◑The seventh indictment / A lack of loving and compassionate Church discipline
The seventh indictment—and we will just rush through this—and I know that this is misunderstood today and so I am going to define it: A lack of loving and compassionate Church discipline.
Most evangelical pastors in America today ought to take Matthew 18 and rip it right out of their Bible.
You can’t do that, sir. You have got to take the whole thing.
Many pastors, their theology gets left behind when they come out of their office, out of their study. They are theological in conversation. They are theological in their office, but when they step out, they run the church by carnal means.
I am not an elder at my church and so—and have not been there very long—so I can say this without boasting. It practices church discipline. It is a very large church, about 1000. And they estimated they have saved 30 marriages in the last several years through loving, compassionate church discipline that does not begin with excommunication. It begins with, “Ye who are spiritual...”39
We say, “Oh, I am too loving. We can’t practice discipline. We just... we are just too loving.”
You are more loving that Jesus? He is the one who commanded this.
“Yeah, it will cause so much problems.”
Yeah, you’re right. Maybe that’s why there’s not a whole lot of problems between the church and culture today because we are not confronting culture.
And we don’t confront culture just by going out there and picketing Hollywood. We confront culture by obeying God. Noah built the ark and condemned the world. You don’t have to have a protest sign. Just walk in obedience and the world will hate you.
My dear friend, “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.”40 Oh, what a wonderful thing. “But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed.”41
It is not that these guys are on your side. They are going to listen and judge. Maybe you are the one that is wrong. Maybe your brother is not in sin. Maybe you are overcritical and legalistic. Who knows?
And listen. “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”42
My dear friend, I believe that we need to hear this. We can either start obeying God and disciplining ourselves or we can have God do it for us. And maybe the hour is coming and now is when that is going to happen.
I am not talking about critical, legalistic, hateful men. There’s enough of those. I am talking about a man, a group of elders, leaders who love enough to lay their life on the
line because they know this is not a game. This is not something that we do just for this life, that eternity is at stake, the salvation of souls. Look at all these Christian bookstores. Look at the old books of the old days of the Wesleys and the Whitefields and on and on, the Puritans and the Reformation. Most of those books dealt with what is the gospel, how do you preach it, how do you bring someone to Christ, how do you discern true conversion, how do you be a doctor of souls.
We have joined Rome in this matter. Rome: The baby is baptized, the baby is Christian. The baby is Rome’s. Never again deal with conversion. Just create all sorts of worldly means to try to keep them in the Church.
Evangelicals have done the same. Pray a little prayer with them after two or three minutes of counseling, after a half an hour of preaching, 25 of which was very funny stories and then drawing the net after five minutes. Counsel them for a little bit and then declare them saved and then spend the rest of their days discipling them and wondering why they don’t grow.
I want to submit to you, I believe in personal one on one discipleship, but, my dear friend, the Church got along for a thousand or more years without it, without what we know as personal, one on one, discipleship with all the books and all the different things.
I want you to think about this. One on one discipleship became gigantic in the late 70s and until today. What was the cry? Just as many people are going out the back doors, coming in the front door and the reason why that is happening is because we are not discipling people.
No. The reason why it is happening is because people aren’t getting converted, because his sheep, they hear his voice and they follow him, whether you disciple them or not.
Now we ought to disciple, but that is not why they are leaving. They went out from us because they were not of us.43 And they hardly got a chance to be of us because they never heard a true gospel and no one ever dealt with their soul.
So we spend a fortune discipling goats, hoping they will become sheep. You can’t teach a goat into a sheep. A goat becomes a sheep by the supernatural working of the Spirit of almighty God.
Now Church discipline... I moved my family to this church because they practice Church discipline, because I need to be under Church discipline, the watchful care of elders and other members who take this seriously. I want my children, if they are converted one day, they are all tiny right now, but if they are converted or they make a profession of faith and then go awry, I want to know that my children will be brought before the Church, if necessary for the salvation of their soul.
Some of you in here would get so mad if a pastor walked up to you and said, “Honestly, I have been praying about your child and I fear that they are unconverted.”
You would get so mad you would rally up a group to have that pastor kicked out instead of realizing, “Oh, praise God, we have got a man of God here.”
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