Years ago, when I was beginning to sense that God might be leading me to be a pastor, a Southern preacher came to our church and gave a sermon with the title I have used today, God’s Renewing Grace.  It was such a different kind of message from the ones I had usually heard – sermons that rightly told me I needed to be saved from my sins and that this salvation happened when I asked Jesus into my heart.  But, I had the impression that this decision for Jesus should put all my struggles and temptations into the past.  I got the idea that the world out there (outside the church) might be involved in dishonesty and anger and pride but that, other than rare one-time lapses, struggles with those sorts of sins were eradicated for church people.  Of course I was given some specific rules to keep, which eventually we mocked with chants like, “I don’t smoke and I don’t chew and I don’t go with girls who do!”  But, I soon became aware of thoughts and attitudes inside me that I felt I had to hide from others – and somehow get victory over in my own strength.  I thought, “I’ve just got to keep this inside and deal with it on my own.”  As the years went by, I would often ask what was wrong with me.  I wondered why it was taking me so long to get better.

            This sermon I heard one day about God’s renewing grace was life-changing for me.  Isn’t it a beautiful phrase?  The message I heard that day has been at the heart of so much I preach about here at LAC. It was about the gospel, the good news from God.  The preacher said that God’s good news is certainly about the fact that our past sins can be forgiven  -- but a forgiven past alone would not be great news for people like us because we keep sinning.  God’s good news is also about God’s promise that he will work in us until our lives are completely remade.  The preacher told us about the repeated promises in the Bible that God would work in us and never give up on us until we are conformed to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29) -- made complete in Christ (Col. 1:28). But, he said, this requires a process of growth.  Sin and imperfection is so deeply engrained in our natures that our remaking will not be done in a moment.  And, he said, it will happen because of God’s renewing grace.  And, he declared, that grace must be experienced within the church.

            God’s renewing grace:  It’s all from God.  Grace – we cannot earn it or achieve it but we must receive it.  Renewing – God is ready to work in us and with us until what is not right about us will be made new.  God’s renewing grace – the phrase helped me to realize that God would never give up on me -- that when I confess my sins he will be faithful and just and will forgive my sins and cleanse me.  Tomorrow can be more than yesterday because of God’s renewing grace.

            We begin to know God when we turn away from our sins, give them to Jesus asking him to forgive us and trusting him with our lives. Still, we struggle with our human nature.  And, we do not “grow to live as we were meant to live” simply by having a set of rules put in front of us and striving to keep them in our own strength.  No, the Bible points us to three gifts of grace God gives us:

Gift #1:  God’s Mercy -- The beautiful gift of being made right with God – of his forgiveness for my sins -- leads to grateful hearts ready to respond to the kindness and love of God.  When I follow Jesus, I don’t earn my way to God but I do respond to him.  As Rom. 12:1 says, “In view of God’s mercy”, I offer all I am to him.  I no longer live for myself but for him – because I want to please him.

Gift #2:  God’s Spirit -- The Holy Spirit dwelling within. We no longer have to operate in our own strength (which has already been proven to be insufficient).  God’s Spirit comes within and convicts us of what is wrong and empowers us to live in a way that honors God.

Gift #3:  God’s New Community – the church family.  The church family must do “life together” teaching the Word, supporting one another, encouraging one another, correcting one another…  And, today, we will see that one basic part of us doing life together in a church is that we confront one another when we see each other walking away from God and both firmly and gently offer a path of restoration.  It is in the church that we should regularly experience God’s renewing grace. 

How will people like us become like Jesus?  Many things might be said but one of the most important parts of our growth is this: being a part of a caring and grace-filled church community in which we confront sin in one another’s lives and set up ways of experiencing God’s renewing grace until the one who has sinned is restored to full fellowship and service in the church family.  The Bible simply takes it for granted that any healthy church family will carry one another’s burdens in this way over and over until each one of us is complete in Christ (Col. 1:28-29).  This is what the Apostle Paul declares in Galatians 6:1-2:

Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted.  Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

#1 Why This Must Be Experienced in the church (other than that the Bible tells us it must)

Bottom line – God made us in his image.  Do you remember what we said in our Statement of Faith? God is one being who has always existed eternally in community, one God in three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  When God made the first man in his image, the one thing the Bible says was not good was for the man to be alone.  People made in God’s image were not made to live in isolation. So, God created one like Adam so that life could be lived in relationship with others.  But, in Genesis 3, open and honest community was broken by sin.  The people who had sinned hid from God and started blaming one another. The result is that something is now “broken” in us all.  We need forgiveness and remaking.  And, the place God created for our healing and restoration is supposed to be the church that Jesus gave his life to establish.  In the church, walls that separate people are to come down.  When God reigns in a church, we will be involved in a healing and restoration ministry until each one of us is complete in Christ.

And Gal. 6:1-5 tells us what must happen over and over again in a healthy church family, i.e., we will see sin in one another and we must confront the sin with truth and love.  Sometimes we will have to be the ones confronted – and sometimes we will have to be the ones confronting.  But, in the church, we are to carry one another’s burdens until each one of us is conformed to the image of Jesus. God’s remaking work happens when we participate in this way in a loving, Spirit-filled, grace-permeated and Jesus-following community in which we are all committed to encouraging and exhorting the one another toward godliness.

John Calvin said that restorative discipline is so important that it is one of the surest identifying characteristics that a church is healthy.  He wrote: As the saving doctrine of Christ is the soul of the church, so does discipline serve as its sinews, through which the members of the body hold together, each in its own place.  Therefore, all who desire to remove discipline or to hinder its restoration -- whether they do this deliberately or out of ignorance -- are surely contributing to the ultimate dissolution of the church.                                                                          Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV

#2  How We Must Go About It

It’s very, very hard for fallen human beings to get this right – even though Bible is very clear about it.  Restoration ministry requires toughness and tenderness, truth and tears, justice and mercy. This is the way God deals with us.  He won’t let us stay in sin but he offers us grace that is greater than our sins.  He is hard on sin – but he forgives repentant sinners over and over.  God gets it right – we are more sinful than we ever dared to imagine and more loved that we ever dared to hope.  But we human usually are either too harsh or too soft and emphasize either the sinfulness or the love to the exclusion of the other.

Of the many, many places in the Bible when these to are put together, perhaps the great “boil down text” of the Old Testament is the clearest, i.e., Micah 6:8.  God has shown you, O Adam (O human beings) what is good!  So, what does God require of us?  To act with justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God.  God always tells us to deal with one another both with truth and love.

This message of both justice and mercy being essential to our dealings happens so often in the Bible that we should not miss it.  It’s like what happened one day when Chris was in Chicago and I was home with our dog Baxter.  He was irritating me by staring at me and barking.  I gave him food.  I let him outside to do his business.  I picked him up – but he kept on staring at me and barking.  Finally, he went over to his water dish, stuck his paw in it, and dragged it over to me.  It was empty.  I felt like he was saying, “How clear do I have to make this?  I need water!”  That’s what I think God says.  How clear do I have to make this?  I’m tough on sin and, at the same time, my grace is greater than sin.  So, you confront what is wrong but always do it with the opportunity to start again. It’s God’s renewing grace seen in the church.  So, let’s look at those two parts:

Part 1:  The Discipline of Toughness (Truth-speaking)

            *When should it be done?  When someone is caught in a sin (6:1).  The idea here is that a pattern of life is detected.  It’s not that you should tell someone off whenever you see anything that seems wrong.  When we do life together, we will see patterns of life in one another that need to be confronted – anger, immorality, unfaithfulness, unkindness…  And, sometimes a serious sin will seem to explode from the private recesses of life into public awareness.  Galatians 5:19-21 gives us a list of the kinds of patterns of life we should be alert to and that run counter to the fruit of God’s Spirit.  When we see a brother or sister caught in this way, we must go to them, confront the issue, and begin to walk with them.

            *Who should do it?  You who live by the Spirit (6:1).  In the context of Galatians 5-6, this almost certainly means those who have the Holy Spirit inside.  In other words, all followers of Jesus should be involved in this kind of ministry.  As we read in 6:2, we are all to be involved in carrying one another’s burdens.  We usually think that phrase means bearing the burdens of their troubles or trials.  And, it does mean that.  But, here it refers to bearing one another’s moral burdens.  We need accountability to overcome sin.  If we ignore one another or hide sins from one another, we will almost certainly fail again and again.

            My rule of thumb is that the restoration process should be as public as the sin.  If it is a very public sin known to the whole family, the discipline and the restoration process probably needs to have some more public aspect about it.  It might even mean that the “spiritual leadership” (the LAC Ministry Council) will have to be involved in the process.  But most of the sins are to be dealt with in smaller communities of the church – in our small groups or adult classes.  These are the places in a larger church where the “one-anothers” of Scripture are lived out.  Those of you who lead those here at LAC can see from this passage how we must be helping one another toward Christlikeness through discipline that leads to restoration.

            *How should it be done?  Without conceit… and gently (5:26; 6:1) We will need to address the sin as Paul does in Gal. 5:19-21.  Call it what it is.  Name the sin.  We must love one another enough in a church to refuse to ignore patterns of life that end up destroying the one sinning and the ones around them too.  But, we must do so “gently” (6:1) and humbly (5:26, 6:3-5). We must set up a path for people to have hope for restoration.

Part 2:  The Discipline of Tenderness (Tear-shedding)

            Many people are surprised that the main warnings in this passage are not to those who have sinned but to those helping the sinner.  And the big problem that the Bible envisions is that the one confronting the sinner will become proud and self-righteous.  In fact, I find Paul’s comments very strong in vv. 3-5.  My way of reading those verses is this:  “If you think you are not susceptible to the kind of sin you are confronting in that other person, you’re deceiving yourself.  So, go ahead and go it on your own and apart from the family of God.  Keep taking pride in your own self-righteousness and looking down on others.  But, at the end of the day, you’ll have to bear your own burdens.”  In other words, your pride will keep you from receiving the support you desperately need toward your own growth and that God provides in his church.

            *What do we seek to do?  Restore (heal) (6:1). The word for “restore” was commonly used for setting a dislocated bone back into place.  I even like one online dictionary definition of the word: a return of something to a former or improved condition. That’s what we must long to do – to help our brother and sister to be healed and to become stronger after the healing that before the sin.  We must have hearts longing for the futures of our brothers and sisters to be better and more blessed.

        *How do we go about it?  Gently (6:1) -- (i.e., not wanting the wound to grow worse) and humbly – by serving.  THE thing that will most often keep us from obeying God’s Word in this is conceit.  The attitude we must have is what we see in Paul – “I’m a fellow sinner but, in this mess you’ve gotten yourself into, I’ll walk with you.  I won’t give up on you.  I won’t let you keep ruining yourself by sin but I won’t leave you to carry this load alone.”  Carry each other’s burdens.  Imagine your friend under a weight.  To carry with them, you have to get into their shoes.  You have to feel the struggle.  You must allow some of the weight to be yours.  You have to give up some time. Don't increase the other person’s burdens. Make them lighter. We who still sin need to help one another to find victory.

#3:  Some Final Perspectives

*Restoration means (practically) that the one who was caught in a sin has repented of it and is experiencing a turn around (toward God) – to the extent that he/she is restored to become involved again in the “carrying” and serving ministry. What that service will look like in the church will differ depending upon many factors.  But, as we do life together, “those who live by the Spirit” should provide wisdom and counsel about how future service will look.  But, it’s clear that the one who is restored must again get involved in using the gifts God has given for ministry to the church family.  Restoration is not to wait until the person is absolutely perfect.  Restoration should occur when the person has demonstrated that the trajectory of his life is in the direction of god – that the sin no longer has him “caught” in its grips.  A part of our growth toward Christlikeness is experienced as serve -- carrying one another’s burdens until God is done with us and we are complete in Christ.

*The spiritual leadership must be trustworthy and the church family must trust.

The ones involved in the discipline/restoration process must be trustworthy – both to deal seriously with sin (and not to sweep it under the rug or to minimize its seriousness) and to offer gently and humbly God’s grace.  And those in the body who have entrusted the discipline process to others must trust them to have done their job.  I see no evidence in Scripture that everyone in the church must know every detail about the sin.  The spiritual leadership must be trustworthy and the church body must trust.  Apart from this, we will not be able to fulfill this clear directive from Scripture.

*Those who are restoring the one who has sinned must take the risk of humble obedience to God’s Word – meaning confronting, and offering a plan toward restoration, and making accountability a requirement, and praying and counseling, and loving and…) and the one being restored must take the risk of humble submission to the process.  The latter may be the harder part.  That may be why Scripture seems to be more focused on the attitude of the restorers than on the one being restored.  It’s hard, when a sin has come to light, to show up and be there with those who know about it – and to stay until the restorers say, “It’s time for reentry.”

*The one who has sinned must repent of the sin and stick with his church.  And the church must stick with the brother or sister - until God’s work is done.  In other words:  never give up on one another.

            I know – oh, I know that when sin comes to light in most 21^st C churches in American, we usually experience one of the following:

*Some ignore the sin as if it isn’t happening (and sweep it under the rug);

*Some cut the person off harshly communicating the attitude that there is “nothing about you we want to redeem”

*Perhaps most often, the one caught in sin leaves the church in embarrassment or anger and is never seen again.

            But God’s Word is clear: Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. ² Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

            When we do, we will experience together just a taste of God’s renewing grace.