Now, there is a such thing as church discipline, how it's supposed to go. And church discipline is a lengthy process. It's not a one, two, three step process and nothing like that. It's very lengthy and it takes time. And it's built on compassion and love towards the individual, wanting to see them grow in Christ, wanting to see them come to repentance and grow. Now, how church discipline is supposed to go is that if you see a brother or sister in a sin, you go to them and correct them.
If they hear you and if they repent, you've won your brother or sister. That's how it's supposed to start. Now, if you got somebody who's just rebellious and they don't want to hear correction, then you go bring a witness, you go bring a witness to you, to them. And you try to, you two, all y'all together, try to convince the individual of their sin, hoping that they will come to repentance.
This isn't a, hey, get it together, Ivy and C, this says, hey, man, this is wrong, or hey, sister, you know, you see this? I love you. This is sin. God's word. You're bringing God's word to bear in what's going on in the person's lives. And if then you want them, then praise God. But then you have those cases where you have one person talk to them, you have a few people talk to them, and they still don't want to hear. They still rebellious and they still don't care.
They still want to do their own thing. This is where you bring it before the church. Now, the rest of the body is aware of what sin has happened, and they are talking to the person, loving on them, surrounding them and encouraging them to trust in the Lord, to repent, to turn from this evil, turn from this sin, whatever it is, turn from it. Because obviously this person doesn't agree to this sin at this point.
The individual does not agree to this sin, does not agree that they need to stop, does not agree to any change. And at this very last point, when you've done all of this, that's where you have excommunication. Excommunication seems harsh to the outside, but excommunication is basically saying, okay, we tried, now we got to send you away. And at this point, it means you're removing them from the church roles. They're no longer part of the church and you no longer see them as a Christian.
Because the heart of a Christian turns from sin, not practices it and not amends it, not loves it. See but when you realize there's an individual who loves their sin, who is not turning from their sin, then they're showing fruit of somebody who may not truly be a Christian now. And we have to send them away. And at that point we still pray for them, we don't stop loving them as far as praying for them. But we can't, we can't associate with you at this point.
We can't break bread no more like we used to because you, you're rebellion against God and you find that's okay. That's the issue. Now we're not talking about how we deal with sinners in the world who don't profess Christ, we love on them, we come around them, we eat with them and all those things.
But when you got somebody who profanes the name of God, who has come and sat with us, who broke bread with us, proclaimed the name of Christ and then turned and now no longer wants to follow God and just spit set God and disrespects God, that's a person you don't want to associate with. You're not going to want to associate with, hey, I'm going to pray for you. Pray God, rock your heart and you come back to him. Because at the end of the day, we don't know who's God.
At the end of the day we don't know, only God does. And we leave all that to him. Once again, he is sovereign.