“Rebuking your Brother when he Sins, a Loving Thing to Do”
Luke 17:1-10
10/7/07
After I read this text the first question that came
into my mind was, “Doesn’t the instruction here to rebuke
our brother when he sins against us contradict what Jesus said in
another place about not judging, lest we be judged, and that before we
try to remove the speck from our brother’s eye we need to remove
the log that’s in our own? Is Jesus speaking out of both
sides of His mouth, telling us in one place not to rebuke our
brother’s sins while telling us in another place to rebuke his
sins?” You can be sure that if you ever try to rebuke a
person for a particular sin he’s committed that you’re
gonna get an ear-full of “Who are you to judge me??” and
“Why don’t you listen to Jesus and remove the log from your
own eye??” Most people like Jesus’ words about not
judging; they’re not so crazy about His command to rebuke.
But if we look carefully at this text we see that
Jesus is not contradicting Himself. His command not to judge
others and to remove the log that’s in our own eye before
attempting to remove the speck that’s in our brother’s eye
is directed towards us when we see ourselves as more righteous and holy
than our brothers, when we do not see ourselves as being as big of a
sinner as they are. You see, by nature we like to compare
ourselves with others, weighing our sins against theirs, and it makes
us feel good about ourselves to point out the really bad sins our
brothers commit over against the little sins that we commit.
We’ll say that it’s out of love that we’re bringing
our brother’s faults to his attention. But we’re
really only doing it for our own self-aggrandizement, hoping that we
might even help our brother to become more like us in his
behavior. In this situation, Jesus’ words about not judging
and about first removing the log from our own eyes must be heeded, and
we must confess our own sins in humble repentance before we even begin
to address the sins of our brothers. You must be on the receiving
end of the Lord’s words of rebuke first on account of your sins,
be brought to repentance, and then hear your Lord’s words of
forgiveness, before you try to help your brother deal with his sins.
Once you rightly confess yourself as the chief of
sinners, who would suffer under God’s eternal wrath and
punishment in hell if it weren’t for your Savior’s
sacrifice on the cross, then you can properly do what Jesus commands
here and rebuke your brother when he sins. This kind of rebuke
will not be given in order to try to make yourself look better than, or
appear to be less of a sinner than, your brother. Neither will it
be done in order to try to put him down, embarrass him before others,
or lead him into despair with no hope of forgiveness. It will
only be done out of love for a brother who’s relationship with
both God and with us, his fellow believers, is in jeopardy due to
unrepentant sin. The goal of this rebuke is always the
restoration of a brother’s relationship to both God and His
people through repentance and forgiveness. Such rebuke can only
be done out of love and is, therefore, truly a loving thing to do.
Now, it won’t be received as something done
out of love. You see where this kind of love got Jesus. Out
of His love, He rebuked the world of sin in order to lead us to
repentance and faith in Him as our Savior for the forgiveness of our
sins, but it got Him crucified. And yet, through that
crucifixion, God was reconciling the world to Himself through the blood
of His Son, not counting your trespasses against you, so that now, you
who have been brought to repentance and faith by the work of the Holy
Spirit through the proclamation of the Word have received the
forgiveness of your sins, and your relationship to God and His people
has been restored. You no longer live under the threat of
God’s wrath, but under His mercy for Christ’s sake in His
kingdom of grace.
You and I (all of us here) have been baptized,
washed clean of our sins with the blood of Jesus, and brought into
God’s family. We are now brothers of one another.
“Brothers” is a term that the Scriptures use for fellow
believers in Christ. Whether you’re male or female makes no
difference; the fact that female Christians are also called
“brothers” lets them know that the same inheritance belongs
to them in Jesus as it does to male Christians, and that there’s
no distinction before God; all are equal in Jesus. So we brothers
in Christ all share the same heavenly Father, the same Lord, the same
Baptism, the same Spirit, the same salvation, the same forgiveness.
But we brothers are all still sinners. We sin
all the time. Most of the time it’s in our heart and we
don’t act out our lusts. Most of our sins are secret, known
only to God. But sometimes we sin in such a way that our sins are
open, manifest, and public (for example, when it becomes known that a
brother among us has committed adultery, stolen something, disobeyed a
parent, or gossiped about someone else). In that case, the
brothers who are aware of this must come to their brother who committed
such a sin and rebuke him, in order to lead him to repentance.
This rebuke will be done with great humility (realizing that each one
of us could be in the same situation); it will be done privately at
first, calling in others if unrepentance continues; and it will be done
in love. Again, the goal is to restore our brother to a right
relationship with God and His people. This is why such rebuke is
a loving thing to do, because what’s at stake is our
brother’s salvation. If he were to continue unrepentant in
his sin, he would cut himself off from God’s forgiveness in
Christ, and to do that would mean that he would spend eternity
separated from God in hell.
So, we brothers in Christ have been given a great
responsibility by our Lord to rebuke one another when we sin. And
when we are on the receiving end of this rebuke, we must receive it as
from the Lord Himself. But our responsibility doesn’t stop
with rebuke. If our brother repents of his sin, we must then
speak the Lord’s forgiveness to him. To fail to speak
God’s forgiveness to our repentant brother is tantamount to
setting a stumbling block before him. Our translation renders
“stumbling blocks” here as “temptations to
sin.” What Jesus literally says here is that stumbling
blocks are inevitable and unavoidable; they’re going to
come. They are things that would turn us away from the Gospel and
faith in Jesus Christ. They are things that would cause us to
despair of God’s forgiveness and/or cause us to depend upon an
idol or our good works for our salvation. We can cause our
brother to stumble by doing things like mixing Law with Gospel, by
teaching false doctrine, by tempting our brother to sin, by not
rebuking him for his sin but instead excusing and tolerating his sin,
or by not forgiving him when he repents. To those who would put
stumbling blocks in the way of a brother, including the refusal to
speak the Lord’s forgiveness to him, Jesus speaks a word of
woe: “Woe to those through whom stumbling blocks
come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around
his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of
these little ones to sin.” God threatens wrath upon those
who would cause any one of His children to stumble, including those who
would withhold His forgiveness from repentant sinners.
Now, this is a very important point to
remember: It’s not your forgiveness that you give to your
repentant brother; it’s the Lord’s forgiveness.
That’s because sin is not ultimately an offense committed against
you; it’s an offense committed against God. It’s an
infraction against His commandments, and He has the right to send us to
hell for such infractions. But look how God took care of our
sins: He gave them to Jesus, who paid for all our offenses
against God with His blood shed at Calvary. God’s message
to the world is not, “You’ve sinned against me one too many
times!” or “It’ll be my pleasure to send you to
hell!” or “There’s no hope for you!” but
“Repent and believe the Gospel. Confess your sins, trust in
my forgiveness for Christ’s sake, the sacrifice for your sins,
and turn from your evil ways and live.” This is His call to
the world, and it’s also His call to Christians - justified
sinners, who still fall into sin on a daily basis and need to repent
and believe the Gospel again and again. In fact, your Baptism was
the beginning of a lifetime of repentance and faith which the Holy
Spirit is still working in you today.
And He uses you and me as instruments to help bring
our erring brothers back to a restored relationship with God when they
sin. It’s a loving thing that we do, that God does through
us - through me as your pastor and through you, brothers in Jesus, so
that we might not fall away from God into unbelief. It is the way
our Good Shepherd comes after us when we stray from His fold. He
calls us to repentance with His words of rebuke, and He calls us to
faith with His words of forgiveness. And God is not stingy with
His forgiveness. He forgives you the whole lot of your sin, not
just the sins you ask forgiveness for. To confess your sins is to
confess all of them, even the ones you’re not aware of, even the
ones you don’t remember, even the ones you don’t think
you’ve committed. God doesn’t give fractional
forgiveness; therefore, our confession can’t be fractional
either. We cannot withhold any of our sins from Jesus’
forgiveness. He didn’t die for some of your sins, but all
of them, which He did apart from your asking Him to. And God
applied Christ’s sacrifice to you at your Baptism, washing away
all your sins even before you confessed them. He still grants you
full forgiveness of all your sins today, even before you name
them. To pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us,” does not mean that God withholds
forgiveness from you until you forgive others and until you ask for
forgiveness. We are taught to ask for the forgiveness that He has
already promised, given, and continues to give us in Jesus and to
forgive others as we have been forgiven. When we forgive others,
it’s a sign that we ourselves live under the Lord’s
forgiveness and withhold it from no one.
Live under that forgiveness, then, for yourself and
speak it to your brothers in Christ, who have been cleansed with His
blood and clothed with His righteousness just as you have been.
Let your words of rebuke towards your brother in Christ always be done
in love, and speak them with this end in mind: that the Spirit of
God through His words in your mouth might remove all stumbling blocks
of sin from your brother, so that nothing might hinder him from being
restored to a right relationship with God and from receiving again the
full forgiveness of all his sins in Jesus. Amen.