Jesus said, “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. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
“Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” Matthew 18:15–20
Jesus gives you an in-person church.
1. He gives you Christians for correction
2. He gives you himself for confidence
A few weeks ago, we had a visitor who saw our sandwich board signs and joined us for worship. He’s got an interesting goal, to visit all the churches between his house and where he works over in Uptown. And he had an interesting observation, that he’s finding out churches in Chicago are in a lot more places than just church buildings. There’s churches like us, who worship in schools. There’s a church that meets in the Davis Theater. There’s a church that meets in an event space on Ravenswood. There’s a church that meets at the pastor’s apartment.
As we close out our worship series The Kind of Church Jesus Wants, we haven’t heard that Jesus wants all churches to meet in churches. When Jesus says “church,” he isn’t thinking about a beautiful stone cathedral or even a humble wooden country church. He’s thinking of people. The word church literally means gathering. People can gather to worship in Jesus’ name just about anywhere.
And in the last few years—especially in the last six years—people have really stretched that. Some people have thought that since a church is simply a gathering of people, people can gather anywhere and worship. And so they come to the conclusion that they can gather online and be a part of a church. After all, isn’t this the natural progression of churches: from giant cathedrals to impressive a-frames to elementary school auditoriums to online, where you can worship from the privacy of your apartment?
As we go through today’s reading, we will see two of the many reasons why it is a bad idea to go to church online. We will see that, in fact, is extremely challenging to be a part of The Kind of Church Jesus Wants from your living room couch. It’s not really even a good idea to take a more hybrid approach. We learn that Jesus wants us in-person from this reading because there are two big gifts that Jesus gives to you through the church that can only happen in-person: correction from your sisters and brothers in Christ, and himself.
1. He gives you Christians for correction
Jesus 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. Two things to point out right away.
- Firstly, Jesus says to do this with your brother or sister—Jesus does not say if your atheist uncle sins or if your Muslim friend sins, confront them. He is talking about your sibling in Christ. A fellow believer. Jesus does not command us to be the morality police for people who are outside of the Church. He calls us to be good citizens, and we want to uphold justice as good citizens, but he’s not telling you to foist your specifically Christian morals on your non-Christian friends.
- Secondly, what does Jesus mean by “sins”? If your family member lets their anger take over for a minute, if your friend has too many drinks one night, if your fellow Crossroads member has a weak moment and gives into lust, do you need to pull them aside and have a talk? Or is Jesus talking about more serious, repeated patterns of sin: the anger problem, the alcoholism, the repeated lust? We can see that this is a sin that they may not recognize that they’re committing. There’s a chance that they may not listen to you, they may not agree that it’s sinful. And, since Jesus says that if they listen to you, you have won them over, we can assume that he’s talking about people who have been lost to a sin. In other words, when someone has been conquered by anger issues, or a pornography addiction, or chronic selfishness. Sin has the power to master us, to conquer us, to win us, to the point where someone very well may not realize the damage they are doing to their faith by giving into these sins over and over again. Those are the kinds of sins Jesus wants you to make a special effort to confront your friend about.
Jesus is very clear here. It is your job, as a Christian, to correct one of your brothers and sisters when they are stuck in a sin. Yet, picture this: you find out that a fellow Crossroads member, a sister or brother in Christ, is stuck in a sin. They either don’t know that what they’re doing is sinful, or they don’t care to a certain extent. Does the idea of inviting them out for a coffee to point it out bring you joy?
Probably not. And there’s a million excuses you might make to avoid that conversation.
Ultimately, thinking about this conversation makes us squirm for two reasons: it requires incredible humility. It requires humility on the part of the person caught in the sin, and maybe even more humility on the part of the person who’s trying to win them back.
Here’s what I mean, and here’s why this can’t be done virtually. No Christian ever wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Wow, I wonder what sin I can give my heart over to starting today.” No Christian wants to let a sin chip away at their faith. But it happens. It starts with a small hold on us and grows from there. And we are especially vulnerable to sins that are forbidden by God but ok’d by our culture.
We had an example of that in our second reading. The apostle Peter was born as a Jewish person, and as a Jewish person at that time he had certain rules instilled into him. One of the biggest ones was you can’t share a table with Gentiles, non-Jews. Jewish people were forbidden to eat certain foods, and Gentiles were not; so if you shared a table, you would run the risk of having your clean food contaminated by unclean Gentile food.
But, after Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, he broke down those barriers between Jew and Gentile. Because of the gospel, that all were welcome in the Church, there was no longer unclean foods, and there was no longer a need to avoid eating with Gentiles. And Peter was on board. We heard that before certain men came from James (another leader in the Church), Peter used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. Because it felt culturally normal for Peter to avoid Gentiles, he started to do it, and what was the result? The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. And, they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel.
It took a great amount of humility from Peter, the de facto leader of the Church, to be opposed by his brother in Christ, Paul, and recognize that his sin, his cultural preference to avoid Gentiles, was chipping away at the truth of the gospel.
If you think that you can be a Christian from your living room, you are thinking that you are immune to cultural pressures that pull you away from God even though they seem perfectly moral to you. If the great Apostle Peter was not immune to this, don’t you think you and I aren’t either? We need to be humble enough to recognize our reliance on our fellow brothers and sisters who can help us see the sins that we do not see. We need to meet regularly with these people, to share our lives, so be vulnerable, so that we can help one another avoid the sin that would so quietly conquer our hearts.
But the person who is pointing out sin needs to be humble too. And this is the key. Because if you see your sister or brother stuck in a sin, and you know Jesus wants you to warn them, the number one thing in your mind might be that you don’t want to be judgmental. After all, wouldn’t it be prideful of you to point out someone else’s sin when you are sinful yourself? In reality, it’s judgmental of you not to point out their sin.
Here’s what I mean. When I was in college, I played football for a year. And I was the third-string running back. Our starting running backs were incredible, far better than me, and I never had a chance of seeing the field. But, one day in practice, our starting quarterback pulled me aside and said, “When you run that play, you need to run with more arc so that the timing of the play will work.” He could’ve very well just have watched me continue to run the play poorly and figured that I’m not fast enough to run the play correctly, so it’s not worth correcting me. But he didn’t; instead he saw room for improvement and tried to point it out to me.
If you see a sister or brother conquered by something that’s sinful, the temptation is for you to think, “Ah, they’re simply not as good of a Christian as I am, so it’s not right for me to point it out.” By not correcting them, you’re showing yourself to be judging their faith. But when you correct them, you recognize that you are just as much a sinner as they and just as liable to fall into sins without realizing it.
So whether you are the one conquered by a sin or the one pointing out a sin, you need humility. And you need to spend time with your brothers and sisters to be able to have this humility.
2. He gives you himself for confidence
But correcting one another is not the main reason to come to church in-person. Far from it. The main reason is in the second half of our reading, when Jesus shows us how he gives us himself for confidence.
He says, truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. If you were to read this verse in your Bible, you would notice a little footnote. And the footnote would give you an alternate translation, which in this case is a better translation. Said more clearly: whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven. In other words, when you warn your brother or sister, you are simply revealing reality to them. If you go to them and say, “I’ve noticed this pattern in your life, and I’m concerned that this sin might be taking over your heart.” And they say, “No, I don’t think what I’m doing is sinful,” and so you meet again with other siblings and eventually bring the matter to your church, and still they don’t agree that they are sinning, you are to bind their sin to them. Which is to say, you are to show them that when God looks at them from heaven he sees them conquered by their sinfulness. Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven. Jesus wants them to know that if they have decided that they would rather embrace their favorite sin than embrace him, heaven is not their home.
When we have concern for our siblings in faith, we deliver this message, even though it is hard. But ending with a judgement is never the goal. And whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. The goal is to show your brother or sister from God’s Word that their sin is dangerously bound to them in God’s sight.
And when they see that, you get to do the most wonderful thing a human being could ever do: tell them that Jesus has untied that sin from them. It’s no longer attached to them. Because Jesus comes to dwell among his people: where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them. You have the privilege of telling your sister or brother that their sin is gone. No matter the extent to which it had conquered them, no matter how many times they had committed it, when they realize their sinfulness and realize that Jesus is their only way out, Jesus releases that from them.
This is why it is so important to be a part of an in-person church. Jesus is with you when you are alone at home, certainly. But here he promises a special kind of presence. He is present with us when we gather together in his name in a way that gives us total and complete confidence that our sins are no longer attached to us as far as he’s concerned. He does not leave your eternal relationship with God up to any individual human’s judgement. He gives us total and complete confidence that when the person leading the service says “Your sins are forgiven,” it is as if Jesus himself is looking you in the eyes and says “Your sins are forgiven.” Because he is here. He is with his children in a special and unique and real way. He is with you always, but he gives you this amazing gift: you get to gather together with your siblings in faith, and look around the room, and know that each person here used to have their heart conquered by sin but has been set free by Jesus.
So although the buildings we gather in may be different, the gifts are the same. Jesus gives us one another to correct each other when we get lost. And he gives us himself so that we are totally confident that when God looks at us from heaven he no longer sees our sins. There are some who are unable to gather with us in-person, and his Word and his forgiveness goes out to them. But for those of us who are able—don’t let these gifts go unopened!
