Kingdom Culture
There is a program for troubled teenagers called Three Springs, built on a phrase: from oppression to expression. The staff wanted a milieu where the teenagers, not the staff, confronted inappropriate behavior. So they taught a ladder. A helpful non-verbal. A helpful verbal. A verbal warning. Peer involvement. And only then, staff involvement. These were kids who had spent their lives skirting authority and rules. Put an adult in front of them and they knew how to work around him. So the program took the adult out of the front of the line and put a peer there instead.
The Kingdom of God is built upon a similar culture. Jesus makes it evident that sin is a disease that must be remedied. The remedy is applied personally, through humility, self-denial, and honest self-perspective. But sin does not always stay in the personal realm, and when it escapes, Jesus teaches us that we must be our brother's keeper. The Kingdom culture is a culture of killing sin, personally and communally. We share in each other's lives and we love each other, and one of the ways we love each other is by helping each other be rid of the sin we are so easily entangled with.
Chapter 18 is the blueprint. The disciples ask who is greatest, and Jesus sets a child in front of them, because no one enters this Kingdom until he is low enough to admit what he is. Then comes the warning about stumbling blocks, since it is enough for a man to be killing sin in his own life without someone else compounding the problem for him. Then the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine and goes after the one who wandered. Then our passage, where sin has escaped a man's own efforts and the family steps in. Then forgiveness, and a servant who was forgiven a fortune and would not release his neighbor. Confrontation sits in the middle of that chapter with pursuit on one side and mercy on the other.
Before we get to the process, understand what we are dealing with. Sin likes to conceal itself, and we learn that from the very moment sin enters the world. Adam and Eve eat, and the first thing they do is cover themselves and hide, first from each other and then from God among the trees. God walks into the garden and exposes them. He asks where they are, not because he has lost them, but because they need to come out. God is love, so every act he commits is an act of love, and exposing them was love. Then he covers their shame with better garments than the ones they made for themselves, garments that do not merely conceal but restore, and something had to die to make them. That is the same pattern Jesus prescribes in Matthew 18. The sinner will always want to hide. The sin will not want to be found. So we must find it. We must hunt it down and bring it into the light where it can be dealt with.
Consider what it costs a man to keep his sin hidden. He hides himself from his family and his friends. He justifies the sin, feeds it, and works out reasons why it is not what it is. He keeps lying, because the lie is the only thing keeping the sin alive. He separates himself from the very people who could help him overcome it, so that he can go on living in it. He becomes a slave to his sin just to keep it breathing, and the whole time the shame and guilt keep stacking up on him.
So we begin by showing him the sin. Assume the man is already killing sin in his own life. There will still be sin he cannot see, and the second line of defense is that you have others in the fight with you. Go and show him his fault in private. You and him and no one else. Not your wife on the ride home, and not the prayer chain. The word Jesus uses is the word for reproof, which means to convict and to convince. Hopefully that is enough to bring him to repentance and to seeking forgiveness, which is how sin is put to death. Repentance keeps the sin from being exercised again. Forgiveness removes the sin already committed. If he listens to you, Jesus says, you have won your brother. You did not win an argument. You kept a man alive.
Watch what happens when the sin comes into the light. Drag it out kicking and screaming in front of a brother who loves you, and it loses its power over you in that moment. The enslaving breaks and the fetters fall off. Your shame gets covered and your life gets restored to you through the blood of Jesus, and you are handed back to the people who now know your trouble and will love you in it. The worst is over. No more lies, no more hiding, and you can put off the shame and put on love and hope and life starting today. There is freedom in having your sin named and known. It is in admitting you have sinned that you can confess it and cling to Christ, and through repentance comes salvation and eternal life. Do not let sin whisper in your ear that keeping it secret is what keeps you safe.
If the man will not repent, invite others into the situation. Witnesses, according to the law of God. Bringing them demonstrates that this is not a personal attack; it is an attack upon the sin that is seeking to steal his life. We call it an intervention today, loving people in agreement about the sin going together to keep a brother from death by sin. And keep those two or three in mind when you reach the end of the passage, where Jesus says that where two or three have gathered in his name, he is there in their midst. That is not a promise about a thin crowd on a rainy Sunday. It is a promise about the hardest conversation the church will ever have. Christ stands in the room when you go to your brother.
If the sin is rooted so deep that he cannot let it go, bring it before the church. The whole church has more power than any one or three individuals, and the church has the power to bind and to loose, with heaven standing behind that judgment. Let the church's love purge the sin from the sinner and save his life. And if he still will not let it go, the church must loose him and give him over to it. We cannot see the heart the way God does. We judge the outside. After compassionate confrontation has been made privately, if the man refuses to give up his sin, the church has the right to judge him dead in sin and treat him as one who needs the gospel in order to be made alive. Remember how Jesus treated tax collectors. He ate with them. He called one out of a tax booth and made him an apostle.
Go about all of this with humility. Approach the way you would approach a wounded dog, understanding that the first instinct will be to bite, so you come low and slow and gentle, not to harm but to pull the thorn and bandage the wound. Take the log out of your own eye first. Meet the level of respect to the level of responsibility, since those who carry more weight in the home and the church face more judgment and are not to be flippantly pursued. Learn how the sin crept into his life, because you may find an open door he needs help closing or a real hurt he has been treating with a substance instead of healing. And when he repents, let it die. Love keeps no record of being wronged, and God has already put that sin as far from him as the east is from the west.
People run from this. They run from accountability and keep running from church to church until they find one that will compromise with their sin, and some will call themselves victims of church hurt when they get there. Understand what is actually happening when a man runs. He is not running from harsh people. He is running because he does not want to be rid of the sin he loves.
We must love Christ and his ways more than we love our sins. The Christian life is a killing of sin. If you will not kill your sin, your sin will kill you, and it will bring upon you the very death you fear above all. So go to your brother. Go alone, go low and slow, and know that Christ is standing in the room when you get there.
Peace be with you,
Pastor Bruce
