Christ has established the church as a primary context in which the discipleship of His people takes place. Local congregations are responsible to cultivate the growth of their members. This involves correction if they go astray. In this session, Tom Ascol will explain how corrective discipline is an important way God’s people show love and encourage each other to grow in grace.
Well, open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 5. 1 Corinthians chapter 5. Being a Christian is a community project. It is something that takes a church. In order for a disciple to grow into maturity, a church is required to be involved in that disciple's life.
And that's by God's design. Because God never designed for followers of His Son, the Lord Jesus, to try to work out their salvation and fear and trembling on their own. He intends for us to do it together. Christians relate to one another as brothers and sisters. And those family bonds that we have together in Christ draw strength through the fellowship of local congregations.
There are essential duties to be performed as well as wonderful privileges to be received that can only be engaged through the fellowship that you find in a healthy church. This is why I often say that the most important thing you can do for Your spiritual welfare and the spiritual welfare of your family is to find a healthy church and build your life around it. Sink your life into it. That means more than just showing up periodically, but it involves being willing to know the members of that church and to let yourself be known by them. Apart from that, your discipleship, your growth in grace, and your knowledge of Christ will inevitably be stunted in various ways.
That's true because there are divine commandments that you cannot obey apart from being submitted to Christ in a local church and there are God-ordained blessings that you cannot receive outside being a faithful member of a faithful church. And there are many such duties and blessings. We're not going to try to enumerate them all this morning. I want to focus only on one of them. I want to call your attention to the duties and blessings of church discipline and hopefully to show from 1st Corinthians chapter 5 how corrective church discipline is an aid to Christian discipleship.
Commitment to a particular church is essential because Christians need one another if we're going to follow Christ faithfully. And we need one another more than just an hour and a half a week. We need to be involved in each other's lives. So submission to Christ in a church involves covenanting together with other disciples of the Lord Jesus to live for Him, to grow together as a family of faith. We need the church as disciples because we need each other.
You know, the local church is not an afterthought in the mind of God. He designed it to be the body of Christ on earth. The church, as we heard last night, is called by God to make and to mature disciples of the Lord Jesus. And as the church does that, it becomes a testimony to God's character and glory. And it does this by putting the gospel on display through the lives and testimonies of its members.
The gospel, that good news of what God has done for sinners in Christ, how He sent His Son into the world to rescue people like you and me. That gospel teaches us that God is both holy and loving. In His holiness, He opposes everything that is unrighteous, everything that is unholy, including the particular sinfulness of His own people. In love, He is full of compassion for sinners. He is willing to rescue sinners from the bondage and the ravages of sin.
And in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, we see both the holiness and love of God displayed. In order to save us from our sins, God doesn't wink at our sins. God doesn't overlook our sins. Rather, He deals with them decisively and justly because were He to do anything less, it would undermine the very nature of who He is as the Holy, Holy, Holy God. We see the holiness of God in the life of Jesus, His complete obedience to the commandments of God.
He kept the whole law for His people. He fulfilled righteousness for us. The righteous requirements that God makes of us that we simply cannot deliver because of our sin. And then having fulfilled righteousness in his life, he voluntarily laid down his life on the cross in order to atone for the sins of his people. He took the just holy penalty of judgment against our sins.
So if you want to see how holy God is, look at the cross of Jesus Christ because God did not spare his own son When his son took upon himself the sins of humanity. You want to understand what God thinks about sin? Look at the cross. If there were ever one person in all of the world that God would spare, it would be the Son of His love. And yet when the Son of His love stepped into the place of sinners, God did not spare even him.
He did this because he will not deny himself. He cannot compromise his holiness. We see that in Jesus, but we also see in Jesus the love of God displayed through this good news of salvation. Jesus' whole life was a rescue mission. It was a rescue mission that was born in the heart and mind of God who is love.
God loved us and gave us his Son. He has great compassion on sinners, people like you and me. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather he delights in showing mercy to those who deserve his judgment and he loves sinners. He so loves sinners that he gave his only begotten son to come into the world to save us. So our holy and loving God in a holy and righteous way, loving way, through the life and death and resurrection of his Son the Lord Jesus saves sinners.
He saves us. He makes us to be disciples of Jesus so that we also will grow in holiness and love. What this means then is that a church, body of believers, disciples of the Lord Jesus, a church is comprised of people who are committed to following Jesus and becoming increasingly like Jesus. Increasingly becoming holy, becoming increasingly loving. For a church to fulfill this calling, to reflect the holy, loving character of God, requires the individual members to grow in holiness and love, and to encourage one another collectively to do this.
And in order for this to be done well, a church must be willing to obey its master, its head, our Lord, and to carry out careful, faithful discipline within its membership. That's what 1st Corinthians chapter 5 is all about. In this chapter Paul takes up the problem of sin in the church and the failure of the congregation to deal with sin properly. So follow along as I read from 1st Corinthians chapter 5. I'm going to read all 13 verses of it, and you look in your copy of God's Word as I read from the New King James Version.
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles, that a man has his father's wife, and you're puffed up and have not rather mourned that he who has done this deed might be taken away from you among you. For indeed, as I indeed as absent in the body but present in spirit, have already judged, as though I were present, him who has so done this deed. 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. 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 the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I write 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. 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 what have I to do with judging those who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside?
But those who are outside, God judges. Therefore put away from yourselves the evil person. Christian disciples grow through the loving accountability of a local church. To grow into a healthy disciple of Jesus, you must unite yourself together with other believers who are similarly committed. You must be willing to live together with those who love you enough to point out to you where you are walking waywardly.
Who love you enough to come beside you, put their arm around you when they see you going down a wrong path in order to correct you. This exercise of accountability is known as church discipline. And like many churches, yours I trust, our church has a covenant, a church covenant, that we use to help hold one another accountable. It's something that everyone who joins the church agrees to as a summary of good things that the Bible teaches us regarding how we ought to live together. In our church covenant, we pledge to engage by the aid of the Holy Spirit to walk together in Christian love, to strive for the advancement of this church in knowledge, holiness, and comfort, and to watch over one another in brotherly love.
In other words, we commit to live together lives of holiness and promise to hold each other accountable and to encourage each other to fulfill that commitment. This is the way a church is supposed to function and whenever a church strives to live this way it is in fact helping individual members to grow spiritually and it's collectively growing in reflecting the glory of God to the world. But where a church fails to live this way or falters in pursuing this kind of life together, it becomes unhealthy. And it hinders the discipleship of its members. And it distorts the glory of God to a watching world.
That's exactly what had happened in the church at Corinth. They had failed to exercise loving, corrective discipline within their membership. One of their members got involved in open sexual immorality, and rather than hold him accountable and correct him, the rest of the church turned a blind eye to it. And there's some indication that they rather took pride in the fact that they were so loving and non-judgmental in this. They did not correct him and as a result they actually failed to love this person.
They failed to encourage holiness in the whole body and they failed to obey their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In fact, they were actually undermining the discipleship of all of the members of that church. So Paul corrects them and he gives them very plain instructions about what steps they must take in order to rectify the sinful situation. In short, he commands them to carry out the final step of corrective discipline on this member who was determined to go on living in open, blatant sin. The way that they are to do this is by excommunicating this member, removing him from the membership of the church.
Now, There are many lessons in 1 Corinthians 5 about the nature of the church and specifically the relationship of the church to the world. We're not going to address all of those. I want to focus only on the main point of the responsibility that Christians have to hold each other accountable in the church, and to live up to the devotion and loyalty that we have pledged to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as His disciples. Paul calls this church to practice loving discipline, and in doing so, he teaches us two key lessons about how church discipline aids Christian discipleship. The first lesson is this, a church practices corrective discipline for the welfare of its members who fall into sin.
It is possible for professing Christians to fall into scandalous sin. I mean surely if you've lived Larry Long in the church then you've seen this, you know this, but even if you haven't there's so many examples in the Bible that we should not be naive about this at all. King David, man after God's own heart who gave himself over to adultery and to murder and lived that way until the prophet of God came and rebuked him. Judas who proved to be a false convert but nevertheless was three years with the Lord Jesus Christ preaching, teaching, doing everything the other disciples were, walked away from Christ. Demas who was once a faithful companion of the Apostle Paul, served well with him, betrayed Paul.
He forsook Paul, having fallen in love with the world. There are many warnings. We just heard in Scott's sermon from Colossians 3 warnings about various sins that we must give ourselves into scandalous sins have you ever read the Jerusalem Council letter and just marveled at what it is that the Jerusalem Council sends out to the Gentile Christians about how they are to conduct themselves. They want to make sure that they communicate you don't have to become a Jew to become a Christian, but then they say Here are the things that we think you must abstain from. Things offered to idols, blood, things strangled that would have all been offensive to their Jewish believing friends, and from sexual immorality.
If you keep yourself from these things, you'll do well. Do you really have to tell Christians to keep yourself from sexual immorality? Well, of course you do, because Christians are not immune to the temptation to fall into sexual immorality. In Ephesians 4 and 5, we see similar admonitions to quit lying, quit stealing, have nothing to do with sexual immorality. In 1 Corinthians 6 we are given warnings about being involved with prostitutes and all kinds of other sexual immorality.
It would be unwise, brothers and sisters, for us to just pretend that somehow because we're Christians that we're not prone to falling into even the most flagrant kind of wickedness. We need help to stay on the right path. We need help from brothers and sisters who love us enough they're willing to correct us when they see us going astray. No Christian is immune to such temptations. No church is immune.
Therefore every church needs to be clear in our responsibility before God regarding how to respond to sin in our membership and how to respond when sin begins to be tolerated and even promoted by members of the church. When such a sad situation arises in a congregation, the members of the church must not sit idly by and do nothing. That's what happened at Corinth. And if you'll notice in this fifth chapter of 1st Corinthians, Paul is actually talking about two problems in the church. The first is the most prominent that we normally think of in this chapter.
A man was having sex with his father's wife. Scandalous. Most likely his own stepmother. He was a member of the church. She was not a member of the church or else Paul would have dealt with her the same way that he dealt with him.
And at the end of this chapter, he indicates the distinction between insiders and outsiders. That's a massive problem. But the second problem is that the church was letting it go on unaddressed. They were doing nothing. They're tolerating it.
It's scandalous that a professing Christian would give himself over to this type of blatant immorality such that it is not even named among the Gentiles. He's breaking the seventh commandment. He's breaking the first commandment, the tenth commandment, the fifth commandment. But notice how Paul addresses the problem of this sinful church member. He doesn't deal primarily with the man.
He does specifically tell the church what to do with the man, but he spends most of his time dealing with the church. The member needs to be corrected, but so does the church. Why? Because when sin in the church is not corrected, it's sin. And it needs to be rebuked.
Unrepentant sinners must be removed from the membership of a local church for their own good. So Paul mentions no words. This man needs to be excommunicated. Verse 5 and also verse 13. There's no uncertainty in what Paul means here.
The communion of the saints, the fellowship of believers in the church is to be withdrawn from this man. He is given up the privilege, the right to be named as a brother among the church of Jesus. And he's to be excommunicated for his own spiritual welfare. You see that in verse 5? Do this, that His Spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
The goal of this step is that this man might come to feel the weight of his sin in such a way that he'll be convicted to repent of sin. Paul says he's to be delivered over to Satan. What does that mean? It means that he now will have the privileges and promises given to the church removed from him. Taken from the domain of Christ which is in the church and delivered over to the domain of the devil's rule in the world.
This is precisely what the Lord Jesus teaches us about how we are to care for one another in the church. Jesus spells this out in Matthew chapter 18 verses 15 through 18, and he gives us specific steps to be followed when the case is not so flagrant and so far gone. In that passage he says, moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. Praise God. If he hears you, you've won your brother and you rejoice in that.
And that's where most corrective discipline in a well-ordered church will end. With brothers and sisters caring enough for one another, watching over one another, you see your brother in sin, you go put your arm around him, you say, brother, what you're doing here is not good. And you convince him, he sees it, he repents, it's over. You don't have to have an announcement about that nobody needs to know about that but through corrective discipline accountability this brother's discipleship is help but if he doesn't hear you Jesus tells us what to do You take one or two with you and you go so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. If he hears you, it's over.
Small group of people know about it, that's all. But it's over and you praise God because you have seen your brother restored to a path of growth in discipleship but if he refuses to hear that small group Jesus says then you tell it to the church church goes after him if the church is able to convince him praise God church rejoices that a brother walking waveredly has responded to the call of Christ through the body and is restored. Jesus says, but if he refuses to hear even the church, can you imagine that? Well then let him be to you as a heathen and a tax collector." The situation in Corinth was so public and scandalous that the church was called upon to go immediately to this last step, Let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector. Deliver this one over to Satan.
Now that doesn't mean when a church does this that the church has the power to withdraw salvation from any member who sins. When we take this step as a church and remove membership, we remove someone from our membership, we're not saying you're no longer saved. We can't say that authoritatively. But you know what we can say? Is we can no longer affirm your discipleship.
You don't have any biblical reason to hope that you're saved. And our hope and prayer is that through removing you as Christ tells us to do, that you'll come to your senses and repent and your spirit will be saved in the day of Christ. There's to be a clear line of distinction between the church and the world. God's always been concerned about this, that we distinguish between those who are His people and those who are not. Before Adam and Eve sinned, they were in the garden in fellowship with God.
After they sinned, they were put out of the garden. Noah and his family were saved by being inside the ark of salvation. And everyone else perished as outsiders, not in the ark. Faithful Israelites were those who were welcomed inside the camp. Unfaithful ones, those who didn't know God, were put outside.
This distinction between insiders and outsiders continues through the establishment of the New Testament Church, which is why we must never take church membership lightly. When a brother or sister is received into membership, The church is saying, we declare to one another, to you, to the whole world, that you are a disciple of Jesus Christ with us, and that you with us are following Christ together. And if a member, somebody of whom we have made that declaration, decides that he would rather go on living in sin than to renounce sin for the sake of Christ, then the church has the obligation to withdraw its declaration through the serious step of excommunication. That didn't mean we shun the person. It doesn't mean that we pretend they don't exist.
We don't allow them to come sit under the teaching of God's Word. We want them to be under the teaching of God's Word. What it does mean is we no longer relate to them as Christians. We don't call them brother, sister. As verse 11 explains, we do not 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 eating with such a person.
We don't pretend to have fellowship with such a person. Why? Because these people have chosen their sin over Jesus. And our love for Jesus and for their souls will not allow us to just turn a blind eye to it and to pretend like it's no significant matter. When a church member falls into sin the other members must not sit idly by.
They must attempt to restore him, to help him. If he refuses, then the church must do what Jesus and Paul tell us to do, to excommunicate him for his own spiritual good. But before leaving this point about the welfare of the individual in sin let me just point out how the church is to do this such a person is to be ex communicated with broken-hearted humility that's why I can't stand it when people talk about church discipline about oh you kick people out of the church, as if we're talking about a softball team or a rotary club. No, it's brokenheartedness that leads us to this. There should be sorrow.
You see it in verse 2. Paul says you should have mourned And by their refusal to mourn and their tolerance they're actually guilty of pride. Had they seen it clearly and appropriately and responded the way they should have in grief and sorrow it would have led them to remove this man sooner and Paul wouldn't have had to admonish him to do it. He would have been, as Paul says in verse 2, taken away from among you. There should be sorrow.
There must also be sober judgment. This judgment is our responsibility And nobody likes to be judgy today. But did you see in verse 12? Do you not judge those who are inside? Of course, it's our job to do this.
Such judgment is to be exercised in the name and power of Jesus. Verse four. See how Paul stacks up the seriousness here? In the name of our Lord Jesus when you're gathered together along with my spirit with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ that's how it's to be done and then also in verse five it's to be done with real hope. Why?
So that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. You see, a church does this not to be mean, not to get rid of problems. The church does this in order to see the salvation of the soul of the one who has fallen into sin and refuses to repent. Discipline is never pleasant in whatever sphere of life it's administered, but the hope always for a proper administration of discipline is that there will be good fruit as a result. Hebrews 12 says this in verse 11, no discipline seems to be joyful for the present but painful nevertheless afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
We see this in children who've been well disciplined. They're happier, they're poised for success, they're respectful. Much good comes from discipline properly administered to children. And the hope when we exercise corrective church discipline is that good fruit will come from it. We pray that the disciplined person will come to his senses, will repent, and be restored into the fellowship of the church with renewed devotion to Christ.
That's what happened in Corinth in 2 Corinthians 2 where Paul writes about a man who had been removed from the church but then seeks to be restored and he tells the church to restore such a one. There are some commentators that think that 2 Corinthians 2 is referring to the same man, 1 Corinthians 5. I'm not fully convinced in my own mind of that, but it well could be. But it was a man who was removed from the church. And so we read in verse 6 of 2 Corinthians 2, the punishment which was inflicted by the majority is sufficient for such a man so that on the contrary you ought rather to forgive and comfort him lest perhaps such a one be swallowed up with too much sorrow therefore I urge you to reaffirm your love for him." This wayward church member repented.
His spirit was saved. He turned from his sin. Which is what disciples of Jesus do. It's a normal way of living for a disciple of Jesus Christ to be turning from sin and trusting Christ. We call each other believers, but we're also repenters.
We live in repentance just as we live in faith. This idea of church Discipline, excommunication can sound strange and harsh to our ears today. And it does so, I'm afraid, because it's certainly not the way that the world thinks churches are to be. It's not the way the world thinks God ought to be. But Paul tells the church it is the way the disciples of Christ are to be and it's love.
Doesn't sound loving but we just heard that the world's given us all kind of crazy ideas about love but true love rejoices with truth. True love cares for souls in the light of all reality, including eternal reality. For so many people, love is refusing to do anything that makes me feel uncomfortable. If you love me then you'll let me have my way. If you love me you'll affirm me no matter what my decisions.
But that's far from the biblical idea of love. It's certainly not the way that God loves and God is love. Proverbs 13 24 says, He who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly. Children, do your parents discipline you? Oh, if they do, you ought to thank God because He gave you parents who loved you.
They love you too much to let you just go on on the wrong path. Proverbs 3 11 says, My son do not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor detest His correction. For whom the Lord loves, He corrects just as a father the son in whom He delights." Well carrying out corrective discipline is the most loving thing that we can do to a church member who falls into sin and refuses to repent. This is God's prescribed means for the welfare of his people and therefore when a church practices corrective discipline that church is aiding the discipleship of those who fall into sin. But the second lesson Paul teaches us is this, a church that practices corrective discipline does so for the welfare of all the members, the whole church.
God created the church and he's designed how it's to be constituted. We're not free to write the script of what a church ought to be and how a church ought to operate. This is why Paul rebukes the Corinthians because they were dishonoring the Lord in the way they handled this problem. Church is the bride of Christ, A bride that he has purchased at great cost in order to make her holy. This is what Ephesians 5 25 through 27 tells us.
It's what Titus 2 14 says that Christ gave himself for us. He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people zealous for good works. Christians are called to be holy just as God is holy and as we follow Christ together we manifest his holiness to the world. When unrepentant sin is tolerated in the church, we portray the wrong message to the world. We send the erroneous message that it's okay to have Jesus.
You can have Jesus and your sin. You can love Jesus and live in impenitent sin. That destroys a church's witness and ultimately its purpose in the world. Paul uses an illustration from the Old Testament in the Passover feast and leavened and unleavened bread when the Jews would celebrate the Passover remembering how God delivered them out of Egypt and gave them freedom, new life, that they were to do this annually by purging yeast from their household. When Paul applies it, he does it to teach that the toleration of sin in the church results in its spread.
For a church to tolerate sin in anyone is to promote sin to everyone. A little leaven leavens the whole lump just like yeast through a batch of dough. Therefore, for the sake of the whole church, every disciple, sin must be dealt with as Jesus commands. Christ, as our Passover has delivered us from the bondage of sin, He saved us. The church is a community of sinners who have been rescued by His grace.
To tolerate unrepentant sin in the membership, Paul says, is malicious and wicked. You see that in verse 8? What should be characterized in the church is sincerity and truth, but when unrepentant sin is ignored, the one who is guilty is allowed to go on a pathway leading him further and further away from God. But in addition, The rest of the members are emboldened to treat sin as insignificant in their own lives. Thus, their own discipleship will be hindered.
Church members must deal lovingly with those who fall into patterns of sin in order to rescue them and to encourage others not to follow their example. We see this even under the Old Covenant when God instituted capital punishment. You can read in the book of Deuteronomy repeatedly this phrase that once capital punishment is carried out for those capital crimes it's to be done so that the congregation might hear and fear hear and fear and not be complicit in that same kind of activity. Proverbs 19 25 teaches this principle, strike a scoffer and the simple will learn prudence. Reprove a man of understanding and he will gain knowledge.
You'll help the man and you'll help those that are watching to be prudent. I've seen this time and again in the course of my ministry, the church where I serve, where God has used the sad sober exercise of discipline to remove someone from membership to awaken in others a sense of sin. We've seen people converted as they've heard about the church doing this. We've had people get angry at us only to be converted later. And we've seen multiple times within the congregation those who were secretly toying with sin, come forward and say, help me.
I'm on the same path that this man was on, and I don't want to go where he has gone. It's by design. This is what God intends for the church to do for one another. It's how He helps us through the way we order our church life to watch over and encourage one another's discipleship. We hear, we fear, We resolve by the power of the Spirit to follow Christ more faithfully in repentance and faith.
Brothers and sisters, this is what we need to make it all the way home. Why would anybody submit themselves to this kind of life in a church? The only one reason, devotion to Jesus Christ our Lord. Submission to Him as head. Sincerity in experiencing more and more the transforming power of His grace through His life and death and resurrection.
The fact that we've staked everything on Him, that we've come to know Him, and we want to honor Him in how we live. If you're here and you're at peace with your sin, I want to plead with you to stop and examine yourself and to realize that that is not the way of the disciples of Christ. To be satisfied with your sin so that you just say, well, nobody's perfect or it's not that big a deal, I'm gonna go on with it. That is not the way of Christ. And you need people in your life who love you enough that can help you to see this and to turn from it.
And it may be that you've just learned to live your whole life this way. And you think that this is okay, this is the way Christians can live. It's not. And if that's you, friend, I would plead with you today to consider Christ and to consider the holiness of God and the love of God that sent his own Son into the world to rescue sinners like you. He came to save his people from sin, not in sin, and he will save you.
Even if you've been living for decades trying to manage your sin, he will save you. So trust him. Believe him. Take God in his word and you'll experience the salvation that he gives to all who trust him from their hearts. Well most churches I know don't practice church discipline, but when they fail to do so, they disobey Jesus Christ.
No matter what they may say, they're not really loving Christ nor loving the people who are members of the church. You know, John Dagg, the 19th century Baptist theologian said, when discipline leaves a church, Christ goes with it. Church discipline, both formative, which we've heard a lot about this week, and corrective, is the way of Christ. If we understand this, then we will recognize more and more that real love involves helping one another to stay on the course, get back on the course when you stumble, and to persevere all the way home. Brothers and sisters, find a church that loves you enough to correct you and plant your life there.
Find a church that loves you enough that is willing to remove you from its membership if you fall into sin and refuse to repent. Because this is the way that God helps us get all the way home. This is the way that he aids our discipleship. This is the way that he enables us to grow in both believing and repenting as we continue to follow after our Lord and Savior. Let's pray.
Our Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for speaking to us simply and clearly about these matters of church life. We ask that you would help us and strengthen us and all of our churches to live in a way that will encourage one another to honor the Lord Jesus Christ as we follow him. For we ask in his name. Amen.