The Love One Another Podcast | Episode 11 - Confronting Sin in the Church

This is the Love One Another podcast from Beach One Church.

Together, we're exploring the first letter to the Corinthians with the hope that we will be formed by the way of the cross and the love of the one who bore it.

Admitting, as this letter says, that we are nothing without love.

Love, empowered by the Spirit through the work of Jesus, is an unstoppable force.

It invites each of us to join God in the work of redeeming all things back to God.

With that in mind, let's open our hearts to God's work today.

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate.

A man is sleeping with his father's wife, and you are proud.

Shouldn't you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?

For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit.

As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this.

So when you are assembled, and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

Your boasting is not good.

Don't you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?

Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch, as you really are.

For Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed.

Therefore, let us keep the festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

We said the church in Corinth had problems, and Paul opened the letter by addressing problems with division and status.

But here in chapter 5, Paul made a shift to what we might describe as the church scandal of all church scandals.

We all sin, we all made mistakes, we all make choices that we would prefer no one remembered.

Some of us even have mistakes that keep us up at night 10, 20, 30 years or more after they took place.

Childhood errors that we wish we could just laugh at, but still somehow well up a sense of embarrassment in us.

Adolescent slip-ups that make us cringe with shame as we try to remember why exactly we did what we did.

Maybe even egregious mistakes that weren't just embarrassing or shameful, but were painful and caused real harm to people and our relationships.

But no matter the sin, no matter the mistake, no matter the choice you made, you can find relief in the fact that it will almost certainly not be remembered 2,000 years from now.

Like the sin Paul addressed here in these verses.

Yet this case of sexual immorality from a man and his stepmom, while painful for the church and for those involved, serves as an example for us today of how to handle issues of sin.

Paul took the example of this sexual immorality and compared it to the Passover.

A strange connection at first glance.

The Jewish community celebrated Passover by sharing unleavened bread, bread made without yeast and lamb, in remembrance of God saving them from the last plague during their captivity in Egypt as the angel of death passed over their houses.

But making bread in the ancient world was a little different than you carrying for your sourdough starter today.

There were no packets of yeast ready to be sprinkled into the flour.

There wasn't an even an understanding of what yeast really was.

The people of the ancient world simply knew that mixing the ingredients for bread together in a bowl previously used to mix the ingredients for bread, caused the bread to rise and have a fluffy texture.

It was a happy little accident in the spirit of Bob Ross.

In order to make unleavened bread, the Jewish bakers, whether at home or in their place of work, would thoroughly clean their mixing bowl to eliminate every last trace of the old bread mixture, which removed the yeast and kept the bread from rising.

Paul said, For Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, and we, the church, are the unleavened bread, not made with malice and wickedness, but with sincerity and truth.

The solution then to the problem of sin in this case of sexual immorality is to clean the mixing bowl and to wash out the yeast.

This is no simple task.

It comes with some significant work and patience.

But if this community will truly love one another, then it will protect one another from even the little yeast of sin that could leaven the whole batch of dough.

Let's take a moment to respond to today's reading.

Paul used the metaphor of yeast spreading through bread dough to describe the impact of sin in the church.

What are some small sins in your own life that you might be tempted to overlook that can still spread and cause harm in our community?

What did you learn about race and truth in that process?

How can we hold one another accountable in love without falling into judgmentalism or reason?

You can find the Love One Another Sermon series and other resources at Beachpoint.com slash messages or on the Beach Point Church app.

May you carry the love of God into every encounter you have today.