The Victory Spoils of Christ

Ephesians 4, 1 through 16. Therefore I, the prisoner in the

Lord, exhort you to walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being diligent to keep the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace.

There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one

Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.

But to each one of us, grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore, it says, when he ascended on high, he led captive a host of captives and he gave gifts to men.

Now this expression, he ascended, what does it mean except that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth?

He who descended is himself also he who ascended far above all the heavens so that he might fill all things.

And he himself gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of the service to the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain the unity of the faith and of the full knowledge of the

Son of God to a mature man to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ so that we are no longer to be children tossed here and there by waves and carried by every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming, but speaking truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head that is

Christ from whom the whole body being joined and held together by what every joint supplies according to the properly measured working of each individual part causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

Let's pray. Lord, you are merciful and kind and gracious and we want to worship you intimately this morning.

We want to hear your word. We want to be transformed by your word. Be with your servant

Josh this morning as he leads us. And Lord, thank you that we get to be a part of this marvelous kingdom that you are building.

And may we confess sin to one another and be healed. May we confess sin to you and be strengthened.

And Lord, may we learn to love you extremely, extremely well.

By Jesus' name we pray, amen. If you guys have read ahead in 1 Corinthians, you would see that there are a lot of strange things coming up, especially to our modern way of thinking.

There is a lot of talk about prophecy, talk about tongues. Things are mentioned just naturally.

Like there are apostles, there are prophets. There are people who need to speak in tongues only if there's an interpreter there.

And today I think that we look at that with a lot of skepticism. And so I have scrapped a sermon.

I had one written a couple weeks ago. I knew that Corey was up last week. And then on Monday I came in and started looking and said that's not it.

What it was was a sermon that was called A Primer on Spiritual Gifts.

And what it was going to be was explaining four positions on it and how those positions get there.

And I don't think that's where to start. I think where to start is why the church has to have spiritual gifts.

They are assumed everywhere in scripture. They are not divided in the list. We get lists of things interspersed together, helps, teaching, alongside, miracles, healing, and prophecy.

And yet as we are on a quest to make doctrine, as oftentimes we are reactive to very bad behavior, we put divisions that may not be there.

This is the reason that I wanted to preach First Corinthians, I can tell you.

And this has been building for a long time. This has been about a three year journey for me in understanding that a lot of my priors were based on just no doctrine, just tradition.

And so we start here and what I want to do in the main point of today is what happens when the church has spiritual gifts that are being exercised?

What is the result of that? And I want to put that against the grandiose vision that Paul wrote about in Ephesians four that talks about how things look a mess, doctrine seems to be lost, and at the end of the day what's going to happen is

Christ the head is going to bring it all back together. And friends, one of the things to cut to the chase is that a church that has the spiritual gifts being exercised is a church that is unified.

Everywhere that the scripture speaks of spiritual gifts, what goes right alongside of that is unity.

We live in troubled times today. And we are really in many ways in the heart of the

Bible Belt in Northwest Arkansas. And we've seen it. If you've grown up in this area, you've seen large cultural differences happen, huge differences in the way just the land is.

It's kind of discombobulating to drive around and see like, man, for my whole life there was absolutely nothing here.

And now there's subdivisions, gas stations, all of this stuff.

And I think as the Bible Belt has wasted away, it has left Christians looking around, trying to figure out what's going on.

Where did our culture go? See, churches today, and you guys will know this is true, churches today are more characterized by their fighting than they are their

God -given unity. And where that is true within the local expression, it's even more true when we look at the lens and we see the groups of churches and how we fight and get on the island and hole up in our enclaves and throw rocks at each other instead of trying to work together.

In the midst of the fighting, what has happened is counterintuitively, while we went fighting with each other supposedly for the doctrine, during that time we have also tolerated unruly men who come in and whole traditions of the faith have been steered into the rocks, making shipwrecks of many's faith.

We know this. Methodists, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and let's be honest, most of the

Presbyterians have tolerated and then promoted feminism, which then bloomed into full -scale promotion of sodomy.

Who would have thought that possible in the early 1900s? No one. No one would have thought that possible.

We sung a song this morning blessed by the beginner of the Methodist church.

It's a great song. I got choked up trying to sing the third verse. The imagery of it always just blows me away that the dungeon of light shown through in the dungeon.

Is that not what it is to come to faith? What an amazing thing. But in the goal to look more like the world, they went to places they never could have imagined going.

Meanwhile, there's another offshoot. This is our Pentecostal friends and assemblies of God. What they've done in many situations is they have diminished doctrine in the service of chasing an experience, like a church camp high, heightened emotion to neglect or wave at core doctrines of Christianity.

And what has resulted is disordered madness, just absolute craziness.

And we like to point our fingers at all of them. We're not gay like the Anglicans. We're not stupid rubes like the

Pentecostals, right? But here in conservative Baptist land, we have in a different way reacted to the

Pentecostals. And we look to explain spiritual gifts as being naturalistic expressions of personality and talents.

We determine spiritual gifting by personality test. Have you taken the Myers -Briggs?

You might be gifted to mercy. Not, these are not personality traits.

They are not natural talents. They are spiritual gifts. And so the outflow of that is that we are skeptical, very, very skeptical of when anything happens that cannot be explained by the principles of the enlightenment or materialism.

With this going on, if the scripture talks repeatedly about spiritual gifts bringing unity of the body, many members, one body, with this going on, it's no wonder that we are more characterized by division and church splits than we are by unity and organization around the core doctrines of Christianity.

To put a point on it, charismatics have chased a spiritual high, often divorced from doctrine, while we have tried to create a naturalistic faith more informed by the enlightenment than by scripture to turn the faith into a set of intellectual and academic lists that we must assent to.

If that doesn't describe the Reformed Church to a T, I don't know what does. There's a set of doctrines that you must assent to.

And if you do that, you're a super Christian because you're smarter than everybody else. Can you believe?

Can you believe those idiots over there who don't believe in Calvinism? Have you ever seen these wacky dispensationalists with their charts all over the place?

And we look and we go, that's not historic, not confessional, you're out of the kingdom, or maybe you're in the kingdom, but you are the enemy that we have to fight and not the enemies that are ravaging at the gates all the time because as I've often said, it's much more safe to shoot

Nerf guns at each other than it is to get in the stray fire of what's going on outside where they really do want to kill the morals of Christianity.

What's come of this is we have warring camps, warring camps, and there are good and there are bad arguments.

And what has happened is we have used the topic of spiritual gifts to separate and divide.

And you know this is true, right? We can't be like those guys because they're a little charismatic.

We can't be like those guys, they're the frozen chosen. And what we do is we hole up and we sell tickets to conferences to throw rocks at people who differ on this topic.

I don't know what's going on today. I've tried to figure this out. I've prayed about it. It seems like we are in a time of silence.

There will be a lot more taught on this as the days go on. It seems like in many ways as the church has turned her back on Christ in large scale in America that we have seen a ceasing of God speaking.

And there are pockets that blow up but we seem to see a coldness, right?

And it shouldn't be that way. Jesus said the fields are white. But what we've missed is that our core doctrines and our academic understanding is not going to change people's hearts.

Only the spirit regenerates hearts. And I think that we've forgotten in our materialism that salvation is an utterly miraculous thing that happens.

That's why that song is so amazing to me is that even as a seven year old sitting by a pond in Cedarville there was a flash of light across the dungeon and I realized that I was hell bound.

I realized that I was at odds with my creator. And because of God's grace, he gave me a new heart and I bent the knee to my

Lord 38 years ago. And he has held me fast that whole time.

Why has that happened? Is it not because of the power of the Holy Spirit? It's not because of my willpower.

I can't even control it when ice cream's around. What makes me think that I could be allegiant to a

God that I can't see when I can't even control junk food? I don't have the willpower.

I don't have the mental fortitude. I don't have the discipline. What's happened is that God changed my heart.

And everyone in here, you have the same story if you're of God. And you know that you don't follow him because of your own ingenuity and yet we often think that we accomplish things for the kingdom because of how smart we are and because of how naturally gifted we are.

So you've seen all of this. Some of you in here, I know this is a hot button topic for many people because there has been a lot of really bad behavior.

If you've read Strangefire or watched the conference, if you've come from a charismatic background, you will see that the arguments in this domain are always lobbing bombs at the really bad behavior of the other side.

And we never really talk about the issue with good faith people who want to know what scripture says.

The question I have for you is A, do you want spiritual gifts? And B, if you get spiritual gifts, are you gonna be a glory hog and say that you're doing the work, praise be to you?

Because if you do that, then we will have the good kind of division in the church, the kind that Paul describes as separating those who are unworthy and unaccountable from those that are worthy and that are cutting the word straight and are doing the work of Christ.

This has to happen. There has to be good division and there has to be a cutting off of the bad division, the bad division where we are puffed up in pride.

And so let's get to the text. Point number one this morning is spiritual gifts always result in unity.

Anywhere you look in the New Testament, you just heard it read, I'm gonna give you a couple other places, the spiritual gifts, when they are practiced in faith, within prescribed order, will strengthen the church.

They will bring in disciples and they will ultimately bring unity to the body. And look, just as an aside, not a note that occurs to me, the most common reason

I have heard for people leaving churches, and I've been in churches for a long time, the most common reason that people give is,

I just don't feel very connected. It's number one by a mile. That's why people leave. And it makes me wonder as I look, because my first instinct now is to not throw stones at them.

Back in the old days, what I would do is like, well, did you come to any of the stuff? And just to be fair, the answer was almost always no.

Okay? However, there's something deeper that's going on. Because what happens is, when the spirit is moving in a church, then what's gonna happen is the spirit brings the body together under our one head.

And we don't do that. See, that's where church is not about friendships. Church is not about social clubs.

It's not like we're getting here at the, what do they call it, at the Moose Lodge, all right? We're not a bunch of people hanging out in the

Moose Lodge talking about all the cool stuff that's going on. That's not what the church is about. The church is a body that is bound together by the power of the

Holy Spirit. And where the Holy Spirit is not at work, it's gonna be a lot of different people, a lot of separate people.

The church is not your answer for friendship. The church is not your answer for family. The church is not your answer for social fabric.

True enough, those things come with the church and they are part of it. But the church's mission is to make disciples.

And the only way that can possibly happen is through the work of the Holy Spirit. There is no other way.

Have you ever tried to regenerate someone's heart? The only tool we have is to try to emotionally manipulate or to try to argue them into the kingdom.

And it doesn't work because you can see it when the Spirit changes somebody because He takes up residence and He owns them.

And there's no looking back. Think to your salvation. You know this. And we miss this so often.

Romans 12, three. For through the grace given to me, I say to each one among you, not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, but to think so as to have sound thinking as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.

Do you realize that you're saved because God has allotted you a measure of faith?

You didn't do it. You know this, Calvinists, you didn't do it. But how often do you think you did?

I think there's a lot less objective, consistent Calvinists than we would like to believe ourselves.

We always want to come in and take the glory for even the very basic start of our faith.

God gave you faith. It was a gift of His grace. He gave you a measure of it. And so the warning that always comes with spiritual gifts is do not think too highly of yourself.

Now listen, if your spiritual gift was to live out your natural talent, why would you think higher of yourself, right?

Look, I had some natural gifting at playing basketball, and it didn't take very long for me to find people who had more natural gifting at basketball, and they would beat my brains in.

Cooper beat me and Jake with my sister on his team. Cooper is much more talented at basketball than me, and it can be a humbling experience to see that happen.

But what happens is, oftentimes, is that we lift up people and we think, man, this is a spiritual giant, and we raise up the man.

And what happens when we do that is we introduce division into the church because we forget who gave the gifts.

Who gave the gifts? Who is the power of the Christian faith? We just read it. There is one body and one spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling, one

Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father, of all who is over all and through all and in all.

Are you getting that? Do you hear that? There is one rally cry of the church.

But to each one of us, grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. Do you understand that?

We're not gonna be all gifted equally within the body. We're gonna be gifted in different amounts.

And what's the first thing a human being does when they see someone who has a little bit more gifting than someone else?

We cut them down. It's what we do. Because we always try to make our stick longer by making somebody else's shorter.

It is human nature. Why do we think we gossip and have divisions? It's because of our sinful pride.

It roots out of looking at someone else and going, I want that, I'm envious of that. And that's how the spiritual gifts that should bring all glory to Christ can bring madness like what is happening in the church at Corinth.

You didn't do that. And see, oftentimes what we'll do is we'll see different measures. And let's be real, guys.

I'm in the position right now of the one that people get the most jealous of, right?

Wow. And I'm so glad so many of you guys know me so well. Look, I pray to be a godly man.

But at the same time, I'm a deeply flawed man. And I don't think people are hanging around me thinking that I'm gonna pray that the rain would stop like Elijah and that it would stop.

And here's what I understand. Elijah had a greater measure of gifting than I did.

So do I hate Elijah? Do I hate Paul? Can I imagine writing something like Ephesians 4? No, I can't imagine it.

I read him and it just blows me away. I can't imagine it. But Paul would tell me right away, this is the

Holy Spirit. He didn't even do it. The Spirit used him to glory to Christ that that's what he does.

And what we do oftentimes is we look at this different measuring. And we look at things getting weird. And it's especially the out front gifts that we like because we want everybody to look at us and go what a man of God that is.

And you only get that with the out front speaking gifts. And so what's going on in Corinth is what have they elevated?

Tongues, prophecy, miracles, right? Can you imagine if you healed somebody, what would happen in your life?

If I just walked over and you had been struggling for years with an illness and I laid a hand on you and you were healed, what would happen naturally in our human minds?

You'd go, oh, rice is a healer. And you'd be reverence, right?

And everybody would be calling me to go over to their house to pray because that's what happens. Because those are the public things.

It's the Spirit of God that does things. And understand this guys, the Spirit of God is not against himself.

So what happens is when we start to divide over these things, we are working contra the

Spirit of God. We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which

God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. How does God know what we're going to do? Because he laid out all of the works before us.

He created us with those works in view. He created you to do the works that he had already appointed for you to do before you'd ever been born.

He knows every decision you're gonna make. And in fact, he ordained and purposed every decision you're gonna make.

You're not surprising God. How does that make you feel in the Pridometer? He already accomplished everything that he's going to accomplish through you because God stands outside of time, transcendent.

What are you worried about brother? You didn't do it, you can't thwart it. Your inactivity is not going to stop

God and your activity is not going to accelerate God. You're totally at his disposal.

We are vessels. Paul would say janky, empty clay vessels.

Not good to look at, but what is going on is that so that no one would see the clay vessel and go, what an amazing piece of pottery that is.

No, they're like, whoa, that looks like a first grader got that on a wheel for the first time and it's got a little bit of crack in it, but I see something shining out of that and what's shining out is the gospel.

Right, that's the idea. That's what Paul wants us to think about when we look at ourselves and regard ourselves.

So understand this, if we're going to have the spiritual gifts, and I pray all the time, look, the mission of this church, we will get there, it is to make disciples, that's the mission of every church.

If we're going to do that, we're going to have to see spiritual gifts being exercised by all the members of the body.

You don't get to sit this one out. If you sit it out, the body is crippled. You might be the right foot.

Can you imagine living your life without your right foot? It's brutal. You might be the pinky finger.

You're not going to be able to grip as well if you don't have it. Who knows which part of the body you are, but if you are selfishly abstaining from exercising the gifts that have been given to you, then we cannot work at the full capacity.

So there is this tension, right? God has laid it out for you beforehand, but also we are the means of how he works and we are to work obediently, we are to be faithful.

See, humility for us, and humility is what brings us to unity in the gifts, humility comes not only from understanding our position in salvation, but also understanding the origination of our works, where we see disunity.

Have any of you guys seen it? You don't have to raise your hands, it'd be too depressing. Have you seen disunity in the church?

Have you seen awful fighting and quarrels? If you've seen it, definitionally, what has happened is that the people have usurped glory in our works.

We despise the gifts, or it's a combination of the two. Either we're glory hogging, we're trying not to exercise gifts, or it's a combination of both.

See, if we're unified, it shows that we are humble, and the desire to walk in the works laid out before us has been given, that's what we should want.

Understand this point too, spiritual gifts are the lifeblood of the church's effectiveness.

From the very beginning days of this church, Bart and I would tell one another and remind one another that we're a bunch of idiots that are on a boat, and we're like holding cloths up, and we can't make the boat go anywhere unless the wind fills the sails.

The wind has to fill the sails, there's nothing we can do. But here's the good news, church.

Here's the good news, Christ won already. Did you catch it in Ephesians four? It's quite grandiose, is it not?

Let me read it. Look, people make this an academic challenge, don't do that this morning. I want this one to hit your emotions,

I want this to wash over you, and think about what Paul is saying here. Therefore it says, this is the scripture, when he ascended on high, he led captive a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.

Now this expression, he ascended, what does it mean except that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth?

He who descended is himself also he who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.

And he himself gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers.

Parallel verse Colossians 2 .15, having disarmed the rulers and authorities, he made a public display of them, having triumphed over them in him.

Do you know what Paul's talking about in Colossians? He's talking about the demons and Satan, and all of, all of those powers of the air.

There's a fascination with them this week, is there not? As the UFO files have been released.

Wow, we may not be alone. Yeah, we know, there are demonic and angelic powers that are in the second heaven.

The scripture speaks of this. There's no surprise to this. And guess what? Christ has claimed victory over all of them, and he has put them on display.

Do you, can you imagine, can you imagine being a demon who fell from heaven, who had the judgment of God put on him, and all of his purpose, all the time for millennia, is to thwart the promise of the

Messiah. And can you imagine how those demons felt when Christ rose out of the grave, and then he preached to the captives?

Can you imagine being there? The captives in chains as the

Lord of glory descends and he preaches to them, and he leads them out.

And I believe that what happened to Sheol is emptied on that part, and they are in the presence of God.

There's debate on that. It's an academic text. But let me say this. Christ is victorious.

And what happened is, Paul is playing on the Greco -Roman world, because what would happen is when a great king would win victory, he would parade it in front of everybody on his way back to his stronghold.

There would be banners flying, there would be parades, there would be flowers being given, and then he would carry behind him all of the victory spoils of his military conquest.

To shame his enemy, to accentuate his strength.

And then what he would do is he would take those victory spoils, and he would give them out to his loyal men.

Would you be rich from fighting and being a general with the king who won? The answer is yes.

Friends, that's what Paul is saying, is that we who are saved, we who have been elect before the beginning of time, we who through his foreknowledge were chosen to be inheritors of his, we have been given the victory spoils of his victory over the authorities and principalities.

And what he has done is he has given his people the victory spoils so that it would put on display the futility of his enemies.

And you know what these victory spoils are? They are first salvation, but then they are second gifts.

He has given us spiritual gifts because he has plundered the earthlies and the heavenlies.

All authority on heaven and earth is given to him. And he gives his people tremendous gifts.

We see it in context, do we not? He gave some to be apostles, some to be evangelists, some to be preachers and teachers.

See, the church needs a variety of gifts. We read that this morning, did we not? If the church is going to function, if the church is going to operate, we can't just all have the gift of preaching.

Can you imagine how frustrated everybody would be? Look, I've been in a situation where I was a little frustrated, okay?

What happens is we are given different gifts and those gifts are held in tension with each other, but also they accentuate, build and encourage each other.

It's an amazing tapestry. It's just like how your body works. We are majestically and wondrously made.

When you study biology, even on the micro level or the macro level, you're going to see that there is a design that is in play that shows the glory of the creator.

It's amazing how your body works, how you involuntarily blink to replenish your eyes.

It's an amazing thing. Every member of this body has a gift that's given and it's given in different measures, four different times and we need you, we need you.

See, any member who is not exercising their gift is depriving the body and inhibiting the work.

You're not gonna figure it out by introspecting. You're not gonna go online today and type into Google or chat

GPT, what is my spiritual gift? That's not how it happens.

We don't get it through introspection. We don't get it from personality tests. It is not natural.

Spiritual gifts are gifts of God. They are supernatural, even the ones that we think we understand.

Do you understand this? You hear one, the gift of mercy. Have any of you guys ever met someone who has an overflow of the gift of mercy?

I have and here's the thing. When we see someone's mercy, what we do is we go, man, that's a really soft -hearted person.

They were not soft -hearted before they were given the gift of mercy by grace having their reprobate, rebellious heart changed by God.

There's no one who naturally loves God's people. Did you understand that? You love

God's people because he's given you a heart to love God's people. You're not born that way.

You're not born merciful to the church. You're not born with the gift of administration for the church.

That's given by the spirit. It's not through an incantation.

It's not through enlightenment. What will happen is that you should ask people what they see in your life.

How is your Christian walk going? And people will give you some insight. And then when you start to understand this, when you start to live in the word, when you start to live under teaching and you start to be sanctified, looking more and more like Christ, you're gonna start acting more and more like Christ.

He's not divided against himself and so you're going to start living out the life. And friends, I'm gonna tell you something in this place.

It should shame us, but it should more than that, it should excite us. If God pours out his spiritual gifts and we earnestly seek to exercise them, let me tell you guys something.

Crazy things are gonna happen here. They're not natural. Is anything natural that's going on in Corinth?

Have you read it? They've got all these things going on, but in the midst of all of it, God's spirit is poured out on this church and they need to have order.

They've forgotten cardinal things. But in the midst of that, the

Gentiles are coming in at Corinth and they're amazed at what they see. There's stuff that we would be amazed by.

There's stuff that we would, much of us, be skeptical of. But what will happen is if we are not united in Christ, these gifts will cause us to envy, to elevate, to despise, and then when we despise, we start to passively withhold them.

Nobody notices I'm not doing anything at all. This is how the gifts of service are despised.

They don't get noticed, because we think it's about us. We have to exercise spiritual gifts for the body to accomplish your mission.

Did you hear it? Verse 16, from whom the whole body being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

Never forget the love. The Corinthians did. But what's going to happen is when every member, when every part is working in the

Spirit, they're going to be joined together. How are they gonna be joined together? It's about you holding barbecues together?

No. We're gonna be joined together through the work of the Holy Spirit, which is manifest every week right here at the table.

First Corinthians 10, it's one of the functions of the means of grace of communion is that the

Spirit bonds us together through the table because we come to one place and we give the same confession.

As that happens, you're going to see the church start to build itself up in love.

And what we're gonna do is we're gonna cry out to God and say, thank you so much. Thank you so much.

See, the church, we'll see it very soon. Primarily, the church has a calling to love and we work out that love for God and for one another.

This is the law, right? The law is summed up, love God and love your neighbor. And if that happens, we're gonna have a church that seems to be out of our control.

Seem like it freewheeling, right? It's gonna seem like it's out of our control and it's going to push our faith and it will ultimately leave us with something that I took from the men's retreat a couple of weeks ago.

It was from the nighttime service and this is the thing, and I want to have this. It will leave us with awe and wonder at what

God has done. Don't you want that for CBC? Don't you want to look back three months, six months and be filled with awe and wonder at what

God has done, not only in your life, but what he's done through the life of the church? We have many, many reminders in the

Old Testament of the sovereignty of God to protect and prosper his people. We cling to those today.

We have many examples in church history of protection and provision of the church.

The church should have by rights been dead many times. And we see dark days today, but there have been darker days.

And Christ will sustain us. So let's round it into form here and talk about the real specific application.

And I'm gonna leave you with questions and maybe a little bit of disruption this morning.

I'm gonna try to break some stuff. Trust me, the teaching and the order is coming.

Corinthians is about order, okay? My purpose is not to tie this all up this morning.

So here we go. Let's remember, my dad reminds me often, we need to have this often in front of us.

How can you go where you're going if nobody knows where you're going? So here we go. The mission of CBC.

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the

Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of age.

From the very beginning, the power of the church is only the power of God that is executed through the

Holy Spirit. He will send you his comforter. He will help you.

That's what the disciples heard. And he did. He did. So what we are hoping to do here is we are hoping to accomplish this mission so much as God has called it to do it by a king who has authority every single place in the cosmos and outside of the cosmos.

That's pretty grand, is it not? That the king has given us this mission, to make disciples.

And it can be scary. It can be true. But if we are to accomplish this mission, there is a key thing.

And it will start to, you'll start to understand why this is the key thing. We are only to fear

God. If you fear anything else, repent.

We're not to fear anything else. And we will be tempted to fear other things.

But what does it mean to fear only God? Let me put a little meat on that. If we are to fear only

God, that means that we should fear disobedience. We should fear it. You should be afraid of disobeying

God. You should fear blasphemy. You should fear ascribing to God something that is not of God.

You should be afraid of that. You should be sober -minded. You should test that. You should fear faithlessness.

You should fear not believing. But what you should never fear is stepping out in obedience.

How did it work for our cloud of witnesses when they stepped out in obedience? Over and over and over and over in Scripture.

We know their names today because they stepped out in obedience. And we are here today because God used them as the means of your salvation through the writing of Scripture.

He didn't need them, but he used them. Here's the vision of CBC. Let me read it in its entirety.

Our vision at Covenant Baptist Church is to be a church that becomes a replicating church. We desire to train and develop qualified men into eldership so that we can joyfully commission and support new churches, emphasizing

Northwest Arkansas first, but eventually extending the vision to the ends of the earth.

We believe this to be the pattern of the New Testament apostolic churches who appointed elders and went from city to city to be starting new churches.

We must be a church who is faithful to God's word, intense in our prayer and discipleship, and dedicated to the mission of discipling the nations.

We believe firmly that the church is the primary method by which God has and will continue to build his kingdom.

So let me ask you a couple of questions. Do we need full exercising of the spiritual gifts to raise up elders who will go do the work of planting, discipling, and growing?

Do we need some that are given as preachers and teachers, some that are given as apostles, some that are given as prophets?

Do we need that? Is that what Paul's talking about in the New Testament? I think we do.

I think we need that. I think we need different ministries that are all given by the same

God. Let me ask this. Do we really believe that the pattern of the New Testament church is the pattern for us?

Or are we in a different period? Is how they did it the way we're supposed to do it?

Or have we evolved? It's a question that needs serious examination. Should we be like Titus on Crete?

Or should we be more like Nahum or Acts 29? It's a good question.

And I'm not strawmanning people. I think we have to ask that. Is the church really the primary means by which

God will disciple the nations? All right, let me lower the boom here. Here we go. What are the gifts that we need?

I've said we need them. I've said we need unity in them. Here is the undivided list from Scripture.

Here we go. We need apostleship, prophecy, teaching, evangelism, pastoring or shepherding, service or ministry, exhortation, encouragement, giving, leadership through administration and governance, mercy, helps, faith, which is special faith, healing, miracles, distinguishing of spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues, word of wisdom, word of knowledge, hospitality, celibacy.

These are every gift that is given in the New Testament. Now let me, before you get all,

I can feel it, right? We're in a stream here, okay? Let me ask this question. Can you even begin to imagine a church who is using all of these gifts in unity and they're using them with order, trust, fellowship, church discipline and truth with love and humility standing above all of them?

Can you even imagine that? I don't know if we can, to be honest.

I really don't know. But let me paint that picture. Let's say that in some measure, again,

I'm trying to break things, right? That whole list, let's say that those are being practiced and that we love each other and that there is order and there is unity.

In that environment, do you think the lost would come in? Do you think you would be edified, confident, courageous, bold, and zealous?

Would it help your faith if you saw stuff like that? Would you fear man if you were in a church like that?

Would you? Would you be in despair? Would you be blackpailing, strolling the internet, going, man, we're all gonna die?

I can't believe Trump did this. Can you believe what the Democrats did? Would you be doing that if you saw this happening in a church?

Let me ask you this even more poignantly. Would you hate other churches? God has given us commands and rules for order that can result in divisions that are good for the body as it shows one approved.

And it can cause chaos if we don't use God's order to adjudicate conflicts and discerning things.

We have to get back to the basics of order, the basics of the Christian faith if we're going to complete the mission.

The most basic thing of all, and I want to leave you with this as I leave you with some discomfort. I can see it on some people's faces, right?

As I leave you with some discomfort, let me ask you this. Primarily, do we have a dependence on prayer that God would use us as instruments to display his glory to the nations?

Because if not, why not? That's me too. It's very tempting first thing in the morning to look at my phone first thing.

You know what would be better? Is to pray that God would show his glory through me that day by proclaiming his gospel and by living a life that raises in others the question, what is the hope that this guy has?

Are you living that life? Are you praying that prayer? Friends, I covet your prayers for this church, but it helps you, does it not?

If we're a church of prayer for these things, it helps you. And we will be typified by what we all want.

I know you want this. You want to love one another. That's what every human being wants.

Every human primarily, gutterally, almost like primally wants to be known and loved.

And if you're known and loved, you have tremendous confidence with the one who knows you and loves you.

That's why marriages can be strong. And guess what? Christ knows you and he loves you.

And it didn't stop there. He gave you gifts. So as we go through the next few weeks, let that be your prayer, that we would exercise gifts, that we would have order, that we would have discernment, that we would have wisdom.

Let's pray. Let's pray. Lord, your scripture confronts us.

It takes down lofty arguments. It disarms rulers and principalities.

Lord, you have subjected them to mockery, but not us. We are not high enough to mock them, but through your name,

Lord, they have been displayed as what they are, as rebels, as those who would reach for glory and fall in the effort.

Lord, I pray that we would, at this church, that we would be your descendants. Lord, that we would not reach for our own glory, but instead that we would try to display your glory.

Lord, I pray that we would be a church that reaches the lost, that we would stop the infighting with other churches that does more to shame us than it does to edify us.

Lord, that we would look at your people with love, that we would start to be characterized again by people who love the brothers.

Lord, I pray that you would start to join together what has been divided and broken. And Lord, that we would be peacemakers.

Lord, help us to not be proud. Help us to not be selfish. Help us to not be arrogant. Help us to not elevate things that ought not be elevated.

And Lord, most of all, we pray that we would be faithful. Lord, that you would hold us fast, that you would minister to our souls.

Lord, so that we would be a light to those who do not have the hope that you have given us. We pray these things in your name.