All right, welcome back. We're on our 25th week together of the Restored Bible Study series, and I'm really looking forward to digging into what we're going to discuss today. It's kind of picking up on something we covered a few lessons ago about forgiveness, and now I want to talk about something that's really, really important. We've talked a little bit about the necessity of the body of Christ, how important it is to be part of the family of God. Now I want to talk about something that really gets in the way of our fellowship, and that's when we have some kind of break in the fellowship because of offense or some kind of sin against us. People move from church to church all the time. Sadly, the church has broken out into thousands of denominations right now because of an inability to work through things in love.
It's really critical for us as believers that we learn how to resolve offense with one another and just learn how to get along. It's harder than it seems. We really find out how loving we are when we're pressed into a family of people with whom we have personality conflicts and disagreements and, yes, still active sin. And so Jesus gave us an impossible standard, meaning a humanly impossible standard, when he gave one new commandment. Jesus came to fulfill all of the law and the prophets. So if we're in Christ, as we've seen, we're no longer judged by a rule book. We're no longer subject to a set of standards, meaning external regulations to tell us how to live.
The Bible just confirms what's already written on our heart, and that's how we go about life in a simple way. But Jesus gave us one new commandment on top of all the old ones. The old commandment used to say, love your neighbor as yourself. Love your Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. Those are the two greatest commandments. Love your neighbor as yourself sounds very noble, and it's what all the religions of the world have as a common thing. We call it the golden rule.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and so on. But Jesus said, I'm going to take that, and I'm going to raise it up to heaven's standard, actually, and literally to heaven's standard. At the Last Supper, Jesus said this to his apostles, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another even as I have loved you. Did you catch that? Not love your neighbor as yourself. Love your neighbor the way I have loved you, and that you also love one another that way. By this, all men will know that you follow me, and that you're my disciples, if you have love for one another.
So Jesus took the standard of love and measured it up to what he did on the cross. How does Jesus love us? While we were yet sinners, Jesus died for us. While we were completely lost, and even in many ways hostile toward him, he still extended love toward us. Jesus extended the kind of love that represented a wide open door. Anytime you want to be reconciled with me, I will not be the barrier for that. I'm the father whose door and arms are wide open so the prodigal can come home.
That's how Jesus loves us. And he said, my commandment to you, there's one commandment that I give to you, love each other the same way. Now that may seem at first like, oh, it's absolutely impossible. Or it may seem so simple, depending on which way you look at it, until you get in the mix with a group of people, and you have to do life. So maybe you already, I'm just introducing this subject right now. Maybe you can already think of one or two people, maybe five or six people, that you'd rather never see again. They may have hurt you so deeply, or they may have offended you in some way, that you say, it wouldn't really affect my life if I never saw them again.
That's totally human and completely understandable. But let me just give you the Bible's level of love and what we're called to. There's a chapter in the Bible that's read at most weddings. It's 1 Corinthians chapter 13. And I just want to read you the introduction. It talks about love is patient, love is kind. But before that, Paul wants to let this church know, here's how to live. Here's how to really see life the way that you are. And he says, if I speak with tongues of men and of angels, but I have no love, I've become a noisy gong, or a clanging cymbal.
Meaning if I am gifted spiritually, and I speak the Word of God, and I prophesy to do all these things, but I don't have love, I'm just really annoying. I'm like that neighbor that won't, you know, turn the music down. If I have the gift of prophecy, and I know all mysteries and knowledge, and if I have all faith to move mountains, but I don't have love, I'm absolutely nothing. So again, no matter what gifts were and benefit we bring to the body of Christ, if I don't have love in my heart, the way Jesus has love, then I haven't yet really taken my first step with him. Then he goes on, if I give all my possessions to the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, like as a martyr, but I don't have love, it profits me absolutely nothing. All those things seem to be really loving activities, don't they?
I'm giving everything I have to the poor. What greater love is that? I am prepared to, you know, use my faith to move mountains. I'm ready to die for the cause of Christ, and for my faith, rather than deny the Lord. How much more love can I show than that? And Jesus' response is, all those things are wonderful, and yes, they are reflections of love, but if your motive is not love, if it's not, I sincerely desire for you to be blessed, and I sincerely desire to live at peace with the family of God, then it profits us absolutely nothing. First John says it like this, John was an apostle who had anger problems.
In fact, Jesus called John and his brother James the sons of thunder. They were just ready to pour down hellfire and brimstone on the towns that rejected the gospel message when Jesus was working with them, and this gospel, John's gospel and John's letters reflect he had a transformation, meaning he got it. He heard what Jesus said that I just read to you at the Last Supper, a new commandment I give to you, and John began to live that way, and here's his revelation, what he said to the people that he loved in this church he wrote to. He said, the one who says he's in the life, light rather, but hates his brother. He's in the darkness even until now. The one who loves his brother, though, abides in the light, and there's no cause for stumbling in him. No cause for stumbling in him.
Stumbling means I'm tripping now, and I'm falling into sin. One of the sins we don't talk about very often in the body of Christ is sins of the tongue, and sins of gossip, sins of anger, sins of unforgiveness. Those are the kind of sins that we open the door to. If we love, we abide in the light, and there's no cause for stumbling into those kind of sins. So there's no wiggle room here. Jesus made it clear, love is the goal. Now you may already be feeling like, well, I'm falling short on that.
I don't measure up to that standard yet, and what I could say to that is welcome to the club. All of us have not attained yet to that standard of love. There's nobody who quite loves like Jesus loves just yet, but we're on a journey toward that, and we're being intentional about growing into the image of the God who is love. So love's the goal, and it's really the only way to remain in Christ. Why do I say that? That's a really strong statement. Well, because Jesus' goal is to love everybody back into the family of God.
Love sometimes means speaking the truth in a hard way to hear. I mean, you're a sinner. You really need to repent of what you're doing. Right now, your behavior is excluding you from life in this peace-filled, loving family of God. Sometimes love means that. Sometimes love is the wide open arms of forgiveness. When you've offended, and you've sinned time and time again, you're always going to find the wide open arms of love. Whatever the case may be, the only way to stay with Jesus is to love like he loves, because that's his mission in the earth, to reconcile everything back to the Father, and that means extending the arms of love.
And so there is a four-step process that would be absolutely ideal, and if all sin and hurt and offense within the body of Christ would work out this way, then we would be the community that Jesus dreamed of, that Jesus prayed for, this love community, really the family that all of us have always dreamed of being a part of. Haven't all of us wished and wanted to have a community and a family where if I blow it, I have no concern that I'm going to be rejected and cast out forever if I repent. And if I, with sincerity of heart, say, I messed up. I want to be restored to this community.
I don't want to be, you know, outside, you know, finding and wandering on my own. I want to love like you love. Doesn't all of us want to live in that kind of a community? So ideally, it's impossible that offenses shouldn't come, Jesus said. Absolutely impossible. There's no way that we can live life really getting intimate with people. It's easy enough to be a hermit and not have any offense because of people, although most of the hermits I know are carrying all that offense in their mind and heart, and it's part of the reason why they live alone and keep away from people.
That would be easy enough, but when we live around people, it's impossible that we're not going to hurt one another. Say the wrong thing, not say something when we should have said it. Say something with an attitude, and it's impossible also for us never to hear something that's not being said. Somebody said there's nine parts of communication, and there's the words that were said. There's what was heard. There was what was meant by what was said. There was what the person thought we meant by what we said. There's what we wish we would have said but couldn't find the right words.
There's all the judgment about, well, here's what I think you really mean by that. You see how this goes, and it gets layered and layered, and so it really is impossible. So it's vital that we learn how to work things out, how to reconcile with the family of God. We've been reconciled to Christ, or reconciled to God through Christ. Now it's important that we learn how to reconcile with one another. The world ought to look at the church and say that community really knows how to do it. They know how to get along with one another, even though they're so radically different, and even though they disagree with one another even on certain things.
It seems like the one thing they agree about is that they all have the same father, they're part of the same family, and they're going to work things out no matter what it costs. There's a scripture in Ephesians that describes the process of growth, and it says in Ephesians 4, that they, speaking the truth in love, may grow up into all things, who is the head, which is Christ. Speaking the truth in love doesn't just mean I'm going to say the things that are going to be hard for you to hear. Speaking the truth in love, if you can imagine me embracing somebody right now with whom I have to reconcile.
I'll use my wife. We've got to reconcile over something, but I have to tell her something. It's going to be hard for her to hear, and I'm embracing her because what I want to know, what I want her to know, and what I want to really communicate to her is that I'm saying this not because I don't love you, but because I do love you, and some things come between us. So I'm already determined that I'm embracing you in this. I'm not saying this to reject you. I'm saying this because I don't want there to be so much as an inch in between us and our fellowship because I love you.
That's speaking the truth in love. When we minister reconciliation with one another with that mindset, it becomes actually hard to resist. At the end of 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, other things may fail, but love never fails. And to that I might add, love never fails. It's just that people fail to love sometimes. We all fail to love. But when we express love, when two people have agreed, I will love you, meaning I'm expressing my heart towards you, and I'm desiring reconciliation. And if you feel the same way toward me, love never fails.
Only when people fail to love. So four-step process the scriptures describe, and I'm just going to kind of give an overview of it for us right now. The first step ideally is repentance. When we wrong somebody and we know it, we go to them and repent, and we own it. Hey, I did that. It's not your fault. It's my fault. It's not you made me do this. Repentance is not saying, man, if I offended you, please forgive me. It's saying, I blew it, and I need you to forgive me. I'm asking you to give me the gift of forgiveness, because I hurt you with my mouth.
I hurt you with my actions. I offended you in some way, and I'm taking ownership of it. Genuine repentance. Repentance is just that. It never involves fault-finding in other people. It never involves finger-pointing. It's never, please forgive me for doing that. But you know, the reason why I did that was because you said something and made me mad, but I know I shouldn't have said what I said. Do you see how that just kind of undermines the entire thing? Repentance is what we looked at way back when. Psalm 51, I sinned.
I blew it. Would you please forgive me? That's it. Ideally, when there's repentance, then the one who is offended against is willing to forgive. That's the part that's in our court. We have the power to forgive. We have Holy Spirit to help us. We have the choice to forgive. We now have a divine nature in us who is the best forgiver in all of creation. So repentance followed by forgiveness, that's perfect. Following that, then we have reconciliation. If we have repentance, we have forgiveness. Now we have reconciliation, which literally is a word that means a bone that was broken has now been restored to full strength.
And in some cases, just like a bone, maybe even stronger than it was before. Every tried and true relationship, like I love hanging out with couples who have been married for 40 or 50 years and asking them, what are the secrets of your marriage? And 201, 201, I really can't think of an exception, 201, apart from the funny things that they say. They say, we're just really good at forgiving one another. And we've been through so much together. Why would we throw all that out now? A tried and tested relationship is one that's had offense and forgiveness and reconciliation.
Offense, forgiveness, reconciliation. Been through that so many times that they're stronger than they've ever been before. So it ought to be with us and so it can be with us. Now here's a part that I want to add after reconciliation that we don't talk about very often, and that's restitution. After there's been repentance and forgiveness, there's been reconciliation. The one who did the offending has one more job to do because words are easy, right? I can say to you, I blew it. Please forgive me. You can forgive me for what I did, which is wonderful.
Now we're reconciled. But I also feel the responsibility to fix what I broke. You may not require me to do that, but I want to go the extra mile. Zacchaeus, after he was forgiven by Jesus, you might have read the story as you're reading through the gospels. He was up in a sycamore tree to see the Lord. The Lord, he was a tax collector, which meant that he stole from people. All tax collectors charged more than they needed to, took a little bit on the side that got paid really well.
They were despised by everybody. And Zacchaeus was one of those kind of tax collectors who was stealing money from people while using the authority of Rome to collect taxes. And so when Jesus said, I want to come, I'm going to come to your house today for lunch, while he was eating at Zacchaeus' house, Zacchaeus repented of all of what he had done. He had a real moment because he'd been loved by this Jesus that he was absolutely in awe of. And he said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to return more than what I stole. Everybody I took from, I'm going to give back twice what I took.
I'm going to give all this to the poor. I'm going to give half of my possessions away. He took action on his repentance. In other words, that's where the one who did the offending can put the heart of the one they heard at rest to say, I get it and I want to fix what I broke. Now you may, you know, the one doing the forgiving may say, I don't need you to do that. I can see your repentance is sincere. But it's basically, if I borrow this picture from a great teacher I've listened to, Danny Silk, he said, if you've hurt someone, imagine yourself in a room with a gallon of paint and everybody that got hurt by, you know, everybody that you hurt is sitting around in a circle right now.
Imagine yourself dropping that gallon bucket of paint, paint splashes all over the room. It's your responsibility now to go back to everybody that has paint on them and make it right. Not only repent of dropping that bucket of paint, but offer and help them clean up the mess. That's restitution. Jesus put the ball actually in the court of the offender. So we're to take initiative if we know that we've done something that wronged somebody, even if we don't think that they had any cause to be offended by what we said. Look, I'm from New York City.
I know what it means to speak bluntly and speak frankly. And I know that I've hurt people by being just overly blunt. I'm not trying to be offensive. I'm communicating in my native language of New York. And I'm a New York Jew at that. Very plain spoken. But in some context, that can be hurtful. And it could be it could come across harsh and unfeeling and unloving. So I've learned that since moving here. Love learns to speak the language of the people, wherever you are. And so if I know that I spoke harshly, or I said something that would hurt somebody, I feel responsibility to go to them.
Even if I don't think they had any cause to be offended by it. Even if I don't even know for sure that I offended them. If I think I might have. Jesus said it like this. If you're presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you. Leave your offering there before the altar. Go be reconciled to your brother. Then come offer your offering before the Lord. So he put the onus on the offender. You go and make it right. Don't wait for somebody to have to confront you about what you did.
If you see that somebody's countenance changed by the harshness of your speech, or you know that you did something that may have harmed somebody, before they have to come to you, go to them and fix that problem. You know what it's like when somebody comes to you and they confront you about something. And then you say, Oh, I'm really sorry that I did that. It has a little bit less weight to it than if you go and say, Hey, I want to talk to you about what I said the other day. And they're carrying hurt. But you take the initiative to go and say, I want to own what I did and repent of it. Boy, does that put that heart at rest that, Hey, you really get it.
And you mean business with your repentance. So the onus belongs to the offender. And this is, we're talking about in the body of Christ, in the family of God, those who do the offending ought to take initiative to make it right with those they hurt. If that doesn't happen and we need to do confrontation, let's do it properly. Did you know that the only subject for which Jesus gave a step-by-step process on how to do something was how to work through forgiveness, reconciliation, and repentance, how to confront one another in the body of Christ. So sin doesn't just go floating around hurting people. And it's found in Matthew chapter 18.
Most everything else, Jesus just said, you're going to have the law written on your heart. Holy Spirit will help you work through all these things. When it came to this issue, though, Jesus said, step-by-step, here's what you do. He said this, if your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. That's step one. That's simple. I'm going to go to you in private. I'm not going to talk to other people about it. That's gossip. The problem with that is that now I'm causing other people to stumble.
Let's say somebody sins against me. And before I go and talk to them, I go talk to Johnny and Susie and Billy over here. And I spread the word about what this person did. Can you believe what they did to me? Now they are carrying my offense. They have secondhand offense is what we would call that. The problem with that is that there's no cure for secondhand offense. They have nothing to forgive. If somebody offended me, he didn't offend them, but now they're offended on my behalf. I've made them stumble into sin because they're carrying judgment in their heart against that person.
Maybe now they're even offended with them, even though that person did them no wrong. So Jesus said, let's just handle it like this. Go to them in private and handle it that way. There's a scripture in John that says love covers a multitude of offenses. And what covers a multitude of offenses means we don't cover sin up. We just don't do that in the body of Christ. As you've seen by now, we ought to be the best in the world. Jesus is the best in the world at dealing with sin.
We don't cover things up. We don't sweep things under the rug, but we also do it in a wise and honorable and discreet manner. And that begins with, if you only sinned against me, you're the only one I'm going to talk to about it. If you, if he hears you and he says, oh my goodness, I am so sorry. I didn't mean to offend you that way, but I can see how that would come across hurtful. I own that. I should not have said it that way. Would you please forgive me?
Great. You won him over. Done deal. Then he goes on though, Jesus being living in reality and being a realist. If he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, not a whole bunch of people, just one or two more with you so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every fact may be confirmed. Now, again, the next step would be, I'm going to take a couple of people with me. You may have heard of an intervention in the world of addiction. This is similar to that.
This is somebody whose sin is causing harm to the body of Christ. It's got to be dealt with or people are going to continue to get hurt. So we're going to go deal with this because we've been eyewitnesses to this behavior. The two or three others that go with you should not be people back to that first circle. They're not people that I went and said, hey, you're not going to believe what so-and-so did to me. Would you come with me so I could confront them? They're not a witness to that behavior.
They just heard from you. If somebody is in some kind of overt sin where other people are noticing it and you can see it happening, then it's not gossip to say, hey, would you come with me? I really love Susie and she's really, you know, she hurt me with this. I know that she did. I saw her do it to you. Can we all go together and just in love, draw her back into the fellowship? And that, by the way, is the goal of this entire process. This, some people view it like it's Jesus giving four steps so that we can excommunicate somebody.
It's four steps so that we go the extra mile into the ends of the earth to keep somebody in the family who is sinning in such a way that they're beginning to cut themselves off from the fellowship of the saints. So two or three people go and as gently but firmly as possible say, we heard you say this or we saw you do this and we love you and we want to be reconciled to you, but we're not going to allow that kind of behavior to continue out of love for you and love for us and love for this family that we have right here. It's a hurtful way and we're asking you to stop. Would you please repent and own that behavior?
If they won't hear that, then we tell it to the church, which can mean a lot of different things. I take that to mean involve the church leadership. Don't get up on a Sunday morning, grab the microphone and say, hey Susie, you know what she did to me the other day? That's not what this is about. It's going to the church leadership then, trusting that the elders and shepherds in the house will know how to handle it and that we're going to deal with it. They're not going to hear this and then say, oh well, you know what Susie's like, you know. No, no, no.
A good solid church leadership should be willing and able to get in there and deal with sin that's going on in the camp. It's an obligation of leadership to see to it that overt, rebellious, shake your fist against heaven kind of sin doesn't remain in the body of Christ. We've got to deal with that kind of thing. It's important. It's serious and it harms the body. A little bit of leaven, which represents sin, Paul said, leavens the whole lump. And so I hope you're part of a church where if you're bringing a report of behavior that two, three or more people have seen to the leadership that they're willing to get involved in bringing that to a head, confronting that one in love and giving one last opportunity this is a behavior.
We're not making judgment. We're just saying this is what you've done. This is what you've said. And we're asking you to take ownership of it and turn away from that, like repent from it. Turn away from that. Don't do it anymore. If the person still won't hear the church, then Jesus said, well, treat them just like you would a tax collector or a sinner. In Jesus' context, that meant treat them like somebody who is outside, who is like unsaved. Treat them like somebody who needs to hear the message of the gospel, where God will come in, change you, make you brand new.
All of the things that we've been looking at for the last 25 weeks together. Treat them like that. Because somebody who's so hard in their heart that even when being lovingly confronted by the body of Christ, they're not walking with the Lord. We shouldn't even need really, you know, somebody walking solid with the Lord doesn't need any of this process. We're grieved when we step into sin. And all the more when our sin affects the body, the people that we love, we're all the more grieved about it. So we go before the Lord, repent, as I shared earlier, and we take initiative to repent of it.
Somebody who gets all the way to the end of all of this loving confrontation and has a hard heart and says, well, I'm not going to change. I don't see the problem with it. They're not honoring the Lord. They're certainly not walking in the light. And so we treat them like an unbeliever at that point. We don't treat unbelievers mean. We don't turn away from them. We treat them like the father treated the prodigal. We're looking down the road. We're eager to reconcile and communicate to them as far as we're concerned.
When you're ready to repent, our arms are wide open and you're not going to find a hard wall of like the older son. You're going to find the warm, welcoming arms of the father when you're ready to repent and own this sin. We do need to be firm about that. Only the hardest of hearts can resist that and have really just demonstrated that they have no intention of walking with God. I hope that's helpful. That's a really practical step-by-step process that Jesus gave us. And I hope this exhortation really touches you.
As a pastor, nothing grieves me more than to see people separate from one another in the body of Christ, all because of an unwillingness to deal with the offenses and the hurts that come our way. It takes courage, but mainly it's the courage that comes because of intense love. Let's love one another so much that we won't let so much as the thinnest of veils live between us and have this community of love and joy and laughter that the father really, really longs for and that Jesus paid a price for. God bless you and enjoy your devotions this week.