In his sermon on church discipline, Paul Carrington emphasizes the critical importance of discipline within the church to maintain its purity and effectiveness. He uses the historical analogy of the Johnstown Flood to illustrate the consequences of neglect and compromise. Carrington explains that church discipline is not optional but a necessary practice derived from Christ's authority, aimed at preserving the church and restoring individuals. He highlights the three core areas of corrective discipline: unity of fellowship, purity of life, and faithfulness in doctrine. The sermon underscores the dangers of compromise, apathy, and indifference within the church, drawing parallels to the book of Judges, where Israel's greatest enemy was its own internal compromise. Carrington stresses the importance of addressing sin early, comparing it to tending to cracks before a dam breaks. He warns against the leavening influence of sin and false doctrine, emphasizing that discipline deters sin, protects the church’s witness, and upholds God’s honor. Ultimately, the sermon calls for a return to foundational biblical teachings on discipline, advocating for vigilance and mutual accountability within the church community.

Well, this afternoon we're going to be speaking about the subject of church discipline. It's a, you know, every time we open the Bible it's a sober time, it's a sober topic that we're going to be going through, whether it's going through expositorily or picking a topic. But when we look at something like church discipline, it's really one of those that stand out just in terms of its level of gravity and of its severity and in terms of how we want to hopefully understand it today. And so my prayer is that the Lord would help us, that he would give us grace and be with us as we try to grapple with this subject here. So before I begin, let's just pray and bring this time before the Lord.

Father, we are entirely dependent on you, Lord. Every breath that we have is a gift from you, Lord, everything that we possess. And our salvation itself is given by you, and we are so thankful for that. And Lord, as we now come to approach the subject of church discipline, Lord, we look down through the ages and we see that where there were churches at one time, there are no longer churches. Once bright spots are now dim.

And Lord, we pray that you would sustain and keep us as a church we know that you will keep us individually to the end Lord you are our great confidence that we cannot be lost because no one can pluck us from your hand but as for our church oh God we pray that you will sustain us all down through this generation and the next and the next until Christ comes, Lord, would you make us a light in this world. So be with us now, Lord, as we discuss this topic. We pray your blessing upon this time. Amen. Amen.

Well, it really is an interesting topic. When I was going through it, it exposed a lot of different ways of thinking for myself, and I hope I'm able to convey much of it today. I want to start us back by going 130 years into history. And there was a little town by the name of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. And It was a town not very well known, but it was fairly prosperous.

And just outside the city, there was a hunting and fishing club. And it was frequented by men like Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, some what would be almost today modern day billionaires. It was called the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club. And the lake on which this club was based had a dam on the other side of it. And so here you have this lake, a dam, and then maybe 14 miles away you have this little town called Johnstown.

And there was a problem in that these people, they stocked this beautiful lake with exotic fish of all kinds so that they would be able to go and fish and catch big fish and all sorts of other types of things. And so here they were, but they had made some compromises with this dam in order to maximize the fishing and the outflow of the water to stop any fish from escaping. They had made some compromises. And there was a townsman by the name of Daniel Morell, a civic leader in this town, and he had done some investigation of the dam and expressed some concerns about the construction of the dam. And He brought those compromises and those problems to the fore, and he kind of made a bit of a stir in the town, tried to get people's attention, but people just said, you know what, not that big a deal.

I think we can get by with it. Anyways, what was happening underneath the surface was erosion was taking place, and you know, nothing happened. A year passes and months pass, and nothing's happening. It was kind of summarily dismissed as an overreaction anyways there was a time in May of 1889 where some super heavy rains began to fall. And even then this guy Daniel Morel, he raised his voice and said look there's some serious problems and after raising the alarm some people woke up a little bit and said you know what maybe we should pay attention but after some time nothing happened.

The rains kept falling and people just kept living. Well it wasn't too far into the future, maybe about a couple of weeks where slowly the the water level of the dam began to rise and all of a sudden just like a slap everything just gushed and broke and all of this water millions and millions and millions of gallons just coursed through this valley uprooting trees overturning rail cars destroying homes and it reached this little town called Johnstown Where 2200 people lost their life lives in a moment? It's the worst dam break in the history of the United States or 79, 000 dams in the United States, but this was the worst dam break. And the question is, how do you account for such a tragedy like this? How do you account for something that was so easily preventable if only people had paid attention?

Well, it comes down to compromise, to apathy, and to indifference, that once a beautiful, prosperous little town is no longer in almost an overnight period of time. And if you look in the Bible, we could go back to the time of the judges and you could see something similar where you see apathy, you see apostasy running through the ranks, and these people, the Jews, the Israelites, had now entered into the promised land, and here they were there in the very place God had promised for them. But something terrible was occurring in the land. They, instead of taking the land for God, Israel was increasingly becoming caninized and compromised and they would be led into captivity by their pagan neighbors and and then God would show mercy upon them when they cried out to him. But what becomes very clear as you go through the book of Judges is that the greatest enemy to the nation of Israel weren't the the ites of the land, but their greatest enemy was Israel itself and the compromises that they were making.

And deeper, deeper levels of depravity were seen. You have a replay of what you see in the city of Sodom in the book of Judges, but this time among a town in Israel. Increasingly deplorable conditions are evident and they became almost what you call moral relativists. You know, they compromised and left the very foundation on which they had been built, on which Moses and Joshua and other men had planted them. And now they had departed to the point where it was almost unrecognizable.

And if you look at the book of Judges, There's one term or one phrase that keeps coming up over and over again that really describes very succinctly the time. And that phrase is, every man did that which was right in his own eyes. And you see that all the way through the book. It's a graphic warning to the Church, and we have to also think about it as well in our day, in that our greatest challenge as a Church, our greatest threats don't come from persecution. The Church actually prospers a lot of times when persecution is evident, but the greatest challenge that the church has is increasing compromise little by little, laxness with sin, compromise with the world being dismissive of danger, just like those that live below the realm of the dam.

And so living comfortably when the foundations are being eroded over time is one of the worst places to be. And so knowing this and knowing men's hearts, God has given the church the grace of church discipline. And that's what we hope to look at today. You know, it's far better to attend to the cracks as they're developing, as they're being seen, than to wait until it's too late and then all of a sudden in the case of Johnstown, totally wiped out, or in the case of a church. The candlestick is removed.

We keep having church but blissfully unaware that Christ is no longer there. And so we hope to address some of the serious elements of that today. Because one of the things I think you find when you look at the New Testament, even contrary to what's conveyed in our modern day, is that leniency with sin is unknown. You don't you don't really see that at all in the in the New Testament. And so just last week we took a look at church membership and that really dealt with admission into the church, right?

And it was what we were saying to each other upfront that I am your responsibility and you are my responsibility and we lock arms together to advance the kingdom of God, to advance holiness in the earth. Well today we're talking about not the admission into the church but what governs the actual membership of the church. We're talking about the idea of not just excommunication but how do we interact with each other, how do we watch for one another and so on. And So if you don't have church membership, right, you can't really have church discipline. So you can see how everything kind of falls apart.

And what's amazing is that when you look back over the last hundred years or so, these two areas, right, church membership and church discipline have almost fallen into nothing. It was basically when you go back in time a church wouldn't have been recognized as a church. In fact there were for centuries Christian churches would be recognized based on three pillars or three marks of a real gospel-believing, Christ-honoring body of believers. And the first mark was that there was pure preaching of the gospel taking place. The second would be the administration of the ordinances, you know, the Lord's supper and baptism.

And the third mark, the third mark would actually be, does that church practice church discipline? That would be the mark of a true church. But when you fast forward down through the ages, it came to the point of the 1960s where only a very small group of churches even knew what it was or was practicing it at all. And you think about it, if you're the adversary of the church, to basically demolish and get rid of the admission into the church by having real, meaningful church membership on the one side, and then what governs the actual life of the church, which is church discipline, to just remove those two things. What do you end up getting?

You end up getting what we actually have in our modern day today, which is a mass, a body, kind of a blob of Christianity, but it's undefined, it's very weak, it has such little impact, if any impact, on the world around it. It's a place where sin kind of largely goes unconfronted. People just come into church and they go out of church, basically it was a good message, but that's the extent of it. And so there's ever increasing, what you see is ever-increasing portions of people's lives kind of being sectioned off, where the church can't say anything about what I watch, about where I go, what I wear, what I do. Those are my, that's my domain, but the church has to stay on its corner.

Well, that's not historically how things have been. And so we want to see if we can recalibrate a little bit on what the actual word of God has to teach, because this is a time that we want to avoid what happened in the book of Judges. We want to be awake and aware and we want to see sin for what it is and be able to confront it. You know in the 1960s all of a sudden things became where people weren't really sinning but they were making poor choices. You know, divorce, that's not a good, that's a poor choice, you shouldn't do that.

It's not the best. And things began to be watered down over time. Well, praise God that he's brought back and revived some of the church history as well as biblical teaching around the area of membership, around the area of church discipline so that we can actually have some understanding. We're really the recipients of much grace and so while I want to make very clear while church membership, church discipline, they don't save, right? No one is saved by becoming a member of a church, right?

That doesn't do anything. A church isn't preserved by doing church discipline. God is the one who preserves it, the church. And no one, I want to make abundantly abundantly clear, is saved because of church discipline as an individual. It's by the mercy and by the grace of God.

And this John MacArthur says, hey if you could lose your salvation, you would have already lost it a long time ago, right? None of us are strong enough or wise enough to actually hold on to our salvation. But churches go through certain paths and trajectories, and churches go out of existence because of being unaware of the Word of God, and somehow over the course of time a diminishing of the holiness and and the honor that God is due. And so what is church discipline? Well it's not optional right?

The church doesn't have the option to ignore persistent scandalous sin or behavior among believers among members in that church. We just do not have the option. It's not something that, well maybe we should do it, it would be good for us, but God will see today, I think, has some very, very specific commands. And it derives its authority directly from Christ. The church discipline comes directly from the Lord of the church.

And it's more than excommunication. So oftentimes, I know when I first started thinking about it, my mind automatically darts to excommunication. But it's much more than that. But what it does include is preservation of the church as well as restoration of people who do end up being excommunicated as well. And so what you have is I'm not going to deal with all of church discipline today, you know, you have what you call formative church discipline.

We practice that today, right, when we did the Lord's Supper, where we're brought to a point of examining ourselves. We had a sermon today, which also causes us to examine ourselves. And we have other things like praying or reading the Bible. Those are areas where we hopefully gradually are more conformed to the image of God over the course of time. But then you have what you call corrective church discipline.

And this is employed by the help of the Holy Spirit. And it really orbits around three core areas. And we're going to be talking about these three areas. And these are the areas that we're usually most apt to sin in. We're most apt to sin in, areas that really encompass much of the Christian life.

And so the first one is unity of fellowship. We'll talk about that. And then we'll talk about purity of life and then finally faithfulness in doctrine and so the first one that we're going to talk about unity of fellowship we're going to be taking a look at Matthew 18 and most of us who have been around probably know Matthew 18 fairly well But it's critical to look at the context, right? It's in the context right after the Lord speaks about this, what we're going to be looking at. He talks about the parable of the unforgiving servant.

So you can get some perspective of where this is in context. And if you think about it, what are the greatest areas of friction in a church, most likely and most often, it's personal offenses, one against another, that you know begin to grow and surface and before you know distance and even dislike and harm between people and relationships begins to fester. So especially knowing this, the Lord gives us really a pattern to deal with this and it's really broken out into four stages. So I'm going to read the text and you can follow along. It's in Matthew chapter 18 verses 15 to 17.

It says this, moreover if your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him to be to you as a heathen and a tax collector." And so this verse 15, I want to deal just verse by verse, verse 15 says, moreover, if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.

I think it's important right off the bat to acknowledge, right, this is not just for, you know, I just, you make up sins and little offenses or so on. It's not for people who have an itchy trigger finger to catch people in their sins and to just go and take advantage of the situation and make complaints, but we're dealing with actual sin. But what it's worth looking at is notice, first of all, that a sin is committed, but also notice who's the one going. It's the offended party going to the one who might have offended, whether knowingly or unknowingly. But notice the spirit in which the person goes, right?

It's a spirit of humility and a spirit of consideration. It's not censorious. You're not trying to call someone down on the carpet and try to embarrass them or anything like that, but it's a very private situation that you're, there's a sin that's been committed, but you're going in a spirit of love with the hopes of restoring that relationship that might have been frayed a little bit. And so the motive is to gain someone to holiness. It's really, really important that we see this first stage in church discipline when we talk about personal relationships.

And I think one of the things I got out of this is that there's this recognition that church unity isn't something that's natural among human beings. It has to be striven for. It's because we're constantly selfish. We're at different levels. And we're going to have problems.

But it has to be striven for. We have to actually work for unity within the body. And it's one of those things that when it actually happens in a marriage or something else, it's wonderful to see, but it's not a natural state. And so most offenses should be able to be handled this way. Most offenses, probably 90 plus percent of them should end at the end of verse 15 that you don't have to go any further and that's what the Puritans called kind of this mutual watch care where you're looking out for me and I'm looking out for you and this is what Hezekiah Harvey says he says were this done and done in the tender loving earnest spirit of religion few instances of further discipline would be required.

So it's this idea that we should rarely have to get to verse 16. But in the case that we do, verse 16 says this, but if he will not hear you, take with you one or two more that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established." And so what you're noticing is kind of this progression from informal just a one-on-one to something becoming more formal. You'll see how it progresses to becoming very formal by the end of it. And this is a word of warning, I think sometimes we also wanna be careful that we don't jump right to verse 16 and we go and tell two or three people about an offense that someone's committed against us because when you do that, the offended becomes the offender when you do that. But it's far better to go to somebody individually and talk to them.

And you're not trying to gang up on them, but you're hopefully trying to prevail upon that individual and win them. It's this idea that perhaps they'll listen to two or three or four people saying the same thing and maybe that will register more so with them right that's the idea but if it doesn't happen 17 says and if he refuses to hear them tell it to the church so now things are getting very very formal but it's not hasty I think you see a lot of grace, right? There's stages that are going, you're going through. There's no dictate on how much time between all of this. That's not, that's not what we're trying to understand here, but I think there's a lot of grace.

That's what you see, And it's now brought to the church, a broader segment who can weigh into this whole situation. And we're not aiming for spectacle, but what you're saying is, brother, please open your eyes. Please take heed, be warned, break off what you're doing, and turn. That's really the spirit that's happening at that point. It's an urgent call for repentance, but if he will not hear, it says at the end, if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.

So this is the most severe stage of discipline where excommunication takes place. But like I said, hopefully after verse 15, just the first stage, 90% of the cases, even more, are going to be able to be dealt with. But this is at a stage now where the sin is so significant that the church feels it can no longer really confirm that profession of faith and so he's acting in this way as an unbeliever we need to treat him as an unrepentant unbeliever very very sad time it's never joyful it's usually done with with tears and if it's not there should be great great concern but but it's with the hope and we'll talk about that in a little bit of seeing restoration as that brother hopefully will be brought to repentance what can't be done and what's so tempting to do is to coddle and to just pat someone on the back and dismiss. And that's really one of the biggest challenges that we have. And this is not nitpicky, private eye stuff, where you're trying to dig up stuff on individuals at all.

We always have to be careful about those tendencies in ourselves. But it's this real desire to win a brother and a sister or a sister back towards the Lord, to turn them from the path of veering off back to the path of walking in faithfulness towards God. And just as we're dealing with with personal offenses just in this first section I thought it'd be helpful just to to to send out a strong warning as well to those that cause and sow discord and create factions in the church it's really worth thinking about this as well as we're on this topic. Paul says this in Romans 16, he says, Now I urge you brethren, know those who cause division and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you have learned and avoid them. And so the message we want to take away is beware the strife sower or the strife spreader and the sower of discord, right?

Every church normally has some element of that working and we wanna be awake and alert to that, that A, that I'm, Lord, keep me from being that. But if you are brought into interaction with that, to be able to nip it in the bud and don't just become a receptacle for garbage and difficulty and complaints But be able to see it for what it really is and so really important because Satan will often tempt People or seduce people to bitterness one against the other. And it could be entirely imagined. And so we need to be awake to that and be able to be aware to that. You can think all the way through the scriptures of men like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, or you could look back at men like Absalom, or in the New Testament, men like Deutrophes that are strife spreaders and sowers of discord.

Let's be alert for that and not be that individual because it's such a damning, such a dangerous thing. And so we dealt with this idea of personal relationships. Well, looking at purity of life, this is so critical. I just want to turn our attention to 1st Corinthians chapter 5 and again another familiar section of Scripture where we see a man, a young man, that's caught in something that is so unabashedly evil that it says in the scripture, Paul says that the thing that you're doing is not even named among the Gentiles. When the Gentiles hear about what you're doing, they cover their mouth in amazement that that could actually be done, let alone done in a place where moral purity should be upheld and sustained.

And it's good to remember that the first act of church discipline was actually enacted by the Lord himself. Do you remember the time of Ananias and Sapphira where they're in the middle of a revival and the Lord stops the music and you see these two people that have lied to the Holy Spirit and he strikes them dead right there in the church and he's sending a message right there that I'm not a God to be toyed with. And that actually increases the level of fear and causes the Word of God to even spread more. See, that's one of the effects of church discipline is it actually brings people up short and cause them to see that God is true, God is real. Sin is the enemy of the church, not something to be embraced.

But it's also a warning that sin never lives alone. You see it in the husband, Ananias, as well as in his wife. And God knows that if that is allowed to just be there, it will spread throughout the church. And that's what you see in 1st Corinthians chapter 5 with this sin here and so many this is something to be aware of that many individuals and churches have forfeited their witness for Christ because of toleration of sin right That church loses its witness and it no longer has salt and light to shine in the community. And this is a warning that we should all take.

Listen to this from Charles Spurgeon. Listen to what he says. He's preaching a message on church discipline and he's pleading with the people. And I'd say this to us today, I'm afraid some of us are barren of spiritual usefulness because we do not watch against sin. Oh, keep your conscience tender.

Beware of getting it seared. That's his appeal and cry to the church. And so God seeks to protect the moral purity of his church. There's never a shrug or dismissing among the Apostles but a very serious look at it. And so here you see in 1st Corinthians chapter 5 a city that's remarkable for its immorality.

And the word that Paul uses when he confronts this sin is pornea. Obviously this is a category for all manner of sexual sin. This is what it covers, pornea. And in our day also it's a scourge when you think about what goes on in our modern day. You can hardly go a week without hearing of some sort of calamity or catastrophe.

Some well-known person who was speaking on behalf of the Lord, taken down because of this kind of immorality. And what Paul was worried about was two things I think, two things are at stake here. One is the witness of the church. That was very important to him because wherever there's continued unrepented sin allowed to fester, you know, he says should you not rather mourn? There's no shame, they weren't even able to blush.

And where that kind of sin exists, the church cannot prosper. And so he was very, very careful to bring this up to them because the more we are like the world the weaker we become and so when a church gets involved in this what happens is what we're saying is that Christ doesn't really reign he has his little section but but I reign and my way is the right way. And that's what this church was doing. It was boasting itself. And so it's really important that the church retains its salt and its light, because God's design is that the church be light in the world amidst a wicked and perverse generation.

And what is the salt and light that God speaks of? Isn't it the moral purity that when people see that how this group of people are able to live a life of honesty and integrity home or when they gather together, something strikes the world as this is totally unlike anything that I've ever seen but when that goes away what happens it reflects also on the character of God oh that's what it's like to serve God I don't need to follow after him at all and I'll continue on my way. That's why Paul says in Romans 2 that the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of the way that the Jews were living, the Jewish Christians at that time. And so super critical. That's the witness aspect.

The other area that Paul was interested in here is the leavening influence of sin, right? He asked this question, he says, do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? And you think about this, that our first parents, they sinned, Adam and Eve, and the entire human race was leavened as a result of one sin at the very beginning. And if you think about it, like the dam break, right, where the cracks should have been addressed and they were left unattended. Look at the ramifications of that down the road.

A little leaven, for those of you that bake, understand that you just put a little bit in and before long it spreads throughout the entire loaf. Think about it, every time I drive down through country roads and you see Cud's Zoo all over the, how did that start? One little plant and before you know it it's taken over acres and acres along the way and that's what Paul is most concerned about is that the leavening influence of sin doesn't overtake the church and destroy it and eat it from the inside out. There was a couple of months ago where there was a giggling teen over in Oregon who he was walking in a canyon he lit off fireworks and the fireworks leapt off into the canyon and sparked a fire. Well this fire wasn't easily put out It actually spread to about 48, 000 acres.

It cost $18 million to the fire departments. And the mom, when she heard about this was the fault of her son, who by the way now is in serious, serious trouble as you can imagine, expressed her concern over the trauma that her son was experiencing because everyone was blaming him for the fire. She coddled his sin. But look at the damage one spark caused because it was unattended. Forty-eight thousand acres and even now obviously you can't do much with that land anymore.

And so sin like leaven it often spreads little by little imperceptibly right throughout the entire congregation. So God is very concerned for this. But the idea is to purge out the leaven, this matter of life and death, really. And so this man had to be excommunicated. But the end goal of this was that the church would be preserved and that the witness of the church would also be restored.

And hopefully, hopefully, hopefully there's an evangelistic message as well where Paul says turn him over to Satan for the destruction of his body that his soul may be saved in the day of the Lord. There's always this idea, how can we restore this individual, not by coddling like the mom and her teen, but in this case, very, very tough love. And So what do we see when you go over to 2 Corinthians? What do you see? You see restoration, and this man has now been brought back into the fold.

And Paul commends the church because of their violence of repentance, because his letter here had such a good effect on bringing about repentance that the people in that church actually turned and Paul commends them for that and so it had a very very sanctifying influence. And so what is one of the goals of church excommunication and church discipline when it gets to that point? It's to kill the fatted calf. We look for that day when that man or woman would repent and turn back to the Lord just like the prodigal and come and be restored fully and be embraced. But it's sometimes needed that a person has to be cut off, just like a sickness has to be cut off or cut out, so that the rest of the body would be able to be preserved in holiness.

And so that's never the desire, but this is the reality of church life here. And so we've talked about the breaker of fellowship in Matthew 18 and we've talked about the moral impurity that sometimes affects a church and I just want to end off by talking about faithfulness and doctrine, the third area where church discipline covers and and this is important right that we guard against we guard sound doctrine against infiltrations of false doctrine. Because what you believe is critical. It actually determines how you live. And people have said that, that culture is nothing else but religion externalized.

So you can get a sense of a culture their religion by simply looking at the way that people interact just as you sit on a Corner, that's their religion their way of life is seen in that way Well, the idea is that when we come to doctrine that false teachers must be guarded against And in every area you see false teachings stalking the church and looking for victims. You could go down the line and what you'll see is repackaged doctrines coming up in different ways, right? We have Arianism or Antinomianism or Sosinianism or Universalism, all of these isms, works-based religion that somehow I can earn my way into the kingdom or even the prosperity gospel. And these things come in and they affect and infect the church from within. And so part of meaningful church membership is also having an understanding of good doctrine.

And enemies of God, think about it like this, they're constantly working on the foundations of the dam, trying to undermine the church and steal away the solid teaching. Paul says it to the Galatians, I'm afraid of you. These four churches that were in the church of Galatia. And Jesus, he warned of the leavening influence of the scribes. Timothy, when Paul wrote to Timothy, he warned him about two men named Hymenaeus and Phileetus because they're teaching, teaching that the resurrection had passed, which spread like a cancer and overthrow the faith of some.

And then to Titus, Paul warns of the Judaizers whose mouths, quote, must be stopped. That's what he says. And he says, teaching the things that they ought not to teach. This is how serious. And then you begin to look at 2 Peter.

He talks about false doctrine as damnable heresies. Or Jude, he says he wanted to write a nice letter to encourage the saints, but He couldn't do that. Instead, he said, I had to exhort them to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. And so it's very serious. And so Galatians 1 says it like this, but even if we are an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you, then that which we have preached, Let him to be to you accursed.

As we have said before so now I say again if anyone preaches any other gospel to you then what you have received let him be accursed." And so what can we what can we take away from this? I think one of things that we can take away is stick to the old paths where the good way is, the solid doctrine, the historical doctrine of the church. It's so important that we do that because a little false doctrine paves the way for more false doctrine. But the power is in the Word of God. Why in the world would we go off and dabble and go into dreams or or go into all these other areas that are uncertain when we have the sure word of God underneath our feet.

Why not stick to the true and to the tried? That's the safe path. And this is what Martin Luther said. People came to him in the midst of the Reformation to ask, how is this happening? That the church is on its back, that the gospel is spreading throughout the kingdoms, and he says this, I simply taught, I preached, wrote God's word, otherwise I did nothing.

And then while I slept, the word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The Word did it all. See his confidence is in the Word of God. Why would we go off into other things and strange doctrines?

Stick to the old paths where in the good way is. That's really important and God cares about sound doctrine. And so just concluding here, what are the fruits of church discipline? Well there's many fruits of it but God remember God is governing the membership of the church through church discipline admission is church membership and then the governing of of the actual interactions of people and the purity of the doctrine and and the purity of our lives is is governed by church discipline And so one of the fruits is that it warns people, it deters people from sin. It's almost like a picture of the last or the final judgment where Jesus people stand before him and he says I never knew you, depart from me you worker of lawlessness, You lived as though I never gave you a law by which to live, is really what he's saying.

And we always want to remember that Christianity is as much a way as it is anything else. It's a way of living. And so when church discipline is enacted, hopefully it warns people and deters others. It also protects because bad doctrine as well as bad living are infectious in the life of the church and so it's far better to address things early than when the when the dam burst its banks and it's too late to do that. It also sends a message to the watching world that the Lord reigns in his church.

This is so important rather than every man doing what is right in his own eyes, it says that the Word of God reigns and God's ways are the right ways and even if it hurts that we will do what is right before him because we fear him and it also retains God's blessing on the church as well as on our ministries we often say that does Saturday night affect Sunday well of course it does and the way that we live will affect the effectiveness of our ministries when we go out to the abortion mill or to you name it the way that we live the night before is gonna have an impact on the morning when we go out to minister it's so important that we that we realize that and so most importantly though with regards to to church discipline it maintains the honor of God and the reputation of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And so what I'd like to end with is just a thought that a dam that exists below a city or a town that exists below a compromised dam has a better chance of long-term survival than a church that dismisses church discipline and says it's unimportant.

Let us embrace this as a means of protecting and keeping and also edifying and strengthening one another, remembering that hopefully it doesn't have to get to the point of excommunication, but by strengthening, by sharpening, by walking with one another, many, many, many of the problems and sins that crop up can be dealt with either one-on-one or in a small setting. So may God help us to understand and to grapple and grasp these things in our hearts that he might be glorified at the end of it all because at the end of the day when it's done right it's one of the greatest means of love towards one another as well as honor towards God. Amen. Father, we do want to thank you for your goodness, your watchfulness over your church, Lord, that you are the one that preserves and sanctifies and keeps your body healthy and whole by the means of church discipline, Lord, and we pray that this would not be a foreign thing to us but Lord that we would have it in our hearts to honor you and to love one another in such a way, O God, May you root out sin in our hearts and draw us close one to another.

In Christ's name, Amen.