Church Discipline, Object of – Charles Spurgeon

SOME backsliders, I fear, are apostates, for having brought dishonor upon the Christian church, they nevertheless are far from being humbled, but impertinently thrust themselves and their supposed claims to attention upon the church whom they have grieved and injured; their much-talked-of repentance appearing to us to be more early than deep, and to be more pretentious than true: but at the same time, if a man has fallen, and even if the church be obliged to put him away, we do not deliver such a one to Satan that he may blaspheme, but that he may learn not to blaspheme. The object of church discipline should always be the good of the person who has to endure it. There is no more Christlike work anywhere than for elder Christians to be watching over the young ones, checking their first declensions, nipping the evil in the bud—no nobler work, unless it be the restoration of those who have actually gone astray.