>> Jen: Hello, faith listeners, and welcome to the Bible explain podcast. I was going through my old episodes, and I noticed that recently, the way I've been titling, the episodes are a lot less creative than I used to be. One of my most creative titles, I think, was back in the book of Genesis when I was talking about Isaac. There was a story about how Isaac dug three wells, and I named the episode. Well, well, well. Uh, to this day, I'm still so proud of that
particular episode. But then I was looking at the episodes recently, and I'm just like, now I just title it based upon what I'm talking about. I'm not getting, like, super creative with my titles anymore. So, what do you guys think? Should I go back to trying to be more creative with my titles, or do you like just the matter of fact titles that I have been doing? So you know the topic immediately when you, uh, click on the episode? I'd like to hear about
that. You can find my contact information in the description of the episode, and also, don't forget that you can share a prayer request with me. M at any point. I do read all of my emails, and if I get a prayer request, I will write you down my little prayer journal, and I will pray for you for the week. So let's go ahead and read one. Corinthians 5913. It's a short little segment we'll be talking about today, but it has a
lot of content. So I'll be reading this out of w eb, but make sure to grab, uh, the version of the Bible that you prefer this morning, and let's read this together first. Corinthians 5913. I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual sinners yet not at all. Meaning with the sexual sinners of this world or with the covetous and the extortionists or with idolaters, for then
you would have to leave the world. But as it is, I wrote to you not to associate with anyone who is called a brother who is a sexual sinner or covetous or an idolater or a slanderer or a drunkard or an extortionist. Don't even eat with such a person. For what do I have to do with also judging those who are outside? Don't you judge those who are within, but those who are outside, God bless judges. Put away the wicked man from among yourselves.
So, on Tuesday, we talked about the first part of, uh, first Corinthians five and how there was a guy in the corinthian church who was living in sin, like in sexual sin with his stepmom, which even the Corinthians, the non saved Corinthians at the time, didn't engage in something like that. That was considered taboo and off limits to sleep with your stepmom or stepfather. So Paul writes to the corinthian church, and he's
like, what are you guys doing? Even the Corinthians, who are notoriously sexual in behavior, don't even do what you guys are allowing in your church. What is wrong with you guys? You need to get this guy out of your church, because he is engaging in incest and in sexual sin, and it is not loving for you guys to allow this kind of immorality inside your church.
So he says, you guys need to get together and reprimand this guy and then excommunicate him from your church, because ultimately it's going to be better for that man in the long run, because then when he loses his church family, he might realize this terrible sin that he's doing and turn away from it and actually turn towards God bless once again. So actually, Paul is thinking about the well being of that man as well. He's not just saying for the church to bully the guy.
He's, uh, considering the well being of that man as well as the well being of the church, because Paul also goes into the fact that a little bit of sin in the church will corrupt the entire church. Just like a little bit of yeast in the dough will spread throughout the entire
dough. So the corinthian church is having a few problems, not just this problem with sexual sin that's going on in their church, but they're also having the problem of being very arrogant and divisive and overly critical of things that they shouldn't be critical about, but then not critical enough of things that they really should be critical about. So Paul continues on to in first Corinthians five, in verse nine, I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual
sinners. So apparently Paul wrote them a previous letter that we don't have. And, uh, it really irritates me when people are like, oh, you know, the Bible references other letters and other books. And so because the Bible references these letters in books and we don't have them, that means the Bible is incomplete. That argument drives me up a wall, because would you ever consider just a normal book, like an average book in your library, to be incomplete because it references another book?
No, you wouldn't. Just because Paul wrote the Corinthians a letter that we don't have nowadays doesn't mean the Bible is incomplete. It just means that God who has preserved the Bible throughout the ages, decided that that letter was not for all of time. But first Corinthians chapter five is, in fact, for all of
time. And you can see why this chapter is in here, because basically we can look at all of first Corinthians five and apply it to our church right now, because our churches right now are emulating the corinthian church basically to a t. So Paul had written them a prior letter that said, have no company with sexual sinners. But he clarifies what he meant in that
letter. He says, yet not at all, meaning with the sexual sinners of this world or with the covetous or the extortionists or with idolaters, for then you would have to leave the world. So he says, look, church, I am not telling you to not associate with the sinners of the world. The people who are not christians, you're going to have to associate with them because you live in the world. And if you wanted to get away from them, you'd have to literally leave the world.
So I'm not talking about those guys. I'm talking about the sinners that are inside of your church. He says, as it is, I wrote to you not to associate with anyone who is called a brother who is a sexual sinner, like that man who was sleeping with his, his mother in law or his, I'm sorry, his stepmom or covetous, or an idolater, or a slanderer, or a drunkard, or an extortionist. Don't even eat with such
a person. So if somebody is in our church and they are living in sin, whether it is sexual sin, say they are living with somebody who they are not married to, or they are covetous, meaning they are greedy and can't get their hands on enough. And man, can. I think of some pastors that are covetous. I recently, I told you guys, I'm really into new
thought right now. And, um, I, one of the pastors that's real big into new thought is Joel Osteen and all of the other pastors right now that are famous, that are friends with him. And man, do they have a lot of wealth. They encourage people to give to their churches. They say, you know, if you guys pay us, God bless is going to rain wealth and rain blessings down on you. So you have to give, give in order for God bless to bless you financially. That is what some of these pastors
do. And so they're very greedy, and they're also taking advantage of their flock. Paul says we aren't supposed to be associating with people like that. There's another, um, website that has gotten pretty famous over the years called pastors in sneakers. I think it is. You might have heard of it. And the entire website just shows famous pastors throughout America right now and how much their clothing items that they're wearing costs.
I know that Stephen Furtick is often featured on that website because he wears, I don't know, thousands of dollars worth of clothes on his body every single Sunday. So there are certainly covetous pastors out there that us christians need to be very wary of. That being said, though, you know, the church is supported pretty much solely through the giving of the congregants, but that giving should never feel
forced. You know, the pastor shouldn't be going up there and preaching a sermon about how God bless is going to bless you if you give, or preaching a sermon about how if you don't give, you're a sinner or something like that. There's a proverb that says God bless loves a cheerful giver. So the. The congregants of the church need to be cheerfully giving, not giving, out of obligation. So Paul says, to avoid sexual sinners in our churches, to avoid the covetous, to avoid
idolaters. Obviously. Idolaters is anybody who idolizes something above God bless. Now, of course, all of us have our sins. We can never avoid sin fully in the church because all of us are messed up and all of us, uh, have our problems and have our vices and have our sins.
But if we are outwardly doing these things, like outwardly idolizing something above God bless and spreading that around and boasting about it in church, that is what Paul is saying to avoid is people who are outwardly and blatantly idolizing things above God bless, whether it be other gods or whether it be something else in their lives that they might be putting above God or a slanderer. You know, to slander somebody means to tell lies about them behind their back or a
drunkard or an extortionist. Don't even eat with such a person. You know, that might sound harsh in today's language where everybody's like, oh, you know, christians need to be a lot more tolerant. And by the way, that's another thing that drives me up a wall. Tolerance is not a christian virtue. You are not going to find the word tolerance in scripture in any sort of positive light every single time. The word tolerant is stated it is with a negative connotation. Tolerance
is not a christian value. We don't need to be tolerant of things going on in our church. Tolerance is not loving. So no, christians don't need to be more tolerant. They need to be a lot less tolerant, in my opinion. So in our culture right now of tolerance and love, you know, Paul's words here, they sound kind of harsh. Don't eat with a Christian who is engaging in these things. That sounds very harsh. But what would that do if we refused to eat with people who are acting like this?
That would make that person think twice about what they are doing. When their church and everybody in their church is rejecting what they are doing, that's going to make them feel a little bit shame, and it's going to make them think twice about what they're doing. And ultimately, maybe that person would change their ways and be accepted back into the fold again. And be
accepted back into the church again. Now, in today's day and age, it doesn't really matter so much because there's a church on every single corner that will tolerate pretty much anything and say a church rejects somebody because they are acting in one of these ways, that person can just leave the church and go find another church very easily and feel accepted at that
particular church. So unfortunately, nowadays, because of the amount of tolerant churches there are, it causes the sinner to not have to think twice about their sins. And that's why it's so important for churches to be unified across the globe, across America. And how do we be unified if we don't know people at the other churches? Well, we're unified because we follow the same principles in the Bible. It's
really that easy. But sadly, most churches don't actually pick up the Bible and read it and apply it for their churches. So that is why the church is not unified. It's because they're not actually reading the Bible.
But if we all read the Bible and applied the principles of the Bible, my church, which is in Ohio, could be unified with a church that is in California, and nobody in that church would ever meet each other, but we'd still be unified as the body of Christ because we're reading the same text and following same
text. So churches aren't unified right now. And that's causing a lot of issues, because if somebody is doing something wrong, they can just leave a church, even if they get kicked out and go find a church that accepts them just the way they are. So Paul says, don't even eat with such a person. Now it could be that Paul is also talking about, don't take communion with this person. Like, tell them, hey, you cannot participate in communion right now because of what you are
doing. So it could be that Paul is not specifically saying that in every single one of these cases you have to kick them out of the church or excommunicate them. But he could be saying, don't let them partake in communion with the rest of the congregation if they are going to be acting in such a way. For what do I have to do with also judging those who are outside? Don't you judge those who are within? So Paul says, I don't have anything to do with judging people who are outside
of the church. And honestly, Paul never did. He never did judge anybody who was outside of the church. The only times he ever judged it was when a situation was happening inside of the church. And that is what us Christians should be doing as well. Now, on Tuesday, I talked about how we are supposed to be kind in our judgments, but I'm not going to go back into that again. But when it comes to people in the world, we are not supposed
to be judging them. That is not for us to do because they are going to act like sinners. They are going to act in a way that christians don't approve of because they don't have the truth. They are lost. They are in the darkness, and we should feel sorrow over that, not judgment over that. So the church needs to be a lot less focused on what the world is doing and a lot more focused about what is going on inside the church. And unfortunately, it's kind of the opposite in a lot of
cases. A lot of times the church is a lot more focused about like a particular cultural sin that is taking place outside of the church. But then they're not even watching what is going on inside of our churches. And why do you think Paul drives this point home so drastically in first Corinthians five, it's because the church is the body of Christ. The
church is holy. Think about that. The church is the body of Christ, and Christ is our savior, and he deserves honor and he deserves glory, and he deserves to have a church that is not corrupted by these sins that people are bringing in. God bless said in Ezekiel, chapter, I think, 43, I can't remember specifically. God bless said the basic requirements for his temple is that it's supposed to be holy, and yet the church can't even do that. That is the basic requirement of the church, be holy.
We owe God bless that at least. We can't give God bless, anything. But at least we can make the church not full of sin and corruption and extortion and greed and sexual immorality. We can at least do that. And how do we do it? Well, we start with ourselves. Firstly, we have to be analyzing ourselves constantly. What does Paul say? He says, take every single thought captive. So you have to constantly be self analyzing and making sure that our thoughts are in line with what God bless wants them to
be. Now, of course, that is extremely hard to do, and we're going to fail quite a lot, but we need to be a lot more self observant so that we can confess those sins when they pop up in our mind and not just, you know, fall into sin over and over and over again. That is why we take every thought captive. That's the first thing we do. The second thing we do, though, is we watch out for people in our church that are causing problems, that are causing divisions.
We need to watch out for that. But at the same time, we can't cross over into overly critical either. We still have to be forgiving and loving towards our brothers and sisters in Christ the way that Jesus was forgiving and loving of his disciples and of basically everybody he came across. We do have to be following in the path of Jesus. So it's, uh, a very thin line that we have to be walking on where we can't cross over into overly critical and overly punishing everything going
on in our church. But also, we can't cross over onto the other side of being just tolerant of every single sin that's going on. But in extreme cases, like what was going on in the corinthian church, they should have been on that like white on rice. They should have told that guy, hey, this is wrong what you are doing. You got to stop doing it. And they should have put him out from the congregation, which is what Paul says here in verse 13, put away the wicked man from among
yourselves. And that is from deuteronomy 17:7 19:9 21:21, 22:21 and 24:7 so deuteronomy has a lot to say about what you are supposed to do with somebody who is acting very wickedly. You are not supposed to treat that person as if they are a friend, because not only is that going to be bad for the church, but it's also going to be bad for that individual, because that's going to give them the encouragement that they need to just keep doing that sin that they want to do so badly.
This is a really hard topic for me to talk about because I think it's so pertinent to what is going on today. I just get so heated about this particular topic. So forgive me for that but I hope that you guys learned from first Corinthians five and maybe it was convicting to some of you. And if it was then share it on your social media platforms and tell people that the Bible explained podcast exists because word of mouth is the best possible way
to grow the podcast. I'm so thankful for you guys who have been sharing the podcast uh with your friends and family members and I know that you all have and I appreciate m all of you so so much so faithful listeners. Don't forget tomorrow there's not going to be an episode that is for the Ko fi tier members on Ko Fi. But on Monday I'll be back with an episode from one kingsen. So I hope you guys have a fantastic and wonderful weekend. But as always happy listening and God bless.