There are two extremes relative to the administration of church discipline which members of church courts would do well to guard against. There is the danger of loose and lax sentimentalism overcoming one’s better judgment on the one hand, and a stern unrelenting rigidity impervious to evidence of repentance, on the other. The former dangerous extreme tendency has been the fertile cause of denominational backsliding and the prevalence of soul-ruining heresies in the history of the Christian Church, while the latter equally dangerous extreme has been the cause of making many office-bearers actual, if unconscious, persecutors of members of the mystical body of Christ, whom the Holy Spirit had restored after a grievous public fall on the part of particular backsliders.
Those who yield to the former extreme allow themselves to be moved by personal considerations of pity for the individual, and other mixed motives, thus, often unintentionally, undermining church purity, while the other side are carried away by zeal and faithfulness, as they imagine, to such an extent that they forget that they themselves are still in the body, fallible creatures, often guilty of limiting the Holy Spirit, who is as much, to say the least, glorified in the penitent restoration of a backslider, as when He originally regenerates a precious immortal soul. If in the case of the former, personal considerations of favouritism influence their attitude and action, too often in the other extreme case it will be found that personal animosity, perhaps of long standing, against an individual backslider may assume the subtle disguise of zeal and faithfulness to the glory of God and the purity of the Church, whereas examination and scrutiny of the actuating motives in the history of the case may reveal a personal desire to keep a fallen brother down in the ditch even when the Holy Spirit has restored him, in humble self-effacing penitent modesty, to the Divine favour. Jealousy is as cruel as the grave.
Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne at one time thought that if he preached a full-orbed Gospel, church discipline would look after itself, but he soon found that if he had not been as faithful and zealous relative to church discipline as he was in preaching the Gospel, he would soon have no Gospel to preach. One of the Puritan fathers declared that “he who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must travel himself, for everyone has need to be forgiven.” The importance of church discipline, in its terrible severity, is exemplified in the cases of Ananias and Sapphira on the threshold of New Testament church history, so that for all future time men privileged to administer church discipline should not trifle with it. As the Most High, however, mingles judgment with mercy in all His dealings with His covenant people during the course of their earthly pilgrimage, it always becomes us, in this connection, to remember the faithful admonitions: “Let him who thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall,” and “If a brother be overtaken in a fault ye which are whole restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, lest ye also be tempted.”
(F. P. Mag. Aug. 1941)