Church in the Wild
Week 7: Sex, Judgment, and Church
Pastor Rick Henderson February 14-15, 2026
Note: This manuscript isn’t a transcript of the sermon, but a planning guide showing what the speaker intends to say.
1 Corinthians 5
This our passage today. I’d love for you to grab a Bible and turn to it.
If you’re new or checking things out, you picked quite a weekend to come to church. Today, we’re walking straight into one of the most uncomfortable chapters in the New Testament. It raises questions about sex, judgment, and what to do when the church itself is part of the problem.
Around here, we say we want to take truth seriously and give grace relentlessly. This is one of those passages that will test whether we actually mean that. I think we’re all going to experience some diverse, maybe even confusing feelings today. Some of us may even feel angry, anxious, or just plain hurt. Wherever you are on that spectrum—skeptical, curious, or already following Jesus—you have a place here.
My goal today isn’t to weaponize this text or to explain it away. My goal is to let it say what it says, as clearly as I can, and to ask together, if this really is God’s word for messy, modern people like us, what would it look like to live it out with courage and compassion?
Are you ready?
1 CORINTHIANS 5:1-13 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. 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? 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. So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord. Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? 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. 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. I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—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. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”
I don’t think it’s possible to read this passage in 2026 and not think about the ever-present controversy of the Epstein Files. Just like the rest of you, it’s my hope for our nation and for victims and all those directly impacted that truth will be brought to light, that justice will prevail, and that all people will be held accountable to the law, regardless of how rich, connected, and powerful they may be.
You’re not alone if you’re struggling to understand how people could do such repugnant things. You’re not alone if you’re trying to understand how accountability structures fail to hold people accountable. The passage we just read doesn’t allow us to solely fixate on the wrongs of people out there. Instead, it turns up the heat and turns the spotlight back on us.
Naturally, we’ve got questions about this passage. That’s a good thing. It’s appropriate to read this and ask the hard questions, the direct questions, questions that don’t shy away from the messes. Let’s start here.
QUESTION: How could someone be a Christian and ___________?
You could fill in the blank with just about anything. In this case, it’s a guy who’s having an affair with his stepmom. That’s troubling. How could someone be a Christian and do that?!
If you are in Christ, you are forgiven of all sins: past, present, and future. You are made new. You have the Spirit of God in you and with you. This means that you are not alone. This means the power of sin is broken. You don’t have to be bullied by it. You don’t have to live under its control. All of that is true.
Let me be very clear about what is not true. It is not true that you are no longer vulnerable to sin. For those of us who follow Jesus, we are vulnerable to all kinds of sin. I want you to think about this with me.
We must know the difference between STRUGGLING with sin and being STUBBORNLY in sin.
[Pointing to STRUGGLING] This one says, I know it’s wrong. I admit it’s wrong. And I’m battling. I may even feel like I’m losing the battle. This person may or may not be taking advantage of the all the resources available to them in Christ. This may be the those who haven’t yet broken the addiction to pornography. It could be those who are sleeping with their significant other, even though they’re not married. This could be those who feel shame about sexual choices—and they’re not trying to defend it as OK. If I’m describing you, you’re in the fight, and maybe you’re getting your butt kicked like the Patriots’ left tackle—you’re struggling.
[Pointing to STRUGGLING] That is a different category from the person who is willfully disregarding faithfulness to the way of Jesus. They are entrenched and stubborn, and defending their disobedience as OK and no big deal.
I don’t know what you know about Roman culture. Corinth was thoroughly Roman. Tim Mackie, from the Bible Project called it a Las Vegas type city. Here are some quick facts about sex and Roman culture.
ROMAN CULTURE:
- Consent was not a value.
It was not celebrated. It was not in the social consciousness at all.
- Servants and slaves didn’t have the freedom to decline the sexual advances of men who outranked them.
The heads of household and slave owners had sexual rights over their servants and slaves. Gender didn’t matter. Marital status didn’t matter.
- Prostitution was legal and encouraged.
- Married me were allowed, even expected to have affairs.
- It was illegal for a married, free woman to have an affair.
It was a sexually permissive culture that privileged wealthy, powerful males. And for all their vices, the city would be shocked by someone sleeping with his stepmom.
1 CORINTHIANS 5:1 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.
And this guy was a core part of the church. His affair was not a secret to the church. It was common knowledge. Which leads us to ask…
QUESTION: How could a church look the other way?
I have an answer. It probably won’t be emotionally satisfying. There are no words that will zap away those feelings of broken trust. There are no words that can hit like morphine, covering over the pain of disappointment from discovering that leaders were complicit or failed to exercise accountability.
How could a church look the other way?
1 CORINTHIANS 5:2 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?
They were proud. They were full of themselves. Pride has a way of callousing our hearts. We become desensitized to things we should respond to emotionally. Pride grows callouses around our hearts; it reverses the course of emotional health, and that results in a total lack of grieving the presence of sin.
- They were numb to how this sin impacted the guy.
- They were numb to how this sin impacted the stepmom.
- They were numb to how this sin impacted the dad and everyone else in the home.
- They were numb to how this sin impacted their church.
- They were numb to their loss of credibility to the city around them.
It’s no secret that there have been far too many churches in the very recent past that have failed to respond quickly, transparently, and appropriately to sexual misconduct or sexual abuse. That horrible trend corresponds exactly with a decline in church attendance in America.
Why does it seem like too many churches cared about themselves more than the people impacted? It’s because they cared about themselves more than the people impacted. That’s what pride does. It fills our hearts with self-concern, with self-preservation, with reputation management. Pride is like an acid. It corrodes our mutual submission to one another; it eats away at our submission to Jesus.
We’re keeping the spotlight on ourselves today. Is there anyone here who isn’t vulnerable to the sin of pride? No. We may not be guilty of what they were guilty of, but we’re just as vulnerable as anybody else.
1 CORINTHIANS 5:2 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?
What’s your response to this? At the outset, I told you that we aren’t going to weaponize this passage and we aren’t going to explain it away either. What’s our theme verse and series thesis?
1 CORINTHIANS 16:13-14 Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love.
This has been our anthem.
SERIES THESIS: Stand FIRM and FEARLESS, but let LOVE lead.
We absolutely want to be loving people, while also being people who have the guts to stand firm in our faith. And if we’re going to do that, we must stare down what’s in this passage, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable. Paul made some hard statements.
HARD STATEMENTS:
- Shouldn’t you have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?
- Hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.
- You must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
- Expel the wicked person from among you.
Maybe the hardest on the list is, “Hand this man over to Satan…”. What is that?! [Playful and Light] I didn’t know that was an option. I know some folks whom I’d like to hand over. This was a church that needed to be shocked back to their senses. It’s not surprising to see bold statements intended to grab attention. This guy was not following the way of Jesus. And he was stubborn about it.
This is Paul saying, “Alright. Let him go all the way with it.” If that’s how he wants to live, don’t stand in the way. But he doesn’t get to defiantly oppose the way of Jesus and gather with people who are trying to follow Jesus. He can’t have both.
Love doesn’t shield people from the CONSEQUENCES of their actions.
It’s not about trying to hurt people. It is about letting people feel the full force of the consequences they brought on themselves. Have you ever heard the statement, “What’s rewarded is repeated.” When we shield people from the natural consequences of their willfully bad behavior, we are rewarding that behavior. So, we should expect that it will be repeated.
In another church in another state, there was a guy who was in a pattern of sexual choices that was leading to the destruction of his marriage and maybe the collapse of his medical practice. This dude was stubborn. He was also a part of a Men’s Group that met weekly for breakfast. The group was at their whit’s end with. They invited me to join them for the final intervention.
The men at that breakfast table, one by one, declared their unwavering friendship. They got vulnerable about their own foolish and sinful choices. They talked about their own consequences and then told stories of redemption and how things are being healed in their lives. And each man pleaded with this guy to change course. And after they all shared, they made this clear. We are following Jesus. If you want to be in this group, you don’t have to be morally perfect, but you have to be moving in that direction too. Until you stop those behaviors, you can’t join us anymore.
Do you know what that was? It was standing firm in the faith, with love and guts. Love for Jesus. Love for each other. Love for that guy and his wife, and his kids, and all the others being impacted by his choices. When we see it from that angle, I don’t think Paul’s statement is all that hard. We’re really talking about rugged empathy in action.
1 CORINTHIANS 5:4-5 So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.
Paul is reminding them of what we talked about last week in chapter 3. We are the temple of God. We host his presence. Jesus is with you. You rely on his power, not your own. The power available to you and me as the church isn’t to punish. What’s the point of it all? The whole point is that the person be restored.
Accountability that doesn’t aim at RESTORATION is just BULLYING.
Read 2 Corinthians. This is what you’ll discover. The unnamed guy received their accountability, and he repented. As is often the case, the church overcorrected. They went from being too passive to being too hard on the guy. And Paul told them to forgive the man and comfort him. The whole point of this process is not for us to inflict pain on anyone. Rather, the person should feel the pain of the consequences of their own choices. We don’t shield people from the pain they inflict on themselves.
The whole time we are aiming at their restoration. We pray for their restoration. We never stop telling them that our goal for them is their restoration. And when the person comes to their senses, we don’t pile on. We don’t punish. We don’t rub their noses in it. Jesus took the beating for all of our sins on the cross. Therefore, we don’t beat each other up. When someone repents, we should sprint to comfort them.
I want to pause and acknowledge an objection that some of us might be feeling. Because we are products of a modern, western culture, because we’ve been conditioned our entire lives to put a high premium on autonomy, because we grew up with Disney movies that made heroes out of people who broke away from the rigid confines of community identity so that they could find their true selves and fulfill their deepest desires—because that’s the air we’ve breathed our entire lives, understandably there is discomfort when private sexual choices between consenting adults meets publicly accountability. There’s an instant reaction that labels that as repressive and a fundamental violation of a free person. I get it.
It’s important to remember that Paul put up some inflexible guardrails.
1 CORINTHIANS 5:12-13 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church…God will judge those outside.
We aren’t culture warriors, and we aren’t the morality police. In the church and as a church, we have no business holding anyone accountable for personal choices if they aren’t followers of Jesus. It’s none of our business. Of course, I have an opinion on behavior that is right, best, and wise. Who do I think I am that I would bring it up with someone who doesn’t share my allegiance to Jesus or who hasn’t given me permission to talk about that? Only an arrogant person would do that.
Do we practice accountability at our church? Yes. But how do we tell who is in the church and who isn’t. This service right now is not a church. This is something our church does, it’s not who our church is. The best relationships are the ones in which people give each other permission to hold each other accountable. That’s part of what church membership is. It’s a relationship of mutual support and mutual accountability.
If that’s a new perspective for you, you might be wondering why people would agree to that. Let’s turn back to what Paul wrote.
1 CORINTHIANS 5:7 Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are.
Sometimes biblical authors use yeast as a metaphor for sin or a corrupting influence. Unleavened bread doesn’t have yeast. So it’s used as a metaphor for holiness. For those of us who are following Jesus, we want to be like him. We aren’t asking, what are the rules? Our question is, who rules? We love Jesus. We follow him as King, and we trust that his way of life is a life that is truly life.
In the language of biblical metaphor, we want to get rid of the yeast. To state it more plainly. For those of us who follow Jesus, we value when our brothers and sisters have our backs in getting rid of corrupting influences.
We get what we TOLERATE.
We just don’t want to tolerate behavior that hurts people. If we tolerated behavior that violates love for Jesus and lover for others, what would we get? More behavior that violates love for Jesus and violates love for people. Let me say it in a way that I think you won’t forget. Unrepentant, tolerated sin in a church is like a fart in the sauna—it spreads.
A moment ago I said we’re not asking, “What are the rules?” The real question is, “Who rules?” Let me tell you about the One who rules. He adores you. He made you in his image. How do you know what something is worth? You look at what someone is willing to pay for it. The King stepped out of heaven, became a servant, and paid for your forgiveness, your healing, and your new life with his own body. That’s how much he loves you.
And there is no part of your moral life he does not see. There is no corner of your heart hidden from him. When you feel ashamed after binging porn, when you feel ashamed driving home from the rendezvous, when you feel bone‑deep exhaustion because you can’t stop this pattern that treats your body as worth less than what your soul knows is true—Jesus does not look at you with contempt. His eyes are full of compassion, and his message to you is on repeat: “Won’t you repent? Won’t you turn from that and trust me and receive new life?” He is saying, “I love you, and I have the scars to prove it.”