“That the Spirit May Be Saved”

This is the hardest of the instrumentality passages, and the most easily misused. Paul commands an act of church discipline so severe it sounds like condemnation — and states its purpose in the saving verb. The purpose is the key to the whole thing.

The Situation

A man in the Corinthian church is in an ongoing sexual relationship the surrounding pagan culture would not tolerate, and the church is not grieved but puffed up — proud, perhaps, of its tolerance. Paul is appalled at both the sin and the complacency, and he acts:

To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

1 Corinthians 5:5

Hina to pneuma sōthēi en tēi hēmerai tou Kyriou — that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. This is the sentence the study exists to read rightly, because everything depends on the purpose clause. The severe act — delivering the man to Satan, putting him outside the protection of the church into the realm of the destroyer, for the destruction of the flesh — has a stated goal, and the goal is salvation: that the spirit may be saved.

Discipline Aimed at Rescue, Not Ruin

The whole force of the passage is that this crushing measure is restorative, not vindictive. Paul is not condemning the man; he is trying to save him. The logic is that a professing believer persisting unrepentant in destructive sin is on a road to ruin, and that being handed over — removed from the church’s fellowship, exposed to the full consequences of the life he has chosen — may break the flesh, the sinful self-indulgence, and bring him to repentance, so that his spirit is saved at the last day.

The destruction of the flesh is aimed at the death of the sin, not the damnation of the man. And the horizon is the day of the Lord Jesus — final salvation. Paul reaches for the most severe tool the church has, and he reaches for it in order to save. The discipline is an instrument of rescue.

This is confirmed by what Paul does with a disciplined man elsewhere. In 2 Corinthians, most likely referring to this very case, he urges the church to forgive and comfort the man who has been punished, lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow, and to confirm your love toward him. The discipline was never meant to be permanent exclusion. It was meant to produce repentance and then restoration — which is exactly what it did.

Why This Must Be Said Carefully

A study of this passage carries a pastoral responsibility, because the verse has been abused. Church discipline severed from its saving purpose becomes cruelty — a weapon for expelling the inconvenient, dressed in Paul’s language. Paul gives no warrant for that. His discipline is:

Aimed at salvation. The stated goal is the man’s spirit saved in the day of the Lord. Any discipline not aiming at the offender’s restoration has left Paul’s model.

Grieved, not proud. Paul rebukes the Corinthians precisely for being puffed up rather than mourning. Discipline exercised with satisfaction or superiority is already corrupted.

Restorative in intent. The endpoint is forgiveness, comfort, and reaffirmed love once repentance comes — not permanent banishment.

Held within those bounds, the severe act is an act of love. Outside them, it is the opposite. The saving purpose is not a footnote to the discipline; it is the reason for it.

The Leaven

Paul gives a second reason alongside the man’s own salvation — the protection of the church. “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” Unaddressed, flagrant, celebrated sin spreads; the health of the whole body is at stake, and Paul calls the church to purge out the old leaven. So the discipline serves two ends at once: the offender’s eventual salvation, and the congregation’s purity.

These are not in tension. The same act removes the corrupting influence from the body and, by removing it, confronts the offender with the seriousness of his condition in a way that may save him. Paul is careful to add that this judgment is for those within the church — them that are without God judgeth — not a mandate to police the surrounding world.

What the Word Means Here

The full sense — final salvation, the spirit saved in the day of the Lord Jesus — as the goal of even the harshest church discipline. The peril is unrepentant sin working destruction in a life; the means is severe, restorative discipline; the agent is God, through the Lord Jesus and the church’s act.

Its contribution to the gateway is to show discipline itself as an instrument of salvation, and to guard that truth from abuse. The delivering of an unrepentant man to Satan is not his condemnation but an attempt to save him — the destruction of the flesh so that the spirit may be saved. Handled with grief rather than pride, aimed at repentance and ending in restoration, the severest act the church can take is, in Paul’s hands, a means of rescue.

This study is part of What Does It Mean to Be Saved?, an examination of every New Testament use of saving language in context, within Resource Cluster 3: Life in Christ. 91 of 91 passage studies are complete — see every occurrence.