How to Handle Sin in the Church

Tom Shrader walks through 1 Corinthians 5, where Paul confronts the Corinthian church for tolerating ongoing sexual immorality rather than pursuing the four-step discipline process Jesus outlines in Matthew 18. Shrader explains that church discipline is not punitive but restorative, aimed at winning back the unrepentant member while protecting the purity of the congregation. He also addresses Paul's clarification that Christians are not called to withdraw from unbelievers in the world, but to hold professing believers within the church to a higher standard of accountability.

“It is not a question of being critical or condemning. It is a question of being wounded and shocked and hurt. It was sin that crucified Jesus Christ.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: 1 Corinthians

Recorded: 2001 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 1 hr 19 min

Themes: church discipline, sexual sin, accountability, repentance, purity, confronting sin, restoration, holiness, church leader, pastor, elder, struggling with sexual sin, navigating church conflict, new believer, unrepentant member, member in sin

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 5:1-13, 1 Corinthians 3, 1 Corinthians 4:6, 1 Corinthians 4:18-19, 1 Corinthians 8:1, 1 Corinthians 11:27-30, 1 Corinthians 13:4, Matthew 18:15-17, John 9, 1 Timothy 1:20

Theological Themes: ecclesiology, church health, sanctification, becoming holy, biblical authority, pastoral care, excommunication, restorative discipline

Full Transcript

The Setting: A Church Surrounded by Paganism

Open your Bibles, if you would, to 1 Corinthians chapter 5. Let me remind you of the background and the setting, the culture, the society. Corinth is what one author described as a sex-obsessed seaport. When people became not only Christians but part of this church, some of that contamination from that culture came with them. It was especially difficult in the early days of Corinth for believers to be dealing with immorality, especially in the sexual area.

William Barclay writes this: "In this passage, Paul is dealing with what was for him a reoccurring problem. In sexual matters, the heathen did not know the meaning of chastity. The heathen took their pleasure when they wanted it, where they wanted it. It was so hard for the Christian church to escape the infection. They were like a little island of Christianity surrounded on every side by the sea of paganism. They had come so newly into Christianity, it was so difficult to unlearn the practices which generations of loose living had made part of their lives. Yet, if the church was to be kept pure, they must say a final goodbye to their old heathen ways."

The Focus: How the Church Responds to Sin

Paul is writing to this church, and what we will look at today is all of chapter five. Paul is dealing with sin in the church and how you respond to it. It is important to note that while he is talking about an individual and a specific sin, the focus here is on how the church responds and how the church deals with it. We need to keep that in mind.

This passage has great practical application to us today. I would suggest that one of the marks of a healthy church is a church that is willing to deal publicly, if need be, with sin. One of the things you see among churches today — of all different stripes, denominations, community churches, Bible churches — is an unwillingness to follow the very prescription so diligently laid out, not just by Paul, but by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, for dealing with sin. We obviously need to take this section very seriously.

The Specific Sin: What Everyone Already Knew

Here is what Paul says. 1 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 1: "It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind as does not even exist among the Gentiles, that someone has his father's wife."

Paul says it is common knowledge — everybody knows it, everybody in the church is aware of it, the world is aware of it. Everyone knows there is immorality. Now that word, while Paul is speaking of a specific sin here, has general application. It speaks of any sexual behavior that transgresses the norm that God has laid out. God says sex is good within the context of marriage — we will look at that in a couple of weeks in 1 Corinthians 7 — but anything other than that is a distortion, a perversion of God's plan.

Many of us would look at the issue of homosexuality and say there is no question that it is a perversion, and we would not back away from that. However, adultery is equally a perversion. If you are single and engaged in sex outside of marriage, that too is a perversion of God's plan for sexuality. The specific sin Paul is addressing is this: someone has his father's wife. In the Greek it is in the present tense, communicating a continuous, ongoing sin. There is a young man in the church who is sleeping with his stepmother. It may even be — though we are stretching here since we cannot know for certain — that his stepmother has divorced his father so that they can be together. What we do know is that there is a sexual sin between this man and his stepmother, everyone knows about it, and yet the church will not deal with it.

The Church's Response: Arrogance Instead of Mourning

Paul says, "You have become arrogant. You should be mourning, but you are not." Arrogance is a recurring sin in the church at Corinth. We saw it back in chapter 3, where Paul is chastising them because they said, "I am of Paul, I am of Peter, I am of Apollos." They were fleshly, divided, and filled with jealousy, and Paul warns them, "Let no one boast in men."

In 1 Corinthians 4:6 Paul writes: "Now these things, brethren, I have figuratively applied to myself and Apollos for your sake, in order that no one of you may become arrogant." Then in chapter 4, verses 18 and 19, he says, "Now some of you have become arrogant." And in 1 Corinthians 8:1 comes that great truth: "Knowledge makes arrogant." Even in the love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, as Paul defines love and says what it is, he also defines it in the negative — what love is not. So 1 Corinthians 13:4 says: "Love is patient, love is kind, and it is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant."

Their attitude had become: we are above this. They had decided not to deal with the sin. Paul says they should be mourning — and that is the Greek word used to describe the brokenness or grieving one experiences at the death of a loved one. Have you been to a funeral where you see someone who has lost a father or a husband, and you see them weep with that heaving, broken crying where they can barely speak? That is the mourning Paul is describing. He says that is how they ought to feel about this sin, and yet they had become arrogant instead.

Paul then lays out the prescription they should follow: take this person and remove him from your midst. He ought to be out.

Tolerating Sin in the Church

Paul makes no reference to the woman in this situation. Our assumption, therefore, is that she is not a believer. But there is this young man who says he is a Christian, who is involved in this sin. The whole church knows about it, yet they will not have anything to do with addressing it. They are pretending like it is not even there, and Paul is saying they must deal with it.

Ray Stedman writes: "They were boasting and glorying in their tolerance of this condition, as many people do today. They have a mistaken feeling that rather than showing condemnation and judgment on this man, the church ought to express understanding of the pressures and difficulties of living in a world like we have today. Let the individual work it out on his own." This is what was happening in Corinth. They thought they were showing love and understanding by their attitude of casualness toward this sin. In other words, they were saying, "We really love this guy, we really care for this guy, and what we are going to do is just let it go on. We are going to employ a little denial here and pretend it does not even exist."

What Jesus Taught About Confronting Sin

As you look at this, it is very important to remember that on a typical Sunday, about a third of you were not here a year ago. You come from a variety of different backgrounds, and most of you come from churches where you have never seen the church deal with sin like this. Perhaps they have talked about it, and you have read those passages, but you push them out of the way, assuming nobody would ever actually do it today. You need to understand that this is not just the thought of Paul — this is what Jesus said.

Look at Matthew chapter 18. The context is that Jesus has just told a parable about having a hundred sheep and one being lost — you leave the ninety-nine and go and find the one. He then says: "If your brother sins, go and reprove him in private." Notice what He is saying: this is a brother, a believer. You are a believer, and this person claims to be a believer, so you go and reprove him — which means literally bringing to light or exposing. "If he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you," verse 16, "take one or two more, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. And if he refuses to listen to them, then you tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen to the church, then let him be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector."

Here is what Jesus is saying: we cannot permit sin to continue within the church. This is for not just the good of the individual, but for the protection of the body. Always, as we deal with sin, we understand that our ultimate goal is the restoration of the one who is unrepentant.

The Four Steps Jesus Lays Out

Jesus lays out four steps. If you have a brother who sins, you go to him first. Here is what you do not do: you do not call the prayer chain and say, "I have a guy who is really struggling, let us pray for him." You do not start talking about him and his situation in your small group. You do not come to us and say, "What are you going to do about it?" The first thing you do is go to that person directly.

One of the climates I have tried to create at this church — among staff and among leadership, hoping it now drifts down and permeates the whole body — is that when somebody sins and you are aware of it, you go to them. The whole idea is that you go in private. You know somebody is sinning, you know it is ongoing, you know they say they are a believer, and you know they are unrepentant. The burden is on you — you go to them. If you come to me first, the first thing I am going to say is, "Have you gone to them?" If the answer is no, then you need to go. That is the first step. And if they say, "You are right, I am sorry," and they repent, that is the end of the matter right there.

Escalating the Process

If they will not listen to you, you take one or two others with you. The idea is that you are confirming the facts along the way and have witnesses there to validate that the whole process was carried out correctly. You go to this person and say, "Here are the facts. You are involved in this sin — is that right?" Most often they will not even deny it. They acknowledge they are engaged in it. Then you say, "You understand that it is wrong, don't you? You understand that God says He will deal with this sin, that God says it is wrong, and that you need to repent." If they say, "You are right and I am broken," the implication is that the matter ends there. But if they say no, then step three is to bring it before the church and make it public.

For those of you who are getting very nervous at this point, let me tell you that this process takes a long time to work through. We typically have two or three cases at any given time, and it takes three, four, or five months to work through each one. It is not simply one meeting after another leading straight to a public announcement. But in the history of this church, on three or four occasions I have had to stand at this pulpit and say, "You know so-and-so. They are involved in this sin. They are unrepentant. And you ought to have nothing to do with them." It is very hard to do. There is no joy in it. It is probably the most difficult thing that we deal with, but we have to deal with it.

When Discipline Leads Back to the Gospel

If even at this public stage the person still refuses to repent, we continue to call them to repentance, but we now assume we are dealing with an evangelism situation. We are sharing the gospel with them, calling them to repentance, and asking them, "Do you really know Christ? Can you continue in this?" The idea is that if somebody is truly a Christian, what they desire deeply is to be involved with other believers.

The Purpose of Church Discipline

I believe that if you are really a Christian, you ought to have a deep desire — I would go even further than that — a deep need to be engaged with other Christians. The whole idea of the discipline here is to take that person and isolate them, to remove fellowship around them. What happens most often is that person is not going to keep coming in. All of a sudden, that person is going to show up at another church.

Ideally, a letter needs to follow them to the next church, and to the next church, and to the next church. Not in a vindictive way, but to say to them and to the body: you are dealing with somebody who is under church discipline here. We will regularly get a call from somebody saying, "So-and-so has been attending your church — do you know they're under church discipline over here?" And the answer is often that we never heard of it, didn't know, don't even know who the person is.

There are two objectives here. Number one, the restoration of the individual. Number two, equally important, is the purity of the body. This is that loving Jesus that everybody keeps talking about. You need to understand that that loving Jesus says some things that on the surface appear very harsh, but in fact they are very loving.

Discipline is always difficult, but it is always done out of love. Those of you who have children know this. One of the most difficult things you have to do is consistently, regularly, and frequently discipline your children. As you are disciplining them, their frequent thought is, "You just don't want me to have any fun." But when a child says you won't let them play in the street, the answer is no — because you do not want them to get hit by a truck. You are saying to them: that is for your own good. It is not to punish a person in a vindictive way or to ridicule them. It is to say, "We love you so much that we are not going to let you get away with this."

Paul's Direct Judgment

Now Paul begins to speak and addresses an issue we face frequently. He says, "For I, on my part, though absent in body," he is not with them, "I am certainly there in spirit. I have already judged him who has committed this." Jim Harper was telling me that one of the interesting things they are seeing in small group is this: people will come in — they may be brand new, may not be Christians at all or little baby Christians, knowing almost no scripture — but they know this verse: "Judge not, lest you be judged." So they are saying they do not want to get into someplace where everybody is judging everybody.

We are not talking here about some sort of preferential issue. We are not talking about chastising somebody because of the way they dress, or where they live, or how they walk. What we are talking about is somebody who knowingly, willingly, and persistently continues to do something that God calls wrong. That is what we are talking about here.

Paul says, "In the name of the Lord" — that is how we do this, consistent with God and who He is. "In the name of the Lord, when you are assembled, I with you in spirit and the power of the Lord" — he is saying you need to deal with this.

Delivered Over to Satan

Look at verse 5 and how powerful it is. It ought to serve as ammunition to support what I am saying. Can you imagine the terror in your heart if the Apostle wrote this about you? "I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord." Can you imagine the Apostle saying that about you — I have decided to just deliver you over to Satan, to say to Satan, "Have your way with him"? The idea there is that it could ultimately mean even destruction of the flesh. It could even mean that your life would be taken over this.

The word "deliver" is a strong term indicating a judicial act of sentencing or handing over. In 1 Corinthians chapter 11, Paul is talking about communion. In verse 27 he addresses those who take communion in an unworthy manner, and then in verse 30 he says this: "For this reason many among you are weak and sick and a number sleep." You are dead. God has apparently moved in the church at Corinth and there are people who are physically weak, people who are sick, and people who have died. Paul says the reason for it is that they have taken communion in an unworthy manner.

A Caution Against Misreading Affliction

Now let me caution you: do not for a second think that because somebody is sick it must be sin in their lives. In John chapter 9, Jesus and the disciples are coming into the city. There is a man who is blind. The disciples, using the conventional wisdom of the day, ask, "Who sinned — this man or his parents?" One of them had to have sinned. And Jesus said no, neither one of them. He is blind that he might be a display case for the glory of God, so that Jesus could give him sight and they would see the power of God.

So it is a great mistake to judge our spiritual condition necessarily by physical affliction or sickness in our lives. However, we need to understand that apparently under certain circumstances God moves and brings physical affliction — sometimes just to show what is already there, as with the thorn in the flesh for the Apostle, but sometimes as discipline. In 1 Timothy chapter 1, verse —

The Danger of Tolerating Sin in the Church

In 1 Corinthians 5:20, Paul mentions two men he has delivered to Satan. The footnote John MacArthur writes on that passage is this: Paul put both men out of the church, thus ending their influence and removing them from the protection and insulation of the church. It was two things. First, he sent them out. Second, that was the end of the protection. You are on your own, and it is a scary world out there. You have no cover, no protection, no fellowship. You are isolated, and the idea is to restore you.

Verse six says, "Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, just as you are, in fact, unleavened. For Christ, our Passover, has also been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice or wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."

Paul speaks here of the Passover meal, which we saw recreated just a couple of weeks ago. Part of that Seder dinner was the ceremonial hunting for leaven in the house. Leaven, to the Jew, almost always meant evil or evil influence. Part of what they were doing was hunting through the house to get the leaven out, to remove all evil influence, because a little bit of leaven affects the whole loaf. A little bit of sin begins to touch the whole body. That is the point. You cannot begin to sanction, to institutionalize, to say it is okay to sin.

A Serious View of Sin

There ought to be a brokenness over sin. David Brainerd lived approximately 250 to 260 years ago, and as you read his diary, you are struck by the holiness of this man. He wrote this: "I never got away from Jesus and Him crucified, and I found that when my people were gripped by this great evangelical doctrine of Christ and Him crucified, I had no need to give them instruction about morality. I found that one followed as sure and inevitable fruit of the other." Here is what he is saying: when somebody truly understood that Christ died for our sin, that it was our sin that put Him on the cross, their life was inevitably affected.

William Barclay writes this: "An easygoing attitude to sin is always dangerous. It has been said that our one security against sin lies in our being shocked at it. Carlyle said that men must see the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin. When we cease to take a serious view of sin, we are in a perilous position. It is not a question of being critical or condemning. It is a question of being wounded and shocked and hurt. It was sin that crucified Jesus Christ. It was to free men from sin that Christ died. No Christian man can take an easygoing view of sin."

You live at a time — and let me be even more specific — you live in a church culture, and I do not mean East Valley Bible Church, but churches across the board, where sin is not dealt with anymore. In fact, the most popular church philosophy of our time is to take words like sin and remove them entirely. The thinking is that we do not want anything that would affect or offend anybody. But your sin is offensive to God.

I was talking to a man recently about hypothetical questions — what would you do in this situation or that one? We got onto the subject of organ transplants, and the question was whether, if your liver were failing, you would accept a transplant. I said absolutely. I told him that if they were already in there, I would take a heart and lungs and everything else that came with it — the whole enchilada. Then I asked him what he would do, and he said no. He used this phrase: "I am so sick and tired of sinning." Do you have that view of your own life? Do you see it as a pattern of constant sin, constant disobedience, constant missing of the mark?

Separating from Sin, Not from the World

Verse 9 tells us something interesting: "I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people." Although we call this letter 1 Corinthians, it is actually the second letter Paul sent to them. There had already been communication between Paul and this church, as we will see throughout the book, where he frequently refers back to questions they had asked or things he had previously said. So he had told them not to associate with immoral people — the word associate literally means to mix up with.

Apparently, they took Paul's instruction and concluded they should separate themselves from the world entirely. Paul addresses this directly in verse 11, saying that to do that, you would have to remove yourself from the entire world, and that is not at all what he was calling them to. He clarifies: "I don't mean at all immoral people of this world, not covetous or swindlers or idolaters, for then you'd have to go out of the world."

I see this tendency all the time among Christians. As we grow, there is a natural desire to think that part of being holy means having nothing to do with the world. I meet men and women regularly who say they would love to work in a Christian environment and want nothing more to do with fighting ethical battles in the workplace. I had one man say to me, when I was challenging him on evangelism, that he did not even have a non-Christian friend. But that is not what Paul is talking about.

I was listening to a call-in radio show recently — a teenage program on KFLR — and a teenage girl called in saying her best friend had just moved 1,000 to 1,500 miles away and asking for prayer. She said she needed a new friend. When the host told her she ought to find one, she explained that she was a homeschooler —

Engaging the World Around You

If you have created an environment where your child, especially as a teenager, is not interacting with non-Christians, you have created an unhealthy environment for that kid. How is that child going to learn to evangelize if they are not in contact with non-Christians? There is great tension here. You can feel it. There is a desire to be with the saints — that is how this topic even began — and yet at the same time you must understand that you are salt and light. You cannot be salt and light if you are not spending time with non-believers.

A couple of weeks ago, on Good Friday, I had the privilege — and I mean it was a privilege — to attend four Good Friday services, and then the absolute joy of attending six Easter services. Ten services total. The next day I played golf with two total pagans. One had no idea what I did for a living, and I do not think the other one knew either. I heard Jesus' name taken in vain over eighteen holes more than I had heard it reverently in all ten services the day before.

At one point, one of the guys asked what I do, and I told him. Usually when I say that, the language settles down a little. This man seemed to take it as a gauntlet, a challenge, and he increased it. But when we were all done and sitting around — one guy with a beer, the other with a Coke, and me with a juice — one of them said, "Let's talk about something you know. What happens to people when they die?" If I had been huddled in a little Christian foursome the whole time, that conversation never happens. That is not the environment God wants you in.

I am genuinely grateful that God gives me the opportunity, and at least to this point the strength, to do both East Valley Bible Church and Priority Living. It means three times a week I am out with groups of people where, on many occasions, half of them are not believers. It is not at all unusual for someone to come up afterward and say, "I don't buy that at all." When I talk with others who do what I do, some of them will even admit, "I don't know any non-Christians. I go to a Christian staff, we have Christian talks, we listen to Christian music. If we dare venture into television, it's Christian television. Any movie is a G-rated movie about Jesus." I am here to tell you that is not how Jesus told you to live, it is not how He role-modeled life, and it is not what Paul said.

Paul could not be more clear. He said that if you are not going to associate or mix with non-believers at all, the only way to accomplish that is to get out of the world entirely. I think there is even a kind of mystical movement coming into the church that isolates us further. I am not against contemplation, meditation, and thinking deeply about the Word — but when the Christian life becomes more and more inbred and more and more isolated, something is wrong. John MacArthur made this point at the Shepherds Conference: every good thing you do on this earth, you will do better in heaven — except evangelism. Your life ought to be marked by brokenness over lost people.

Three Categories of Sin Among Unbelievers

The point here is that while you ought to be broken over sin within the church, there is a whole world out there. As Paul looks at the sins of the surrounding world, he identifies immoral people, the covetous, swindlers, and idolaters. These can be understood as sins of the body, sins of the mind or heart, and sins of the spirit.

Immorality comes from a distorted view of humanity — the idea that man is essentially an animal. That is what immorality is at its root. It says, "I will do whatever I want, whenever I want. I will live like an animal." If an animal wants to eat, it eats. If an animal sees another animal, it pursues it without any regard for who is around or what is happening. It simply satisfies whatever impulse arises. That is the spirit behind immorality.

Then there are sins of the heart: covetousness and swindling. One translation puts it well — "greedy and grasping." It is simply the posture of always wanting more. When we talk about not being conformed to this world, we so often focus on obvious sin, but I think it runs deeper than that. Our entire lifestyle ought to look different.

Let me ask you a question, and I am the last person who wants to make you feel guilty or hand you a set of rules — you will have to answer this for yourself. Is it acceptable for you to drive the same car and live in the same house as everyone else at your income level simply because you have the money to do so? I hear it all the time: "I've got the money, I can afford it." But that is not really the question. If you cannot afford something and take it anyway, you already know that is wrong. But does having the money automatically make it right to acquire everything you can? Some of you have been extraordinarily blessed in the area of finance. What I observe in some of those cases is two things: first, never being satisfied — always wanting the next deal, the next proposition, the next thing; and second, no real concern for how God would have you invest that money, time, and energy.

Sins of the Spirit: Idolatry

Then there are sins of the spirit, and Paul names idolatry. Those who practice idolatry do not love the one true God and do not follow Him. They are given over to what is false.

This brings us to the clarification Paul provides in verses 11 through 13, which is where we must close.

Separation from the World vs. Separation Within the Church

It is impossible to carry on normal life in Corinth without associating in everyday affairs with those who are non-Christian. Paul is not in any way saying or recommending that a Christian ought to withdraw from the world. It was John Wesley who said, "God knows nothing of solitary religion. Our religion is prepared for us to confront the world." So when Paul wrote about not associating with the immoral, he was clarifying that if you were going to pull away from every immoral person in this world, you would have to leave the world entirely.

What Paul actually said was this: he wrote not to associate with any so-called brother if he is immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a swindler, or a drunkard — not even to eat with such a person. The distinction is clear. If someone claims to be a Christian and is involved in ongoing sin — and he expands the list here to include the immoral, the covetous, the idolater, the reviler, the drunkard, and the swindler — you are not to have anything to do with them. The implication is that you have already gone through the process laid out in Matthew 18.

Judging Those Inside the Church

Verse 12 states: "For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges." The principle is straightforward. There are pagans in the world — do not waste time and energy judging them. God will judge them. If you are going to exercise judgment, direct it toward those within the church.

And here is Paul's final word on this whole episode: "Remove the wicked man from among yourselves." If someone — man or woman — is engaged in ongoing, unrepentant sin, the church must act. This applies across the board, and it applies to students as well. If a junior in high school says they are a Christian, and the whole school knows they are living in an immoral way — drinking, trying drugs, engaging in sexual immorality — we should not simply be in their face about it. If they do not repent, this process applies to them too. This is serious.

The Heart Behind Discipline

The message of discipline is not that we do not love you or care about you. It is precisely because we love you that if there is no repentance, there must be removal. That is what makes this an awesome task. Does this mean the church is filled with nothing but perfect people? No. It means that when we sin, we are broken over that sin. The people Paul is addressing are those who sin, continue in it, and refuse to repent.

The Danger of Ignoring Sin

John MacArthur writes this: "A church that does not discipline a sinning member is like a person who has good reason to believe he has cancer, but refuses to go to the doctor, because he either does not want to face the problem or the treatment. If he waits too long, the whole body will be permeated with the disease, and it will be too late for treatment to do any good. No church is healthy enough to resist contamination from persistent sin in its midst, any more than the healthiest, most nutritional bushel of apples can withstand contamination from even a single bad apple. The only solution in both cases is separation."

This is serious, and it is not an external discussion — it is not for the world to hear and weigh in on. Paul is speaking to those of us who say we are Christians. He is saying that our sin ought to break our hearts.

Understanding Sin Leads to Holiness

David Brainerd said that when he truly understood sin, and God, and the punishment due for sin, and the sacrifice that was made, that understanding inevitably moved him toward holiness. You do not need a long series of lectures on morality. When you understand Christ, you begin to live in a moral way. That is what Paul is teaching here.

This is one of the great marks of a healthy church — not just that we teach these things, but that we actually deal with them. God has been gracious to place you in an environment where we are not afraid to talk about this, because we love you.

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*Father, thank You for Your Son, Jesus — for His life and His death. Thank You for these words that seem harsh but are not. They are truly words of love. As we have to deal with sin in the body, may we do so with a spirit of love and gentleness. We pray especially for the students here, that they would take this equally seriously — that being 15, 16, or 17 does not mean having a right to sin without consequence. Whoever we are in this place, if we say we are Christians, then our lives are to exhibit a broken and contrite heart, broken over our sin. Through Your Spirit, do that work in our lives. In Jesus' name, Amen.*