13 What Paul Means by 'A Little Leaven Leavens the Dough' (1 Corinthians 5:6-13)

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for joining me today for the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is the podcast where we explain not only what Scripture means, but how we figure it out. Today we're gonna study 1 Corinthians chapter 5, verses 6 through 13. This is the 13th talk in our series on 1 Corinthians, and you can find lecture notes for today's talk on the link below the podcast or by going to the website wednesdayintheword.com slash 1 Corinthians 12. And while you're there, take a moment to check out the website. There's no charge, no spam, no ads, only Bible study. Glad you joined us today. Well, when we finished chapter 4 of 1 Corinthians, we finished the first major section of the book, and now Paul has moved on to a new topic. He's still responding to the issues he received from the verbal report about the situation in Corinth, and in the first four chapters he addressed the factions or the divisions going on in the church, but more importantly the bad theology that led to those divisions. Then in chapter five, he switched to a new topic, and he was responding to the fact that one of the Corinthians is blatantly and defiantly living in sexual immorality. And what makes it even worse is the rest of the church is excusing this man's actions and doing nothing about it. We started this section last week looking at chapter five verses one through five, and in that section Paul made two main points. First, Paul wanted them to make clear that this man's behavior is incompatible with a claim to faith. The man in question was having an affair with his stepmother, probably while his father was still alive, and that situation is very offensive to both the religious and the pagan communities. And Paul wants them to make clear that while this man claims to be a believer, the fact that he blatantly and defiantly rejects God's standards of morality indicates that he probably doesn't have real faith. So while he fellowships with them as a believer, he lives the rest of the week in rebellion to God. And Paul wants the church to make clear to him that he has chosen the ways of the world and not the ways of God. And then the other point Paul made is that he wanted them to take this action because it has the potential to redeem this man. Paul wants them to take this action to alert this man to the error of his ways and bring him back to God. He believes confronting this man will be redemptive, and that they are not doing him any favors by excusing and ignoring his behavior. Rather, if they confront him with the reality of the situation, that has the potential to save his soul, which is of course far better in the long run. In the section we're looking at today, chapter five, verses six through thirteen, Paul is now going to address the church's attitude toward this man's situation. And Paul is very concerned about what their response says about the church. Now this section raises questions about church discipline. What does church discipline look like? What does Paul really want them to do? Paul has said call this man out on his behavior, but what would that look like in a church? And that question has been debated throughout church history. It's difficult to sort out, and I certainly don't have all the answers, but I at least want to attempt to sort through the debate and try to get some perspective on it. So Paul has just told them in five one through five that they should no longer treat this man as a believer, and now he turns to the church and their attitude. I'm going to pick up in first Corinthians chapter five and I'll read verses six through eight. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened, for Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. In five six, Paul says your boasting is not good, and I think the you there is addressed to the community, not the individual in question. I think he's saying you guys as a church have a problem. You guys as a church your boasting is not good, and the context suggests that he's addressing the community here. This man is committing blatant immorality and maybe he's one of the rich and powerful and prestigious and they don't want to offend him by calling him out, or maybe he's one of the sophisticated elite and they think, oh, if we associate with him, then that gives us status. We're kind of cool and sophisticated to tolerate this man's open and progressive modern views. Arrogance has come up repeatedly in this letter. Paul keeps mentioning the arrogance of the Corinthian church. Submitting yourself to the truth of the gospel is in part an act of humility. Humility is part of faith. Faith has to come to a point where you say, I have been wrong, I have sinned, and I need God to save me and teach me. The way I've been viewing myself, the way I've been viewing the world is wrong, and I need to start looking at things from God's perspective. Paul sees the Corinthians as lacking that kind of humility toward the truth. They have a very high opinion of their own perspective on reality and their own ability to judge who and what is wise and who and what isn't wise. They have set themselves up as the measure of wisdom and truth even to the point of rejecting Paul's authority. They have arrogantly chosen Apollos over Paul. They have been arrogantly judging Paul and mistrusting his intentions and thinking he won't come to them when he said he would, and they have a very high opinion of their own perspective. Now in response to this man committing immorality, they have become arrogant rather than mourning over the sin. And Paul says your boasting is not good. They are proud of their open minded tolerance of this man who's living an immoral lifestyle. They see themselves as sophisticated and cool because they've moved past that old fashioned view of sexuality. I mean look at how open minded and tolerant we are. We can even approve of this man who's having an affair with his stepmother. They probably suspect that old Fuddy Duddy Paul would not approve of the situation, and look, they're just so much more sophisticated, so much more cosmopolitan. They're not held back like Paul by his narrow Jewish upbringing. They understand how the world has changed, and they're so much more tolerant, sophisticated, and open minded than Paul. It's that kind of boast in their own understanding that's not good. Paul says rather than boasting, you should be mourning over the sin in your midst. Look at five six again. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Paul introduces an extended metaphor here related to unleavened bread and the Passover, and we want to make sure we understand what his analogy is and what corresponds to reality. Unleavened bread is an essential part of celebrating the Passover. Leavening is an agent that produces fermentation. The leavening agent produces air or steam that expands when heated, making the resulting product light and altering the grain trecture. So leavening is yeast, baking powder, baking soda, that kind of thing. So Paul starts with this common biblical analogy that if you knead a piece of leavened dough into a piece of unleavened dough, the result is that the leaven will spread throughout the entire piece of dough. That's how leavened dough is passed on. Each time you make leavened dough, you hold back a piece of it before you bake it, and then you put that piece into the next batch to leaven the next batch of dough. Then you save a piece of that batch, and again you use it in the next one, so the fermentation is passed from loaf to loaf. So the picture he's painting is I start with something that doesn't have any X, in this case leaven, and by putting a little bit of X into it, the X spreads throughout the entire entity. And this is a phenomenon we're familiar with. So you put a tiny drop of red food coloring into white frosting and the entire batch of frosting turns pink. There's no way to keep a corner of the frosting still white. You put a little leaven into a batch of dough and the entire batch will be leavened. You stir a spoonful of sugar into a glass of lemonade and the entire glass will be sweet. That's the picture he's painting. The pervasive influence of something that seems small and insignificant. So you start with this small thing, this little drop of food coloring or this little bit of leaven dough or a spoonful of sugar, and you put that seemingly inconsequential small thing into the batch, and the entire batch is affected by it. As good Bible students, then we want to ask what's the reality that Paul is describing with this analogy? And there are a couple of good options. The first option is that the lump of dough is the Corinthian church and the leaven is this particular sinner. And this is probably one of the more commonly taught options, but I think there's a better one. Under this view, the Corinthian church is decent, moral, and happily content, but they have this one sinner in their midst. And if they let this one sinner hang around, well, he's going to infect the whole church, and the entire moral standards of the community will break down. So the important action they need to take is to remove the sinner so that he doesn't have a bad influence on everyone else. Well, that's one possible interpretation, and actually the way I first heard this passage taught, but I don't think that's what's going on here. For that to be true, Paul would have to view the Corinthian church as by and large a godly, deeply faithful people who are deeply troubled by this man's immoral lifestyle. Maybe they've discussed it, prayed about it, but they just can't agree on a course of action, so eventually they decide the best thing to do is nothing, and they just accept him because they don't want to make a big deal out of their choices, and maybe they just keep on praying for him. And so Paul would come along and say, if that's how he saw the church, he would say, you know, I appreciate your desire to be gracious and accepting, but don't you know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? If you let him stay in the church, you're going to risk losing the whole church. Soon everyone will be following his choices and committing adultery and living immoral lifestyles. And I know right now you're all on the straight and narrow, but if he stays, he's going to pull you all off the path. Well that's not the picture we have in Corinthians. That's not the way Paul is addressing the church, and that's not the way he's described them. Paul has said mostly negative things about the Corinthian church. The only positive things he said were in his opening prayer. In the immediate context he just rebuked them for their arrogant attitude, and given what he's going to go on to say in the rest of the letter, it's difficult for me to imagine that he would think the Corinthian church is on the moral high ground except for this one guy. Also, that picture doesn't square with reality. Paul is not afraid that if you hang around with someone who's committing sin, that sin is going to rub off on you. We know from Romans and Galatians that Paul thinks all of us have sinned, all of us are guilty, and apart from the grace of God, none of us is going to be saved. We've already got the disease. The openly defiant sinner cannot infect the rest of us because we're already infected. We are already sinners. We just may be hiding it better, but we're already sinners. So I don't think the leaven is the presence of an immoral person as if the rest of us were morally pure and sinless because we're all sinners. So if the leaven is not a picture of the presence of one sinner in an otherwise upstanding church, what's our other option? Well, I think the leaven is their acceptance of this man as a believer. Their acceptance of his openly immoral lifestyle as a lifestyle acceptable to God and their casual attitude toward blatant sin and rebellion is the problem. That's the very thing Paul's just been discussing. That acceptance and tolerance is what they've been boasting about, and Paul is concerned with that, that casual attitude toward sin. And he's saying a casual attitude toward sin in this one area indicates a casual attitude towards sin in every other area. Here you have a man who's having an affair with his stepmother, most likely while his father is still alive, and that's a situation that is highly offensive to even the pagan communities, and you're accepting it. If that situation doesn't bother you, what's going to bother you? The attitude of casually accepting blatant immorality indicates that the church doesn't want to accept the implications of the gospel. They're making a claim to faith, but you know, not if it means they have to change their sex lives. They don't want God to tell them what He created sexuality for and under what circumstances it's to be enjoyed. They don't want God to define sin for them. They want to accept the gift of Jesus' death on the cross, and then, you know, we'll decide for ourselves how to live life here and now. And that's the problem. Paul's saying you can't claim to believe God and then pick and choose which of his precepts and instructions you're going to obey. That's not the way it works. Believing God means accepting what God says is right and wrong and accepting what God says is sin and what isn't. The Corinthians, on the other hand, want to have a gospel that lets Jesus die for their sins so they can go to heaven, but then they get to decide what's sin and what isn't. They get to decide what's appropriate in terms of sexuality and what isn't, not God. The problem though is the entire Christian gospel deals with the nature and the problem of sin. God has shown us what real holiness and godliness looks like and what real evil looks like. When we understand what God says about holiness and goodness, we realize we don't measure up. We are not the people we should be, and if we have faith, we turn to Him in humility and mercy, seeking forgiveness because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. After we repent, we seek to live our lives in light of what God says and what God values and the hope of the gospel that we will be freed from sin. To dig our heels in and say, Okay, God, I like this pain the penalty for my sins part, but let's talk about sin. I just don't agree with you there. I mean, sexuality ought to be freely expressed as long as we love each other and no one gets hurt. So thanks for the ticket to heaven and all, but you know, I'm just gonna live out sexuality on my terms. Paul is speaking to that kind of an attitude when he says a little leaven leavens the entire batch of dough. The picture is a little rebellion is rebellion. If you're a little bit rebellious, you're entirely rebellious. Rejecting God a little bit is rejecting God. A crucial part of the gospel message is humbly accepting the truth of what God says about life and about sin and then repenting from those sinful ways. Lack of repentance in one area is a lack of repentance and indicates a rebellious heart. God has shown us what real evil looks like and real good looks like. In turning to Him for mercy, we live our lives in light of that knowledge. We live in the light of the hope that one day we will be freed from sin and evil. To live my life now as if God's view of sin and evil is irrelevant is to be a re a rebel sinner. The crucial choice before us is will we accept and believe what God has said to be true and live our lives in light of that truth? Will we repent? Now, the choice is not will I get my act together so that I will be good enough for God to accept me. That's not the choice. The choice is will I bow to the truth? Will I humbly admit the error of my ways and seek God's mercy and grace? I think that's what Paul's concerned about. A little bit of rebellion makes the whole person a rebel. The acceptance of a blatantly immoral lifestyle is an anti gospel perspective. He goes on then in verse seven, clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened, for Christ our Passover has also been sacrificed. Here he changes the metaphor slightly. At Passover not only did the Jews eat unleavened bread, they were commanded to remove all the old unleavened bread from their houses. So remember the picture is you make a batch of dough and you hold back a little piece as a starter for the next batch. And then at Passover, they were commanded to get rid of any pieces they were holding back, not save any of it, don't save any of the old batches of leavened dough. They are to start fresh with nothing left over from before. I think the symbolism there is starting over, starting new, not carrying any of the old batch into the new batch, but starting from something new and fresh and clean. That's what they need to do, but it's what they're not doing. They want to be saved by Jesus, but they want to keep their pagan ways, their pagan habits, and their pagan view of sexuality. Keeping that pagan perspective on life is mixing the old leaven into the new dough, and it corrupts the new dough. But God's intention is to make them an entirely new lump of dough. He's not going to use any of the old leaven. His intention is to create a clean heart, to teach them new ways, new perspectives. He's not using any of the old starter leaven. He's making something new, pure and distinct and different from what they were before. Again, five seven, clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lamp, just as you are in fact unleavened, for Christ, our Passover has also been sacrificed. So Paul draws another image from Passover. Passover is the time you eat unleavened bread, when you clean out all the old leaven, but it's also the time when the lamb is sacrificed, and the blood of the Passover lamb symbolically brings deliverance from sin and makes you acceptable to God. So the picture he adds now is being delivered from sin and found acceptable in God's eyes because of the blood of the Passover Lamb. So he gives us these three images and they all work together. The first one is cleaning out the leaven as symbolizing leaving behind sin and your old way of life. The second is the blood of the lamb making you acceptable to God, symbolizing God's making the way to forgive and accept and redeem his people. And then the third is this new batch of dough which is symbolizing your new life in Christ. So Jesus Christ then is the fulfillment of the Passover. The Passover was a shadow or a type of the deliverance to come, and Jesus fulfilled that shadow. He voluntarily offered himself in our place as the true Passover lamb, the one who was sacrificed on our behalf and whose blood paid the price for our sins and made us acceptable to God, making it possible for the leaven of sin to ultimately be swept out of our lives and make us new creations. That's essentially the gospel message, that we are accepted through the blood of Christ so that we might ultimately be cleansed. So there's a sense in which we believers are unleavened now. Because of the blood of Jesus Christ, we are acceptable to God. Jesus took our guilt and paid the penalty for our sins, and no other sacrifice is needed. We have been redeemed and made acceptable to God. God. If I recognize the reality of the depth of my sin, the magnitude of my guilt, and the enormous price paid on my behalf to make me acceptable to God, then I ought to turn away from sin, turn away from that sin that was destroying me and seek the new life that Christ offers me. Part of the gift of saving faith is not just my redemption, it's also giving us the desire for holiness, the longing for righteousness, the despair and grief over sin and the hungering to be set free from it. Part of the gift of saving faith is that we no longer want to sin, and when we do sin, we're grieved by it, we mourn over it, and we long to be set free from it one day. It's not that we believers won't sin again in this life. We will sin, but we won't take that sin for granted anymore. After I come to faith, I don't justify sin or deny that it's wrong or view my sin casually. As the Spirit works in my life and as my faith matures, more and more I begin to see sin for what it is. Sin becomes less and less appealing as I begin to value more what God values and gain a better understanding of the life that He's offering. So I want to be clear, we believers still struggle with sin, but our attitude toward it should change over time. And it's precisely this kind of attitude change that Paul wants to see in Corinth. But instead he says in verse two they've become arrogant and they haven't mourned, and in verse six he says their boasting is not good. Paul wants to see them mourning over their sin, grieving over it, and longing to be set free from it, not excusing it or tolerating it or boasting about it. They ought to be seeking new life in Christ, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. And yet when one of them openly and defiantly sins, they think it's kind of cool. It's kind of sophisticated and open minded and modern, and that's the arrogance Paul says is not good, and they should mourn instead. Then in verse eight he says, Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven or with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I think sincerity here has the idea of unadulterated, not mixed with anything, sincere as in pure. So he's saying a single-minded, pure commitment to the truth. I think that's what he means by sincerity and truth. Paul's continuing this Passover imagery as if our lives are a celebration of the Passover. The true Passover has happened, the true sacrifice has been offered, the leaven has been dealt with. How therefore should we live? We should not live in our old pagan lifestyle of evil, malice, and wickedness with the old leaven. We should seek to live our lives as new, unleavened selves with sincerity and truth, seeking after what God says is true and submitting to God with a pure heart. Not a perfect heart, but a heart that has embraced the truth and submits to God. That's how we ought to live. You want to be part of God's people? Well, you don't live as a believer and continue your pagan lifestyle. Don't try to live with a foot in both worlds. Embrace the gospel with your whole heart and let it change your life. Get rid of all the old lemon, start fresh. Now he's going to clarify what he wants them to do. Let's read chapter five verses nine through thirteen. I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world or with the coveted and swindlers or idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually I wrote to you not to associate with any so called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. So in this section we learn that Paul wrote a previous letter to this one, and it's a letter that we don't have today, it didn't survive. We don't know the situation he was addressing in that letter, so we don't know exactly what he said or how they responded, but the text suggests that whatever he wrote to them, he's clarifying it and correcting their misunderstanding. So he tells us that he wrote to them not to associate with immoral people, and they took him to mean they should form a kind of believer's ghetto and not have anything to do with anyone else. And so they should form this closed community and not associate with anyone outside it. And Paul says, No, that's not what I meant. You'd have to leave the world to do that. That wasn't my concern. Paul may have been addressing this specific situation of the man having an affair with his stepmother. That might have been what he was addressing in his previous letter when he said not to associate with immoral people. He may have known exactly what was going on, or he may have just heard bits and pieces. He doesn't tell us what he said other than that one verse, but he clarifies what he meant. He says, Of course I didn't mean to associate with any and every immoral person because that's impossible. You'd have to leave the earth to do that. All of us are immoral. You have to rub shoulders with all kinds of immoral people. Rather, his concern is with who defines your community. What kind of behavior defines believing in Christ? Do you accept people as genuine believers who are openly living a rebellious and defiant lifestyle? That's his concern. He says, Don't let someone who is pursuing evil and malice and wickedness claim to be a believer. That doesn't help anyone. If you really want to do what's right by him, you have to make it clear where he stands. Deceiving himself into thinking that he's saved when he's not in fact saved helps no one. So he says, pay attention to the people who claim to be your fellow believers but are living an immoral lifestyle, and then he gives this list. So what does this list tell us? One thing is it shows us that Paul is concerned with more than just sexual immorality. Sometimes we get the idea that sexual sin is unique and that we must reject those who are trapped by it, or that those who fail in their sexuality have crossed some line and they're now second class citizens and we shouldn't associate with them. Well those of us who are prideful, well, you know, that's just par for the course. That's totally understandable and acceptable. Well, the specific situation Paul was addressing in Corinth was a sexual sin, but it's not because sexual sin is somehow worse than all the others. It's just the one they happen to be dealing with at the time he wrote the letter. It's the issue in front of them. But other sins could have provoked the same kind of response. Look at the list again. If we're not supposed to eat with people who have committed these sins, well, we're all going to have to start eating alone because none of us is pure enough to pass this test. Coveting, idolatrous, greed, who among us hasn't failed that sin? I don't think Paul's describing the person here who fell into idolatry and is grieved over it. Rather he's describing a person who has this boasting, rebellious attitude that we've been discussing throughout this section. So the people who would qualify for being on this list are the people who embrace these sins, who boast in them, who have no intention of turning away from sin, and are totally unrepentant and would justify their actions as completely acceptable to God. These people wouldn't care what Scripture says about it or what God says about it. They love their sin and they're openly unrepentant. The problem is not that we find these sins in ourselves as believers, we will. The question is when we find these sins in ourselves, how do we respond? Do we grieve over them? Do we throw ourselves on the mercy of God and ask his forgiveness and ask him to take the sin and the guilt away? Are we willing to be corrected? Or do we justify our sin? Do we try to explain it as acceptable and defiantly claim our actions are without fault and we don't really care what God says about it? The issue is are we willing to be corrected or not? Are we willing to turn from our ways and strive to see life the way God sees it? Ultimately, in the short run, we may be defiant and rebellious, but ultimately in the long run we have to turn around. And Paul wants the Corinthians to make clear that sexual immorality is sin, it's not acceptable to God, and embracing the gospel and the truth of the gospel means you have to take sin seriously. So what does he mean by not associating, not eating and r with the one and removing the wicked from among you? I mean, what's that supposed to look like? Figuring out how to apply this is not easy, and it's not as straightforward as ostracizing anyone whose sin has become obvious. I mean, think about that. It would be silly to send flyers inviting everyone in the neighborhood to church and let them in and then have guards at the door to keep out someone who used to come but is deceiving himself. I mean that person might be your friend, and I think you can still be their friend, but you don't want to encourage their self-deception. I think associate in this context is to try not to do anything that encourages their self-deception. What does that look like? Is it excommunication? Is it shunning, or do we ignore them and pretend they don't exist? All of that's been debated through church history. I think the clue here is the phrase the so-called brother, the person who claims to be a follower of Jesus and at the same time lives their life as a pagan. A person who claims to believe in Christ but lives in rebellion and who is unwilling to submit to correction, to scripture, or to rebuke. Paul is saying you need to make it clear to that person that he has chosen a different path. You need to make it clear to him what following Jesus looks like, and make it clear that sin is sin and embracing the gospel involves turning away from your sin. It's saying to that person, we can't treat you as if you are a fellow traveler on this journey of faith because you're not. You're following a different path. Now, what does that look like in the local church? I wish I had a here's three steps you can always take, or here's five ways to figure it out, but I don't think there's a blanket rule that we can apply to every situation. I think this is one of those cases where we're gonna have to figure out based on our culture, our place in history, our specific situation, what it means to treat someone as an unbeliever and no longer encourage them in self-deception. Well that leaves us with the part about eating together in verse eleven, and I'm not sure, but here's my best guess with what I know at this point. The early church had a tradition of a fellowship meal together. We know that they met regularly for a meal, and that meal was intended to celebrate that they were the body of Christ. So this particular meal was a symbol of their unity in Christ. Later in the book, Paul's gonna chastise them for splitting into factions, like rich and poor during this meal that was to celebrate their unity and symbolize their mutual share in the gospel, and he's calling them out for that hypocrisy. Since Paul wants them to interact with this man in such a way that he cannot misunderstand and not mistake that his choices are wrong and indicate a rejection of the gospel, that implies they can't allow him to share this particular meal if this meal communicates that he's part of the community and a genuine believer. So I think that's what's going on. I don't think Paul would say you can never have this man over for dinner anymore. Rather, you can't send him the signal that he's a believer when he's embracing and clinging to his pagan lifestyle. Instead, you need to treat him as you would treat any unbeliever, evangelizing him as you would any other non-believer. Okay, to wrap this up, let me let me make a few reflections on this section. Notice that Paul says in 510, I didn't mean this, I meant that. That may seem like a small point, but as a Bible student, this tells you that Paul intended to communicate a specific message. Paul views himself as writing real letters to real people that make specific points, and here he tells the Corinthians, you got it wrong. I didn't mean that thing, I meant this thing. And we today can misunderstand Paul just as easily as the Corinthians. We should take this to heart as a model for how we approach Scripture and we should seek to discover the message that Paul or the author intended to say. We're not free to figure out what it means to me, what it means for today without first understanding what the author meant to say. The Bible can't mean one thing to me and another thing to you when we're both right. The Bible means what the authors intended it to mean. This letter means what Paul meant, and Paul is signaling to us how we are to approach Scripture. We are to focus on the author's intent. In that sense, the Bible's like every other book and that it means what the author intended it to mean. Second, we should ask why is Paul saying this stuff? What's at stake? What would he want us to come away with? Many people see Paul's concern here as being with the institution of the church. They think his concern is that he wants to create a stable, functioning, organized community. He's creating a new society in the church and he's concerned with the purity of that society. So we have to keep out the riffraff and the dissidents and keep the church as an institution pure. If you hold that view, it leads to a certain kind of thinking. For instance, I myself was told that I could no longer teach at a particular church because I missed too many Sunday morning services. I was told I'm a bad example and basically I could infect the rest of the church with my poor behavior. Well that kind of thinking is based on concluding that Paul wants to create a stable, functioning institution and that Paul is willing to sacrifice individuals to make that society work better. And if that's your view, then pastors and elders have to do some kind of surgery and cut out this person or that person to make the whole community work better. Bad examples just have to go. I think that's a misunderstanding of Paul's concern here and what he's trying to accomplish. Now I realize this touches on the bigger issue of what is a church, and that's too big to take on in this podcast, and I realize I'm not going to answer all your questions here. Maybe at some point I'll do another podcast on what is a church, but for now, let me just say this. I think the church is a group of people who have gathered together because they are fellow travelers on this journey of faith. We are on the same road to the same destination in the same geographical location. We believe the same gospel, we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Messiah who died on the cross in our place to pay the penalty for our sins, such that God can forgive us and free us from the slavery of sin and death. And we come together as a group to celebrate that gospel, to remind each other of that truth, and to encourage each other to maturity and wisdom and enjoy each other and seek God together. Now I think it's important to recognize that we don't determine membership in that group, God does. God chooses to have mercy on whom he has mercy. He opens the eyes of those he wants to open. And membership in this group belongs to those who have repented and are seeking life from God. And if he's opened your eyes and changed your heart and given you understanding, it's not my place to say otherwise. If he's opened your eyes, you're my sister or my brother, whether I like it or not. And if he's placed us in the same local body at this particular point in history, I don't think it's my place to kick you out. I don't get to exclude you or include you because you fit or don't fit my standards like skin color, social status, economic status, upbringing, background, coolness factor, education or accent. Likewise, I don't get to include you or exclude you based on your musical preference, how often you want to celebrate communion, whether you like a formal liturgy style or a casual liturgy style, what kind of prayers you prefer, if you want to stand or raise your hands or don't want to stand or don't want to raise your hands, whether you want to dress up, whether you like hymns or choruses. None of that stuff is a basis on which to say you get to be in the group and you don't. On the other hand, if I abandon the faith and change the gospel and start seeking enlightenment through acupuncture or something, then it's a real question whether I had faith or not, and in that case, you ought to step back and treat me as a nonbeliever. Paul's asking the Corinthians, why are you proud of your response to someone who has rebelled against the gospel? What is it that binds you together as a group if not the blood of Christ? What is it that binds you together if not your common belief that sin is a problem and that we need to be saved from it by the cross of Christ? Fellowship is having a share in something with someone. For believers it's having a share in the blood of Christ with each other. If you're not interested in the blood of Christ and the forgiveness of sins, then why are you still here? Because that's what makes us a group. It doesn't make sense to encourage a rebel in his delusion. It doesn't make sense to compromise or cloud the gospel for the sake of acceptance because the church is not a social club, it's not a service organization, and it's not a sorority or fraternity. You're making choices now that determine your eternal destiny, and you know that the other person is making choices that will determine his or her eternal destiny. Why would you want to encourage someone to make the wrong choice? It doesn't help to say to someone who has set their feet on the path to death, hey, glad you're with us. You're just encouraging their wrong choice. Now every local church faces the temptation to become an institution that exists for the sake of the organization itself. That's not what a church is supposed to be. It's the body of Christ. It's a gathering of believers, it's not an institution. It's the community of believers in a particular place who recognize who Jesus is and what he did for us. And we should view it, I think, more as an extended family than an institution or an organization. So I don't think Paul's encouraging them to have a committee that decides who's in and who's out, and I don't think he's trying to establish an institution for perpetuity. The issue is we ought to have enough basic understanding of the gospel and the moral compass of Scripture to know which path leads to life and which path leads to death, and we ought not to confuse the two. And we dare not tell those who are on the path to death that they are doing just fine. The temptation we have to resist is becoming an institution. Instead, we want to be an extended family that lives on its faith together. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how I reach those conclusions. If this podcast has been helpful to you or you've enjoyed listening, please leave a comment on your favorite podcast platform, subscribe to the podcast, and tell a friend about it. And if you can only do one of those things, telling a friend is best. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coats of Heartfeltmusic.org. I invite you to check out his other music. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.