What is the Church, Part 2

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ChumbaCasino .com. No purchase necessary. Voidware prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. Today on The Wrap Report, we are going to cover part two in our series on the church.

And today we're going to continue where we left off, but we're going to look at the medieval church, get into some details, give you really a historical view of the church at the time of what we might call the

Middle Ages or Dark Ages. Going to give you a lot of history. This is going to be really cool for those of you history buffs out there.

But what we want to do is show you the things that were going on in the church at that time and how that affects what we call the church.

Coming your way right now on The Wrap Report. Welcome to The Wrap Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to The Wrap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport.

And I'm joined with Bud Alheim, who is down suffering in the cold weather of sunny Florida.

Oh, 60 degrees today. I woke up in teens.

I'm hating it right now. But I sound a little bit different. We talked about this before we went on.

And for folks, so you can know, I'm in the process of moving and I've discovered that one of the things that gave me great audio quality was 8 ,000 books.

And they're off the shelves. And now my voice is bouncing off of the walls.

I actually put two throw pillows in front of the microphone so it maybe absorbs some of it and doesn't sound too much echoey.

So please bear with us as this is going to be in the new sound, unfortunately, for a little bit till we can sell this place and move.

But realize books do absorb a lot of the sound. Well, let's just hope that their absence for acoustical absorption doesn't translate into affecting your theological acumen.

Oh, I was afraid you were going to say that the absence of the books in this room would somehow make it to your room.

But I'd come up there and get them. But it's too cold and I don't have a parka.

Yeah, we packed 55 boxes of books yesterday. And it really wasn't me.

I had friends that came over, a couple, and they did 55 boxes all by themselves.

It was amazing. But a friend of mine and I packed like 10, 12 boxes of the books that didn't fit on the shelves.

And I have two more bookcases to go. So we're thinking it's going to be about 70 to 80 boxes of books, maybe even more, because I still have another bookcase to go that's in another room.

But with that aside, Bud, I sent out an email asking folks for some feedback.

And I thought some of this may be encouraging to folks, so I thought maybe we could go through a bit of the feedback I got.

Yeah, sure. So I sent out an email that basically was looking for people who are tied to the ministry, and I said from time to time

I'd like to get an idea of how our work is impacting those that we serve, and could people take a couple minutes, hit reply, and let us know how

Striving for Eternity has had an impact on their life. If anyone listening, if you want to, you can feel free.

Just email info at strivingforeternity .org. That's info at strivingforeternity .org.

Email us. Let us know your feedback. We love to hear your feedback. That's why we love reading reviews.

When people leave reviews for us, that helps us to know how this is having an impact on people.

We really don't get to know otherwise. So please let us know. And we got some feedback.

This first one is from John. He says, it is indeed a high time to inform you that the title of your ministry is appealing to many

African souls. Striving for Eternity is a,

I think it's rear call, but I'm not sure that's what he meant, but is a rear call as we, probably rare call is probably what he meant, a rare call as we hear sermons from different ministries in Kenya.

If you could share, if you could share or you had already shared how

Christians could strive for eternity, it would be better our side of Kenya once more. And so there's two things.

We actually had a podcast episode that Bud and I did on why striving for eternity.

And we have a blog post on the website at strivingforeternity .org. Again, saying why the name striving for eternity.

And really it's because we want folks to have that, and I forget the who said it.

I think it might have been Jonathan Edwards or someone that he quoted that having eternity stamped on the inward sides of our eyelids.

In other words, we should be going about our day thinking about eternity in all we do.

Nathan had sent in and said, being even a small part of the ministry is exciting.

I pray we can make a bigger impact. Keith, and when he says Keith, he's speaking of one of the podcasters at the

Christian podcast community. This is one of the newer ones that we have, and so he's speaking about their podcast in here.

I guess I should make that clear for folks. Their podcast is called

Quest for Truth. So he says, Keith was telling me our downloads have multiplied,

I think, 10 times since we've joined—he said SFE really means Christian podcast community.

That's huge. I pray God uses us. And they're a really interesting podcast, but I don't know if you've had a chance to listen to theirs.

They do some interesting things as far as they do live dramatizations and things like that, and they have a teaching too that they do.

The thing that people probably wouldn't be able to pick up on is Keith is completely blind and he does all the audio editing.

He does website design. I'm amazed with the guy. A really sweethearted gentleman.

So that's from him. Another one that we got was from Alan, and this really touched me. I want to go through two more, but I actually got way more than I expected.

My email actually started coming in like—I was like, whoa, okay, I didn't expect that many, like really quick.

So we'll spread them out and read several of them, but here's one that really touched me. It's from someone named

Alan, and I remember this phone call he's going to refer to, but he says, Good evening, Pastor Andrew. Thank you very much for your email, and I hope and pray you're doing well.

Your ministry has impacted my life in a big way. I called you when I was questioning my salvation and was in fear that I somehow fell out of the

Lord's grasp. Your encouragement and practical advice has been instrumental as I strive to walk closer with the

Lord. How I feel daily does not change the fact that I have been chosen by the

Lord to be His and never to be abandoned.

Your book, What Do We Believe?, is the most insightful book I have ever read that addresses the basic and critical areas of our faith.

I read it aloud to my wife, and we are both blessed and challenged by the depth that you have shared with respect to sanctification, glorification, eternity, and more.

Of course, you know more. You wrote it. Smile. That's tremendous.

Praise God, that's good. He says, We greatly encourage your prayers and encouragement as we've had some major family stresses, a crisis with two of our children in a recent day.

So if you guys could think about praying for Alan. But yeah, what he said about the book was very touching, and I remember the phone call.

He called up the ministry, and we talked for a while, and it was just—you know, maybe this would be encouragement to you who are listening.

Sometimes we don't know the impact we make in someone else's life, and just answering the phone and answering someone's questions, and you don't know how much that may help someone.

So this next one's a little bit of a longer one, bud, so let me just read through this.

Now remember, I'm asking for some feedback from folks, and so here's this last one that we'll read today.

It says, I love questions, but rarely take polls, surveys, or enter to win contests.

Polls, methinks, merely are employed by the poll sponsor to either support an outcome which, more often than not, has already been determined.

Thus, polls' responses support the predetermined and desired result are touted.

Those that fail to support the desired result tend to be disregarded.

Why would I waste my time? Surveys are much the same, yet with a covenant marketing purpose.

Covert marketing purpose. Answering to surveys, questions, and usually employed merely to track my personal preferences and then to match those preferences to products and services which may be targeted at me.

I don't like being a target. If it's something I need,

I probably already have it. If it's something I want, it's likely I'm deliberating a decision to get it.

If it's something I desire, it's probably sinful coveting, and I'll pray for strength to avoid the temptation.

The survey should thus be a satanic tool employed against me.

Contests don't interest me either. As a believer in a sovereign

God who has already provided everything I need for life and godliness, it seems to me that I'd be exhibiting some form of faithlessness by presuming that the means he wishes for me to get something else is by virtue of a presumably random selection process, notably professed by the contest sponsor.

Or it could be an outright covetous sin for me to try to win something, to win some desirable prize, which again, if the

Lord wanted me to have, he would have already supplied. It's simply to the same principle which precludes me from playing the lottery, though the lottery has added dimension of irresponsible stewardship for what he's already provided to me.

But questions, questions I like. What was yours again? Oh yes,

I've got it. But now I'm out of time, and I've waited for my work computer to complete a process, so I'll have to get back to this.

However, it'll be interesting to see if the email was randomly generated by a program software tool, or if you,

Andrew, actually produced it. If the answer is the latter, then knowing you,

I'll get some witty, appropriate, and thoughtful personal response. But before I respond,

I'll await your reply. And I'll add that I'd first like to know how

Justin Peters answered your query. He's a really godly guy, and I'll probably like to plagiarize some of what he says.

So I like questions too. Here's a question for you, bud. Who wrote this? I confess that I was sitting there, it popped up.

I'm waiting on my computer at work to finish this thing that took about 10 minutes. And I'm like, well, I'll just put something in there to see if this is some random software generated question, or if you actually were behind it.

And I'm blessed to know that you are. But I really do want to know what Justin Peters has to say in answer to your question, how has the ministry affected you?

Because I probably would plagiarize some of what he said. Yeah, well, if he actually reads the email,

I'd be more surprised. But yeah,

I do plan to try to respond personally to everybody. But yeah, I read that.

I was cracking up. So you now know that I sent it. Well, I figured you would get the spirit of goofiness that I implied with it.

So it would now be a bad time to mention that the Christian podcast community is hosting a giveaway, a contest.

We've got a contest going on. Oh, well, I'm glad by the time this airs, it's over. It's too late. Oh, I feel better now knowing that I don't know who the winner is yet, because we're recording this before I head to Shepard's conference.

So the winner will probably have been announced already. Whoever you are, congratulations and know that Bud is totally against you entering the contest.

I provided no competition for you. So congratulations. God bless you. You got some great resources.

Oh, no. I entered like you and Chris Honholz just because you guys wouldn't. So, you know, I just figured.

Oh, well, then, you know, should I end up being the winner? This is the providence of God. It had nothing to do with coveting or irresponsible stewardship.

I really did want to enter Chris Honholz and it would be hilarious if he actually won because he's like, no, you guys bless me too much.

I don't want anything. And so it would be hilarious if I put him in and he won like that whole thing.

He could then do a giveaway on his show. $1 ,000 worth of books. He'd be doing giveaways for years if he broke it up and did one at a time.

All right, so what are we talking about today? We don't usually do this long of an intro, but I did want to read through some of those things.

We want to get into continuing part two of our discussion on the Church, and as we look at that,

I really want to get into a discussion as we've been discussing a chapter of my book,

What Do We Believe?, that was mentioned earlier in the feedback. One of the chapters goes over the

Church, and I really tried to lay kind of a historical view of what the Church is because I think a lot of people don't really have a good handle on Church.

When they think of Church, they think of Church in the context of a building or a denomination, something they kind of grew up with, things like this, and yet Church is so much more.

I think as we look at it historically as how the meaning of Church has changed,

I think we get a richer picture, and I think it helps us to deal with issues today. Now last week we dealt with some of the term

Church, where it came from, the word ecclesia. We started looking at how we see differences within theological systems with the way they approach

Church. We started to look at the early Church, and I want to pick up there and spend most of the time today,

Bud and I want to spend most of our time in the Dark Ages, in the Middle Ages, the period that people call the

Middle Ages or Dark Ages, and deal with what was the Church then and things like that.

There's a lot there, and we may not even finish in this and may carry over one more episode, but as we look at this, we want to start with the fact that in the early

Church we did see that when Paul spoke of the Church, he really didn't think of it as separate individual congregations, though he'd refer to the

Church in Galatia or Colossae or Thessalonica or whatever, he'll mention different churches in different areas, but what you don't really see, he's not talking about the

First Baptist Church of such and such area. Right, yeah.

And there's the idea early on we see of a more universal type

Church, the body of believers, yet he does see some sort of distinction with people that live in a certain area that gather together in that area, and he'll speak specifically like things to the

Corinthian Church. Well, there were things he wrote to Corinth that didn't apply to everyone, even though some things are helpful for other

Church congregations, but then he can write books like Ephesians, which many believe was actually a rotating letter.

We have some early manuscripts of the same letter, but not with the Church of Ephesians, different area, and so he'd have an encouragement that's just general to all of the

Church, and the thought is that he took the same letter and they sent it to different churches, and so that could be as well.

Colossians would be another book very similar to Ephesians, general things that are good for everybody in the body of Christ.

And so I think that what I'm trying to point out in that early Church is things were not as defined as we have today.

The issues that we would look at when we define Church today, it's more specific, and this is a time where it's just changed.

Think about the time that Paul's writing. The term has changed from being a gathering for the purpose of voting, just a congregation that gathers, typically before then, for voting purposes or for announcements, and now it's turning into an act of worship, a place where people gather for worship.

And so this is where we start to see a shift in the term. And so things are not going to be as defined as we might like them to be.

As we get into the Middle Ages or Dark Ages, there's been a change here. Things have been more specific with it, but I think the first thing we have to start off with,

Bud, is the fact that many people may not realize that as we look at what we call the

Middle or Dark Ages, they don't often think of why we call it that. So a good place to start,

I think, for us is why do we call it the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages? The Middle Ages are really between that early

Church period and what the secularists would like to call the

Enlightenment Age, the Renaissance Age, but we would know it as the

Reformation. Right? And so we have this period where people think or act as if the

Church was dead. You had the early Church, then you had a

Reformation, and as if the Church was not active in that time. That's why people refer to it as a

Dark Period, because theologically the Roman Catholic Church had dominated, though it split into the

Orthodox and the Catholic, and it really wasn't a time that people think of with great theological growth.

There were some great Catholic theologians and minds of people, but they weren't going to be because of the fact that they're still steeped in Catholicism, they're not going to have solid theology, and yet there's still things we can learn from some of those people.

So it wasn't that the Church was gone, absent, dead, vanished at that time. You agree with this,

Bud? Yeah, kind of what I'm pondering here is we've been talking about how the presentation of the

Church temporally in the world has changed through the ages, and when you get to the

Middle Ages, which I think historically they define the Middle Ages from about the 5th century to about the 15th, 16th century, just like you've talked about up to the

Enlightenment period. That may be stretching the actual historical view of the Middle Ages a little bit longer, but what does the

Church look like? And you've referenced the Roman Catholics, and I think that what drives the presentation of the

Church in this era, which is a long time span, you're talking a thousand years, give or take, is the notion of sacralism.

You've got this confluence of the Church and the state. They're merged. There's this union between the two.

Who has authority? Who has the role of submission? You see some of this play out with Calvin in Geneva and how that was sacralistically organized.

We don't think in these terms in Western civilization, particularly in America, where Church and state are distinct.

They're to be separate. There's this American doctrine of separation of Church and state. So we don't think of those terms.

But in the Middle Ages, you had the confluence, the union of those two things, and the

Roman Catholic Church was the dominant force in that whole system.

Certainly not what we see when we read Paul. You mentioned Ephesians. You know, if you go to Ephesians and look at the last verses of the first three chapters, the doctrinal, the indicative portions of Ephesians, you know, the end of chapter one,

Paul's writing that he put all things in subjection under his feet, under Christ's feet, and gave him as the head over all things to the

Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. You go to chapter two, you go to the end of it, and starting around verse 19,

Paul says, you're no longer strangers and aliens, but you're fellow citizens with the saints and are of God's household, the

Church, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole building, the

Church, being fitted together as growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you were also being built together into a dwelling of God in the

Spirit. So Paul would see local expressions of the universal

Church in his theology in the New Testament. As that played out in the Middle Ages, you get into this sacralism period that really started,

I think, with Constantine and his move to make

Christianity the official religion of his empire. And we could get into a lot of discussion of why he did that.

But there's a lot of interesting discussion on that whole move.

Was he saved? Was he not? But as we think about it, though, the one thing

I want to encourage folks who may not study Church history, the Church didn't die out during those ages.

The Church was not gone. There was always groups of separatists. They were separate from the

Roman Catholic Church, and they were murdered for it. Yeah, what we would call the true

Church is what you're talking about. Correct. Yeah. There were always remnant of believers, though they were not able to organize and worship freely.

Very much, if you think about it, in Muslim countries today where Christians cannot organize and worship freely, you think of communist countries, where you have the

Church, but it's underground. The same thing is true during those Middle Ages. Many people,

I think, have this idea, Bud, that you had the early Church, and then once Constantine just declares the

Roman Empire Christian, the Catholic Church immediately moved in and just took over and changed everything.

Well, it wasn't that way. It was actually a slow process. You did have Constantine start with basically declaring the whole nation

Christian, which is not the way someone becomes a Christian. It's not by an emperor that just decides that you're not born a

Christian. You don't get baptized and become a Christian. You are a Christian when you put faith in Jesus Christ.

It's an individual thing. And this was different than the religions of the time, and they didn't have the same mindset.

So, you have Constantine, he's trying to reunite the Empire after a very divisive war, and what ends up happening is he just declares everyone's

Christian. Now, understand some of the history, and maybe I'm getting into more history here, Bud, than folks may be aware.

But when Constantine had done this, prior to this happening,

Christianity was illegal. You had people who had homes, they were confiscated.

People who had buildings they used as church, confiscated. And the government just took all that over and imprisoned

Christians, put them into the arenas for sport, be killed by lions, things like this.

And now all of a sudden Constantine declares everyone's Christian. He starts funding Christian churches.

So now the Roman Empire is paying for buildings. They're paying the salary.

The government was paying the salary for pastors. So all of a sudden you have a change.

This is something very dear to the Emperor. So what ends up happening is the politicians realize if they want to be in the good graces of the

Emperor, what do they do? Get involved in church. Church is the way to get to him.

And so what you end up seeing is a shift that started happening where people started to get into church and act as pastors, not because they cared about the souls of people, not because they want to shepherd people, but they got guaranteed housing, a guaranteed good salary.

And for some, they got guaranteed good graces of the Emperor. So it became something that people who are unregenerate got into positions so that they could have the influence they wanted politically and be able to have a nice living.

I mean, it was a secure job where you're covered for life.

And so you ended up seeing after Constantine, you'd have a lot of unbelievers in the position of teaching the

Bible, which obviously is going to have an effect on the church as a whole, because unregenerate men cannot really teach the

Bible to regenerate people in an adequate way. And not saying they can't some.

I have commentaries on my shelves. Oh, sorry, they used to be on my shelves.

Now they're in boxes. But I have commentaries from some unsaved people, excellent commentaries.

I remember one commentary, and I was reading through his account in the

Gospel of Matthew, and he doesn't believe in the supernatural, but he clearly said what the

Bible says on the matter. And you can have that. But is he going to be able to teach me about what it means to be spiritually mature?

No. And so this is the thing that we got to think through is as the church started morphing in this way, you had more and more influence of unregenerate people.

What are they going to do? They're going to shift the gospel from something that they cannot do themselves to something they can do themselves.

They're going to take the gospel that came from God and make it a gospel that came from man, and that's exactly what the

Catholic Church started to do. Not right away, but over time. The Catholic Church, the way we think of it, the

Roman Catholic Church that we think of today really didn't come about until 1000

A .D. with Pope Innocent II. That's where you really start to see what we think of as a

Roman Catholic Church with all of its structure and all of its hierarchy and all of its self -proclaimed authority.

And so that's a thing to realize is this church morphed over time, and so it was over these dark ages.

We'll call the dark ages, the Middle Ages. But you said it was about a thousand year period. Well, half of that time was the progression to Pope Innocent II, and he's really the that really kind of tried taking the authority from the government and putting it in the church, and to do that, he really had to structure things in such a way that made the emperor accountable to the church and gave them the authority that they thought they had for the next 500 years.

So there's really 500 years of development within the Catholic Church to be what it is today.

I'm giving that historical lesson, and a lot of that's not in my book,

What Do We Believe?, but I wanted to give that historical background because we have to realize that as people were in this false religious system that was the major religion of the

Roman Empire, there were always people that were part of the true body of Christ.

They may have been forced to go to the Catholic Church, but they didn't believe it.

Maybe there were some who were underground. Those who would try to be public about it were often killed or imprisoned.

So throughout history, we always see that there were believers. But let me also knock off one argument that some

Anabaptists and Baptists make. There was not a line of succession that goes from the early church to the

Baptist movement. And I'm a Baptist. My seminary degree was at a

Baptist seminary, a fundamentalist Baptist seminary. So the thing, though, is

I was taught this line of succession where they try to grab throughout all the history as if one group got imprisoned and they taught the other group, so it was like a handoff type of thing.

Historically, we really can't make that argument. They were just always believers. They weren't always connected with one another.

It was hard to learn. Keep in mind that you're not going to have what we have today.

We don't have all the books, like all the books I used to have on my shelves and don't right now because they're in boxes.

All those books, we have these things with good theology, but when the

Catholic Church is the only ones printing books, you're not going to see much writing that is giving us good theology.

This is why it's called the Dark Ages, because it was theologically dark. There were people that were believing, but they had to communicate one -to -one and do it underground.

Well, I think that's a valid point not to miss. From our perspective, one of the reasons we would call it the

Dark Ages is because the book, the Bible, people didn't have it.

It was the sole property of the Church.

You didn't have printing. You wouldn't find a Bible in everybody's home. They relied for any sort of spiritual feeding from the

Word of God to be done from the Catholic Church, which, as you pointed out, really was a political pragmatism.

The effect that it had over those years of development was driven as much by politics as it was contending for spiritual truth.

So you had believers who did not have Scripture, but the Lord providentially protected

His Gospel from the moment of the inception of the Church and Acts throughout this entire period.

So you've got that true Church that is always there. When Scripture becomes available, then it explodes again, and that's what you see when you get to the

Reformation, sort of at the end of this Dark Age period. You know, we take so much for granted, but I hope you realize what we're talking about.

We want to put you in the perspective, in the mindset of people before Gutenberg.

Yeah, what's your faith going to look like if you don't have a Bible today? And there are many believers, some who may even be listening to us, that can't understand that.

They live in China. They live in countries where they're not allowed to own a Bible, and they're imprisoned if they're preaching the truth, and they have, there are, you think of these

Muslim countries where people are not allowed to worship Christ, and the more strict Muslim countries, they can't even own a

Bible. It's interesting. I know people that go to China, and what they do is they, it's real interesting.

They have a setup they do. They put a dozen Bibles or two dozen Bibles on the ground. They come with a backpack of Bibles.

They put them on the ground. They preach the gospel for three minutes. They announce that they're giving away

Bibles. Why three minutes? Because they know how long it takes before the police can get there, because someone will call.

So they have a three minute, three to five minute gospel presentation.

They present, and they say, we have Bibles here for you. Please take them, and they run. The reason they do that is they want people to have time to get the

Bibles before the police come, and they will have people stay to watch to see what happens, and they say the

Bibles are just, people will run up, grab one, and leave. They're illegal, but to have something so valuable, and people are reading these

Bibles and then getting saved. So this is the mindset.

You have to understand that it was, biblical Christianity was outlawed in a quote unquote

Christian empire, okay? And so you don't have a lot of writings being done.

Writing was very expensive. As Bud, you mentioned, people don't own a Bible at this time unless they're very wealthy or they're tied to the

Roman Catholic Church. So if you don't have a

Bible, where are you getting it from? You're going to get it from the church, but then you have to end up reading on your own, studying on your own, and not letting anyone know.

So put yourself in that mindset before people owned Bibles. I mean, I've packed up already,

I think I've got two dozen Bibles, and I have maybe three or four more dozen

Bibles. Just Bibles, because I have one in all the different translations, and people give me,

I basically have a habit of, in my devotions, I read a study Bible a year is what

I try to do, notes and all. And so every year I'm doing a new study Bible. I've had people who've just sent me study

Bibles that they found. So I have lots of different study Bibles that I read, and I had someone that shipped me, found out that Holman Christian Standard was my favorite translation.

Not the Christian Standard, I like the Holman Christian Standard, the old one. And he sent me about a dozen study

Bibles in the Holman Christian Standard. So I enjoy getting through them. But all that to say, we have tons of Bibles in our homes, many collecting dust.

And in the time frame that we're talking about, the genuine believers had the

Bible memorized. That's the Bible they would have. They might have pieces of it, they might have fragments.

Some very wealthy people might have copies of books of the Bible or an entire

Bible. It was an expensive process. It's not like we have today where there are groups,

I think Bible by the bundle, I think it was called, I forget. But there's groups that produce

Bibles in mass to give away. I mean, when I go do evangelism, I look up where I get,

I have it bookmarked, the Bibles in the box that are just a dollar, it's a dollar a

Bible for an ESV or a King James. We print them in mass now, but that wasn't the time in the time that we're talking.

All right? So all that, I feel like I'm preaching a sermon, all that was introduction.

Amen. Yes, amen. So let's get into the

Church of the Middle Ages right after this commercial. All the introduction put aside, we're definitely going to do this in two more episodes,

I'm sure. When false religions ring your doorbell, do you know what your

Muslim and Jewish friends believe? You will if you get Andrew Rappaport's book,

What Do They Believe? When we witness to people, we need to present the truth, but it is very wise to know what they believe.

And you will get Andrew Rappaport's book at whatdotheybelieve .com. Can you prove that God is a

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Just go to our store, pick them up. We appreciate that. So let's get into the Church of the Middle Ages now, and we'll pick this up, as I said, next week.

We'll finish up, but as we move into the Middle Ages, the theologians that were writing were being a little bit more specific.

They started to make the distinction during this time between what Bud and I kind of referenced earlier as the visible and the invisible

Church. There were theologians that understood some of the issues that we are raising.

Even though they're part of the Catholic Church, there were some who saw what the

Bible teaches and would teach what the Bible teaches in local areas and be able to get away with it.

Not all of them did that. And remember, in the earlier parts, you didn't have the

Church the way it was. There was 500 years of development. And so during that time, that development, we end up seeing some of this.

We see the beginnings of where everybody goes to church.

Maybe some of you are in the Bible Belt down in the United States in the southern part where it's cultural to go to church.

Everybody goes to church. Everyone says they're a Christian. It was even more so in this time period.

Everybody in these small towns were expected to be at church. They would go and the theologians would realize that not all those people that attend the building are really the

Church the way the Bible would refer to it. And so to make a distinction, they refer to it as the visible and invisible

Church. And so the visible Church would be that local congregation that would meet in a building and should be for the worship of God.

The invisible Church referred to the Church, the body of believers who were redeemed by God, who were regenerated and given new life.

And what you end up seeing is not everybody in the invisible

Church were part of the other. In other words, we can sometimes,

I like to refer to this as the local and universal.

I think those terms which came out later in history are better. But as we look at that, think about the local

Church, the local gathering. That's the visible Church. It's what you see. The invisible

Church is the universal Church. It's the Church all over the world that actually believes in Christ.

Now, in your local Church, it's going to be made up of people that are part of the invisible or universal

Church and some who are not. In other words, in your local visible congregation, you have people that are believers and people who are unbelievers in the same setting, and yet we call that Church.

But they're not all the Church. Yeah, so the local Church is comprised of sheep and goats.

The universal Church, the invisible Church, is only comprised of sheep.

These are genuinely regenerate believers. So the

Church is like a zoo? No, it could be like wheat and pears. See, but notice, if you're noticing,

Christ spoke of this. We just didn't define it as well during the time of Christ, but He clearly understood this principle.

And if you think about this, the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the pears, as you think about this, this helps us to understand some passages of Scripture because there's going to be passages of Scripture.

I think specifically of Hebrews chapter 6, Hebrews chapter 10, where people in Hebrews chapter 6, it's going to be speaking of people who have tasted of the truth, and so people tend to think that this is speaking of someone who, because they've tasted the truth, it must be a believer, and yet they've left the truth.

So this is Hebrews 6, 4. For it is impossible for the case of those who were once been enlightened, had tasted of the heavenly gift, have shared in the

Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God, and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away to be restored again to repentance, since they have crucified once again the

Son of God to their own harm and holding Him up to contempt.

So people say, well, see, this is saying that you could lose your salvation. And when you come to a passage like this, you have to ask the question, which church is in view?

Is it just the wheat, or is it the wheat and the tares? You see how this distinction, this is why we're taking the time to really define the church for you, so you understand how, just like we said how the

Roman Catholic Church changed and morphed over time to what it is today, so did the definition of church.

And we have to know that when we're reading the Scriptures, they don't always have the definition we would use today.

So you're seeing in this passage, Paul, if you think it's

Paul, the writer of Hebrews, is going to be writing this to the

Hebrews to say these are people that, the phrasing he uses, had once been enlightened, had tasted the heavenly gift, have shared in the

Holy Spirit, have tasted the goodness of the Word of God. I believe that what you see in context here is he's speaking of that visible local body of believers, made up of believers and unbelievers, and those unbelievers that are in the body that walk away, fall away from the faith, it's because they never had the faith in the first place.

We know that because we see that in 1 John 2 .19, because that's the clearest passage where he says, "...they

went out from us, but were not of us.

For had they been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they were not of us."

So what we end up seeing here in this distinction that was being made is we see that there's passages in the scripture that refers to the church but as unbelievers.

They're in the church. Christ knew that. He says in the parable that Bud referenced, when you have the unbelievers come in, do you rip them out?

And Christ says, wait till the final judgment. So we shouldn't be surprised if there's unbelievers in the church, the local church, but we have to recognize they're not the universal church.

It was interesting. I was reading MacArthur commentary this week, and I think it was on Matthew, and he makes the comment,

I don't even remember when this was, probably published in the 80s. He makes the comment that half of the church today, the visible church in the

United States, half of the congregation is actually, they're actually unbelievers.

And I'm like, wow, that's massive. But it's important to keep in mind. So we don't go around trying to kick out the goats.

The Lord does that, and primarily he does that by the preaching of the word. So where you don't have expository preaching and where you don't have the word as the central focus of the edification of the saints, you're going to be full of tares.

You're going to be full of goats. So in a practical way, as we look at this practically, what this helps us understand is the fact that you have people who do church marketing, the church growth movement.

As you look at that, we see that we have churches knowing there's unbelievers in their midst, but they make church about the unbeliever, and it changes what the purpose of the church.

The churches, they don't want to do expositional preaching because they want to skip over passages that may make the unbeliever feel comfortable, because now, for those churches, what churches become is about the gospel, about getting people saved, about sharing the gospel of Christ with people.

That's not the purpose of the church, folks. We're going to see that next week for sure, but the church is about the worship of God.

And that's where this, even in the early part of the church, the word started to morph to not just be about a gathering, but a gathering for the worship of God.

And this is the change that we end up seeing in the culture where people are focusing, unfortunately, on the whole concept of trying to build the church bigger by getting unbelievers in and witnessing to them.

The preaching of the word of God, if done well, done right, has one of two effects on the unbeliever in the local church.

It convicts them, and they come to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, or they leave because they realize this isn't for them.

They're not getting anything out of it because they're being selfish in why they came into it. And the reality, they're doing it for self, and they're getting conviction.

I think of— They either get saved or they leave. Yeah, I mean, I think of— And that's

God. That's Christ building his church. You know, when I was pastoring, and I had a couple that came in, the husband had gotten saved, the wife was not a believer, but she was the type of woman,

Bud, that in any area of her life, she rose to leadership. She was just the type of personality that she liked controlling things, everything, everyone in her life she wanted to control.

And he got saved, and he was like, well, we're going to church. So he's coming to church, she's coming along, but she actually was upset when, you know, we're bringing him in as a member of the church, and I wouldn't allow her because she wasn't saved.

I found out like a year or two after the event, I'm going to tell you, you know, she actually told some of the ladies that she was going to be the pastor of the church within two years and kicked me out for not letting her be a member.

And they were like, you're not going to be the pastor of this church. You're not even going to be a member if you don't get to be saved, so it was kind of interesting, but this is her mindset.

Well, she left the church. About two years after she left, one of the ladies

I was talking with told me that she told some of the ladies she left because I was preaching about her every week.

I was announcing her sin to the entire congregation week after week after week, and she got so sick of it that I was calling her out in front of the whole congregation every week that she left.

And I'm like, what in the world is she talking about? Well, I went back in time because I had kept records back then, and I looked at what

I was preaching when she had left, and I realized I was preaching through the first part of Matthew chapter 18 on the issue of humility and pride.

Oh, wow. I never had her in mind at all during that, but the Holy Spirit, through just preaching what the

Bible says about the sinfulness of pride and what humility would look like, just preaching what

God's Word says, she came under the conviction, and so much so, she thought I was targeting every single message directly at her for the whole congregation to hear.

That's what proper preaching does. To the unbeliever, it convicts them, and they become uncomfortable and either want to leave or repent.

They run or repent. That's—as preachers, we should literate, right? So repent or run, because we should put the repentance first.

That's what we prefer. So good expositional preaching causes an unbeliever in that local assembly to either repent or run, and that's really what should happen.

So let me just wrap up, and we'll pick this up next week.

Bud and I do not want to rush through this because I hope you're seeing there's a lot of application in looking through this definition of the church and what it is and examining this to come into and understand how this implies and affects some of the way we read

Scripture today. You want to add anything more on this before—I mean, we're going to pick this up next week, but anything more you want to add?

No, other than repent. Make certain you are in the true church, regardless of what goes on in the visible church.

The redeemed hear the voice of the Lord, and they follow Him. They deny themselves.

They take up their cross, and they follow Christ, and that's the truth that we see only and always in the visible church and the invisible church.

Now, let me explain why I think what you've just listened to for the last 45 minutes or so, why is this important?

Well, here's why. Why the importance of the distinction between visible, invisible church, local, universal church?

Because the world around us is going to be arguing, look, the church is wrong because look at what this pastor over here does, or look what happened at this church over here.

Look at this, and he goes to church. What are they doing when they're doing that? They want to condemn all of the churches everywhere in the world because of the actions of some members of a local congregation that are probably, in some cases, not part of the universal congregation, you see.

And when you understand this distinction, and people bring this up, and a fun way to do it because the unbelievers don't understand this terminology.

So what I do, and I had a woman, a coworker years ago, as many years ago, probably 20 years ago, and I worked at Bell Laboratories, and I had this woman who came up, and she said, well,

I was trying to share the gospel with her, and she goes, well, I can't believe in church because there's so many hypocrites there, which, okay, a lot of different ways we can answer that because the hypocrites aren't in the church.

The church are filled with people who admit they're sinners, so when they sin, they're not being hypocrites.

No one said that Christians are going to be perfect. The unbelievers make that claim. But you want to avoid the hypocrites.

Don't go to work. Don't go to the malls. Don't go shopping because that's where the people say they're good, and they're not. But what

I chose to do is, she said, well, you know, I used to go to church, and she described a pastor who had done something that she felt was wrong.

I think he embezzled money or something like that, and I looked at her, and I said, was he a member of the visible or invisible church?

In other words, is he part of the local church or the universal church? And she went, what? I said, well, which church is he a member of?

When you refer to him as part of the church, which part is he? And she's like,

I have no idea what you're talking about, and it allowed me to explain this distinction between the invisible universal church versus the local and visible church, and in doing that,

I was able to not only teach her, but show her that not everyone that goes to church is a believer.

So that may be helpful to you as you get that, because that argument is going to come up. As you get that argument, you can maybe be more mindful of this and throw that out to them.

Say, well, which church were they? The visible or invisible? People are, well, what? I don't know.

They're invisible. I can see them. Oh, so they may be unbelievers. Because then what you get into is you can now distinguish and define what is a believer.

What are you doing when you're doing that? You're sharing the gospel in a very natural way now, because you're doing it to distinguish between those who are in church that are believers and those that are in church that are not believers.

So just something to think about. All right, so Bud, after this commercial, we should play a game.

The good news is Striving for Eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks, teaching them biblical hermeneutics.

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There's a contact page and give us your feedback. Let us know you would like one of those seminars, because this is what we try to do.

We try to help people understand the Word of God. And we also have seminars on evangelism, which is where we have our spiritual transition game.

It's time now to start the spiritual transition game.

Okay, so we play this game, bud. I explain this all the time because we have new people listening all the time and they don't understand it.

So we need to explain. The purpose of this game is because we want you to be evangelizing.

I encourage you to evangelize. The hardest thing, though, that I've discovered, people telling me over the many years, is the hardest thing in evangelism is the transition from the natural world to spiritual.

So we made a game of it. And the more you practice this, the more you play this with your friends, or even in your own mind, the more you do this, the easier it's going to be to transition from the natural world to the spiritual world, such that when something happens, you don't have to say,

Oh, Lord, give me an opportunity to share the gospel. You can create that opportunity. You can turn every conversation into a gospel conversation.

Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not. But you just practice how to do the transition. So we're going to do this.

Bud is going to give me something that I have to transition to the gospel. And I don't know what it is. I don't edit this part out. I don't cut out the long periods of silence where I ramble for minutes on end because I don't know what

I'm going to say. I don't know what it is either, is what I'm thinking. Okay, well, you think, but you knew this was coming.

That's the worst part. So, but the goal is that we would practice evangelism, that we would practice how to transition so that we can share the gospel more often.

So what am I going to transition to, Bud? Well, actually, a scenario that I encountered this week, and I didn't really get to speak too much into it, but I was kind of a third party listening.

And it had to do with a person on each side. One guy is so pro impeachment.

I can't believe this didn't go through. This is just evidence that our country is not being led right.

And the other guy, the other person was pro

Trump. He was against the impeachment, and they're debating the woes and desires of the impeachment process that didn't take place or did take place and had a different result.

And I'm sitting there listening to this, realizing that these guys are trapped in politics is life and didn't have a whole lot of opportunity to speak into it.

But how do you deal with that? You got two guys fighting about the impeachment of a president from each side.

And let me give it just before I even start to transition, because this is something we come upon often, and I do want to encourage people to think about what is the greater priority for us as believers?

Is it to convince someone that Trump should have been impeached or shouldn't be impeached, or is the gospel more important?

And sometimes it's more important to let the person whose position you disagree with go with that to get the gospel, because that's more important.

And reality is, if they get saved and come under good discipleship, their views may change on that to biblical views.

So that aside, so let's start with that. So I think really the issue at the heart of this, on either side, if I have both these gentlemen next to me,

I could speak to both of them and say, listen, I think at the heart of both of the arguments you're making is an issue of justice, is it not?

I mean, to you who think that this is a tragedy, that Trump got away with this, that you believe he's guilty, you believe that he tried to affect an election, he abused his power to affect an election, and you think that it's horrible that he got away with it, you think that because you believe that there should be justice.

And to you who believes that what the Democrats did was an abuse of their power to affect the upcoming election, that they couldn't defeat

Trump on ideas, and they've spent two years doing nothing but trying to find a way to impeach him, and now that that failed, they're trying to find another way to impeach him now.

I mean, right out of the bat. And you feel that's wrong, and that's a travesty. And again, you do that because you have a sense of justice.

I mean, can you both agree that at the heart of this matter is the issue of right and wrong, of the idea that there should be justice for, you know, wrongdoers should be punished, and those who do right should be favored or should at least not be punished for doing right?

In which case, I think both would end up agreeing to that. But the issue is that both of them are looking at this typically from one side of an issue.

Maybe they're looking at both, but you can appeal, I would appeal to them and say, listen, the issue is none of us here have all the facts, period.

We think we do. We're making decisions on what little we know. But what do we do?

We're going to evaluate the information we have, and we're trying to make a stand on what we think is just.

Wouldn't it be good if we had someone that just could know for sure, 100 % knowledge, that they knew everything about the case to weigh in?

Would that be a good thing? I think both sides would agree that that's a good thing. Well, I think that we might think it's a good thing, but often we really don't.

Because if there was someone who knew everything, I mean everything, had all complete knowledge on everything that's done, what

I think we would find is we would hate that. We actually would, because that person would know every wrong that we've ever done.

I mean, think about it. Every time we've lied, we've stolen, we've cheated someone. No matter how small it might be, that being would know that.

And if he's going to bring justice, then guess what? All three of us, we're all guilty. We all deserve to be punished.

That's what we deserve. And there actually is a being like that. We call him

God. He created the universe, and that being is going to judge us. He's all -knowing, and he is going to judge us with a righteous, infinite judgment.

And all three of us, myself included, would be guilty. But God made a way of escape.

God himself came to earth. He died on a cross 2 ,000 years ago to be a payment of sin that we could be set free.

That though all three of us are guilty and deserve hell, eternity in hell, because we violated the law of an eternal, holy being, he's going to separate us for all of eternity.

But he also made a way of escape that if we repent, and not run, but repent and believe on him, we can have eternal life.

So that's how I would go about doing it. Now, what did I do in that? But I avoided, really, the discussion.

I'm accepting of both sides of the discussion as their viewpoints, but I'm trying to get to the gospel without negating either viewpoint.

Yeah, exactly. You're not trying to win that argument. Because reality is, at this point, people's minds are made up.

I mean, you know, but it's more important that they come to know Christ. So by the time this airs, bud,

I had a wonderful time at Shepherds Conference. I missed you. You weren't able to make it this year.

I thoroughly enjoyed Shepherds Conference. It was a great time, and I feel relaxed, rejuvenated.

I'm ready to just hit the ground running with serving

God, and, you know, got that spiritual relaxation that I needed, and I feel great.

It's tremendous. I enjoyed seeing all those posts and pictures, and it was gratifying.

I guess we've been doing this long enough, we know exactly what to expect. Hey, I guess

I should give a shout out to all of the other pastors and people that I met at Shepherds Conference who maybe it's your first time listening.

Hey, it was great to meet you. Maybe on a future episode, I'll give your names because I don't know who they are yet.

But I am looking forward to going there, and it's always a good time. It's really become like a kind of a family reunion type of thing.

G3 and Shepherds Conference have become this thing where we get together and really just have a kind of a family reunion type of thing.

Another thing that is a family reunion type is something that we put together, and it's going to be in July.

We've changed the date, though, and that is July 24th and 25th is going to be our Quip Jersey Conference.

That's here in New Jersey. We basically do a conference Friday night, Saturday, and then what we'll do is go down to, on Saturday night, go to the

Boardwalk Seaside Heights where they filmed that horrible show Jersey Shore, and I never watched an episode of it, but I've seen plenty of it being filmed as I would be preaching.

The thing is we go down there, we share the gospel, and if you're nervous with that idea, that's why we do it.

We have guys that do evangelism day in and day out, and we'll train you. We'll work with you.

We'll be standing right alongside you so you can hand out tracts. You can do some evangelism one -on -one and know that you're not alone, and so if you could make it out to that.

We don't have the information up on the website yet, but I'm just giving you those dates so you could save the dates.

Plan to spend some of your summer up on the beautiful Jersey Shore where it's nice and sunny, just like Bud has every day of the year.

Will it be warm by then? I hope so. It'll be a lot hotter there where you are.

Then you'll be wishing you were coming up to me. So until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

And you know what, Bud? What's that? It's a wrap. This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry.

For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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