August 30, 2017 Show with John Samson on “The Importance of Church Membership & the Fallacy of the Maverick, Lone Wolf Christian”

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 30th day of August 2017.

I'm so delighted to have back on the program a returning guest who has become one of my favorite guests and also has become a dear friend. His name is John Sampson, and he is an author and the pastor of King's Church Peoria, Arizona.

We are discussing today the importance of church membership and the fallacy of the maverick lone wolf Christian, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor John Sampson.

It's great to be with you again, Chris, I always enjoy being with you. And for those of our listeners who have never heard Pastor Sampson before, one very fascinating aspect of his life is that he is a former Word of Faith Pentecostal pastor and also a former Word of Faith Pentecostal talk show host, having served as a host on the local TBN affiliate in the Peoria, Arizona area.

And he came to the doctrines of sovereign grace by God's sovereign grace, and he is now a Reformed Baptist pastor. And King's Church in Peoria, Arizona is a church adhering to the 1689 London Baptist Confession.

Why don't you tell us, our listeners who have not heard you on this program before or have not heard you on James White's The Dividing Line program, why don't you explain to our listeners, especially those discovering you for the first time, a little bit more about.

King's Church? Yeah, we're very much seeing some major things happening and very much encouraged by what we're families in the church already. We don't have all the bells and whistles in place, but we have at least one bell in the next month.

But we're looking at whistles in the next.

Calendar year. Don't add too many bells or you'll wind up becoming a Catholic church.

That's very true. If I get too many bells, it'll be a lot of whistles.

And I think that you are a reminder to some of us who are staunch Reformed people who are perhaps so meticulous in our doctrine and so on, who unfortunately sometimes, it really goes polar opposite to the doctrines of grace we believe, but we have a tendency sometimes to give up hope or even develop any kind of hope for the salvation or the transformation of someone from that extreme heresy of word of faith Pentecostalism of ever becoming a sound and biblically faithful pastor.

We just don't even think in that category very often. And you are a living example of someone who God drew out of that heresy and into solid biblical Reformational.

Theology. Many times they're not even willing to show mercy towards me, but he put in me a desire to know the truth. When people do come out again, it's just as someone entrapped in the grace.

And I know that you have written a couple of books and there's a new booklet out that we already interviewed you on. And anybody who wants to hear the interview on your booklet, The Five Solas Standing Together Alone, they can go to ironsharpensironradio .com and click on the archive for the program.

And the archive button is on the top right side of the page where it says Past Shows and in parentheses Podcast. If you type in Samson in the search engine of that archive, S-A-M-S-O-N, leave the P out of that, S-A-M-S-O-N, and you will get all of the interviews that we've had with Pastor John Samson.

But for those of our listeners who missed your interview on The Five Solas Standing Together Alone, why don't you give an abbreviated.

Description of that book? Well, there's a lot of great, not everybody has something out there, that language. And I didn't see anything out there that I was really happy with. And so write something very concise, but yet able to talk about those things without the so necessary to understand this one because more accessible.

And I ended up with just and it can be read in about an hour. And one of the testimonies I have is that my mother, who died in May, one of the great pain the last few days. And my wife, Linda, was able to read the manuscript at that time.

The manuscript of this, it allows you to face death knowing the Word of God. So on the basis of vacation before God being declared right in his sight is on the basis in the person of the Lord. And that's why all of the glory for salvation goes to God alone, no other denomination or church.

Well, if anybody wants to order that book, and I strongly urge pastors to order at least a case of this booklet, because it is a very affordable and brief booklet on a very important issue. If you want to stack your track racks, or just to put them on the table in your foyer or your narthex for not only your members, but your visitors, especially if you're having a Reformation Day celebration, this would be the ideal booklet for you to hand out.

And go to solid-ground-books .com to order that book, The Five Solas Standing Together Alone. And that's from Solid Ground Christian Books, solid-ground-books .com, solid-ground-books .com. I had a very interesting conversation with.

A pastor in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and he was expressing his gratitude for the book, and he called it a booklet, of course. And so I said, well, if it's that good, you're going to ask me to come and do a booklet tour.

And he laughed like you're laughing.

The Biblical Case for Church Membership from Creation to the Tabernacle

Well, we are addressing a very important topic today, the importance of church membership and the fallacy of the maverick lone wolf Christian. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question, again, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com.

And please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old USA. And obviously a subject like this especially might lend itself to someone asking a question that is in regard to a personal and private matter.

Perhaps you've been horribly scarred mentally and spiritually, perhaps even physically, from a horrible experience you had being a member of a church. Perhaps it was a church that was cultic or overbearing in its authoritarianism or some other issue.

Perhaps you were molested by a church leader or even just a fellow member, or there was some other horrible event that occurred that has perhaps made you extremely resistant to the idea of joining another church.

I understand that would compel you to remain anonymous. We will understand that and grant your request to remain anonymous. But if it's not about a personal and private matter, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

This is an important matter, Pastor John, because I'm sure you have met and I have met many people over the last 30 years of being a born-again believer where there are Christians who, or should I say professing Christians, who will say, well I don't see anywhere in the Bible where becoming a member of a church is necessary for salvation.

I see nothing but sinners and Pharisees and charlatans and hypocrites and frauds in the church everywhere I look. I am just fine by studying the Bible alone at home, having small gatherings perhaps of fellow believers in my home, having Bible studies, but I don't need to be a member of any church.

Been there, done that, ain't gonna do it again. And this is really not reflecting the heart and mind of a biblically literate born-again believer in Christ, is it? Not at all. I remember a conversation I had with.

Someone, and as the conversation normally goes when someone asks me, you know, what is it you do? And I say, well I'm a pastor. Sometimes that opens up more conversation, sometimes it just flatly shuts it down.

But not everybody, you know, wants to talk to a pastor. But one reaction I had, which is interesting, was a lady telling me, well I'm not into organized religion, just so you know. And my response was, oh, so you're into disorganized religion?

And they didn't really know what to do with that. But I'd like to kind of address what you said, because your question had so much emotion in it, and I really, as a pastor, my heart grieves to even think and consider that people have had those kind of experiences.

And I'm coming from the background of for many years as a pastor, not having what I now have as in terms of biblical church membership. And coming from that exact perspective, saying, where's that in the New Testament?

And over the course of the program, I'd love to get into some of the scriptures which only make sense in the light of biblical membership. Right from the beginning in Genesis 4, there's a description of Cain and Abel and the two offerings that were brought towards God.

And one was accepted by God, that of Abel, and the other was rejected. And if you do a bit of research on not only that passage, but what we find out in the book of Hebrews as well, chapter 11, which speaks about that incident, Cain is bringing his offering from the fruit of the ground.

It speaks of man's labor, whereas Abel is bringing a blood sacrifice. There's an animal that's been slain. And Hebrews 11 tells us that that offer on faith, and again, doing some research with other passages in our Bibles, faith comes on the basis of not nice music or a certain attitude towards God, but it comes by hearing the Word of God, Romans 10, 17.

So if an offering's based on faith, it's based on the revelation that God has given. And so Cain did the exact same labor, and the Bible's very clear that Cain's offering was rejected, Abel's was accepted.

And I think if you go then all the way through to the end of our Bibles, you've got Cain's religion producing the harlot of Revelation 17, and Abel's religion producing the bride. And so right from the get-go in our Bibles, not every kind of religion is accepted by God.

We go on to the book of Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers, where we have the outlining of the tabernacle. And again, God never said to Moses, hey, take a survey, ask what kind of service people will come to.

It's the exact opposite. God says, this is how you'll worship me. This is how you'll approach me. Everything is to be done. Everything, all things according to the pattern shown you on the mount in Exodus 25.

And that's a phrase we find repeated in the New Testament, Acts 7, 44, Hebrews 8, 5. Let me just quote Acts 7. Our fathers, Stephen said, had the tent of witness in the wilderness, just as he who spoke to Moses directed him to make it according to the pattern that he had seen.

So all that to say, there's a way of approaching God that is acceptable, but it's on his terms. And anytime we make up our own religion, I would say to anyone who's been hurt, may God heal every wound.

My heart bleeds as a pastor to hear some of the things you mentioned, even as a theory, to realize we're talking about people that actually experience those things, how heartbreaking that is. And yet I would say to them and to all of us, God still says what he says, and we have no right to make up our own religion and the way of approaching.

And when we come to the scriptures, God has not only the way of salvation very clearly defined, but also what happens to the Christian after he comes to know the Lord. And that is, he is, she is to be in the nurture of a local church, and that's what I'd love to get into.

Yes, of course. And I have said this many times on this program and off the air, that very often people will reject Jesus because of Judas. Judas was one of the 12 apostles, and yet he wound up betraying Christ in a manner that led to his murder.

Now, of course, we know that Jesus laid down his life willingly, and it was ordained that he die by his own father. But nonetheless, those that here on earth were the human culprits involved in his persecution and execution are no less guilty because of that.

And if Jesus Christ did not expect people to reject him because of what Judas did, there's no reason why people should reject Christ's church because of what some horrific church has done or what some cult has done to bring about serious harm, whether mental, spiritual, or physical upon anyone.

Would I be.

Correct in saying that? Yeah, absolutely. And the Lord of the Church, I'm sure, is deeply grieved by all of that, and the honest truth is, all those who've been involved in that will stand before the Lord one day, and it won't be an exciting prospect at all.

It'll be a day of dread for those that have inflicted harm on the people of God. Yet the Lord of the Church summons his people into the body of Christ, where he has ordained that we, the members, have elders over us in the Lord who are to watch over our souls as under-shepherds of Christ.

And that's something that has to be part of a local church, to be a local church, something that God recognizes. There's no such animal in the New Testament, no such person in the New Testament as someone who is a follower of Christ, who's not part of a local church.

And there's certain verses in the New Testament that scream church membership, and it's a lot like the Trinity. You can't just turn to one verse and say, there it is, there's one verse that shows you the Trinity, but it's putting the Scriptures together so that you and I can say, the Bible teaches the doctrine of the Trinity clearly.

And I've come to see that the Bible teaches the doctrine of membership of the local.

Church clearly, and I'd love to talk more about that. Yes, in fact, I know that you have verses and texts of your own to bring up, but I want to... Actually, they're from the Bible, but... Anyway, in Hebrews chapter 13, verse 17, we read, Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account.

Let them do this with joy and not with grief, for this would be unprofitable for you. Now, obviously, how are you supposed to submit to leaders, obey and submit to them, if you're not even a member of your church?

And how are you supposed to have these ordained men keeping watch over your souls and giving an account for your soul if you are not a member of a church? I don't know how people who are professing Christians who claim to know the Scriptures can escape the truth behind this.

That's a very good point, and that was one of.

My verses. But just to look at that verse, I remember reading it and thinking of someone who was a pastor. Two things are there staring at me in the text that I didn't see for years, because I just went on to what I thought were more exciting things to talk about and study, but two things have to be assumed for that Scripture to be applied.

Number one, the people know which leaders they are to obey and submit to. They're not to submit to every leader in every church, but it says, obey your leaders and submit to them. And then number two, the leaders know which people they are to give an account for, not merely anyone who shows up at a service, but someone who comes along and says, I'm considering you guys my elders, I'm submitting myself to you, and I want you to watch over my soul.

And the picture in my mind is a staggeringly haunting one, and rightly so, that one day I as an elder will stand before the Lord and he'll say, do you remember Sister So-and-so? She was in your church for three years, and you need to, right at this moment, give an account for how you led her towards Christ-likeness.

Did you nurture her? What was she hearing in the sermons? What did you do to pray for her? Did you pray for her? Was it a regular occurrence? Do you even know her name? And give an account, John, right now, and then do that for everyone else who's been part of your church however long that has been.

And that's scary, and it's meant to be scary, so that we understand the relationship here. The people know who their leaders are they submit to, and the leaders know which people they are to give an account for.

And this is Christ, through the writer to Hebrews, giving us this instruction. This is not someone off on his own tangent. This is Christ nurturing his people and saying, I want my people in a nurturing relationship whereby I'm able to feed them in the feeding.

House, which is the local church. We're going to go to our first break right now, and if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question about church membership, we would love to hear from you at ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. You may remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable, because the question is about a personal and private matter.

But if it's not about something that personal and private, please at least give us your first name, city and state, and your country of residence. Don't go away. We'll be right back with John Sampson and the importance of church membership.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Armson, if you just tuned us in. Our guest today on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio for the full two hours is John Sampson, who is an author and pastor of King's Church Peoria, Arizona, and in studio with me, who has just joined us due to an appointment he had before the program.

We have back in the studio the Reverend Buzz Taylor,.

My co-host, and it's great to have you back. It's good to be here, and you know I missed the first part of the conversation, but I felt like I've been here from the beginning because I've already been fed just the last few minutes, because this was a big issue in my life.

Yeah, why don't you tell us about that?

Well, of course, I was ordained back in 1984, and of course anybody who's ever...

So there was something Orwellian about your ordination.

There was, yes. But anybody who's been through ordination knows exactly what it's like to when you get grilled, and one of the questions I was asked at my ordination council was, what do you believe are the requirements for church membership?

And I had just come recently out of a non-denominational church that didn't believe in church membership, and I was sort of persuaded the same way at that time, and that really caused a stir, and I was really worried about my ordination at that point.

But they decided with further counsel from the pastor that I was assisting at the time that they would ordain me after he enlightened me about church membership. And I have to admit, they did a terrible job of trying to convince me of church membership.

It wasn't until I really came into Reformed understanding that I started to understand even the concept of church membership as I understood covenant theology and so forth. Then I started seeing exactly like...

I mean, you just mentioned from Hebrews, how do you get around that?

Right. And yeah, Pastor John, I don't know, have you been my co-host when Pastor John.

Sampson has been my guest before? I'm not exactly certain. Chris,.

You've interviewed so many people. Well, anyway, Pastor John, you and Reverend Buzz Taylor have something in common in that you were both charismatic at one time and both came into the Reformed faith, although Reverend Buzz Taylor was never in the Word of Faith movement.

Well, I tickled it. Yeah. I was getting materials from Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland for a while. And I even took some of my church members of a non-charismatic church to some Hagin meetings. But when I started hearing some of the things that they believed, which were not taught to me before, as soon as I started hearing about Proto-Heaven and all that stuff that they taught, I immediately saw through it.

And it's like, I can't be part of this.

But Pastor John, Reverend Buzz Taylor brings up something interesting because it's not just lone wolf Christians who don't want to have any oversight upon their lives. They don't want to have any ruling elders overseeing them and leaving themselves open to discipline.

It's not just these lone wolves who are thinking that they don't need pastors or churches to be in fellowship with. There are churches that don't believe in church membership. They don't think it's a biblical concept.

I can remember years ago, I don't know if you remember this, this may have been in the 80s, perhaps the 90s, but there was a news-breaking event where a Church of Christ congregation was being sued by a woman who was put under church discipline because she was an unrepentant adulteress.

And she sued the church because she was not a member of the church because the church didn't believe in membership. And therefore, she was suing them on the basis of character assassination and so on because of the fact that the church made her situation public as any church should if a person is unrepentant over a serious issue especially.

And she sued the church. I can't remember whether she won the suit or not, but there are churches out there, even conservative churches.

That do not believe in church membership. Very true, and I was a pastor who would have said the same. I don't see it in the scripture because I couldn't find a verse that taught it. But again, the whole premise of the New Testament is when someone is converted, they repent, they believe, they're baptized, and they're added to the church, which is not merely the church universal, they're a member of the body of Christ, but a local church.

And if we can just get that concept that's really in place in our minds, we don't get to decide what the church is. It's Christ who does that. And both in the Old and the New Testament, God has said, this is how you'll approach me.

It's my way. That's what the tabernacle was. It was not the polling of the Israelites and showing you on the mountain. Similarly, when Jesus, in Matthew chapter 18, walks through the scene that this person is to be treated as a tax collector, which really means to be treated as someone outside of the covenant community, there's a definite in and a definite out.

You go to the elders, you go to the church, and there's a process involved that, again, was very eye-opening to me when I sat before some elders, and they were grilling me, and they were asking me about certain things that happened in my life, and even as a pastor, and they said, so if you had a biblical church, this is how we would have done it.

And my eyes were just open to realize, wow, you actually do? And they said, yeah, that's Jesus' commandment with all kinds of issues in relationship, and that's right, yeah, well-solving issues, and that is under the protection of the local church.

Oftentimes we see the abuses, things that you characterized at the beginning of the program today, and we are aghast, and our reaction is to run the other way a thousand miles an hour if we could, but if we get back to our standing there as Lord of the church saying, will you take on what I say?

And when we see Jesus' words, there are members of a church that you can go see the elders and talk about specific issues, and then in the New Testament, again, for us Corinthians, we have the incident in chapter 5 where there's gross immorality taking place, and if repentance doesn't happen, he's to be put, and to be put out means that there's first an end.

You can't be put, you can't leave a building unless you're first put out means that someone was, it's in that context that the whole New Testament comes to us. God expected that when, because they would be part of the gathered community, so that when Paul wrote to the Galatians, for example, ordained elders, not just people who met in a Titus 1 -5.

Paul writes to Titus and says, the reason I left you in Crete was that you might set in order what was unfinished and appoint elders in every town as I directed you, and he's saying, I want elders in every town.

If you don't have elders, I'm finished in getting a church started, and again, getting that in our framework is so different because we're so used to individualized Christianity, it's just me and Jesus.

I've got my Bible, I can listen to preachers, I can watch Christian television, I can do my own thing, but if we go back to the Lord Jesus and we take his word, I don't believe Jesus considers that a church, even meeting together with fellow Christians, unless there is these components of the word of God and baptism being administered and church discipline of the people.

And just a little bit more, if there's someone who's scamming the elderly amongst the church and protect the flock, and it's the elder's job to say, this is not right doctrine you're teaching, and you either need to repent of this or you need to leave because we are not allowing wolves to reign in the flock.

And it's for the protection of the people, for the nurturing of the people, so that when the Lord Jesus has one of his sheep, he can put that sheep in the protection of one of his group of under-shepherds, tightly nurtured, and the wolves don't run free.

And the Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say.

I think it's also noteworthy, I mentioned before in my short testimony there about, it was a fundamental Baptist ordination council that ordained me, and I said that they didn't do a very adequate job of explaining church membership to me, but that was also a group of churches that not only didn't believe in elders in the church, they were vehemently opposed.

It was unheard of that a Baptist church would have elders in it, and it's interesting because you mentioned from Titus, they would appoint elders in the church and you knew who the were appointed and they knew who they were leading.

In other words, they believed in the authority of a sole single pastor, or perhaps a pastor and associate pastor.

Or congregations, you know, voting. Well, listen, the church that I was in at the time, where I was an assistant pastor, not while I was there, but I heard in previous years, they would vote on how much toilet paper to buy.

I mean, it was really pathetic.

But as far as the visible leader in the church, it was a single pastor.

Right, single pastor.

And they did not believe that the office of pastor and elder were even the same.

No, they did not.

Okay. Now, obviously, from what you were saying, they didn't even believe the elder was a biblical office. In fact, how could they escape that? Because that's the wording in the Bible.

Well, what's interesting is that the church that I was assisting before I took my senior pastor, which was at the time of my ordination, when I was moving into my first senior pastor, when I was assisting that pastor, he was trying to convince his congregation of elders.

And, you know, I've had people come up to me afterwards and say, how can you work with him? He has elders in the church.

Well, weird. Anyway, so Pastor John Sampson, I know that you have some texts that you want to enlighten us with.

They're obvious when you see them, and I don't want to bore people who are so familiar with these things. But again, just understanding that it's not simply Jesus and me, me and Jesus. It's Jesus loving us enough to put us in a group where we will grow.

And he says, this is where you'll meet me. You know, the Israelite who was of the tribe of Naphtali, let's say, back in the Old Testament, he didn't get to decide how he would approach God. He came on God's terms and he would go to the feasts as God directed on the days God directed with the offering God directed, the way God directed ad infinitum until God said otherwise.