First Letter to the Corinthians 5

¹ I have been told as an undoubted fact that one of you is living with his father’s wife.[*a] This is a case of sexual immorality among you that must be unparalleled even among pagans.

² How can you be so proud of yourselves? You should be in mourning. A man who does a thing like that ought to have been expelled from the community.

³ Though I am far away in body, I am with you in spirit, and have already condemned the man who did this thing as if I were actually present.

⁴ When you are assembled together in the name of the Lord Jesus, and I am spiritually present with you, then with the power of our Lord Jesus

⁵ he is to be handed over to Satan so that his sensual body may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.

⁶ The pride that you take in yourselves is hardly to your credit. You must know how even a small amount of yeast is enough to leaven all the dough,

⁷ so get rid of all the old yeast, and make yourselves into a completely new batch of bread, unleavened as you are meant to be. Christ, our passover, has been sacrificed;

⁸ let us celebrate the feast, then, by getting rid of all the old yeast of evil and wickedness, having only the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.[*b]

⁹ When I wrote in my letter to you not to associate with people living immoral lives,

¹⁰ I was not meaning to include all the people in the world who are sexually immoral, any more than I meant to include all usurers and swindlers or idol worshippers. To do that, you would have to withdraw from the world altogether.

¹¹ What I wrote was that you should not associate with a brother Christian who is leading an immoral life, or is a usurer, or idolatrous, or a slanderer, or a drunkard, or is dishonest; you should not even eat a meal with people like that.

¹² It is not my business to pass judgement on those outside. Of those who are inside, you can surely be the judges.

¹³ But of those who are outside, God is the judge. You must drive out this evil-doer from among you.[*c]