Episode 47: Christ in Mexico

To the Ruled Church podcast.

Christ the King and the Local Church

This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas? You see that one in Pechote, Mexico?

Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it. The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast. I've got with me my brother and good friend, Jonathan Murdock, and we're not gonna talk about amillennialism today, right?

That's right, good morning.

Did you know, brother, by the way, good morning,.

Did you know that that episode is now the most-listened-to Ruled Church podcast episode?

Are you kidding me?

No, I'm not.

It's a little bit lengthy.

So, we're not gonna do that today, and we're not gonna go that long, either, but.

So, but we are gonna talk about leaving loose states, right?

That's right.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, there you go.

You're always trying to get me in trouble, bro. But no, we wanna talk about something near and dear to both of our hearts. It's the summertime, I know, recently, and I don't know the order yet, Jonathan, but Eddie and Gunner recorded an episode about their preaching at the Gay Pride Parade in February.

Oh, nice, yeah.

I actually think it'll come out after this one, but anyway, so we're recording some stuff that's going on in the summer, and you know, a lot of people, for a lot of people, the summer's like, I've got a summer reading list, and I'm gonna do this this summer, and I'm like, dude, I feel like summer sometimes is busier.

What do you think?

The summertime, for me, is way busier.

I got, I'm preaching a church camp coming up. We've got, you've got a church camp coming up. We've got, we've had already one trip to Mexico at the end of summer, really kind of beginning of fall, I guess, we'll have another trip to Mexico.

I actually had two trips. One of them was vacation, but, to Mexico. It's kind of been nonstop for me.

You're really suffering on that trip.

I was very suffering, taking one, the team.

Well, what we want to do today is we want to talk about what we're doing in our mission work. We've had an episode like this, it's about a year ago, and they can go and listen, and really, I think it's probably the first episode you were on.

We're talking about FIRM, and talking about our trips and all that, but we've recently come back from Veracruz, Mexico. We had what I think was a great trip. By the way, I preached for over an hour again when I got back, so something about my church is going to stop letting me go to Mexico.

Fellowship of International Reformed Missions

But let's just start for a minute again. I know it'd be a little bit of a rehash from, if you listened to this a year ago, but in case you didn't, why don't you talk about, Jonathan, what is FIRM?

Yeah, so last time we did this, we talked about the fundamentals, you know, kind of the doctrine behind it, which we can do that again if you want, but I think coming back this time, one thing that was interesting to me is the ideas really coming about.

So when we started looking at this as a church, and we started weighing out the two ideas of formal association and fellowship of missions. So that's what FIRM stands for, is a Fellowship of International Reform Missions.

As we've come back from this trip, we're sitting in that room that day with all those brothers, having this incredible time together. It's really what we have is a fellowship. And so we have a fellowship in two regards.

One is on this side of the border, not just with Mexico, but Honduras, Salvador, between a couple of churches, you guys, us, by the word. And so we have a fellowship where we've come together for the efforts of training pastors and planting churches.

And we've decided to take our mission efforts and put them there. And as we decide this, we've brought some brothers in from Mexico and from Honduras and from Salvador. And so we just come back from that meeting with the Mexico guys.

And so in our idea, in our strategy of training pastors and planting churches, we were able to come together and say, what is the need for these brothers and pour ourselves into them? And them into us, right?

And so that is what we're doing. We're taking our small efforts that we can as a local church and walking together with brothers internationally.

Yeah, I think that's good. So a lot of times when people hear, when you go to Mexico, I think, and I really don't wanna disparage some of the good things in this, but I think they think of people going down there and building something or those sorts of things.

Actually, let me be so bold to say this. I think by and large, short-term mission trips have tended to be more harmful. And what I mean by that, what I mean by short-term mission trip, obviously our mission trip was short-term, but I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about the church that says, okay, this year we're gonna go for a week in this place and then a week in this place and a week in this place. And a couple of things that happens. One, sometimes the church itself doesn't have very good motivations.

Sometimes the place that they go to doesn't have good motivations. And then oftentimes there's just more harm done than good. There's not long-term commitment made. There's not long-term relationships built, sometimes not even the gospels being proclaimed.

And so I just wanna state from the outset, that's not what we're doing.

And let me also add, we're not against going and helping a church build something.

Amen, yeah.

Jack just went after our trip, Jack and Tanya, and he helped a brother build the structure for their church. But the difference is it's a local church base and focus.

That's right, yeah, that's the key. That's what this whole thing is about, is pouring into, not a missions organization, not in any other institution, but pouring into specifically the local church. So when we do that

And so I'm even thinking about like, so I went on vacation and meet this brother, Rodolfo. I'm hoping that at some point we take a trip to Playa del Carmen. This brother has jumped in. He's hungry, he has a great need.

But that trip won't be even like the trip we just did. We just went and poured into a local church and poured into pastors. That trip would be completely different. We'd be knocking on doors. I mean, he has three people coming to his church.

You know, I mean, we're not opposed to doing those type of things.

Well, and I would say in this like, even it's possible in our trip in September that we're gonna do some street preaching, you know?

Yes, sure, absolutely.

There's nothing wrong. In fact, I'm just saying, when I talk about short-term mission trip, I'm talking about going down, you know, passing out candy or something, even though my girls, one of my girls passed out candy this time.

And that's just like, and like you forget about them. And that was great. The summer of 2020, that was great. And now next year we're going to this place. And it turns out being kind of touristy, you know, the point I'm trying to get at is, and what you get at and what we share is like, we're pouring into the local church.

A Week in Veracruz with Word-Centered Ministry

So just logistically, our trip, we left on a Tuesday, we flew down. I think we ended up getting, man, it was late. It was like 10 or, no, it's like close to midnight, wasn't it?

When we got here. It was midnight.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it was like 1245.

Yeah, you got to coordinate all the different people coming from different churches, all those things. We go down there.

We packed in a van.

Yeah, that's right. Packed in a van, driving for two hours.

That's another thing is because of the way we're doing it, we ride in Christian's van and not some kind of super rented first class van, you know what I mean?

Yeah, we're doing this pretty economical. Yeah, so Wednesday, we'll just walk through day by day. Wednesday, it's not that we sleep in, it's just that we don't have much going on in the morning and we start out on Wednesday with devotion.

So you want to talk about that for a minute, like it was with the family.

Yeah, with Christian and his family.

Not just our team, but for David and Christian.

English and Spanish, I translated for that. And it was a good time to pray together and get the trip started off right.

Yeah, I think one of the things that I love about our trips, and of course I've only been on two, my third will be in a couple months, but Lord willing, but starting the day with the Word together and encouragement, then the rest of that day, we just really kind of lay low and try to recover from all our trip.

And then what we did that night is we gathered with the saints at Grace Baptist in El Pochote.

That's right. And Brother Randall preached a great sermon on how to listen to the preaching.

I want to talk about something before that, which was a phenomenal message. I posted it. It reached out to us. I would encourage any pastor to listen to it. Tell me, tell me what you think the average churchgoer in America would think about the amount of scripture that was read on a Wednesday night service.

They wouldn't bear with it. I mean, we read two chapters out of Judges.

Judges, yeah.

And they were long chapters.

Yeah.

When he said that, I was like, there's no way we're gonna read all of it.

Same, I'm glad you thought that. Because I was like, I thought I'm misunderstanding something, you know.

Like even in my own heart, it was like, man, this is really taking a long time. And I was convicted. It's like, it's the word of God.

Yeah.

So they, that's one thing I love about Christian and the church there, they have a high priority on the word of God.

So they have the deal, we're gonna read two chapters. And I believe if they were reading through the Psalms and they come to Psalm 119, they're not gonna do. The American, well, we'll break it down into a few weeks.

Yeah.

They're gonna read it.

Amen.

So then, Brother Randall preached from James 1, 19 through 21 and basically that night was just like a service. Their normal Wednesday night service.

Their normal Wednesday night service.

And we were there with them. So then we get up Thursday, we do a little running that day. Y 'all ran along, y 'all left me by the way. I'll go ahead and put that. I show up to run at seven. Y 'all are already gone.

And so I have to run on the streets of Mexico by myself. I'm not even sure if I'm going the right way.

We actually ran on Wednesday too.

Yeah. Well, I didn't run Wednesday. So I was enjoying the split unit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And no air conditioning.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's not, well, if you're from Arkansas and Texas, it's not that it's hotter. It's not hotter.

It's the same.

It's, yeah, it's pretty close to the same, maybe even a touch cooler.

Cooler, right.

But you have no AC and so you just go all day.

You can't get away from it.

So you, so then Thursday was similar to Wednesday in the sense we get up, devotion again Thursday, but Thursday we begin to prep. Thursday we went to Cordova, didn't we?

Yeah, you did devotion that morning on Elisha and the mauling of the 42 kids.

Yeah.

Very good.

So, but then Thursday night is when we started the conference and Thursday night. So the conference, we began to, there's at least two pastors I was not familiar with from the area that we got connected with.

Yes.

I was saying about Louise and Daniel.

Were they not? They weren't part of firm, right.

That's right, that's right.

Were there any more than that?

No, just those two.

Okay, so that was like, for me, that was a benefit of the conference that I wasn't expecting.

Right, sure.

That we'd go down there. So I know the other brothers and it was great to reconnect with them.

Oh.

So let me say this on that point. We're not saying that we're the best at this and we're not saying that we have the most to offer. What we're saying, and I think what we're doing is, we believe it's biblical for pastors to invest in pastors, right?

Amen.

And we're saying, we see our responsibility to invest even if we are some ignorant country guys from Texas and Arkansas, but it's right that we invest in what the Lord has given us and to others. And so you take Daniel, for example.

Daniel is Christian's uncle, pastoring a church in Cordoba. And we would love to help him. We would love to invest in him. We'd love for him to be part of firm. All we can do is serve it up and if it's beneficial to him, he can eat or not eat.

Yeah, and this is, let's talk about this for a second too. The idea here, and I have no idea about the stock market. So probably a terrible analogy, but if you have two commodities that you can invest in, one is like flash in the pan, like you can invest in this and it may get you some like big time investment maybe real quick, but it's really just kind of like here today, gone tomorrow.

Or you've got this other commodity that in the long run, like right now it may be hard. You're pouring in, you're pouring in, pouring in, but in the long run, it's going to give you the best return on investment.

That's the one you should choose. Well, it's a terrible analogy, but I think maybe it sticks a little bit as you think about, when we think about investing in the kingdom, okay? There are ways to do some sort of, always doing these rallies and stuff like that.

And you're always getting people to come forward and you're doing these crusades or whatever. And listen, sometimes God has worked through those and has brought people, the faith or whatever, but the long-term investment has to be in the local church.

And in investing in the local church, you invest in the leadership of the local church. If you can help the pastors of a local church, you are going to make the biggest impact long-term in the kingdom.

And also it comes to this, Jonathan, when you say, do we trust the scriptures about this or not? Because God's vehicle for reaching the nations

Local church.

Is the local church.

Right, exactly.

And so what we're doing, we're going down here, we're investing. We got connected at least, more connected probably with one church, but at least maybe a little bit connected with another church, like just going down there.

Just going to eat at their church.

Yeah, yeah.

Let me share with you something that hit me last year, I think it was, when David Allen got axed from Southwestern. Supposedly the most important thing in the local church is the pulpit.

Yeah.

But supposedly wherever the pulpit is, that's where the church is going to be. So if we look at seminaries and we say, what is the most important thing for a seminary to invest in? It's the pulpit, right?

So teaching men how to study and preach. Well, whether we agree with this theology or not, David Allen was probably the number one guy in the Southern Baptist Convention doing that. You know what I mean?

He was the preaching guy. I mean, you can disagree with his little work on the atonement,.

But he's good.

Little work.

Yeah, little work.

Yeah.

But he's good at teaching men how to preach and they fired him. He was the best. And it kind of hit me when that happened. We need to make that our focus. Like that should be the focus in moving forward.

Like if we're going to make an impact in Carlos's church, where he has three families, including his own, it's gonna start with the pulpit.

Right.

We've completely minimized and mocked the pulpit in many places in America, especially in the SBC. We made a joke about the plagiarism stuff. It's like, it's wicked.

It's wicked.

Right.

And so I'm thinking about Juan Carlos there. He's got three families in his church, right? So you get two things, and this is probably gonna bring it back to firm. When we go in September, we're going to go to a big church, right?

Felipe has a big church. He's probably the largest church in firm, including him, right? Maybe him and brother Randall are battling for who gets the award for the largest church, right? But it's a large church.

They're doing well. They're flourishing. Went through a little bit of a problem here, but they're making it through it, right?

After we do that,.

We're gonna spend three days in Buena Vista, right? Tabasco. So I asked my wife's cousin, I've heard it's pretty in Buena Vista because the name Buena Vista means good view. Well, Carlos told me that it used to be called the center and no one would go there.

And it was just kind of the town was falling apart because no one wanted to go to a place called the center because it's like the center of Mexico.

Yeah.

So they changed the name to Buena Vista to attract people. And he said, it's not pretty. It's the ugliest place in Mexico. It's the hottest place in Mexico and it stinks. And so Yvonne's cousin was like, he's right.

I've been there. It's the worst place I've ever been. So you have, that's the worst place in Mexico, right? With a church of three families. So the question is, why would we spend resources to go spend three days in Buena Vista with a guy that, you know, no one knows, he's never going to have this big church and there's three families, including his own.

Well, two reasons. Number one, I believe God's worthy of a faithful church in Buena Vista.

Amen.

Right?

And number two, the way that we build a right church in Buena Vista is investing in the pulpit.

Amen.

And so we model it, we invest, we teach the people to listen and we pour our lives into one. Carlos.

Amen.

And that's what we're about.

Yeah, amen.

That's the heart of FIRM is investing in local churches, specifically, ordinarily, primarily by investing in the pastors of the churches.

And we have good relationships with them.

That's right.

We meet every week on Zoom and we have gone through different teachings on Zoom. And then we have times of interaction or questions, answers, those things, but the face-to-face, you just, you still can't ultimately beat that as great as Zoom is.

You can't ultimately beat being down there with these brothers. And so Friday, we start off again with devotion, but then Friday afternoon, something a little bit different. We actually sat around with the pastors and had, if you're at a big conference, you would call it a breakout session, but it's really good, really helpful, teaching through church discipline, because here's the thing like

Membership and discipline, right?

Membership and discipline. So here's the thing. It's like, you can read about it. You can, there's lots of good books out there you can read about membership and discipline, but none of those books ultimately answer every question.

They can't, they're not designed to. And so we had an opportunity to walk through, okay, here's what, here's membership, it's biblical. Here's discipline, it's biblical. Okay, but what does it look like in your church?

But, and here's the reason we did that. I don't even know. You and I didn't have this conversation about this, but when we started FIRM, if you were gonna, if you, so we started FIRM a little bit before you came along, but if you were gonna be on the front side of that, and you said, we've got these 20 guys that we're meeting with on Wednesdays from different parts of South America or Latin America, what would you think is gonna be the number one problem they're gonna face in their churches learning the theology that we're teaching?

Oh, I would have said dealing with the doctrine of predestination.

Predestination and election.

Yeah.

What has tore the churches apart, three churches, has been church membership.

Yeah.

And that has been their biggest struggle. And so that's why we decided to do church membership together with discipline in that first section.

Listen, let me just make a plug here. In some ways, I'm thinking on my feet here, so in some ways it's easier to just embrace the doctrines of grace in a church. Like you'll find a church, you'll find churches all over the place and be like, oh yeah, we embrace the five points of Calvinism.

Yeah, we're Calvinistic.

Yeah.

It's harder to actually care about membership and discipline.

It's far harder.

And

Membership is way harder.

Yeah, you can find churches that will embrace the doctrines of grace, but will blow up when you start talking about elders, when you start talking about church membership, when you start talking about church discipline.

I feel like in some cases that happened here.

Oh, big time.

Because it wasn't over the issue of doctrine, although it was. I mean, but you know what I'm saying. It wasn't over the issue of like the doctrines of grace.

They were fine with you being a raging Calvinist, but when you

Raging Calvinist? I'm not angry, bro.

Yeah, I know. That's how they would refer to you as. But when you brought that into practical implications of that in the local church, it became an issue.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I think if you say, as if you're a pastor out there and you say, hey, we've come a long way. We've moved from Arminianism to the doctrines of grace in our church. Well, I wanna, first of all, commend you and say, praise God.

That's important.

And I don't wanna minimize that. But let me say this. You're not done. Don't stop. And yeah, that's right. Don't even rest in that victory. I mean, I commend you. I congratulate you. And I say, praise God for you, brother.

I know that's a hard battle, but it's just begun. Like, don't quit. Like, you've got, like, God cares just as much about the structure and order of His church as He does the beliefs of His church. I'm not saying it doesn't matter what you believe.

Of course it does. What I'm saying is it all goes together.

I remember when I planted the church in Mexico, I preached through Ephesians. And the first three chapters was like a pep rally.

Yeah.

Everybody was like, amen, hallelujah. I get to 4 -1 and it divided the church. Half the people left. And it was because you gotta take these and walk these out in the context of the local church. You gotta take these doctrines, walk them out in the context of the local church.

And that's when the fire got turned up.

Yeah.

And that's what these brothers are experiencing.

Yeah.

You know, like Felipe, they just had a division in their church. And it didn't have to do with the doctrines.

That's right.

Yeah.

It was membership and submitting to the authority of the church. Carlos preached the church empty. And it was because he started a new membership class and told people you have to sign a covenant with the church.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I totally agree, brother. And that's to get back to our trip. I mean, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to... Christ builds the church, but he does it through the preaching and teaching of the word of God.

And so it's our desire to pour into these churches and trust that God is going to use these churches for his glory.

Amen.

You say Christ is worthy of a healthy church in Perryville and Port Arthur and El Patote.

Do you like that?

And Hazel and...

I couldn't make the alliteration go with Hazel.

Yeah, yeah.

Tabasco. But anyway, so...

So we did membership and discipline with these brothers.

Friday afternoon, yeah.

Right, Friday morning.

Oh, Friday.

Yeah, morning to afternoon.

Yeah, that's right, that's right. Before lunch and then break and then after lunch, yeah.

Yeah, and then we did bearing with difficult times. How do you continue through difficulties?

Yeah, and that was after a message that Randall, again, had preached on Thursday night about suffering. Then Saturday, Saturday was a good day. Saturday, we adjusted the schedule a little bit.

Actually... Let's go back to a comment that Carlos made on Friday.

Okay.

It was funny because AJ and I were talking about it later and AJ wanted to express, I'm so happy for you guys. AJ wanted to say, I'm happy for you guys. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're doing this.

And then Carlos spoke up and was like, hey, I know this is a struggle for us to get here financially and be here and everything, but we need this. And he just talked about what firm had meant to him. And that was probably one of the greatest blessings on the trip for me.

Absolutely. You think about some of the things that we've experienced, probably one of the best conferences I've experienced is CHEPCON.

And you think about the opportunity,.

You just get to go there, hang out with faithful brothers, be fed.

And get fat from all the food.

Yeah.

And obviously we didn't go down there and do CHEPCON, but in a very small way, we're able to foster the fellowship. I mean, that's what we're called, fellowship.

And it was so fun. I mean, we come back and Kike and Pepe and Manuel, those guys are goons. They're so funny. And we really, really got to hang out. And another thing is these guys are so hungry for theology.

They get out of the van when they get there on Thursday. And within 10 minutes of them being there, we're having a conversation on Baptist covenant theology.

Amen.

And it's some of the deepest things that we're talking about theologically today.

And it puts some things into perspective. So when I come back, everyone's complaining on Twitter about whether or not you should leave a blue state. And I'm like, I don't got time for this. I mean, like I have some opinions.

My opinion basically is that whole argument is a lot overblown. There should be some people that leave and it's good. There should be some people that shouldn't leave. If they were to leave, it would be wrong.

So it's like, so what?

The question is, are you in a good church? If you are to stay, fight it out. And if you're not in a good church, find a good church, wherever you have to go.

But the point I was making on it is like, that seems so small. When your eyes see glimpses of the kingdom of Christ, then all these things that we're griping about seem so small in comparison to that.

Yeah, I agree 100%.

Church Membership, Discipline, and the Doctrines of Grace

So Saturday, similar up devotion. We adjusted the schedule because of the Lord's day on Sunday. And that turned out to be providential because let's see, we did the session in the morning.

Two sessions in the morning, yeah.

Two sessions in the morning. But then we turned around and the next session was like at three, I think. Or two sessions at three. And then after that, by the way, we ate tamales. And

Oh, I do need to say this. I'm sorry, brother. I got to do it.

I knew it was coming.

So this guy, Daniel, Christian's uncle has been coming and he comes at the end of the second session. And a matter of fact, in the second session, it was in the first session. It was in the first session.

He kind of gets up and is walking around during the first session. I'm like, oh man, he's going to fail. He heard something he didn't like and I'm thinking he's going to fail. But he comes up and he's like, man, the guy that does our Bible study tonight for married people is sick and he can't do it.

And so I asked Cuatro, hey, you want to do this? He's like, oh yeah. I mean, because we want to pull Daniel in. I've been preaching and translating for the whole week. And I'm like, it's a seven o 'clock Saturday evening.

I'm not going, right? I mean, I'm just wore out and I need to rest for Sunday. And so I asked Cuatro, you want to go? And Christian has this puzzled look on his face like, well, guys, we were going to do tamales tonight.

And as soon as he says that, Cuatro looks at AJ and is like, hey brother, you want to take it? And he completely sold out the gospel of preaching to these married people for some tamales.

They're really good tamales though. But I did end up going still. AJ taught.

Yeah, you did.