Episode 31: Worship, Homes, Fellowship (Biblical Distinctives Part 4)
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Eddie and Allen finish their discussion on the Biblical distinctives of a healthy church in this week's episode. They talk about the regulative principle of worship, the roles of men and women in worship, and the importance of the home and church fellowship. They also share some practical wisdom on reformation in the church.
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- to the Ruled Church podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.
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- He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?
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- You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.
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- The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be
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- Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the
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- Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving
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- Jesus in a local, visible congregation. The Ruled Church podcast, episode 31.
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- How you doing, Eddie? Man, I'm doing great. I'm doing great. How are you doing, Quattro?
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- A nice, warm day in February, which if you have a warm day in February in Arkansas, it almost always means you're gonna storm.
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- Yeah, this morning when I was leaving the house, I brought my kids with me today, and my son was like,
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- Dad, it's in the 60s, it's gonna be in the 70s today, can I wear shorts? And my wife said, oh, man, she said if it's that warm, you know it's gonna storm today.
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- Yeah, don't have to stay in Arkansas very long to realize that. Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast.
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- I'm your co -host, Alan Nelson. With me is my brother in the faith, co -labor in the ministry,
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- Eddie Ragsdale, pastor at First Baptist, Marshall, Marshall, Marshall, and I'm the pastor of Perryville Second Baptist Church.
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- Eddie, we're talking today about the distinctives, 10 biblical distinctives.
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- This should be our last episode here. We've gotta wrap that up. But before we do, how's things been going in your church?
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- Man, they've been going great. You and I were just discussing before we started is some changes that both of our churches are making changes to our constitution, our bylaws, our statements of faith, those kinds of things.
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- And so we just finished up some of that work on Sunday. We've had a committee working on that for a while now, and it feels great to kind of get that squared away.
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- And now we've got, you know, ratified as church, but man, the Lord is just really blessing us, especially in the area of fellowship.
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- We've just seen so much increased fellowship these last several weeks and months that it's just a great time to be at First Baptist, Marshall.
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- How's everything at Second Baptist Perryville? That's similar, similar things, and we're encouraged.
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- We're, you know, one of these days I'll tell the story, you know, but we're a little smaller, and, but we're excited right now.
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- Now, by the time this comes out, everything will be over. But while we're recording this on February 22nd,
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- I'm looking forward to next week, which we'll have Mike Stone and Tom Askell with us.
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- And then Thursday, next Thursday night, we're gonna, we'll have done the round table on what churches need in pastors, you know, why we need faithful.
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- So all that's going on right now, we're really excited. And we've been doing some cleaning up, some rearranging.
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- Oh, that's funny. I should actually say that physically and spiritually, I guess, as it were, but we're just some good things happening here.
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- And I'm very, very encouraged by that. Obviously, I pray that the Lord would bring more folks, but it's important to get everything lined up the way that the scriptures would have.
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- So we're going through a series on, which we're talking about today, we're going on a series on 10 distinctives of our church.
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- And I just finished that actually last Sunday. And this coming Lord's Day, I'll be preaching 1 Timothy 3, 15, how the church is pillar and buttress of the truth.
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- And then Dr. Askell will preach the next Sunday. And then after that, we'll be back in Ephesians. So we've had a good winter, a tough fall, a good winter, looking forward to a good spring.
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- And we love the local church. Yeah, praise the Lord. That's awesome. Well, let's jump into these biblical distinctives.
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- Which one do you wanna start with? We left off last time where we're on worship now.
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- And we may have a little bit difference here, but I'm gonna read you what I've written and we can chat about it.
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- But biblical worship, we believe that our triune God alone determines how he is to be worshiped and has expressly set forth in his word how he would have his local churches worship him.
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- We therefore seek to follow the regulative principle of worship. This means that we believe that only what
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- God has expressly commanded his church to do in worship should be done. Let's stop there. I think we're in agreement there.
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- Any thoughts you wanna add? Yeah, we would agree totally. Hey, would you wanna maybe define regulative and normative principles in worship?
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- That might be helpful to everybody. I kind of defined it in the thing, but just to reiterate, what
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- I put is in layman's terms, the regular principle means that we believe that only what
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- God has expressly commanded his church to do in worship should be done. And the normative principle is anything that's not forbidden may be done.
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- Right. And I think that's helpful for people to notice that the
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- Lord gives us instructions on how he wants to be worshiped. It's not up to us to be creative in worship.
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- Amen. It's up to us to be obedient in worship. Yeah, that's right. And there,
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- Jesus says that we are to worship the Father in spirit and in truth.
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- And this is why, when you look at things, for example, like the Asbury event or revival or whatever, you're not trying to be hypercritical, but you are trying to understand these things through the lens of truth.
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- So when it comes to the local church's worship, we're to worship in truth. And so some people push back against the regular principle because they talk about like screens and stuff like that, but those are really what you call incidentals.
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- They're not the forms. The forms of worship are, so for example,
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- I'll just take you through our worship real quick. We start out, we don't find a great place for announcements.
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- And so we start, how we've been doing it is we start our meeting and we'll give announcements and then we'll have an opportunity to shake hands and welcome one another.
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- But how we really structure our worship is then after that we start with the reading of the scriptures.
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- And so we read the scriptures and then we pray. And so that's starting. After that, we recite our memory verse.
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- After that, we sing. We sing two songs. After those two songs, we have a teaching portion, which is someone reading from the 1689 and then from the
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- Baptist Catechism. After that, we sing again. After that, we take up an offering.
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- I believe there's warrant in the scripture to do that. And then after that, there's prayer.
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- There's prayer after the teaching and the offering. After that, we preach the word. After that, we sing again.
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- And then we have recently voted to do our Lord's Supper once a month.
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- And so that's where we're at. I would imagine there's a pretty similar worship services, you guys, except I know you guys partake of the
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- Lord's Supper weekly. Yeah, what happens in our service and the only real distinction that happens from week to week, some weeks, we will have a song like before we actually get into the structure, like our worship team will just, they'll lead in a song at the very beginning.
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- But that's probably more rare. Most every week, we have a brother who will come up and he'll do announcements.
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- He will read the catechism question and answer for that week. He will read the scripture and he will pray.
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- And one of the things that in that prayer, we're always praying for a local church in our association and we're always praying for whatever ministry that we're supporting that month.
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- So for example, this week, this month we're praying for Grace Bible Theological Seminary because that's who we're supporting.
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- So we prayed for them, we prayed for a local church and their pastor. And then we sing, we usually sing four or five songs and then
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- I will come up and preach. After the preaching, the way that we conclude the preaching time is we will sing a song, but we'll sing an acapella song.
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- Nobody comes up onto the stage. And while they're singing the song, I will set the table for the
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- Lord's Supper. And then I will come back to the pulpit and dismiss our online, because even before COVID, we had our service available online, but we dismissed the online at that portion because what we're gonna do following the sermon is,
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- I would say nothing that we're gonna do is anything that you can participate in if you're not there.
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- And so then what we will have is an open time for people to share testimonies, maybe testimonies of what
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- God's done in our life or maybe testimony of evangelistic encounter or something like that.
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- Also, it's time when people bring up prayer needs and things like that. And then we'll have a special time of prayer for what's been said during that time of sharing.
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- And then we partake of the Lord's Supper. And the way we partake of the Lord's Supper is we invite the believers to come to the table and receive.
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- So we don't carry it around the room distributing it. I don't think it's wrong to do it that way.
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- We've just found it's better for us to do it this way, to call the believers to come to the table.
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- And then we partake of the Lord's Supper. And then that concludes our service. And we've started over the last month.
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- We've just started having a meal every Sunday. So then we go, not everyone, but many people stay and enjoy time of fellowship and having a
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- Lord's Day meal. We do a meal as well. We don't do the meal at the church, although we could, we just,
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- I don't know, we do it at the home. And that is one thing I would encourage. I would encourage church.
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- You might think, well, it's just no way, but you might be surprised the response you get.
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- I know churches that are doing this all around and that's just getting together in people's homes and saying, you know, like how we do it.
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- And we let the wives take care of it. They do a great job, but they kind of coordinate something like, okay, this week we're gonna do tacos.
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- So they just send out a message, do tacos. This is what we need. People pitch in and they do it. And then we'll usually meet at my house or Gunner's house every other
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- Sunday, kind of. Now, March 5th, when Dr. Askel's here, we'll just do it at the church. But man, it's been a great time of encouragement, fellowship, just a wonderful time.
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- But the point is that we want to do, we want to do the, in our worship, what the scriptures have commanded.
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- Mm -hmm, mm -hmm, that's right. All right, so that's the, I mean, that's a very, very basic discussion of the regulative principle.
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- But let me press further and see if you have any disagreements or thoughts about this.
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- This also means that we believe only qualified men may preach or publicly lead in the singing,
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- Bible reading and praying that occurs when the church is corporately gathered in our Lord's Day main assembly.
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- Yeah, the only distinction you and I would have here is we do have women on the worship team.
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- So that would be the only distinction you and I would have would be there. Because I would separate the singing from being a pastoral role, so.
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- So my conviction here is, my conviction here is in the leading.
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- Not in the, not like in a woman's singing.
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- I mean, in fact, the woman should, the women of the church, they better be singing, right?
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- Or you're not gonna have a, it's not gonna, you're not gonna have a very loud church.
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- The conviction is not about the singing so much as it is about the leading. And so I think that however a church ends up working this out, that it's not the place, it's not the woman's role to be leading in that portion of the worship.
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- I mean, you understand what I'm trying to communicate there? Yeah, I do understand what you're communicating.
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- I just, once again, I think that the way
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- I would see it is it's not leading in a instructing role.
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- However, and I will admit here that I could be convinced differently because I do think that the
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- Bible does talk about how that we're teaching one another in the singing of songs, but I don't think it's the idea that the person leading the song is teaching us.
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- I think that the way that Paul uses that language in Colossians and in Ephesians, it's all of us are teaching and admonishing each other as we sing the songs to each other.
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- I just want to say it's a weighty issue and it's an important issue. And I can tell you from experience, it's not an issue that you need to take lightly, but I will just kind of mention, obviously we know when we're both in a full agreement, that Paul clearly says a woman's not to teach.
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- Right, absolutely. Or preach, but I would add there too that, or have authority.
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- And ultimately, so for me, this is my position, of course, I'm not, I'm just sharing it on here.
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- My position is that when you put a woman as the main leader, okay? I mean, I'm not saying a lady on stage, okay?
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- And there's a man that's leading, a lady singing, you know, whatever, or even, you know, the way sometimes, if you've seen the
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- Gettys, maybe not a concert, but like, if you ever seen like at a worship service or something, you know, you kind of have
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- Keith that's doing all the talking and all that. And then they sing, but obviously it's
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- Christian singing or whatever. Okay, that's different. But when you have that main leader, what ends up happening is, she does end up having authority over the congregation.
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- She ends up kind of, I'm sharing my position, she ends up kind of dictating the ins and outs and the standing, the sitting, and, you know, how things are gonna go.
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- And I just think as we study, you know, as we were dealing with SBC stuff, and as we're dealing with our confusion of gender roles in the
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- Southern Baptist Convention, and as I began to study that more and think through that more and have conversations, that's just where I landed that, ultimately that would be an inappropriate position.
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- Well, yeah, and I would say this, this is not the case for us here at Marshall. I mean, if I guess
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- I was thinking in terms of leading musically. And so in our worship here at Marshall, some of the songs, we've got a brother on the worship team that leads some of the songs.
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- I'm talking about musically leading, like he's the lead singer in the song. And then some of the songs, just because of the nature of the song, the way that,
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- I'm not, I don't know anything about music, but, you know, it tends to be led easier by a person.
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- He's a pretty low bass singer. And so one of the ladies on the worship team will lead some of the songs in a musical sense.
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- But yes, I'm certain that everybody listening to this podcast can relate to going to church and there being a lady up there singing that more or less preaches between the songs.
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- And that should be unacceptable, I think to everyone wanting to abide by scripture.
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- We can't have that. That's not the case in what we do.
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- But yeah, I mean, we know that there are a lot of churches that they would affirm that a woman shouldn't teach, but in essence, they do allow a woman to teach because she spends five minutes between each song, you know, instructing us on what we're supposed to be getting from that song.
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- And I think that that's completely inappropriate. I talked to a man from the state convention about this. It like blew his mind, you know, that, you know, like there's people not even thinking through this.
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- And so this is something you need to think through. And we want, ultimately we want to honor the
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- Lord and worship him. That's right. He does care. It does matter. So, all right, last part of this paragraph on worship.
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- We prize the first day of the week, Sunday, as our day for worshiping God corporately. While there will be times of providential hindrance, we prioritize our meetings on this day.
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- Setting aside this day is sacred for worship and fellowship with the body of Christ. Okay.
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- Any questions, comments there? No, I agree. Absolutely. And Sunday ought to be our priority.
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- Yes. Jeff Johnson told me one time, a few years ago in class, he told the class, we ought to schedule, our church ought to be what we schedule everything else around.
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- But for most people, we schedule church into our busy schedule. If we've got something else going on Sunday, then, you know, sorry,
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- I can't go to church. But as the old meme goes, church ought to be your excuse for missing everything else.
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- Yeah, yeah. And we ought to take seriously the idea of it being the Lord's day. You know,
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- I've said this for years, but so often Christians, we begin to treat it like it's the
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- Lord's, like it's the Lord's hour instead of the Lord's day.
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- And we almost want to be efficient with it. We want to be moving through and getting this stuff done so that people can get on to other things.
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- And we should not be thinking of it that way. We should be thinking of it as, we want to linger with worship on the
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- Lord's day. We had some people that were upset with the great coffee debate, but they were upset over coffee at the church.
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- Oh yeah. And they said, it was Gunner making coffee. And they're like, you can't go one hour without coffee.
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- And it was like, that's what you see our meeting as? You see our meeting as we're just getting, we're coming in for an hour and leaving?
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- That's terrible. That's a terrible view of the church. And so anyway, yeah, it's the
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- Lord's day. All right, last part, this is part of that paragraph, the last part says, we believe that biblical worship is for all ages and that the entire church body and every family ought to worship
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- God together. We therefore do not provide separate spaces for children's classes during corporate worship.
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- Thoughts, comments? Yeah, I absolutely agree. I don't think that it is wise to separate the family or to take the children out of the experience of worship, especially since I would say that what we're doing, going back to the regulative principle, these are the things that ought to help our children to see their need for Christ.
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- So often people are concerned about children growing up in a
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- Christian home and they're really concerned or how are they gonna recognize that they actually need to repent and put their trust in Christ, that they're not already
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- Christians by nature of growing up in a Christian home. And I would say, well, one way is that when they are in the service with the family, that they see the things that they're not able to be included in.
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- For example, the Lord's Supper. It is a witness to my unconverted son that he does not partake of the table.
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- I think there are - Even if he wasn't in there, then he wouldn't get that witness. That's right.
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- Even if there wasn't any kind of New Testament verses to go along with this, I think that there's enough in the
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- Old Testament and there's enough all that you've said to say, amen, amen. But I would even add one more thing to this.
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- And that is in Ephesians 5, Paul addresses husbands and wives.
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- Why? Because he expects both are going to be in the meeting. And then in Ephesians 6, who does he address?
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- He addresses the children. Yeah, he doesn't say, and tell your children to be obedient.
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- He says, children obey your parents. Now, why does Paul, think about this, isn't that something?
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- Paul, the great apostle addresses children. Says, hey, like a father would, children obey your parents in the
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- Lord for this is right. Why does he say that to the children? Because he expects just like he expects the husbands, the wives, the masters, the slaves, he addresses all these people and the children, because he expects that they're all going to be together.
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- So I think that we have theological warrant from everything that you said. And I think we have biblical precedent.
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- And I really don't think that there's any biblical warrant for separating out and having a children's church.
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- Now, I'm not gonna be like, oh, you're not a true church. But I would say it's just unwise, brother, if that's what you're doing.
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- It's not the best practice. And I understand the counter arguments. Oh, but we're teaching them so much more.
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- Yeah, but the things that you're teaching them, which we can transition just a minute, they ought to be learning at home.
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- That's right. And what they're missing, they can't replicate at home. That's right. So any other thoughts about that?
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- Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And even like you were saying, when we think about even the way that Paul is speaking there, we have to remember that when, take the
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- Ephesians, when they received that letter, they didn't all carry a Bible home that day with it in it.
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- So the children heard that because they were in the meeting. Paul did it that way because the letter was being read to the entire church.
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- And the children were in the meeting. And so we ought to want our children to be in the meeting.
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- And as well, we're not saying that there's no scenario where a parent would need to take a child out of the meeting.
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- There might be a time when a child needs to be taken out of the meeting for discipline. There may be times when parents need to take out infant children to care for them.
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- But we're saying that the regular meeting of the church ought to include the whole family.
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- Yeah, amen. That's right. Well, we've got two left and we've been on here about 25 minutes, but I think we can get these.
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- These are pretty just simple. And we've already kind of talked about them. One is biblical homes.
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- The other is biblical fellowship. Biblical homes, we believe that God's design for marriage is between one man and one woman for life.
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- We believe that the home ought to be a place where Christ's reign is recognized and rejoiced in and where family worship happens frequently.
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- We live in a society that hates biblical masculinity. We believe men must be the leaders of our homes.
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- We reject today's idea that gender is fluid and that men and women's roles are interchangeable. God's design for the home consists in godly husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church and submissive wives seeking to follow their husband's godly leadership and children submissive to their parents.
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- We desire to order the home the way Christ would have us. We disciple men to prize the scriptures, to prize learning theology, to prize growing in the faith, to prize humbly and graciously leading their families to do the same, to learn from and disciple other men.
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- We disciple women to prize the scriptures and learning theology, to tangibly prioritize children in the home, to love and respect their husbands, to learn from and disciple other women.
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- We disciple families to have regular times of family worship in the home. Questions, thoughts?
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- No, I think it sounds really good. And I think that's what we ought to desire is godly homes.
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- If you want to build godly churches, they're going to be built from having godly believers who are coming from godly homes.
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- And so we ought to want to see that in the local church. I think that at each level of, if we want to think in terms of government or jurisdiction that the
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- Lord has put us in, at each level, we ought to be drawing near to the Lord. And so that means personally, we need to be drawing near to the
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- Lord as families. We need to be drawing near to the Lord. Then as a church, if all of the individuals and families in the church are drawing near to the
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- Lord, then as a church, we'll be drawing near to the Lord. And I also think that our homes can really be an opportunity for evangelism because our homes are different, because our homes do speak a better word to those around us than if we were living as if we weren't a part of Christ when we weren't a part of the church meeting.
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- Amen, amen. I mean, so there's a whole, in fact, maybe, I'm coming to your church to speak about this, and maybe as we get closer, we could do a whole episode on family worship.
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- But basically what we're saying is like, men should be men, women should be women, children should be children, and the home should be a place of regular devotions.
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- We have some people in our church that call it family devotion, some call it family worship. I mean, it doesn't really matter.
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- The point is we should be doing that together. Right, and I would encourage people, and I guess this could be a whole nother topic we could get into someday, talking about educating our children.
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- But years ago, I came to the conviction that regardless of whether our children were in a public school or where they were being educated, before the
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- Lord, I'm responsible for my children. And I would say to Christians, you are responsible for your children.
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- Now, is your pastor also responsible for your children? Yes, he's responsible to instruct and to teach in the local church.
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- But men, you are responsible for the spiritual instruction of your children.
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- And it is not enough for us to simply bring them to the church so that in the
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- Sunday school or the Wednesday night meeting, or even the meetings of the church, that they would be instructed in the things of the
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- Lord. It is on us to instruct our children in the things of the Lord. And the primary disciple maker of children is the parents.
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- That's right. And dad, you've got to take the lead in this. And moms, there might be a situation that dad isn't taking the lead and you need to just do it while also encouraging your husband in love to do it.
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- That's right. The last one we've talked about a little bit, but biblical fellowship. A local church is not merely something one goes to like going to the movies.
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- A local church is a family with bonds more lasting than those of our blood relatives. We believe local church members must intentionally and joyfully cultivate time together outside of our regular
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- Sunday meetings as providence allows. We believe prioritizing time with one another will result in giving up other things at times, but that such fellowship is for the good of the church and the glory of Christ.
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- This time together with other church members is not only for the enjoyment of one another's company in the
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- Lord, but also for spurring one another on in holiness. You know,
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- I think when we look at the New Testament, the early church was a fellowshipping body.
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- I just don't know there's any way that you can get around that. And even when we see Paul dealing with problems, for example, in the
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- Corinthian church around their celebration of the Lord's Supper, the issue is the problems they're having in fellowship.
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- You know, if you read 1 Corinthians 11 and you see how many times Paul refers to them coming together, and you see
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- Paul's criticism of the problems in their Lord's Supper gathering, the problem is them not being hospitable to one another in the gathering together of the body.
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- And so we've got to be a people that fellowship with one another and really show that we love one another.
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- You know, Lord Jesus said in John chapter 13, that people will know that we are his disciples because of our love one for another.
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- And I even told our church just this last Sunday, you know, if you slip in right as the service is starting and you slip and you're out the door just as quick as we say amen, then you're not really being a part of the church, even if you're here every
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- Sunday, because we need real fellowship with saints. You're going to have some of that.
- 32:03
- You're going to have those folks that are just kind of like that. But what you're trying to do is cultivate a mentality, an attitude in your church that we like being with each other.
- 32:19
- That's right, that's right. For example, I'll just give you some examples. And this also helps too, like there's some of these you can hit up together.
- 32:29
- For example, we go evangelizing together. We enjoy that, you know?
- 32:35
- We, Saturday, a group of us are going paintballing together. There's a brother who has a son who's having a birthday.
- 32:43
- He wants to go paintballing. We're just going to do it. Now he's inviting family that's not from the church, but he's also like, why wouldn't you want your church family?
- 32:50
- That's right. We've got folks that go hunting together. And there's a guy in our church that comes in and takes one of my sons duck hunting.
- 33:00
- I don't really duck hunting, but so it's all sorts of little things like that. And then also one of the most important things we do though is our meals.
- 33:10
- And eating together is one of the most important things you can do. Invite someone to your house, work on that.
- 33:17
- So anyway, these are the distinctives and I'm not saying that every church necessarily has to have this distinctive the way that I put them out, but a lot of these are necessary for a healthy church.
- 33:32
- Yeah. You know, and what you said about us just liking to be together, I would just share this about the way that we started having these
- 33:41
- Lord's Day meals. Well, what was happening was there was a pretty good size group of us that every
- 33:49
- Sunday we would find ourselves sometimes two hours after the service was over still standing around in the sanctuary talking.
- 33:59
- Yeah. And the only reason we would leave then was because people were hungry and they were ready to go get something to eat.
- 34:06
- And it was a little over a month ago. It was five weeks ago, actually. We stood around and talked till about 1 .30.
- 34:14
- Our service is over with a little after 11. We'd stood around and talked to about 1 .30.
- 34:19
- We went to a local restaurant. Well, we were there after all the other churches had gotten there.
- 34:25
- So we stood there for 45 minutes waiting to get a table. And as we were waiting to get a table where we could all sit together,
- 34:32
- I think there were about 15, 16, 17 of us, we kind of all decided if we had just brought our lunch, we could have just been eating at the church together.
- 34:46
- And so that was really what brought it about. It wasn't even like we were saying, well, we ought to be eating this meal together.
- 34:54
- It was more, we just want to be together. We want to have these discussions about the things of the
- 35:00
- Lord. We want to continue our time together as God's people. And so why don't we eat?
- 35:07
- That's not, and that's not something that you can create, but it is something you can cultivate. And so what
- 35:14
- I mean is you just can't, and I've tried and you've tried and we've all tried. You just can't force a person to fellowship that doesn't want to time and time again.
- 35:24
- You might get them to bounce in here or there, but it's really, really hard. But what you can do is you can take those that want to and you can cultivate it.
- 35:35
- And also what happens then too, is that's being cultivated and you're doing that. It's kind of contagious with some.
- 35:42
- People begin to like, oh, well, I can do that. Some people that would never start it and they're not even sure about it, but when they see it and they see you doing it and then they realize they can be a part of it, then it just kind of clicks for them.
- 35:58
- But you can't really create it or force it. If you get up Sunday and you say, we're going to stay and eat after church, probably won't have too many, but you can cultivate it.
- 36:10
- And I'll tell you this, I ended up making a person mad and I didn't even mean to, but I said, hey, we're going to eat at the park and this person kind of complained to me about it and all that and we were going to do sandwiches and it was like, they were offended that we did that and it just takes time.
- 36:25
- So I would say, if you're going to start this, here's how it started with us. We had one family, my family and one other family and we started doing it.
- 36:35
- And then slowly it started happening and we always try to have enough. So we try not to go out, we're like, we try not to go out to eat, we try not to buy stuff on Sunday.
- 36:43
- We try to do that, but so we try to have enough for other people, but if we don't, we'll just go to the store and buy, like, okay.
- 36:54
- And so when we have guests come, there's been many times we've had guests come, we're like, hey, come and eat.
- 36:59
- And they're like, what? Okay, they've come, we've had a good time. And so anyway, this has gone on pretty long, but this is what we're working through with our church.
- 37:08
- I think you agree with these distinctives as well. Obviously everybody's going to have a little bit of disagreement about things, but this is what we're trying to set forth as what
- 37:17
- God would have for our church here in Perryville. And I think it's important if you haven't thought through what the distinctives are of your church, it's a good practice to open the
- 37:29
- Bible and to think through where you're at and what God has called your local church to there in your area.
- 37:37
- Anything else you would add, Eddie? Yeah, and I would encourage everybody, we ought to be willing to say, we want to do whatever the
- 37:46
- Bible teaches, even if it conflicts with what we've done in the past. And here's the thing, for almost every one of us, that's going to mean changes.
- 37:57
- Your church is going to have to change. You're probably not going to open your
- 38:02
- Bible and read that everything your church has been doing for the last 50 years is exactly what the
- 38:08
- Bible says. And so it's probably going to mean change. And we're not saying that you have to change everything next week, but we are saying that all of us, every one of us,
- 38:20
- Marshall, Perryville, every church, ought to be seeking to be as biblical as possible in the way that we worship the
- 38:27
- Lord. It's not up to us how we worship Him, it's up to Him how we worship. Amen.
- 38:33
- Well, thank you guys for joining us on this week of the Rural Church Podcast. Hope you'll tune in next time.
- 38:40
- Say goodbye, Eddie. We'll see you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what
- 38:51
- God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemas, the masterpiece of God.