every city.

And so it's this massive fissure in the faith. And so Augustine comes to bat later and he starts to commit his pin to the controversy. And he contributes three things to the conversation. And again, in all of this, take it or leave it, I'm hoping you see that there's nuance. And you can see the reason that people on both sides of this issue are saying what they are. And so to begin with, Augustine's thinking about sacramental theology. And he's thinking about this at two levels.

First, at a pastoral level, in a very practical level, he's saying, "We're never actually going to know which clergy, which pastors, which elders are pure and which ones are not." Obviously, if they commit some egregious sin, then we can know. But what about the people who carry their sins with them to the grave, who are never penitent, who only God can search out? Jesus says that the deeds done in secret will be manifest on that last day. And so this poses a pastoral problem is we actually don't know who is genuinely pure and who is not. We can have these ideas, but only God knows these things. And then the other problem is, as soon as you point to some guy on the, quote, family tree and say, "That guy was impure, therefore all of these people's baptisms are invalid," and the people that baptized them are in like, and it breaks out into this massive, complicated hornet's nest of a situation.

And so that's the pastoral problem. But there's a theological problem too. And it's who is actually doing the work of the sacrament. When we are baptized, is it, let's see, is, well, how to put it? Is it the minister doing that work? And depending on whatever theology you have around baptism, for those who it's like this, actually, I'll put it this way. Just say, "Is it the minister doing the work?" And Augustine's actually going to say no. And all of these people are operating within a sacramental framework where baptism is actually cleansing you, is actually purifying you, and there's this grace from above. And he's going to say, "It's not the person, the man who's doing that.

That's God." And so at the extreme cases, we can accept these sacraments, even if they were performed by men who were corrupt or impure, because it's not them doing it. It's actually God who is doing it. God is the one who works these mysteries, is what that term means. So that's his contribution to sacraments. As far as ecclesiology, he's going to say that the church is visible and invisible, that the invisible church is pure, but the visible church is mixed. And he's actually going to take Jesus's parable about the wheat, excuse me, the wheat and the tares, and apply that not to the world, as probably many of us would, but to the church itself and say, "There are going to be wheat and tares in the church."

And the radical step is that it's not actually our job to separate them. In fact, attempting to separate the two is folly on the church's part, because then you're trying to separate the sheep and the goats, which only Christ can do. And so Augustine's going to say the church is always going to be this heavily mixed visible entity. It's like Noah's Ark. There's clean animals and there's unclean animals. It's just this giant mixture.

And in light of that, he's going to say that schism in the church is a worse sin than even apostasy. So the Donatists might be right to be concerned about these sins of apostasy, but what they're doing in Augustine's eyes is way worse.

And so you can see the stakes are high. And I'm hoping you can see that there are at least intuitive points on both sides and points where each side might be going a bit far or might not be applying things in the most healthy way.

And so these two controversies really set the stage for what we do with sin in the church. Notably, on a more historical side, these two controversies are massively influential in establishing the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Without North African Christianity, there would not be a medieval Roman Catholic Church in the same way that it was. Almost every facet of the Roman Catholic Church was really pressed out here between Cyprian, Augustine, and earlier Tertullian. So that's on the historical side for everyone who wants to go geek out with me. I don't know, others.

But on a more practical note, where does this leave all of us? And how does this open up broader conversation? And so, whoops, I want to zoom out and kind of pivot from these historical episodes as kind of an entry point to just a quick overview of the principles of how we're relating to some of these issues today and going back to the apostolic writings and the scriptures.

And so one thing that's helpful in dealing with all of this is that by this time, by the Novatianists and the Donatists, much of the church was practicing child baptism, and much of it was actually practicing infant baptism. And that's actually a really big deal because that means that everyone who has been baptized as an infant, as a one-year-old, a five-year-old, a seven-year-old, is part of the church. And by the time they grow up and be adults, you can see that some will be more interested in following Christ and some won't be. And so the fact that I would say probably the majority of us here on this call believe in adult baptism, that might be a step far.

That's my assumption. Correct me if I'm wrong. That changes things.

Very briefly, we are saying in that statement that the church is an assembly for the saints. We can clarify what that means later, but it is a gathering of those men and women who have committed themselves to Christ consciously, knowingly, and after bearing fruits of repentance. Repent, believe, and be baptized. And so in and of itself, that actually helps at least somewhat with this argument that we're at least starting off with a picture of the church as an assembly of the saints. And notably, saints, holy ones, simply means those who are called out, those who have stepped into baptism, those who are called out of the world.

Okay, so that's where our starting point is. And that would have changed the conversation 1,500 years ago. So we're starting at the point of an assembly of the saints. So just as a reference point, 1 Corinthians 1:2, Paul says to the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people.

So that being said, what happens when sin does occur among baptized believers? Is it an assembly of the saints and a hospital for sinners? Is hospital for sinners a bad term? This was notably coined by Augustine himself. What should we do with all of this?

And the answer proposed is it depends on what you mean when you're using these terms. As always, when you're getting into a conversation, especially one that's going to involve doctrine, going to involve theology, this is just a life tip from seeing things play out in a historical point in my studies and also personally in my personal life. Define your terms upfront. What do you actually mean when you're using these words and these phrases? So there's some stereotypes for each of these positions. One is that the assembly of the saints is a place where no sin is ever tolerated. It is an assembly of the perfect, the perfectly holy, the perfectly pure, and there is not a speck or mite or anything of sin to be found.

That's going to be a character. The other extreme is the hospital for sinners that anyone can do as they please. We're all just sinners. Who is anyone to judge? It's just a place where there's communion, and we hope that some of the seed grows up as wheat instead of tares, and the minister's just going to scatter seed and see what happens. And again, those are two extremes that we're probably not going to want to be at. And I'm hoping that I'm not presuming by saying that.

The answer, as you can expect, is somewhere more nuanced, somewhere at least in between the two. And I want to give a few passages, sorry, to show both of these pictures. So regarding the assembly of the saints, oh, hello, Paul talks about, as he's writing, he writes that so that Christ might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish. So that's actually looking like the very first thing I said, and I said as a character, that's actually the goal. So what do we do with that?

This next passage, 2 Corinthians 6:14 through 18, it's longer, so I don't have it written there. It's a passage I think we're all familiar with. It's the, "Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers." And you can imagine this in a Donatist or a Novatian's mind. This is playing in their mind. "Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? What portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?" And goes on and on. "I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore, go out from their midst and be separate from them," says the Lord, "and touch no unclean thing.

Then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters." And so it seems like God's being a father to us and welcoming us is predicated on us not touching the unclean thing and coming out from among them.

Whoops. In 1 Peter 1:15 through 16, the apostle writes, "Be as he who is holy. You also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, 'Be holy, for I am holy.'" Hebrews 12:14, "Pursue peace with all and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord." Isaiah, "When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves." And then finally, Ezekiel 8 through 10, where we see that because of the idolatry in the temple, God's glory does depart from the temple. So you take these passages in lump sum, and wow, God really does care about sin. He does really care about holiness and purity.

And as such, we should care about that. What does that mean? We can figure that out, hopefully some in this talk, hopefully throughout our lives and our churches. But at the very minimum, we should at least care about these things and that it is an assembly of the saints.

Now for some passages that others on the other side of the equation might pull from. 1 John 1:8, "If we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us." And so people are going to point at, let's say, our caricature Donatist and say, "You guys say you're perfect and pure and holy, and that shows us that you are actually not." John tells us so.

If we say we have no sin, we are lying and do not practice the truth. Mark 2:17, "Jesus' words himself, 'It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.'" And so again, the rejoinder would be, "Okay, you guys say you are healthy. Apparently, you guys no longer need Jesus. You're good to go."

We, over here on this hospital for sinners side, we're saying that we still do need Jesus. We still call upon him. We are still unhealthy.

And similarly to this health imagery, James 5:16, "Therefore, confess your sins to another." This is happening within the church. "Confess your sins one to another and pray for one another that you might be healed." Finally, Galatians 6:1 through 2, "Brothers, even if a person is caught in any wrongdoing," Greek is the same as trespass, "you who are spiritual are to restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness. Bear one another's burdens and thereby fulfill the law of Christ."

So, sorry, my—there we go.

It seems like the answer is somewhere in between these two. And so I want to briefly dive into this. But before I do, I want to focus on three terms that are thrown around a lot in these conversations about the nature of the church. And that's purity, holiness, and righteousness.

Because these are very important terms. And I want to throw a few passages in that you might not have as your knee-jerk passages about these phrases or about these terms, but I think are very important. So purity. What is purity, first of all? It's unmixedness. Pure gold would be gold without alloy. It would be 100% pure. And this is the purity that Jesus says, "Without which no one will see the Lord."

1 Peter 1:22 says, "Since you have purified your souls." So he's talking about purity. "Since you've purified your souls in obedience to the truth for or unto a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart."

And so at least Peter right here is tying purity to a love of the brethren. "You have purified your souls in obedience to the truth unto a sincere love of the brethren." There's three things going on. Purity by obedience to the truth that Jesus gives us unto the sincere love of the brethren.

So that's noteworthy. Regarding holiness, and I'm going to tie these ideas up, but regarding holiness, 1 Thessalonians 3:12 through 13, "And may the Lord cause you to increase in overflow in love for one another and for all people, just as we also do for you, so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints." So here you have something similar. "May the Lord cause you to increase and overflow in love for one another." Why? "So that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness." So if you want to be blameless in holiness, it's going to involve an increase in overflow in love, once again, one for another.

And then finally, righteousness.

Jesus says that we need a righteousness that exceeds that of the Pharisees. What does that mean? And I'm going to make the claim that it doesn't mean that they get up at 5:00 in the morning to pray, so we should get up at 4:00 in the morning to pray, and we should just do more things than them. It's that we need a different type of righteousness, categorically different. They're doing righteousness this way. Jesus wants a completely different type of righteousness. Notably, Paul says that Christ himself is our righteousness. It's a very different proposition.

Romans 13:8 through 10, talking about righteousness and fulfilling the law, "Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law." Why do I bring this up? People often take these ideas of purity, holiness, and righteousness and treat them as these independent things that float around over here, and then other things like love of the brethren and a care for the church, and you got a genuine love for people and put them over here.

And they think, and they're trying to do the calculus in your head, okay, how can I have love and also holiness, purity, and righteousness? What am I going to do with these? And the scriptures, at least in reading these verses, seems to want to collapse that dichotomy and say purity, holiness, and righteousness inherently and explicitly involve love, and again, specifically love of the brethren. And so I'm sure you have met people in your lives who are kind of like this scary, even scarier than Moses figure, like almost throwing lightning down and kind of this distant look in their eyes, and they're so consumed with a zeal for holiness, and yet they have forgotten the people in front of them, and it becomes this detached holiness.

And this is what the scriptures are saying that we shouldn't do. And notably, I say scarier than Moses because Moses himself was concerned with his own people and said, "Let blot me out if you're going to blot these people out." And so even he's tying this with a love of the people. And so we should keep this in mind when we're thinking about a pure church and a holy church and a righteous church, that this is inherently tied to love of the brethren. And takeaways and caveats, all this stuff is centered around love. And this should make sense because our God, who is pure, holy, and righteous, describes himself as love.

That being said, he's also described as a consuming fire. And so just a caveat, my focus here isn't to say that we should all be sentimental, flimsy, sappy, fluffy, saccharin, people-pleasing, permissive, whatever words you would have, that that's not what love is. I do think with all my heart that purity, holiness, and righteousness are inherently tied to love, but I also think that our notions of love do need to be purified and reoriented to God's truth. But it is helpful to anchor ourselves in the idea of love of the brethren when moving into a conversation about sin and purity of the church because that's the goal of what we are doing. 1 Timothy 1:5 says, "The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith."

So just a few, here's some more passages if you guys want to read them. A few passages just to briefly look at excommunication. We're running a bit low on time, so I'm going to go through this more quickly, but there's— Take the time you need, David. Okay, cool. Right? Please do. Cool. Yes.

So in looking about sin in the church and really trying to dive into this, I perused a lot of the New Testament, and I'm not saying I found every passage about definitely church discipline, but it seems like I hopefully included a lot of the passages, especially about excommunication.

And so I want to dive into these. The first one, probably the most famous, is 1 Corinthians 5:1 through 5. And this should be pretty familiar. It's actually reported to you that there's sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that not even pagans tolerate. A man is sleeping with his father's wife, and you are proud. Shouldn't you have gone in the morning and have put out of your fellowship this man? So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of the Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

There's a few takeaways here. This is talking about excommunication regarding a public, egregious, even by the world standard, and ongoing sin. And not only that, but the church was in this posture of arrogance or pride. So hold that thought when we get to some takeaways.

Another passage, 1 Timothy 1:19 through 20. Among those who have rejected faith and a good conscience are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.

Romans 16:17. I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught. Avoid them. So that one doesn't explicitly deal with excommunication. But the next one does. Titus 3, wait, sorry. There you go. Titus 3:10 through 11. As for a person who stirs up a division after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful. He is self-condemned.

And then finally, Matthew 18:15 through 17, which I think we're all familiar with this passage of going to your brother who has sinned, going to him with one or two other brothers, bringing it to the church. That is a topic in and of itself, so I'm not going to dive specifically into that one.

But, excuse me, here we have a list of passages talking about when excommunication is warranted. Before I get to takeaways, I want to give a few about when it is not warranted. So sin in the church, here's some other passages.

Whoops. Oh, I don't have the passages typed up, so I'm going to have to look these up. 2 Thessalonians, oh no, I do, sorry. 2 Thessalonians 3:6 through 15. It says, "In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers and sisters, to keep away from every believer who is idle and disruptive and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. We hear that some among you are idle and disruptive. They are not busy. They are busy bodies. Such people, we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the food they eat. As for you, brothers and sisters, never tire of doing what is good.

Take special note of anyone who does not obey our instruction in this letter. Do not associate with them in order that they may feel ashamed, yet do not regard them as an enemy, but warn them as you would a fellow believer."

So that's interesting. We have people that are disruptive, that are idle, and the word disruptive is the Greek is disordered. So people who are just walking poorly, they're not doing a good job of living the Christian life. They're walking in a disordered way. They might not be working for the food they're getting. They're just, yeah, living disordered.

And Paul isn't saying, "That's A-okay. You know, go hang out with them. You know, be friends, hang out, you know, spit the breeze, all that stuff." He's saying, "Don't associate with them. They should feel a bit of shame in this. They should be encouraged to live in a different way." So when you're with them, we're not just hanging out with them. You're exhorting them to a greater way of life. Yet, don't regard them as an enemy, but warn them as you would a fellow brother or fellow believer.

Colossians 3:5 through 8, this is Paul writing to the church and encouraging them to put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatries.

Excuse me, idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. Now you must rid yourself of all such things: anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language. And so he's writing to the Colossians, telling them that they are still needing to put to death these things, and like this ongoing process where the old man kind of pops in and you keep putting this to death as you're more and more sanctified.

And then similarly, those restoration passages that we just read, where if someone sins or is caught in transgression, restore them gently, ye who are spiritual. Confess your sins one to another that you might be healed. And so there's passages where sin isn't met with straight-up excommunication. And so, oh, sorry. Finally, one more verse. There's actually one mention of an abuse of excommunication as a tool in the scriptures.

How many of you have read 3 John recently? Yeah, same. It's not generally on my reading list. It kind of slips through the cracks sometimes. But in 3 John 9 through 10, John writes, "I wrote to the church, but Diotrophes, who loves to be first, will not welcome us. So when I come, I will call attention to what he's doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us. Not satisfied with that, he even refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church."

So we have this church leader, Diotrophes, and there's a few problems with this guy. He wants to be first, and he's not welcoming believers outside of his closed network. And people that do welcome believers, other Christians, he's actually throwing them out of the church. And so kind of this picture of this church leader, really not dealing well with things outside of his direct control, where he has his hand directly in the pot, and he is not first in the supreme call, and he starts excommunicating people. And so John is saying, "This is a really bad deal." And so there's ways to abuse this process of excommunication. So with all of these passages, sorry, what are the principles?