Tony Evans - When Believers Stray
- Watch
- Donate
Summary
Drawing from James 5:19-20, the preacher urges believers to actively pursue and restore those who have strayed from the truth, emphasizing that such intervention saves a soul from spiritual death—separation from God—and covers a multitude of sins accumulated in their wandering. He explains that straying leads to severe divine discipline or even physical consequences if unchecked, but loving confrontation can bring repentance and restoration before God steps in more harshly. The key point is that genuine Christian love compels us to care enough about others to go after them, turning them back to fellowship and sparing them catastrophic outcomes.
The Goal of Godly Sorrow
He says, "I write to you to make you sorry because if I can make you feel bad enough about your sin, it will drive you to repentance. I want to drive you to repentance because godly sorrow, he says, leads to repentance. Some truth should make you cry; some truth should knock you down because the goal is to lift you up, to restore, to help.
Why Should We Care About Straying Brothers and Sisters?
Why, why, why, why should we care about this? Why, why, why should this matter? Well, my business, your business, and know why. Why should we care enough to notice when a brother or sister strays, and then go get them and turn them back? Why should that matter?
Verse 20, because he says in verse 20, "Let him know," so because he's talking about my brethren now—the person who is going after the other person who is straying from the truth. Let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way, from walking away from the truth, will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins. That is a beast. He says, "Let them know." This is my brethren, this is the folk who go after the folk. Let them know that when you go after somebody you see clearly has abandoned the truth, this is persistently walking away from God based on His Word. When you see that, let him know that when you go after that person, you save a soul from death.
Saving a Soul from Death
Now, that's one thing you do, but then he says you do a second thing: you cover a multitude of sins. So let's dig down into that. When you and I go after brothers and sisters who have strayed from the truth, this is not where they've done one thing wrong; this is where they've adopted a direction. They're straying; they're in a direction that's going to be spiritually cataclysmic. Yeah, he says you save a soul from death.
So now let's talk about death. The word "death" in the Bible means separation. So if you want a synonym for the word "death" in the Bible, the word death means separation. When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, God said, "On the day you eat thereof, on that day you will surely die." But they didn't die that day; they lived for dozens and dozens of years after that. I mean, we are talking about super lifespans. But Jesus said, God said, "On the day you eat, you're going to die," because on the day they ate, they were kicked out of the garden; they were separated from God. When they got separated from God, what happened? Thorns and thistles, family conflict, Cain kills Abel, sibling rivalry—the earth was in an uproar. In other words, spiritual separation brings life consequences; spiritual separation brings life consequences, and the Bible calls that death.
The Bible calls that death because it's a separation. Now, we're familiar with physical death, but that's a separation too—that's when the immaterial part, the soul, is separated from the material part, the body. The body can't do anything because the soul has been separated from it. So the Bible means separation. Eternal separation is what the Bible calls hell, which is where a person is separated from God eternally. So it's separation. He says, "Let him know that the one who goes after the straying one," and the reason you have to go after them is that they're not returning on their own. Okay? They're not returning on their own, so you have to go get them. If a person is drowning in the water, it means they can't get out on their own; there must be a lifesaver to go get them.
Let him know that the one who goes to get the straying brother saves a soul from death—in other words, restores them back to the truth, back to the Lord.
The Football Injury Illustration
In my right leg, there's a steel plate. I got a steel plate in my right leg because when I was playing football, I was the weakside linebacker. They threw a pass; I intercepted the pass and was making my way back the other way, and it had rained the day before, so the ground was sort of muddy and sticky. A guy hit me with a cross-body block. When he hit me with that cross-body block, my leg didn't come up—pow! Snap! My tibia and fibula, both bones in your leg—pow!—were snapped in two. They brought the ambulance onto the football field, put me on the gurney, and took me to the hospital. They said, "We must do surgery immediately." He took the scalpel, opened up my leg, and put a steel plate in it.
In other words, they restored my ability to walk. The break was so severe that if they didn't fix it, my leg would have been bent for life. But there were enough doctors and nurses available when my bones got shattered to do surgery on me because they weren't just looking at the moment—they were looking at the life. Because it would have affected my whole life. To turn back means to restore, to bring back to health, hope, and healing. He says when one does that, they are restoring; it means to reset a bone. And by the way, I didn’t drop the ball; I just wanted you to know when I said you save a soul from death. You and I are to interpose ourselves in the lives of other believers who are straying from the clearly defined Divine standard—not preference, not opinions, but Divine standard.
The Call to Assemble and Stimulate One Another
Hebrews chapter 10, very interesting, a few pages back, he says in verse 23 of Hebrews 10, "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together." You don’t get to stay home and watch TV every week if you're healthy and if COVID is over. "Not forsaking our own assembly together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near." So he says part of the reason for assembling is stimulating one another.
So there is a horizontal—not just a vertical—there's a horizontal reason why you need to be connected to the assembly. But why? Notice verse 26, "For if we go on sinning willfully—" this is the person straying—"after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know Him who said, 'Vengeance is Mine; I will repay,' and again, 'The Lord will judge His people.' It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God." He's talking about Christians because he says those who've been sanctified.
Intervening Before God Disciplines
There comes a point in the life of a straying believer when God decides, "Too far, too long, that’s enough." When He decides "too long, too far, that’s enough," He comes in directly and deals with it. But the reason He says in the previous verses to not forsake the assembling of yourselves together but stimulate one another is because if we get to them before God gets to them, we save them from extensive consequences by the discipline of God. So the reason we intervene is so that a worse situation doesn't have to be brought to bear, which means you have to care about somebody other than yourself for that to happen. And somebody has to care about you enough for that not to happen—to interject, to interpose.
Paul Confronts Peter
That's what Peter did. Peter did it on the issue of race, Galatians chapter 2, verse 11 and following. Peter stopped eating with the Gentiles based on race because he didn't want to offend his own race. Paul came and said, "When I saw what Peter did and that he was not acting in concert—watch this—the truth of the gospel, he had abandoned the truth in favor of racial identity. When I saw what he did, I condemned Peter before them all." I condemned him publicly because he did it publicly. And even though he was Pastor Peter and he's the head of the Jerusalem Church, he was wrong. I condemned him because he abandoned the Word of God in order to maintain his racial identity, and he needed to know that that is against the Word of God.
If we were to have more people confronting others about issues like that with the truth, we wouldn't even be in this mess today. But because pulpits and pews abandon the truth in the name of illegitimate racial identity, he addressed it head on because it was an issue of the truth. He confronted it to bring Peter back to his identity in Christ: "I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless, I live." That's your identity, Peter—not your skin color. Your skin color is secondary to your Christianity. He had to use the truth.
Paul's Sorrowful Letter to Corinth
So, over and over again, this thing of abandoning the truth, Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 8 to 10. He had to get a whole church straight. He said, "I wrote to the whole church of Corinth because the whole church had abandoned the truth. The whole church had abandoned the truth, and I have got to make you sorrowful." See, every sermon is not designed to make you shout. If you’re shouting every week, something is wrong with the pulpit. If you're shouting every week, the church has failed. He says, "I write you to make you sorry because if I can make you feel bad enough about your sin, it'll drive you to repentance." And I want to drive you to repentance because godly sorrow, he says, leads to repentance. So some truth should make you cry; some truth should give you shame; some truth should knock you down because the goal is to lift you up, to restore, to help.
And so he says, "I made you sorrowful because I wanted to bring you to repentance so God could get back on your team, back on your side." That’s right, right? And so it can lead to physical death, Ananias and Sapphira, or spiritual death, where the consequences of God's discipline are there.
Examples of Restoration
The Bible is full of people who have been restored. Solomon deviated from God for a long time, but then when God got a hold of him, he repented, got right, and wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes. Peter denied the Lord three times, and Jesus went and met him on the Sea of Galilee and restored him back to usefulness: "Feed my sheep." Over and over again, you have restoration because of intervention. God says you intervene first because you're saving a soul from death.
Love Covers a Multitude of Sins
Why? Because 1 Peter 4:8 says, "Love covers a multitude of sins." Proverbs 10:12 says, "Love covers all transgressions."
So let's answer the question: "What's love got to do with it?" Love is always other-oriented. God so loved the world that He gave; He was thinking about somebody else. That’s right, that's right. We don't attend worship selfishly; we attend worship service, which means we care about serving, we care about caring. It’s why there are all these "one another" verses in Scripture: care for one another, love one another, connect with one another, serve one another—all these "one another"s. It’s not just sit, soak, and sour; it’s how can God use me to be a blessing while I'm asking Him to give me a blessing. One of those responsibilities is the restoration of people when you see they drift—when they stop coming to church, they stop serving, they adopt other lifestyle issues that they're unrepentant of.
He says if they could come back, if they wanted to come back, you'd be hearing from them. They're straying; go get them. Go get them! That's what the church is supposed to be about. You go get them. And he says if you act in love this way, oh yes, it will cover a multitude of sins. Ooh, ooh! You've got this straying believer. If they have been straying for a period of time, they have accumulated sins. Yeah, well, talk about one thing; maybe they started with marijuana, and then they graduated to crack or cocaine, or you know, they graduated. So now one thing led to another thing that led to another thing that led to another thing, and you've got this accumulation now.
And the more the accumulation, the harder it is to return because now you've got to step over all this stuff that has accumulated. You've got this multiplicity of sin. He says, but if you go after them and you save them, you restore them. You've not only dealt with where they are; you're dealing with how they got there because there's this multiplicity, there's this continuum. You have saved a destiny, and it looked like a situation, but if that situation continued, it would become a destiny.