1 Corinthians 5
5
1 Above all else, it is being said that there is fornication among you, even fornication of a such kind that is not among the Gentiles, so that someone would have the wife of his father.
2 And yet you are inflated, and you have not instead been grieved, so that he who has done this thing would be taken away from your midst.
3 Certainly, though absent in body, I am present in spirit. Thus, I have already judged, as if I were present, him who has done this.
4 In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, you have been gathered together with my spirit, in the power of our Lord Jesus,
5 to hand over such a one as this to Satan, for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
6 It is not good for you to glory. Do you not know that a little leaven corrupts the entire mass?
7 Purge the old leaven, so that you may become the new bread, for you are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover, has now been immolated.
8 And so, let us feast, not with the old leaven, not with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
9 As I have written to you in an epistle: "Do not associate with fornicators,"
10 certainly not with the fornicators of this world, nor with the greedy, nor with robbers, nor with the servants of idolatry. Otherwise, you ought to depart from this world.
11 But now I have written to you: do not associate with anyone who is called a brother and yet is a fornicator, or greedy, or a servant of idolatry, or a slanderer, or inebriated, or a robber. With such a one as this, do not even take food.
12 For what have I to do with judging those who are outside? But do not even you yourselves judge those who are inside?
13 For those who are outside, God will judge. But send this evil person away from yourselves.
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1 Corinthians 5
5
The Mystery of Sex
1-2I also received a report of scandalous sex within your church family, a kind that wouldn’t be tolerated even outside the church: One of your men is sleeping with his stepmother. And you’re so above it all that it doesn’t even faze you! Shouldn’t this break your hearts? Shouldn’t it bring you to your knees in tears? Shouldn’t this person and his conduct be confronted and dealt with?
3-5I’ll tell you what I would do. Even though I’m not there in person, consider me right there with you, because I can fully see what’s going on. I’m telling you that this is wrong. You must not simply look the other way and hope it goes away on its own. Bring it out in the open and deal with it in the authority of Jesus our Master. Assemble the community—I’ll be present in spirit with you and our Master Jesus will be present in power. Hold this man’s conduct up to public scrutiny. Let him defend it if he can! But if he can’t, then out with him! It will be totally devastating to him, of course, and embarrassing to you. But better devastation and embarrassment than damnation. You want him on his feet and forgiven before the Master on the Day of Judgment.
6-8Your flip and callous arrogance in these things bothers me. You pass it off as a small thing, but it’s anything but that. Yeast, too, is a “small thing,” but it works its way through a whole batch of bread dough pretty fast. So get rid of this “yeast.” Our true identity is flat and plain, not puffed up with the wrong kind of ingredient. The Messiah, our Passover Lamb, has already been sacrificed for the Passover meal, and we are the Unraised Bread part of the Feast. So let’s live out our part in the Feast, not as raised bread swollen with the yeast of evil, but as flat bread—simple, genuine, unpretentious.
9-13I wrote you in my earlier letter that you shouldn’t make yourselves at home among the sexually promiscuous. I didn’t mean that you should have nothing at all to do with outsiders of that sort. Or with criminals, whether blue- or white-collar. Or with spiritual phonies, for that matter. You’d have to leave the world entirely to do that! But I am saying that you shouldn’t act as if everything is just fine when a friend who claims to be a Christian is promiscuous or crooked, is flip with God or rude to friends, gets drunk or becomes greedy and predatory. You can’t just go along with this, treating it as acceptable behavior. I’m not responsible for what the outsiders do, but don’t we have some responsibility for those within our community of believers? God decides on the outsiders, but we need to decide when our brothers and sisters are out of line and, if necessary, clean house.
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THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved. Used by permission of NavPress. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers.