“Brothers and sisters, even if a person is caught in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual are to restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you are not tempted as well.” Galatians 6:1
Seventh Indictment: 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. But you can’t do that; you have got to take the whole Bible—or not any of it at all! Many pastors leave their theology behind when they come 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 I can say this without boasting. Our church practices church discipline. It is a very large church, with about one thousand attending. The pastors estimate they have saved thirty marriages in the last several years through loving, compassionate church discipline—church discipline that does not begin with excommunication. It begins with, “Ye which are spiritual, restore…”
You say, “We can’t practice discipline—we are just too loving.” You are more loving than Jesus? He is the One who commanded this!
“Oh, but, it will cause so many problems.” Yes, you’re right. Maybe that is why there are not a whole lot of problems between the church and worldly culture today, because we are not confronting the culture around us. 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.
“If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother” (Mat 18:15). Oh, what a wonderful thing! “But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established” (Mat 18:16). Friends, the witnesses are not there to be on your side. No, they are there to listen objectively and to render a judgment. Maybe you are the one that is wrong; maybe your brother is not in sin—maybe you are overcritical and legalistic. Who knows?
“If he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican,” i.e., as an outsider and a tax collector. My dear friend, I believe that we need to hear this. Either we start obeying God and disciplining ourselves, or we can have God discipline us. And maybe the hour is come and now is the time when that is going to happen!
Now, I am not talking about critical, legalistic, hateful men—there are enough of those. I am talking about a pastor, a group of elders, leaders who love enough to lay their lives on the line because they know this is not a game. This is not something that we do just for this life, but eternity is at stake—the salvation of souls. Look at the old books from the Spurgeons and the Whitefields, from 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 become a doctor of souls.
We have joined Rome in this matter. In the Roman Catholic Church, the baby is baptized, and the baby is pronounced “Christian.” Henceforth, the baby is Rome’s. Never again do you deal with conversion. You just create all sorts of worldly means to try to keep them in the church!
But listen: Evangelicals have done the same thing! Pray a little prayer with them after two or three minutes of counseling, after half an hour of preaching—twenty-five minutes of which were very funny stories—and then you draw the net for five minutes at the end. Counsel them for a little bit, and then declare them “saved.” Then you spend the rest of their days discipling them, and wondering why they don’t grow!
I believe in personal one-on-one discipleship. But, my dear friend, the Church got along for more than a thousand years without it, without what we now know as personal discipleship with all the books and helps available today. I want you to think about this. One-on-one discipleship became gigantic in the late 70s and it remains so until today. What is the cry? “Just as many people are going out the back doors,” they say, “as are coming in the front doors, and the reason why this is happening is because we are not discipling people.” No! The reason why it is happening is because people aren’t getting converted. They show themselves as unconverted because Christ’s sheep hear His voice and follow Him (Joh 10:3), 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” (1Jo 2:19). And they hardly got a chance to be “of us” because they never heard a true Gospel—no one ever dealt with their souls. So we spend a fortune discipling goats, hoping they will become sheep. You can’t teach a goat into a sheep. A goat only becomes a sheep by the supernatural working of the Spirit of Almighty God.
I moved my family to our church because it practices church discipline, and because I need to be under church discipline—the watchful care of elders and other members who take this seriously. If my children, who are all tiny right now, make a profession of faith and then go awry, I want to know that they will be brought before the church, if necessary, for the salvation of their souls.
Some of you 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 he is unconverted.” You would get so mad, you would rally a group to have that pastor dismissed—instead of realizing, “Oh, praise God, we have got a man of God here.”