Carl Tuttle

I've been writing a lot of articles of late rather than things that are personal, so I thought I'd take a moment to throw out some thoughts, not all of which will be related to one another.
The Church: A place to get hurt, a place to get healed. It can be the worst experience and it can be the best experience.
Salvation: Why is it that in coming to Christ we freely and fully admit that we have 'fallen short', that we have no righteousness of our own, that we are totally dependant upon the grace and mercy of God, then we seem to spend the rest of our lives trying to prove that is no longer true. What is it about 'glorying in our weakness' that is so disgusting to us and hard for us to accept, remaining just as dependant on Christ for our sanctification as we are for our justification? Just curious.
Church Discipline: As far as I can tell there are about 4 or 5 texts that deal even remotely to this thing called 'church discipline'. Matt 18, Galatians 6, I Timothy 5, 1 Corinthians 5, with the exception of the situation in Corinthians where Paul specifically tells them to 'cast out the immoral' brother, only to have to tell them later to receive the repentant brother back, none of these hint at anything punitive. Someone somewhere coined the phrase 'church discipline', but it would be better rendered 'church punishment' according to how it's handled. Hmmm this deserves a whole blog........but, I do think it's curious that we NEVER see a Pastor/Leader/Elder 'disciplined for pride, greed, gossip, malicious talk or selfish ambition, plenty of which is on display throughout the church today, I'm pretty sure the Bible clearly describes these as sins that are grievous and harmful, way are these left off the list of offenses that are commonly 'disciplined'? Just curious.....oh well that's all for now....the old guys tired.