Be Wise about Church Discipline

Scripture

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.

1 Corinthians 6:19–20 KJV

Big idea

Summary

Paul confronts a specific, public sin the congregation had not only failed to address but had grown “puffed up” about tolerating — a level of immorality that, he points out, even the surrounding pagan culture condemned. Rather than a call for harsh policing, Paul frames real church discipline as the response of a grieving family: mourning the loss of a brother’s fellowship with God, formally judging the sin in an official gathering, and removing what functions like yeast working through the whole loaf before it spreads further.

He then turns to a second, related failure of witness — church members hauling each other into pagan courts to settle disputes. Paul finds this doubly embarrassing: believers destined to judge the world someday cannot even resolve disagreements among themselves, and the very act of suing a brother is, he argues, already a spiritual defeat regardless of the verdict.

The chapter’s final movement addresses the theological root beneath both problems — a cheapened view of the body. Against the Corinthian slogans excusing sexual license, Paul insists the body is not a disposable appetite-machine but a member of Christ himself and a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, bought at the price of the cross. Because the Father made it, the Son redeemed it, and the Spirit indwells it, what a believer does with the body is never a private, morally neutral matter.

Key points

• Genuine church discipline flows from grief, not self-righteous policing, and aims at restoring a fallen believer, not merely punishing.
• Unaddressed sin functions like yeast — small, hidden, and quietly spreading through the whole community if left alone.
• Taking fellow believers to civil court over personal disputes damages the church’s witness and already represents a kind of defeat, whatever the outcome.
• Two popular Corinthian slogans — “everything is permissible” and “the body is just for appetite” — both trivialize what the body actually is and misread Christian freedom as license.
• Because a believer’s body is united to Christ and indwelt by the Spirit, sexual sin is uniquely serious: it isn’t incidental to the person, it implicates the whole person.

Illustrations & analogies

• Paul compares the tolerated sin to the leaven in a loaf of bread — small and hidden at first, but working through the entire batch of dough if it isn’t removed.
• He points out that the Corinthians were dragging each other before pagan judges over disputes that even other ancient societies would have settled within their own community, embarrassing the church before the watching city.
• He contrasts sex outside of marriage with a robber who “gets something but it is not his and will one day pay for it,” against marriage, likened to depositing money safely in a bank to draw future dividends.
• He reminds the church that their bodies once served idolatry and self-indulgence but have since been “washed … sanctified … justified,” a completed transaction with ongoing obligations.

Notable lines

Christians are not to be isolated, but separated.

Warren W. Wiersbe Be Wise, ch. 5

Be ye holy; for I am holy.

Warren W. Wiersbe Be Wise, ch. 5, quoting 1 Peter 1:16

For reflection and discussion

1. Why do you think churches, then and now, sometimes find it easier to tolerate a public sin than to address it?
2. What’s the difference between mourning over a brother’s sin and simply being harshly critical of him?
3. How does viewing your body as “bought with a price” change the way you think about everyday decisions, not just obviously moral ones?