Sin in Church

As some of you know, I teach Sunday School for some of the adults at Praise Baptist church. Really, if I’m being honest, I spend most of my time guiding the conversation on the verses we are reading and making small points here and there. Most of the work is done by the class, which I love. Very often this means class turns out nothing like I imagine it will and most of the time, because of the great students in there, it is better than I would have planned for. Yesterday, though, I would put in the category of missed result.

So we are talking through the 7th chapter of 1 Samuel, the Israelites are called to Mizpah to do a cleansing ritual for their sin and Philistines, knowing where they all are at, plan an attack. So, in class we talked about the complexities of dealing with sin in the church. As a note, this is often a fire starter and yesterday was no exception. See, the church is in a difficult spot when it comes to sin, if someone comes in confessing their sin it can mean we keep them out of certain ministries which could be a problem for them. This can feel like judgment, or placing special punishment, but not forgiveness. It can feel like the best option is to lie, which of course we don’t want to encourage. So, I asked what is the church to do. The class talked about sexual sins and people who might be thieves and how to isolate them from the temptation, which caused me to ask how they would like to be isolated based on the worst sin of their past.

This of course lead to the conversation of why we hide our sins, judgment, fear, embarrassment, pride. Now the class knows, and we talked about James 5:16, which tells us to confess our sins one to another. But the verse, for many, wasn’t greater than the hurt they had experienced when they had try to do this right. In some cases people lost friends or became a point of gossip. Doing what is right is hard and sometimes painful. So, we came back to the story, what did the Israelites do when the war came to their gates, when the philistines took advantage of their faithfulness. They cried out to the Lord and God took care of it. If we don’t if we hide we make a church no one wants to come to, because you should fear people who look perfect and a church which is giving into the enemy. We need to cry out to the Lord, be obedient and let him do the rest.

Now, had we ended there, I might not be writing today, but immediately afterwards they flipped the script on me. What are we to do when another is caught in sin? This might seem obvious to some, but this is actually a far trickier problem. If you think people don’t like confessing their sins, imagine how they feel about having them called out. I should note that I was not as prepared for this portion of the discussion, so while I tried to make sure what was said was Biblically accurate, it is possible there we gaps in my explanation or clarifications on what was offered up by the class.

The first and healthiest way you come to know of another Christian’s sin is by your closeness to them. In this relationship, it allows you to see something they don’t see or have turned away from, but is not spiritually sound. The class referred to this as a gentle rebuke, which comes from Galatians 6:1, which says if a brother is caught in any transgression you are to spiritually restore him in a spirit of gentleness. We focused, and I think rightly so, on that spirit of gentleness. To have that spirit you have to have a relationship, the person has to know first and foremost that you love them, that you are not trying to do them harm, that you are not trying to show how you are better than them. Truth is, you are not, you have an opportunity to restore them because you can see them clearly, it is not the other way around because you are better at hiding, not because of how great you are. We talked about this in terms that were hard on ourselves, but this needs to be taken seriously.

The second way we talked about was one in which you go through steps, which is from Matthew 18. These steps start with a private meeting, then if the person won’t turn from their sin is a meeting with a few people of like mind, and finally if they remain unmoved the church can remove them. There are more details than this, but questions on this method abound. How was this sin discovered? If it was by gossip, isn’t that also a sin? Does that disqualify you from following these steps? Is that first step the same as the gentle rebuke? My answer, while not satisfying to everyone, was to go back to the source scripture. Matthew 18:15 (ESV) says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens you have gained a brother.” So, I focused on this idea of “sins against you”. Not any generic sin, but one in which you are the victimized. Admittedly, this gets tricky in a church where a sin can damage a ministry you are responsible for or can be inadvertent because of close interactions, but if you are only using this method for those who have clearly sinned against you, it keeps you out of the gossip or witch hunting, which should be avoided.

The class, though, did not universally have this read though, some removed the “sin against you” phrase, which changes the handling of these verses. Why? I have a learned class? So, I did a little research. Matthew 18:15 (NIV) says, “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.” It is not a divide on understanding, it is a divide on translation. So, what does it say? What does it really say? Is this method for just those who sin against you or is it any who are sinning?

It turns out this problem is not an ESV/NIV problem. It is much older than that. In the field of Biblical discrepancies, each old translation is called an evidence. These evidences are used to write the various translations. With some quick internet work I found a website that shows 24 evidences for “sins against you” and 5 evidences for no “sins against you”. For now, I probably believe the better interpretation is the one I used in class, but I might be less strong about using it. It gets a little more muddle than this, because of the use of parenthesis and what those mean, but as I was writing this I realized how boring this could becomes. Suffice it to say, handling of sin in church is one of the most important things we do and one of the easiest things for us to mess up. It should be taken seriously, with prayer and with love. I expect we’ll be talking about this again next week, so if anyone has any valuable insight, I sure could use it.