What is the Church? | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, Director of Media Gratiae, and I'm just outside of Oxford, England on a

Media Gratiae filming trip with Dr. Jeffrey Johnson. Now, Jeff, you are the author and the presenter of the newest project that Media Gratiae is currently in production on.

We wanted to sit down this evening on day 11 of a 14 -day filming trip in places all throughout the

Mediterranean and now up into the UK to get you to explain what is this project, what are we doing, why are we out here, and to give the people who follow our podcast some insight into what the project is and why we're doing it.

But first, let me say, welcome. Thanks. I mean, this has been an amazing experience from the beginning even until now.

I mean, it's, what is this, day 13? Day 13. Tell the people where we've been. We've been all over the place, and it's really exciting to think, okay, we're going to go to the place where Augustine taught and be in the very arena that he preached, and to be there, and then go from North Africa to south,

I guess it's south or mid part of Italy where Thomas Aquinas was born, to hike up mountains, to get into the very places.

I mean, they had stairs, but the stairs were burnt down, and so basically it's hiking through no man's land.

Waste high grass and 100 degree temperatures going up to what was it,

I don't know, how many thousand feet above sea level? Yeah, and just to get a few lines. I mean, what you have to do just to get a few moments of the film is amazing.

I made a lot of work. It's a lot like work. It is a lot of work. But it's been fun, and we know why we're doing it.

It's not travel blogging. We're not doing it for the gram. We're doing it because this is, well, we'll talk a little bit about what the project is about in just a little while.

So you mentioned we started out in, we flew into Tunisia, North Africa, into a city called

Tunis, and then we drove about a half hour over to ancient Carthage where Augustine once lectured during a series.

Yeah, and Cyprian. Cyprian was the bishop of Carthage. That's right. I forgot. And we're dealing with the life of Cyprian and his teaching on the church in particular, and Augustine, and then we go from there to flying to Rome.

And of course, the way we're traveling is not the chronological order of the film.

It's the geographical order. So in your mind, you have to piece these things together and kind of hear we're doing this part of the film and then this part of the film.

So as we said, we flew directly into Tunis. We shot there in Tunis and ancient Carthage, and we flew over to Rome, rented a vehicle, and we drove south into a little village.

My favorite city, the name of it, my favorite city, Roca Seca, you know, or Rock 'em

Sock 'em Robots, as we call it. The city where Thomas Aquinas was born in the year...

1225. And then drove up to Rome, shot some things in and around Rome, had disturbing experiences there.

First time I've ever been to Rome. Yeah, Rome is an amazing place. Yeah, it's, boy, it was hard for me to appreciate any of the beauty because of just the rank idolatry.

Parading itself as Christianity. So we then drove north and went through, what was the name of the area there?

The Florence area? Yeah, in the Tuscany. Yeah, kind of wine country, gorgeous wine vineyards everywhere.

Continued to drive up into the Alps, crossed into Germany first?

No, we went through... Went into France. Italy to France. To Lyon. To Lyon.

Now, why did we go to Lyon? Lyon is an amazing place because it was a Roman city established,

I think, in 83 BC. And in Lyon, you had a lot of the

Roman roads, so it's a historical city, which is amazing because most of the church fathers are further east, the early church fathers.

But there's an early church father who was a disciple of Polycarp. And we know Polycarp was a disciple of the apostle

John. And his name is Irenaeus. And Irenaeus was sent to be a bishop in Lyon.

And so... And what year is that? I mean, that's the year 200 and something, right? Yeah, he was born, I think, around 200 in the second century.

So literally, he's one generation removed from the apostles. So he was a very early church father.

Yeah. So we leave Lyon and we drove into Switzerland, I believe. Yeah. Which was absolutely amazing.

It's my favorite place in the world. Yeah. I will say, we weren't on vacation.

It's not like we really got to enjoy. We tried to enjoy. We'd get out of the car and we'd walk around and go look at stuff.

But if you are planning a vacation to anywhere else in the world other than Switzerland, my advice to you is to cancel that vacation and to rebook it and go into Switzerland and just go look at stuff.

It's free. It doesn't cost anything to just look at stuff. And it was absolutely gorgeous. Yeah. You know,

Stephen McCaskill reminded us, as we were looking at the mountains, a quote by Charles Spurgeon, who recommended that if anybody in his church could come and see these mountains, to come.

You know, he urged them to come. And I would say that to our congregation. If you have the opportunity to come to Switzerland or go to Switzerland, go.

You know, I'll contribute $10 to that fund to get you there. But if you can't,

Spurgeon said if you can't come, remember that Jesus Christ is way more beautiful. Yeah.

And if you've laid your eyes upon the Lord Jesus Christ, you've seen the most beautiful thing in the world. Yeah. It is also striking when you remember that this part of the world is under the curse, just as much as any desert anywhere.

Yeah. And it is groaning and waiting for the revelation of the sons of God.

And if that is what this earth looks like under the curse, what must the new heavens and the new earth be like?

I mean, we just can't imagine. So we drove through Switzerland on our way to Germany.

And went into Germany, right? Yeah. And we went to, we're all in Germany. Well, we basically just drove to East Germany.

We went almost a beeline to Wittenberg. Now, we did stop at the birthplace of Martin Luther.

And then we went from there to Wittenberg. And that was a whirlwind for me because basically it was driving all day and then just hitting these locations, getting out, filming our lines, getting some

B -roll, which I'm learning what that means. But it's amazing what has to be done for these films is a lot of work, a lot of time.

But, I mean, it's exciting on the one hand, but it's definitely a job. It's a lot like work. We spent 11 hours easily that day of just driving on the

Autobahn. So we're going a hundred and a lot. We're going fast on the

Autobahn. Now, that's in kilometers, but we're going fast. And we're in a giant rental van.

It's like driving a loaf of bread down the Autobahn. And people are just blowing past us.

We think we're going fast until someone passes us. And then we're like, well, what in the world? We covered a lot of ground that day.

And we'd pull over, jump out of the van, shoot it, go, wow, this is where Luther was born.

It's amazing. Let's stay here. Let's build a booth here. Nope, get in the van. It's time to go.

Get in the van, drive another several hours, hop out. Oh, man, this is great. This is beautiful.

This is where Luther nailed the 95 theses to the castle church door. It's amazing.

All right, we've got to go get in the van. It's time to go. And so we wound up in Berlin where we flew from Berlin to London and rented another vehicle and drove to Oxford.

And now here we are right outside of Oxford. We've got a couple days left. Today was amazing because we went to Winslow, which is where one of our personal heroes and very unknown and yet -to -be well -known man by the name of Benjamin Keech, who was an early particular

Baptist, where he ministered and faced a lot of persecution for his nonconformist particular

Baptist convictions. We were able to meet up with our friend

Jeremy Walker there and get an interview with him, which is always great and very encouraging to get to meet up with our good friend there.

And where did we go after Winslow? We went to where William Carey pastored.

He pastored there. What's the name of that city? Moulton. We went to Moulton where William Carey lived for a short season of his life.

Yeah, four years he pastored there. We got to see the chapel where he preached and the home where he lived.

Yep, shot a lesson there. Yeah, it was great. And tomorrow is the Lord's Day, so we're very happy to be able to go and fellowship with an evangelical church here in Oxford.

It's a good day to have a day of rest when you work like this. It's good to have a day. Six days you shall labor, right?

We put our six days in this week. Yeah, I'm ready for it. And then we'll be in and around London going to the

Met tab, and we'll go by Westminster Chapel, and we'll go by some statues of some of the men that we mentioned in the film and maybe one or two other places while we're there.

And then, God willing, we're back home to all of our short people who we miss terribly.

Now, why? What is this thing? You've mentioned a documentary.

We're making a documentary. There's a book that is kind of the things that we explore in the documentary but expand it out in much more detail, so those two things go together.

And the name of that project is The Church, the Pillar and Ground of the

Truth. And as you said, it's engaging in historical ecclesiology.

So, in other words, we're tracing the development of the doctrine of the church.

And our view is that Christ established the church, and he communicated by his spirit what the church is to his apostles, and they communicated that in the scriptures.

And so there it is. It's laid out. We're not free to deviate from it. And yet, not just a couple hundred years later, there are massive deviations from the doctrine of Christ and the apostles of what the church is.

And we trace that until those two lines line back up.

So, tell us a little bit about that. Just a general overview of the film. To love the truth is to love the church, and to love the church is to love the truth because those things are married together by God.

You can't have one without the other. It's important to know which one's the foundation of the other.

The church is not the foundation of the truth. And that's what the Roman Catholics end up doing.

They place themselves as the authority, and they add a tradition to that. So, they put themselves on the bottom layer and the church on the top layer.

And what we need to show is that God has put the truth on the bottom layer, and the church is built on top of that.

But wherever you see the truth, you're going to see the church. And this is the truth as revealed in God's word.

That's right. So, for someone to say, I just love the truth, but I'm not into organized religion, what they may be saying is,

I've got my personal relationship with Jesus, but I'm not into the church or meeting on the

Lord's Day and assembling of the saints and being accountable to leadership. Well, that's very foreign, not only to the teaching of scriptures, but it's foreign to the very nature of how truth exhibits itself.

You know, truth is not just believing propositions. Truth is living out realities in our lives.

Wherever you find truth, it's going to manifest itself in living examples.

And it's like, where do you find the truth? You find truth where the truth is exhibited. And where is that? It's in the local church.

And where you... So, how do you know what is a good church and a bad church? Well, by the only test there is.

But where is the word of God being preached? Where is the truth proclaimed? And so, that's what

I hope that this film does. It drives churches back to the word of God and build everything they do, all their functions and activities, and everything that they say, what kind of ministries we want to do, what are we supposed to be doing as a church?

And not only do they go to the scriptures to get direction, but the church would be an overflow of the truth being lived out in the

Christian life. Yeah. So, that's two elements of this thing that we've been calling the Church Project, which is not the official name.

You know, nothing has the Church Project printed on it, but it's just easier to use this umbrella term of the

Church Project to talk about four major elements. So, two of them are the documentary, the church, the pillar and ground of the truth, and then an expanded book that really takes the things that we present in the film and works through them a little bit more.

Now, there are two other elements, and one of those is the church, her nature, purpose, authority, and worship.

And that is a very short little paperback book, which is a reworked,

I guess you could say updated and expanded version of a book that you wrote some years back called

The Church, Why Bother? Right. And it's been described to me by a dear brother as the best book that he's ever read on the church in the sense of just its accessibility.

He said to me, it's like you take all those great little Nine Marks books, the little color -coded series, and squish them into this short, thin, easily accessible paperback.

So, it's an excellent book on its own. You have been able to rework the book, update it, expand it a bit, and we're releasing that book under the title

The Church, Her Nature, Purpose, Authority, and Worship. And there is also a 12 -week video -based study guide that goes along with that book.

And the idea is that a local church would take that book, and they would read a chapter, and then they would get together as a group, and they would watch one of these lessons that we've been shooting.

And we're incorporating a little bit of church history into that as you are explaining what is the worship of the church, and as you're teaching on what is the regulative principle, and how does that correlate with the simple means of grace ministry.

And then you talk about a person from church history who really understood that, and who lived on that, and I think

Martin Lloyd -Jones was your example on that. So, those are the other two elements.

Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the most important part of this project. The documentary, hopefully, will lead people into the study.

With the documentary, my prayer is that God uses that to lead churches back to the

Scriptures, where the church becomes, we must be committed to the Word of God. That's essential, that's foundational.

In the study, I pray and trust that the Lord uses that to lead Christians to the church.

I really firmly believe that God's given us many gifts on earth, but the greatest of gifts that God has given to his people is the church.

And to shun that, to throw up your nose to the church, to say, I don't like the church because there's people who have offended me, or the church is all full of hypocrites, and many reasons people kind of turn their back on the church, or get disgruntled, or inconsistent in attendance, or just not committed to the church.

There are many excuses that we have. And understand that there's no perfect church. I mean, think of the church at Corinth.

I mean, who could recommend that church? You need to go to the church at Corinth, that's an outstanding church.

No, it had its problems. But not once did Paul tell the people to flee that church and form a new church.

And I know there's a time to leave a church. When there's certain aspects of the church that's not being done, it's time to look for a healthy church and to get out of there.

But at the same time, it's not optional to say, I'm out of church altogether. I'd rather go to a poor church that's doing things very inconsistent than just stay at home.

And certainly that's what happens a lot of times to professing Christians. And so my goal in this is to get people to cherish, to love the church, and not just love the church, but know what the church is to be doing, what's the purpose of the church and the functions of the church.

I would say that that's another huge aspect to it. For church leaders and for church members who should be holding church leaders accountable to the

Word of God, to really look at what is the purpose of the church. Is that our purpose in our church?

What is the nature of the church? Is that what we are? What about the authority?

And what about our worship? Are we worshiping in this way? Because this is not just our opinion about these things.

We're trying to look into the Scriptures, which is, again, the truth that is the foundation for the church, and to reform, re -form ourselves in line with those things.

How many churches are out there that are just making it up as they go? I mean, it's basically, that sounds like a good idea.

Let's do that. And literally, it's, why not do this? And it's kind of the mindset, well, this will be edifying, and this is helpful, or let's do this.

And they don't even have an idea of what the church is there for. Why did God establish the church?

What's its functions? And it only makes sense that if we're going to be in church leadership, that we would go back to the

Scriptures and say, okay, now what does the leader, the leader, the head of the church, want us to do?

As we know that not many should desire to become teachers because we will be held to a stricter judgment.

Well, what criteria will we be judged with?

Well, it's not your sincerity. You can be sincerely wrong. You can have a great desire to want to glorify

God, but the way that you choose to try to do that, it can be antithetical.

It can be working against what God has said. Well, where do we get that? We get it from the

Scriptures. And we should be concerned to make sure that we know the criteria by which we will be judged.

You know, there's many things in the church that are primary, and there are secondary things. And it's sometimes hard to know all the little details of church life.

The Lord doesn't map out everything, but the Lord does give us principles. And what I want to do in this study is show the principles.

And I think everything should be deliberate. For us, I wouldn't put this in the study.

This is not in the book. It's not in our study. Because it would become legalistic if we say, do it this way.

Because we're just trying to apply the principle in our church in a particular way. But it may not be the way other people would apply the principle.

But, for example, we believe that one of the principles of worship is congregational singing.

And we feel like that is a biblical command, that the singing of our worship should be congregational based.

Not a concert based or a performance based. Or not in a sense that someone's worshiping in a private way where they're closing their eyes.

They're almost completely forgotten the surroundings. And the music's so loud you can't hear anything but the beat of the music and your own thoughts.

Well, that's a private, personal experience. And that's not incongruent with the principle of congregational singing.

Singing to one another. That's right. And so we want to foster the congregation. And so the loudest instrument is not the musical instruments.

Or the lead singer or the worship leader, whatever he may be called at the front.

The thing that's most predominant in our church, Lord willing, is the collective sound of the congregation.

And so because of that being a principle in scriptures, we do a lot of other things very deliberately.

We don't turn the lights down, which would mean we're not trying to take the focus off the congregation and onto the stage.

We're not putting a spotlight there. We're putting a spotlight on the congregation. Is that something you have to do?

No. But you know why you do that. Yeah, and everything should have a reason.

So we're not just making this up. Right. We confess that Christ is

Lord of the conscience. That God is Lord of the conscience. And that when it comes to matters of faith and practice that are against scripture or beside scripture, to require man to follow those things in blind faith,

I believe that's sin. But there are principles that we need to do business with because they're in the word of God.

And we can learn from church history. We know that God doesn't intend for his church to be a cookie cutter church.

You go to different parts in the world, even different parts of America, even different rural and urban contexts, whatever.

Some of these accidents of worship, the word is used in some circles.

The way that you do things may be different, but the elements, the essential things are going to be the same.

Because where do we get this? That's right. We get it from the word of God. Churches around the world from the beginning until the

Lord comes back should all have preaching of the word of God. That should be a consistent element that we see everywhere.

The regular principle of worship tells us what we should see that transcends culture and time.

But the accidents are things like the pulpit, are things that facilitate the regular principle of worship.

Should you have a guitar or a piano? That's accidental. Those are things that facilitate what is required.

Every church should be singing. We went to Benjamin Keech today. The Catholic Church pushed out singing altogether.

One of the things the Reformation did, even Luther began writing hymns. Benjamin Keech wrote hymns and introduced congregational singing.

I've read many of his hymns. There's a reason we don't remember them. They're not the best hymns. At least he's attempting to write music that could be sung by the congregation.

You're teaching one another as you sing. Another element that we do in our church that's deliberate, we try to make our singing and the music one easy to sing.

So the congregation can follow along. We don't have these elements in the song service where the congregation has to drop off.

We hear from people fairly regularly who say,

I'm a Christian, but I don't go to church, either because the churches around me are not serious enough for me.

They don't teach the same doctrine that I see in the Scriptures, which is a problem. We pray for that to change.

Maybe on the other end of the spectrum, I can commune with God out here on my fishing boat better than I can when

I'm gathered with a bunch of other people in a stuffy room. If that's you, if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah,

I say that, that's kind of what I think. Our desire is not to attack you with this film. It's not to even come along to you and say something on the level of, you know that you should eat vegetables, and you need to eat your vegetables.

I know they're gross, but just eat them because they're good for you. Well, that's not the message.

The message is so much better than that. The message is that the church, the bride of Christ, is beautiful.

And if you could see her the way that Christ sees her, you would love her if you were indwelt by His Spirit.

And even though she is plain and simple, and she struggles, and she is still a sin, she still sins, she is repentant, and she's beautiful.

And again, if you could see her the way that Christ sees her, then you would love her.

And we want you to understand that God has determined to glorify

Himself in these last days, in His Son, and in the church.

And if what I just described fits you, you know, I'm happy out here on the bass boat, or I'm going to Little League or whatever,

I just don't have time for it, what's the big deal? I can have a personal relationship with Jesus. We want to challenge you, because you need to be challenged.

But we want to do that in a way that's loving, and we want to show you not like, we don't want to add more, you know, moral duties to your life to weigh you down, as much as we want to show you the beauty of Christ's bride.

Yeah, I mean, the same way that we have a prayer meeting, and my objective in our church is to get our prayer meeting to 100 % attendance.

You know, and I don't know of any church where all the members show up to their prayer meeting, which

I think is unfortunate. And it's something that I would love for our church to meet that.

But I could hound our people every week at the prayer meeting, you know, and just wear them out.

But there's times I think I need to encourage them in that way. But I'm really convinced the best way to build attendance at our prayer meeting is for the

Holy Spirit to be in the prayer meeting, and people who do come know that they met with God.

And when you've met with God, that aroma spreads out to the point where people who are not attending is like, man,

I'm missing out. I mean, I'm hearing all the buzz about how

God met with the people, where they corporately met together. I don't want to sleep in.

I don't need that extra 30 minutes of sleep more than I need the presence of God. And so that's truly the nature of the church, is that you can be out on your bass boat on Sunday morning.

But is that really nourishing? That's what the world loves. Is that really satisfying?

Of course, God meets us everywhere throughout the day, and we can worship God privately, fishing and hunting.

All that's true. And that happens to me and you and all the saints every day. We're getting on one guy who happens to have a bass boat really hard.

It could be the skate park. It could be just hanging out with your family. Culturally, it has become

Sunday fun day. It's just an extra family day. But what we want to say to you is there's something even better, and it's necessary.

When I was in Cuba, and this church there is flourishing, and I'm just privileged to be there.

And one Cuban on Sunday morning woke up and he said, It's the Lord's day. And he said it like it was

Christmas. Yeah. You know, it's like, this is the Lord's day. Praise the

Lord. Yeah. And it rebuked me. I'm like, he's a kid excited about meeting

God with God's people. Would we not just wake up and say, Man, it's the Lord's day.

This is the day that God has called us together to meet with him. And I believe this, Matt. I meet with God every day.

Some days more than others in my personal walk. Sadly, some days I wake up.

I'm so busy. It's just in the night. I'm like, Lord, I'm sorry. I meet with the

Lord every day. But God's presence is greater with the assembly than it is with the individual.

And if I want God, I want to go where God's people is, and where the word of God is displayed.

And that's what we want to display in this film, in this study, that God is with his people.

That's where his glory is manifested. It's not manifested principally at the NBA all -star game.

It's manifested where the truth is properly proclaimed and believed by his people.

It's precious. It is. Yeah, so that's why we're doing this project. That's why we're 11 days into a pretty grueling schedule here with some more to go once we get back home.

A few more interviews to do. A little bit of shooting in the USA. Some cool stuff that we won't tell people about right now.

But bringing some neat elements in. My life has been changed by local church.

Now, it was Christ who changed my life. How did I come into contact with the risen

Christ? It's through local church. And every aspect of my life has been changed for the better by a local church.

Christ loves his bride. The believer loves the brethren.

It's how we know that we've passed from death to life. Because we love the brethren. And so, because of that love for Christ and for his bride, we want to make these projects, this broad umbrella term, the church project, to put out to people who follow

Media Grazie and perhaps beyond. You know, a closing word I'd like to say to the people watching this is so many of your viewers that look to Media Grazie either contact me or, and I know that my church family as well, are praying for us.

So, I appreciate if those who are listening that are praying, and I just ask, you know, continue and thank you.

We need God's help. The prayers of the saints are vital for this project.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks, brother. Look forward to finishing this thing out.

Yeah, we're almost... See the outcomes of it. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to the

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