Episode 27: Biblical Distinctives of a Healthy Church (Part 1)

To the Ruled Church podcast.

Christ the King and the Church He Purchased

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, episode 27.

Hello, Eddie.

Hello, everybody. Big question for you right now as we get started.

How do you say February?

February.

It's not how it's spelled.

February.

What?

That's not how it's spelled.

Feb-ruh.

It's like rule, rule, rule, February.

Welcome to February on the Ruled Church podcast.

Is this the first episode in February?

No, this is the second.

That's what I was thinking, so.

Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast.

I'm your co-host, Alan Nelson, pastor of Perryville Second Baptist Church. With me is my dear friend and brother in the Lord, co-labor in the ministry, Eddie Ragsdale. How you doing, Eddie?

I'm doing really well. We had a good, we have a meeting on Wednesday mornings, me and some other brothers just praying through scripture, and really had a good meeting this morning, and so really doing well today.

Amen.

Well, today we want to talk about the local church. Hey, have you listened to the new intro?

I have, it's wonderful. What about the outro?

I've listened to that, too.

Got some dear brothers on there. Randall Easter from By the Word Baptist Church in Briar, Texas. We have Christian Martinez, who's been on the podcast, from El Pachote. We have, who else is Brother David Miller, and then Brother Jonathan Murdoch.

And I don't have any clips of you, Eddie. I need you to send me like a clip, a sweet clip from you preaching about the local church. Feel like pinking the brain. What are we going to do today? What do we do every day?

We talk about the local church.

That's right.

So we want to talk about today, though, distinctives of the local church. Really, this stems from a couple of things both of our churches are going through. And it was a couple months ago, I guess, a few months ago, that I just got an encouragement from my friend, Jeff Johnson, and he was just talking about their church, Grace Bible Church in Conway, and just some of their distinctives.

And so that got my brain rolling. Okay, I want to teach our church. Okay, this is what sets us apart as a church. In fact, I'll just read a little preamble here. I'm not sure I'll read this whole document.

It'd take a long time, but there's a little preamble here. 10 distinctives of Perryville Second Baptist Church. And the preamble says, we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man, risen from the dead and now seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty as King of all, is worthy of a healthy church in Perryville, Arkansas.

We believe taking these 10 distinctives together sets us apart as a local church in the location where God has planted us. These distinctives do not exhaust all of our beliefs as a body, but they are a non-negotiable part of who we are as a local church.

We hold these truths according to the Bible for the purpose of the good of one another and our community, and ultimately for Christ's honor and glory. Now you guys aren't going through necessarily the same thing, but it is something similar in that you guys are working through your confession of faith that you're going to adopt, or you're thinking through that, and also a church covenant.

So let's go back to you for a second. Tell me a little bit about that, then we can go back to these distinctives.

Yeah, well, I believe that what we're all trying to do is aim for having a healthy church. And I think one thing that we probably need to mention at this point is the idea is not that we're trying to have the best church, or we're trying to have the biggest church, or the most impressive church in our community.

What we're trying to say, and we're not in competition with other true churches, we do want to call people to not fellowship with churches that aren't churches, to not be in churches where the gospel is not being preached, where God's word is not being prized, where God's people are not being fed and being loved.

But what we do want to see happen in local church is we want to see them be healthy. And the reality is, and I think we talked about this several months ago when we were talking about some of the issues with the convention and things like that, we can't control what's happening in the other churches.

We can't control what's happening in 42 ,000 SBC churches. We can't control what's happening in the other churches in our town or in our county, but we can influence and we can affect what's happening in our local church and the lives of the people that God has put in our body.

And so we want to see our churches being faithful to the things that the Bible has given us.

Amen.

Being a Healthy Church According to Scripture

Yeah, I just want to say I myself have been distracted by that before. And we've talked about it. You've talked about it. You've encouraged me and even maybe rebuked me in it. But yeah, I think that's a good word.

So what is it, anything you'd like to say about where you guys are right now, with your covenant or with your confession, we're trying to have, okay, one thing I say in our preamble and it's true of your church as well, Christ is worthy of a healthy church in Perryville.

And Christ is worthy of a healthy church in Marshall. And it's kind of hard to say that because there's so many people might look at that and be like, well, are you saying all these other churches aren't healthy?

Well, maybe, but really what I'm saying more above and beyond, because I don't know the ins and outs of every church, but what I'm saying above and beyond is no matter what everybody else is doing, we are going to strive to have the church that Christ would have us to have according to his word.

He's worthy of that. He purchased, Acts 20, 28 says this, he purchased the church with his blood. Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion. People get mad, he goes in and he fires people and he reads structure stuff.

Why does he do that? It's his, he bought it, 44 billion. Okay, Christ has purchased his church with his blood, infinitely more valuable than $44 billion. He gets to do what he wants with his church. It's his church.

So therefore we should listen. We should trust him, obey him. He's worthy of our allegiance and our worship. So anyway, anything you wanna say to that or where you guys are right now?

Yeah, I think one thing we wanna think about as well is that no church has arrived, right? No church can say, okay, we're there. We've done everything, we're, you know, there's nothing more to do. The church is, you know, reformed and always reforming.

We're always moving toward health. It's never that you arrive at perfect health. You're, you know, you think about your physical body, you're always moving toward being healthier with your diet, with exercise and those kinds of things.

And in the same way in the church, we're always moving toward being healthy. And so the fact that what we're striving for is being a healthy church in our community, isn't saying that there are no other healthy churches.

And it's also not saying that the other churches aren't healthy at all, but it may just be saying, well, listen, I hope that the other churches don't feel like they've arrived. I hope that they feel like they need to be moving toward health.

But I don't know what's happening in those churches, but here we wanna be moving toward health. And yeah, what we're looking at in our own local churches is things like the, what confession, you know, we're looking at different confessions.

I was just telling you that we're looking at probably adopting some version of the abstract of principles as a, you know, as a minimal, it'll be a minimal confession of faith. And then really working with our people that, I think the most important thing is that the people in the church actually know what their covenant says and what their confession says.

You know, I grew up in the church for years and I never knew what the covenant said. I didn't know what our church's confession said. And I think a lot of people in churches, there are a lot of churches, they have these documents because some previous generation realized how important they were.

But most of the people in the seats, in the pews, don't have any idea what they have, what they have covenanted to do in the covenant and what they have said that they believe by being members of that local church.

Yes, there's some vestiges of the past, which are good, that have stuck around, but the problem is people don't know why they are. And we keep saying health, health, health. I can't emphasize this enough because, you know, you might hear somebody like Ed Stetzer talk about church health or whatever.

Well, I'm trying to make sure that what I'm talking about is biblical health, health according to the scriptures, not health in numbers, whatever. You know, I mean, yes, we want, look, we're not against numbers, but we also understand that numbers don't necessarily, are not necessarily indicative of health.

And so we want health according to the scripture. All that's good. Well, let me bounce off some of these. I don't know if we might not get through all 10 in today's episode, but that'll give us something for next week.

But let me bounce off some of these to you and see what you think. These are 10 things that I think distinguish us. So I'm preaching through a series right now, Christ Vision for the Church. And I think these are 10 things that set us apart as a church in our community.

And these are Christ-centered, Christ-exalting, Christ-mandated distinctives. And I would also say that maybe there's one or two that you might say other places hold to, but taken all together, this is who we are.

So let me go through them and bounce them off you. The first is biblical sufficiency, biblical sufficiency. I'm not gonna read the whole thing. If I read the whole thing, I've kind of got a few paragraphs on this one.

But the point here is we start with this one. This really lays the groundwork that the foundation of the church is built on the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus being the chief cornerstone. So what we're saying here is the Bible is enough to tell us how the church ought to be structured.

Thoughts, comments?

Yeah, and we've got to be adamant in the current culture that we're in about rejecting every addition. You know, I was just telling our church this Sunday, I'm more of a teacher than a preacher, although this Sunday I did get a little animated in the pulpit on this one issue.

We were in Isaiah 36 and 37, where Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, has sent the Rabshakeh, and he is trying to get Israel to basically just turn themselves over to the Assyrian army or Judah to turn themselves over to the Assyrian army.

And he claims that Yahweh told him to go and destroy Jerusalem. And I just told our church how wicked that is, how wicked that is to claim to speak for Yahweh when Yahweh didn't say it. But it happens all around us in our culture, and we maybe don't need to get off into this, but people are watching The Chosen or they're reading Jesus Calling, and it ought to break our hearts, and it ought to cause real indignation that people would claim to speak in the name of God.

If God's word is insufficient, then we have nothing to hope in. But if his word is sufficient, it is the worst of sins for people to claim to say something for God that God did not say.

That's right. To disbelieve or disobey the Bible, or to fail to trust its sufficiency in all manner of godly living is to insult God. So we put that together. It's obviously in that we talk about inerrancy, infallibility, authority, but the distinctive self is called biblical sufficiency.

Maybe I could say it this way. We don't mind starting our conversations with the Bible says.

The Bible says.

Because that's our starting point. Oh, but you know what, lost people, I don't care if you don't accept that. I mean, obviously we're gonna be gracious, and you've been around, we know each other. People listening to this may not know, they might just think we're just jerks or whatever, but of course we're not gonna be, not trying to be rude to people or be unnecessarily offensive or whatever, but we're really just not gonna back up with this and say there is no other starting point.

The Bible says. Why do you do these things as your church? Because the Bible says. I'll say something at the end here of this portion. I'll read something at the end of it, and then we can go to the next one.

But you already said this, but I said this. A church must constantly check itself according to the word of God and always be reforming according to the scriptures. And all that we do, we must always seek to be biblical.

This is something that never ends. You never arrive at the end of this first distinctive. You're always adjusting. And by the way, we want health, again, to reiterate defined by the scriptures. So are we gonna do this event?

Are we gonna partner with this organization? You're always checking yourself with scripture. Is how much should we be partaking of the Lord's Supper? How much, how often should we be, or what should our Sunday morning service look like?

Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to do that? Like everything, what should our leadership look like? And all this, it all stems from the scripture. So that's our first one. The rest of these are not really in a, they're in an order, but I don't know that it matters so much.

But this one does. We start right here with this one. Our first distinctive biblical, almost said deficiency, biblical sufficiency. We're not looking for another word, and I say that in there too. We're not looking for another word.

We're not looking for voices, dreams, prophecies. We've got the Bible. All right, distinctive number two, biblical holiness. This is a short paragraph, so I'll read it. We believe that God really and truly saves the vilest of sinners by his marvelous grace through the righteous life, prophetic fulfillment, vicarious death, and victorious resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Those who are truly born again persevere in grace and holiness. We acknowledge the sad reality of false converts in our day and teach and preach against false assurance. That is, those who say they are Christians, but display no demonstrable love for Christ, his word, his ways, the local church, and his mission.

We believe that genuine Christians desire to be a holy people. And because they follow Christ, will ultimately be hated by the world. Holiness is defined by God's book. Thoughts, comments, rebukes, repudiations.

No, I agree. Yesterday, I began teaching a series at a local recovery place that I teach at, and I'm teaching through Dr. Don Whitney's book on spiritual disciplines. And, you know, that book begins with this whole idea that the whole point of the spiritual disciplines is that we are called to live lives of holiness.

You know, it says in Hebrews chapter 12 that there is a holiness without which no one will see the Lord. And the apostle Peter in 1 Peter 1, verses 15 and 16 tells us that we are to live holy lives we are to be holy as he is holy, as the holy one, our God is holy.

And so with all of that being the case, what sort of lives of holiness and godliness, Peter later says in 2 Peter 3, ought we to live? And so we are called to biblical holiness.

I preached on January the 15th, I preached on this distinctive and the text I ended up deciding to go with was Matthew 7, it's 21 through 23. And I actually preached about the reality of a false converts.

And then I preached the point there in verse 21, where he says, it's not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven.

Now, quick context here, this is in the Sermon on the Mount, Sermon on the Mount. And in the Sermon on the Mount, he's teaching kingdom living, what it looks like to be a disciple, what it looks like to live in the context of the kingdom.

And we're not by any means saying that you live this way in order to enter the kingdom. No, you live this way because you've been born again. John 3, you not see the kingdom unless you've been born again.

But if you've been born again, you see the kingdom and this is the way we desire to live. So here's a thought I had about this off here real quick. But in verse 21, he says, the one who does the will of my father in heaven.

Now around here, I run into people quite often who out in the community or whatever, they see me, we can talk and they say, oh, I know I need to be in church. Oh, I know I need to read the Bible. Oh, I know I need to spend time in prayer.

Oh, I know I need to be sharing the gospel. You know what Jesus says? He says, the one, not the one who knows the will of my father in heaven, but what? The one who does it. The one who does, and it's a really terribly sad reality.

I think that some people comfort themselves with the fact that like, since they know what the Bible says then they're okay with the Lord.

Well, here's what people think. They think knowing is believing, but it's not. And people think, well, we believe that we're saved by faith and by faith alone. Correct, we are justified by faith and faith alone, but justifying faith results in doing what you believe.

Everyone does what they believe. Not everyone says what they believe, but everyone lives according to what they believe to be true. And the reality is people think that knowing is believing when actually it's living.

The way you live your life is your believing.

Saving faith is not works. Saving faith is receiving Christ. It's by grace you faith. But saving faith always results in good works, ultimately. Now we distinguish these, we separate these. It's very important that we separate these.

And it's very important that we remember the man on his deathbed that receives Christ is just as justified as anyone else. And we don't add to our justification, or any other believer, we don't add to our justification with the works, but the reality is when we believe on Christ, we desire to be a holy people and we produce fruit.

In fact, we were reading last night, in family worship, we were reading 1 Timothy chapter five. This has been good for us in family worship. We've been a little, like we just haven't read, like we just kind of skip around what we're reading, or maybe just read what I'm preaching Ephesians.

And right now we're reading through it, doing a different kind of deal. And so we're reading through 1 Timothy. And it says in 1 Timothy 5, 24, the sins of some are conspicuous, going before them to judgment.

But the sins of others appear later. Then he says in verse 25, so also good works are conspicuous. And even those that are not, cannot remain hidden. So the reality of the believer's life is that there may be, there are various levels, certainly of holiness, various levels of sanctification, should say it that way.

But the reality is all Christians will bear fruit. And we believe that God calls his people to be a holy people.

And that maybe leads to one other thing I'd want to mention about holiness, is there is evangelistic value in holiness. It's not what worldly churches think. They think we'll win the world by being like the world, but it's the opposite.

You'll win the world by being like Christ. Man, holiness is actually the thing that the world will see. And those whom God is calling will be drawn to a holy church.

Aren't you tired of the mentality of apologizing, apologizing for say conservative Christianity, and the way that we try to go in to talk about certain sins, or talk about the way we live, or even people kind of trying to maybe flaunt their freedom or whatever, all in an effort sometimes to show, hey, look, Christianity is not that weird, it's cool, you know, or whatever.

It's like, well, Jesus says the world hated him. The world's gonna hate us too. I don't mean that we have to go out of our way to make the world hate us. And there's some things that we need to repent of sometimes of going too far, maybe in this or that area, pushing things here or there that we can have Christian liberty, sure.

But the reality is that we don't attract the world, well, we don't attract the world regardless, but we do commend the gospel in holiness, not in worldliness.

Well, and even think about the way we sometimes use language. You know, something you said right there made me think of this. But even the way we use language sometimes, and I've been guilty of this, we might say something like, you know, I'm sorry, but God's word says that pastors in the churches ought to be men.

Well, actually, I'm not sorry about that. No, that's what it says. That's what it says. And why would we say, well, we're sorry God said this, we believe we have to live by. No, no, I'm not sorry that God's word says that.

God's word says it, it's right, it's good. We should celebrate it. We shouldn't say, well, I'm sorry that God's word rejects homosexuality or it rejects even heterosexual promiscuity. No, I'm not sorry that it says that.

It calls those things sin, and we ought to call them sin.

Well, and it makes me think of another, by the time this comes out, this will really be old news. It's already becoming old news now, but you know, Beth Moore tweeted a few days ago about Jonathan Edwards, you know, and his sermon centers in the hands of an angry God and just how it felt wrong to her that God's dangling you over the pit of hell like a spider on the web or whatever.

Okay, I'm wondering, have you read the book of Revelation? Right, in Revelation 14, it talks about, it likens people to grapes and how in a wine press, actually, I've never seen a wine press, but I'm just assuming in my brain, how in a wine press you squish the grapes, right?

And what happens, all the juice comes out. That's what it says, a wrath of God, he's going to squish people like grapes. And you know what the juice is gonna come out? It's blood. It says the blood is as high as a horse's bridle for 1600 stadia.

Now, I calculated that one time, and you basically come out to like 190 miles or something. Now, I know it's prophetic language there. It's not necessarily has to come out to an exact 190 miles, but that's as wide as the state of Alabama.

Okay, so this is the imagery that the Bible gives us about the wrath of God, which I think is more vivid and more gruesome than what Edwards preached. And so the point is like, how are you gonna apologize about the Bible if you're a Christian?

We're not, and specifically in this point, we're not gonna apologize about biblical holiness. Man, we've only made it through two. I think we can get through one more. What do you think?

Yeah, I do wanna add, since you mentioned the Beth Moore tweet, I didn't see it. I don't know what Beth Moore does usually, but I did listen last night to a pastor who is a Edwards scholar responding to Beth Moore.

And basically his conclusion was she obviously hasn't read anything else that Edwards wrote, and she obviously did not even read all of that sermon because he does give the gospel. It's not like that was all that Edwards said, even in trying to help people to see the great danger that sin puts us in.

Edwards was preaching the gospel so that people could be saved. And so often this desire to have a gospel that it's only about inclusion and a worldly idea of love causes us to miss what drives people to the gospel, which is the wrath of God against sin.

Yeah, it shows the beauty of Christ and his atonement. And in getting back into biblical holiness, it shows the sufficiency of the blood of Christ and the power of Christ to truly save sinners. We really believe that no matter, I don't know that anybody be listening to this, but no matter, that's unregenerate per se, but whether you're the rankest idolater or the worst hypocrite or the most self-righteous or the most sexually immoral person, the gospel really saves.

Come to Christ. You know, and that's what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, such were some of you. So when we encounter Christ, he really does save us by grace through faith and he really does change us. All right, the last one we'll get through today, biblical preaching.

Expository Preaching Through Books of the Bible

We believe the mainstay of our preaching is to be expository sermons through books of the Bible. We believe the biblical text itself must drive the sermon. We believe sermons ought to be both weighty in theology and application.

We believe the ultimate goal of every sermon is the exaltation of Christ our King. We believe there are appropriate times to preach topically, but the desire of the people of God must be to receive the full counsel of God's word.

While we do not put a time requirement upon sermons, we believe that healthy exposition requires sufficient time and therefore the sermon ordinarily takes up the majority of our Sunday morning gatherings.

Thoughts, comments?

Yeah, obviously, if you start with understanding biblical sufficiency, it's going to lead to the reality that God's people have to be taught his word. You know, a church with, even with a high view of scripture, if the people of God are not being taught his word, they're not going to know, they're not going to be able to grow.

And, you know, I mentioned earlier that I'm beginning to teach through Don Whitney's book on biblical or on spiritual disciplines. And those are talking about personal disciplines, like Bible intake. But the reality is just you with your Bible is not enough.

You need the input of the local church. You need pastors and elders teaching. You need other brothers and sisters helping you to clarify and understand. The Holy Spirit uses God's people and especially the pastors, the elders, the preachers and teachers to help us understand God's word.

The reality is if I just take my Bible and say, I'm just going to do my Bible study every day on my own, that the opportunity for me to be led astray by my own misunderstanding is great. We've got to be teaching God's word.

And one of the advantages of expository teaching and preaching of God's word is that it teaches the people how then they should study the Bible. Because it's not just open your Bible and study this passage, open it and study that passage.

It's the way that we work through the scriptures, verse after verse, line upon line, they can go home and do that.

Yeah, I think that we've said time and again on this podcast that the pulpit is not the only place for reformation, that there are other things that you must be doing. There are other aspects of pastoral ministry that must be going on.

Your prayer life, your time in the word of God, your time in visiting, your time in leading in appropriate changes and making changes and confronting sin, all these things. However, that's not minimizing the pulpit.

The pulpit is the spotlight, as it were. It is the show, maybe, it is the main aspect. It's not the only aspect, but it is clearly the place that you must steer the direction of the church. You must be preaching the scriptures.

And I think that, again, it's not all of these, in my opinion, are non-negotiable, but certainly this one. If you're trying to do all these others and you're not doing this one, this is gonna be problematic.

Preach through books of the Bible. Again, it's funny, I'm saying this in the midst of a topical sermon series, right? But there are times for that. There are times for that. But the mainstay of our preaching is expository sermons through books of the Bible.

I grew up going to a church when I was first converted, when I was first saved, where it wasn't a big deal to have a singing. You know, it wasn't a big deal to have a Southern Gospel group come in on a Sunday morning and there be no actual sermon.

Now, there'd be an altar call, but no sermon. And I never really, as a kid, I don't guess I thought anything about that. But looking back on it, we would never have a preaching, like we're not gonna sing any songs.

We are only going to preach three sermons in a row, no songs at all, no anything else. We're just gonna preach. Well, maybe we would do that. But the idea is the local church needs to be doing all of the things.

And the thought that any church would say, we don't need God's word this week. Like we don't need that. We can just sing or we can just pray, but we don't need God's word. No, we need everything that God has given his church.

We need to be fellowshipping together, breaking bread together. We need to be singing together, but we definitely do not need to minimize the right preaching and teaching of God's word, the elevating of the scriptures, the instruction of the saints.

I'll tell a quick story, then we can close. In my first pastor, we were at a deacon's Christmas gathering. And it was a great gathering, by the way, we had steaks and all that. But one of the deacon's wives confronted me, and she said, you better not ever do again what you did last Sunday.

And I was shocked, I was like thinking to myself, what, you know, what did I do? Did I preach without my shoes tied or something? Was my hair not combed? Was like, what did I do? And I just looked at her bewildered and I said, what?

And she said, preach after the cantata. And what had happened was we had had a Christmas cantata, and I didn't know, like, after the cantata, I preached. You know, like, yeah, I really did not know. And so she confronted me and rebuked me about it.

But as I've grown, I realized that was silly. She was wrong, we have to preach. The mainstay of our worship is preaching, opening the word of God and saying, thus saith the Lord. Well, we got through three of these.

I don't know if we'll pick these back up next week or not. We kind of reserve the right to kick them down the road if we want to, but this has been Biblical Distinctives part one, I think has been a pretty fruitful, hopefully a helpful episode.

I do want to let folks know, you want to reach out, you got questions, comments, thoughts, anything you want to say about the podcast, you can find us on social media. That's probably the easiest. You can also, I know you can send a message to us at our website, perryvillesbc .org.

What about you? Can they email you or anything on your website?

Yeah, they sure can. It is marshalfbc, marshalfbc .org, I think.

Marshalfbc .org, there you go.

I'm pretty sure that's right.

All right, thank you guys for joining us.

On this episode of the Ruled Church Podcast.

We'll let Jonathan Murdock take you guys out.

And preach and say goodbye, Eddie.

See you guys next week.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemos, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?