Two Things

Excerpts from Kevin DeYoung post:  Unifiers and Purifiers

Now if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure- not to put it too severely- to all of you. For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. (2 Corinthians 2:5-7)


This passage contains two simple, fundamental commands for the church of Jesus Christ: discipline and forgive.

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...  The true Christian will not pit grace against truth, love against faithfulness, discipline against forgiveness, unity against purity. But neither do we want the fullness of one half of the pair to be an excuse for a deficiency on the other side.

There are two things that will always tear a church apart, sometimes slowly and imperceptibly and sometimes quickly and loudly, but these two things will always rip the fabric of Holy Spirit unity: having no standards and having impossible standards.  If you can get one of those two things going on in a church you will be well along your way to ruining that church.  But if you can by God’s power find a way to uphold moral and doctrinal standards with a spirit of mercy, humility, and eager forgiveness, then that will be a mighty church and even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.