The Lord said to Moses, Speak to the Israelites and say to them, I am the Lord your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the Lord your God. Speak my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live by them. I am the Lord. No need to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the Lord. Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother. Choose your mother. Do not have relations with her. This is the word of the Lord. It is taken from one Corinthians chapter 5. It can be found on page 1147 for the Church Bible. One Corinthians chapter 5, page 1147, it is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans, a man has his father's wife. And you are proud. Shouldn't you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowships a man who did this. Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit, and I have already passed judgment on the one who did this just as if I were present. When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord. Your boasting is not good, don't you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough. That grid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast, as you really are, for Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, therefore let us keep the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth. I have written to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people, not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindler or idolatrous. In that case you would have to leave this world, but now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother, but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolatry or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler, with such a man do not even eat. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside, expel the wicked man from among you. This is the word of the Lord. Our Heavenly Father we do ask that you will take these gifts as a token of our love for you, use them for your glory we pray. Now we ask that your word will speak to our hearts and lives by your spirit in Jesus' name. Amen. This morning we come back to a series of sermons on one Corinthians which we left just a few months ago at the end of chapter 4, so briefly I want to summarise the book so far. The church of Corinth you remember was founded by the Apostle Paul some years before he wrote this letter. The people in the congregation had received many gifts of the spirit and he compliments them on that and thanks God for those gifts early on in the letter. But gradually some of them have become rather proud and arrogant of what they have received from God. And in those opening chapters Paul had to remind those who claim that they were better than others of the grace and love and mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ. They were not saved because of some good they had done or because they were well educated or whatever. In fact most of them says Paul were nothings in the eyes of the world when they became Christians. People didn't deserve God's salvation. The only thing a Christian could ever boast about said Paul in those early chapters was the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior. And so Paul had said we preach Christ crucified. And then he went on to show the Corinthians that they had to grow as Christians, they had to grow and mature as Christians. And now in these chapters the follow Paul picks up some deeply practical issues and really he takes what he has taught in the first four chapters and now applies it in very specific areas of their Christian and church life. And in the first of these in chapter 5 Paul confronts a major problem. There is serious immorality going on in this church. But more than that the Christians are tolerating it, first one a man has his father's wife and exactly what the relationship was, we can't be completely sure. One that he doesn't say, he has his mother, it's probable that the sexual relationship he's talking about was between a man and his stepmother. This sort of relationship was not just considered incestuous and wrong in the Christian community or in the Jewish community as in the passage that we've just read from Leviticus. This sort of relationship Paul said is even considered wrong among the pagans, even they don't get involved in that sort of sin. A long time ago now I was a member of a church where a new couple joined who were Christians. The trouble was that both had just got divorced from their previous partners, also Christians and had been asked to leave their church because of that particular immorality and disobedience to the Lord. Now was our church now receiving these two people in, how were we supposed to deal with the situation? The majority wanted to say nothing. Some felt if we were truly loving to this couple as Christians then we should forgive them and accept them. The problem was that even though they had completely torn apart two Christian families and children the whole community knew about it they remained totally unrepentant, but it was easier to ignore the problem or to pretend that the right thing was to do nothing, that's the way we are. We prefer to keep the peace. Paul's main problem in this chapter is not actually with the couple, they are wrong, they are behaving immorally not just in the eyes of the church but the world as well. Paul is concerned about how the church is reacting. In verse 2 he again mentions the congregations arrogance and boasting, they are not listening to God in these matters, they think they know it all. When they should rather say have been filled with grief at such immorality and have asked the couple to leave the church because of their continued sin and lack of repentance. Paul makes the point again in verse 6 and you see that your boasting is not good. It's not good enough to think we have the gift of the spirit of knowledge or discernment or whatever other gift these people thought they got. It's not good enough to think that we've got all of that if it takes away from the truths of God's word. Do we know better than God? That's really the question here. When we disobey God we are becoming arrogant and boastful. Their boasting says Paul is no good. So Paul appeals to the need for individual Christians and the church as a whole to be different, to be separate from the ways of the world. This is what the Bible elsewhere calls and Paul elsewhere calls holiness. Here there is an appeal for holiness, for separation, for distinctiveness as Christians. If you turn on to 1 Peter chapter 1, 1 Peter chapter 1, verses 15 and 16, Paul sums up this idea of holiness building on the Old Testament ideas of holiness and applying it now to Christians. 1 Peter 1 verses 15 and 16, just as he who called you as holy, so be holy in all you do. For it is written be holy because I am holy as the Old Testament verse Peter quotes at his people. Be holy says God for I am holy. We have a God you see who is separate, perfectly good, separated from sin, separated from sinners and sinful people. And so we must be like him, be holy because I am holy and one of the ways we show our holiness is in our behavior where to separate ourselves as far as possible from sin and sinful people and this is for two reasons. First as part of our service to the Lord who is holy and as we've seen once his people to be holy. So that's the first and most important reason it is an obedience and service of the Lord that we wish to separate ourselves in this way and to behave in a way that is distinctive. But secondly it is also part of our witness to the world in which we live, that we don't get involved in or condone sinful people and their behavior. So in this passage Paul talks about both the holiness of Christians as individuals and what we might call corporates holiness or the holiness of the whole church of God's people. And first on the personal side then, verses 2 to 5, Paul is surprised that this man has not yet been put out of the fellowship. Now you can just hear, can't you? How people would react if that letter had been sent to this church about a person worshipping with us in this church. How unloving Paul is, wanting to get rid of somebody from the church, what does he think he's saying, nasty apostle, how unkind, how unloving, what makes him think he's so good, better complain to the bishop, Paul has no such worries about criticism. Paul is surprised that this man has not been put out. Now we need to be clear here, Paul never expects perfection. He is the first to say that he is the worst of all sinners. But Paul does understand the demand for perfection and holiness. He understands God's demand for holiness. He knows that those who wish to be known as Christians are to live holy lives. Lives that obey God's law, lives that will set them apart from the rest of the world and the values and the thought forms and the ways of the world around. And the world then of course which will look off and see evidence of obedience to God as they watch the holiness of God's people. The Paul, the difference for the individual between being holy on the one hand and not holy on the other, is not perfection against imperfection. But it's the difference between asking God continually for forgiveness and for help in leading a holy life and not admitting there's a problem at all. That's the issue in this passage. The problem with this couple is not that they have sinned and repented. Surely that is how all Christians are sinners who have repented. That is not the problem. The problem is that they refused even to acknowledge their sin and arrogantly continued blatantly to flaunt their sin in the eyes of the community, not just the Christian community but presumably the society around as well. And Paul's concern is for personal holiness here to begin with. Paul wants this church to deal severely with this couple so they will see their sin, repent and be saved when Christ comes again on the day of judgment verse 5. This idea you see of sending them out of the church is designed to restore the individuals to salvation and to enable them to stand on the great death judgment before the Lord. To take this very seriously, grave sin whether the congregation sees it in you or not needs repentance. For that final judgment day is coming when all our sin will be revealed, all the sin that is that isn't clothed and covered by the righteousness of Christ. Unless you turn for forgiveness to Christ and seek to amend your ways and to follow Him, then judgment does await and that is what's so concerned and worried for for those two individuals in the church. But the church should draw attention to their continuing sin by expelling this couple is infinitely, literally, infinitely preferable to falling into the hands of God as an unforgiven unrepentant sinner on the day of judgment if somebody wants to talk about love, what is more loving? To let a child have his own way and walk yet again into the fire where eventually he dies because he burns himself, or to castigate the child for going near the fire. I mean, that is really what Paul is dealing with here, which is more loving. To let this couple go their own way to hell or to do something about it and to step in. So Paul is concerned here first for the individual standing before God and that should be our concern for each other here too. How do we deal with things when we see a continuing lifestyle that is sinful and far from holy? Do we fear for the eternal security of the individual? Do we try to do something to restore them? Even if it means being severe with them. Or do we pretend the problem doesn't exist and doesn't concern us? At the end of verse 8 Paul goes on to talk of the holy life as a life of sincerity and truth. How do we deal with those people among us who profess the faith that are blind to their sin? How do we handle a situation in which all can see that the priorities of materialism and earthly possessions have taken over an individual's life to the extent that they cannot even see their sin anymore? They cannot even see that they've made idols out of their greed and taking on the values of the world around. See we can all identify with the horrific sin of incest but look at verse 11. Paul says we should separate ourselves from the sexually immoral but he also refers to those who are greedy or idolatrous. To be greedy for wealth, possessions, for the huge house, the fast car, the best clothes and so on. Once these have become a priority in your life, your holiness is suffering. Those are the values of this world, not of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You're no longer distinguishable in your goals from those around. And we find this so often in individuals, in church life, in England, just as Paul did in his day. Remember how Paul had to plead with the Corinthians in his second letter to them, in two Corinthians, to give money to the Lord's work? And yet he tells them that the Macedonian Christians who were renowned for their extreme poverty, the words he uses of the Macedonians, renowned for their extreme poverty had given from that poverty in abundance. That's the difference between personal holiness and the holiness of the church, the Corinth and the holiness of the church in Macedonia. Their values were different, their lifestyle was different, their priorities and goals were different. Are we separated from the values of this world so that we always look to how much more we can do to further the work of the Lord Jesus? Or just exactly what are our priorities? God knows, we're not perfect, we're not holy, but for that very reason you see, we need to continue to return to him and seek forgiveness and make sure that with God's help we are seeking sincerity and truth in our lives as individuals and together as a church. Personal holiness does matter before God and it's not a theme that people, including myself, like to hear about these days because it hits every single one of us doesn't it? Every one of us is not holy as we should be. But then secondly Paul here is concerned for the holiness of the congregation. Don't look it up unless you are quick with your fingers that in one piece of chapter 2 verse 9 we read this, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. You are a holy nation for speaking to the church to be anything other than holy as a church is to be arrogant. Sorry Peter is speaking to the church there and to be anything other than holy as a church is to be arrogant and to think we know better than the Lord. God's will for us here in Hartford is to live out God's holiness. We must become what we are. Look at verse 7 of our passage, get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast as you really are for Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed. This is a lovely theme that keeps recurring in Paul's writings. It's the idea that God has made us something but now we have to work it out in our lives. You are this therefore be it and it comes through so clearly in this verse, we are holy, we are without the old yeast. Now be it, get rid of the old yeast. God has chosen you now be, God's chosen people. God has made you a holy nation, now be God's holy nation in this world. Now we have to be seen to be different from the world around you see. It's not just good having abstract theology that we are a holy people. It's now got to be worked out in practice. The Corinthian church must take this issue of incest seriously if they are to work out in practice the holiness of the church. When I was a child we used to bake most of our bread for ourselves at home. I have to say we what I really mean is my sister and I very quickly learned how just a tiny little bit of yeast was needed in a batch of dough to make that dough multiply in size several times and in verses 6 to 8 Paul picks up that picture and he says that if you want something to remain uninfected and fresh and good you have to clear out the old spores of yeast that remain. In the Bible because of the way in which yeast sort of hung around and infected everything in the Bible yeast became a picture of evil and sin. Just as a small amount of yeast has such a dramatic effect so a small amount of sin has a dramatic and pervasive effect and again Paul brings the whole thing back as he kept doing in the first four chapters to the gospel message of Christ the Passover lamb who died. That's where he keeps you'll find this always through this book of one Corinthians. You found it so clearly in the first four chapters right back to the basic gospel. That's where we turn every time for our guidance to the message of Christ crucified. Just as yeast was not used in the Passover festival so now says Paul be careful as you deal with being a church for whom Christ died that's the issue Christ died for his church therefore do what he wants be what he wants as you celebrate the feast first eight the festival of being God's people keep yourselves pure forgiven and humble so pretend we don't sin as a church we do with the Lord's help we need to ask him to clear out that which is unholy in our midst surely as we come to communion this morning there's no better time to pray about this and to think about what we're doing Paul is not worried of course about our contact with the world out there we're not to sit in judgment on them says Paul in verse 12 God will do that we need to be out there among the world proclaiming the gospel to them Paul isn't preaching here a ghetto mentality be so separate you never have any contact that's not what Paul is getting at but Paul is saying we do have a responsibility among ourselves as a church to point out to each other where we're failing to be holy and where true repentance is required of us and as a church we must never tolerate continuing evil in our midst where blatant sin continues without any desire to repent whether that sin is sexual immorality greed continued drunkenness or whatever we must refuse to have fellowship verse 11 makes that very clear and those are tough words for us today we did in a society which is made of God of toleration it has made a God of toleration the only people who are not tolerated are those who have definite views about anything have you noticed that today it's true isn't it the only people who are extremists are those who can't tolerate something evil or somebody else that is our society all over heard that just not having come to eight o'clock this morning for the first time in about a year I actually listened to about ten minutes of the of the Sunday program and there we heard it again as we do week after week after week on the media the extremists in other words those who really believe in God and believe that you're going to hell if you don't that's extremists we made a God of toleration so these are very tough words and they sort of fight against the society in which we live but I'm sure that one of the great failures of our church today is to take the whole question of church discipline seriously enough how holy are we all here in Hartford we're far from a perfect church and God himself of course knows that this side of heaven we won't be a perfect church but that continuing striving after holiness should be a mark of any thriving church and where people are worshipping the idols of our day without true repentance the idol of money oh yes that is such an idol even among us is it not the idol of money the idol of housing of cars oh yeah that's an idol too in our society just look at the way the teenagers deal with cars the idol of education or of leisure or of wealth creation or of an immoral lifestyle where people in our mid-star court up in these things are not repentant and not admitting that there is sin there then we need to be helping each other by being quite definite about what the Bible demands of all of us as Christians and a Christian lifestyle in our church we should be working in love and together in these things because true love for each other will point it out because we will fear for that person when they eventually stand before the Lord their judge it is that series true love will be there as we point these things out the love for any individual who has to be disciplined is seen in the fact that our greatest concern is for their eternal security not for how they just feel at this moment that our love for God will also be absolutely paramount as we seek to honour his name in this and serve him as a holy people a people who are quite notably different from the world around let's challenge ourselves to repentance today first for our own sin and lack of holiness isn't that true of all of us the yeast of malice and evil that affects us but let us also with care caution and love seek to make our church more the church of God's desire a holy people separated unto God's service and to obedience to our Lord let's pray father we come before you in true repentance repentance for our personal lack of holiness
father forgive us father we come before you in repentance for our corporate church lack of holiness
our inability is or our lack of desire to tackle the thorny issues the tricky issues
father forgive us help us to be a holy people unto our Lord for we ask it in Jesus name oh man song that I'm about on the scene group led us in purify my heart let me be as gold as a beautiful song that really does sum up today's talk doesn't it and I wonder whether giving advanced notice to Paul I wonder whether we might sing it quietly during the reception of communion when we're taking the bread and the wine they might perhaps just sing it quietly to us that would be lovely I think and remind us of our need for holiness before the Lord we stand now to sing here oh my Lord I see the face to face