5
“Remove the Former Yeast of Sin”
1 The news is getting out everywhere, that there exists among you sexual immorality, and of such a kind that not even the Gentiles will condone it. Someone there is sleeping with his own stepmother!
2 And you are so proud and arrogant! Mourning and lament is what your response should have been, so as to expel from your fellowship the man who did this thing.
3 For I, though not there with you in person, but being there in spirit, have already pronounced a decision, as if I were there, concerning the man who did this thing.
4 When you are assembled in the powerful name of the Lord Jesus, and I am there with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present,
5 turn this man over to Satan for him to heap disaster on the man’s body, so that the man’s spirit may be saved in the Day of the Lord.
6 This prideful talk of yours is so dangerous and ugly. Surely you realize, don’t you, that it takes only a tiny bit of yeast to corrupt the whole lump of dough.
7 Remove the former yeast of sin, so that you may be a new lump of dough, since you are a batch of unleavened dough; our Passover Lamb, you see, has been sacrificed—the Messiah.
8 So then, let us celebrate the festival not with the bread having the former yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
9 When I wrote to you previously, I instructed you to have nothing to do with people who are sexually immoral—
10 not at all meaning everyone in this world who is immoral, or just any greedy person or swindler or idolater, since then you would have to die!
11 What I meant was that you are to have nothing to do with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister, and yet lives a life of immorality or greed or idolatry or slander or drunkenness or swindling. With such a person don’t even eat.
12 After all, what business is it of mine to preside as judge over those outside the assembly? Your job is to govern and arbitrate decisions for those inside, is it not?
13 As for those on the outside, God is the one who will judge them. “Remove the evildoer from your midst.”+