Scandal!

1 Corinthians 5

 ⁹ I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— ¹⁰ not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. ¹¹ But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister^[c] but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.

 ¹² What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? ¹³ God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”^[d]

The modern church does not have the monopoly on scandal. The early church, specifically the church at Corinth, had it's share of scandal. This message from Paul really puts our churches on alert. We can not worry about our "Ministry" to the outside world of sinners, if we have scandal from within. Churches are not going to be perfect places. But, sometimes this is used as an excuse to accept sin from within. We must not allow sins of sexual immorality, greed, idolatry, slander, drunkenness, and other sins take over our churches. We must be diligent to deal with these sins upfront and with all candor and honesty. We can not accept immorality for the sake of members. We can not ignore the premise of the bible to be more popular. Churches must take a stand. We must draw the line in the sand to not accept sin in our midst. We can not even chance the appearance of endorsing sin. If we accept it from those who claim to be followers of Christ, if we accept it from those who are leaders, we will earn the label of hypocrite. The only respect we can possibly hope for is if we are true to the values of Christ. 



We walk a fine line between endorsing sin and accepting broken people who are in search of Christ. I'm not saying we should close our churches to outsiders. I am saying we must make sure that we are firm in our stand against sin and that we do not change our standards to make it appealing for people to attend our church.  


Example: Murder is a sin. Yet, we can accept the murderer. By accepting the sinner do we need to endorse murder as OK. NO, of course we don't. Yet, that is what we do for abortion, homosexuality, drunkenness, sexual immorality, and a multitude of other "controversial" sins.