Waching daily Oct 2 2018

Yes, we at our church believe strongly in membership. We want to have very meaningful

membership, which means that there's a covenant you take as you come into membership. And that

includes stipulations that if you fall into sin, you will potentially be, fall under the

discipline of the church, which is done for the purposes of restoration, to purify the

church, but we're hoping to restore that person, that the process of discipline will draw that

person back.

Church discipline is something we do seldom and we do slowly and with a great desire to

really undertake it in such a way that we draw that person back. So, you don't want

to be afraid to bring discipline to bear. Somebody has committed a sin that is public

and known. If somebody is living in a way that's rebellious. If somebody is just, they

clearly turned their back on the Lord, theologically even, bringing division in the church. We

want to put that person under the discipline of the church, but when people come to us

as elders and they have questions, we always want them to take the lead on that. So, we

as elders, it's not our job as elders to solve all those things, it's not our job to be involved

until the second or third step of church discipline. And so, if people come to us and say what

about this person, we'll say, you approach that person. If that person is sinning and

you're aware of it, you go to your brother and you appeal to him. You minister God's

truth to him and show him where he's wrong and call him to repentance. If he doesn't,

find somebody else. Take another person and the two of you go and confront him. And if

he still won't repent, then you come to us. Those first two steps can take weeks or months.

If that sin isn't directly terribly affecting the church, if it's not causing terrible division

or discord within the church, we're content usually to let it go on for a time and trust,

sometimes the Word of God works a little slower than we'd like, right. As people are praying,

as people are bringing truth to that person, as they're calling that person to repent,

we want to give them time. But our confidence is that God has given the church discipline

process for the purpose of either restoring people who are truly saved but have fallen

into sin, or identifying people who for a time were part of the church, but have proven

they're not believers. So, we have to have tremendous confidence in the process that

God has given us and then faithfully follow it even to the conclusion of removing people

from the membership of the church. And we should be very clear here, the Bible lays

out essentially two different kinds of discipline. There's, somebody has fallen into sin, is

one kind, and somebody's trying to destroy the church through division, is another kind.

We're usually talking, somebody has fallen into sin, and in that case, if we remove that

person from membership, we are not saying, we will have nothing more to do with you,

we're not saying, get away from us and never come back. We're just saying, we're removing

your membership because we can no longer say with confidence that you are a Christian.

We love you, we want you to turn to Christ, and we say, we want to welcome you back into

the membership of this church, but first, we need to see that you're actually, you've

become a believer. So it's important that we don't conflate those two so that we treat

somebody as a... We cast somebody off when really they simply need to hear the Word and

be saved.