by Bill Robinson

There Is No Honorable Life Without Truth

There is a verse in Proverbs that reads like a command given to a merchant. “Buy the truth, and do not sell it” (Proverbs 23:23). The picture is of a man at a market. He will pay whatever it costs to get the truth into his hands, and once he has it, there is no price high enough to make him part with it. That is the posture I want to think through with you, not because I enjoy hard subjects, and not to win an argument, but because I am convinced that everything God has entrusted to us to keep rises or falls on whether we will hold the truth when holding it becomes expensive.

What follows is mainly for those professing to be Christians, but I have tried to write it so that a friend who does not yet believe can follow the reasoning and weigh it honestly. If you are reading as an outsider, I would only ask this: a community that will not bend the truth even when bending it would be easier and warmer is either foolish or trustworthy. By the end, decide which.

Truth is the ground we stand on

We do not get to define God on our own terms, nor approach Him on our own terms. Jesus said it plainly to a woman at a well who wanted to argue about the right mountain for worship. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). Notice the word "must." Truth is not decoration on worship. It is a condition of it.

The night before He died, Jesus prayed for His disciples and said, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). What sets a person apart for God is the truth, and the truth is identified with God’s own word. This is why Paul calls the church “a pillar and buttress of the truth” (I Timothy 3:15). A pillar holds something up and holds it out for all to see. If the church will not hold up and hold out the truth, it has abandoned the very thing that verse says it is.

I want to say this carefully, because it is the hinge of everything else. We can offer no acceptable or honorable life to God apart from truth. That is a direct implication of these texts, not a slogan. If worship must be in truth, and if God’s word is truth, then a life shaped by something other than His word is not the life He asked for. It may be sincere. It may be warm. It may be admired by others. But sincerity has never been the measure. The measure is whether we have done what God said, the way God said.

Fellowship is shared light, not shared taste

Before we talk about the danger of fellowship with sin, we have to be honest about what the word means, because most arguments about fellowship collapse the moment someone quietly changes its definition.

John tells us why he wrote his first letter. “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (I John 1:3). Then he draws the line that defines the rest of the conversation. “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (I John 1:6-7).

Read that slowly. Fellowship is not friendship, nor is it personal affinity. It is a shared participation in the light, in the truth, in the cleansing blood of Christ. Two people have fellowship not because they like each other but because they are both walking in the light with God. This is the necessary inference from the text. If fellowship is grounded in walking in the light, then fellowship has nothing to do with whether I find a brother agreeable, and everything to do with whether he and I are both walking with God in the truth.

That single distinction prevents most of the abuse this subject invites. Fellowship is not mine to grant or withhold based on preference. It is defined by God, around the truth, and I do not get a vote.

The danger of sheltering sin in the name of fellowship

If fellowship is shared light, then sheltering a brother in unrepentant sin is not kindness. It is a quiet agreement to call darkness light.

Paul wrote to a church that was proud of how tolerant it had become. A man among them was living in open immorality, the kind that would have scandalized even the pagans around them, and instead of mourning, they were puffed up (I Corinthians 5:1-2). Paul’s words are not gentle. “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (I Corinthians 5:6). Leaven does not stay in its corner of the dough. Sin tolerated does not stay in its corner of the church.

Before I go further, let me say clearly what kind of sin this is and what kind it is not, because everything hangs on it. The brother in view is not a man with a fault, a weakness, or a disagreement. He is someone in open, grievous sin who has been told the truth and will not turn. Jesus laid out the path. You go to him alone, then with one or two witnesses, then before the church, and only if he refuses every appeal does the church withdraw (Matthew 18:15-17). Even the withdrawal is not the slamming of a door. “Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother” (II Thessalonians 3:15). The whole aim is rescue. The man is handed over so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord (I Corinthians 5:5), and the church takes note of him so that he may be ashamed and turn (II Thessalonians 3:14). This is the surgeon’s knife, never the executioner’s. It is the last appeal of love to a man who would not hear the gentler ones.

Now to the objection that always comes, and rightly so. Did Jesus not eat with sinners? He did, and openly. The Pharisees grumbled, “This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:1-2). When they accused Him of dining with tax collectors and sinners, He answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Matthew 9:10-13). So how can withdrawal ever be right?

The answer is in the difference between the two situations, and Paul names it himself. He says he is “not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world … since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty” (I Corinthians 5:9-11). There is the line, drawn by Paul’s own hand: not the immoral of the world, but the one who bears the name of brother and will not repent. Jesus ate with the lost in order to call them home. That is evangelism, and we are commanded to do it. Paul forbids something else entirely: ongoing fellowship with a man who wears the name of brother and refuses to repent. The physician sits with the sick who want to be made well. He does not play along with the patient who insists he is healthy while the infection spreads. The difference is not how sick a man is, but whether he will let the Physician heal him. The pursuit of the lost and the refusal to shelter unrepentant sin are not in conflict. They are the same love facing two different people.

The clearest example of all is not a faceless sinner but the apostle Peter. In Antioch, Peter began to pull back from eating with Gentile believers once certain men arrived, and his hypocrisy drew others along. Paul writes, “But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all …” (Galatians 2:14). Sit with that. Paul opposed Peter to his face, in public, over a meal. If affection for an apostle, a friend, a fellow pillar of the church, did not buy a pass when the truth of the gospel was at stake, then no relationship in my life buys a pass either.

Our lives are not our own

Here is where preference dies. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35). Paul puts it as worship. “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1).

A sacrifice does not negotiate. The Christian life is a life poured out, lost in the service of the One who bought it. So when I am tempted to keep peace by keeping quiet, the question is never “What would I prefer?” The question is “What does faithfulness to Christ require?” My preferences were nailed to the cross with the rest of me.

I want to be fair, because this cuts both ways, and an honest writer says so. The same principle that forbids me to maintain fellowship out of fondness also forbids me to break fellowship out of dislike. Preference is not a reason to stay where I should withdraw, and it is not a reason to withdraw from a faithful brother I simply find difficult. The early church had men who turned the gospel into a party banner. “Each one of you says, ‘I follow Paul,’ or ‘I follow Apollos’” (I Corinthians 1:12). That is preference dressed up as conviction, and Paul rebukes it. Truth governs fellowship. My likes and dislikes do not.

Truth is never a license to be cruel

If you hear only the first half of this and miss what comes now, you will become exactly the kind of person these texts were meant to prevent.

Paul could confront Peter to his face, and the same Paul wrote, “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head” (Ephesians 4:15). Truth and love are not rivals to be balanced against each other. They grow up together or not at all. He told Timothy, “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness” (II Timothy 2:24-25). And when a brother is caught in sin, the charge is to “restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted” (Galatians 6:1).

So truth above everything else, yes. But never truth wielded as a club. The man who loves to tell people hard things has not understood the truth he claims to defend, because the truth he defends took on flesh and washed His betrayer’s feet. A correction delivered with contempt is its own sin, even when the content is right. We cannot be faithful and cruel at the same time.

The quiet lie that some sins are safe

Now to a temptation that hides even inside careful people. We learn to rank sins so that our own land is in the acceptable column.

I want to be precise here because Scripture itself speaks of degrees. Jesus told Pilate, “he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin” (John 19:11). The servant who knew his master’s will and did not do it receives a severe beating, while the one who did not know receives a light one (Luke 12:47-48). Not every sin carries the same earthly weight or the same measure of guilt. To say otherwise is to flatten the Bible.

But here is the lie. The lie is not the existence of degrees. The lie is using degrees to excuse what God has not excused. James closes that door. “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law” (James 2:10-11). The point is not that gossip and murder do identical damage. The point is that the same God forbade both, so I cannot wave away my respectable sins by pointing at someone else’s scandalous ones. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) has no asterisk for the sins we find tolerable. When I rank sins in order to shelter my own, I have not become a faithful Bible student. I am showing partiality, judging sin by who commits it rather than by the God who forbade it, and James calls partiality sin (James 2:9).

A fair reader will press the next question. If we will not excuse sin, then who decides which sin is grave enough to break fellowship, and how do we keep from manufacturing offenses out of our own opinions? It is an honest question, and it deserves an honest answer. The discipline texts do not hover over private disagreements or matters of judgment. They name open, public, unrepentant sin that even outsiders recognize as sin. The scandal in Corinth was the kind of thing a pagan city found shameful. That is a long way from a brother who reaches a different conclusion on a question God left open.

And I have to be plain about my own house. The danger runs in both directions. It is possible to sin by sheltering real evil, and it is possible to sin by breaking fellowship over things that were never sin at all. Those of us who prize the truth have not always kept that second line. We have at times divided over inferences we should have held as opinions, and called it faithfulness when it was something closer to fear or pride. If I warn against the first danger, honesty requires me to confess the second.

What we tolerate, we soon condone

There is a path the heart walks, and it is downhill the whole way. First, we tolerate. Then we condone. Then we defend. Watch how Scripture traces it.

To the church in Thyatira, the risen Christ said, “I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants” (Revelation 2:20). The charge was not that they taught her error. The charge was that they tolerated it. Toleration was enough to draw rebuke from the Lord, because toleration is never the end of the story. Paul shows where it goes. Of those who reject God, he writes, “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:32). First, you do the thing. Then you approve of others doing it. Toleration becomes applause.

Let me set a guardrail here, because the maxim is true of sin and false of liberty. Not every difference among brothers is darkness to be purged. On the matters where God has left us free, the command is not vigilance but welcome. “As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions” (Romans 14:1). Paul spends whole chapters teaching the strong to bear with the weak over food and days and conscience without ever calling it sin (Romans 14 and I Corinthians 8 through 10). So the principle bites on sin, where toleration really does slide toward approval. It gives me no license to manufacture offenses or to draw the line of fellowship around my own preferences. To bind where God has not bound is simply another way of selling the truth.

And there is a final stage that the Bible shows us in story after story. The defense of a practice usually follows the practice. We act first, and then our minds get to work building the justification. Aaron made the golden calf, and when Moses confronted him, his account was almost comic in its evasion. “I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf” (Exodus 32:24). As if the calf made itself. Saul disobeyed the Lord’s command, kept the best of the spoil, and when Samuel arrived, Saul reframed his disobedience as worship. “The people took of the spoil … to sacrifice to the Lord your God” (I Samuel 15:21). The disobedience came first. The pious defense came after, manufactured to cover what was already done.

This is the necessary inference from these accounts, drawn from the pattern they show rather than from a single command. The heart leads, and the mind follows to defend what the heart has already chosen. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

I cannot exempt myself or my own tradition from this, and it would be dishonest to try. Someone could fairly say that I hold my convictions about fellowship simply because they were handed to me, and the only honest reply is to take them back to the text and test them again, not to wave the charge away. The principle is a mirror before it is anything else. The moment I pick it up as a club to swing at someone else, I have proven I do not understand it. So our most confident defenses deserve our most careful suspicion, beginning with my own.

Buy it, and do not sell it

So return to the market in Proverbs. The truth is for sale, and the price is real. It will cost you some friendships. It will cost you the comfort of being liked by everyone. It will cost you the easy peace that comes from looking the other way. Buy it anyway. And once you have it, do not sell it, not for affection, not for approval, not for the quiet life.

But before you go looking for the brother who needs correcting, look in the mirror. “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). Start by asking which of your own settled comforts you have quietly defended that you should have repented of.

We do all of this for one reason, and it is not love of being right. It is God who is Himself the truth. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). To hold the truth is to hold on to Him. To sell the truth is to let go of Him. He paid everything to bring us into the light. The least we can do, and by His grace the most we can do, is refuse to drag the darkness back in.

And there is something worse than dragging the darkness back in. It is sitting in the dark long enough that our eyes adjust until we are certain we are standing in the light. Jesus warned of exactly this. “If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matthew 6:23). The most dangerous man in the room is not the one who knows he is in sin. It is the one who has made his peace with it and calls it fellowship with God, which John already told us is a lie (I John 1:6). So the prayer underneath all of this is not first that we would correct one another. It is that God would keep our own eyes from adjusting to the dark.

Buy the truth, and do not sell it.