Boundaries & Restoration

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We are in 1 Corinthians 5 today. We're in this series called Unexpected, because it comes from... Well, Paul was an unexpected apostle. He didn't expect to be one himself. He became one, kind of like, whoa, after the fact. After he was persecuting the church, God turned him around. And that's the best way of understanding, by the way, repentance, is God turns you around. You don't really turn yourself around too often, okay? And today we're going to be talking about kind of a turnaround. And he was an unexpected apostle. The Corinthian church was a mess. Let's just put it that way. What I've noticed is there's not a lot of pastor... Well, at least some of the pastors I've tried to learn from and grow from, they don't preach on this letter. And there's reasons, and you're going to find out today. It's a little messy. But the whole point is, in the book of 1 Corinthians, in the second chapter, we've been focusing on this theme. What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him. I think that's a slide there. Right? Yes. Okay. And that is kind of the theme, that God has prepared for us what we don't even anticipate, what we don't expect. Thank God he gives me what I don't expect or anticipate, and actually what I don't deserve. If I got what I deserved, well, not too... Yeah. That's all of us, I think. We can look back at our lives. In fact, that last song, I love it, James, that we had that song, that last song, because your goodness has been running after me all my life. I can look in retrospect a lot easier and see God's hand in my life all the way along, and how he shaped me to this point, and I am so thankful for that. And it's usually the things I didn't want, I didn't expect, and I didn't want to go through. And that has made the most difference in my life. Today is one of those days where we're going to get to a passage that I don't think Paul ever wanted to have to write, and a church didn't want to have to hear it, and they didn't want to have to deal with it. And it is a tough topic. If this is your first Sunday here, please understand we don't talk about this type of stuff all the time. Not at all. Because often what happens when we talk about certain specific topics, either you feel really bad because, ooh, that's me, or you feel really good because that's not me. It's that neighbor I have. It's those people. And that can either produce a feeling of real guilt and shame in a sense that if it's focused just on the self and doesn't get anywhere else, that becomes a real problem. Because the real point is not to bring up a difficult issue. The real point is to work through it to bring it to restoration, reconciliation. And that's Paul's point in this. And the other side of it, if I bring up a topic and you go like, well, that's not me, I've never had that issue, then you can feel very self-righteous. And that's actually dangerous. It's a very dangerous condition. So we're going to be looking today at probably one of the spicier passages from the book of Corinthians in chapter 5. And what underlines this issue in this chapter, as well as the issues throughout this book that we're going to get to some of, is the fact that we brought this up. They were puffed up people. They were full of themselves more than the Holy Spirit. They were full of a lot of hot air, not the Spirit of Christ. And that made a huge difference. Their arrogance, their sense of being on top of everything and knowing it all and being it all and experiencing it all and thinking they had it all together. And this was one of the most immature churches ever. By the way, Paul didn't just write two letters to the Corinthians. We only have two. He probably wrote about four, more to this church than anyone else. Seriously. There was a previous letter of some type to this book. Because in 1 Corinthians 1.5 he says, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with, here comes the topic, sexually immoral people. Yeah, we're talking about it. So notice he wrote already a letter before this one. Probably good we don't have that one because this one's tough enough. That one would have been probably really, really juicy and a little too much for us to handle. Then he probably wrote a letter after this one before the letter of 2 Corinthians. So let's get into it. We're going to actually start with the whole chapter. Just read the whole thing. And yeah, it is probably a lot of questions. This might be a better passage to sit down with you one-on-one and walk through it together and have you ask questions about it because it's like, what is going on in this church? These letters were written very particularly to whatever issues were coming up. And this one, well, it's something that I've never had happen in my own congregations I've been a pastor of. Bu...