Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike Fabarez: H3 asks, "How should I feel about and treat a sibling that is living in sin and is secular or professing to be a believer?" First Corinthians chapter 6 says you shouldn't even eat with such a one. When it's a sibling, that can be a little bit more complicated than what Paul is addressing in First Corinthians 6. There, he is talking about a fellow believer, or a so-called believer, one who is professing Christ and trying to go to church with you.

The church should say that they are not going to be a part of this and that the person is not welcome in this assembly as long as they are claiming Christ and living in sin. If they won't repent, won't admit it, and won't seek a repentant response to this sin, then Christians in the church say they are not even going to eat with them. What if you are married to this person? First Corinthians 7 says you shouldn't seek a divorce because you could be the relationship that leads them to repentance.

Somewhere between that could be an uncle, a cousin, or in your case, a sibling. As it goes on to say in First Corinthians 6, you can't leave the world and not have some relationship with non-Christians, especially if you are related to them. If you are a sibling living at home—for example, if you are 17 and your sibling is 16—you are going to have to have connections and you are probably going to have to eat with them. You can't follow the direction of First Corinthians 6 as though this is just a fellow person at church that you can cut a relationship with and exhort as someone who needs to repent.

That is the point. Why do we treat them as a non-Christian? We do it so that they will come to faith in Christ. That means I can't act like the sin is no big deal. Change your behavior or change your profession. If you are going to profess that you are not a Christian, then great, I can have a meal with you and share the gospel with you. As long as you are trying to hold to your label as a Christian and you are going to continue in this sin, then I am not going to act like everything is copacetic because it is not.

You asked how you should feel about it. You should feel terrible about it. You should feel really bad about it. You should treat them as though this is a big deal. They probably already know that, and if not, then you should say it is a big deal and that you are really concerned. If you are continuing in sin while you know what the truth is and you claim to be a professing believer, you should read First Corinthians chapter 6. That is what the passage is about.

When they say you are judging them, that is what the passage says. Who am I to judge outsiders? I can't do that. I have non-Christians living all around me in my neighborhood. It is not my job to go around telling them anything other than they need to repent and become Christians. It is the so-called believers that I am supposed to say something to. You can't call yourself a Christian and do that. You are responsible for them, and even more so if they are a sibling.

You need to be able to say that Christians are not supposed to live that way and you can't say you are a Christian and live that way. The other book I would spend time in is First John. Spend your time in First John, starting in chapter 3, and then go back and read the whole book. Read it a couple of times through and then answer your own question. How should you treat someone, even a sibling, in this situation? You should treat them as though there is a real problem here.

This is like asking how to treat someone who has a knife sticking out of their shoulder. You should feel really bad about your sibling having a knife sticking out of their shoulder. You should want to get it out. If they keep saying it is okay and not to worry about it, you still need to worry about it because it is really bad for them and they are bleeding. That is what you are going to get from First Corinthians 6 and First John chapter 3. Spend some time in those two passages and the whole book of First John, and that will make this really clear.

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Pastor Mike Fabarez: I took one of our guys from Compass Bible Institute up to Idaho with us, and we spent some time promoting our Compass Bible Institute. It is a great way for you to understand your giftedness and to increase that giftedness. In First Corinthians 12, it says God has in some way given you some capacity to make the church stronger, more glorious, and more equipped. However He has given you some manifestation of the Spirit for the common good—whether you are a teacher, technically inclined, or musically inclined—God wants you to be better at that.

God wants you to be more informed as a Christian grounded in a good biblical awareness of making sure we don't step outside of what the Bible says. Compass Bible Institute is all about you understanding the scripture and understanding how any topic should be understood in light of biblical data. You learn how to defend God's Word and how to see all of the world through the lens of scripture. To give them titles, we need to learn biblical survey, systematic theology, apologetics, and Christian worldview.

Those four quadrants of understanding biblical studies are very important. We need to be able to use all of that to go and serve the church and the world. That is what we are doing at Compass Bible Institute. Our program for 18 through 24-year-olds is a one-year Bible program. We really try to target people who are just coming out of high school. Before you go on to trade school or college, just give us one year.

We had a great time meeting a lot of young people up there in Idaho that we tried to give everything they needed to rethink whatever they are doing. Just pause for one year and think about what you can do to try to lay a foundation to get biblical data, systematic theology, apologetics, and Christian worldview nailed in your life and in your mind. Do this before you go on to sit under professors, many of whom are not going to have any deference to the Word of God. Get this really squared away in your life before you go study something else.

To learn more about that, just go to compassbibleinstitute.org. It would be really worth it even if you just want to take one of our intensive classes that are streamed online. We are doing this all at a financial loss. God has brought some blessing into your life, and we do this at a loss for everyone that takes a class. If you want to support this, that is up to you, but there have been many people, what we call founders, that have made this all possible. God has met our needs through those people who have chosen to participate in that.

Something else that may be of interest to you is that a lot of what we are doing on this program and others is answering people's questions in real-time. We put that into a book, which is the first of many volumes we hope to put out. We put 50 of our questions in print in a book here at Compass Press, and it is coming out really soon. You can go to compasspress.com and get your copy of that. You can actually pre-order it and we will send it out to you to give you a more thorough in-print answer to some of the most common questions people ask us.

Check that out at compasspress.com.