Separation From Sin Part 1

INTRO: Our subject for the next few messages is the biblical doctrine of separation from sin. I wanted to do one message and then realized it is no small doctrine. I have subtitled these messages ‘the neglected doctrine’. Separation, by itself would be a huge doctrine to go through, if we were to deal with it in all of Scripture. But we are narrowing that down to the biblical instruction of the Christian’s separation from sin in the Church age. We will deal with that separation from the world and from the unfaithful Christian.
Just yesterday, one of our men sent a link to an article by Dr. Al Mohler titled, “Church Discipline: The Missing Mark.” The doctrine of separation includes church discipline. Let me just read the first few paragraphs: “The decline of church discipline is perhaps the most visible failure of the contemporary church. No longer concerned with maintaining purity of confession or life-style, the contemporary church sees itself as a voluntary association of autonomous members, with minimal moral accountability to God, much less to each other. The absence of church discipline is no longer remarkable—it is generally not even noticed. Regulative and restorative church discipline is, to many church members, no longer a meaningful category, or even a memory. The present generation of both ministers and church members is virtually without experience of biblical church discipline. As a matter of fact, most Christians introduced to the biblical teaching concerning church discipline confront the issue of church discipline as an idea they have never before encountered. At first hearing, the issue seems as antiquarian and foreign as the Spanish Inquisition