The Tools of Restoration (2 Corinthians 2:5-11)
Author and Canadian Theologian, Randall Rauser, tells the story of a boy, whose parents had promised him a beautiful car to drive when he turned 16. He dreamed about it all his life, planning to park it in the family’s barn where it could stay warm and dry. However, his dad would have to get rid of that old car sitting under a tarp in the barn. The boy couldn't wait for his dad to haul it off to the dump to make way for his dream car.
Then one evening, after many years, he heard strange sounds coming from that old barn. It sounded like power tools… a drill… a hammer. He stepped out into the warm summer night and noticed a light on in the barn. He walked down the dirt path and poked his head into the barn door.
He saw the tarp, rolled up and left against the door, and thought, “Dad is finally getting rid of that junky old car.” Then he looked and saw one of the most incredible cars in automotive history. It was a Corvette, but not just any Corvette. It was a beautiful, powerful 1963 Corvette 327 V8 with a split window, aluminum knock-off wheels, painted candy apple red.
So that was the car underneath the tarp all those years. He stood there stunned. It was always there, just getting ready for his father's masterful work of restoration. At that moment his father looked up, his hands deep in the engine bay, and handed his son a socket wrench. With a broad smile, he said, “Come on, son. Grab a tool and let's get this car ready” (Randall Rauser, What on Earth Do We Know about Heaven? Baker Books, 2013, pp. 157-158; www.PreachingToday.com).
Sometimes, people are too quick to throw out the old for something new, but God is about restoring people the world discards. And God looks to the church and says, “Grab a tool and let’s get this person ready to serve.”
3So, how do we as a church do that? How do we restore broken people to useful service again? How do we work with our Heavenly Father to make people whole again? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to 2 Corinthains 2, 2 Corinthians 2, where God shows us the tools of restoration He has made available to every church.
2 Corinthians 2:5 Now if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure—not to put it too severely—to all of you (ESV).
Somebody in the church at Corinth had caused a lot of “pain” to the apostle Paul and to the church itself. He was the reason Paul had to make a “painful visit” (vs.1) and write a letter with “much affliction and anguish of heart” (vs.4).
One commentator suggests that this man “had been a ringleader to the opposition, [who] had… personally insulted Paul… The majority of the Corinthians had come to see that his conduct had not only hurt Paul but had injured the good name of the whole Corinthian church (Barclay).
Whatever this man said or did had caused a lot of emotional pain. His sin had hurt those around him, and that’s the first tool God gives the church for restoration. When a believer deliberately and continuously chooses to sin, first of all…
GRAB THE TOOL OF PAIN.
Feel the grief of the offense without minimizing it. Acknowledge the hurt. Don’t ignore it.
In one of my previous churches, members were well aware of a leader in the church, who had been emotionally abusing his wife for years. However, instead of dealing with the abuse, the church chose to ignore it, even voting to elect this man as an elder before I became their pastor. After I had been there a while, I asked people in the church about the problem, and their constant reply was, “It is what it is.” In other words, they tried to minimize the pain and “sweep it under the rug.” But there was no hope of helping this man until the church acknowledged the pain he caused not only to his wife, but to the whole church. On top of that, problems that are “swept under the rug” have a way of multiplying and creating even worse problems later on.
So don’t minimize the pain a sinning believer causes the church. Acknowledge it not only for the sinner’s sake, but for the church’s sake, as well. To restore a sinning believer, grab the tool of pain. Then…
GRAB THE TOOL OF PUNISHMENT.
Discipline the sinning believer. Confront his or her sin and expel them if they refuse to repent. That’s what the church at Corinth had done upon Paul’s direction.
2 Corinthians 2:6 For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough (ESV).
No doubt, following Jesus’ instructions in Matthew 18:15-17, Paul confronted the man by himself, then in the presence of two or three witnesses, after which Paul “told the church,” who expelled the man since he refused to turn from his sin.
I like what Charles Barkley says about this in his commentary on 2 Corinthians. “Paul’s motive in taking disciplinary action was not vengeance but correction; he aimed not to knock the man down but to help him to get up. ”
And that should be our motive whenever we have to deal with sin in the church—not to knock people down, but to help them to get back up.
Bob Ahlberg, pastor of the Roscoe Evangelical Free Church in Roscoe, Illinois, talks about the time his church had to remove a man from membership for repeated and unrepentant adultery. He says, “We followed the guidelines of Matthew 18 and his response was, ‘I know what I'm doing… I know what you have to do… so do what you must because I don't care! I plan to never darken the doors of this church again anyway! So why should I care!’ He proceeded to divorce his wife in civil court.
“His wife continued to attend church, and there were many tearful times with her during prayer meetings. At cell group meetings, we prayed God would do whatever necessary to open this man's eyes and bring him back into a right relationship with himself.”
Then, over two years later, this man called Pastor Bob and asked if they could meet. In the pastor’s office, he threw himself on his pastor’s shoulder and wept, and said he wanted to confess his sin. He said “the Hound of Heaven” had been on his trail for nearly two years, and he couldn't take much more. He set aside his divorce and sought to renew his marriage. Even his wife, who had said she probably could never trust him again, was amazed at the change in his life.
This man was active in the Army Reserves, and his unit had been sent overseas to process the bodies of the military who died in Iraq and prepare them for their return to the States. God's hand was working in his life as he was confronted on a daily basis with the brevity of life and permanence of eternity. Following this tour of duty, and upon returning home, he met with the elders, confessed his sin, and asked to be forgiven for his arrogance and the impact his life had on the local body.
After 2½ years, the church then removed their discipline against this man and restored him to the fellowship! God also restored his marriage (Bob Ahlberg, pastor of Roscoe Evangelical Free Church, Roscoe, Illinois, November 2005; www.Preaching Today.com).
But none of that would have been possible unless the church had disciplined the man in the first place. So, to restore a sinning believer, 1st, grab the tool of pain; 2nd, grab the tool of punishment. Then when the sinning believer repents, 3rd…
GRAB THE TOOL OF PARDON.
Forgive and comfort those who admit their sin and turn from it. Show grace and unconditional love to those who seek restoration. That’s what Paul instructs the believers in Corinth to do.
2 Corinthians 2:7 …so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow (ESV)—Literally, swallowed by overwhelming grief.
2 Corinthians 2:8 So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him (ESV).
That is, convince him that you really do love him. Their punishment was enough to bring repentance, so Paul urges them to forgive and comfort the repentant sinner. Literally, Pual urges the Corinthian believers to show grace and to help the one, who had brought them so much pain.
Sure, the man did not deserve such treatment, but that’s what grace is all about. While you were still a sinner, Christ died for your sins and rose again (Romans 5:8). Then God forgave you and gave you His Helper, the Holy Spirit, (John 14:16) when you turned from your sin to Him.
So do the same for those who repent and seek your forgiveness. Do it for their sake—“lest they be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” (vs.7). Do it for Christ’s sake—“in the presence of Christ” (vs.10). And do it for the church’s sake—"that we would not be outwitted by Satan” (vs.11).
One of my professors at Dallas Theological Seminary, Howard Hendricks, was chaplain for the Dallas Cowboys for several years. In 1979, they invited him and his wife to Miami for Super Bowl XIII. They arrived on a Friday and one of the football players invited him to watch the Cowboys practice. So Prof Hendricks went out to the field where he saw an older man on the side. He said to himself, “That looks like Woody Hayes,” the Ohio State football coach who had just been fired for hitting a Clemson football player in the throat during the 1978 Gator Bowl.
On Sunday morning, Prof Hendricks spoke to the football players in chapel and ate with them at the game meal afterwards. He was sitting next to coach Landry and noticed that Woody Hayes was sitting at the next table. He said, “Coach. What's Woody doing here?”
Coach Landry replied, “Howie, he's hurting. He needs help. I invited him to come down as my guest. Maybe the Lord will give me an opportunity to minister to him.”
Prof Hendricks said, “I went through the floor. You see, when everybody in America was on this man's case, how many individuals, including born-again believers, were reaching out? We don't reach out. We would prefer that individuals like this got their comeuppance.”
Then Prof Hendricks talked about a brother in ministry who went down the tubes morally. It was a bad case, but by the grace of God, he was restored to his ministry. One time when they were fellowshipping together, Prof Hendricks said, “Hey, man, I want to pick your brain. I need some help. Where are we failing, in your judgment?”
The restored brother said, “Howie, when I fell into sin, it was like going down in the surf for the third time. I was looking over at the shore that was filled with believers that I knew. Some of them were crying, ‘Isn't that tragic?’ Some of them were cursing, saying, ‘You're supposed to know the Word of God; why did you allow that to happen to you?’ There were some who were wringing their hands, saying, ‘What can we do?’ But there was only one who risked the surf to pull me out while I was going down for the third time” (Howard Hendricks, “The Problem of Discrimination,” Preaching Today, Tape No. 76; www.Preaching Toiday.com).
That’s what God calls the church to do—to come along side those who are going down like Tom Landry did for Woody Hayes.
To restore a sinning believer, grab the tools of restoration. 1st, Grab the tool of pain. 2nd, Grab the tool of punishment. 3rd, Grab the tool of pardon. And finally…
GRAB THE TOOL OF PARTNERSHIP.
Work together with your brothers and sisters in Christ. Don’t fight each other. Instead, unite to deal with sin in the church in a way that honors Christ and defeats the devil.
2 Corinthians 2:9-11 For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs (ESV).
Satan’s designs are to divide the church, but when the church comes together to restore the sinning believer, he is defeated, Christ is honored, and everyone benefits.
One commentator wrote, “It was important that fellowship between Paul, the Corinthians, and the repentant offender be restored so that the incident not become an occasion for Satan to drive a wedge between the church and Paul. This was one of Satan’s schemes, which Paul had worked so strenuously to thwart (Lowery, Bible Knowledge Commentary).
Please, when there are problems in the church, don’t let Satan drive a wedge between us. Instead, let’s come together to deal with the problem as God directs.
For fifteen months journalist Sebastian Junger followed a single platoon of U.S. soldiers stationed in a dangerous part of Afghanistan. Living and working in the midst of a warzone made Junger realize how much the soldiers had to rely on each other. What you do or don't do as a soldier affects everyone else in your platoon. Junger writes:
“Margins were so small and errors potentially so catastrophic that every soldier had a kind of de facto authority to reprimand others—in some cases even officers. And because combat can hinge on [small] details, there was nothing in a soldier's daily routine that fell outside the group's purview. Whether you tied your shoes or cleaned your weapon or drank enough water or secured your night vision gear were all matters of public concern and so were open to public scrutiny.”
Junger writes, “Once I watched a private accost another private whose bootlaces were trailing on the ground. Not that he cared what it looked like, but if something happened out there—and out there, everything happened suddenly—the guy with the loose laces couldn't be counted on to keep his feet at a crucial moment. It was the other man's life he was risking, not just his own… There was no such thing as personal safety out there; what happened to you happened to everyone” (Sebastian Junger, War, Twelve, 2010, p. 160; www.PreachingToday.com).
My dear friends, we are in a spiritual battle against the enemy of our souls. So, pay attention not only to yourself, but to those around you. Help each other do what’s right; and when someone messes up, care enough to speak up.
To restore a sinning believer, grab the tools of restoration. 1st Grab the tool of pain. 2nd, Grab the tool of punishment. 3rd, Grab the tool of pardon. And 4th Grab the tool of partnership.
The German philosopher Schopenhauer described people like a bunch of porcupines huddling together on a cold winter's night. He said, "The colder it gets outside, the more we huddle together for warmth; but the closer we get to one another, the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills. And in the lonely night of earth's winter eventually we begin to drift apart and wander out on our own and freeze to death in our loneliness” (Wayne Brouwer, Holland, Michigan. Leadership, Vol. 17, no. 2; www.PreachingToday.com).
Please, don’t let that happen to you. Sure, there are times when we’re going to poke each other, but let’s use the tools of restoration to stay together and stay warm.
