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.”+