Loving Leadership

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to the 20th chapter of the book of Acts and find your place at verse 17.
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We are going to be reading verse 17 all the way to the end of the chapter, but I do not make any type of pretension that we are going to preach all of that, but this is all one section and so I am going to begin today and then possibly next week finish or the week after depending on how long it takes, but we are going to read it all to see what all it has to say.
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Begins in chapter 20 verse 17, Now from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him.
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And when they came to him, he said to them, You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and tears, and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews, and how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance towards God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
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And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.
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But I do not account my life of any value, nor is precious to myself, if only I may finish my course in the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.
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And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again.
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Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.
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Pay attention, pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God which He obtained with His own blood.
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I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away the disciples after them.
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Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not seize night or day to admonish everyone with tears.
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And now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.
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I coveted no one's silver or gold or apparel.
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You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me.
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In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He Himself said, it is more blessed to give than to receive.
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And when He had said these things, He knelt down and prayed with them all, and there was much weeping on the part of all.
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They embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word He had spoken that they would not see His face again, and they accompanied Him to the ship.
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Father, I thank You for this passage of Scripture.
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Lord, one of the most pastoral sections of the book of Acts, hearing from the lips of the Apostle Paul his love and concern for the leaders of the church of Ephesus, but also, Lord, his love and concern for the church itself.
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And I pray, Lord, that as I preach this that You would keep me from error, as I know that I am capable of error.
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And I pray that You would protect me, and I pray that on behalf of the people here that You would protect them.
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Lord, be merciful to them, and I pray, Lord, that as we go through this text that You would enlighten the minds of the believers here, and Lord, for those who are here among us who have not yet received Christ, I pray that they would be confronted and convicted regarding their sin, and that they would be brought to the foot of the cross, where they might look upon Him who was slain, and believe and find salvation.
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For there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved than that of the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen.
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There are several times in a person's life where he or she may feel compelled to take his child aside, away from the busyness of life, and have a heart-to-heart conversation about whatever it is they're facing.
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On the day a man is to be married, often a father will come and take him aside and remind him of the responsibilities he's about to take on.
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Have that conversation, son, you realize this is a lifetime commitment, you realize this is dedication, and it's going to be hard, and there's going to be things that you're going to face that you've never had to face up until now, but it's important that you understand these things, and what you're doing is valuable and important and good, but here's what you're going to face.
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On the day a daughter might get ready to go to college, a mom might come by her side and sit down with her and say, look, sweetheart, you're going to college now, and there's going to be temptations, and there's going to be things that you face, and there's going to be people that you see that are going to be unlike some that you've ever seen ever before, and you need to be ready for that, and you need to be girded up in your faith and your strength to face what's coming.
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This is going to be a life change, and you need to know what is happening.
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We think about a young man who gets ready to go to the military, think of that conversation that a father or a mother might sit down and have with him to say, look, you're about to spend eight weeks outside of my authority.
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Up until now, you've been in our house and our rules, but now there's going to be guys who are going to get in your face and yell at you, and you need to know that things are about to change.
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It's a good change, but know that it's coming.
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So we understand as parents, especially, and some of you who have gone on to be grandparents, you understand there's valuable times in your life where you have to take your children or your grandchildren aside and have a conversation, and let them know about the changes that are coming and the things that are about to happen, and you understand the value of that.
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Well, beloved, as we come to Acts chapter 20, this latter portion, verses 17 and following, this is what we're seeing in the life of the Apostle Paul.
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He planted the church in Ephesus.
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If you remember when he was coming back from Corinth, and he was going back to Jerusalem several years prior to this, he had gone through Ephesus, and he couldn't stay.
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Even though the people of Ephesus wanted him to stay, he couldn't stay.
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So he left there Priscilla and Achilla, who stayed and taught there, and then he went back to Jerusalem, back to his home church in Antioch, and then he made his way by foot across Asia Minor again, and made his way back to Ephesus, and now he's been there for a couple of years, and he's been teaching daily in the hall of Tyrannus, who was a Greek teacher, and he had been using his hall during the day to teach the Scriptures, and he had made many disciples, and the church in Ephesus had grown to the point that the people of Ephesus had been turning away from the goddess Diana, which was the goddess who was...
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There was a temple to Artemis, which is the goddess Diana, there in Ephesus, and they had turned so much that there was a riot, because the people who sold statues that were made for the goddess Artemis had gotten upset because they were losing money, because so many people were turning to Christianity, so the church at Ephesus had seen great power and influence from the preaching of the apostle Paul.
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And then after he had been there for several years, he goes back into Macedonia, he checks on the churches and encourages the churches that he had planted there in Philippi and in other places in Macedonia, he collects an offering to take back to Jerusalem, because the church in Jerusalem is hurting, the church in Jerusalem is persecuted, and so he's taking an offering back to them to be an encouragement to them, but on his way back to Jerusalem, the apostle Paul stops in a place called Miletus.
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He doesn't go to Ephesus, and as I mentioned I think last week, but just by way of reminder, I think he didn't go to Ephesus because I think he was afraid if he went, he would never get to leave.
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I think he felt the people would, as it were, hold him by the ankles to keep him from going, because he was so loved and there was a ministry that he had there, and he needed to get back to Jerusalem.
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God had given him a timetable.
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He needed to be back by Pentecost.
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And were he to go to Ephesus, he would have faced a church that loved him and not wanted him to go.
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He also would have faced potential rioting, which had happened the last time he was there.
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There's a lot of reasons why he has avoided going back to Ephesus, but he goes to Miletus, and in Miletus, he sins for the elders of Ephesus.
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So we're going to start there, and I'm just going to walk through the text.
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Normally I have some points of application at the end of the message, but because I wasn't sure how long it was going to take me to get through this, we're going to read the verses, and I'm going to make application as we go.
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So it will be a little different than normal, but I'm abnormal, so that's okay.
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It's okay, you can smile.
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Verse 17, it says, Now from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him.
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Now we just talked about that.
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Miletus was about 40 miles from Ephesus, and that's if you went across the Gulf of Latmos by boat.
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If you went around the Gulf of Latmos, it was more like a 60-mile journey.
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Now this is before Uber, so a 60-mile journey was a little bit of an undertaking, and I've often wondered myself, you know, Paul was going to be delayed either way, because had he gone to Ephesus, there would have been the delay, but he's having to send someone to Ephesus who's going to have to go and collect the elders and bring them to Miletus, either 60 miles by foot or 40 miles by foot and boat.
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Either way, we're talking two or three days of journey, and so he does wait there in Miletus for them, and he calls not the whole church, but he calls the elders.
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Now in this particular place in the scripture, the elders are called Presbyteros, and if you're familiar with that term, you probably are familiar with it because of Presbyterian.
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You've heard the term Presbyterian church.
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Presbyteros simply references a type of leader in the church.
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Presbyteros comes from the word which means older or mature, the elder of the church, but it doesn't always have a reference to age only.
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Typically, age is involved with maturity, but not always.
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I've met some very old people who were immature, and I've met some very young people who were – people laughing, I guess you have too.
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You've met some older people who were immature, and I've met some younger people who were mature beyond their years.
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And when the Bible talks about Presbyteros, it is a quality of person that while often accompanies age, is not always an accompaniment of age.
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Remember what Paul said to Timothy, do not let them despise your what? Your youth, because even though you're younger than them, you carry the burden of being the Presbyteros.
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You carry the burden of being an elder among older people.
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So elder wasn't just a title of age, but it was a title of maturity, of spiritual responsibility, and later they are called overseers.
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And the word overseer comes from episkopos, which if you break that up, it's episkopos.
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Skopos means to look, and epi means over or on.
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And so the episkopos are the ones who oversee the ministry.
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We know what elders are.
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I'm belaboring it only to make the point that what we're going to read after verse 17 is Paul's admonition to the elders.
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And what are the elders going to be facing as minister leaders in the church? And this passage does remind us of something else.
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It reminds us that the position of elder or overseer is a plural position.
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I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation with folks from other denominations, and they say, well, are you the pastor? I say, yes, I'm the pastor of the church, and I serve as an elder with other elders, and we all have a position of equality as leadership goes.
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And I think sometimes we forget, because you see me as the mouthpiece of the church, and I think oftentimes people think, well, Keith's in charge.
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Well, Jesus is in charge, I pray.
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I'm not in charge.
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But the elders share an equality of position in leadership, and we're all ordained to that position.
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It's not a position where I lord over Jack and Richard or Jack and Richard lord over me, but we share a plurality of authority and a difference of duty.
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I have a particular duty among the elders.
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I have the biggest mouth, and so you can amen that.
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I have a particular gifting that God has given me to preach, and I've known since a very early in my Christian walk that God had gifted me a particular way.
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I am not gifted like other men in certain areas.
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I'm certainly not an administrative gift as Jack has, and I certainly don't have the same gifts as Richard has, and that's the way it should be.
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And I think that's why the plurality is important, because as we understand the plurality within the eldership, we understand that one man shouldn't and couldn't do it alone.
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And in places where there is a single head of leadership, what often happens is they develop what's called the cult of personality, where that one individual sort of overrides everything by his personality, and it becomes almost like a little pope.
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You know, we joke.
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We say there's a bunch of Protestant popes running around.
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Andy Stanley's a Protestant pope.
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He's got 30,000 people that listen to his nonsense every week, and he's a heretic.
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He's just straight a heretic.
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30,000 people every week listen to his nonsense.
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I could name others I'm not going to, but the point is, that's not what we...
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I'm going to meddle now.
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The whole idea that we pipe in one guy into 50 churches, rather than having several men in each church that are preaching and teaching the Word of God, it's just, it's upside down.
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We have put way too much authority into one guy.
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That's just too much trust and authority in one individual.
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It's not the way the church was designed.
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I should have a check on any authority I exercise and anything I teach.
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I should have men who are able to call me to account.
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And if I don't, that's a problem.
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I'm serious.
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And I have met guys...
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I knew a guy one time who said, he says, well, I have been to seminary and I have had the teaching.
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Who are they to question me? What gall to say such things? You are God's people.
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And yes, you have a right to question me.
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And that right goes both ways.
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I'm just reminding you.
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I mean, we have a right to take each other to the Word of God.
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I am not beyond reproof.
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And I have a feeling that in a lot of places, the pastor feels like he is beyond reproof.
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So like I said, I went a little off there, but that's why we're not going to get through much.
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Each verse, you think about, there's a plurality.
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He says, call the elders of the church.
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He didn't say call the single pastor.
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He didn't say call the bishop of Asia Minor.
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And the idea that the pope is the bishop of all of Christianity is the far afield problem.
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There is no one bishop who oversees all of Christendom.
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And the idea that the bishop of Rome carries that authority is just false teaching and bad theology.
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But I digress.
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There is not a single unilateral head in Ephesus.
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There's a group of men called elders.
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Paul calls them.
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He reaches out to them.
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And when he reaches out to them, he gets them there.
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We don't know how long it takes, but we do know they gather to him.
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In verse 18, Paul begins to recount his ministry to them.
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He says in verse 18, and when they came to him, he said to them, you yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and tears and with trials that happened to me through the plot of the Jews, how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable and teaching in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance towards God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
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If you look at verse 18, he says, I lived among you.
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Ministry of the Lord Jesus ministry is a very personal affair and one of the most difficult things.
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And I want to bear my soul with you for a minute.
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And I know that I know that there are some of you have spent time in ministry and maybe can can understand this better than others.
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But ministry can be difficult to not feel the need to shut yourself off from people because in opening yourselves up to people, you open yourselves up to the potential of hurt.
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My wife and I, a few years ago, I was, I was dealing with some real depression.
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I've dealt with that in my life and I thank God for it only because it has allowed me to somewhat be a comfort to other people who have and that's a blessing.
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But it's not fun to go through it.
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And my elders here have held me while I cried at times as I've just dealt with tremendous difficulty.
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But there was a time years ago where my wife and I were, we went and spent some time away and we ended up at a church we'd never been to before.
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Didn't know, didn't know anything about the church, just knew it was a little small Presbyterian church there where we were.
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And so we went and the minister was, oh, he was good.
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His preaching was just good.
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It was, it was a wonderful message.
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And, and he afterwards came up to me and he said, you look really intentive.
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You must be in the ministry.
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It was so funny.
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He said, you really seem like you were really following along, like you really cared.
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And I thought that was nice.
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But I, he took me into his office and he talked to me and we, we shared for two hours.
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He poured himself into me and I was very grateful for that.
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And my wife got to talk to his wife and they talked while I was in with him.
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She was with her.
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And one of the things, and I, please do not take offense to what I'm about to say.
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Don't, don't, don't take this as a shot at all because I'm sharing this with you for a purpose.
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But one of the things that this minister's wife told my wife, you cannot have any friends in the church.
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She says, I've been doing this for 40 years and you can't have friends in the church.
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Now of all the good things that they shared with us.
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And I said, that man poured his life in me for two hours.
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He was a sweet man and she was a sweet woman and God blessed them.
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But that is the one thing that we took away and remember to this day.
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And it's not, it's not possible.
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I know what she means and I know the pain that she has been through.
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But part of what we do in ministry is we do open ourselves up to the potential of hurt.
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I can't do this if I didn't think you all were my friends.
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Now I know what she meant though, because I have had friends hurt me and I have had people who have said I have hurt them.
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I've never wanted to and I promise you with my heart as open as it can be, I've never intended to, but I know that I have.
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And I'm just saying that when the apostle Paul here says, I lived among you, I think that's just what he meant.
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I think he said, I lived with you.
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I lived with you and we ministered together.
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And I think that that's how it has to be.
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I cannot stay separated if I want you to be ministered to by me.
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Neither can you stay separated if you want to be ministered to by one another.
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A good minister told me years ago, he said shepherds should smell like sheep.
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And while I am not perfect at that, I do know that part of ministry is living with one another.
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And I want that to be how we minister to one another.
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I want us to be open and honest with one another.
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But I also know that that can bring the opportunity for pain.
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So I only say this to say, when Paul was there, Paul was the model.
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He was ministering in the church, living with God's people daily.
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And the verse 19 that follows it, he says this, he says, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials.
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Paul's life was filled with ministerial hardships.
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In fact, if you go back, and we're not going to go back there, but if you do go back to the time when Paul was converted to Christianity, remember when he was on the road to Damascus? His brother Jim always likes to remind us where he was headed.
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To Damascus.
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He was on the road to Damascus, as a joke from years ago.
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And it wasn't a good one, it was just...
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But he's on the road to Damascus and he's blinded by the Lord and he's taken to the house of Ananias.
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Not Ananias and Sapphira, different Ananias.
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He's brought to the house of Ananias.
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Ananias is afraid to even preach to him because this is the guy that's been persecuting and God says, no, you go and preach the gospel to him.
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So he goes and preaches the gospel to him and what happens? One of the things that he says to him, Ananias told him, he says, I've been brought here to show you how much you must suffer for the sake of the Lord.
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So Paul had known from the moment of his conversion that his life was going to be difficult.
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He had known from the moment of his conversion that his life was going to be painful.
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And I think some people take issue with Paul here.
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In fact, I heard one guy sort of take issue with this text as I was studying this because he says, I serve the Lord.
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Verse 19 says, serve the Lord with all humility and with tears.
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And people say, well, if a man has to announce his own humility, he's not very humble.
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In fact, announcing your own humility is one of the hallmarks of pride.
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But Paul is not bragging about his humility here.
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He is not claiming that he is a super spiritual person.
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Paul is pointing to the fact that when he was with the people, he did not lord over them.
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Look at it.
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He says, from the very first day I set foot in Asia serving the Lord with all humility, the word there just simply means lowliness.
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I didn't come in with the hammer of the scripture and beat it into your brains, but I taught you the word of God.
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I did not lord over you and I pleaded with you.
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The Bible says that Paul would plead with people.
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He would encourage people.
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He would pursue people with the gospel.
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Have you ever pursued somebody with the gospel? You say, well, I told them if they didn't believe in Jesus, they were going to hell.
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No.
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Have you ever pursued somebody with the gospel? That's not telling them you can't tell them about hell or that you can't tell them that they need to believe in Jesus.
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But Paul pursued.
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Paul was relentless in his preaching and his teaching and he taught the elders this.
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Elders, we are to lead, not to lord over God's people.
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Lead, not lord.
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In fact, I do want to take you to another scripture in 1 Peter.
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Just hold your place in Acts, but go over to 1 Peter 5 and just look here at 1 Peter 5, verse 1.
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If you have in your mind, man in this room, men in this room, if you have in your mind that God may be calling you to a position of eldership, that God may have given you a gift of teaching among His people and administration and leadership among His people, I think that you should not only commit to studying Acts 20, but I think you should also look at 1 Peter 5 because this is what he says.
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He says, I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder, Peter calling himself an elder, and witness of the sufferings of Christ as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed.
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Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly as God would have you, not for shameful gain, but eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.
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Beloved, that says it all.
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I think the King James says not lording over, where the word here says domineering.
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Beloved, I hope that I have never lorded over anyone here.
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And if I have, I repent of that.
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And that is not my goal.
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Years ago, there was a person who was quite disenfranchised with some of the ministry here and he made the announcement.
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He says, Keith just thinks he has to have everything his way.
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And I hope that that's not how anyone sees me.
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I really do.
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This man, this was the same man who told me that he didn't believe the Bible was true and that it contained a lot of errors.
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He had a lot of sort of weird views on things.
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But I just remember hearing that and I had to take a step back and say, is that how people see me? As a person who lords over others, I do not and I pray that I would never intend to convey such a thing.
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I will say this, I want things in this church to be the way God wants them, not the way I want them.
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But I would hope that my desire would be the same as what God would want.
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You know, I mean, there's a reality where I want to conform my wants to what God wants.
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And some of you get emails from me and I did send an email out last night and the question in the email was, are we worshiping God his way? And as I said in the email, we're not the only church in Jacksonville that worships God his way.
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But I hope that we're at least one of the ones who does.
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We want to worship God his way.
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And that's what, one guy said that, he says, well, I want to worship God my way.
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That's not how it works.
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You worship God your way, I'll worship him his.
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You don't have to be sarcastic, but the reality is true.
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We should seek to worship God his way and seek to please him.
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And the elders should not be domineering men who demand their own way.
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What does the Bible say about love? 1 Corinthians 13, love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious, does not boast, it does not seek its own.
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If we're loving leaders, and that's the title of the message, loving leadership.
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If we're loving leaders, it's not about what we want, it's about what God would have us do.
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And conforming ourselves to that.
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Paul goes on to say in verse 20, after he talks about the trials and the plot of the Jews, he says in verse 20, I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable and teaching in public from house to house, testifying of repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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There's so much there, that one just short sentence I could spend hours on.
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But I do want to sort of start to draw in to a close what he's talking about here, because this is important.
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Because Paul is talking about his own ministry, and some people think that that's wrong of him to talk about himself, but again he's not boasting, he's reminding them how to be a loving leader.
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He's saying I came to you as a loving leader and this is what I did, and I'm calling you to loving leadership and this is what you should do.
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Understand that you are a servant leader, understand that you should be a humble leader, understand that you're going to suffer as a leader, and understand this, that when I was there, I did not shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God.
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You should never, ever, ever equate humility with weakness.
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Humility is not weakness.
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And often people think that, because if you see somebody who asserts themselves, you'll say well that person's not very humble.
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Well the Apostle Paul was humble, but he was not afraid to preach the truth.
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Paul was humble because he understood that he was a man under authority.
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He wasn't there to preach his own ideas or his own message, but he boldly taught what was needful, even if it was unpopular.
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There's a very real problem today.
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There's many ministries, this is a huge problem, that pastors won't address certain subjects because well, those things are not popular.
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There's actually a, there was a little cartoon that went out this week and I, it was too late to put it in the bulletin, but I almost, had I gotten it before we printed, I probably would have asked Pat to put it in the bulletin because there was two guys sitting there and one is a news reporter and he's talking about how, he says, boy everything has to be sensational, everything has to be, you know, have to really stretch everything to make it, make it more than it is or diminish something to make it less than it is.
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We really have to manipulate everything to satisfy people and keep an audience.
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This is the news reporter and the guy next to him turns to him in a little cartoon, he said, you should see what it's like to be a pastor.
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Beloved, that's the way it is in so many places.
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We're so concerned and so afraid to offend.
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We are so concerned and so afraid that we might lose our audience, that we won't tell them the truth.
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You know, people, I get books, I get emails about books all the time.
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People will say, you should read this book, it's on church growth.
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You should go do this, it's on church growth and you should do that, it's on church growth.
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And I've stopped reading the books because they're all the same.
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You find out what your culture wants to hear and you tell it to them.
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Beloved, that is not how Paul led the church.
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Paul did not go into Ephesus and send out a survey and say, how many of you have families? We want to make sure we have a family ministry.
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How many of you are in a different demographic? And we're going to make sure that we talk to all of the different demographics the same way.
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And how many of you like this movie versus that movie? Or how many of you read this book? And how many of you like The Shack? Which by the way, is very bad theology.
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But you understand, Paul didn't do that.
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What did he do? He boldly and humbly, and those two are not exclusive, he boldly and humbly taught the word of God to the people and he allowed God to be the one who was in charge of saving souls.
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We cannot shrink away from certain subjects simply because they are difficult.
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I mean, it's just, thank you.
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Amen.
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You know, there are so many things that are hard to hear about our faith.
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And I have been told, you know, well, you really shouldn't mention hell.
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Don't even say hell.
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Call it separation from God.
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Because that is easier for people to accept.
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Don't say hell.
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Say separation from God.
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You know why I don't say separation from God? Because it ain't true.
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Hell is not separation from God.
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Hell is right smack in the middle of God's wrath.
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That's not separation.
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But we use that term because we have chosen that it is better to not offend men than offend God.
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But Jesus told us different.
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He said do not fear the one who can kill the body, but fear the one who can throw both body and soul into hell.
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Hey, Jesus mentioned hell.
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Look at there.
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I remember one time an atheist man, he said, I came to your church and I never came back because you talked about hell and I found it offensive.
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Now, I wasn't happy that he came and he never came back.
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It was years later that he told me that.
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So I really wish he would have told me at the time.
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Not because I would have changed my message, but because I would have said what I finally got to say to him several years later.
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I said, well, I wouldn't have told you that if I didn't believe it was true.
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And if I do believe it's true, I'd be a monster if I didn't tell you.
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Kind of a person knows the truth of someone's peril and does not tell them about their peril.
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Think about a doctor that finds out that you have a terrible disease and the doctor says, well, I would, out of fear of offending you, I'm not going to tell you about your disease.
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That would be the worst thing in the world to not know and him know and not tell you.
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Paul says, I didn't shrink.
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I did not shrink from declaring to you anything.
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Beloved, we should have that same attitude.
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Is there hard things in Scripture to teach? Is there hard things in Scripture to understand? Is there hard things to accept? Yeah.
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But we stand on the word of God as truth and know that no matter what, we're going to speak the truth.
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Well, that's as far as I think I'm going to get today, but I do want to encourage you to read on ahead.
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Think about what Paul says continuing on and we'll continue our study next week beginning here right around verse 21.
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Let's pray.
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Father, thank you again for your word.
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Thank you for the truth of it.
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I pray that it has been encouraging to your people.
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I pray that the message today has been honest and open.
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And I pray that we realize, Lord, that ministry is so multifaceted and there's so much that goes into being the church, not coming to church, but being the church.
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I pray that we would, Lord, lift up our leaders in prayer, those men who have been called to lead the church.
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And Lord, other men, Lord, that you have seen fit to gift in these areas, that you would raise them up to the understanding of leader, not Lord, over the church.
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For the church has but one Lord, Jesus Christ.
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And it's in his name we pray.
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Amen.
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Let's stand together and sing.