- 00:13
- You said a hundred and thirty miles, a hundred and sixty-five each way, so that would be a hundred and thirty miles.
- 00:23
- Made me think of a little quip, does anybody know the difference between an American and a European? Europeans think that a hundred miles is a long way, Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
- 00:40
- You go to Europe, there's houses that are older than our country, but then again, a hundred miles to us isn't much of anything, where if you go over there, you can go a hundred miles, you went through three countries, you know, so it really is interesting, the distinction.
- 00:54
- Well as Brother Andy mentioned, I'm going to be going over the extension of Article 35, which is what he did, and I don't know if you mentioned this because I wasn't in here, but the goal is we're going to be finishing the study by the end of September, and then we're going to be moving into a new study.
- 01:12
- I'm currently preying over what I'm going to be doing, I know Brother Andy's got an idea of what he's going to do, but we are going to be doing two different things, and I'm most likely going to be going through a book in the New Testament, a shorter book, I'm looking at either one of the short books of Paul, or possibly Jude, that's a short one, but just to spend a little bit of time doing an exposition in the New Testament, so if you happen to have an interest in one of those books that you, you know, have some questions about, and you might want me to go through, let me know.
- 01:41
- Oh, and Brother Andy's doing Proverbs, he's going to teach on, his half's going to be on Proverbs, and I'm going to be doing, so we'll have an Old Testament and a New Testament lesson on Wednesday, he'll do his Old Testament portion, and I'll do a portion of the New Testament, like I said, I could take Jude and stretch it for six months if I really wanted to, there's so much meat in that little book, but if you have something else that you'd like me to do, I certainly would be interested in hearing what that is.
- 02:06
- What's that? I've taught James twice, that's the only reason that would keep me from it, is, you know, I've, huh? Yeah, and they are very similar too, and that would be, yeah, I love James, that's what's, I've actually preached through it twice here and taught through it once at Set Free, so, because I taught back when we had Sunday evening service, and then when I was teaching Sunday school, I did it, so yeah, but I'm not opposed to doing it, I'm just saying I kind of wanted to do something I hadn't done before, but that's just, you know, my life goal is by the time I die, and you never know when that's going to happen, but my life's goal is to have preached through the whole New Testament, of course, John MacArthur did it, and that's certainly a worthy task, and...
- 02:48
- Can you speak to the harmony of the gospel for a long time? Yeah, but that is, you're talking about a long time, I'm not yet ready to bite off and chew on that, because my harmony of the gospels, my desire to do that would literally be a verse-by-verse study of every book of the gospels all at the same time, and I don't know how long, I'm thinking three years that it would take at least to do that, so probably not that one, and because Genesis is so long, I did want to do something shorter, Genesis is, I have no idea when I'm going to be done with that, alright, so let's look at the articles, if you have your books, we're going to look at articles 36 and 37, and this is on church officers, 36 says this, being thus joined, every local church has or hath power given them from Christ for their well-being to choose among themselves meet or suitable persons for elders and deacons, being qualified according to the word as those which Christ hath appointed in his testament for the feeding, governing, serving, and building up of his church, and that none have any power to impose on them either these or any other.
- 04:17
- Currently, our Sovereign Grace Academy, which meets on Thursday nights, is going through a course on Intro to Church Life and Ministry, that's our term for this semester, or our subject for this term, rather, and we're going through the book that I wrote, I wrote a book entitled The Biblically Functioning Church, and that's the textbook for this class, and in that book, I spend a lot of time dealing with this subject, Jackie's in the class, so you know, this particular subject, you know, we have dealt with at length, and I certainly have some opinions on the matter, having spent the time to put my book together, so I'm not going to be able to outline everything tonight, but I do want to point out some very important things about elders and deacons, primarily what we see in this article, because the focal point of this article is very simple, the local church has the right to choose for itself elders and deacons, that's really the key to this article, that's the truth that it's identifying, because we are not governed by an ecclesiastical authority outside of ourselves that would impose upon us leaders from elsewhere, I mean think about the history of the church, priests would be brought in from other areas and put with a church that they didn't know, and people they didn't know, and that still happens in some denominations such as the Methodist church, the Methodist church has a rotating pastorate, where pastors will pastor for two to three years, they will be brought out of that congregation and sent to another congregation, and the concept behind it, I do understand the concept, and that is this, that the church would never become pastor driven, it would never become personality driven, and you've seen churches that are that way, it's the personality of the pastor sort of takes over the church and becomes the force, the warp and woof of ministry is this one man, but the problem with it is number one, when you have men, and in the Methodist church women, rotating through that ministry like that, what you end up with is you end up with no ownership, and really no real relationship past that two or three year mark, and when I say ownership, understand what I mean, I don't mean like ownership in the sense of, you know, this is my property, but the idea that this is what God sent me to do, and I've said many times, and I believe it to be true, I don't plan to go anywhere else, unless God makes it very clear that Keith, you need to go to, please let it be Tennessee, no, I do like the mountains of Tennessee, but I don't want to go, because this is, unless we all go, y'all want to move to Tennessee together, we can all just pick up and, no, okay, well, we just spent time on a commune, we just talked about a commune, yeah, we're not going to do a commune, but I did see the coolest thing this week, and not to go off the subject, but there's a place up in Virginia for sale, it's an old retreat of some kind, had like 40 bedrooms and all this stuff, and it's only three and a half million dollars, I said, I know I know enough people that we can get together and pool that amount of money, and just have the coolest retreat ever, it would be the greatest place, it has a room, that'd be great for your cigars, Mike, like a cigar room, so anyway, but anyway, the point is, the church, the local church has the responsibility of choosing its own leaders, and so what does it say about that, it says, being thus joined, every local church hath the power given from Christ for their well-being to choose among themselves, meet persons or suitable persons for elders and deacons, well, how do we know that they're meet, how do we know that they're suitable, well, I agree, but first and foremost, the scripture gives us qualifications, yeah, Timothy, 1st Timothy chapter 3, Titus chapter 1, we have specific qualifications for the positions of elder and deacon, in fact, I make the argument in the class, and in my book, that that's why we know there's only two offices in the New Testament Church, because there's only two offices that are given qualifications, we don't have other offices, because we wouldn't know how to appoint anyone to those offices, because there's no qualifications for any other offices, the offices that are given to the church are the two that are given qualifications in 1st Timothy and Titus, specifically the office of elder and deacon, and so those are the two offices, and we are to choose men who are suitable for those positions, being qualified according to the word, and how do we know they're qualified, as Mike said, that we know them, Brother Andy, how long were you here before we began to examine you for an elder? Okay, now, you were a pastor before of, you know, many years, and we knew that, but he still came in and had to get to be known by us, same way with Brother Mike, Brother Mike Collier been here a little longer than Brother Andy, but they both had to go through a process of learning the congregation, the congregation learning them, developing mutual trust within, and then the congregation had to affirm them.
- 09:52
- We have a Constitution, I don't know if you guys, most of you know that, because most of you affirmed it, we redid it back in, I think it was April of this year, we reaffirmed our new Constitution, and what is it that a man has to do to be put in as an elder? He has to be a, he has to be discerned by the elders to be qualified, and then he has to be put before the congregation and receive how much of an affirmation? Remember? The 51%? No.
- 10:24
- 90%.
- 10:25
- That 90% of the people of God within the body must affirm that this man meets the qualifications, and that they trust him to be in the position of elder, and the same is the same for deacon, and the reason for that is we didn't want a divided church, and we don't believe that a divided church in regard to leadership is one that God would give us.
- 10:50
- I'll give you a good example right now, I don't know how many of you guys are familiar, there's a very famous pastor, wrote a book called Radical, his sort of huge success because it was about being radical for Jesus and this stuff, well unfortunately their church is going through a major problem right now because there were men put up for eldership, and there was pushback, and there's division over whether or not they're going to get it, and they're not meeting the standard, the vote standard, and I wouldn't even be mentioning this if it wasn't all over you know the Christian news blogs and everything else, I mean it doesn't matter to us, the point is it happens, somebody gets put up, and the church doesn't trust these people for whatever reason, I don't agree or disagree with what's going on because I don't know, I just know that these men put up for this position, there's no, there's not enough trust to move forward, not enough trust to move forward, so we see being thus joined every local church has the power given to them for the well-being to choose among themselves suitable persons for elders and deacons being qualified according to the word as those which Christ has appointed in his testament for the feeding, there's four things, four tasks of the elders and deacons, feeding, governing, serving, building up of the church.
- 12:18
- I didn't, I didn't, when I was preparing this I got to thinking you know we could divide these out as to what's an elders job and what's a deacons job, but really this, here's the simple way of understanding it, the elders are charged primarily with the teaching of the word and the governing through the word of the body in regard to matters of faith, the deacons are charged with serving the body in whatever capacity is needed and so in a sense when we talk about feeding and governing I would say the first two really primarily fall on the shoulders of the elders and serving and building up would be all of them together but primarily on the deacons and so like I said I didn't want to make a hard divide there but I do think that there is somewhat of a distinction that is to be made and when we talk about governing the church we're not talking about micromanaging every aspect of everyone's life that's not our duty but we do govern the affairs of the church we minister within the body and we love the body and seek to encourage the body and to teach in fact when it says feeding what do we feed the body? The word.
- 13:41
- That's right, that's right.
- 13:43
- What's the problem that happens in the church? The sheep don't show up for feeding time.
- 13:50
- That's a big problem you know that people just don't come you know people always I've heard people say I don't feel like I'm being discipled.
- 13:59
- I say you start by being here on Sunday because if you would listen to the sermon on Sunday whether I'm preaching or Brother Andy or Brother Mike's preaching there's enough in the sermon to get you through at least five nights of family worship with your family if you would take what we teach you home and apply it absolutely enough for five nights of family worship if you would actually take the time to invest in what we're teaching and if you do Sunday school and Wednesday night you got plenty of information of food but we often don't so that's just that's one thought the feeding has to be there and it's not I'm not I'm not discounting individual discipleship we do that as well you know currently I'm working through a discipleship program with one of our deacons I'm currently counseling a church member and and obviously phone calls and everything else that go on normal church life those all happen intermittently but the primary time of feeding is is the Lord's Day 1030 a.m.
