Renewing our minds

I ask the people I work with who have fallen to memorize Scripture. We then get together regularly to discuss it. They not only memorize the Scripture but look up every word in the dictionary to see what it means. They meditate on how it applied to their circumstance etc. They will say these verses to me and discuss them with me so that I know that they are penetrating their hearts.

By the way--when they confessed their sin they resigned from all of their positions in the church but I did not have them make a public detailed confession of their sin. We do not want to glorify their sin nor do we want to have it published in Gath--I know you are wondering where that came from so check out this passage.

2Sa 1:20 Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.

The sin will need to confessed publicly if it was a public sin and can be confessed privately if it was a private sin I think. But there is no call to get the news out as much as you can because all you are doing is causing the lost world to rejoice in the failure of another of God's servants. Obviously I am not talking about someone who has committed a crime because then we would be bound to take it to the appropriate authorities. I am talking about the gossip factor that we so often seem to want to get caught up in.

If you spread it they will simply praise their false god.

Jdg 16:23 Then the lords of the Philistines gathered them together for to offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god, and to rejoice: for they said, Our god hath delivered Samson our enemy into our hand.
Jdg 16:24 And when the people saw him, they praised their god: for they said, Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy, and the destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.

So he will resign voluntarily, Lord willing. There will be an appropriate confession but it is best to leave the public confession as generic as possible--after all our goal is not to embarrass our brother but to restore him.

Once he has written out his testimony, looked up all the verses that deal with his sin, and learned what to do not to follow the same path again we will being engrafting the word.

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