1 Corinthians 5:11

Paul is writing to the church in Corinth, a bustling port city in ancient Greece known for its moral permissiveness. He's addressing a specific and shocking situation: someone inside the congregation was living in an openly destructive way, and the church was doing nothing — worse, they seemed to pride themselves on how tolerant they were being. Paul draws a sharp distinction that people often miss: his instruction is not about avoiding immoral people in the wider world, but about how to handle someone inside the church community who claims to follow Jesus while persistently living in ways that cause harm. Refusing to share a meal in that culture was a serious social statement — meals were how relationships were affirmed and sustained.

God, give me the courage to be honest — with myself first, and then with the people I love. Protect me from the kind of so-called grace that is really just avoidance. And where I've been hiding something in my own life, give me the humility to bring it into the light. Amen.

This is one of those passages people either weaponize or skip entirely, and neither response does it justice. Paul is not telling the Corinthians to avoid sinners — he explicitly says that would require leaving the world. What he's addressing is something more specific and more uncomfortable: a community that mistakes looking the other way for grace. There's a real difference between walking alongside someone in their struggle and simply staying silent while they wreck themselves and the people around them — and calling that silence love. The question this passage actually asks is: what does genuine care require of us? Sometimes it requires the kind of honesty that isn't comfortable — the refusal to keep treating something as fine when it isn't. That's not judgment; it's the opposite of abandonment. The goal was always restoration, not exclusion. But before reading this as a list of people to cut off, try reading it as a mirror. Are there places in your own life where you've been calling something acceptable because naming it would cost you too much? Paul's challenge runs in every direction.