Mailbag Episode! Questions about Deacon Ministry, Church Closings, and Assurance of Salvation

Hey guys, it's Pastor Keith. Today is another mailbag episode, which means I'm going to the email box and I'm gonna open it up and answer the questions that you all have sent in.

Well, you can tell I'm not in my normal studio today. I'm actually coming to you from the office at the church.

Every Thursday morning I go and teach to a men's ministry and then I come up to the church and I work for the rest of the day and I decided today to make use of my time by giving some answers to some emails that I have received recently.

If you want to be part of a future mailbag episode, you can go to KeithFoskey .com, go to the contact form, send the email in, it will come to me directly.

If it's one I can use on the show, great, I will, or I'll simply send you an email back with an answer to your question.

Today's questions primarily deal with the subject of the assurance of salvation, even though the first couple questions deal with church life.

So I'm going to deal with those couple questions first and then we're going to move to the last few questions which deal with the assurance of salvation.

So here we go with question number one. And this one says, Hi Keith, the role and responsibility and general use of the office of deacon can vary widely between church bodies.

As a new deacon, I'm very interested in how other churches administer the office of deacon. One, I would love to hear how your church administers the role in office of deacon.

What are their specific responsibilities? And two, I'm also perplexed and disappointed to see that many churches ignore this important role and office that God has sovereignly ordained to help build his church.

This is by either completely ignoring the office or not taking it seriously as they should.

I personally know deacons of churches who are not even saved and live lives of sin and rebellion and yet are deacons.

It saddens me. If you can expound on this either in a reply or a podcast, that would be cool.

And it says feel free to give a brief synopsis of your view of the office of deacon. All right. Well, this could be a whole episode on its own, but I included it in the mailbag again because it's something

I can answer relatively shortly, but also point you to a resource.

If you are interested in learning about the office of the deacon and really diving into this,

I wrote a book. The book is entitled A Biblically Functioning Church. It is available for free.

You can go to sgfcjax .org. That's our church's website. You can go to the section which says books and you can download a copy of this in PDF format, absolutely free.

And it gives you my understanding of what the scripture says about the office of the deacon. Also, you can purchase a hard copy of it.

I have some on my shelf. If I'd have been smart, I'd have grabbed one beforehand and had it on the show. But this is my understanding.

The deacon role is a role of service, diakonos. They are ministers or servants of the church.

The overseeing role or the leadership role of the church is that of the pastor -elder.

And I do believe the pastor and elder are the same in the sense of their role.

They may have different responsibilities. Like in our church, I primarily am the preaching elder, even though our other elders do preach.

My job is to primarily preach on Sunday morning. But the deacon's role is to minister to the body, to the needs of the body, whatever those needs may be.

And so we meet with our deacons once every two months. And in that meeting, each one of them has a list within the congregation that they're responsible for keeping up with.

And they report back to us any needs. And a lot of times we already know what the needs are because it's a small church.

But they are in contact with people. They're keeping up with people. They're helping us to know what the needs are so that we ensure that the people of our church needs are being met.

And that is an important part of what the deacons are to do in our church. Aside from that, we also have a deacon who is responsible for the finances of the church.

We have three finance officers, and the head finance officer is a deacon. We see that as just another ministry in the body, as the ministry of the finances.

And so we have a deacon who is in charge of that. Our deacons help on Sunday morning. They read scripture.

They pray. They help administer the table. An elder will lead the table because we have the

Lord's Supper every week. But the deacons are the ones who are actually passing out the elements. They are the ones who are praying with us and for us during that time.

And so our deacons have a lot of responsibility in the church. We're thankful for them. We have four deacons. We also have a ministry called the

Pastoral Care Ministry, and that is men who aren't necessarily deacons, but are basically like assistants to the deacons.

They are helping the deacons do the things that they need to do. And part of the reason why we started that ministry is some men are not yet ready to be deacons.

And this is sort of an opportunity for them to go through a time of testing. The scripture talks about a time of testing. So it's there for that.

But it's also there for men who really don't desire the full office of a deacon, but still want to serve in the church.

And this gives them an outlet to do that. And so there's a lot, like I said, a lot

I could say about how deacon is to be chosen, their qualifications and things like that. And that's why I'm pointing you to the book, as I think it would be helpful to you.

The biggest thing I would say is in a lot of churches, you made a good point. You said that the person who wrote this said that there are people who shouldn't be deacons because they're living lives of sin or they're not believers, things like that.

I would also say that in some churches, there are some deacons who see themselves as the grand authority of the church, that the deacons are the ones who rule the church.

And from a biblical perspective, that's just not the case. The idea of a deacon board who has to be the sole authority or the primary authority in a church is not the biblical model.

The biblical model is that you have ordained godly elders who are governing the church and the deacons are serving the body.

And ultimately, they are leaders, they're servant leaders, but they're not in our church, they're not decision makers, even though they do make decisions about some of the things that they do as far as the needs and how to help and things like that.

But they're not ruling the church as they do in some churches. So that would be my short answer to this.

Maybe at some point I could do a longer episode. If you're interested in me doing a longer episode on the offices of the church, maybe talking about some of the things in my book, leave a comment.

I'd be happy to work on an episode in a future, maybe a future podcast where I just deal with ecclesiology, as I said, a biblically functioning church.

My book deals with how the church is supposed to function, elders, deacons, the ministry of the body, gifts, how gifts are to be used in the body, things like that.

And there's a lot in the book that I touch on. So that's my, and again, don't take, this is not a plug for the book, it's free.

But if you want to have a more robust answer to this question, I would point you to that resource.

All right, I'm moving on to the next question. This question says, first of all,

I don't read the whole email. Sometimes there's a, like this person wrote a very nice note to me about the ministry, and I'm thankful.

Thank you so much for saying that. But I'm going to get right to the question. It says, our church has dwindled in membership over the last 10 to 15 years.

There's no specific reason I can point to, but rather a combination of events. Our congregation consists of a number of seasoned saints and then four or five younger families.

Our total active membership is approximately 50 to 60 members. What we are finding is that we are housed in a building that is soon going to need more repairs than our congregation can afford.

Our missions and outreach ministries are limited because there are only so many people we can physically, who can physically participate.

On the other hand, we have an amazing pastor and some of the most loving people I've ever met. Our problems all seem to stem from just not having enough people to carry out the ministry we're called to do.

Do you have any experience navigating these kinds of issues and advice for congregations that may be facing these same difficulties?

First of all, thank you for such a heartfelt email. I can tell that your heart is for your church, and as a pastor, that means a lot.

I'm sure it means a lot to your pastor. And I did email you back. The person who wrote this knows I sent an email back, and the first thing

I said in the email is that 50 to 60 members is not a dead church.

I mean, you've got enough people that it's reasonable to consider the fact that your church could go on, your church could continue, and there is potential for growth, especially if you said you have a good pastor, and you have a loving group of people.

50 to 60 people is not really that bad, because there are times when you can see that the church is reaching a point where it may need to give way to either closing the doors of the church, and everyone either going to a different church, or something like that.

Because, like for instance, our church has inherited a couple of churches over the years, and it's just one of them specifically was a church that the the congregation had gotten elderly, and they had another church that was renting the facility that was a larger and younger and more vibrant church at the time, and there was only like three families left, and they just they could not continue as a church, and so those families came to our church.

It was a Presbyterian church, interestingly enough, but we were just enough Calvinist for them, and they're all still here.

We love them to death. Those families are still with us, and they came to be a part of our church, and our relationship would just really blossomed, and was great, and we were thankful to get them, but their church closed.

Somebody recently sent me a book that he said he had an idea, a friend of mine sent me an idea for a book. He said he wanted to write a book on ministering to a dying church, because there are churches that do eventually have to close.

No church is going to last forever, right? So it is a reality that sometimes churches do close, but looking at your situation,

I think the biggest situation you have is a facility issue. Fifty to sixty members is not bad, and if you can't necessarily support a missionary or outreach in the way that you want to right now, that doesn't mean you can't in the future.

That just may mean that it's where you are right now. Primarily, you need to work on what's going on in the body.

Is your minister being cared for? Are the responsibilities of the church being met?

Yes, supporting missionaries, supporting outreach is very important, but you have to take care of those other needs first.

Your minister is your primary concern, and that is, is he being cared for?

And I don't know if he's bivocational or what, but that has to be considered. So that's the first thing

I would say, is if those things are happening, if the building that you're in is going to require more than you're able to do, if you own the building, perhaps sell it to someone who is, and again,

I'm just throwing out ideas here, you could sell your building to another church that has the money to come in and make those improvements and use that money to put towards a smaller but better facility that would fit what you have and be within your budget.

So there are some things. I just, you know, I look at what you've written here. You got some younger, four or five young families.

That's great. 50 to 60 members. That's great. I can tell you, I've been the pastor of Sovereign Grace for 18 years.

There have been years where we were at 50, 60 people on a Sunday morning. It was not uncommon.

And you know, now we're a little, a little bigger, but we're still right at 100 to 120 on Sunday morning. It's not, it's not a big church and so at this point,

I would say it's, I don't think it's time to give up, but if you do, if your church decides that you're going to close at some point, then, you know, you have to, you have to have some conversations about, you know, what that's going to look like.

Are you all going to join another church together, which is what happened with that church that came to our church, or are you going to do something?

Is everybody going to go their own way? And there are some legal things that come with closing a church like because it is, the money that's come in has gone to a church.

Typically, that money would be donated to another like -minded church, which is what happened again when we've had churches that have closed and they donated money to our church because their church budget, when it ended, it just, they just donated to us.

So there's some, there's some legal things that go along with that, that you have to consider, how that money is spent and things. But all that to being said,

I don't think you're there yet, and I pray that God would continue to give your minister a willingness to serve and a heart to serve and to love the people well.

And I know a lot of churches with less people and, and they're, they're continuing to, to, to flourish in the kingdom.

So just be encouraged, my friend. All right. Okay. Now I'm going to get to the questions about the, as I said, about the subject of assurance.

The first one, very heartfelt, very short, says, I hope you're well.

I've hit a bit of a low point recently, and though things around me are going, are going well,

I often return to brooding and self -loathing to cope with my own disappointment and my sin and failure to be good enough for God.

How do you exercise joy and strive for holiness, even when your sinful nature seems so apparent? And I wrote back to this person,

I want to, I want to read a little bit of what I wrote. I said, you'd be surprised at how many believers deal with this very same thing you described.

And I think this can help a lot of people because, and this is what

I wrote, I said, Christ wants us to rest in Him. We are called to repent of our sin. We are called to wage outright war with our sin, but we are not saved by that.

We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone. The comfort that we seek will never come from us being good enough for God.

I cannot stress this enough. You will never be good enough in your estimation. You'll never be good enough in God's estimation, and that's why

He doesn't, He does not require our goodness. He requires that we lay hold of the goodness of Christ, that we receive the righteousness of Christ, and we be found in Him, having a righteousness that is not our own, but a righteousness which comes through faith in Him.

And so, I'm not discounting the importance of sin. I'm not discounting the place of repentance in the life of the believer.

In fact, I'm doing a debate in a couple of weeks. Is repentance a part of the gospel? I absolutely believe repentance is a part of the gospel.

But at the end of the day, perfect repentance is not required for salvation any more than perfect faith is required for salvation, because neither of those things are possible for a person.

You will never have perfect faith, and you will never have perfect repentance. And this is why faith is a daily thing.

We believe, every day, we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and every day we repent, and every day we live a life of repentance, and we fight the battle of sin.

I love this illustration, and I hope maybe this will be helpful for you. The illustration is of a river that is flowing in one direction, and there's dead fish in the river, and they're all floating in the river.

Well, this is where we were before regeneration, before we were brought to life in Christ.

At a certain point, God gave us life. He regenerated our hearts, and then we are now not like the other fish who are going downstream dead.

We are now swimming upstream. We are now fighting the battle because we have been given life in Christ, and we're now swimming, but we're running into other dead fish, and we're swimming against a current that's pushing us the other way, and sometimes it can be hard, and sometimes we fail, and this is not an excuse.

It's just the reality. If any man says he has no sin, he's a liar, and if we do sin, we have an advocate with the

Father, Jesus Christ, and if we repent of our sin, and we confess it, the Bible says he will cleanse us of all unrighteousness, so my encouragement to you is to find your rest in Christ.

It must come from him, and this is going to move into the next question, so again, thank you for sending in that question.

The next question is, I recently came across a video where someone claimed that Reformed Theology teaches salvation in the perseverance of the

Saints, which means you're preserved by your works. Of course, this is a false accusation, and I promptly commented to correct this misrepresentation of fault of Reformed Theology.

This is the person's comment here. He says, I was wondering if you might be interested in addressing this topic, and he shared with me the video.

Well, I watched the first portion of the video, and the guy who was responding was responding to Jeff Durbin, and Jeff Durbin said this.

Jeff Durbin said that we are saved by grace through faith and not of works.

We are saved by faith alone, but faith that is true faith will never be alone, and I don't remember who the first person to say that is.

I've said it before. Many people who believe in Reformed Theology would say that genuine saving faith will never be devoid of works that accompany salvation.

We call these works fruit of repentance, and, of course, we're referring to James chapter 2.

James chapter 2 tells us there are going to be works that accompany genuine faith, and faith that is not genuine, which

James refers to as dead faith, will be marked by a faith that is only words.

James says, can that faith save you? And the insinuation of the question is no, that faith, the faith that is merely words, will not save, and so faith is going to produce in us a changed life.

It's going to produce in us a desire to follow after Christ, and this is where the accusation, well, how do you know you're doing enough?

And this kind of goes back to the last question. How do you know you're pleasing God? How do you know you're making it? How do you know you're going to you're going to to do enough good works?

And the answer is that misses the entire point, because while we say that salvation produces good works, we still are adamant that those good works do not in any way contribute to our salvation.

They are simply the fruit of the salvation that we receive.

I remember the William Tyndale movie, the actor who played in it was a

Hollywood actor, a great actor, and he played William Tyndale. He played he played the

Sheriff of Rottingham in the spoof Robin Hood Men in Tights.

So that's the actor, and I just can't think of his name right now. But he was playing William Tyndale.

William Tyndale was brought before the governing authority, and he was being accused of being a false teacher because he taught justification by faith.

And they said, do you believe a man is saved by faith apart from works? And again,

I remember this from the movie. I don't know that William Tyndale ever said this. I just know that it was in the movie, but it's absolutely true.

He said, the fruit of a tree does not What did he say? Goodness, now

I want to make sure I get the quote right. The fruit of the tree does not make the tree good or bad, but the fruit of the tree does show whether the tree is good or bad.

And I remember that line. First of all, it's just so well delivered by the actor.

He's a great actor. But the point of it is is the fruit, the fruit doesn't make the tree good.

But the fruit shows the tree. It is a byproduct. And so there is a sense in which we can say that there is value in what we do in that it as James says, it shows that our faith is is genuine and not merely words.

But then we get into the issue of, okay, well now I've got to be so rigorously introspective that I'm examining everything that I do.

And if I see anything that doesn't look like good works, it looks like bad, then I'm not saved. And we get into this whole circle of misery, trying to trying to determine our assurance based on what we do.

And again, this is the wrong way. We do not find our assurance in what we do. Our assurance has to be

Christ. We have to understand that our salvation is in Christ.

What he has done, his obedience, his work, is what is credited to us as righteousness.

Our works that flow out of that are merely the expression or the result of what has happened in our life.

And I want to say this about kind of more about this question in the video that went along with it.

The accusation against Reformed theology is that because we teach the perseverance of the saints, we're teaching justification by works.

That's not true. Perseverance of the saints simply says that a person who is genuinely born again, who has been given the gift of the

Holy Spirit of God, will continue in the faith and will continue in the faith imperfectly, because no one has perfect faith.

I mentioned that already, but will continue in the faith and will not apostatize. Because, and this is again, this is a doctrine among most

Reformed people, at least Calvinistic, particularly Baptists, we believe that there is something called eternal security, which means that if a person is genuinely saved, he will continue to be saved and someone says, well, what about the person who says he was saved, but then at a certain point rejects

Christ, becomes an apostate, meaning he abandons the faith. He turns his back on Christ and walks away.

Well, then we would say if that is the case and the person abandons the faith and is absolutely an apostate, that that person was never saved.

Things like, some of the confessions reference seasons of sin, where someone would fall into a time of sin.

And I think that, again, I think that that's possible for a believer to do. I think a believer can fall into a season of sin, even gross sin.

But I don't believe they would, are going to remain there, and there's some, you know, we can talk about lengths of time and things like that, but ultimately, the issue of perseverance of the

Saints is more about whether or not a person will continue in the faith or whether a person will abandon

Christ. It's one thing to say a person has fallen into a sin. It's another thing to say a person has refused to continue to believe in Christ.

And the person I always think about this, and it's a sad story, but Dan Barker, who was, he's one of the most, one of the most well -known atheists in the world today.

He does debates. He's very outspoken, and he was once a minister. In fact, if I remember correctly,

I think he was associated with Katharine Kuhlman, who was a basically like a female version of Benny Hinn.

And he would have at one point in his life confessed Jesus Christ as his Savior. I mean, he was going to be, he was in line to be a minister.

But now he's an atheist. He is an example of someone who confessed faith, but I don't believe truly possessed it.

I don't believe he had a genuine saving faith that came from being regenerated by the Spirit and being filled with the

Holy Spirit. I don't think that he had that. And so, and based upon his, the external reality,

I can say I think that that's the case. And so when we talk about perseverance of the Saints, that's what we're referring to.

Someone who abandons the faith and does not persevere in the faith has demonstrated that their faith is not genuine.

We're not saying that if a person falls into sin or struggles with sin or battles with sin or any of that, that means they're not a believer.

That's not, that's not the reality. It's the category of apostasy that really is the issue.

And so I hope that that demonstrates the distinction there. And again, when someone says, well, how do we, how do you know you're safe?

You're saved by trusting in what Christ did, not trusting in what you do. No matter how good your works are, no matter how faithful you are, no matter how much you attend church, none of that is going to save you.

The work of Christ ultimately is what saves you. It changes your life, and it should change your life, but it's not what saves you.

All right, and this goes into the next question. And that is, my question is this, how do you respond to the idea that the

Reformed understanding of unconditional election actually undermines assurance of salvation?

We just talked about this, but I want to read the question. I've seen this countless of times on YouTube, and I heard it from close friends who are a little less

Reformed than I am. My general approach is to say that I'm not super into overly introspective tendencies that are common in our tradition and would argue that the

Atonement is a bit more subjective than some make it out to be. Basically, I argue that one can pretty confidently know that he is elect because he's trusting in Jesus for his salvation and believes that he is the

Son of God. Am I wrong for maybe pushing back against the sort of introspection that seems to drive a lot of Reformed fruit -checking, and how would you respond to these claims?

Yes, I think, and this is why I wanted to put all these together, because I think they do all really kind of go together, and that is the question of, okay, should

I be looking at myself? Should I be inspecting my fruit to see if I'm saved?

The issue of this, and some of you are familiar with the history of this, so I don't want to belabor this too long, but there's a historical question here, and that's the question between what's become known as the

Lordship Salvation side versus the Carnal Christian side, and this is an issue which has given way even to now a new sort of argument whether or not the

Lordship side is justification by works, things like that. There's a lot of arguments going on, but I just want to give a sort of a history of that debate.

There was a very popular teaching that came into the church during the middle of the last century, the second half of the last century, where the idea was that you could be a

Christian and not have any change to your life. You could say, if you said you were a Christian, if you confessed to be a

Christian, no matter if your life continued with the same trajectory of sin that it was going in beforehand, that you could say as long as you said you were a

Christian, then that was it, and that became, and what the argument was for 1

Corinthians 3 was that if you were a Carnal Christian, because Paul says to the

Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 3, I think it is, he says, I can't speak to you as a spiritual,

I speak to you as carnal. And so people said, well, that must mean there's two types of Christians. There's carnal Christians, and then there's spiritual

Christians. And so we have to accept that there are people who are truly Christian, but who are carnal

Christians. I don't think that's Paul's argument there. I preach the first Corinthians. I have a whole sermon on it, and I'd be happy to send it to anybody who's interested.

If you are interested in that sermon, leave me a message below and I'll send it to you. But ultimately, the pushback against that primarily came from, like Dr.

John MacArthur, who wrote a book called The Gospel According to Jesus, I think was the first book on this issue.

Then it was The Gospel According to the Apostles, The Gospel According to Paul, Ashamed of the Gospel. There's several books that came out on this issue, and it was the issue of what he referred to as lordship salvation, that to truly be a believer,

Christ must also be your Lord, meaning you must submit to him in every area. And so the idea of having a carnal

Christian was an inappropriate category. Well, again, there are extremes.

I talked about this recently in my funeral message, or no, on my NT Wright Doug Wilson video,

I talked about the two ditches. There could be extremes on both sides, and there are extremes on the lordship side, which can lead to a hyper introspective view where you are basically looking at a workspace salvation, where what you do is going to save you, and ultimately, that can be very dangerous.

Again, I'm certainly not saying MacArthur teaches that, or any notable teachers would.

I'm just saying there's a ditch on the other side, and there's certainly a ditch on the... I think the carnal Christian itself is not good.

So either side, there can be some issues that you have to address, but ultimately, the question is the question of, well, should we be looking at our lives?

Well, the Bible tells us to examine ourselves. The Bible does tell us that we are to do things like make our calling in election, sure, right?

Like that we are to examine certain things. But I think the ultimate point of passages like that is asking the question of who or what are we trusting in?

Are we trusting in Christ, or are we trusting in what we're doing? Because I will say this, as bad as someone who is licentious is, and that's a person who's just given to sin and calling themselves a

Christian, but they're living a life of just pure sin, legalism is just as bad, and that's the person who says, look at what

I've done, and how I have accomplished this thing. Neither one is right. We must lay hold of Christ, and we must continue to lay hold of what he has done, and not what we are doing as a result.

What we are doing is important. What we are doing does matter, and I do believe Christ will change your life. And sometimes that's the very question

I ask people. When someone comes to me, and they're struggling with their assurance,

I'll ask them, how has Christ changed your life? It's amazing often how people can begin, even then, to say, you know what?

I used to have no desire for Christ, and now all I want to do is please him. I fail, and I'm struggling with my failures, but I have a desire to please the

Lord. And I will say, where do you think that desire came from? Where do you think that desire to please the

Lord, do you think that came out of your sinful flesh? Or do you think maybe, maybe, that's an evidence that you are his, that you desire him, and that you desire to please him.

And so again, when I ask somebody, how's Christ changed your life? I don't mean, you know, did you become perfect overnight?

Did you, you know, did you stop having, you know, times of anger?

Did you stop having, using bad language all the time? Or did you stop doing any of these terrible things? You know, a lot of times what

I'm saying is, did your affections change? I've told this before from the pulpit,

I don't know if I've ever said it on a podcast, but one of the things my professor used to say, Professor Jerry Powers, loved that man to death, and he said, when

I came to Christ, he gave me a new wanna. He says, what I want to do now is not what

I want to what I wanted to do before. I got a new wanna. And I tell you, if I ask somebody, how's

Christ changed your life? And they say, I got a new wanna. I mean, they wouldn't say it that way. But if they say my affections changed, my desires changed,

I want to be serving Christ. Man, that's huge.

That's a lot of value there. And there's something to say, hey, look, this is how Christ has changed me.

But again, at the end of the day, our assurance, our salvation is based on what he did, not on what we've done.

And so I continue to encourage people to find your comfort in Christ, find your rest in Christ, seek to do the things that Christ has called us to do, and repentance and faith, and acts of good works, and acts of repentance, all of those things are true.

What are the fruits of repentance? I preached a sermon on that recently. What does repentance look like? All those things are important. But you know, at the end of every worship service, our church gathers around the

Lord's table, and the reason why we gather around the Lord's table is to remember what

Christ did, not to celebrate what we did, not to show off, hey, look at us, but to say, you know what, in the final analysis, to quote my favorite teacher,

Dr. R .C. Sproul, in the final analysis, when I stand before my God, it will not be what have you done, but will be, have you trusted in what

Christ has done? That's how we have our assurance in what he did.

So I hope that's helpful for you. I hope answering these emails is an encouragement to you. So if you have an email, please send me an email, and if it's something that I can answer on the show,

I'll do it. If it's something that I can send you an email back, I'll try to do that. And the more emails

I get, the harder this gets, but you know what, I'm gonna try to start doing these as much as I need to, so whenever I get enough emails to make a video,

I'll make a video. So keep sending them in, and I'll keep trying to answer them, and if you like this video, again, hit that thumbs up button.

If you didn't, hit the thumbs down button twice. Leave me your comments below. I'm always interested in what you have to say, even if I can't always respond to every comment,

I do try to read them, and I'm very thankful for them, thankful for your interaction. So thanks for watching.