Responsibility

Let's stand again and open our Bibles tonight to Matthew 28, verse 18. And Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven on earth has been given to me. Go therefore. He's using the story.

He said, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you and behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. Father, we thank you for your word again tonight. Pray you at Awaken us in it. Help us to be solid in your truth and awakened in you in Jesus name.

Amen. God bless you. You can be seated. We have been studying the book of Luke, but we're going to take one week away from the book of Luke.

We spent the first three weeks talking about Luke, talking about the introduction and some of the key things we need to understand. And if you will, get online, if you won't hear from anyone of those weeks and listen to it, I believe these things will help you as you read the book of Luke, especially if you missed week one, week one we really took some time and talked about the culture of the day. And when you understand the two cultures that were active in that day, the Roman culture and the Jewish culture that Jesus was right in the middle of, you begin to understand how radical his teaching was. And you'll also begin to understand how much it's affected our culture and how much we've been influenced by the culture of Christ.

And you'll begin to see how the world is trying to take us away from that and how dangerous, how dangerous for society that that is. So I would encourage you to listen to those things. You get to this point where you read about Pilate and Pilate is saying, I find no reason to crucify this guy. I find no guilt in him.

He's not done anything wrong. I should let him go. And the Jewish leaders are still wanting him to be crucified. You come to understand why the Jewish leaders wanted that.

And you come to an understanding of how Pilate, even though he thought he was innocent, could go along with that and do that and not feel any guilt or any shame or any hesitation. How he could make that decision, even though he's saying, I find no reason, there's no reason to do that. Okay, crucifying. You'll learn about the culture.

You'll learn about the culture. You'll learn about the culture. You'll understand how that can happen. Now tonight, the message tonight is really inspired by some of our circumstances of the day and how we are being, the churches, being influenced by the circumstances of the day.

How we can be influenced. One of the really places where we really have to be cautious is when our children, our grandchildren, our friends, our aunts, our uncles, wander in to sin, wander away from God. And how we treat them, how we respond to them, especially when we love them so much, we don't want to be at war with them. And how we are, what kind of responsibility we have to respond to that.

What kind of responsibility do we have in a society that is pushing us towards acceptance of a certain thing. So we have, you know, one of our presidential candidates, as we talked before, on one of the recent debates said that when he becomes president, that all churches that do not perform same-sex marriages, all churches that preach against homosexual lifestyle, that he will take their tax exemption away from them. What do we do in the face of some of those things? Another one said, this is last week, that in our prisons, that inmates have the right to tax payer-funded sex change operations.

Then that just excites you. And then you hear the audience applaud, you don't hear people gasping, you hear the audience, yeah, that sounds right. How do we, you know, function in this world? And what do we do?

What is our responsibility in the face of a hostile world, even when it's privately hostile to us or publicly very hostile to us? And the first thing I would tell you is this, we have to awaken to the battle that is going on around us. There's a real battle about Christian morals that's going on and how Christianity is seen today. And we have to awaken to it, but not despair.

The church has to come to this awakening that there is a battle going on. It is going to impact the next generations dramatically unless there's an awakening of the presence of God in our country today. And we need to know how to do that now. And simply, we have responsibilities in the kingdom that Christ puts on us, no matter what our doubts are, no matter what our fears are, no matter what our personal desires are.

When we put our faith in Jesus, He becomes our Lord. As our Lord, He has a right to tell us how to act. He has a right to tell us what's right and wrong. He has a right to tell us how society should be run.

And we enter into His service, we have responsibility. So when we have family, friends, co-workers, we have a responsibility to present them with the gospel. It's not an option. It's a responsibility that we're going to answer for.

Just like we have a responsibility to the poor around the world to do something about it, to make their life better. Whether it's a small thing like Operation Christmas Child or whether it's a maybe a little more expensive thing to do a food basket for a family that would have a really celebrate Thanksgiving or whether it's ongoing giving to help missions around the world. We have a responsibility to do something and we should use, look at our lives and ask ourselves, am I individually meeting that responsibility? When I go to church, is my church working to meet that responsibility?

Are we doing what we should do as a fellowship of believers to meet that responsibility? And living within that direction of the Spirit of God. Right now we feed 250 children every day that would not have food otherwise someplace in the world. We do that through convoy of hope.

We do that through our missions giving. My hope is the day of con when we're doing that for one child for every person in our church that we're feeding some child someplace that otherwise would not be fed. I think that's a good goal, don't you? Keith Green, the great song writer used to talk about a generation's responsibility to their generation.

No one can reach a generation except the people in that generation. It's our responsibility to reach the generation. So we have several relationships that happen in this that we are responsible for. One is there are times we meet people in passing.

Just maybe one time in our life we're going to meet them. And the door opens and some way God opens the door. We are to be ready to share faith with that person. That can happen at any moment in time in your life.

You just have to be aware and praying. God don't let me miss those opportunities when they come up. That opportunity arises. Let me be ready.

Now I would tell you when I'm talking to that person I try to stay, keep my focus on the love of God for them and the Lordship of Christ in their life. They want to get off onto some tangent about some specific sin. I try to just, I don't even worry about that right now. I'm worried about, do you know who Jesus is and do you know that he should be the Lord of your life because there's only one way to heaven.

And you're going to stand before God someday. And then I try to just invite them to church somewhere. If they're here in town, if I'm in our church or if they're some other town, I tell them to go find a church. But I recognize in that moment that I am just one in a string of people that God is going to bring into their life.

And I'll usually tell them that. I will usually say to them, listen, as anybody else ever shared their well, I have a few people out. We'll see, I'm next in line. Well, no, nobody else.

Well, I'm going to be praying that other people do. You're going to run into other Christians. And I write their name on my prayer list and I begin to pray for them. And I know God loves them more than I do, and he's going to send other people into their life.

I've known people that it was six or seven people into witnessing to them before they really began to take things seriously. There was a series of events that took place before they really began to be open that God was trying to move in their life. And so if that's the case, I want to be a willing participant in that process. And in that process, if you're really early on in it, you may get real resistance.

You may get mocked. You may get ridiculed. You may be told to shut up and leave me alone. You may be told all sorts of things.

Now, I would tell you, I try not to jump into those things cold turkey. Usually there's some connection that's happened that gives me, that makes me feel, hey, I'm supposed to say something to this person. I'm supposed to talk to them. But I would tell you that one of the things we need to pray for in your prayer time is God let me not miss the opportunities.

When the opportunities are come to me, let me see them, let me understand them, and let me be willing to speak to them. Those can be some of the most exciting conversations you can have in life when you realize God has led you to this point and this time and he's given you an opportunity to plant a seed in that person's life. And whether it's an ugly response or a casually interested response or a man I've been hearing this over and over again response, all of those responses are okay. Especially if this person, you're going to walk away.

I mean, I've got people that I pray for all the time that some I haven't seen in 20 years. I met them one time. They're on my prayer list and I don't know what's happened to them. I don't know where they've gone.

It's way back before Facebook and we could ever connect whether they wanted to connect with me or not. So I don't know where they're at or what's happened to them. But I know God does. And so I just keep praying for them whenever I've got a little list and sometimes I'll think about that list of my prayer time and I'll go and just pray for them.

I'll lift the ones I've got in their names all right if their names up and pray for them. So that's these people in passing. Now the other group of people are the people we're in relationship with. We are in relationship with family, friends, neighbors, coworkers.

How many of you have people in those categories that are not safe? Yeah, they're not. They don't know Christ. Anybody here not have anybody like that in your life?

No, I do. But we are also in relationship with our community. And as a church, we have a responsibility to our community to do certain things. So here's what Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount.

He says this to us. You are the salt of the earth, but if salt loses, lost its taste, how shall it be, shall it be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. You are the lie to the world.

The city set on a hill cannot be hidden nor do people lie to lamp and put it under a basket but on a stand and it gives light in all the house in the same way let your light shine before others so they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. Now especially in this world where we have an angry world, you may have somebody who's hostile towards you because you're fake. You may have a family member or a co-worker, somebody in people in our community that would be hostile to us, angry at us because of our stance on right and wrong and our stance on what is sin and what is acceptable and isn't acceptable. And the whole desire, this is an act of the enemy.

Our whole desire is for us to accept it is okay and so this hostility is there. And so Jesus gives us what the church is supposed to do in the face of a hostile world. We are to be the light. We are to be the light in the world.

We are to work at being the light of the world. As a church we should be trying to be light in our world. What does that mean? We should be trying to make the world a better place.

We should be doing things like bringing coats in for people who don't have coats. We should be involved in things like cumulata. We should be involved in ministries in our community. We should work at making our community a better place for people to be and just be the light of the world in it.

And I would tell you that is the same thing in your personal life with whoever it's in your life. You want to be a light in it. Now what this calls for sometimes is that we take the insult instead of biting on the insult, instead of taking the bait of the enemy and getting in an argument with our family member or friend every time they take a shot at us. That's most of the time we let it go.

We don't get in the fight. The fact that they are saying that to you says that they know what you believe and they don't like it. And if they are saying it to you it's not because they are open to be convinced otherwise. They are closed to be convinced at that point in time.

So the best thing we can do in those moments is just for the most part walk away from it. Just let it go. Don't get in the big fight with them. Go take the argument or get into it with them.

Just let it pass on by. The other step is that we learn to serve with love. We've got to serve people in our life lovingly even when it doesn't make sense to the world. Jesus continually calls us and teaches us that serve in hood is greater than power.

That we are called he came, he gave himself on the cross. What did he do? He took every insult. He took every time he was hit.

Every time he was beaten. Every time he was attacked. He took it all. Even to obedience to death on the cross and saying to them, father forgive them.

They don't know what they do. He was being the servant to the needs of all of those people there in spite of how they were treating him. And he tells us that there are times when we are just to be the light of the world and we are just to be the salt of the earth in that thing. We have got to light the world in that thing and we have got to learn this balance of when is the right time just to walk away and leave it alone and when is the right time to speak up and say something.

So I will tell you, there is time on Facebook I have friends on their belief completely opposite what I believe and they will take a shot at me on Facebook and sometimes my friends will jump on to defend me and I am like this is okay. What I am going to do with that person, I am going to go and message them instead of talking to them online. I am going to go privately to them and begin to enter into conversation with them. It is there where we get a lot more done.

Sometimes it is so out there that I have to say something. I say something. But most of the time I just move that to a personal conversation with them. That is where we will get someplace.

When they call me names and I have had them call me all kinds of names, my response is generally well that is a good argument. Really got me there. The weight of that logic just blew me away. So what are you saying to them?

You are saying to them, you are not even, you are just so emotionally attached to this, you are not even telling me what you really believe and why I am wrong. And that is a question I will ask. Why am I wrong? Where am I wrong?

And what is the basis for being wrong? Now this is for people you are in relationship with. I would tell you there comes this time inside of our family. We don't want to be the person that every year at Thanksgiving dinner, Uncle Bob takes a shot at us and we get mad and take a shot back at him and disrupts the whole day.

There comes a time you just ignore Uncle Bob and you just go on with life. And you just don't let that, you are praying for Uncle Bob and you are just going on. And you are not letting the turmoil of that moment. And just understand again, he is saying that and doing that because it bugs him.

It bugs him because the Holy Spirit is moving in his life. And we just keep on letting him bug him. There are people that I know that are really, really far from God. And some with moral lives that are really challenging.

And we do business with him. I do business with him. And I keep doing business. I don't go look for something.

I don't run away from him. And I have had people ask me, how do you do business with that person with the way they are living? And I say, how am I ever going to build a relationship with them to be able to speak to them as a friend unless I run away from him? I am not going to run away from him.

I am going to try to get next to him. And I like them. I am going to get next to him where I can have conversations. And there are some where we have those conversations.

There are some where I am early in them and haven't had those conversations yet. But my intention is to have those conversations. But I can't have those conversations if I run out of relationship with them. I say, oh, I am never going to be around them.

I am not going to do business with them. I am not going to talk to them. I am going to separate myself from them. The only time that I really find myself questioning whether I should say that is if they are using my resources some way to extend and expand their agenda.

And then I go, I can't be a part of that. I can't be a part of helping you do that. What I want to be able to do is be in a relationship with them enough that I can be a blessing. Now here is the danger point.

The danger point is they can be very kind people. They can be somebody you love deeply, a son or daughter, a grandson or a grad or other. You love deeply. You love them deeply.

You can meet this person and say, this person is really nice. I really like them. I know a lot of people who are far from God that I really like them. Sometimes they are more likable than some Christians you get around.

Have you ever met somebody like that? They are likable. Now here is the problem. I cannot compromise the message.

I can't risk compromise. I have got to recognize that they are kind. I can respect that they are kind and I can try to be kind to them. But the temptation is especially if it is a son or a grandson or a granddaughter, the temptation is to justify their sin.

The temptation is this is one of the conversations I was in with a friend of mine who has sparked me and this whole thought is the temptation is to throw our arms around. I am going to show them the love of Christ. We do need to show them the love of Christ. But Jesus didn't just say be the light of the world.

He said be the salt of the earth. And he gives us the startling statement. If the salt loses its salt, how can it get it back? Once you compromise that, how do you get it back?

Once you have accepted it, how do you get your saltiness back? And then he says all that is good for then is to be thrown out and trampled by men. All that is going to happen is your faith is going to be trampled by men. No power, no effect, no nothing.

But you compromise instead of being firm. And that's the hard part when you have somebody that you really love is how do we stay in relationship with them, love them and try to serve them while at the same time making sure we are not deluding our own thinking or letting them be deluded in their thinking that they are okay with God. It would be absolutely tragic if we let people in our life that we love who are obviously outside of God's will to think that we approve of how they live and that God approves of how they live. Because they are looking for that approval.

What some of our churches today are doing in the LGBTQ question is they are being a part of condemning people to a Christless eternity because they are saying, well this is okay. When the Bible clearly says it's not okay. And they are making up all kinds of excuses. I was talking with one person and they were saying, well you have to go back to this statement and I was just like, you know what, for the last 6,000 years, 5,000 years of Jewish theology and the last 2,000 years of Christian theology, they have all believed the same thing.

It's all throughout their writings. It's all throughout their explanation of Scripture that their sexual immorality that includes sex outside of marriage, adultery, sex with animals, sex with men with men and women with women. What is condemned consistently from the beginning of Jewish doctrine and Christian doctrine and anybody who tells you anything different is somebody who is lying. It's consistently throughout the Word of God and throughout Scripture and Christian and Judaism.

So we are called, we must be the salt of the earth, especially today in this area of sexual confusion. So we cannot celebrate sin or give the message that it's okay with God. We've got to be able to find loving ways to tell people it's not. We must give them the message that they are loved.

Now listen to what God speaks through Ezekiel in Ezekiel chapter 3. He says, at the end of 7 days, the Word of the Lord came to me. Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me.

If I say to the wicked, you shall surely die and you give him no warning nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way in order to save his life. That person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood, I will require at your hand. He says, you have a responsibility to tell the wicked that they're in trouble. And if you don't, they're going to die in their wickedness, but you're going to be held somehow held responsible for that.

But if you warn the wicked, he does not turn from his wickedness or from his wicked way. He shall die for his iniquity that you shall be delivered, you're sold. So God says, if you tell him, now you're off the hook. You've told him.

And again, if a righteous person, think about this. If a righteous person turns from his righteousness and commits injustice and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die because you have not warned him, he shall die for his sin, and his righteous deeds that he has done shall not be remembered. But his blood, I will require at your hand. But if you warn the righteous person not to sin and he does not sin, he shall surely live because he took warning and you will have delivered your soul.

He's saying to Ezekiel, which is this theme, this passage that is revealed to us, that we have this responsibility to speak to these issues, to be clear about who we are, to stand on the truth. And our forefathers did that no matter what the cost. They did that at the cost of beatings. They did that at the cost of property being confiscated.

They did that at the cost of martyrdom. They refused to compromise the message of the gospel. So again, it's tragic if they feel you accept them as a believer. So it's got to be strained at times when you don't.

They may reject you for a time when you don't. But that is the price we walk through for the salvation of their soul. Now listen, every victory in these areas starts with prayer. If they announce sin as if to celebrate it, and they tell that to you, you've got to be able to look at it and say, look, I love you, but I've got to pray about how to talk to you about this.

We cannot celebrate their sin. We've got to find a way to help them through their sin and find the right. I'll tell you what, it drives me. You know what drives me is a pastor crazy.

I'll see somebody on Facebook and they will announce them moving in with their boyfriend. But I'm moving in with their girlfriend. And then you see a bunch of Christians going, congratulations. Oh, how cool.

Oh, how wonderful. We're so happy for you. And I'm sitting there going, we shouldn't be. We shouldn't be crying out in prayer form.

That's what we should be doing. Being that rogue, walking that road is tough sometimes. It's hard. One of our daughters had a baby before she was married.

You know, we don't want to punish the baby. We don't really want to punish her. Grateful that through that she was repentant. Grateful that the young man was repentant.

Grateful that they eventually a couple years later got married. Grateful for all of those things that they did. But in the middle of it, we had to be careful not to celebrate it, not to make it. Now, thank God he's been working such a redemptive way in the middle of all that.

That's absolutely been a marvelous outcome of things. But that's because God worked redemptively. So in the middle of these things, I know with us, our conviction, I'm not putting up my conviction on anybody else, but our conviction was for us that when it came down time for like a baby shower, we just said no, if you want to do something for the baby, give it just, but we're not going to have a party about this. That was our conviction.

I don't blame anybody else for doing something different than that. But that was our conviction. That we said we would really appreciate your help if you'd like to do something for the baby. Here's what you can do, if you want to do something for this is what you can do.

But we're not going to party about this. That was our conviction. And I think every family has to come to their conviction about how do we send the message about what's right and wrong in a way that is clear. And we were pretty certain at that point in time that she understood how wrong it was.

She understood what she'd compromise that the young man had. But we wanted to walk through this thing in a certain way. That's part of this process. Some of you may find yourself in a place where you have a cousin or a granddaughter or son or whatever inviting you to their same sex marriage.

You're going to have to really struggle with do I go celebrate that or do I not? And I don't know that there's a hard, fast law for every one of us to obey. I think that we have to discern wisdom in the middle of that and decide what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. How do I keep the message clear to this relative of mine that I strongly disagree with this without slamming every door communication with them?

And that's the battle every individual has to walk through as we find mercy in the middle of this. And so part of it is what's your relationship? So you have a cousin and they have the same sex marriage thing going on or whatever. Do you even have the relationship to talk to them?

Sometimes we just don't have the relationship. This is a deal. All we have in that moment is prayers what we do. And if we don't have the relationship, all we're going to do is cause turmoil and be seen as a little wacky.

If we have a relationship, then we have to be able to say something. But here's the deal. When we look at our family and our friends, you've got to be able to define in your heart. I think this is a responsibility of a believer.

We have to be able to define in our heart. Are they saved? Are they not saved? There's any evidence that they're born again.

Now, we certainly don't know for sure. You can very well have somebody you think they're really born again and they're not. And you may have somebody you think they're far from God and they really are. But if we get this kind of idea of honestly looking at the people we love and the people we like and saying, yeah, there's evidence in their life that this person's come to relationship with Christ.

I can talk to him about this. It's pretty easy. I see the evidence of it. And here's people.

I don't see any evidence of it at all. We have a responsibility to have a spiritual talk with them. I'm just telling you got a responsibility to have a spiritual talk with them. Now I'm not telling you got to go try to drag them across the line of salvation.

I think that's where we make a mistake sometimes is we kind of get the spiritual laws that we're going to walk them through the spiritual laws and then we're going to say, are you ready to say? And they're probably not. A spiritual talk isn't some evangelism tool to try to convince somebody to come to Christ right then. A spiritual talk is a seed planting event.

It's where you take them out and say, hey, I've got something I want to talk to you about. Can we go talk and I'll buy you a cup of coffee. I want to buy you a lunch and you kind of have a good time and you enjoy being with them. And they say, hey, I thought you want to talk to me about something I do.

And you share how you came to Christ and what Christ means to you and tell them have you ever had that experience in Christ. And do you have an experience in Christ? And then you say, do you want to know more? Now I'm telling you, that should be done in less than five minutes, maybe about three.

If you go for 20, you've lost them. You got about three minutes to say, I came to Christ when I was X number of years old because of XYZ and here's how he's changed my life and I want everybody to know it because he's the only way to heaven. You can't get to heaven without it. I want you to be in heaven with me.

That's about it. You just got to go boom. Have you ever accepted Christ in your life as your Lord and Savior? Well, I don't even know what that means.

I don't think I believe that. Okay, well, I do and I want you to watch my life because I do. I want you to pay attention because I do. I am going to be praying for you that you'll see the light of God send other people in your life and I'm going to be inviting you to things in my church every now and then because it's really important for me for you to hear about and I hope you'll come when I invite you.

I hope you just come out and hang out with me for a couple hours because this is the most important thing in the world. There's nothing more important than this. You're getting your heart right with God. And so I'm just begging you.

I'm pleading with you when I invite you. Come. Come hang out with me for an hour. I'm going to do this three or four or five times a year.

I'd like to come hang out with me. And if you're ever going through anything tough, if you're ever going through anything bad, if you ever feel absolutely empty and lonely, call me. I'll be there. I will help you.

I will talk to you about how this all works and what God can do. And you're like, well, you're trying to open the door to the conversation. You're trying to open the door. You're trying to open the door.

You think I'm going to help? You've got to be honest. I said, well, unless you've ever accepted Christ in your life as your Lord and as your Savior, I'm sorry. That's where I was and if Christ had come, I would have gone to help.

And so would anybody else in this room, you include. Well, you're just a hater. No, I'm a lover. I'm loving you so much.

I'm telling you the risky truth. I love you so much. I'm telling you the risky truth. You're not there to argue with them.

You're not there to fight with them. You're there to plan to see them. We have a responsibility to have those talks. Even when we know they're not going to like the talk.

But you're trying to do it in a way that is as non-confrontational as possible, one of the funerals recently, one of my buddies from grade schools here. And this is a guy who, uh, did a completely different faith background. Really like him, completely different faith background. And we're standing out here.

And we're standing out here and we're talking with each other about once, twice a year. And he looked at me in the middle of this conversation and said, you know where we were in grade school? And I said, yeah, sure. He said, you took me to church to eat with you with some children's event.

He said, I remember going home and asking my parents if I could come. And they said, sure. He goes, you know, I've never, ever forgotten that. What happened?

God planted a seed. I said, well, we need to do it. How long have we going to be in time? I said, let's get together and talk.

God is working in people's lives. We have to be willing. Now, one of the big things is begin to invite these people to church. And again, invite your friends to church.

About 72, 73% of the people get saved because somebody invited them to church. So we should be praying. God, bring your Holy Spirit conviction on our services every Sunday. Bring it so heavily and so mightily that when people raise their hand for salvation and pastor says, come on down here, that they run down there, that they're anxious to get down to learn more, that the altars are free for them to come to the altar.

You know, Sunday, when they raised their hand, I didn't know her. She didn't come down. She didn't come down. A few minutes later on, the Intuaries, I happened to run into her.

And I looked at her and said, how are you doing? As soon as I said, how are you doing? She started crying and said, I need help. I swear, come with me.

And we went back. I was getting ready for a second service. I ran out and got the Bob and Stacey said, hey, can you come talk to this lady? She needs somebody to talk to her.

God will use this if we'll be aware. And so I just want to encourage you to be involved and to have these spiritual talks and invite people to church. Now, here's the big question. Why do we do about people who call themselves believers but don't act like it?

So, let me read a couple of scripts for you. First Corinthians chapter 5, chapter 5 verse 1, 2. He says, it is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you of the kind that does not occur even among pagans. A man has his father's wife.

Listen, and you are proud. This is what the devil does to us. We are so proud of our grace. We are so proud of our loving kindness.

We are so proud of how we treat people. He says, and you are proud. You are proud of this. And have put and shouldn't you have rather been filled with grief and have put them out of your fellowship the man who did this.

He says, listen, you have a person who says they are a brother and they are living in sexual immorality. It is not a thing to be all alone. We just welcome. We have people come to our church on Sunday that they are living together.

They are not married. They are living together. They may have a kid or two together. They don't freak out about that until they get saved.

When they get saved, then we start talking to them. We have had people come to the membership and the membership process we discover, they are living together and not married. We discover that. We say, you are not ready to be a member yet.

Some of those people when you say that get ticked off and leave. Some stick around and listen. And you know what really impacts that is when they leave how other Christians talk to them. I remember one family in particular.

The guy was mad. He was ready to leave. He went out and talked to a friend who is a Christian and his Christian friend and citizen. That is a Christian friend.

They are telling you the truth. You need to listen to him. And it absolutely changes his life. We as Christians, we can't be so mambi pambi that when somebody says, oh, my feelings are hurt.

I am not here to say, the church hurt me. I want to ask what sin were you in that they called you on? That is what most of it is. 90% of it is.

There are some people that are not happening. 90% of them called them on their sin. They didn't like it. That is what the church's job is.

We call each other on our sin. We are arrogant. We are prideful. We are selfish.

Our brothers and sisters should call us on it. We should welcome it. Listen a little further. In verse 9, I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people.

Not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral or greedy or swindlers or idolators. I am telling you not to associate with people who act this way. I am not telling you to do that to people in the world. I don't mean them at all.

He said in that case, you would have to leave the world. Now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but a sexually immoral or greedy idolator or slander, a drunkard or a swindler with such a man do not even eat. He says don't even go out with that guy. Now, what about if we call the person on it and they repent, then we gently restore them.

We lovingly restore them. We bring accountability into their life and we help restore them. But if they say nope, this is the way I am going to live. This is what I am going to do.

At some point in time the church is going to go, you are not going to come here and call yourself a Christian and do that. We are not going to put up with that. That is a hard, hard call. I have to make that call maybe three or four times in ministry where somebody was saying, this is the way I am living and I want to be in choir or teach Sunday school class.

I want to look at it. Not unless you repent. This is the way I want to live. You are not going to be in our choir if I know about it.

Not going to teach you in our Sunday school class until you repent. Those are hard calls. That is not why I preach that goes to Bible school. I hope I can kick people out of the church.

That sounds like so much fun. He wants to welcome people in the church. When a person calls himself a brother and refuses to repent, they present themselves to the world as a Christian and they are not. There are some ministerial associations in this city.

I will not go to because the ministers in them, they live compromised lives and they preach compromised messages. I want nothing to do with it. I am not going to be a part of it. Because what they are is not what we are supposed to be.

What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Those people are outside the church. They are living on God. They are ungodly.

What do you expect out of them? Be their friend. Do business with them. Do whatever.

Not my business to judge them. They don't present themselves as Christians. But are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.

Expell the wicked man from among you. Now what makes that extremely extremely difficult in its face? It is extremely difficult when they have 15 family members who are trying to defend them. And saying it is not that bad.

And you are looking at saying no. Listen the Bible is very clear about sexual immorality. It is very clear about this. We cannot do this.

My own daughter, she was in sin. And in that moment they both repented. They have been very repented. We still look at them and said for at least the next year.

For at least the next year. You are sitting down. Come to church. Be in church.

But you are not doing any ministry in the church. When you are 17 years old the year seems like forever. Now it seems like tomorrow. You need to be my age.

But there comes a point in time, you sit and say for the life vision of the church. We cannot just ignore this. And for the health of that person. Now at the end of the day with our family.

We were able to look at these kids when they were young and say listen, that is the day. You can never go out of here and say this church shot it's wounded. The absolute opposite happened. this church came around them and loved them and took care of them and administered to them and blessed them.

And that's what the church is supposed to do with what we do. When they're repentant, we're supposed to respond. So people will ask me from time to time, you know, what about what are you doing with this person? What's the deal?

I'll say, look, right now, we've asked them to do four things, five things, six things. And they're doing every one of them. They're doing every one of them. As long as they do it, as long as they walk through this, they're getting in a small group, they're getting counseling, you know, they're doing XYZ.

These are the four, five, six things you've got. As long as they're doing every one of them, that is a sign of repentance. The second they stop doing that, then are they start saying, when does this get taken off? I mean, then you're going, okay, what's it really about?

Repentance is as long as a person's repentant, then the church should love them and restore them. Amen. The second the person isn't repentant, then we've got to sit and say, what are we going to do here? So this person, the goal of expelling the person is not to punish them.

The goal of saying, I won't be a part of this. It's so they will know clearly that the church thinks it's wrong. So get this picture. If the leadership of the church says this person's living a lifestyle that they've walked out on their wife, they're having a fair with another person.

Now, maybe people in the church don't know that. We haven't gotten up and said, hey, Billy over here has left his wife. He's having an affair and he's doing XYZ and because of that, we're not letting him be an usher anymore. We're not letting him do XYZ anymore.

We're calling him to repentance and now he's mad and he's leaving. We don't get up and say that. But what Billy does is he goes, there's 25 friends in the church. He says, all the church is being so mean.

You know, my wife's always been bad. She's always been, you know, really negative. She's always been, you know, the XYZ to me and all the stuff that she did to me. And now because I won't live with that forever, they're kicking me out.

And the sad thing that happens that time is sometimes people go, well, yeah, that's how our pastors and elders work. They're just looking for people who are wounded to kick out of the church instead of looking at that person and go, you know what? We know our pastors and we know our elders and they wouldn't do that. Something's wrong with your story.

Tell me the whole story. They wouldn't kick you out if you were just wounded. That's not the way it works here. But because people choose to believe that because some of us, especially some of us, we have this tendency to doubt all authority.

What we do is we support them in their sin and they don't feel a call to repentance. I'll tell you one last story. We'll go talk about this a long time. A number of years ago when I was first first pastor, first couple of years, there was a man in our church who left his wife and went to live with another woman.

And I called him and said, hey, can we talk? And his answer was, I am not talking to you. And we kind of battled that back and forth and then you really need to come see me. Isn't going to happen, not taking place.

This marriage is over. We're doing this. It was a few days later that three guys came into my office, they came to see me and they were all close friends. They had a lot of contact with this guy.

It was much more than I had. And they came into my office and they said, have you know what's going on? They named the guy said, yes, I did. Have you reached out to him?

I said, yes, I have. What's happening? He won't talk to me. I said, he's won't talk to me.

I called him and asked him to come see me. You can't make it. Can't make it. And I'll never forget their response to me as they stood there.

They said, this will not stand. This is not going to stand. They got in the car. I didn't know what they're going to do.

They got in the car. They drove to the woman's house where he was living and they knocked on the door. And he came to the door and they said, he said to them, what do you want? And they said, we've come to take you home and he looked at him and he went, OK.

Let's get your stuff and they got their stuff and they took him home. They're still married today. They're living another state still married today. But that's because the church acted right.

Those brothers didn't make excuse for him. They looked at and they said, this isn't right. We're not putting your coming home with us. Now, there's no guarantee it'll always happen that way.

But it did in that case because the church acted right. He was in my office shortly after that. And we did get to start talking. And it turned into a very good thing.

That's because three guys in relationship helped. I'll tell you, this is why you want your families in small groups. You want them in small groups so that people have relationship with you and with them. That if you need called or they need called on something, there's friends that can do it.

Amen. All right. I talked to you all. I love you.

Let's stand together with us pray. Father, I just pray you'd help us to fulfill our responsibility. Remind us, Father, guide us by your spirit, how we respond to sin and help us, Father, as we reach out to people around us who are lost. And as a church, let us be healthy and righteous in what we do.

In Jesus name, we pray. Amen. Amen. God bless you.

I love you going to the name of the Lord. Amen.