IBS Application for Matthew 18:15

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.”

This, as many of us know, is the beginning of Jesus’ instructions to the Church about how to deal with brothers and sisters who are living in sin. We’re told to go through a process: First, approach them yourself, one-on-one about your grievance against them, or their grievance against God, and if they listen, then we’ve gained them back. If they refuse to listen to you, we are then to take one or two witnesses with us to confront them about their sin. If they still refuse to listen, then we take the issue before the Church elders and have them confront the sinning brother. If they still don’t listen, then they are to be treated “as a Gentile and a tax collector,” which is to say, we excommunicate them for the Church, in hopes that in being given over to their sin apart from the Church for a time will help them realize that they were wrong and repent.

For most of us who know Scripture, this process is probably already well-known. But there’s one step to the process that I want to focus on: the first step, approaching a sinning brother about their sin in a one-on-one manner. Without this step, none of the rest of the process works, and any other effort to get them to repent and seek restitution will fail.

You may be wondering why I think this is such an important part of the process. This is partly because I’ve seen where this has been done incorrectly, where the person or people with a grievance against a brother in sin skip the first step and go straight into the second by telling other people about what has happened and bring those people with them to approach the sinning brother. From the sinner’s perspective, their brother or sister has just gossiped about them-which isn’t untrue-and arrayed a small army to get them to turn or burn. The brother in sin doesn’t feel loved in this moment, and they get to be made to feel as though they’re a pariah within the Church.

Naturally, the brother in sin starts to resist the call to repentance even more than they were before. This isn’t to say that they still can’t be brought to a place of repentance, but it becomes a lot harder for us to convince them to turn back to God. Trying to fix sin with the sin of gossip and failure to properly love our brothers and sisters will invalidate any attempt at using this procedure that Christ has laid out for us to use.

We can’t reach a point of unity with each other if we aren’t willing to love our brothers and sisters who are living in sin in the right way. We have to be willing and able to speak one-one-one with them if we hope to win them back to the body. Getting this wrong puts both sides at fault.

My application for this study will be to pray for the love and courage needed to personally approach someone who sins against me, should that happen. I’ll spend the next three mornings praying for this.