"ChurchDiscipline" Tagged Sermons
Christ’s forgiveness is regularly misunderstood in the church as a forgiveness that costs nothing and requires nothing, a false belief the sermon confronts directly alongside the reality of God’s own wrath. Real indignation toward the unrepentant sits alongside real love for them. Paul’s own prayer in 2 Corinthians 2 is for repentance, not merely for peace.
Scripture supplies real examples of church discipline that succeeded, not just warnings about discipline neglected, and the sermon insists God himself is actively involved in the process, not a distant observer of it. Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians 5:3-5 assumes a ruling body of elders exercising real authority. Discipline, done rightly, is never merely a human transaction.
The media’s own moral depravity forms the backdrop for a sermon insisting that sexual sin, like any sin, finds its only real remedy at Christ’s cross. Discipline’s whole purpose is not exclusion for its own sake but leading the sinner to repentance and back into the church’s fellowship. Purity, understood that way, is a destination, not a gate kept shut.
Paul’s talk of a ‘rod’ in 1 Corinthians 4:21 keeps love and discipline in separate categories rather than dissolving one into the other. Real church discipline, on this reading, is never merely corrective; it carries eschatological weight, anticipating a final judgment already at work now. The same logic, the sermon argues, extends to how parents discipline children.
A specific case of church discipline opens onto a much larger survey: discipline’s near-total collapse across the mainline denominations over the past century, a collapse Machen himself could not finally stop. Both Old and New Testament patterns of discipline are set against that decline. What looks like an isolated case turns out to be part of a long, documented history.
Two summary points about the whole sermon set up a close look at how 7:7-23 holds together as one interconnected unit rather than a loose string of sayings. The two gates of 7:13 and Micah’s own warnings against false prophets in 3:5-12 both bear on the same danger: false prophets operating inside the church as much as outside it. What marks them, the sermon insists, is a ministry with no cross in it at all.
Seven distinct ‘do not’ statements run from 6:2 through 7:6, and the number itself, the sermon argues, implies a perfection the whole set is meant to describe together. Proverbs 9’s own wisdom about worthy and unworthy hearers connects directly to Matthew 7:6’s warning against dogs and swine, echoed again in Matthew 10. Wise judgment, not indiscriminate tolerance, is what this whole set of warnings actually calls for.
The parables of Luke 15, the lost sheep, coin, and son, are read here as being about church discipline rather than evangelism, a reversal of how they’re usually preached. Luke 16’s puzzling ‘mammon of unrighteousness’ gets its own careful treatment alongside that shift. A heavenly orientation, weighing earthly riches against heavenly ones, runs through both chapters together.