Follow Instructions

Luk 17:3-4 LITV
(3) Take heed to yourselves. And if your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.
(4) And if seven times of the day he sins against you, and seven times of the day turns to you saying, I repent, you shall forgive him.

Have we ever done this? Most of us have been offended. How do we tend to handle it? As for me, my tendency would be to just bury it. After all, maybe the offending party didn't mean what they said. Or maybe they misspoke. Or maybe I heard wrong.

Part of our problem with relationships within the church is that we do not follow instructions. These are very simple, but the intent is to keep division out of the church - a problem running rampant in today's congregations.

The definition of 'rebuke' is to reprimand or reprove sharply. Basically, you have to get on somebody's case. We always want to be the good guy, though, which is something that Jesus wasn't so concerned with. We need to buck up.

The penalty for not doing this is very Pavlovian: we get into vicious patters that gradually degrade our fellowships into non-fellowships. We become squabbling, dis-functional families at best - Satan's plan to remove the allure of the body of Christ.