On The Road - Episode 3 - God Centered Church: Whose Church Is It?

God Centered Theology

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Hello and welcome back to On the

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Road. This is Andy Cain and it is August 30th, 2024. We have decided to narrow the focus of this podcast to where we are not just randomly talking about things on my mind, which that's fine and well and good, but you know,

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I find that some mornings there's nothing on my mind. You say, well, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it does. But you know,

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I wanted to have a place where I could talk about the church, specifically God -centered church and what that looks like.

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And I don't mind writing and stuff, but I really prefer teaching from, you know, talking and working things through like that.

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And you know, I do blog about a few things, but I mostly do audible teaching and in -person teaching and things like that.

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So I decided to narrow the focus of this program to On the Road, the podcast that takes you from carpool to work.

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And we talk about what a God -centered church looks like. And that way every day we can have another little piece or another little nugget along the way of what this should be like.

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And we'll work through everything. We got plenty of time. There's plenty of days to work on this. So there's no need to, you know, get in a hurry.

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So this is, after all, God -centered theology. So we want to talk about God -centeredness in all areas of life.

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So we're going to talk about God -centered church on the On the Road podcast. And so the place to start is the place everyone should start when talking about the church is who's in charge?

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Who's the king? Who owns it? Who gets to determine what should happen? And the answer for that, there's only one answer, is

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Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ says in Matthew 28, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

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Go, and as you go, make disciples, baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and the

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Holy Spirit, discipling the nations, teaching them all that I've commanded. And so that message is pretty clear.

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In First Corinthians, it talks about how he is the head of the church and we are the body.

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So he's the head, which means he's the governing tool. He's the brain. He's the mind.

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He's the directional force. We are the hands and feet, the arms, the legs.

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We're the ones that do the work of ministry, Ephesians 4, and God is the one that gives direction.

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Colossians talks about how he's the head of the body of the church. It's his, and we're the bride of Christ. He's the groom.

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So a lot of metaphorical language in scripture to basically say, God is in charge,

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God is the king, and you're not. Now, this doesn't happen very often in the

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Americanized business form, constitutional republic form of our church today, where we think it is the congregation or shareholders, stockholders, constituents that elect representatives to lead them, but at the same time, they're also employees that are there to do the dictates and whims of whoever.

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That's not biblical. But let's talk about who's not in charge, okay?

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The pastors aren't in charge. Pastoral oversight is submission to scripture.

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Elders submitted to scripture will conduct oversight because they're commanded to. Now, they conduct that oversight in light of the fact that they have a high responsibility, which is outlined in Hebrews 13.

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They are commanded not to do it in a sinful way in 1 Peter 5, where it talks about we're not supposed to lord it over the congregation because it's not your church.

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It's not your sheep. You didn't die for them. You're caretaking and shepherding God's sheep for him, and you're to conduct oversight in the way in which he commands.

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Also, there's instructions in scripture, I believe it's 1 Thessalonians 5 .19, if I remember correctly, about how to handle a sinning elder.

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So there's all that in place. So elders conduct oversight and submission to scripture, but ultimately they're not in charge because God's in charge.

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Deacons are not in charge. I don't care how many you got, how long they've been there, how much money they got.

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You can call them a board. You can call them whatever you want. There are no biblical instructions to give deacons decision -making level authority.

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It's not their church. They don't own it. They didn't die for the sheep. The congregation's not in charge.

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Oh my God. Well, bless God, it's working. We vote. What's the point?

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I'm voting. You know, everybody, I heard one time when I said, you know, the reason I'm a member of the church is so I can vote.

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That's a very sad reality to think that's the first thing somebody thinks about. There's no biblical prescription for anybody that's a congregate to vote on anything or have any decision level making authority.

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Now if overseers take a group of people that show themselves to be qualified in a certain area and sort of put them in charge over that area, like we see in Acts chapter six, where they told them to go find six men that were full of the

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Holy Spirit that could take care of the widows. Now it'd be good for an elder to, in a leadership model, to kind of step back and let them do what they do and don't be micromanaging all those things.

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And oversight really is not something to be lorded over people. It's something to be used if it's necessary, but for the most part, you let people go out and do the work of ministry and stay out of their way.

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But congregants are not prescribed in scripture anywhere to have decision making level authority in the form of voting and all this other stuff.

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So congregation's not in charge. This is going to be a hard shock for a lot of people, but they're not.

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God's in charge. Now the congregation needs to have say in things in the sense that they help identify, determine and help build up elders to oversee them.

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And you know, they need to be there for checks and balances in the sense that if there's something sinful or contrary to scripture happening and the elders won't bring it up, yes, at that point you need to step in and say, hey, there's something really wrong here.

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But just simply say, well, I think this is how it should go, so you should do it because I'm a member of the house, it's not how we're supposed to do things.

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So it's Christ's church. He owns it. He died for it. He shed blood for it. So he has the right to say how it should go.

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And that's the whole point. And that's what we're going to be doing all this under that understanding.

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A God -centered church starts with God and then comes down to man, to where man is responsible for doing, for understanding, submitting and obeying to what

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God has said he wants to happen in his church. And if you do that, that's not a bad thing.

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It's a huge blessing. God will bless your church. He will make it strong. You'll be spiritually strong.

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You'll be all that you need to be for God, for his church. So, you know, just to kind of wrap this up, you know,

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I remember one time there was a a quote unquote anonymous letter, which I know who wrote it.

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I knew who wrote it the second it was given to me, saying one of the lines in there was, you know, he referring to me has to remember this is our church and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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And I'm like, no, it's not. And people get so offended and so mad when you say that.

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But it's true. It's not yours. It's not mine. I could be the pastor of a church.

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It's not mine. You're a congregational member. It's not your church. It's not the deacon's church.

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It's not the Sunday school teacher's church. It's God's church. There's only one owner of the church and it's

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God. Amen. Well, thank you for joining me on this episode of On The Road as we look at, begin to look at what a