Dangers of Do-it-Yourself Christianity [B]

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Hebrews chapter 10, we’re going to look tonight at the rest of this passage that we started looking at this morning, the final two points, the dangers of trying to do it yourself as a Christian. And if you’ll recall this morning, we talked about the dangers that are inherent, the dangers that are involved when we try to do Christianity on our own. Now as I said this morning, we can read the Bible on our own at home, and we should.

We can pray on our own and we should. We can witness, we can serve, we can do all the things that are expected of us. We can walk with God at home and we should.

It ought not just to be a three times a week in church walking with God and then you and God are strangers when you leave out of these doors. It shouldn’t be that way. But at the same time, God has placed us together in this local church, in local churches, and it’s not by accident that we are here in this one.

God has placed us together for a purpose, and it’s for our benefit as much as for our ability to further the kingdom. Because we can do more, we can accomplish more things together than we can separately, individually. But also, it’s just a safer place for us spiritually than to try and go it alone in the world.

There’s a verse in Ecclesiastes that I like, Christian and I, I can’t remember the exact wording of it, but Christian and I even used it on our wedding invitations when we sent them out years ago. But the verse says that two are better than one because they have a better reward for their labor. And we kind of thought that was a good verse to start our marriage out on, especially since I was already in ministry and she knew what she was getting into.

She was coming into the ministry with me. You know, we could accomplish more together than we could individually, separately. And that’s been the case so far.

Not that I couldn’t minister if I was single, not that I couldn’t pastor if I was single, but it’s just a lot easier to do with her. But we have a better, the book of Ecclesiastes says two are better than one because we have a better return on our labor. The Bible talks about a cord of three strands not being easily broken.

You know, you take one cotton thread, and you can’t really do anything with it. I mean, it’s not strong. It doesn’t have the strength you can just pull it apart.

But you begin to wind it, and you begin to wind it with other cotton fibers and cotton threads, and you can make rope out of it. Take these fibers and twist them together and make a cord, and then you braid the cords together, and they’re even stronger. And folks, the Christian life is like that.

We can accomplish some things for God on our own. We can have a certain amount of strength to stand against the world on our own, but you put us together, and the local church should be, if we function the way that God set us up to, We should be a force that’s unstoppable in this world. Jesus told his disciples that on this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Local church should. . .

If the gates of hell, if all the power of hell cannot prevail against the local church, there’s nothing that should be able to. And folks, we’re stronger together. We’re more efficient together.

And we’re just plain better together than we would be on our own. And some of the things that I outlined this morning, just as a quick refresher, especially if you were not here. Here in Hebrews chapter 10, verses 23 through 25, we’ll read through them again real quick.

And it says, And let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering, for he is faithful that promised. And let us consider one another to provoke and to love and to good works, not forsaking the fellowship or the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is. But let us exhort one another, and that so much the more as you see the day approaching.

Verse 25 is sort of a well-known verse in church circles, not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together as the manner of some is. And we say from that it’s important to go to church. Well, that’s true.

It is important to go to church, and I think that’s one of the things that the verse hits on. But when you take the verses preceding it, there’s so much more that’s involved in being part of the church than just the fellowship, just the Sunday morning assembly. There’s so much more to it.

And when we neglect the local church, we run some risks. We’re in danger of some things. Just to recap from this morning, we’re in danger of disregarding our service to God and to other people.

It says in verse 24 that we’re to consider one another to provoke unto love and good works. And if you remember the example of the anthill, that provoke means to stir something up. And just like the kids I told you about in elementary school that would poke the stick in the big fire ant hill and be amazed that they’d gotten bitten.

Well, it’s because they stirred up the fire ants. Or the brother and sister picking at each other until something breaks loose and somebody hits somebody, they’d provoked them. We are supposed to provoke one another not to anger, not to wrath, not to envy, not to jealousy, not to any of these things, but to love and to good works.

We are supposed to spur one another on in our service to God and our love for other people. We also run the risk, if we neglect the local church, we run the risk of forgetting God’s character. Because as I told you this morning, and as I’ve said several times before, there’s almost a coordinated disinformation campaign in our world against the character of God.

You turn on the television, you turn on the radio, you watch the movies, you even flip through the newspaper, and you get some of the most ridiculous theology you’ll ever want to find. The idea that God is an ogre, or God is a senile grandfather, or God’s a magic genie. These are not things that come from the Bible, and these are not things that should be taught in the local church.

And any faithful local church will not teach these things. And yet that’s what we hear when we step outside these four walls more often than not. Those are the kinds of things we hear are things about God that are not true.

And we want to know the truth about who God is and His character and all of these things. We should be able to come into the local church as the one bastion of truth left in this world where we’re going to hear the truth about God and the truth about His Word. Now, we’ll hear it occasionally from some of the.

. . some, focus on that word some, not all, of the radio preachers and even fewer of the TV preachers.

You may hear the truth of God’s Word out there some places, but folks, it’s not by accident that Ephesians calls the church the pillar and the ground of truth. And can I tell you, I can’t remember if I’ve said this to y’all or to another church, when Harold Camping, the one who said the world was going to end on May 21st or 22nd of this year, I can’t remember the date now. By the way, he’s amended that to where it should be this month.

So hopefully we’ll all still be here in November serving the Lord. He said it was going to end in May 21st or May 22nd of this year. He’s been preaching that same thing for years over the radio.

And at first he was part of, I believe it was the Reformed Church, and his ministry came out of them, and eventually he disavowed them, and he left his local church. And again, I wouldn’t agree with everything they teach, that they’re closer to God’s Word than some churches. He came out of the Reformed church, took his followers with him, and then his radio listeners he encouraged as the first step toward their deception to leave the local churches.

Because when we wander away from the flock, we’re easier to pick off one by one. And so we forget the character of God, we forget the truth of who He is and what His Word says. And this body should be a place where God’s Word and what we already know and what we already believe is undergirded, is strengthened.

We also run the risk. In verse 23, it says, Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering. We run the risk of surrendering to our doubts.

And I told you about all the kids that I went to church with growing up and graduated with. And they stayed strong in the faith for a while. Some of them I even did ministry with in college.

But as they began to miss a Sunday here and a Sunday there, I’m not talking about missing once in a while. It became a habit. It was so easy to just sleep in on Sunday morning after being out with people on Saturday night that it just became a habit not to come to church.

It started with one time missing, and then a couple weeks in a row, and then they’d be sporadic and then just quit coming all together. And now some of them are not involved in church at all. Some of them are not serving Christ at all.

Some of them have told me, or I’ve heard through the grapevine, that they’ve said they don’t believe in God at all. And I think where they went wrong was wandering away from the local church. Because I know that they studied their Bible just as I did in college.

They prayed just as I did in college. Some of them I went to the same school and sat under the same atheist philosophy professors. But it was the commitment to the local church.

And again, like I said this morning, not bragging on myself. It’s those people at Southgate Baptist Church that helped keep me where I needed to be and being with them three, four, five times a week, keeping me where I needed to be. That was what made the difference, I believe, of me saying now, I don’t doubt what I’ve been taught.

I don’t doubt what this book says. I’ve had questions, yes. I’ve had curiosities, yes.

Is this really true? Why can I believe this? And you know what?

As a result of being able to talk to people more spiritually mature than I was, have more confidence in this book than I did before. Have more confidence in the God we serve than I did before. Have more confidence in my salvation than I did before.

And when we wander away from the local church, we run the risk of surrendering to our doubts. So that’s what we talked about this morning. I’ve already heard this.

Well, again, as I said this morning, the world repeats itself. Why can’t the preacher repeat himself to drive home the point? Because we forget.

I forget these things. Somebody said something to me last Sunday about the message as we were leaving and said they needed the reminder of what I was talking about. And I said, well, so did I, because I find myself forgetting on an almost daily basis that, hey, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, and it takes a daily reminder.

So if the world repeats itself, why not us? But I want to look tonight at the final two dangers that we run the risk of if we neglect the local church. In verse 25, the more well-known verse of this passage, it says, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is.

Now, even in this day, there were people that were trying to start becoming Lone Ranger Christians, I call them. Those people that we know and see today that, you know, they may be good people, they may be well-meaning, sincere people, and maybe they’ve trusted Christ, but they think, I don’t need the local church. Folks, I know many of them, and some of them are good Christian people, believe their Bible, but they don’t know the risk they’re running, and they’re certainly not as strong as they would be if they were here.

And I don’t know about you, but in the Christian life, I need all the help I can get. Anybody else admit to that? We need all the help we can get.

And in this day already, there were some people who were starting to wander away from the local church. I said this morning, the Bible doesn’t mention Lone Ranger Christianity. I guess I need to rephrase that, make it more accurate.

It does mention it. It mentions it right here, as the manner of some is. When I say it doesn’t mention Lone Ranger Christianity, I mean it doesn’t present it as a valid alternative.

But some were already beginning to fall away, and he says, We should do these things, verses 23 and 24, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is. We run the risk of falling out of fellowship with one another, and we need the relationships that are cultivated in this church, in any local church. We as believers need the relationships that are cultivated in this body.

If we are going to make it through the things that the world throws at us, the things that Satan throws at us, make it through the trials and tribulations of life, the doubts, the fears, all of these things we need one another to lean on. I was listening this week to an interview on the radio with Jesse Ventura, who used to be the governor of Minnesota. And as he was talking, he didn’t talk about this again, but I remembered a few years ago him saying that religion in general, Christianity in particular, was a crutch for weak-minded people.

And I thought, well, he’s half right. I don’t think there’s anything weak-minded about Christianity, but Christianity is most definitely a crutch. The problem is all of mankind needs a crutch.

None of us can walk on our own. And the people that have turned to Christianity are just the ones that realize their need for the crutch. And so there’s nothing wrong with the crutch if you need it.

Not one of us could make it to heaven on our own. Not one of us could be good enough for God on our own. Not one of us could do the things that we need to do on our own.

and Christianity offers those answers where we’re not able to get there on our own. There’s no shame in help. There’s no shame in help from one another in dealing with our hurts and our concerns and our work, our ministry.

Christianity, the local church, is most definitely a crutch, but it’s a crutch that we need. So I’m not going to argue with him on that point. The weak-minded thing, yeah, I’ll take exception to that.

But the crutch remark, I think he got it right. And when we neglect the local church, we run the risk of falling out of fellowship. We run the risk of falling out of fellowship.

We’ll still have friends, but there’s nothing like the bond within the local church. I felt it the first time I walked in here, and I wasn’t even a member yet. I wasn’t your pastor yet.

Y’all didn’t even know me. And I automatically knew that you loved me as a brother in Christ. When I got to give my testimony to the local association at the meeting last month, They had the pastors that are new in the area talk about their testimony, how we came to Christ, how we came to Arkansas. I thought it was an interesting question to ask, testimony of how you came to Arkansas, because I was the only one of the four that wasn’t from here.

So I guess they just were from here and hadn’t pastored here before. But I said it wasn’t in my plans. But I told them when I got to give my testimony, you know, some of the reasons I knew that God had called me here and that God had put me in the right place because it had never been my plan to leave Oklahoma.

Some of the reasons I knew that God had placed me here was not only the fact that I had prayed. I remember vividly every time I drive down 540, I remember vividly as we were about to leave town that Monday, Christian had had to stop and get some shoes because there was a sale at the Payless. and I sat there in the car with Benjamin in the parking lot at Payless out on Highway 62 and 540, and I prayed and wept and talked to God and just begged Him not to let y’all call me unless I was supposed to come.

I said, God, if I’m supposed to go, I will go, but don’t put me in the place of heaven to make the decision if I’m not supposed to go. And y’all called me anyway. And so I knew I was supposed to go.

Not every decision works that way, but I just said, God, I don’t know one way or the other. You’ve got to show me. But when we came back, after y’all had called me and I had accepted, and we came back that first Sunday, just the fellowship that I felt in this place was incredible.

The love that I felt from you all was incredible. And so I told the people at that meeting when I gave my testimony, I knew that I was in the right place because I was in love with this church and with the people. And unless I’m just really off here, I believe y’all feel the same way.

And I didn’t say that to get an amen and get affirmation. I just, I feel the fellowship in this place. Not only do I love you all, and I believe you love me, but I can tell you love each other.

And I said something in the bulletin a few weeks ago. I remember who it was, and if you don’t mind me saying it, it was Sister Rose that we were talking one Sunday night about what makes this church so incredible. Every church seems to love you when you’re visiting and when they want you to come, but not every church loves you after you’re a member.

And I’ve been in some that way. And I knew we were in the right place when God gave us that fellowship. You don’t get that out in the world.

You can have friendship. You can have camaraderie. There are people bonding over all kinds of things.

You may be complete strangers, but you both have on your hog shirts, and on a Saturday in the fall, you can go out there, and you can be friends with 80,000 people that you don’t even know, and there’s a camaraderie and a kindred spirit. And you can be friends with people in your neighborhood. You can be friends with people you work with.

You can have camaraderie at a football game. You can have all these things, but there’s nothing like the bond in the local church. And when you neglect the local church, you lose that, and we need that.

I told Brother James weeks ago that I hope the church knows that when they called us over here, they took us to raise, because I come from a large and very tightly knit family that all lives within about two hours of Oklahoma City and sees each other on a weekly basis, and we don’t have that. So you all have adopted us whether you like it or not. And that’s what I’m talking about.

I could not, if I was not part of the local church, if I was not a believer, I could not come over to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and find 60 to 80 people and say, hey, will you be my family? Yet we’re already brothers and sisters in Christ, and you’ve already accepted us in that regard. That’s what I’m talking about.

We need that kind of fellowship. I better stop or I’m not going to make it through the rest of this. We need that kind of fellowship.

I’ve heard preachers say that older preachers that are wiser than I’ll probably ever be tell me that when I was just starting out, don’t get too attached to the church members. Don’t make friends with people in the church. And I know they have their reasons for that, and I respect these men, but I have to respectfully say I think they’re wrong.

I think that might work for them. Some of them have told me you don’t want to play favorites, and you don’t want to play favorites. But don’t get too close.

Don’t make friends with them. I’m here to tell you the pastor needs friendship and fellowship in the church just as much as anybody, if not more so because of the pressures of the spiritual care of the flock. When I say we need fellowship, I’m not just talking about you all.

You need to do this. I’m saying I need it too. I don’t see anything in the Bible that talks about the body being the local church except the pastor.

The body is the local church. We all have a different role, but we’re all still part of the local church. We need that fellowship.

And when we leave the local church, when we neglect the local church, we don’t get that. As I said, we have relationships and friendships and camaraderie elsewhere, but we don’t have the same kind of fellowship. We won’t find it anywhere else.

And we’re not supposed to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is. The local church should strengthen us by providing Christian fellowship. What’s the point of that fellowship?

It’s to strengthen us. It’s to strengthen us in our spiritual walk, to strengthen us for the work ahead. It’s to strengthen us by doing the things that I talked about this morning, helping us answer our questions, helping us in our relationship with the Lord, helping us learn about who God is, encouraging us to push forward and always work harder and always love more and serve more and strive for greater heights in our relationship with God and our walk with Him.

Our fellowship does that. And our fellowship is also a shoulder to lean on when there are difficult times. Somebody to laugh with us, somebody to cry with us.

It may sound emotional and it may sound silly. It may even sound unmanly. but folks, God designed us to need one another.

The final thing tonight is that we run the risk of losing our hope. We run the risk of losing our hope. He says in verse 25, but exhorting one another and so much the more as you see the day approaching.

If we neglect the local church, we run the risk of losing our hope. I’m not saying, please understand me as clearly as I can spell it out for you. I’m not saying that if you don’t go to church, If you’re not involved in church, you lose the hope of eternal life, that you’re somehow not saved anymore.

I’m not saying that at all. I believe the Bible speaks very clearly that once we are truly saved, once we’ve truly trusted Christ and been born again, that He upholds us, that He holds us secure in Him. Now, I’ve seen the passages, and I understand why some other people think otherwise, but I think the plain reading, the plain teaching of the Bible is that we are eternally secure in Christ. So I’m not saying we lose our hope in the sense that we lose our salvation, but in a sense of eyes on the prize, focus on where we’re going and the hope that’s to come, we lose our hope.

We run the risk of falling into despair about where we’re headed. The church ought to be a place where our attention is directed to the hope of His coming. He says that we’re to exhort one another, to encourage one another, and so much the more as we see the day approaching.

The hostility of the world, the troubles, the trials, the things that we encounter on a daily basis will beat us down and try to rob us of our joy. That’s one of the reasons that we need the church for the fellowship and the encouragement. But he says, exhorting one another and so much the more as we see the day approaching.

One of the things that should encourage us and enable us to encourage one another better is the hope of his coming. that this world, fortunately, thankfully, thank God, this world in its current form is not all there is. There’s something better coming, and what’s even more incredible, there’s someone better coming.

The Bible teaches whether you’re premillennial, postmillennial, pre-trib, whatever your eschatology is, the Bible is very clear about one thing, and that’s that Jesus Christ is coming again. Jesus Christ is coming again. And he’s coming again in hope for those who trust in him.

That those, the Bible says, that are alive and remain shall meet those in the air, that the dead in Christ shall rise first, and those that are alive and remain will meet them in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Paul wrote that to the church at Thessalonica. There is a day when he says, I will wipe away all tears from their eyes and there will be no more death.

The former things are passed away in the first few chapters of Revelation. There is a hope in his coming. the sadness, the toil, the strife, the hatred, the hostility, all of the bad things about this world will one day come to an end.

And I don’t mean to sound completely doom and gloom. Yes, we live in a fallen world, but there are some good things to enjoy. It’s still God’s creation.

I enjoy life. It’s not always easy, but I enjoy it. Every day is a gift from God, but whether it’s a hard time we’re going through or whether it’s a good time, there’s still something better coming.

And we go out into the world, and we listen to the world’s influences and we will not hear about the hope that’s to come. They will talk about the apocalypse in a joking way. People call it the apocalypse.

That’s the Greek word for the book of Revelation, the unveiling. When God reveals all things at the end. They’ll joke about the apocalypse in a funny way.

Oh, such and such happened. And I’ve caught myself doing this. Oh, such and such happened.

It’s a sign of the apocalypse. Oh, you agreed with him? okay, Jesus must be coming back.

They’ll joke about the four horsemen. They’ll joke about things from Revelation. But as far as the hope, the fact that Jesus is coming back, that He will redeem His people, you don’t hear that in the world.

As a matter of fact, you hear these doomsday scenarios. I watch the History Channel a lot, not as much as I used to because it’s kind of turned from the History Channel to the future that is not going to happen channel, where they do all these shows about how we’re going to be destroyed by global warming, and we’re going to be destroyed by aliens, and aliens created life on earth, and they’re going to send viruses. Crazy, crazy things.

That if these people did not have PhD after their name, no offense, you’re not one of them, but if these people did not have PhD after their name, they’d be locked up somewhere with some of the theories that they come out with, and there are so many of them. So many ways the world’s going to end, so many catastrophes that are going to happen. We’re going to be hit by meteors.

Just incredible. Some of y’all are looking at me like I’m crazy now, and I’m just repeating what they say. I don’t believe any of these things.

All these incredible doomsday scenarios that are not limited to the History Channel. You turn on the news, and it’s nothing but doom and gloom, and the sky is falling, and the bottom is falling out of everything, and we’re all just going to, in that worldview, you, we’re all just going to live here in a miserable, rundown existence until we die and we get put in the ground. And that’s the way the world sees things.

But folks, there’s something so much better. We ought to be able to come into the local church, as I said earlier, the last bastion of truth in this world. Come into the local church and be reminded of the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. Yes, this world will end.

Yes, this world will end in a in a terrible way. The Bible’s clear. But those who trust Him have something to hope in.

And in the meantime, it’s our job to tell as many people, once we’ve come in here and once we’ve been encouraged by one another about the hope of His coming and the hope that we have in Christ, it’s our job to go and share that hope with other people so that as many of them as possible can have the same hope. But if we neglect the local church, we’re not going to hear about the hope of His coming anywhere else. We’re not going to be focused on as we see the day approaching.

The day that approaches will sneak up on us. And in the meantime, we’ll live in misery, being constantly beaten down by this steady diet of doom and gloom that the world throws at us. Folks, we have a hope that’s to come.

If we’re not part of the local church, we’ll lose our hope. We’ll lose our sense of that hope. I’m thankful that God had the foresight to put us together.

When I was a little kid, I loved church. I always have loved church, but I thought church was something you did on Sundays and Wednesdays, and my dad would drag me to visitation on Saturdays. At that point, I wasn’t saved yet.

I didn’t care to go visiting. If we were going to the church, fine, but I wanted to go to the church, but he told me we were passing out tracks. I thought it had something to do with trains, and I was disappointed when they opened this box of pamphlets that we had to go hand out to people.

But I thought church was just something you did. And as I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize church is who you are, who we are together. And I’m so thankful that God in his unlimited foresight and wisdom recognized the need to put us together because we can’t, we can do some of the things in serving God on our own, but we can’t do it the way we’re supposed to.

We can’t experience the Christian life in its fullness. We can’t experience in its abundance, in its entirety without one another. Because we do live in a fallen world that desires to beat us up because they hate Jesus Christ.