I Corinthians 5:1-8        Disciplined Living             July 27, 2008  

We have all heard the stories through the years or known the people involved.  It happens right here in the Carolinas in the heart of the Bible Belt.  Every year, we hear of pastors or leaders in the church who have forsaken their spouse, run off with the church secretary, fallen into homosexuality, or face some kind of moral crisis in their churches.  Through the years of my ministry, I have seen so many lives tossed about due to immorality.  Last week, we talked about how our lives sometimes mis-fit.  Here is an area where we find a big mis-fit.  Here is an area where our lives can be deeply thrown off track.  Immorality can destroy all we have lived for, all we have built for many years, and it can happen in an instant unless we commit ourselves to disciplined Christian living.

   In our modern world, the idea of disciplined living has fallen on hard times.  Everyone wants to do whatever they feel at the moment.  But that moment can bring permanent consequences.  In our passage today, we see the Corinthian church in much the same situation.  As we have seen, Corinth was a sea-port city filled with temptation.  It was just all around them every day and night of the week.  Just as we are assaulted daily on television, movies, in the grocery checkout line, on the internet, in conversations, the Corinthians were surrounded by temptation.  And so Paul opens this chapter with the words, “It is actually reported that there is immorality among you in the church.”  This word in the Greek is ####### and it means in the New Testament any sexual behavior which transgresses the Christian norm.  Its roots go back to the Old Testament seventh commandment—You shall not commit adultery.  It is any intimacy outside the bounds of Holy Marriage between a man and a woman.  This was the original intension of God for the procreation of children and for the continued love between a man and woman in a family setting.   But in Corinth, things had gone astray and Paul was shocked.  But how could they and how can we hope to escape?  In a culture that is so filled with sin, how can we win and live victorious lives over sin?  Paul gives us three words of advice in this scripture—Grieve, Hand it over, and Be cleansed.   Let’s take a look.

   In verse 2, Paul gives us the first and perhaps most important step on the road to disciplined and victorious living over sin.  He tells the Corinthians that they should be filled with grief.   We must grieve over our sins.  We must grieve over the sin of our culture.  It is not a joke.  It is the destruction of people, of families, of nations. 

   But Paul says the Corinthians were not filled with grief.  In fact, they were proud.  In verse 2 and in verse 6, we are told that they were proud of themselves and were boasting.  Now what were they boasting about?  You see, they were an open minded church.  They were a tolerant society.  They were not judgmental and narrow minded and old fashioned.  They were modern and liberated and free.  And of course, that is modern America.  For decades now, Hollywood and its stars have told us how to live our lives free from the old rules.  But these people cannot run their own lives.  We hear of one tragedy and crisis and disaster after another in the lives of the stars and yet we still listen to them as they boast of every imaginable immorality.  Paul says we should grieve.

     The first step in breaking free from immorality is to be filled with grief.  It is not a little feeling sorry for what we have done or that we were caught.  It is a repentance.  It is a fullness of grief that our lives do not fit.  That we as people and as a society have made a mess of things. 

  Paul tells us to be filled with grief.  The second step toward a disciplined life in Christ is to hand our immorality over to judgment.  Paul tells the Corinthians that when they meet next in church, they are to hand this man over to Satan.  The words in Greek are ek mesou which is an excommunication.  The man is to be put out of communion, out of the community of faith.  It is hard for us to appreciate what this means.  This man will no longer be under the spiritual protection, the prayers, and the blessings of the Church.  He will be on his own and open to the attacks of Satan.  You see, those who are in the body of Christ are surrounded by a force field.  Paul says later in I Corinthians 10:13, “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.”  That is a powerful verse.  If you have seen the movie, “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” the house is surrounded by a force field beyond which the Goblins cannot pass.   And for those in the body of Christ, those who are living a disciplined life in Christ, there is protection.  But when we are cast out of that force field, then we are open to Satan.  

     Let me ask you…Are you living in the protection of the Body of Christ?  That is not to say nothing bad will ever happen there, but God will be faithful to you and give you strength so that you can stand under the attack.  But when you are outside the Body of Christ, then you are in danger.  And so the Corinthians are told to cast the man out there.  Is that mean?  Is that un-Christian?  Paul says in verse 5 it is done so the man can be saved.  Listen.  The sin must be cast out.  Either you can cast out sin or you will be cast out.  A life of sin cannot live in the Body of Christ.  Some people’s lives are a mess because they come to a church building on Sunday but they are not living in the spiritual Body of Christ.  It is not real.  They have not cast out the sin.  They have not handed it over.  To save that man, the church could not let him stay where he was.  Later, the man was changed and Paul told the church to bring him back.  But there is no life in Jesus Christ when our lives are filled with sin.  Either we will cast out that sin or eventually we will be outside in the cold and under the full attack of the evil one.

   We should grieve.  We are to cast out the sin.  Finally, we are to be made clean.  You see, just as yeast works through the whole dough, sins that go unchecked can ruin our lives.  But the good news, says Paul, is that when we begin to cast out the sin in our lives, when we get serious about our relationship and closeness to God, then we see the spread of that influence.  Our lives are made clean and we are the new unleavened Bread of Christ.   Look back in chapter one verse 2.  Paul says that we are those who are sanctified in Jesus Christ and called to be Holy, called to be saints says the old KJV.  Did you know that you are to be a saint?  Now maybe you think, “No.  Not me.  People like Saint Francis or Mother Teresa may be saints but not me.”  The Bible says that God is calling each of us to grow into a closer relationship with God, calling each of us to more fully experience God with us each day, and that this experience will fill our lives until we become people of holiness.  We become saints of God.  Now this is a lifetime journey but it begins now as we grieve our sin, cast out our sin, and begin to fully purge ourselves of sin.  John Wesley called this sanctification.  The Puritan Pilgrims called it the mortification of sin.  You can call it what you will but it is a journey to becoming less and less like the sin of this world and becoming more and more like Jesus Christ.

   We live in a mis-fit world.  And immorality is an area of our lives hat can deeply mis-fit us and ruin us.  But we can live disciplined victorious lives.  We can grieve.  We can hand it over.  We can be purged and clean until we are the saints of God.  Amen.