Matthew eighteen, verse fifteen if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And he refuses to listen, even to the church. Let him to be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my father in heaven. This is the Word of God, and I do pray he would conform you to its image. Here is a fictional story that I'll return to a few times this morning. Pretend a couple of weeks ago in the snow that I am driving into the parking lot to park. And there's a snowbank down the middle like there is this morning, plowed in there. And as I go to turn into my parking spot, some guy in a Jeep, one of those ugly, tacky jeeps just cuts in front of me, goes over the little snowbank and steals my parking spot. Now I mind my own business and go find another parking spot. Should I do anything about that? Should I respond, should I react? Does the Lord tell me what to do to our parking spot thief? Matthew eighteen is the text that we would go to to find an answer for that. And so I want to go through it this morning. The first time I went to a church that practiced Matthew eighteen, the way it's described here, it was my very first Sunday at that church and that community. It was a communion service. The pastor read somebody's name and said the person had left their marriage and their family, and the church had appealed to him. The people that knew them had appealed to the person who left. The elders had appealed to them. And now the reading the name of the church. And if you know that person, the pastor said, you appeal to them, you go after them, tell them to repent and not bring shame onto the body of Christ and honor the Lord in their life and their marriage. And I was shocked. I had never seen that happen in a church before, and it wasn't even in the realm of possibility. I had conflicting emotions. I was a single guy I had. I was a punk. I was a new Christian. I had dangly earrings, the whole thing, uh, and felt wickedly out of place at that moment. And I ended the service thinking, this is a church that takes sin seriously. It takes holiness seriously. I had lots of different thoughts about it. That would take really another ten years or so to settle in my mind. But I went away thinking, you know, I'm not in Kansas anymore or I'm not in Albuquerque anymore. When you read Matthew eighteen, it can seem surprising what Jesus tells you to do. People can make it overly formulaic. They can make it like a procedure or a process or steps or whatnot. It's just Jesus telling you to be concerned for the holiness of the church, and he gives us a pattern to follow through it. In order for you to come to terms with what Jesus says here in Matthew eighteen, which, of course, it culminates in reading somebody's name to the church and telling the church to treat that person like they're not a believer because they're not following the Lord. In order for you to get from kind of our comfortable, individualistic society to that point, you really do need a baseline truth. And that baseline truth is that the church is supposed to look differently than the world. Particularly the church is supposed to love differently than the world. The church is not supposed to look like the world. We lead our lives differently than people in the world. We order our priorities differently than people in the world. It's very common for people in the world. And when I say in the world, I just mean outside of the church. It's very common for people to say that they are living their life to be the best that they can be, or they're living their life to be happy, or they're living their life for their family. After all, family is most important. I would do anything for my family kind of kind of line, and there's differences in those kind of answers. You know, a very bad reason to live your life is to be the best that you can be, and to get the most out of life you can. A better reason, I suppose, is to live your life for your family and to provide for them and and all of that. Christians think differently. We say my goal in life is to be pleasing to the Lord. I live my life to be obedient to him. I want to glorify him. That's what motivates me. That's what drives me to be obedient to Christ. Because of that, the church will look differently in the world. We have a different Lord than the world does a different goal, a different end, different ethics, different morality than the world does. You can almost encapsulate all of that with we have a different love than the world does. We've looked over this the past few weeks. If you recall, this discussion on church discipline begin with Jesus describing the shepherd who leaves the ninety nine to go find the one he's missing a sheep. The sheep is wanting, wandered off and got himself stuck somewhere. There's predators around. The shepherd abandons the ninety nine for the time to go find the one and bring it back. That's the expression of love. We looked at John fifteen where Jesus said, that's the pattern for how we care for each other. The father loves the son and sends the son to the world. The son, out of love. For the father, is obedient in his humanity to the father all the way to the point of death on the cross, dies after living an obedient life as a sacrifice for sin. He then tells us that if you have seen the love of the father for the son, and you've received the love of the son for you, then you too will walk in obedience. He says, you're not any longer my slaves. He says, you are my friends, because you know what the father has commanded me. And then he says, you are my friends if you do what I command. And so we see the love of God given to us is expressed through obedience to the Word of God. And then Jesus says that obedience culminates. Greater love has no one or no more mature Teleios is the. The Greek word greater love is maxed out. It is fully mature. When you lay your life down for your friends. So if you love God and you've received the love of God, you express that in your own personal obedience. And then in willingness to sacrifice yourself and your reputation and your integrity and your time to go after a friend, a brother who is stuck in sin that takes you back to Matthew eighteen, where Jesus says, the shepherd leaves the ninety nine to go for the one the church loves differently than the world. Somebody in the world might say, hey, telling me to repent for my sin that's not loving. Last week we looked at that family analogy which you see here again in verse fifteen if your brother sins against you, this is mapping on to a family context. Remember, the whole passage begins with Jesus taking a toddler in his arms as an image for who the greatest in heaven will be. It ends with a discussion about marriage. And then Jesus goes back to the children at the end of this discussion and brings a child back to him and says, unless you receive the kingdom as a child, you don't go to heaven when you die. So this is bracketed by the family analogy in the middle of those two brackets. He's talking about marriage. He's talking about Christians, brothers and sisters in the Lord together, using family analogies. If your brother sins, well, I mean, my goodness, do you have brothers? Do they sin? Do they sin against you? I mean, you better believe it. It should make sense. You're a bunch of sinners in a house together. Your brothers are going to send more against their brothers than against anybody else in the whole world. And Jesus understands that. And so he tells us how to respond to it because people will sin. First, the church loves differently. Second, we respond to that sin because love goes after the one. And that was the image of the shepherd leaving the nine to go for the one. But now it's played out in the church. That's the model. And everybody reads the shepherd story and says, yes, that's great of the shepherd. Of course, the shepherd goes for the one year shepherd. I want to be like that Shepherd. Well, this is what that looks like in verse fifteen. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him. Go and tell him your fault. He's going to tell you how to go after the one, and he's going to give you a little list here, a flowchart, if you will go after the one, you go after him one on one. He says, if your brother sins against you, go tell him his fault between you and him alone. Go find him and go tell him what he did. Doesn't say if anyone sins against you. Now, if a brother sins against you, he's talking about in the church. Brother or sister? By implication, the word can be used for both. He's not suggesting you follow this process with your neighbor who's not a Christian, with your boss, who's not a Christian. I mean, depending on your boss or what kind of company you work with, that would go very badly, right? You tell your boss, I just want you to know, according to Matthew eighteen, I'm supposed to tell you that you sinned against me yesterday when you were rude to me. I mean. This is talking about how believers interact with each other. You go to a believer and it notice it says, brother, who sins against you. It's not conjecture. It's not something about that guy doesn't strike me right. I'm going to go find out what it is. No, you're not policing the world and you're not policing the church against every kind of sin. We're talking about somebody who sins against you. Now, I recognize that every sin, in some sense is against the body. Every sin can have, carry on effects or knock on effects to the person might just be proud and arrogant and brash. He might be a, you know, a conniving attorney or whatever, or a businessman who's stealing from his work, and it's not stealing from you. But eventually, if he's part of your church, it's going to corrupt your own reputation and hurt the reputation of Christ in the church. I understand that, but the baseline here is he's talking about somebody who sins against you. Go to him now before you go and go to him, understands this basic truth from the book of Proverbs. Whoever covers an offense seeks love. It's to a man's credit or maturity if he's able to overlook an offense. So somebody sins against you in a petty way. You don't need to go discipline them right away. You don't need to go. Start with going confronting them. And I keep using the word discipline because that's the what this is often called. But you don't need to start with confrontation. Somebody sins against you in a petty way. You don't need to go confront. Every time someone sins against you, dial it down a little bit. Again, take the family analogy and go to your family. Your a husband. If a husband confronted his wife every time his wife sinned against him, it would be a very unhappy home. You have to have a category for you know what? She's sin against me. She probably didn't know what was happening. I'm going to let love cover that. And what love covers that means is that you're forgiving her. You're looking the other way. You're not keeping your record of wrongs. You're not measuring it in your heart like Mary. You're you're overlooking it and moving on. But you also recognize that not every sin can be overlooked. It's not good to overlook every sin. At some point, some sins need to be confronted. It's very easy to see in kids. Of course, you can't correct everything your six year old does. That's wrong. You cannot correct everything a six year old does. That's wrong. You just can't. You would be doing nothing else. But you also recognize you have to discipline your child. You have to. And a parent who says, I don't discipline my child because I love them too much. We recognize that's a lie. They love the parent, loves their own comfort. The parent loves their own sense of being loved by their child. Their parent loves a lot of things. If they're not disciplining their child, but their child is not one of them. Of course, a parent disciplines their child to steer them towards maturity. And so it requires wisdom from parents. It's easier with six year olds than with sixteen year olds. Amen. Like, it's just more wisdom is required. What to confront and what not to confront. You apply this in the church. Somebody sins against you. First step can love cover the sin? Is it something small and petty can love cover it? But if the answer is no, like, oh, this is something that person's repeatedly doing, it's hindering their own spiritual growth. It's hurting other people around them. It's they can't grow in maturity unless they're aware of this. Then the most loving thing for you to do is go and tell them what they did. That's verse fifteen. Go and tell them their faults just between the two of you. Again, don't go to your prayer group and say, hey, pray for me. I'm confronting. I'm confronting Jesse tonight. You know how he is. Of course, this isn't gossip. Not. I wouldn't dream of gossiping to my prayer group. It's just I need the wise counsel for you to tell me how to go confront Jesse. Don't do that. You know, go to him. Like if you're honestly looking for wisdom on how to do this, or you're nervous or scared, you can maybe go to somebody who's discipling you or a mature person just for help. That's a valid expression of this, for sure. but the point is, you're not spreading it around. You're not shopping it around. The point is, go do it. It is likely the person who's sitting and she doesn't even know they sinned against you. I will tell you just from my own, not even pastoral experience, my own personal experience. Most of the time in my life that somebody has come to tell me about some sin I've done against them, I honestly didn't know. Like, I didn't know that it was sin. Early on in my Christian life, there were things I was confronted about that I didn't know where sin. I didn't grow up reading the Bible. I didn't know that was a sin. My bad. Thank you for showing me. Sometimes somebody will say, do you know what? You did this or that to me? And I will say, like, I honestly don't remember. Like I honestly don't remember what happened. I don't remember doing that. Know that I didn't mean anything by it. Like I honestly didn't know. And that clears the air. You're like, oh, that's great, and we can move on together in life. I would say most of the time that's how the conversation goes. I didn't know I did that. I wasn't meaning to sing it to you. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry that I was rude to you. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I didn't know I wasn't thoughtful enough, I didn't love you enough, etc.. And you say that and it moves on. That's the way most of these conversations go. But what if you confront somebody and they respond with, well, that's not sin. What if I go to the person first step, the guy who cut me off in the parking lot, first step I think can love cover the sin. And then I think over the course of the week, I get more and more worked up about it, like it cannot cover the sin. All those people in McDonald's saw it. It besmirches the reputation of Christ. It must be dealt with. So Saturday or Sunday, next day at church, I go up to the person, corner them at the coffee and I say, last Sunday you cut me off in the parking lot. I was after that spot and you rambled over to the snow thing. It was so rude of you. Now it's possible the person will say, I'm sorry I didn't see you there, I apologize. Then case closed. But what if the person says, I don't think it's a sin to be rude? Where does the Bible say that rudeness is a sin? Mind your own business. Okay, well, that's. Now the person's not responding. And so now we need to do something else. And that's where Jesus goes next. But I do want to tell you, I want to be so clear before we go to the next step of this. The first step of church discipline. It often ends here. It often ends here because most Christians want to be corrected. Proverbs seventeen verse ten says, this rebuke goes deeper into a man of understanding than a hundred blows into a fool. Now a Christian who's confronted with sin generally genuinely wants to be confronted because we don't know how easy it is it in our own life for us to fall into this idea that we're the center of the world? Everything revolves around us, and we perceive everything as if we're the main character. So somebody comes up and says, the other day, I was trying to talk to you, and you were on your phone or whatever, and you weren't paying attention to me, and it hurt me like I didn't know. I honestly didn't know. I'm sorry. We slide into our own self-centeredness so easily. That's our own default position. So it helps us when somebody tells us this so that we are aware of our sin. We want to grow. There are things, as a new believer, you don't even know our sin. You want somebody to help you. You don't know. You want somebody to tell you. So again, how lame is it if Christians don't help each other this way out of supposed love for each other. I came back from a short term mission trip once. I had a van pulling one of those U-Haul trailers and had twelve high school kids crammed in the van, and we park in the church parking lot. And there was not this church, a different church. It has a field behind it, and that's where I'm supposed to put the trailer. They had these yellow parking barriers there, these like poles that come out of the ground and you can't see them in all the weeds that had grown up. So I kicked one of the high school kids out of the van, a kid with his license, who was supposed to watch as I backed up to make sure it didn't hit anything. Like five seconds later. Crunch. So I get out and look. Sure enough, one of those yellow parking things right in the bumper of the. Somehow it missed the trailer and hit the bumper as I was turning. So I look at this high school kid. What are you doing, man? Did you see this? And he said, yeah. Like, why didn't she say, I'm looking at him in the mirror? Why didn't you? You're going like this. Why didn't you say anything? He's like, well, I didn't want to embarrass you in front of everybody else in the van. What do you think is more embarrassing? That maps on to church discipline. So. Well, I didn't want to tell you what you're doing is sin because I didn't want the conversation. I assumed you already knew. No. Go tell the person. And it seems so obvious. But it's surprising to me how often this step is skipped. It's surprising to me, even in dramatic situations. Dramatic situations, severe conflict where a person says, I'm not going to tell you what you did. And this has never happened to me in real life, but you could imagine it in movies. You're having an argument with your your wife, and your wife says, you ask your wife, what did I do? And your wife might say something like, well, if you loved me, you would know what you did. Again, I've seen movies with that scene. Imagine that in church. There's distance and coldness and like, if somebody sending in, she'd go tell them. Don't make them guess. Don't just live life with unresolved sin. Go tell if they sinned against you. Go tell them. And don't respond with if you if you cared enough, you should figure it out. They can't. We're dumb. We can't figure it out. And by we there, I mean human beings. We can't figure it out. Or even in an extreme situation, like a marriage situation where somebody leaves their family and you think, I don't want to tell them that sin because they probably know. So you just skip the whole process because you don't want to. You don't want to tell him it's sin. And Jesus doesn't give you that option. Go and tell them just the two of you have a conversation about it. So I go tell the person, hey, you stole my parking spot and you were rude, and your jeep is ugly. And they say it's not a sin to be rude. All right, now what? Now what? Well, this is the second part of church discipline. Jesus says, if they don't listen to you in verse sixteen, go take one or two others along with you. Again, this isn't a formula. It's just a principle here. Go bring a witness to the confrontation. Maybe two witnesses, maybe a husband and wife together or something like that. You bring a pair of people for the conversation and this is to authenticate what happened. It is not two witnesses to the sin. That's not what we're talking about. You're not finding two witnesses to the sin. You're finding two witnesses to the confrontation, Which is incredibly helpful in these kind of situations. If you skip this part, you find yourself in the he said she said situation and nobody knows. But if you have this part, the witnesses can often bring a lot of clarity. This is a long standing biblical principle. This goes back to Deuteronomy nineteen. A single witness shall not suffice against a person for any crime or any wrong in connection with any offense. Notice the repetition, the threefold repetition of any any crime, any wrong, any offense. Don't receive the accusation just from one person. Now, this does not mean if somebody commits a crime in like a dark alley at night and there's no witnesses, they get away with it. No, what it does mean is you need witnesses to the confrontation of the sin. Impartial people that can figure out what really happened only on the evidence of those witnesses. two or three of them shall a charge be established. The Scripture says this is a New Testament principle two that's not some footnote in mosaic law. This is repeated at the heart of the New Testament, two Corinthians thirteen. Every charge must be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. Paul tells Timothy the same thing don't. Don't receive a charge against an elder, except by the testimony of two or three witnesses. And I have heard people argue that it's a higher standard for elders than it is for everybody else. It's not the case. It is the same standard for everybody. There's something in our hearts that we actually want to make a lower standard for elders than for everybody else. You know, some kind of like critical theory structure where people who are in authority have more power and influence and leverage. So the protection should be less for accusation against them. But the Bible sets that aside and it says, do not receive an accusation against somebody except on the testimony of two or three witnesses, and the witnesses are to the confrontation, not to the original sin. Like why do you need witnesses? And if they didn't see the sin? Because I'm telling you, witnesses that are impartial can go a long way in getting to the bottom of what actually happened. All right. So the following Sunday, I find the guy, you know, the guy. And I'm bringing two witnesses now to. I grabbed an elder and I grabbed somebody else. That's in our Bible study together. Or somebody else. The elder from that guy's Bible study or whatever it is. Again, it's not trying to make it complicated here. Just grab a witness or two. And I cornered the guy back at the coffee, and I say, two weeks ago, you cut me off in the parking spot. You rambled over the thing in your ugly jeep and you stole my spot. And it was rude. And I confronted you last week and you said rudeness isn't a sin. And so here I am now. And I have witnesses. Okay, now there's a hundred ways this can play out. The most common way, again, is the person who says, you know what? Now that I've thought about it, I do remember what happened. I was being rude. I'm sorry. I didn't know you were going to make it this big of a deal. Since that's obviously what's happening, I am very sorry. And then you leave it and you move on with life. You've won your brother. Or perhaps the person hears you and says, listen, honestly, it was dumping snow. I couldn't see the snowbank at all, much less anybody behind it. A snowplow came by and threw snow everywhere. I didn't even know you were there. And then the witnesses start thinking like, I remember that Sunday it was dumping snow. The snowplow did go by. You couldn't see across the parking lot, and the witnesses start to look at you like. Maybe you're making a bigger deal than you should. The witnesses go a long way into establishing it, or maybe again the guy responds with, where does the Bible say rudeness is a sin? It doesn't. I can act however I want right now. The witnesses can say, you know, the Bible does say rudeness is a sin. First Corinthians thirteen verse seven, love is not rude. All right. So go study that passage and let's meet here next week and talk about it like they're they're dealing with it now. And it goes on now. I chose the parking lot illustration because it's ridiculous. I have never had a conversation like that in my life. Honestly, nobody has ever come to me and said, would you help me confront somebody who stole my parking spot two weeks ago? Never happened. Yeah. You know, it happens all the time. This is an argument from the lesser to the greater marriage situations all the time. Probably every week, every two weeks. Something like this comes to my attention in the church where, let's say a husband is. Nagging his wife and mean to his wife and abrasive and undercuts her and speaks down to her and all the things. So what's the first step? She should confront him. And I reiterate what I said earlier. It is astonishing to me how often that first step is skipped with excuses like, he wouldn't listen. You know, it's been going on for so long, you don't know how he's like when he gets confronted, you know, like a hundred excuses. You know, we're talking about believers here. If the person's a believer, You would expect him to respond at the very least with, thank you for bringing this to my attention. That's a pretty bare minimum Christian response, but no, it's often skipped. Often it's not one on one. Often it's the prayer group is told. Sometimes a secular counselor is told. I brought in this one counselor to give me an outside wisdom. And of course, what is a secular counselor say? You know, get out of that marriage now of what secular counselors say. So you're stuck in this situation because you're not following Matthew eighteen. But maybe you go to your wife and say, you know, you're always saying, I forget if I made the husband or the wife, the the villain in the story. Um, say, say you go to you go to your wife then and say, you're always nagging me. You're always being mean to me, and you're always yelling at me and undercutting my authority. Whatever. And she says, no, I'm not, or you deserve it, or you're ugly and I don't like your Jeep or whatever the conversation is. She says it back. Okay. And so you're in a situation now where you've confronted her and she's not repenting. So now what? Well, now you go. Love's not covering this like this is an issue. So now when you go and you get a witness, maybe two witnesses, maybe a husband and wife pair, maybe somebody that knows you both or has been in your home and you've been friends with for a while, and you think, I don't want to do that. That's embarrassing. They would know we don't have a perfect marriage. Listen, have you been friends with them for a while? They know you don't have a perfect marriage. Like we've already crossed that bridge. Maybe an adult child who's in the house. That's a great witness. I know every situation is different. I'm not giving you a formula. I mean, every situation is different, but the command in the text here is go find somebody who can be a witness to this. And if they know you guys, great, it just makes it so much easier. You're not starting with, you know, where you're from and where your parents are from. They know you already. You're already there, and they can help you. And maybe they listen to the conversation. And at the end they say, you know what? You're not being fair to your wife. You're accusing your things that aren't really true. Or maybe they listen to the conversation. They say, you know what? Both of you guys are being rude to each other. You both have a lot of repenting to do. Let's help. Let's help you. We want to help you work through this in your marriage. That's great. Or maybe what I've seen oftentimes is at that point, one of the two people says, I've had enough. I'm out. I'm done with marriage. I'm not repenting. I'm not repenting. The Lord might ask a lot of things for me, but he does not ask me to repent from this. So I'm out. What do you do in that situation? And that's way more common than the parking spot situation. Well, that's what Jesus says in verse seventeen if he refuses to listen to the witnesses, tell it to the church. Again. It is so common to have people skip these steps and say, I don't want to confront this person for their sin. I don't want to bring witnesses. I don't want to tell the church I love them too much to do this. I love them too much. I've been friends with them for too long to confront them on their sin. I've known this person for ten years. I don't want to read their name to the church. And I'm telling you, that is rank favoritism that is forbidden by the Lord. The Lord says, confront him. Bring a witness if they're not repenting. Again, this is not a he said she said situation. There are witnesses that are establishing what is true and the person says, I'm out. Then you bring it to the church and you tell the church this guy is leaving his marriage. Now, why do so many church discipline situations involve marriage? Because it's the most personal relationship. Listen, if it was over a parking spot, even if you didn't do it and you didn't see the guy, you would repent, right? Like the witnesses come and there's elders sitting down in the atrium at the parking spot. You would say, I don't even own a Jeep, but I repent right now. Like, seriously, I'm sorry it wasn't me. But I am a bad driver, and I apologize. You know, but when it's something as personal as marriage, repentance is so hard. That's why it is not a coincidence. Listen to me carefully. The very next passage in this, after Jesus talks about forgiveness, he goes to teaching about marriage. That's where Jesus sees this being played out the most. So you appeal to the person. How sad would it be? To have a husband leave his family and to have the people in the church not go after him and excuse it by saying we love him too much to go after him. You don't know how mean his wife was to him. Nobody knows except those that are in the home. I've heard that so many times. That's why you have witnesses. Bottom line, you're saying we don't love him enough to go after him. We can't leave the ninety nine to go after the one we got. Somebody's got to stay here and think about the ninety nine. It's so sad. People will say, hey, this doesn't work. Church discipline doesn't work. That's another very common excuse I've heard from. It doesn't work. You can read the person's name. You think that's going to bring it back? It won't bring it back. I'm telling you, it does work. I started making a list this week of people that I know that this has worked on. And once I got to ten, I stopped. Jesus designs it to be effective and it very likely is effective. You can. It's very easy for you to think of a situation where somebody says, you know, they're mean to their spouse and undercutting them and argumentative and belittling them and all this, and they get confronted and they don't want to repent. Their spouse deserves it. Witnesses come and they're like, listen, you're being obnoxious. You're not being loving. You're not preferring your spouse. You're not living with them sacrificially. You're not honoring them, you're not caring for them, etc.. And the person says, I don't want to, and I'm leaving this marriage because I can't do it anymore. And they say, okay, if you do that, we're going to tell the church. That's a sobering effect to that. That's like throwing cold water in your face. If you've been in the church a while, you don't want that to happen. Even at a superficial level. You don't want people that you've been around for so long to have your hear your name read in front of everybody and know that you're leaving your spouse. And more times than you probably would believe that has happened where the spouse has been notified. We're going to read your name to the church because you're not repenting. You're not coming back to your family, and you're like, okay, if it keeps you from reading the name, give me. I'll work on this another month or two. That's a very common outcome. It's almost as if the Lord knew what he was talking about when he designed this, isn't it? He uses means to keep people in the church. And how sad is it, then, to have people who say, I don't trust these means I don't trust them? I don't think they'll actually work. You know, there's a part of it that's joking a little bit. Like I would tell one of my friends, I would tell you guys, if I ever leave my wife, I want you to come fight me kind of thing. Like I'm saying it to the whole church, it's obviously a bit of a joke, but if I'm telling one of my friends like Alex Hargrove, you know, if I ever wig out on the faith or leave Dedra, you come find me and you punch me in the face so hard, and Alex would do it. This guy's a marine. He would do it. You know, and there's an additional step beyond that. Like, if that doesn't work, he's going to bring others. And if that doesn't work, he's going to let all of you know, I don't want that. None of us want that. There's a way that that guards the purity of the church. That's what this is about, by the way. And that's why the people in the church need to step up from like, you know, I don't think it'll work on this person. It's not even it might work on this person. You don't know if it will or won't. But let me tell you what one hundred percent works on it. One hundred percent is effective on guarding the purity of the church. That's the point. You don't skip this process for some artificial, fabricated reason about the person, because that's poisonous to the church. The last thing Jesus says in the New Testament about the church in Matthew twenty eight. He's going to build it by making disciples, baptizing them. So you know who's in the church. They're baptized into church membership and then teaching them to obey all that he's commanded. That's Matthew twenty eight. The very first thing he says about the church is Matthew thirteen, where he does the parables. There will be wheat and tares together, and it's the church's job to care for the holiness of the church. You can't pull out every tear. You'll hurt the wheat. But you know what you can do. You can encourage one another towards godliness. And when you have a weed that gets so entangled, it's so refusing to repent. And you confront, then you confront. As I mentioned, not everybody does respond. You bring the church involved and people do listen to the church. A wise son hears his father's instruction, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke. I think of this verse when somebody says, I don't want to confront the person because they won't listen. What is that saying about the person when you say that? What is that saying about the person? It's saying that they're a scoffer. They're not going to listen to reproof. They're a scoffer. But of course, sadly, not everybody does respond. And so when the church is told, it says, treat him like you would a Gentile and a tax collector. Verse seventeen, that doesn't mean that you throw rocks at them. That doesn't mean that you are mean to them. But it does mean you don't have communion with them. It doesn't mean you don't worship Jesus with them. You do evangelize them. You do pray for their softened heart. You don't encourage them in their faith because they're not walking in it. They're not walking in it. Finally, love accepts the outcome. Love accepts the outcome now. From my own pastoral experience, I have seen people disciplined for leaving their families. And I've seen people not disciplined for leaving their families. Those that are not disciplined. I'm telling you, people sometimes say I don't want to discipline them because then they'll get angry at church or bitter at the church. No, they're going to get angry at bitter the church because they left their family. They're going to say, I just want to be friends with people at church that encourage me. And you didn't support me when I left my spouse. You didn't support me when I left my family. So I can't be friends with you anymore. That's what happens over time, whether or not you exercise church discipline. They're eventually going to get to the point where they say, you didn't support me when I walked away from my family, so we can't be friends. They get cold. They get bitter at their church for not supporting them in their sin. That's why the most loving thing to do is to confront such a person. The most loving thing to do is to bring a witness and then to tell the church. And if they refuse to repent, love, trust that what Jesus designed is the best thing for the church. We'll talk about what it means. Bound and earth bound in heaven tonight. Lord, we are grateful that you have designed. A church that is your body. The body cares for each other. The thumb hurts and the rest of the body cares for it. The foot is stuck in the snow and the rest of the body gets it out. May we be that kind of church that loves each other enough to care for one another, to find one another, when we're stuck in sin, to help us see when we're blind. To lovingly encourage us. As we try to grow into Christ's likeness. Lord, we need help. We are short sighted. We are blind. We do have logs in our own eyes. All of us. So Lord, help us see clearly by showing us your son through His Word. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson. If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website. If you want more information about the Master's Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to TMZ.com. Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C. area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel. I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service. But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church. Now, may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly. Serve the Lord faithfully and share the gospel boldly.