Thought from today’s Bible reading from Matthew 18.
“If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (Matthew 18:15-17).
The New King James Version starts with the phrase, “If your brother sins against you.” Though the New American Standard Bible (quoted above) does not contain a similar phrase, the context certainly implies that private sins that one brother commits against another are the type of sins under consideration. Others were not aware of the sin until after the guilty brother had been approached by the brother whom he had sinned against.
If is important to remember that when a brother sins against us, our first course of action must be to approach him directly. We are not to start telling others about the transgression first. We are not to begin by making it a public ordeal. We are to go to him privately first. Why? Our goal is to correct our brother, not to turn everyone against him and make them sympathetic to us as victims. Love “does not seek its own,” nor does it “rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:5, 6).
The procedure Jesus outlined here is not the required procedure for every type of sin that might be committed (such as public sin or the proclamation of error). These sins were dealt with in other ways (1 Corinthians 5:1-3; Galatians 2:4-5, 11-14). But we need to be sure that we take these steps when dealing with a brother who has sinned against us so that we might win him back and avoid any unnecessary division in the body.
Tomorrow’s reading: John 7-8
[I’m using the Chronological reading plan on the Bible Gateway website if you’d like to follow along, too.]
Daily Notes & Observations contains all 365 articles from this series and is available in paperback from Gospel Armory.
