How serious is sin?

Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.  – 1 Corinthians 5.6-8

I think sometimes we forget just how dangerous sin is. I think it is far too easy to take it far too lightly. The Corinthian church was certainly guilty of that. Here was a man having sexual relations with his step-mother. Paul told the church that this man had to be put out of the fellowship until he dealt with his sin. It would be a wakeup call for him and it was important that the church be protected from the sin.

To show how important purity is Paul uses the illustration of leaven. The leavening agent most of us are used to today is yeast. I don’t mind cooking, and do a pretty good job of it. But I am not much good at baking so what follows is from what I have read and heard and watched when Mary is baking. When she wants to bake certain goods sometimes she adds yeast. It makes whatever she is baking lighter and less dense. It has a major effect on the flour mixture. I love the results when she gets done baking.

But most of the time, some would say every time; yeast is referred to in the Bible it is in a negative sense. Here Paul had just been warning the people about being ‘puffed up’ I can’t help but wonder if that is the image Paul is trying to get across. The church was ‘puffed up’ despite the fact that they were not dealing with. If not dealt with the sin they were tolerating would continue to grow and ‘puff up’ until it affected the whole church.

There were at least two problems here. There was the man’s sin and there was the sin of pride and boasting and being puffed up. The tolerance of the church was its own leaven and if not dealt with the whole church would be affected.

So often sin goes unchecked. No one likes to confront anyone about sin. Sometimes the guilty party is such an asset to the church that no one wants to deal with it. Sometimes dealing with sin might affect the prestige of the church.

But left unchecked even a little sin ‘leavens the whole lump.’