LEAVEN
LEAVEN
To any godly soul there must be a great difference between one continually failing but heartbroken because of his intemperate failure, and one continually erring in the same line, but, at every recurrence with more careful cleverness to baffle discovery, and when discovered, a greater adroitness in excusing it. If the church were a club, I could understand that there should be a reluctance to lose one man more than another; but the assembly is God’s assembly, and what we have to consider is the “leaven”. If leaven be glossed over, it leavens all. A godly care for the assembly leads one to say, “Not for his cause that had done the wrong, nor for his cause that suffered wrong, but that our care for you in the sight of God might appear unto you ..”. (2 Corinthians 7: 12).
We belong to the greatest firm that ever was on the earth, and we must, in duty bound, look after our partners. The [p. 91] awfulness of leaven is that it does not produce in others the same kind of open evil that it began with.
The Corinthians were leavened by gross immorality, and they were disgraceful in their mutual relations with one another. See 1 Corinthians 6. We must guard against two evils — a laxity on the one hand, and a rigid severity on the other. What the church is in the mind of God, only known as Christ is known, has been from the beginning too little thought of — lost, as we know, among Christians in the very first century. In God’s goodness it, that is, the truth of it, has been in this present century (as I might say), disentombed. The whole force of the enemy is directed against it, in order to bury it again. Conversion for the lost, and good conduct for the saved is the scope or range of the truth held and propounded by the mass of Christians. Among us, directly, or indirectly, every division arose from not understanding what the church or assembly is to God; and the contention and difficulty connected with every case of discipline can be traced to the same. Nine-tenths of the teaching abroad does not touch on the church. It is connected with only the gospel and walk, as if there were no church at all.