The Living Instance (4 of 7)

The knowing of John 17:3 — the verse this entire book stands on — is verified by keeping, or it is exposed as a claim. James adds the final demolition of the flattened word: the demons believe the statements are true, and shudder (James 2:19). Agreeing mentally with true statements is something devils do. It saves no one.

So say the hard thing plainly, because the reader needs it plain, and say it about every sin on the list, not one. The person who chooses to hold a practice Scripture names — this one, or the greed in the same vice list, or the slander that flows through Christian social media like a river — who defends the holding, builds an identity on it, and calls the arrangement believing, is trusting a definition of the word that Jesus never used. Paul says of the works of the flesh that "those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God" (Galatians 5:21) — and the word is practice, the settled, continuing, defended doing, not the stumble. John says the one who resides in Him does not keep on sinning as a way of life (1 John 3:6). And the book's spine verse hangs over all of it: Lord, Lord — and I never knew you. The flattened believe can coexist with an enthroned sin forever. The biblical believe cannot, because it is an entrusting, and you cannot entrust yourself into the King while dictating the terms of the surrender.

The struggler is not condemned by a word in this section — hear that clearly. The struggler's life is the proof their believing is the real verb: they fall, they confess, He is faithful and righteous to forgive and cleanse (1 John 1:9), and they get up still facing the Vine. The warning is for the enthroner — the one who has stopped fighting and started defending, in any direction, on any sin. The King welcomes the surrendered from every category in Paul's list; Corinth's congregation was full of them, washed. What the King does not do — what He cannot do and remain King — is be welcomed as an accessory by someone who kept the throne.

What 1 Corinthians 5 actually requires — of everyone.

There is a chapter of Scripture that speaks to this moment with uncomfortable precision, and it disciplines both camps, so both camps avoid it. In Corinth, a man in the congregation was in an ongoing sexual relationship Scripture forbids, and the church had made peace with it — more than peace:

"And you are proud! Shouldn't you have been deeply sorrowful instead and removed the one who did this from among you?" — 1 Corinthians 5:2 (NET)

Paul's target in the chapter is not primarily the man. It is the congregation's posture. They had converted tolerance of defended, ongoing sin into a virtue — it felt to them like breadth, like grace, like maturity. Paul calls it something else:

"Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast affects the whole batch of dough?" — 1 Corinthians 5:6 (NET)

Leaven. And the point of leaven is that it does not stay in one corner of the batch. A church that formally reclassifies a named sin as not-sin has not extended grace to the person in it. It has removed the category grace operates on. You cannot be washed from what has been redefined as clean — and 1 Corinthians 6:11 says washing is exactly what God does with this. The denominational votes of the past twenty years are the Corinthian pride formalized in a Book of Order: not "we have people among us who struggle," which describes every congregation that has ever gathered, but "this is not sin," which is the thing Paul said would work through the whole batch. The fracture numbers above are what the leaven did.

But the traditionalist who reaches for this chapter as a weapon must finish reading it, because Paul disciplines him three times before it ends.

First, the scope. "For what do I have to do with judging those outside? Are you not to judge those inside? But God will judge those outside" (1 Corinthians 5:12–13). Paul explicitly refuses to apply the standard to the surrounding world — he says in so many words that he did not mean the sexually immoral of this world, or the church would have to leave the world altogether. The discipline is for the one who claims to be a brother. Read that against the last forty years of American church life, in which enormous energy went into prosecuting the sexual ethics of people who never claimed Christ — the culture war conducted on the very ground Paul declared none of the church's business — while the discipline of the inside went unexercised. The church did the judging Paul forbade and skipped the judging Paul commanded.

Second, the list. Paul's instruction covers anyone who bears the name of brother and is "sexually immoral, or greedy, or an idolater, or verbally abusive, or a drunkard, or a swindler" (1 Corinthians 5:11). Greed and verbal abuse sit in the same sentence as sexual immorality. The church that would divide over a gay member while installing the greedy elder and platforming the verbally abusive deacon is not practicing 1 Corinthians 5. It is practicing selective enforcement, and the selectivity is precisely what convinced a generation that the whole exercise was politics wearing a vestment. Taking this chapter seriously is far more demanding than the traditionalist camp's practice of it, not less.

Third, the purpose. The removal Paul commands has a stated aim: "so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 5:5). It is a rescue mechanism, not an exile. And the arc completes in the next letter, where a disciplined man has repented and Paul urges the church to "forgive and comfort him... reaffirm your love for him" — because, he adds, we are not ignorant of the adversary's schemes (2 Corinthians 2:7–11). Excessive severity is named as one of his schemes. Discipline severed from the restoration it exists to produce is not 1 Corinthians 5. It is banishment wearing a verse.

The ladder: leaven, lampstand, liturgy.

Now name what has actually happened in the fractured denominations, because it did not stop at the pew. There are three rungs, and each one deploys more of the church's authority.

The member in defended, ongoing practice is the leaven — the 1 Corinthians 5 situation directly, tolerance converted to pride.

The ordination of clergy in defended, ongoing practice is a different act. Ordination is the church's teaching office being conferred, and Paul's officer texts make the officeholder's life part of the qualification — "the overseer then must be above reproach" (1 Timothy 3:2) — precisely because a shepherd's life is the congregation's daily exegesis. "Watch your life and your teaching closely" (1 Timothy 4:16, paraphrased) holds the two together because in a pastor they cannot be separated. When a denomination ordains what the Text names, it has not merely permitted the leaven. It has installed it in the lampstand. Every sermon from that pulpit teaches that the Text does not mean what it says, before a word of it is spoken. The congregation is taught by the ordination itself.