Pastor Joel's question regarding Jesus' parable of the wheat and tares versus biblical excommunication is resolved by distinguishing between final harvest judgment and present church discipline. Citing 1 Timothy 1:18-20 on Hymenaeus and Alexander, alongside 1 Corinthians 5's expulsion of a man sleeping with his stepmother, the host argues that Matthew 18 mandates a rigorous process involving private confrontation, witnesses, and congregational action before removal. This ensures excommunication remains an exception for high-handed sins confirmed by independent testimony rather than speculative hunches, aligning church practice with New Testament precedents while avoiding premature judgment of ordinary false converts. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Bad Seeds and False Converts00:03:38
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Question Do we cast out false teachers or do we listen to Jesus when he says not to worry about separating the wheat and tares, that his angel will do it when the harvest comes?
Thanks, Pastor Joel.
All right.
Great question.
Okay.
So, with the parable of the wheat and the tares, a couple things.
One, fantastic parable, but there's a lot.
And Jesus begins to explain the analogies and illustrations in this parable.
But the angels are the ones who are going to separate.
He says, This is representative of the angels.
And the barn is representative of heaven, and the Father's house, and the fire represents God's judgment, and wrath, and hell.
These kinds of things.
But one thing that I think we should take note of is in the parable, it begins with the idea, Jesus sets the scene with an enemy coming in, coming in in the middle of the night and sowing bad seed in the field.
And the tares are simply the harvest of that bad seed.
So the tares is the harvest of that bad seed.
My point is this in the case of Creflo Dollar, I think that he would have more in common with the enemy coming in in the middle of the night sowing the bad seed than a tear that is the result of the bad seed.
Now, I understand that in the truest sense, we could say that the enemy, I think Jesus gets to this, the enemy who sows the bad seed is the devil.
And so, in that sense, Creflo Dollar is a tear himself that is the product of the father of all lies, the false teacher of all false teachers, the devil.
Himself.
There's truth in that.
But there's also something to be said for the fact that Creflo Dollar is, although a tear himself, he is no mere tear.
We could also say, you know, Jesus is going to separate on the last day the sheep and the goats.
The goats are those who are unregenerate, they're unbelievers.
They're going to be separated.
Jesus says, I'm going to put them on my left and they're going to go to judgment.
All right?
Well, Every false teacher is a goat, but every false teacher also is a wolf.
So they're a goat, yes, but not a mere goat.
They're a wolf goat, if that makes sense.
And so I think Creflo Dollar, I think that there is another category besides merely a tear.
In a true objective theological sense, yes, he is a goat.
Yes, he is a tear, but he's also a wolf.
And I think he's also one of the bad servants, the wicked servants who sowed the bad seed.
He's not just a tear, the result of the bad seed, but he is a sower of that bad seed on an extremely high level.
Okay, so all that being said, I think there's a different category.
But here's the easiest way to answer the question.
The easiest way to answer the question is to say this even if he wasn't a false teacher and he was just someone who was deceived and a false convert, not a false teacher, but a false convert, even if he wasn't a wolf, but he wasn't a wolf goat, he was just a goat goat, right?
Matthew 18 Church Discipline00:08:44
Even if all that was the case, you could still kick him out of the church.
Why?
Because Paul in the New Testament talks about kicking people out of the church.
And not just Hymenaeus and Alexander, not just leaders.
Right, who had gone apostate, right?
1 Timothy chapter 1, verse 18 through 20.
I've handed Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan that they might be taught not to blaspheme any longer for the destruction of their flesh, that their soul may be saved.
So, Paul talks about handing over leaders, right?
Guys who are false teachers, wolves.
But he also, in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, talks about somebody who's simply a member in the Corinthian church who had committed a high handed sin, right?
Somebody who had committed a sin that is not even heard of among the Gentiles.
He was sleeping with his father's wife, his stepmom.
And everybody in the Corinthian church knew about it.
And they were bragging.
Rather than being disgusted, he said, You should be revolting and you should remove him, expel the immoral brother, purge the immoral brother from your midst.
This is a sin that's not even heard of among the pagans.
And you guys are proud?
And why were they proud?
Well, they were proud for the same reason that American evangelicals are proud.
They weren't proud that he was sleeping with his stepmom.
They were proud that in the midst of his egregious sin, how gracious the church at Corinth was.
That's what they were being prideful about.
They were being prideful about, look at how gracious we are.
Even with these types of sins, we don't discipline, we don't judge.
Only God can judge.
We don't judge.
We've just welcomed him in.
And Paul says, that's dumb.
You're bragging about doing something that's wrong.
No, you should judge.
You should judge.
And Paul says, as an apostle, I've already cast judgment on the man.
Now you judge him also.
Follow with my judgment and remove him.
And this is not a false teacher.
This is not Creflo Dollar.
This is just Joe Blow, just a member sitting on the third pew from the back, you know, in the sanctuary, who happens to be sleeping with his stepmom.
And he needs to be removed.
And it's not just high handed sin, although that's first and foremost.
But we see the category in Matthew chapter 18 by the Lord Jesus himself, where he talks to the disciples about the keys to the kingdom whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
He says, He says this, he gives us a roadmap for church discipline.
If your brother sins against you, go to him privately, one on one, and confront your brother, correct him.
And if he listens to you, you've won your brother over.
But if he does not listen, then bring one or two others along with you so that the testimony may be established in the presence of two or three witnesses.
And if he does not listen to them, then tell it to the church, the whole congregation.
And if he does not listen to the church, then hand him over.
Treat him as a tax collector or a Gentile.
Which means, you know, what do you do with tax collectors and Gentiles?
Well, you preach the gospel to them, you evangelize them, but you don't receive them as a brother.
You don't receive them as a brother.
A tax collector or a Gentile means an outsider.
The language that Jesus is using there is no longer treat him as an insider, as a brother in Christ, but rather an outsider.
That doesn't mean that you can't preach the gospel to him, and that doesn't mean that the Lord won't bring him back.
But for now, you are not.
You're not giving him a false assurance of a salvation that he very well may not have.
And again, this is just the basic practice of excommunication, which would be the final end step of church discipline, this longer process for someone who's impenitent.
No matter how much correction, no matter how much confrontation, no matter who approaches them, they refuse to acknowledge their sin, to confess their sin and repent of it.
For somebody who is impenitent like this, Jesus says there's a long process, it's not just a one and done.
It's a multiple step process of confrontation and correction and prayer and all these things.
But if they double down, double down, double down, dig their heels in the sand, refuse to repent, eventually the final step in church discipline is removal.
Their removal from the church.
So, whatever Jesus is saying, in conclusion, whatever Jesus is saying about the wheat and the tares and waiting to let the Lord separate them at the final day so that in removing the tares we don't also accidentally harm the wheat, whatever the Lord is saying there, It cannot be contradicting what he is saying in Matthew 18.
And in Matthew 18, the Lord tells us that there are times and there are individuals that we should remove.
And not just goat wolves, but even just goat goats.
Not just false teachers, but false converts.
False converts.
And we see the principle in Matthew 18, we see the case study in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, and we see, we see, The principle actually works and brings about repentance in 2 Corinthians chapter 2, where the man that Paul says they should remove in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 and 2 Corinthians chapter 2, most commentators say it's the same man.
Paul says, Welcome him back in.
He's had godly sorrow, he has repented, and I don't want him to be overly sorrowful.
Welcome him back in to the church.
So, I guess what I would say is, I think what Jesus is getting at with the wheat and the tares is, He's saying, We don't speculate.
We don't guess.
There's a lot of times I've had people say, Pastor, Pastor, this person is a false convert.
I don't think that they're a true convert.
I don't think that they should be a member in the church.
And what I'll respond with is give me something that is external, outward, visible, witnessable.
It's the same as under the Old Covenant, right?
With the law of Moses.
You can't just say, Oh, this person did such and such.
I saw him do it.
Great.
Did anybody else see him do it?
Because we need two or three witnesses here.
We need two or three witnesses.
It has to be established.
The testimony has to, and that's the same language.
It's following the law of Moses that Jesus uses in Matthew 18 with his pattern for church discipline, his process for removing an impenitent saint.
And so, what Jesus is getting at with the wheat and the tares, I think what he's saying is we don't just go in guessing because wheat and tares, right?
The whole point that people get at is they look somewhat similar, right?
You may be pulling up a tar that is actually wheat.
Right?
And even if that's not the case, because I've heard debates against that, and I'm not exactly sure, but even if you know that this is a tear, you could be pulling it up in such a way that in pulling up the tear, it damages the wheat.
Right?
And so whatever Jesus is saying there cannot be contradicting what he's saying in Matthew 18.
And I think the way you reconcile these two things that seemingly are contradicting, I think the way you reconcile them is you look at what Jesus says with church discipline and what Paul did in 1 Corinthians 5, and you say, the difference is that it's few and far between.
It's the exception, not the norm.
Right?
I mean, look at all the corrections Paul has for the Corinthian church.
I mean, it's just correction, rebuke after rebuke after rebuke.
The whole Corinthian church is immature.
But Paul's not saying kick out half the church, because I'm pretty sure half of the church, you know, and any, me, me, money, this one, this one, this one, duck, duck, duck, goose.
That's not how Paul does it.
He doesn't just say, all of you are radically immature.
Therefore, I think about half of you are probably tares, and let's go ahead and excommunicate half of you.
No, he says, Okay, but this guy I know for sure.
The dude sleeping with his stepmom who's boasting about it, and you guys are boasting about it too.
Yeah, that dude, he's got to go.
And that's what Jesus is doing in Matthew 18.
So, I think with the wheat and the tares, what it means is we don't just go into a church and start cleaning house based off of a hunch, right?
No, it's outward, it's witnessable, it's proven.
There's two to three independent lines of testimony.
The person is given time, there's patience, right?
You correct them, they don't respond.
You correct them again with two or three, they don't respond.
You correct them with the whole church, and if he does not listen to the church's correction, then, right?
So, it's slow, it's witnessable, it has multiple lines of evidence, it's typically high handed sin.
And in those cases, You remove them because in those cases, we know that's a tear.
Proven Faith Over Hunches00:00:24
Okay, that's what I got.
Thank you guys so much for tuning in.
I hope it's been helpful, and we'll join you again next Monday, Lord willing.
God bless.
Thanks so much for listening.
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