The Church [B]

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Transcript:

Well, we’re going to be in Acts chapter 2 this evening. We’re going to finish up the message I started a couple weeks ago on Sunday night. As we’re looking at some of our basic beliefs, we come around to what we believe about the church.

Because there is a purpose for the church. And we need to know what that purpose is. Otherwise, we’ll end up chasing every trend that comes along.

And this will end up being meaningless. The church is not here to entertain. I do find some of our times together entertaining.

But that’s not our purpose. Because honestly, if we were looking to be entertained, aren’t there a whole lot better places we could be today? There’s a lot more entertaining stuff anywhere.

I’m sure somebody’s playing football. I’m sure there’s something on Netflix. I’m sure there are places we could just go and have a wonderful time.

The church is not here for entertainment. The church is not here to make us feel good. Now, I often do feel good when I’ve been to church.

When we’ve worshiped together, I often feel good as a result. Sometimes I leave here not feeling so good, especially when I think about my sin, when I think about how far I fall short of God’s standards. I sometimes feel bad.

More often than not, I feel good for having been here. But if church is just a place to go and feel good, There’s all kinds of other places that you could accomplish that. If I want to do something that’s going to make me feel good, I’d be out on a lake right now.

I’d be out on a lake with a fishing pole in my hand. That would make me feel really good. There’s no stress involved in that for me.

The church has a purpose, and it’s not some of the purposes that we put on the church. Again, church can be entertaining. Church can make you feel good, but that’s not the purpose.

So we’ve been looking at what the church is, what the church is for, and we’re going to look at that in Acts chapter 2, finish that up today. Acts chapter 2, the end of it, 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. And in this passage, we see several things outlined that are things the church does, the things that the church should do.

And these are right in line with what we’ve talked about a couple weeks ago in our doctrinal statement. If you have that, if you have the little copies that I have handed out in the past, we’re on page 13. If not, I’ll just read through it real quick.

It says, A New Testament church of the Lord Jesus Christ is an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel, meaning that we are a group of believers who’ve come together for the purpose of furthering the gospel, and there’s nobody on the outside that gets to tell us what to do. You know, whether it’s religious authorities, for lack of a better word, you know, Brother Tim doesn’t get to come tell us what to do. The association met last Sunday night.

They don’t get to tell us what to do. The Southern Baptist Convention doesn’t tell Trinity Baptist Church what to do. Also, from a secular standpoint, the government does not tell us what to do.

You know, the day the government starts telling us what we can and cannot preach is the day you’ll see me chained to the gate of the governor’s mansion. protesting. They don’t tell Trinity what we can and cannot teach or believe.

Those things are decided by the church, and those things are decided ideally by the church in consideration of God’s Word and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit and the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We’ve come together in a covenant in faith and fellowship in the gospel. This is not just, This is not supposed to be just an acquaintance relationship, but we’re together in a covenant relationship that we have pledged ourselves to one another as a body of believers that we are going to be the church. That’s what we’re supposed to be.

That we are observing the two ordinances of Christ 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. So while we’re here, we observe the ordinances that he’s left us. We baptize in commemoration of his death, burial, and resurrection as a way of identifying ourselves and this body with Jesus Christ, with his death, burial, and resurrection, and the fact that we have been crucified with Christ, and we’ve been buried with Christ, and raised with Christ to walk in new life.

We observe the Lord’s Supper, which is another picture of his death. It’s a way of showing the world that we believe, we still believe in the body that was broken for us and the blood that was shed for our sins. That we still believe that he has the power to save today just as he did 2,000 years ago.

And so we observe those ordinances. We’re governed by his laws. We follow him.

We follow his leadership, ideally. Now, does every church live up to that perfectly? No.

Does any church live up to that perfectly? No. But that’s, ideally, we follow his laws.

we exercise the gifts, rights, and privileges afforded to us. So the church is one of those places where we’re invested in so that the gifts God has given us to do ministry, we have an opportunity to use those. We have an opportunity to use the gifts that God has given us in ministry through this body.

And we’re supposed to come together to encourage one another and disciple one another as we try to follow Him and try to serve Him. And all of this with the goal of extending the gospel to the ends of the earth. It takes every one of us to accomplish that.

It takes all of his people in all of his churches to accomplish that. If it could be done just by the pastors, we wouldn’t need churches. But honestly, it can’t be done just by the pastors.

I can’t accomplish all the ministry that there is to do here. It takes all of us to extend the gospel to the ends of the earth. Each congregation, it says, operates under the lordship of Christ through democratic processes.

And we talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago, this idea of democratic processes. There are churches that vote on things to varying degrees. There are churches that vote on nothing other than the change of the senior pastor.

There are churches that vote on whether or not to buy paper towels for the bathroom. I think both of those, I’ve been in some of these where we have to vote on whether or not I can say bless you after you sneeze. Both of these extremes, I think, are a bad idea.

Are we perfect? No. But I think we have a happy medium.

We vote on some things. We also have people that we’ve put in place, not just me, but others that we’ve given a ministry to and said go, and the church exercises oversight, but we don’t have to vote on every little thing that every Sunday school teacher is teaching. What it means to have a democratic process in the church is that every member has a voice, that every member is heard.

Now, we’re not always going to agree. We don’t always get our way. I’m the pastor, and I don’t always get my way.

Things don’t always go my way. But that idea of a democratic process means there’s no second-class membership in the church, where some people, because they’re not part of the right group, are not shut out of any decision-making. Ideally, we all, as followers of Jesus Christ, should have a say, should have a role in not only the ministry, but in the direction that we go.

In such a congregation, it says each member is responsible and accountable to Christ as Lord. We don’t just have a relationship to Christ as a body where we belong to Christ through the church or we have a relationship with him through the church. The body has a relationship to Christ, but each member of the body is accountable for their relationship to Christ. If the only relationship that the members have to Christ is when we come together on Sundays, we’re missing it.

We’re missing it. We’re called to be in a relationship with Jesus Christ every day. And you know what?

That makes our worship stronger when we come together as people who worship him, who know him, who love him, outside of these four walls, when we come together to worship him together on Sundays. It’s scriptural officers or pastors and deacons, and it says, while both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture. And I told you, I don’t know.

I can’t say this is what God was thinking. I don’t know why God limited certain offices in ways that he did. I just know that he did.

And so I go with that. You know, my wife and I are very different people. We’re wired very differently.

And it takes both of us to keep our family running. It takes both of us. From a standpoint of values, we share the same values, but we have very different personalities.

My wife, for instance, would never leave the house if I didn’t make her. She likes being at home. She can’t keep me at home.

I like being out doing things. My wife is very, everything is a big deal. Everything is a big deal. And I’m the one saying, you know what? She says, what am I going to do about this that the kids did?

I don’t know, ignore it. Not everything, but there are some things that, some things for me are not a big deal. So we balance each other out. And in the church, we all are wired in different ways.

God has equipped us and God has called us differently, not just on the basis of male and female, but on the basis of the way he’s wired us and our personalities. And we all work together to balance each other out and everybody fills their role, whatever it is that God’s called them to do, within the confines of what God has told us we could do. And somehow it works and gets done.

So why did he say only men are the pastors? I don’t know. I just know that he did.

But at the same time, I think it’s very important we not miss the thought that came before that, that women are not second-class citizens in the church and should not be. And I know of some churches where that’s the attitude, that the women are expected to just sit in the back and, I mean, not literally sit in the back, but do nothing. Let the men be in charge.

What’s that? There you go. Just let the men be in charge.

I heard it said at our, no, my next thought I heard said at our associational rally last week, and I’ve said it before, and I agree with it, and I agreed with it when he said it last week, that a lot of churches, a lot of our churches would have gone under years ago if it had not been for godly women who were doing what God called them to do. Because some places there just aren’t the men, and in some places the men are not stepping up and being the leaders that God called them to be. And so I think we can and should be thankful for godly women who live up to the calling that God has given them.

And we should never, it’s not just a male-female thing. There should not be second, we should not act like there are second-class citizens in the kingdom of God. All right, I need to move on.

It says 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, tongue, and people, and nation. And I think I told you all that because of my background, I’m more comfortable calling that the family of God, but I just know there is a spiritual unity that exists among believers wherever we go. Now, back to Acts chapter 2, because I think what we’re seeing in Acts chapter 2 is a good illustration of what the church is supposed to be, of what we believe the church is supposed to be.

And ultimately, the reason for the church’s existence is not to entertain. It’s not to make us feel good. It’s not a social club.

The purpose of the church is to be a body that makes disciples. And disciple-making, I think we’re going to talk about disciple-making starting on Wednesday nights. Disciple-making is the idea of taking someone from where they are in their relationship to Jesus Christ. including somebody who doesn’t know him at all, but taking them from where they are and moving them a step closer to where they need to be, which is maturity in Jesus Christ. Anything we do along that spectrum is making disciples, and that’s the job of the church, for us to come together and work together to make disciples.

And within that, I’ve outlined several things that the church does to get that job done. And just to, I know you all slept since then. So from this passage, I’ll tell you real quick the three things that we talked about two weeks ago and the three things that we didn’t get to.

So first of all, in order to make disciples, the church teaches truth. And we see that in verse 42, they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine. The apostles’ doctrine was not just teachings that the apostles made up.

These were the things that they had learned at the feet of Jesus for three and a half years, and then they came and passed those things along. So when we’re talking about the apostles’ doctrine, we’re talking about the truth of Jesus Christ. The church continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine. They weren’t concerned with what the culture said.

They weren’t concerned with what opinions were. They were concerned with what is the truth as revealed by Jesus Christ to his apostles. If we ever stop doing that, if we ever stop worrying about teaching the truth, if we ever stop worrying about adhering steadfastly to the apostles’ doctrine, we might as well just chain the doors and go home.

Not in that order. I guess go home and then chain the doors. Might as well just close up shop.

And I hear about churches that don’t teach. I hear about churches where the pastor preaches out of a magazine article or doesn’t call it a sermon, calls it a talk, and it is only loosely affiliated with the Bible. And I think, what is the point of even going and doing that?

I’m not saying I’m the best preacher in the world. Everybody should be like me. I’m just saying, if it’s not the Bible, what’s the point?

If it’s not God’s Word, what is the point? So the church is here to teach truth. That’s one of the jobs that we do in order to make disciples.

Second of all, to foster fellowship. It says in verse 42, not only that they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine, it says, and fellowship and in breaking of bread and in prayers. They fellowshiped.

And of course, they worked food in there. They broke bread together. I don’t know that that necessarily means they had communion every day.

I think they were sitting down to eat together. And, you know, we don’t think of eating together, I guess, as intimately as they used to, but there’s still an element of that in it. Do you want to sit down and have lunch with somebody you can’t stand?

No? Okay. Are y’all awake?

It’s siesta time, yes. You typically are going to choose to have lunch with people you kind of like, with your friends and your family. Well, family may not fall in the category of people you like.

Thanksgiving’s coming. Learn to love your neighbor and your brother. But you know what?

They had a relationship with one another. And so what that tells me is not just the physical act of them eating. They spent time together.

They fellowshiped together. They got to know each other. They spent time together.

They spent their lives together, and it says, and in prayer. So it wasn’t just the everyday life they spent together, But they were praying to God together. They were focusing on spiritual things together.

And what we discover is if you do ministry together, you grow closer together. I grew up, I say grew up, I started there when I was 16. But I grew up in a church of, I’d say, 400, maybe 500 people.

It’s hard to get to know people in a church of that size. It can be hard to get to know people in a church this size, but in a church that size, how are you going to get to know people? you know what, sometimes you’d end up getting thrown into a ministry with people you didn’t know.

And when I used to work children’s church with people I didn’t know before, boy, you come out of there knowing them real well. And as I got involved in different ministries, as we did ministry together, what I discovered was these people became friends. These became people that I wanted to spend time with.

And as they were doing ministry together, as they were getting together, thinking about godly things and pursuing the things of God, they grew together in fellowship. And I’ve always said here’s the test of fellowship. If you can walk away from a church and not feel sad about it, you haven’t had fellowship.

Because when we fellowship, we are knit together. We are stitched together. And when you rip something apart that’s been stitched, it hurts.

It hurts. And that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t occasionally move us different places, but that’s the test of whether or not we’ve had fellowship. If we can come apart from each other and not miss each other, we haven’t really had fellowship.

Third of all, the job of the local church is to glorify God. That’s one of the things that we do to make disciples. We lift up Jesus Christ. And just like Jesus said during his earthly ministry when he was talking about the serpent, the bronze serpent that Moses had made at God’s command so that people who’d been bitten by snakes would look at this bronze serpent when they were in the wilderness and they would be healed of the snake bite.

That whole thing, I would love to talk to you tonight about that this afternoon. That would take the whole time. That’s one of my favorite stories in Scripture, one of my favorite pictures.

But basically, it was supposed to be a picture of Jesus Christ, that as he’s lifted up, that he is the cure for what ails us, which is our sin. And if we would just have the faith to turn to him, we’ll be saved from that snake bite of sin. But as he’s talking about that, one of the things he says is, If the Son of Man be lifted up from the earth, he will draw all men unto himself.

If we’ll just lift up Jesus Christ, some of the people around us won’t help, won’t be able to help but being drawn to him. And especially with new Christians. You know, we work so hard to, sometimes, sometimes we work so hard to lead somebody to Christ, and then we just abandon them.

It’s amazing that there’s not a spiritual DHS that gets called on us for abandoning newborn Christians, but that’s what happens. Especially with somebody who’s new in the faith. We should be nurturing them.

We should be working with them, helping them to grow stronger, helping them learn to study God’s word, to feed themselves. One of the things we need to do for them is to lift up Jesus Christ, to lift him up together, to glorify him together. Because when people see who Jesus is, especially new believers, they’re going to want more.

And it says that in verse 43, fear came upon every soul and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. They saw the glory of God in what the apostles were doing. These people glorified God, and I think if we’ll glorify Jesus Christ, that accomplishes a big part of what we’re supposed to do.

So those are the three things that we kind of hit on a couple weeks ago, just to refresh your memory. Here are the three new ones. We look at verses 44 and 45.

It says, 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. Now, I could go into it with you today why this is not necessarily a command for today. We are called to be generous with one another and called to be generous with the church.

We’re not called to practice communism, which, by the way, this is not communism anyway because nobody has a gun and is forcing them to sell all their stuff. They, out of love for one another, they’re saying, I see a brother over here who has need, and I have this that I don’t need, and it could take care of his need. Why would I sit here and let my brother do without while I have more than I need?

And it was a voluntary charity thing. But even if we don’t go sell everything we have, I’m not telling you today, go sell everything you have and bring it in here to the leaders of the church and let us decide what to do with it. That’s not the point of this.

The point of this is they saw needs and they said, we’re going to not let those needs go unfilled. Part of the job of the church is to notice needs. It’s to notice needs.

And I’ll admit I’m not always the best at this. I go to one extreme or the other. I have had experiences where I’ve tried to be the guy who, you know, on behalf of the church goes and helps people with whatever problem they have, and only to have that be abused and get scammed and to the point where now I’m just so cynical. Anybody comes up and I don’t know them, they walk up, excuse me, no, I’m not interested, I have no money for you.

And that’s not the way we’re supposed to be, right? On the other hand, I also fall into that category again where let’s just give them everything we have. And I’ve told you before, I’m thankful for Brother Greg.

We balance each other out. That I’ve called him in on some of those meetings where somebody comes and says, I need my electric bill paid today or it’s going to get cut off, and I just want to help. And Greg’s sitting there saying, wait a minute, this didn’t just happen today.

You didn’t just find out you had your electric getting cut off today. why were you not doing something about it earlier you know early we had a guy tell us one time well I was at a ball game this morning and Greg’s like well it’s not that big of a deal to you then is it and I don’t want to make Greg sound unfeeling he’s not he’s not but there’s a balance here between I want to help let’s just turn over the deed to the church and give them everything and Greg’s saying wait a minute we need to be good stewards of what God’s given us and it takes both of those and in my own life, more often than not, I’m the one saying, we’re just going to get scammed again and my wife is saying, is God telling you to help that person out? So I can play both roles.

I’m sure you play both roles at times. And again, that’s part of the reason why God puts us together in the church. But the church is here to help people.

That can mean monetary help and we have done that. We’ve had people that have run out of gas. It’s amazing how many people run out of gas right before church time and managed to end up at the church.

We’ve had people run out of gas. You know what? A better example, we’ve had people who’ve said, I don’t have anything to feed my kids this weekend.

I’m thankful you had the idea of starting a food pantry. I don’t even know how many people that’s helped over the last year or so that we’ve had that. Thank you all for contributing to that.

Only God knows how many people that has helped. It can also be spiritual needs. It can be any sort of need.

But we live in a world that is so busy, and it’s not too different from the world that they lived in. A world that is so busy, everybody going about their business, and that’s all they’re worried about. A lot of times we see people all around us in need, and we don’t even notice.

As the body of Christ, we’ve been called to slow down a little bit and take notice. And where God has gifted us to be able to meet needs, we need to notice the needs, and we need to do something about it. We see in verse 46, it says, 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.

So this kind of goes hand in hand with fellowship. What I’ve written down here is that the job of the church is to maintain the bond within the body. It’s not enough that we have fellowship at some point.

We need to work hard to fellowship together and do ministry together and stay together on purpose. and keep that bond strong so that we can function together as one body. And they did this daily.

They did this daily. Now, we’re a little bit more of an individualistic culture than them. They’re what we call communitarians in the East, meaning it’s all about the community, it’s all about the group, where we in the West tend to think in terms of individualism.

It’s about what I want to do, I need my space, that sort of thing. I’m not sure we might not kill each other if we were all in each other’s houses every day, right? we like our space.

I had this conversation last Sunday morning. I love being around people, but when I get ready to go home, I don’t want people camped out in my backyard. I don’t want to see my neighbors.

Even before the whole dog incident. I lived in a house in Moore one time that had an old church that had turned into a daycare on one side. It had a city park in the back and had a house with nobody living in it on the other side.

I was in hog heaven, okay, because I could go, there’s nobody around me to bother me. Hey, I need to get over that some, right? We’re called to be a part of each other’s lives on a daily basis.

Maybe not every day. June, I’m not going to, every day when you wake up, I’m not going to be there sitting at your kitchen table already drinking coffee, okay, just waiting for you to get up. But our bond with one another should be more than just Sunday, right?

And it should be more than just sitting in the pews together on Sunday. Hi, how are you? And then we go on our separate ways.

There’s supposed to be a bond and it’s supposed to be an ongoing bond. Now, I don’t always have all the answers on how we do that. I think things like what we did today are a good step in the right direction.

Just spending time together that doesn’t involve you sitting next to each other and listening to what’s going on up here, but actually having relationships with one another. But I want you to think about that. They did this every day.

They got out there and they were the church every single day. Are we the church every single day? Should we be the church every single day?

Last verse, verse 47, it says, praising God and having favor with all the people. Praising God and having favor with all the people. They were out there praising God in full view of their community.

The people saw them. They knew who they were. They knew what they stood for.

It says they had favor with all the people. Now, I go back and forth on what this means because obviously you read the book of Acts and you can tell everybody that was around didn’t like the church. I don’t think favor meant that everybody just loved the First Baptist Church of Jerusalem and everything they were doing.

I think it more likely means they had a good reputation with the people. And you can have a good reputation even with people who don’t like you, right? It’s possible.

Sometimes people won’t like you because you have a good reputation. Now she’s just a goody two-shoes. Better than a batty one-shoe, I guess.

I don’t know. Is there an opposite to that expression? I’ve never heard one.

I don’t know where goody two-shoes came from. But you can have a good reputation even with people who don’t particularly like you. And there were some in Jerusalem who didn’t care for the church, didn’t care for what they were doing, but you know what?

They had a good reputation. And they had a good reputation because they were representing Jesus Christ well. And that’s one thing that we are called to do.

That’s one way we make disciples is just by getting out there and every day as we go about our everyday lives, we are making a concerted effort, a conscious decision to represent Christ until he returns. Brother Greg talked this morning about retirement and how there’s no retirement age in the Bible. That’s true.

There is no retirement age in the Bible. And I’ve always told Charla about, well, if I retire someday. Because I can’t imagine that I’d ever want to stop preaching.

I might retire someday and just, you know, I might get a camper like you, Brother Greg, and just go help out churches that don’t have anybody. I can’t see myself fully retiring. I hear a lot of people are just retiring to another ministry.

But the bottom line is there’s no retirement in the kingdom. There’s reassignment, but there’s no retirement. And what that reminds me of is there’s no expiration date on our service.

There’s no point in the Bible where Jesus says, represent me until you turn 75. Represent me until you get tired. Represent me until your neighbors get on your last nerve.

No. We’re told to represent him until he returns. One little part of what we do to represent him is the Lord’s Supper.

And he says, as often as you do this, you do show my death until I come. We’re supposed to be representing him and proclaiming that belief in his death until he comes again. There’s a verse that a friend of mine quotes all the time where Jesus said, occupy until I come.

We’re supposed to represent him until he comes again. We don’t, until he comes for all of us or until he comes for each of us. You know, meaning until he calls you home or until he calls all of us home, we’re called to represent him.

And we have to do that on purpose. We have to make a concerted effort. We have to make a deliberate decision that we’re going to represent him.

You know what? I’ll let you in on a little secret. You’re not going to feel like it every day.

Right? There are days, well, maybe not days. There have been times, there have been moments in the last week where somebody has said something or done something, and I’ve told Charlotte, oh, I almost wish I wasn’t a Christian for just a minute.

And when I think about it, that’s a dumb thing to say. Now, I wouldn’t want to give up my salvation for anything. I wouldn’t want to give up my relationship with Jesus Christ for anything.

But man, I wish I could say what just went through my head. But I’m reminded constantly that I represent Jesus Christ. I don’t alway