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Passionate privilege: Protection and purity
Acts 20:28 and Acts 5:1-11
I. “Judge not, lest ye be judged”
“Judge not, lest ye be judged”
I have heard this phrase quoted by every kind of person you can imagine. It’s the rallying call of the liberal, the secular, the humanist, the anti-nomian, the homo-sexual, the promiscuous, the junky, the abortionist, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker AND the Christian.
And since it’s a scriptural text, you cant really argue with it. Its black and white, simple and straightforward.
II. Purity and protection
For the next several weeks (other than Palm Sunday and Easter) we are discussing the passionate privilege of God’s people in Poolesville. Last week I called you to remember the promise you made in the covenant. I called you to remember what that was based on—the new covenant that Christ has with his people. Last week I called you to unfurl the banners and come together with the people of God here in Poolesville and dedicate ourselves to making the demons quake.
Today, I want to continue that call by reminding you of another passionate privilege you have of being here at Poolesville Baptist Church. Its one that isn’t readily obvious in this day and age, but it is a passionate privilege all the same. So this week I emphasize the passionate privilege of protecting purity.
Those of you who are members of PBC have the privilege of protection. We, the shepherds of the church, have been given a solemn task—to protect the purity of this local church.
Acts 20:28 Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.
This is our job primarily and your great benefit, but there is so much to this.
III. The gods of this age
Jerry Shirley, the pastor at Grace Baptist Church, says there are three things that have become gods over the last 30 years that weren’t so prevalent before that. Because I agree with him so strongly, I thought it important that you hear our thinking on this subject.
The three “new” gods are
1. Open-mindedness
2. Total acceptance
3. Privacy
A. Open Mindedness
Open-mindedness is important isn’t it? In fact, I am going to ask that you be open minded today. I am going to ask that you consider something that might be quite foreign to your thinking. But this isn’t the open mindedness I mean.
I mean the open-mindedness which says there is no such thing as absolute truth. What is true for you may not be true for me or you or you or you. Truth is constantly changing and relative. There is no standard, no authority. The bible is great for the things we like, but lets keep an open-mind. Its no longer authoritative in all areas.
If you take a stand on an important issue you will be labeled as narrow minded.
· “it’s just an alternate lifestyle, and you’d understand if you weren’t so narrow-minded!”
· “don’t judge us you narrow minded extremist!”
B. Total acceptance
We are expected today, by those around us, to accept the behavior of everyone around us, no matter what it is. The cry of the day is “TOLERANCE!” And the price of intolerance is to be labeled a bigot.
· The abortionist yells, “Don’t judge me, you have no right!”
· The teen with their girlfriend yells, everyone is doing it. You are obviously a loser if you are still a virgin at 16.
C. Privacy
“Stay out of my private life. What a man does behind closed doors is his business!” And if it’s been true of the president, then who doesn’t it apply to…if even HE is not accountable for his actions, then what I do is my business and no one else’s!
In America, privacy today has been elevated to constitutional status. Many of today’s social programs are grounded in the false assumption that people have a private sphere around them that no one has a right to intrude upon.
Even your teens demand that you knock on their door and stay out of their bedroom when they are not home
IV. The gods in our church
But what has this to do with the church?
The problem is that privacy, tolerance, and open-mindedness are not just gods of the heathen, but have become our gods as well.
The whole idea that there should be a shepherd who leads you on your path and ignores your demands of privacy, tolerance and open-mindedness is ludicrous. You hate your boss at work, you sure don’t need another one at church.
This just sounds like Big Brother is watching, and I am not in favor of BIG CHURCH government. Is that what this is? Another boss, Big Church?
We had my wife’s parents over for dinner this week and my kids were all talking a mile a minute and somehow the “who’s the boss?” question came up. Probably because we had to discipline them at the dinner table …again. Davin says, Mama is the boss matter-of-factly. Kadin said, “no, Papa is the boss!” And Rhyston, calmly replied, “No, neither of them is the boss.” I assumed he would follow that God is the boss, but that wasn’t what he meant. He said with incredible profundity, “we don’t have bosses, we have leaders.
That is so true. Your elders aren’t here to be bosses, they are here to lead. They, like parents are here for your benefit, for your protection. They are here to reform your practice, to care about your piety, to protect your purity.
V. Shepherds are Protectors
They are even here to protect your future.
Remember Acts 5, which Carl read this morning? Ananias and Saphira brought their offering to the leaders of the church. That’s a great thing. But then we find that they were liars. Their crime wasn’t that they didn’t give enough, or give the whole amount, but that they lied to the Holy Spirit. They could have come and given the same amount and not pretended to have given everything and God would have been happy I assume. But they lied. I don’t know how long they had been liars. Perhaps this was a way of life for them, perhaps not. But I know the conclusion: God killed them.
This is kind of a scary passage to me. But I know that one of the responsibilities that God has given me is to protect the souls of His church from death. Physical death, yes. But more significantly, my job is to protect you from spiritual death.
But still the church cries out, “Be more open-minded, be tolerant, give me my privacy!”
And if this is your cry, there are plenty of churches ready to acquiesce. There are plenty of preachers who are afraid to deal with subjects that might be controversial, that might rock the boat. I don’t want you to leave because you disagree, I want you to stay and listen and talk to me and let the Holy Spirit talk to you and perhaps we will both grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord.
I know some will leave this church over this. I must be honest, I don’t understand at all. This is one of the greatest privileges that membership brings. Protection of your eternal soul. Why would you give that up for anonymity in a church? Why would you give that up for a church that doesn’t love you enough to confront you? Isn’t confrontation an obvious show of love?
I hope you parents see it that way. I hope you haven’t bought into the modern mindset that your only role is provider of their food, clothes and other luxuries. I hope you haven’t given into their cries of “Give me my privacy!”
What a ridiculous concept for parents to yield to. Please don’t give your kids their privacy. Sure they can have their own room, but don’t give them the impression that that room is only theirs.
That thinking is to abdicate your responsibilities as a parent and to cease to protect them from their sinful self. If my dad had found something in my room that wasn’t okay and confronted me when I got home, the last thing on my mind was questioning his right to be in my room.
Parents, if they live under your roof, you have the right…even the responsibility…to go into their room, their car, anytime you want to!
You have every right to check up on them, to listen to that CD sitting by the stereo, and you have every right to throw it into the trash can!
My guess is that someday soon, my children will indeed go into “THEIR” room angrily and lock the door. I will knock gently on the door and ask to come in. I like to think they will quickly realize their mistake and unlock the door. But lets just say, that he doesn’t unlock the door. I am sure many parents wouldn’t know what to do. I mean, he is 16, he deserves his privacy and I am just being intolerant.
But do you know what I would do. It would be five minutes and that door would be up in the rafters of my shed. My children have rights, lots of them, but only within certain bounds. There is an authority. If they submit, obey and stop rebelling, I would be thrilled to hang that door on his hinges again.
I wouldn’t remove his door because I am angry and want revenge on my child. Disciplining our children is an act of love. And love for our children isn’t displayed in saying yes to everything they want, sometimes love is saying no!
It is the responsibility of the leaders of this church to present God with a pure church. Can you imagine the responsibility that is? It’s the same responsibility you fathers have for presenting your wives pure and your children pure. It’s almost too much to bear.
I can say this honestly, I don’t like it. I don’t like being confronted on sin and I don’t like confronting others. I hate it. It hurts, its scary, it makes knots in my stomach sometimes for weeks. Its not about popularity, its about purity. I am convinced by Acts 20:28 that I must grant you this gift. And I should add that if you saw it as a gift, then it wouldn’t hurt me or be scary to me, or make my hair turn gray, or make me stay up late at night dealing with the stress. It’s a gift I give to my children and it’s a gift we elders give to our spiritual children.
We don’t give this passionate privilege to everyone the same. There is a sense in which we hold all Christians accountable for their actions, but our primary responsibility is to the PBC members who have made a covenant.
“So what are you saying pastor? That you have the phones tapped and cameras in my house?” Of course not. What I am saying simply is that we take our responsibility to guard the purity of the church seriously. We will confront you if you are in sin. We must protect the reputation of the church. And you benefit from that.
VI. The example of I Corinthians 5
The church in I Cor 5 was on the verge of moral collapse. Will you turn their briefly. They were losing their influence and their testimony for Christ was tarnished.
1 Corinthians 5:1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father's wife. 2 And you are proud! Shouldn't you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this?
What? Put out of fellowship? You must be insane. My fellowship is voluntary, you can’t kick me out. Isn’t that like kicking me out of Selbys because I am sleeping with my boyfriend?
But you cant ignore what it says here, can you? So maybe you accept what it says, but you at least need to point out that this was a flagrant, public sin that even the pagans don’t practice.
But look—the church is proud of its tolerance and privacy and non-judgmental attitude. I said it before, I will say it again, “Judge not, lets you be judged.”
Ah, but look at verse 3
3 Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. And I have already passed judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present.
Paul already passed judgment on this man and he wasn’t even there.
“Judge not, lest you be judged?” Perhaps we are going to have to reconsider what that verse means.
But that’s Paul, perhaps he could judge, because, well, he is Paul. But look at verse 4
4 When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5 hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.
Hand him over to Satan? What does that mean? Most commentators believe it includes disfellowshiping the person. Not allowing them to be a part of the church anymore. Why? To be cruel and to get revenge? No, Paul tells us the reason is so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord. He disciplines in order to protect.
And not just to protect the man in sin, but to protect the purity of the church. Look at verse 6
6 Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? 7 Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast-- as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.
A little yeast effects the whole bread. A little sin effects the whole church.
UCLA sociologist, James Wilson, has observed an interesting fact about city life: The crime rate escalates on those streets where broken windows are not repaired. His study showed that the failure to replace windows makes an announcement to the public by saying the standards have been lowered and authority has been abandoned. Wilson sees such practices of disrepair as an invitation for further crime without the threat of adverse consequences. What is true on the street is also true in the church. If we allow sin and unscriptural practices to go unchecked, we are inviting destruction into the Lord’s church. When we exercise the discipline needed to stop and change our damaging behavior, we will erect a fence of protection that will prevent further erosion.