The Church [A]

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Transcript:

All right, if you would, turn with me in your Bibles tonight to Acts chapter 2. Acts chapter 2, and if you have your booklets on the Baptist faith and message, we’re going to be on page 13 of that tonight. Page 13, section 6, we’re going to talk about the church tonight and what the point of the church is.

And I will just go ahead and cut to the chase and tell you my understanding of it is that the job of the church is to develop disciples, is to help train and equip people to follow Jesus Christ and serve him as he’s called us to do. We can be Christians. We can be believers.

We can be saved and not be part of a body of believers. But I don’t believe we can be obedient and stay outside of the body of believers. Now, I’m not talking about, you know, you’ve moved and you’re looking and that sort of thing.

But to deliberately stay outside the body for an extended period of time, I believe, is disobedient. Because God looked at us and said, you all need each other. And that’s why he put us together.

So that we could, like it says in Proverbs, iron sharpens iron. So that we could help develop one another as disciples. We’re going to look at this tonight, at the ways the church does this and the purpose of the church.

As you’re turning in your Bibles to Acts chapter 2, let’s look at what our teaching is on the church. Here on page 13, it says, A New Testament church of the Lord Jesus Christ is an autonomous local congregation. That word autonomous means we don’t answer to any outside authority.

We don’t have a bishop. We don’t have a pope. we don’t have a presbytery outside of the, any council outside of this congregation that we answer to.

We decide how best to be obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ. All right. We, we make that determination. Brother Nichols has been here on Wednesday nights and he’s talked about this a little bit.

And one of the things that he stressed is, you know, we don’t answer to Brother Tim. We love Brother Tim, but we don’t answer to Brother Tim. He can make suggestions to us, but he doesn’t make decisions for our church.

What’s that? That’s right. He can give us suggestions, and he does, but he doesn’t give us orders.

We don’t answer to the local association. We don’t answer to the state convention. We don’t answer to the national convention.

As a matter of fact, those things answer to the churches, not the other way around. And on top of that, we don’t answer to the government for what we teach and what we believe. Now, obviously, we are supposed to follow the laws of the land.

Don’t take what we say here as an excuse to go out and break the speed limit. You can drive 90 going home because we don’t answer to the government. But what I mean is we don’t answer to the government over what we believe or teach.

If the government tomorrow said, no, you have to use a certain translation of the Bible, no, we don’t. If the government said tomorrow you have to follow a certain doctrinal statement, no we don’t. And we’ve been learning about that some in the series on Baptist history, that in New England, people who came here for religious freedom set up their own church and then expected everybody to follow their lead.

And there were Baptists even in that day who said, Massachusetts government says we have to be congregationalists. No, we don’t. And they, you know, sometimes at great personal cost, they said, we’re going to follow the Lord Jesus Christ as we feel led, as our conscience dictates.

And I’ve forgotten the man’s name again, but he talked about him Wednesday night when they were arresting the Baptists and saying, you know, the law says they’re going to be flogged or pay a fine. And somebody said, we’re going to pay the fine for all these Baptist preachers. And one of them said, no, you’re going to have to flog me.

And so the whole time he’s being flogged, beaten, as he’s being whipped, tied to this post out in front of everybody in town, he continues to preach a Baptist sermon to the people who were assembled to see him punished. And that’s sort of been one of our guiding principles from the very beginning. Nobody outside of this body determines what this body does.

Now, we are subject to Jesus, and we’re subject to his word, but we’re not subject to any outside earthly authority. Okay, so it’s an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel, observing the two ordinances of Christ, which are baptism and the Lord’s Supper, governed by his laws, exercising the gifts, rights, and privileges invested in them by his word, and seeking to extend the gospel to the ends of the earth. And there are all sorts of ministries, folks, where you can use the gifts that God’s given you.

There are all sorts of ways that you can serve Him. There’s all sorts of ways you can be obedient to the calling that He’s given you. But as Baptists, we believe that the primary way God wants us to work is together as a church.

And by the way, that doesn’t mean that everything you do for God has to take place in these four walls. I’ll give you an example. What we’re going to be doing on the 31st does not take place here, does not take place on our campus, in our four walls.

If we were going to do any kind of fall festival, I don’t think it would work real well here because nobody knows we’re out here. But we are getting together as a church at a different spot, and we’re going to do ministry together. And I think God has left the church here as a way to encourage and equip one another to do ministry as he’s called us to do.

Each congregation operates under the lordship of Christ through democratic processes. The lordship of Christ means even though we don’t answer to outside earthly authority, it doesn’t mean we just get to do whatever we want because Jesus ultimately is the head of the church. And it says through democratic processes.

Now, how you apply that is up to the church. And every church is a little bit different. I know of some Southern Baptist churches who elect a group of elders, and they make most of the day-to-day decisions.

I know of other Southern Baptist churches that vote on absolutely everything, and that would drive me insane. I think both of those would probably drive me insane. But what it means is not that we vote on everything that happens, but that everybody has a voice, that it’s not just the pastor dictating everything that happens in the congregation.

As a church, every member has a voice in what happens here, but we still empower people to do the ministry that they’ve been called to do. As a church, we’ve decided to elect Sunday school teachers, but we don’t vote on every lesson Brother Ken is going to present, do we? Would you listen if we did?

Nobody votes on what I’m going to preach on, and I probably would have trouble with it. Now, there’s also the check and balance of saying that if I start preaching things that are not in God’s Word, you have every right and every responsibility to vote me out of the pulpit. So there’s a place where everybody in the church has a voice in the church, and at the same time that we equip and empower people to do the ministries that God’s called them to do.

And there’s a balance to be found there. I don’t know that anybody has it perfectly, but we seem to be a pretty harmonious group. So it’s working for us, whatever we’re doing.

In such a congregation, each member is responsible and accountable to Christ as Lord. I was reading a book today called The Pursuit of God. And I can’t remember who it’s by, if it’s A.

W. Tozer, R. A.

Torrey, one of those men. But it was talking about how God is not known through the church. Now, the church is a body, comes together, and we know him, but we know him because each individual has a relationship with him.

We don’t have a relationship with Christ through the church. We have to come to him individually and we have to know him individually. And the church is only going to be as strong as our relationship to God on an individual basis.

We are each responsible and accountable to Christ as Lord. It says that scriptural officers are pastors and deacons. We have those.

Qualifications are laid out in Scripture, and the job that we’re to do is laid out in Scripture. Now, we have other offices. We have Sunday school teachers.

We have a treasurer. Thank goodness I would not want to do Kathy’s job. I wouldn’t want to take care of the money.

I hate keeping track of my own checkbook. I do it. What’s that?

What? That’s not a school day. I hate money.

Yeah. Money is not always my favorite thing, especially when I don’t have any. I balance my own checkbook every day just to make sure I don’t miss anything, and then I go tell Charlo we have no money or we have a whole lot of no money every day.

Well, she uses her debit card. I have to stay on top of it every day. So anyway, the point I was trying to make, we have a treasurer, and I’m glad that we do because I don’t see myself volunteering for that job, and probably the deacons are glad they don’t have to do it either.

We have Sunday school teachers. We have other people who do other jobs, but the ones that are set up in Scripture where it says these are what you need to have is the pastors and the deacons. And it says, this is important.

Hear this last part of this paragraph. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. I don’t know I don’t know if I was called on to explain well why did God set it up that way I can’t tell you for sure why he, I mean I might have my thoughts and opinions, but I can’t tell you for sure he didn’t reveal that to us, exactly why he chose that it would be men who would be the pastors and deacons, but he did and so that’s what we go by, but we need to understand that doesn’t mean that women it should not mean that women take a lesser role in the life of the church.

It’s just like a man can’t be a mother and a woman can’t be a father. God has designed us to do different things. I’m trying to choose my words very carefully because this is one of those topics that people get strung up in the town square about nowadays.

It’s not my opinion that men are pastors and deacons. That’s something God’s Word says. But at the same time, we’ve got to be careful to make sure we don’t act in such a way that we convey the belief that women are second-class citizens in the churches.

It shouldn’t be that way. And I’ve been, let’s just say most of the churches I’ve been around, been pastor of, been associated with, spent much time around it all. I can name a couple that had men strongly involved and taking a leadership role in most of the ministries.

In many of the churches that I’ve been associated with, the churches would have fallen apart a long time ago if it had not been for godly women holding things together and doing what God called them to do. In many churches, they’re teaching the lion’s share of the Sunday school classes. They’re doing the lion’s share of work.

And so I don’t ever want it to be said that we don’t appreciate women. I’m thankful for godly women who will be obedient and who will do the things that God has called them to do and quite honestly doing things that men should have stepped up and done. I’m thankful for women who have been obedient to the call of God.

But as far as that office, as far as those offices, scripture says those are for men. Anybody going to be mad at me afterwards? Okay.

Not that I’m going to compromise if you were mad at me, but maybe I didn’t explain it right. All right. It says next, the New Testament speaks also of the church as the body of Christ, which includes all of the redeemed of all the ages, believers from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.

Now, I was raised in a flavor of Baptist that teaches there is only the local church. At the same time, I look at scripture and I see there’s something else out there. I would have called it the family of God.

I would have called whatever this communion is of all the redeemed who’ve ever lived from every nation, tribe, and tongue. There is a spiritual unity among us. I mean, I think I talked about it when I came back from Phoenix.

That turned out to be a really bad trip when I went to Phoenix for the convention two years ago. I mean, it started out with them canceling my debit card on the way out there because they couldn’t conceive of me stopping for gas in Elk City. Car broke down on the way back.

It was just crazy people across the hallway from me at the hotel. It was a miserable trip. And other than going to the convention itself, the highlight of my week that week was to walk into a church in Phoenix that I thought was a different church because they had similar names.

I thought I was going to a Southern Baptist church. And I walk in and I see their bulletin and I see their guest speaker is from a particular college that I knew to be independent Baptist. And I thought, oh dear. I don’t have a problem with independent Baptists.

I used to be one, and I have family who still are, and I know that some of them don’t like Southern Baptists very much. They think we’re all crazed liberals. Because some of you ladies have come to church in pants.

Yeah, they think we’re liberal. And I thought, oh no. I sent them a message on Facebook last night to find out what time church started. I told them I was in town for the convention. They know I’m a Southern Baptist and I thought and they’ve already seen me come in they know who I how do I get out of here gracefully and I my mind just running running running and I thought no I’m just gonna I’m just gonna sit down and have church and whatever happens happens because I thought I hope they’re not gonna make an example out of me in the middle of the you what oh I might make an example out of you but in a fun ha ha way yeah well you pick on me too but I didn’t want to hear about how awful we are, so I just sat there and thought, what’s going to happen?

But those were some of the nicest people, and they were not like the independent Baptists I remember, and they sort of took me under their wing for that day, and we were going to go to lunch together. I had something else come up, but they were just as hospitable as they could have been, and these are brothers in Christ. I know a long way to get around to that. Here’s where I’m going with it.

One of the highlights of that trip for me was to be able to walk into a church where I thought I was going to be shunned, in a city where I knew nobody, in a city that I have not had a great experience with up to this point, in a city where I thought, please, Lord, get me back to Oklahoma. I don’t understand these people. And I walked in there, and I found that I had brothers and sisters in Christ. And even though we had never met, there was an instant bond.

I’ve experienced the same thing in Mexico. I’ve experienced the same thing in Canada, where we should be able to walk into any body of believers. And despite any cultural barrier, despite any language barrier, despite anything else, we should know that we have Jesus Christ in common, and there should be a unity between us as a result of that.

Some people call that the universal church. I call it the family of God. Whatever you call it, it’s out there.

And they’ve included that in this section on the church. But primarily when you hear me talk about the church, I’m referring to the local church. I’m referring to a body like this where we meet together and we observe the Lord’s Supper together and we worship together and we study God’s Word together.

And that’s primarily what’s talked about in the book of Acts. If you haven’t already turned with me to Acts chapter 2, we’re going to look at a few things that the church is supposed to do. And I’ve taken some of this, I’m leaning heavily on notes from a message I’ve preached a few times before in different places on the role of the church.

But as I preached for many years on the jobs of the church, I look at these notes again, I say there’s really one main job of the church, and all of these other things that I’m going to talk about tonight are ways of fulfilling that job. And I think that job is to help develop disciples. So, but as we start looking at Acts chapter 2, starting in verse 42, and it says, And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship and in breaking of bread and in prayers.

And fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles, and all that believed were together and had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as every man had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.

Now we’re going to see a few things here that the church does and is supposed to do as part of its God-given mission to make disciples. And the first thing that we see in this passage is that the church is there to teach truth. The church is there to teach the truth of God’s Word.

And I say this about a number of things, but it’s especially true of this. You’re not going to get that necessarily elsewhere. I mean, you can go to the movies and Hollywood is not there to teach you God’s truth.

You can look to the government. Washington is not there to teach you God’s truth. Whether you think it should be or not, where we are now, it’s just not going to.

And that’s just the reality of things. You can turn on the radio and Nashville is not designed to teach you God’s truth. What is designed to teach you God’s truth is the church.

Some churches live up to this better than others. And I hope that the Lord finds us to be a place that’s faithful in that. We may not be right about everything.

I’ll say it this way. I think we are. I wouldn’t deliberately be teaching you something I thought was not true.

So I think we’re right about everything. But there’s a chance we may not be right about every little detail. But I hope that the Lord looks at us and says, even if we’re not perfect, we’re faithful.

And so we’re trying to teach truth. the church there at Jerusalem, in verse 42, continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine. And the important thing to understand about the apostles’ doctrine wasn’t that it was just the apostles’ opinions.

These are the teachings that the apostles made up on the spot. These are the things that the apostles were relaying to people that they had received from Jesus Christ. So when we’re talking about the apostles’ doctrines, what we’re really talking about is they’ve taken Jesus’ teachings And they’re going out and they’re explaining them and teaching people how to apply them. So everything comes back to Jesus and what we’re talking about is his truth.

For us today, the Apostles’ Doctrine, we find right here in the pages of this book, in the 27 books of the New Testament in particular, we find the Apostles’ Doctrine. They continued steadfastly in those things. You know, if you’re not careful, if you’re not doing it on purpose, If you’re not doing it on purpose, groups have a tendency to drift from what they were formed to be.

I was reading this morning, and I can’t remember the names of these two churches. One of them was in San Francisco, and one of them was somewhere in the Dallas area. And I couldn’t tell you how long ago this happened because it was an older book.

But they were talking about churches that started out faithful, talked about the church in particular in San Francisco that, you know, a generation before that was preaching the gospel and proclaiming the gospel in that city. And this particular church in San Francisco had gotten to where now it was just teaching however you want to live, God’s okay with it. Whatever you want to do, God’s fine with it.

Whoever you want to love, God’s fine with it. And talked about going into their worship services, and it was just dancing and gyrating and bizarre things. And talking about a church in the Dallas area that had brought in a.

. . I don’t even know the terminology to make this not graphic, but had brought in an exotic dancer from one of the clubs who was an attendee of another church.

And I thought, well, that’s. . .

Oh, so many things wrong with this story already. And she came in and did an exotic dance routine in front of everybody, men, women, and children, as part of the Sunday. .

. Because this is how she worships, and they’re learning about how all forms of worship are valid. And I’m reading this and going, this can’t be true.

And yet I’m sure it is. I can’t imagine making things like that up. If those are not true, I’m sorry, I read them from a book, and I assume they are true.

I could name several churches by name. I won’t tonight. None of them are in our community anyway.

But I could name several churches by name that started out as solid gospel-proclaiming churches and have now descended into something else. And the first step on the downgrade, as I believe Spurgeon used to call it, the first step is when we stop trying deliberately to stand on God’s truth. If we think we’re going to do it by accident, that’s just not the way we’re designed as the human race.

It says they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine. They did it on purpose. They stuck with the truth on purpose, and they said we are not going to be moved.

Like Martin Luther said when he nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, when he was questioned about it later, and they said, we need you to recant, we need you to, you know, if you’ll just recant, all these consequences will go away. And he says, here I stand, I can do no other. So help me God.

In other words, I’m not budging, I can’t. And for a church to make disciples, for a church to live out its calling before God, a church has got to deliberately, steadfastly, on purpose, uncompromisingly, teach the truth of God’s Word. If we ever stop doing that, I don’t care if we’re a small group, I don’t care if we become a huge group, if we ever stop doing that, let’s chain the doors and sell the building because we’ve stopped being a church.

All right? The second thing we see here in verse 42 is that one of the things the church does in order to develop disciples is to foster fellowship. It says that they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship and in breaking of bread and in prayers.

So they had fellowship. It says breaking of bread. Now this could be the Lord’s Supper.

It’s possible. I tend to think they’re talking about they ate together. And we see throughout the Gospels that That was an intimate thing.

That’s why people got mad at Jesus for eating with this person or that person because they thought, well, he’s endorsing what they do or what they teach. So I think these people, I think the early church, they were together, they were eating together. And folks, there’s nothing especially spiritual about us eating together as much as we as Baptists would like to believe that it’s the third ordinance of the church.

There’s nothing especially spiritual about eating together. The significance of this is they were together. They were spending time together.

They were spending time together. There was fellowship. They were in each other’s homes.

They were living life together. I hear preachers say all the time, doing life together. I hate that phrase.

I don’t know why. It just goes all over me. I hate the phrase doing life together, but the principle, I think, is correct.

And I’ll say it, that they were living their lives together. these were not a group of people who just were together on Sunday they were the church every day fellowship they were breaking bread together they were praying together and you know what when you spend that time together and you spend that time together focused on the things of God specifically because we know they were getting together to pray together when you spend that time together especially focused on the things of God you are you are going to grow closer to each other now some of you may be thinking, if we were all in each other’s houses every day, I’d get sick of you. You might get sick of us.

There might be days I’d get sick of you. No, never. But you know what?

That’s what family does. That’s what family does. Are any of you ever annoyed by members of your family?

Some of you are laughing even as you’re shaking your head no. I know the answer is yes when I see that. We get annoyed by our families. I have a sister, I understand.

My sister and I get along pretty well now. It’s because mom gave us the speech years ago about it’s only the two of you and someday we’ll be dead. That’ll really get to you.

She lives out by Purcell now, I live here. So it’s easier to love somebody long distance. I really do love my sister.

There are times that she’ll say something to me and I’ll have to call mom and say, what is up with her? what is her problem today but you know what I’d have her back just but I can’t imagine a time I wouldn’t have her back if there was a problem you know we get irritated with the family that lives in our own homes sometimes charla called me last night uh they were staying in the city to um to visit family while they’re on fall break and she said are you missing us yet I said yeah she said are you missing charlie I said yeah a few minutes later we’re still on the phone and I hear him screaming And I said, you want to ask me again about Miss and Charlie? Oh, the screaming just goes through my head like a nail.

But you know what? I love him. I love him more.

I love him more every day. I just, y’all had kids, you know. That’s what family does.

Sometimes we fight. Sometimes we annoy each other, but we grow closer together. And I’m sure there’s some of that in the church.

You know, as we grow closer together, if we spend lots of time together, There’ll be squabbles and things. But as long as we love each other when it’s all said and done, that’s what matters. And so don’t let the fear of, you know, we’ll get on each other’s nerves stop you from having fellowship in the church.

That’s what we were designed to do. And that’s one of the ways we make disciples. We don’t disciple people through a class.

And I’m not picking on anything we’ve done here. I loved Brother Terry’s class. I know it was called Discipleship Training.

It was a wonderful class. Discipleship, though, is primarily done through relationships. As you spend time together, as you serve God together, as you do ministry together, you grow, and you grow spiritually.

That’s how discipleship is done. We can’t disciple somebody if we don’t spend time with them. That’s my point on this issue about fellowship.

Verse 43, it says, And fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. One way the church develops disciples is to glorify God. If we get up and we decide everything that we’re going to do is done primarily for the glory of God, a lot of other stuff, a lot of other concerns take care of themselves.

And it says that what they were doing was glorifying God. That these wonders and signs were done by the apostles. They didn’t have the power to do those things in and of themselves.

That power came from God. And when they were doing miraculous signs and miraculous wonders, they were demonstrating the power of God to validate the message that they were preaching. And it says, fear came upon every soul.

People were astounded at the power of God as it was displayed through these people’s lives. What they were doing was to glorify God. And let me tell you, if we decide that that is our goal first and foremost, that that’s what we’re focused on for everything we do, And by the way, we’ll never be able to do that perfectly.

But if we shoot for that, it takes care of a lot of other things. And I may have mentioned this before, but as an example, sometimes I will read books on preaching because I always want to try to get better at the things that God’s called me to do. And so I’ll read books on preaching.

I might take an idea from here. I might take an idea from there about something different to try. But a lot of guys that I look at and say they are really excellent preachers say you have to stop and ask first, why am I doing this?

Because if I can’t tell you why I’m telling you this, you probably can’t tell why you should listen to this. I should have a reason for what I’m doing. And so you stop and you think about what is, as you prepare a message, what is my purpose in doing this?

And there are some guys that say you need to go really heavy on application because you’re your objective, your objective is to get people to obey God. Okay, that’s part of it. That’s important.

People need to not just be hearers of the word, but doers. Okay, so we need to talk, we need to do this with an eye toward helping people obey God. Some guys say, no, you don’t really need to focus on application.

The Holy Spirit will do this. Your job is to teach the word. If people understand the word, God will use that and the Holy Spirit will work in their hearts.

Your job is to help people understand the Word better. I can’t say I disagree with that either. But I realized, I probably should have realized this sooner, but I realized a couple months ago, my goal, my job in preaching is to glorify God.

See, if I focus on, oh, I’ve got to make sure Greg understands this today so Greg can go out and be obedient, or I’ve got to make sure that June understands this today so she can know God better and he can work. I’m getting into God’s business about what the Holy Spirit’s going to do in your life. My job is to open my mouth and say what God tells me to say for the glory of God.

And if I’m focused on pleasing Him and honoring Him, He’s going to take care of all that other stuff. And you know what? Once I realized that the preaching is really first and foremost about glorifying God, you know what?

It took a lot of pressure off. And somebody who had been gone for a couple weeks, as I’m working through that process, somebody that had been gone for a couple weeks and came back, You were so relaxed up there today. It was like you were a different person.

I thought, I don’t know how to take that. But when you’re not worried about you producing the results, or you accomplishing this, or you doing that, and you’re only concerned about glorif