“Those who sin should be reprimanded in front of the whole church; this will serve as a strong warning to others.” – 1 Timothy 5:20 (NLT)
We’ve got to talk about this. We just have to. Have you ever heard this verse even mentioned by anyone before? Any pastor? Any church leader? No, didn’t think so. But why? Why do we, the Church, shy away from talking about sin and the calling out of it? Is it because more often than not our church leaders themselves are walking in sin, and to call out sin would be to expose themselves?
We have so flipped the script in our culture today. The Early Church was so quick to expose any sin they found to be amongst the Body. Now, in our modern church culture, we actually celebrate sin in a lot of cases. How sick and demonic we have become! Satan doesn’t have to even lift a finger to get us on the wrong path, because we have already done that ourselves. His job has literally never been so easy.
So what am I saying? Well, I’m saying that we need to get back to the standard that we see was upheld by the Early Church. We need to get back to the black and white of the Truth of Scripture, and stop operating in the gray that doesn’t exist. We need to dispose of the sin among us. The yeast that, if allowed to grow, will work through the whole batch of dough even if it is just a little bit of yeast. It doesn’t take much to create a disaster.
What Paul instructed Timothy to do is this passage is something that almost every single church leader today would freak out about. But we MUST expose the sin among us before it grows into something out of our control, and the entire Body suffers because of it. The days for tolerating sin, though they never should’ve happened at all, they need to be gone. Sin cannot be tolerated by us, because it is not tolerated by God Himself.
Notice how Paul says that the reprimanding “will serve as a strong warning to others.” No one wants to be exposed. And when someone is exposed, it causes others to shy away from committing the same acts. I’m not saying that we need to scare people out of their sin, but there is something in this passage that I feel we are missing in our church culture today.
The Lord desires purity of heart. The tiniest bit of sin will pervert purity. Paul even commands Timothy in verse 22 of this chapter and he says, “Keep yourself pure.”
So, where is the purity?
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You are spot on yet again! I literally *just* finished commenting along these very lines on a facebook post of a man standing up and holding the ‘church’ accountable for being what it is today. This is SO rare today and it’s needed now more than ever. The gist of my comments were “if we are not DIFFERENT from the world, then we ARE the world. … Just speaking truth is not enough … only DOERS of WORD are allowing their Light to shine; you can shout the truth from the mountain tops, but if you’re not a DOER of that Word you are not letting God’s light shine through you. ” there was more, but that is the gist. This message is so important today; it’s so heartening to find people who are standing up and speaking … and DOING … something about it!
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