Treat Him Like an Unbeliever

We don't talk a lot about church discipline as a church, but it happens all the time. Most "discipline" never goes nuclear - it ends at the first step in Matthew 18 where a person confronts his brother about a sin the brother has committed against him one-on-one, and nobody else ever has to know about it.

Occasionally, two or three people have to go to a person about a sin issue and on a few occasions, ministry leaders have to get involved in trying to restore a person. Often by that point a person has either chosen to repent or chosen to remove him or herself from the church altogether.

On very rare occasions, the process Jesus talks about in Matthew 18:15-20 reaches the point at which a person has to be treated as a "pagan or tax collector," whatever that means!

So what does it mean? How did Jesus intend that we would treat pagans and tax collectors?

When you look through the Scriptures, it doesn't seem as if Jesus had in mind that we would ignore them altogether (Luke 19:1-10). Where else will they be restored if they don't have Christian influence to speak Truth into their lives?

However, it also doesn't seem as if Jesus was passive about their sin (Mark 2:13-17). He associated with them but never passively. He loved them, but never allowed his love for them to be mistaken as implicit agreement with their paganism.

One of the hardest conversations you can ever have with a fellow believer who has chosen to live an unrepentant lifestyle goes something like this: "I love you, and I'm going to continue to pursue you because of that love. But we need to be clear on something: you are living in willful, sinful rebellion against God which is completely unacceptable to me as a follower of Christ and as a person who loves you and wants better for you. So you need to know that in choosing to live this way, our relationship must necessarily change. I still want to love you, and want to be there to celebrate when you choose to honor God with your life. But until that point our relationship needs to change. I'm not going to disappear from your life and hope that you won't either; but until you get to the point that you are willing to live differently, our conversations will revolve around this topic; it's too important to ignore.

In order to truly love a person through a period of self-imposed brokenness it is important to be clear about sin, clear about the issue, and clear about the relationship. All with the purpose of seeing a person restored in his or her faith, and restored in community the way God designed it.