judgment!

Dealing With a Case of Incest

5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. ² And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this? ³ For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. ⁴ So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, ⁵ hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,^[a][b] so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

⁶ Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? ⁷ Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸ Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
⁹ I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— ¹⁰ not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. ¹¹ But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister^[c] but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
¹² What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? ¹³ God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”<sup>[d]

I find this passage interesting!! WHY? You may ask, let me tell you! Its because it deals with judgment. Well, we christians always say, let God be the judge! While that is true, there is an addition to that truth!! We see here:

I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this.

 Paul passed judgment onto the people of the church! What i really learn here is that sure, God is the final judge, but we are all capable of passing judgment in the name of Jesus here and now. While that is not to persecute anyone, it is meant to help people realize their issues. 

However, the rest that he says is in consistent with what i already knew! We the church are not to pass God's judgment across other(non-christians), for that alone is God's job! Not ours!</sup>  

Law AND Grace? Law OR Grace?

¹⁵ What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! ¹⁶ Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷ But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. ¹⁸ You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

How clear that verse is! Although we are no longer under the law, we are now under grace! This verse reminds me of some of the sermons preached by some preachers, they only preach exclusively about grace. Grace is good, but not to the extent that we do not learn the law.  The sacrifice of Jesus Christ does not abolishes the law but gives us grace ontop of those laws. The law is like a sin mirror, reflecting to us what are the sins in our lives. Because on our own without God or Holy Spirit's help we would never be able to discover these laws on our own. 

But God needs to make clear to us the laws through Moses and others to help us recognize these sins. Law is just a tool to let us recognize the sin, and subsequently repent. But it still holds that it is up to us to repent. 

So in short, before the death of Jesus Christ, we need to recognize the sin using the law and then repent. However, as human beings, we have problems with both the recognition and the repentance of the sin. 

Well, God knows this from the very start and He sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross so that we understand the gravity of the matter. Then we do not need to spend so much effort recognizing and repenting. 

Jesus made recognizing simple as when He dies, the holy spirit comes upon all who believe and that will always remind us of the law and what is sin. Talking about repentance, we just need to recognize and apologize to God about the sin. And Jesus's blood will wash us clean again. As when Jesus died on the cross, He died for ALL sins. Whether before or after. EVERYTHING. 

But then, even with such simplification, its still hard for people and sin is still rampant. It all boils down to one thing- choice. Do you or do you not?

This righteousness!

This righteousness is given through faith in^[h] Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, ²³ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

 As i thought and mediate on this verse, I just want to thank God for the the salvation that He has given all of us! We only need to believe in that, belief that God had sent His son to die on the cross for all our sins. The fact that all people are not righteous is a key fact! We may think we are righteous, but to God's standards, we fall short. Our definition of righteous and God's definition is so different. God's standards are way stricter. There is no difference between anyone in the world, for everyone has sinned in the eyes of God and needs repentance. 

Now what is the effect of that?

I would say that we can no longer justify ourselves, we cannot claim that we we are right and wrong in front of God, but we can only use God's standards to say this is an area we need to work on.

We can no longer judge anyone with respect to right and wrong. Because we no longer have any standards, as God has shown that His standards of people is the only standard, we cannot judge people based on our standards. We cannot also judge people based on God's standards, as for one we do not come up with those standards. two we have no right to judge them as we were also prey to the sin.

We cannot claim that our salvation is ours and rejoice. For the salvation that we receive is given to us by God.