Acting according to the Father
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2014 · 23 March 2014
Let's look together at Matthew 18:18-20, “Assuredly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven 19 Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.”
Now this particular passage speaks of the Lord's command for the holiness of His church. And here we find His instruction as to our part in that purity. And that sin has to be dealt with. How does the Lord deal with sin in His church? Item number one is the ministry of the Word. The Word is an instrument of holiness, it is a purifier.
Secondly, the Holy Spirit is called the spirit of holiness. And the ministry of the Spirit is essential to the holiness of the church. But thirdly, this all must link up to Matthew 18. The Lord is moving in His church with purity in mind, penetrating people, searching out sin and ready to deal with this, not only through the ministry of the Word and the ministry of the Holy Spirit, but through the ministry of His people.
In Matthew 18 Christ is involved in purging His church through the people who represent Him in the world. And that's why at the close of the passage He says “when you're gathered together in my name, I'm there in the midst of you”. In other words, when the church is moving to discipline itself, to seek its purity, Christ is there in the midst moving among all who are doing His purifying work.
John McArthur says that never is the church more like Jesus Christ than when it is engaged in dealing with eliminating sin and when you are seeking the purity of His church. And yet, in most churches across the world today, this is not in the thinking of their pastor nor the people.
Many people live under the illusion that to revitalize the church and really win the lost souls we just have to talk about love all the time on some kind of sentimental level. But they don't understand that you are never going to have revival and restoration until you have a sense of how holy God is and how sinful man is. Only out of that understanding comes true brokenness and true revival.
Richard Lovelace writes, "The whole church was avoiding the biblical portrait of the sovereign and holy God who was angry with the wicked every day and whose anger remains upon those who will not receive His son. So the church substituted a new god who was the projection of kindness mixed with a gentleness of a Jesus who hardly needed to die for our sins. And many congregations were having ministers to protect them from the real God."
And then He insightfully says, "It is partially responsible, not only for the general spiritual collapse of the church in this century, but also for a great deal of evangelistic weakness. For in a world in which the sovereign holy God regularly employs plagues, famines, wars, disease, and death is instruments to punish sin and bring mankind to repentance, the image of God as pure benevolence and love cannot really be believed, let alone feared and worship in the manner prescribed by both the Old Testament and New Testament."
John Owens said, "The extent and power of the spiritual life depends on the mortification of sin. Sin has to be faced, exposed and dealt with. Christ wants to do that in His church. I believe Christ came into the world to do one thing. Now if you want to take all the will of God and compress it to one statement, God wants His people holy. That's the message. And that's why Christ is moving in His church.”
In the kingdom, Isaiah 35:8 says that, "A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness." In James 4:8-10 it says, "Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.”
Now let's find out how again. The place of discipline, in verse 17, is the church, the assembly of God's redeemed people. Second, the purpose, the end of verse 15, "If He shall hear you, you have gained your brother," restoration, and he needs to be regained as a treasure that was lost. And the person of discipline is you. We're all responsible. We are all to be workers of holiness.
So when do we do it? Verse 15, "If your brother trespasses against you." And every sin actually is a sin against all of us, either directly or indirectly. The process of discipline then, we saw in verse 15-17. Four steps; step one, go and tell him his sin alone, privately. If he responds that's the end of the process. If he doesn't, step two, verse 16, take one or two with you that his attitude and his response might be confirmed by two or three witnesses, which according to Deuteronomy was the standard of legality.
Now if he doesn't respond in that setting then, step three, verse 17, tell the whole church and that means the whole church then goes to try to restore him. And if they still do not hear, then step four, treat them as heathen or a tax collector. And we pointed out that those were two types of people who symbolized being an outcast. Treat them like you would somebody on the outside of your church. But we always have to try to forgive them and call them back.
What is our authority? By what right do we do this? And that we find in verses 18-20 and this is the climax of this text. And all the effort to have a spiritual revival without ever confronting sin and without ever proclaiming the holiness and the fear of God is just absolutely a wasted effort. We must do this disciplining though it is very difficult, but what is our authority?
Two reasons why we have authority. Number one, the Father in heaven acts with us. Did you understand that? And that is what it is saying, look at verse 18, "Truly I say to you," it's a good thing He put the word truly there, because it's so hard to believe, truly, "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Now that may seem at first obscure to you, but these are rabbinical terms familiar to the Jewish audience.
This refers to a rabbi either binding someone's sins on them or loosing their sins from them. In other words, after the discipline process you are either still under the bondage of sin or you are free from sin because it is forgiven. And the verse says that, "whatever you bind on earth," when on earth you say to someone you are still bound with sin, it will already have been bound in heaven. And on earth when you say to someone your sins are loosed, you are freed from them, heaven will already have done that as well.
In other words, when the church finally gets around to saying your sins are bound on you or your sins are loosed from you, the church is then beginning to act in accord with the Father who is in heaven, who has already said either they are loosed or they are bound based upon whether the person responded to the conviction of sin or not. Now the point is this, heaven ratifies what is done on earth when the church follows this process of discipline.
Listen, if you sinned against a person in the church and that person goes to you and you don't repent and two or three go to you too and you don't repent and then the whole church is pursuing you and you still don't repent, we can say your sins are bound on you. And we can say that because we have gone through the process to determine that based on the word of God. And now we are simply saying what the Father has already said in heaven. So the church is acting in the behalf of the will of God the Father in heaven.
On the other hand, if you're in sin and we go to you and say you did not repent the first time and two or three go and then you do repent and your heart is broken and you grieve and you turn from your sin, we can say your sins are loosed, welcome into the fullness of the fellowship. We are merely doing on earth what has already been done in heaven. So we act with authority on behalf of the Father in heaven who has already done what is right in your case.
This is taking the kingdom in heaven and bringing it to earth. That's our authority. Heaven stands with us. You say well how can it be our authority? Because we've followed the biblical pattern. When you meet someone that is in a religion that does not recognize Christ as savior you can say, "My friend, you are lost in your sin. You don't know God. You don't have forgiveness of sins. You don't know Jesus Christ."
And after explaining the gospel to him, you have the right to say to a sinning friend, you my friend are bound in your sin and the Father in heaven is acting with you when you say that. You become the ambassador of heaven on earth. This is why the church must do this. As I said at the beginning, the will of God can be condensed into one thing, "be you holy for I am holy."
A lot of times people think if you try to be aggressive and you try to confront sin and call it what it is, that you are being unloving and all of these other things but what you're really doing is you are really fighting God's battle. You are lining up with heaven. It’s hard to convince people of that in this time because people do not understand that love goes hand in hand with holiness.
And verse 19 basically repeats what it said in verse 18, because it is hard to accept that the Father in heaven is acting with us. So Jesus says "Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven.” The two here are the two witnesses who confirm the unrepentant heart or who, on the other hand, confirm the repentant heart.
When all of you who are looking into this person's life agree that his sin is still there or his sin is repented of, whatever it is, covering anything, the Father will be agreement with you. This verse is not talking about a blank check from God for obtaining prayer results and this has often been totally misused if you use it out of its context where most people think it just means any two people, if you can just get them to agree, God has to give you what you agreeing to.
I have heard that said so many times and there is even an Indonesian church song about that but that is not what the bible says. The two here are the two witnesses in a case of church discipline who really want God's will done and if they agree over this issue and follow the biblical pattern, they can be confident that they will receive it and God will do what's right. That confidence is very important, because when you move into discipline, you probably will get a lot of push back which makes you wonder if you are doing the right thing.
Second reason, not only does the Father in heaven act with us, but the Son of God on earth acts with us also. And here is another verse that gets terribly misinterpreted, verse 20, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Now you have probably heard that often, if we can get two or three people together God will be there. Listen, if you have just one person, God is there, right? When you call on Him at any place, at any time, all by yourself, God is there, right?
What are the two or three people in this context? These are the two or three witnesses related to church discipline. That is why it's so important to teach the context and flow of Scripture. Two or three witnesses, when you gather in my name, what does that mean? To do my works Jesus says. I'm moving among the church. And when you gather together in the name of Jesus to reflect my character and my will, there am I in the midst of that.
Isn't that great to know? Not only is the God the Father acting in heaven with us, but the God the Son is there on earth with us at that moment. We are truly fulfilling the will of God and the work of the Son when we are acting in the purging and the purifying of His own church. We all have to be a part of that ministry of holiness.
In closing, just a word about the sinning victim in this, we really need to bring that brother or that sister back, don't we? You can't just let them go. They need to be brought back. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who lived and died through the terrors of Nazi Germany wrote a little book that I read many years ago called ‘Life Together’. In it are some very profound thoughts that might give us a better understanding.
Listen to what he says, "Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him. And the more deeply he becomes involved in sin, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed sin poisons the whole being of a person.”
“This can happen even in the midst of a pious community. In confession, the light of the gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin is brought into the light. The unexpressed is now openly spoken and acknowledged. All that is secret and hidden is made manifest. It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted, but God is able to break gates of brass and bars of iron" (Psalm 107:16).
Listen to this, since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian brother, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders. He gives up all his evil. He gives his heart to God. He finds the forgiveness of all his sin and the fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother. The expressed acknowledged sin has lost all its power. It has been revealed and judged as sin. It can no longer tear the fellowship apart.
Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother. He is no longer alone with his evil for he is cast off his sin in confession and it handed it over to God. It is no longer reckoned to him. Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God and the cross of Jesus Christ. The sin concealed separated him from the fellowship and made all his apparent fellowship a sham. The sin confessed has helped him to find true fellowship with the brethren in Jesus Christ.
What a tough ministry, the ministry of restoring the sinning brother. It is the key to purity of the church. It is the key to revival of the church, the renewal of the church, and the reaching of the world through a renewed church. We must hear these words of our Lord and we must act on the Word of God. Are you ready to be involved in that minister of reconciliation and holiness? Are you willing? Come on God is calling….! Let's bow in prayer.