Church, Part 4 of What We Believe, Part 39

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We specialize in cancer, and you. A lot of times what we have is people who refuse to let the

Holy Spirit be the Holy Spirit. They want to be the one to do the convicting, and they want to make sure everybody knows, you know, this person, they're not good, they did this.

If you have to say that to other people and yet you've never gone to that person, the Scripture says you're wrong, right?

If we have a means to go to those people privately, that's what we should do. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host

Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the

Executive Director of Striving for Eternity Ministries and of the

Christian podcast community, of which this podcast is a proud member. I'm joined again by the jolly one,

Nathaniel Jolly of Truth Be Known Podcast, one of the other great podcasts at the

Christian podcast community. Eskimo you, how are you? I'm good. We're warm today.

Warm in Alaska is what, like 20, 30 degrees? No, we have a very warm spring day of 37 today.

And there are many Floridians that are saying, 37? We never see that!

It snowed all day yesterday, so. Oh my, yes. Well, I am glad that you choose to be a missionary up there and start the church there to do what

I'm very thankful God has not called me to do. Oh, brr.

I mean, you know, Jim Osman's always trying to convince me to move to Idaho, and I'm telling him that's too cold. Alaska, yikes.

But today we're gonna talk about, we're gonna continue our discussion on the topic of the church. We're gonna get into several topics today, but we're primarily gonna try to focus on the church leadership.

That is going to be the goal. Let me start right off, out of the gate, with welcoming any of those who are from the 1618 podcast.

The 1618 podcast was one of the many, many podcasts at the Christian Podcast Community.

However, they did what's called pod fading. He just had too much going on and wanted to shut down completely, and so he decided to, in agreement with us here, to send his listeners over here.

So if this is the first time listening to The Wrap Report, we want to welcome you, let you know that you're gonna get some, hopefully, great content, at least from Nathaniel's side.

Nathaniel is my guest. This is the last week Nathaniel's joining me. We are rotating around with guest hosts, different podcasters from the

Christian Podcast Community. We are grateful for his expert analysis of the church as you're working on your doctorate of ministries, so we're gonna have to call you

Dr. Jolly soon. Hmm. Yeah, you're gonna be the doctor of jolly. Nope, Nathaniel's good. Nathaniel's good.

So let's get into this. So if you want to follow along with us, we're discussing the church, and what we're actually doing is going through the doctrinal statement at Striving for Eternity.

So if you want to follow along, obviously not if you are driving. If you're driving, just listen, please.

No causing accidents. But go to strivingforeternity .org, go to the About button, click on What We Believe, scroll down to it says

Church, open that section, and we are in the paragraph, let's see, it's the fifth paragraph there.

I'm gonna ask Nathaniel if you wouldn't mind reading this paragraph for us that we are going to try to get through today.

Why are you laughing when I say try to get through? You have expectation, you think that we can't do this?

You know, I just know that preaching through Ephesians, I'm close to like 80 -plus sermons, and I've been known to preach on one word, so...

Well, you're 80 -plus, and have you made it to chapter 2? Yeah, we're almost done. Almost done, okay. Yeah, well, look, if you want for your congregation to feel better,

I wish I remembered who this Puritan preacher was, but a lot of the Puritans decided, they got together and said, let's each take a different book and just preach it, like, for everything, and we'll share it, and that way every book of the

Bible will be, like, thoroughly covered. And there was a guy that took the book of Job and was in the book of Job something like 38 years in the book of Job.

You talk about a depressed congregation. Yeah, that's one of those things where he started his preaching ministry and he said,

I'm starting in this book and I'm gonna die in this book. Yeah, I mean, okay, granted, once God starts speaking, the book of Job is wonderful.

I mean... It's actually my favorite book. If I was forced to choose a book, it's one of my favorite books.

Interesting, okay. Yeah, I usually, if I'm asked a New Testament book, it's the book of Hebrews because it lifts up Christ so highly, and if it is an

Old Testament book, I'd go with Psalms because so much of our theology is written in song there, unlike today where so much of ourselves are written in song, not theology, but the

Psalms are just rich in theology, so that would be the one. If I had to choose a second, and this surprises people,

Leviticus, because Leviticus and Hebrews go very well together, but Leviticus has the gospel very clearly when you start to read it.

People just hate Leviticus, it's seeming so tedious, but when you really dig in and start understanding what's being said, it's like, wow, it's so...

God is so good to us. We are so unclean and need him, and I need that constant reminder.

So with that, why don't you start us off with this paragraph in our doctrinal statement.

All right, the one supreme authority for the church is Christ, and church leadership, gifts, order, discipline, and worship are all appointed through His sovereignty as found in the

Scriptures. The biblically designated officers serving under Christ and over the assembly are elders, also called bishops, pastors, and pastor teachers, and deacons, both of whom must meet biblical qualifications.

These leaders lead or rule as servants of Christ and have His authority in directing the church.

The congregation is to submit to their leadership. Okay, there's a lot here. Some of it

I know we're gonna get to later on in future episodes, so we're gonna do a cursory view of some of this, but this is part of an ongoing series that we've been doing on what we believe for the purpose of helping people know not just theology, the importance of theology, but also to understand what is in a doctrinal statement, what is not in a doctrinal statement, what kind of things should we look at and see.

And we ended the last episode with this, and that is the one supreme authority for the church is

Christ. And that's a good place for us to pick up again, because as you said last week,

Nathaniel, this is a huge issue. In fact,

I'm gonna say this. If people don't listen to you and Ecke on your podcast

Truth Be Known, this one statement, I think, is an underlying argument for your entire podcast.

I mean, as I think through the Truth Be Known podcast, what I hear in almost every episode is

Christ reigns supreme. As you guys deal with different issues in the church, you did your series

Ten Commandments, but every topic I end up hearing, what you guys end up doing on your podcast is always lifting

Christ up and basically saying, Christ is where we get our answers from. We get our answer from Scripture. And when you talk about the church, you always put it, you and Ecke put it into light of what does

God call for us to do in the church. And this is something where I think in the last episode you were talking about how this is not some minor point.

This is a major point, and I think that we don't want to skip over and keep reading even though we touched on this, because it is this major of a point.

If we do not understand this, if you go to a church, you're looking for a church to attend, the question you want to first know is who's the authority in this church?

The supreme authority. In other words, you get into a discussion on something that happens in the church.

Who is it that has final say? Is it the pastor? Is it the deacons?

Is it the guy that gives all the money? Or is it the guy who has all the influence and friendly with all the people?

Or is it Christ? Now, that sounds like, well, the answer is obviously

Christ. How does your church actually function? I mean, most of us know, if we've been in church long enough, there are those churches that the ultimate supreme authority from the church is the guy who gives lots of money, the guy that has lots of influence, the pastor, or a couple of deacons, or that family that just says that we're gonna have final say over everything that happens in this church, and if you don't like it, we'll get rid of you one way or another.

That's not biblical. The final say should ultimately, and it should be seen in the church, as Christ.

In other words, how does that play out? I think the way that plays out is when there is discussion within the church, people are turning to Scripture and saying, what does

God say on this topic? When we don't have something clear in Scripture, people are turning to the

Word of God and saying, what principles can we apply from Scripture to this situation? When there's not clear principles that could be applied, we're taking and saying, okay, here's a list of things.

Does it cause someone to sin? Does this at least in line with the Word of God, or does it not?

Starting to look at things, but it's always tied to Scripture. It's always tied to saying, what does

God want us to do? You say, well, Andrew, sometimes there's just not a big deal. It's what color carpet to have.

And yes, I do know a church that split over the color of carpet. Stupid!

But there were people that left because they didn't get their way, and that was really the issue. That some people didn't get their way.

And that is the problem, not the color carpet. But what you end up seeing is that there are times when, as you examine the different issues in the church, maybe it's something like the color of carpet or the type of carpet, whether to have carpet, if we have pews or should we have chairs.

You're not gonna see those things in Scripture. You may not find principles to use in Scripture, but I could tell you one thing is everybody's saying to one another, let's humble ourselves and submit to one another as Scripture says, because even on those areas where there's, we would say, well, this isn't a big deal, you still see people who can get prideful, and guess what?

Then they want to be the head of the church, not Christ. That becomes a problem.

And so we're saying that when it comes to the church, Christ is the ultimate and final authority because he's the head of the church.

It's his church, if you want to use the imagery. It's his bride. We are to obey what he wants us to do, and guess what?

That may not mean we get to do what we want to do, even as pastors may not get to do what you think is best for the church.

And so as we say the one supreme authority is Christ, this has a lot of areas that we can get into.

Nathaniel, I'm gonna trigger you. Women pastors, why can't we do that? There's plenty of women who preach better than men.

They can lead better than men. Why are you so against women pastors, Nathaniel?

You can be a woman pastor. I don't have any problem with women pastors. I'm listening for effect.

I've listened to your podcast. Satan has plenty of women pastors. In fact, they all belong to him. I really wish you'd speak your mind.

You just can't be a biblical one. You know, it is a hot topic issue, but in all seriousness, well,

I'm really not joking about that. I think John MacArthur says better than anyone, a woman pastor is the most obvious sign of God's judgment on a place and rebellion against God in a place.

It has nothing to do with equality, you know, has nothing to do with ability. There are plenty of women out there who are better speakers than I am, who are smarter than I am, who are more capable than I am, but God has ordained his church to be a certain way, and leadership is reserved for men, and qualified men, not just any men.

Qualified men. And we're gonna get into that, but folks, listen to what Nathaniel said. What did he appeal to?

He didn't appeal to his culture, his feelings. He appealed to what God ordained. This is the difference.

Recently, I was at a conference, the Truth Matters conference in Philadelphia. I was speaking, afterwards we had a

Q &A, had someone come up, read 1 Timothy 2, 12, and following about the women's role in the

Church, and said, well, isn't this teaching that the Church is, you know, anti -women?

And I explained why it's not, and I explained the text, and why it's based in creation and not culture, and a young man came up, very upset, and was like, well, yes or no?

Is God against women? You know, it's like, no. I mean, three times I had to say no to him. Three times.

He said, you know, is it? It's like, and I said, just as you said, there's women that preach better than me, can do apologetics better than me, can evangelize better than me, could do a lot of things better than me, they could lead better than me.

I don't dispute that, and it's not what I think that matters. And I said,

I could care less in one sense, because as long as I'm not going to that church, it's not affecting me, but what does

God say about it? Well, God's really clear about it. And the comment that got me in a lot of trouble in the

Philippines when asked, what do I think about female pastors? I just looked, and trying to be quick because we are short on time,

I just said, they said, what do you think about a church with women pastors? I said, well, she's not a pastor, and it's not a church.

Next question. And there was a groan from like three tables of female pastors, right?

But what am I appealing to? I am not saying I'm better than them. I'm actually saying there's many that are better than me.

I'm not saying that there's something wrong with them or they're second -class citizens, not at all. I'm just saying what

God says is they can't do that. So that is when we talk about the ultimate authority, it's not about what we prefer.

I mean, personally, take Scripture aside, if there wasn't Scripture saying it, it wouldn't bother me personally, because it doesn't really affect me any.

I could learn. But since God has spoken on this, now it matters. If we're gonna stand up for truth, then we have to say it's wrong when asked or when we see it, because God is the authority, not us.

It's not our church, it's His. You know, you're talking about other cultures, and I should say this so people don't cut up my,

I'm sure none of your listeners would do this, but the nefarious people might try to cut up audio clips.

You know, my comment was really geared towards the American culture and context. If you live here, you live in our country, the women who put themselves up as pastors, they know what the

Scripture says, and let's just be real honest, that's one of those Scriptures that you don't need an interpretation, you just need the plain reading of it, and it's clear.

And so literally a woman has to read that and say in her heart, God, I'm God, and this is what

I want to do, and I don't care what you say. And so that's why I make that statement so strongly. There are places in other parts of the world where they just don't know the

Bible, and they've not been taught, and so it's not a rebellion in the same kind of way. Yeah, that's a good point, because what we end up seeing is they'll say, well, this is a cultural issue, and they try to find a way to make it cultural and argue for that.

Meanwhile, they read it, they know what it says, but they don't like what it says.

And so when somebody—I don't care what you're dealing with in Scripture— when somebody, plain reading the text, decides that's the meaning, that I know this is the meaning,

I'm giving it a different meaning because that's what I wanted to say, you are the supreme authority.

And when you're doing it as a church, you're claiming to be the supreme authority of the church. And one thing

I never want to hear from a pastor, ever, is you bring something, you bring a correction, you bring, hey, you said this, and whatever it is.

Never want to hear, is, well, I told you this is what it means.

That's a problem, because then that pastor is saying, I'm the authority over this church.

What he should do is say, well, I think this means this, and here's why. That's perfectly fine.

But when they— if someone shuts down any kind of discussion because they're the authority, that's a problem.

And we see it a lot. So I think we've made it sufficiently clear that it is extremely important to recognize that Christ is the supreme authority over the church, for all matters.

So in the statement here, we give some of them. So the one supreme authority for the church is

Christ, and church leadership, gifts, order, discipline, and worship are all appointed through His sovereignty and found in Scripture.

So before we deal with each of these as a cursory review, let me just say, the whole point of this is to say that where do we find the answers to how we should do church worship?

Whether it's the songs we sing, do we do an offering and pass it around, do we have a time of Scripture reading, whatever it is.

Preaching versus drama. All those things, we look to Scripture. When it comes to leadership, we look to Scripture.

When it comes to the gifts, and we're gonna spend more time on the spiritual gifts as we get on in future episodes down further in the statement, but that is gonna be from Scripture.

What are the church? What church discipline is? So let's briefly go over each of these.

Now, we're gonna spend the rest of time with church leadership, so I'm gonna skip that one for now, but we talk about gifts.

Now, when we speak about gifts, Nathaniel, what is it that most people, at least

American Christianity, far more in, if you were in African Christianity, what do most people think of when they think of spiritual gifts?

Oh yeah, well, most people are thinking about what we would call the apostolic sign gifts, is what

I would... Things like speaking in tongues? Yeah, speaking in tongues, healing, you know, signs, wonders, miracles, those sorts of things.

Prophecies, and people look to those things as if that is the proof that we need to vindicate

Scripture. We need somehow to have these signs and miracles.

Now, mind you, that wasn't commonplace in much of Christianity.

In fact, until a little over a hundred years ago, most people didn't focus on that.

Most people focused on the Word of God, not the gifts of God. Are those gifts for today?

Well, where are we gonna look? To the Word of God. Christ is the authority. But the thing is that there's a lot of other gifts that we end up having to recognize.

There's a gift of teaching, there's a gift of administration, there's a gift of mercy and exaltation, giving.

When we look at these different gifts, each of these gifts, and here's the thing when we talk about gifts, the gifts, every one of them, you can find in Scripture commanded for all believers.

I say that for this reason. When we look at the gifts, some people will say, Nathanael, I'm not sure if you ever heard this, but when you encourage someone to go and evangelize, they go, well,

I'm not given the gift of evangelism. Oh, yeah. My response is, good, there is no such gift, because, you know, you're commanded to do it anyway.

And that's the thing. Even with the gifts, well, I'm not gifted to teach, okay, but you're commanded to teach in Matthew 28, 19, and 20.

You're to be discipling. You may not be a gifted teacher, so it doesn't mean you get up and teach

Sunday school or preach or something like that, but we are all commanded to do those things.

So we have to recognize that, okay? The other thing to recognize with this is the fact that there is a difference between a gift and a talent.

A talent is something you're born with. I was born with a talent for organization.

I was way too organized. My sister hated my organization, because her room was nothing like mine.

Everything had its proper place, and it couldn't be out of place, or I would be extremely agitated and upset and had to put it back right away.

That was my OCD. But that was me. I liked to organize things.

I did not like to teach. But a spiritual gift you get when you are saved.

When I became a Christian, I suddenly recognized that I was good at teaching, and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back.

I mean, others have recognized it, but I started having a desire to teach others. That is what we talked about with spiritual gifts.

So there's a difference between a talent and a gift. You're born with a talent. You may be born just having mercy toward others, or having that type of good, strong exhortation in a loving way.

You may have that personality, but that's not a spiritual gift.

That's a talent. You've just always had it. When you're saved, there's new things God gives us, and we're to use those in the body of the

Church. Let me just say this. We were talking a little bit—I will get into this in greater detail in a future episode when we talk about gifts—but when we talk about the gifts, in light of what we said about Christ, this is what

Hebrews 2 says, speaking of gifts. Starting in verse 1, we really want to focus verse 4, 3 and 4, but it says, "...the

word spoken through angels prove untenable, and every trespass and disobedient receive a just penalty."

How will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

That salvation, first spoken by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard

God also testifying with them, both by signs and wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the

Holy Spirit, according to His own will. Now, a couple things that we see in that passage. One is the purpose of the signs and wonders and various miracles, the gifts of the

Spirit that's being spoken of there, that so many people want to look for today, He makes it clear the purpose of it, to vindicate the spoken word of the

Lord, but it was written down. We don't hear it anymore. We see it. It's written.

Now that we have that, do we need to have it continuously be confirmed? No, because you're no longer confirming the writing of the

Word. You're no longer confirming what was heard. So, the purpose of it was to vindicate the

Word of God as it was heard and written down. Now that we no longer have continuing revelation of Scripture, we have a closed canon, the canon being that measure of what we hold and say is

Scripture, is the Word of God, the canon is closed. We no longer are adding books to the

Bible. We don't need those anymore. Another thing that we see is that these gifts, the gifts that are given, are given of the

Holy Spirit according to His own will. In other words, you shouldn't be praying for gifts. You got them when you were saved, whether you knew it or not.

Now it's a time of investigating your life, looking at the gifts and figuring out, what do I do with them? Which gifts do

I have? How do I utilize them? How do you know that? Well, like I said, all the gifts are commanded. Do them all.

Find out which one suddenly starts to become more natural to you. That's a gift. Go to your leadership and ask them.

Let them evaluate. Look into your life and examine you and see what your gifts may be, and then use it in the

Church, because that's why God gave you the gifts. He didn't give you gifts for your selfishness. I know people try to use that in 1

Corinthians 14, or sorry, I think it's 12, 12 through 14, somewhere in there, where he says about the gifts being tongues being used for yourself.

No gift is for self. Self -edification is never praised in the Bible. That's how you know that that passage is sarcasm, because everywhere in the

Bible, what do you see? You see that the gifts are meant for others, and self -gratification, self -edification is condemned everywhere in the

Bible, except for this one passage? It makes more sense to say

Paul's being sarcastic, as he is elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 12 to 14, specifically chapter 13, 1 and 2.

He uses sarcasm there. How do I know that? Because he says, if you don't have love, but you know all prophecies and all knowledge, you're nothing.

If you had all knowledge, you would be God. He's clearly being sarcastic and using exaggeration there.

That's a way of speaking. If you don't see that, you're gonna miss the point of the text.

So gifts are meant for others, the order of the Church. Churches should function a certain way.

You should not have chaos in the Church. Now, I know that would never happen in Nathanael's Church.

Nathanael's not gonna let chaos occur. But you see this in some of the churches, especially some of the

African churches, the churches of very charismatic churches, you see people, someone's preaching, but then someone's gonna just break out dancing.

Not break dancing, but break out and do dancing. You're gonna have people just screaming out, and Paul speaks against that.

Everything should be done decently in order. Why? Because I think the same things we have happening today in churches was happening in Paul's day, where people were just trying to get attention for themselves.

I think that was the same thing. Happened in Paul's day. So he says, no, everything should be done within the

Church decently and in order. In other words, there should be a plan to it. Oh, Andrew, are you saying that we can't let the freedom of the

Spirit, just let the Spirit flow in Church? Well, I'm gonna argue, and we'll see if Nathanael disagrees with me,

I'm gonna argue that he already explained how he wants the Church to function decently and in order.

Now, it doesn't mean you have to have lots of liturgy. There's some who say that must be that way.

There could be freedom in that, but it shouldn't be chaos. It shouldn't be a free -for -all, because Scripture has spoken,

Christ is the authority. Nathan, you wouldn't allow a free -for -all in your church, would you? No, not at all.

Look, I think when people in the West say silly things like, we just want the freedom of the

Spirit to be able to move, what they mean is we want to be able to act like childish toddlers and do whatever we want with parents who don't reprimand us or discipline us.

That's what they mean. But clearly, you go to start in the Old Testament.

This is why you just, you've got to know your Bible. You know, most people that have opinions on these things are people who read their

Bible for three minutes on Sunday morning vicariously through the preacher who read a verse to them.

You know, the rest of the week they don't touch their Bible and they have all kind of opinions about, you know, what they think the

Holy Spirit should and shouldn't do and all of that. In the Old Testament, you want to see, you know, God doesn't change.

You want to see how seriously God takes worship? Look at the parameters he set up around the temple worship, right?

You didn't do something properly, he would kill you. There were boundaries set.

You come into the New Testament and then you have the Apostle Paul reiterating the fact that, as you've said, right,

I mean, he makes the statements about how things should be done orderly. And then he gives examples.

And so like one of the ones that we see today, which is really ironic, to be honest, is speaking in tongues.

One, we don't do that anymore. Two, the gift of tongues was miraculously being able to speak a real human language that you never had learned previously.

But besides all of that, even then, Paul says, let two or three of you speak at the most.

So when you come into church services and you see, you know, again, just forget the fact that what they're doing isn't really biblical tongues, but you've got, you know, 100 people, you know, speaking gibberish, even that was forbidden when the real gift was active.

And so you see Paul being consistent with God's demand for things being orderly in the church.

So the Holy Spirit moves when we're obedient to God's word.

And so if we're being obedient in the Sunday morning service or whenever to what

God desires, then you can know that the Spirit is working and the

Spirit is moving. And just by the way, Sunday morning service isn't about your freedom to do anything.

It's not about your freedom to worship. It's not about your freedom to do anything. We call it worship.

So who are we worshiping? We're certainly not worshiping you, at least I hope not. You know, you're coming to worship a holy

God who, you know, for no other reason than his gracious love has brought you into his family through faith in Christ Jesus.

And that's who you're coming to worship. And God says, I want to be worshiped a certain way, and so that's what we do.

Now notice, folks, what Nathaniel just did. Where did he root it back in? The supreme authority of the church is

Christ. What has God said on these matters? Not what we think. And I think you're right that a lot of people use that argument because they want to be the authority in the church.

They want to be able to do whatever they want in the church, but make it sound spiritual. You don't want to get in the way of what the

Spirit's doing. Well, the Spirit is not going to work outside of his word. So let's tackle this next one.

This will be a little bit longer before we get into qualifications, but discipline. You know, this is one,

I'll just say this, this is not a good time to go to sleep. I mean, if you were going to go to sleep,

I would say to grab yourself a good MyPillow. Get yourself a MyPillow with the promo code

SFE. That shows them that you went to them from us, so they continue sponsoring us. We are glad for MyPillow as a sponsor, but now is not a good time to go to sleep.

But I'll tell you one other thing, is if you want to make sure that you don't fall asleep,

I do want to recommend a podcast to listen to other than this one and Nathaniel's, but that is

Conversations That Matter. I don't know if you listen to this one, Nathaniel. You actually should. We were discussing the issue of Christian nationalism before we started recording.

He's actually the one I heard where he interviewed some of these guys, and so that's where, you know, that's one of the things

I like about, the thing I like about what John Harris does on Conversations That Matter is he goes in and not only has good discussions, even with people he doesn't agree with, but he really is recognizing what's going on with the church, the persecution of the church, what we're under.

He just did a recent one on Boko Haram, and most people have all forgotten about that, because it's been out of the

American news, and yet they're still going after kidnapping Christian women, raping them, forcing them to marry

Muslims. That's still happening. It's just the American news doesn't talk about it, and that's one of the reasons

I like that podcast, is because he doesn't, like, just let those things drop. He brings it up in the broader scale of, look, there's persecution, intense persecution, that we're, and we in America have been spared from a lot of that, but not for too long.

You know, the way I became aware of his podcast was actually because I did two episodes on this podcast about Al Mueller, when he made a comment that you can't have your cake and eat it too, criticizing a

Canadian politician who is Roman Catholic that didn't want to answer a question on the issue of homosexuality, and it was at the same time that there was an open letter to Beth Moore asking her to answer on homosexuality, and Al Mueller was saying, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

If you're gonna say you're Catholic, you got to answer that question. Well, how about the

SBC having someone that's a well -known speaker in the SBC? Beth Moore, shouldn't she have to answer that?

Silence, crickets. Well, I did that, I did that episode, and I guess that's how

I found about John Harris, because he did some episodes on Al Mueller, and everyone thought that we were both working together getting information because there was so much similarity, and I went,

I never heard of the guy, and he's going, I never heard of the guy. So we both started listening to each other, and I was like, boy, this guy's got a lot of good stuff.

So that podcast won't put you to sleep, much like Truth Be Known won't put you to sleep. This podcast, well, maybe, but not at this moment, because we're gonna talk church discipline.

So church discipline is one of these things that a lot of people don't understand. There's two main views that I end up seeing in church discipline,

Nathaniel. One is the laissez -faire, anything goes, just leave people alone, we don't want to judge anyone, and that's really the common thing.

Everyone's, we shouldn't judge others. I find that amazing, because no one has an issue judging Christians.

The world loves to judge Christians, and even those people that say we shouldn't judge love to judge biblical

Christians. I'm sure that if any are listening and have gotten this far after we said women shouldn't be pastors,

I'm sure that anyone, there's probably many who'd judge that right away and would condemn us for judging these women as they judge us.

The other extreme is you have the sin police, where you have people that feel that it is their responsibility,

Scripture commands them to go after every sin that happens, and we gotta be the Holy Spirit. There's a lot of people who want to play the role of the

Holy Spirit. They want to convict people of sin, and they want to tell them what the

Word of God should mean, not what it does mean. And so those are ministries of the

Spirit. You see this on the streets, Nathaniel, I'm sure, when you see open -air preachers. I'm saying this as an open -air preacher, but many who do open -air preaching don't do it well, and you see what we often refer to as the screechers that just yell at people and try to condemn people, and what are they doing?

They want to be the Holy Spirit. They're going to name your sins because they want you to feel convicted over what you did.

You're not the Holy Spirit. Just read Scripture, give what God says, and let the

Holy Spirit do what He does far better than you, because it's His ministry, not yours.

And so those are kind of the two extremes, but what does the Bible say? Well, Matthew 18, 15 to 20 gives us the answer, but I want to just unpack this a little bit, and I won't have time to fully unpack this, so I'm going to go to strivingforturning .org,

go to the store, and I think if you go to page two, you'll see our quick reference cards, and we have two of them that would be good for this.

You can get the three -pack bundle cheaper, but we have three that are going to be really helpful for you here.

The one I'm thinking of for this one is the Reconciliation Flowchart, but we also have one on Qualifications of Church Leaders, and that'll be good for what we're going to talk about next, because it's going to go into a lot more detail.

The questions you should be asking when doing church discipline, what does Scripture say about how to do it?

But one of the mistakes people make is they think that if my brother does anything

I don't like, I'm easily offended, I don't like the way they said it.

Nathaniel, I know, I've listened to your podcast, you've mentioned some things once or twice or a dozen times about the tone police.

I've heard that mentioned, but that's the big thing, right? It's not what you said, but how you say it, and people take this and go,

Matthew 18, 15, you know, if your brother offends you, but that's not what it says.

Maybe some translations, but it says, now, if your brother sins, and it's not just a sin, because what you need to do is look at the context of the rest of this chapter, where it's all about people's pride.

And so the issue is, when you have someone who sins against you, so first off, it is a sin. It's not,

I don't like the way you said it. It's not, I perceive this this way.

Now, if there's a perception, you still practice, you go to the person and validate your perception.

And so what it says is, you go and show him his fault, not the way he said it, not, you know, it's a fault.

It's a sin. It's a clear sin. It's not your preference. But here's the tough one. Between you and him alone.

Ooh, ooh, wait, Nathaniel, this doesn't mean I get to go to Facebook or Twitter and be like,

Nathaniel's a big meanie. He wasn't nice to me. Is that what I'm supposed to do,

Nathaniel? According to this passage? I mean, if you look at my Twitter, you would think that's what you're supposed to do.

Yeah, you know, this is an interesting one. We're going to get into one of my favorite misquoted verses here in a few minutes.

You'll get to it. But I think, you know, the whole premise of church discipline, you know, a couple things to understand.

One is that it must happen because this is biblical and we live in a Christianized, yeah,

I was going to say society, but our society is pagan now. But within the church, right, we have the general thought, you know, of evangelicalism that the 11th commandment rules, and that's thou shalt be nice, and it's not nice to do church discipline.

So if your church doesn't believe in church discipline, then you don't have a biblical church, you know, and that's just how it is.

But I think the second thing is for those who do believe in church discipline and do believe in addressing the sins of brothers, if that is not rooted fundamentally in the desire to see your brother or sister come to truth for the sake of their own

Christianity, their own witness before God, their own relationship with Christ, if it's not rooted in that, then your heart motivation is wrong.

If you just want to fight people or you just want to be right, then inevitably you're going to do this wrong.

And I think a lot of that is what leads to people not wanting to go in private, right?

They want it to be displayed. They don't want to cover the sin. You know, love covers a multitude of sins.

I mean, one application is found right here. Doing it in private is a function of that covering,

I think. Giving someone an opportunity to say, you know what, man, I really messed up.

That was wrong. I slandered you or whatever it was. Please forgive me, whatever the case is, and then you never bring it up again, right, as kind of the thing.

Yeah, and that's why I say go get that Reconciliation Flowchart that we have at Striving for Eternity, because it walks you through.

First, questions to ask yourself. Am I in sin? Is this a preference issue? Could I be wrong about it?

A whole bunch of things to ask yourself. Then, if it's not you, then you ask, is this actually a sin?

I mean, most people don't do that. They don't ask, is it a sin? And it walks you through that. Then the question is, do

I need to go to them? And do I need to go right now? These are the things. So the whole front page of that is asking you things before you practice

Matthew 18. A whole bunch of things you should be asking before you start Matthew 18. But if you have to go

Matthew 18, the thing that we see is that this is for an unrepentant sinner.

This is not for someone that says something you don't like or offended you because you're easily offended.

It's not because you feel you must get them, you must belittle them, you must have everybody know how bad they are.

See, a lot of times what we have is people who refuse to let the Holy Spirit be the

Holy Spirit, they want to be the one to do the convicting, and they want to make sure everybody knows, you know, this person, they're not good, they did this.

If you have to say that to other people and yet you've never gone to that person, the Scripture says you're wrong, right?

Now, granted, this is within the Church, so, Nathanael, you and I both have public ministries, we deal with other people in public ministries, and there's times where people will say things publicly and we address it.

Okay. We address things that happen in public, but we're addressing it in light of that.

If we have a means to go to those people privately, that's what we should do. You made a very interesting point, though.

If your brother listens to you, you've won over your brother, that's what the text says. In other words, you don't bring it up anymore.

It's done with. The person repented. Once repentance happens, that ends the discipline process.

And this is a thing many people don't understand. And I think we're talking about this, and we should reiterate the fact that this is, this here is specifically talking about what we do in a local assembly, right?

This is not Twitter world. You aren't obligated to correct anyone on Twitter or on Facebook or in another city.

And before you even ever get to this, this is kind of more formal type of discipline process here.

I normally counsel people, you forgive anything and everything you can before you ever get to this.

Someone in your local assembly says something that hurts your feelings, you know, forgive them.

It's a one -time thing, forgive them. Obviously, there's some boundaries and things like that, but you know, if it's something that that you would want to be forgiven of, it was a one -time thing, something said out of anger or, you know, something like that.

I mean, you shouldn't be looking at this passage. Your love for your brother, your sister, you know, ought to forgive that, cover it.

And if it becomes a repeated thing, then you can deal with it. But yeah, I think it's worth saying, again, this is in the context of the local church.

And the very next passage after this, okay, Matthew 18, 21, specifically 22, is the point,

I mean, the response to this whole thing, Peter says, he comes and says to him, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him up to seven times?

And he says, no, up to 70 times seven. So you're right, this is the exact, this is Peter's response to this.

The whole understanding of this is that it should be forgiveness. And that's why Peter's saying, well, how long do

I let this guy sin? How many times do I let him get away with it? Peter's like, I want to get that guy right away because there is something within us, a sense of justice, that we want wrongs righted.

Now, some of us have a stronger sense of justice than others that can get us in trouble as well, because we want to right every wrong that we see.

That could be a problem, but here are the ideas, what you said, we as believers should be a people that are forgiving, and we should be noted by that, we should be marked by that, and we should be letting

God handle these things, not that we have to handle everything. But when we talk about discipline, and we're going to pick up the leadership next week, because I know we're not going to touch on discipline and worship, so worship we could cover kind of quickly, maybe.

But here's the thing. As we look at this, there's four steps to church discipline. You go alone.

You don't go to friends. You don't talk to anybody else. Why? Because you may be the one that's wrong.

It may not be a sin. It may be your perception. I don't know how many times I've dealt with people that try to practice church discipline, and the problem is actually with the person who's approaching them, because they are the one that have a perception, and they don't let go of their perception.

They won't question if their perception could be wrong. I mean, you and I both know that right nowadays, theology doesn't matter, truth doesn't matter, it's only the narrative that matters.

And that's the problem, because your narrative could be wrong. And if you're not willing to question your narrative, and whether your perception of the person, then you need to take a step back.

You should not practice church discipline if you're unwilling to question whether you could be wrong.

And so the first step is you go one -on -one. The reason is to keep this as private as possible.

Well, okay, there's an actual sin there. I mean, there's like, really, there's a sin.

It's not like, well, I perceive it this way. It's not like, well, this is, you know, I want there to be something here.

No, there's an actual sin. It's recognized. Both parties recognize it, but the person goes, I'm not changing.

Okay, then what do you do? You take two or three witnesses. Now, this is something most people make another mistake at,

Nathaniel. What they think is, okay, so I have a problem with Joe over here, and I think he lied about me.

So I go to you, Nathaniel, and I say, hey, let's go and talk to Joe, because we got to practice church discipline. He lied about me, and this is what he said, and this is what he did.

What have I just done? I've prejudged your mind to my conclusion, and you're not being a fair witness anymore.

You're not there to witness. What are they witnessing? If we read it, we're to witness the unrepentance.

They're to witness the unrepentance. Well, they can't witness the unrepentance if I just tainted you,

Nathaniel. You come into the situation thinking this person's wrong, because I made a really good case.

I'm not going to talk to you. I'm going to convince you of my case before we go talk to the person. That's what you shouldn't do.

You go with the witnesses so that they can witness the unrepentance. In other words, they're also going to witness that, yes, there's a sin here.

Maybe that sin backfires, in a sense. I've had this happen. I had a woman that came to me with church—what she decided was church discipline.

This kind of gets into the worship. I was leading the church. We didn't have someone to lead the singing, and so I would lead the worship, and I would preach, and I would try to guide with my hand, but I didn't do it right, because I'm not musical.

And she didn't like that, and when we finally got a pastor called to the church, she was saying that because I was doing it too fast— or sorry, too slow—she said it had to be faster.

She didn't like that, and I was trying to do it purposely to undermine her. And yeah,

I see you putting your hands into your head. Well, we talked about it. I said, well, you know, like one -on -one, we talked about it.

I said, I'm not trying to undermine you. Well, she wasn't happy with it, so she grabbed the new pastor and one of the deacons, and the four of us sat down, and the pastor looked at her and said, um, you need to just forgive him and move on, because you're wrong here.

There's no sin, right? Sometimes the two -or -three witness will go that route, okay?

And that's why you should not be telling them your side of the story. They're witnesses of the unrepentance.

But if two or three witnesses, you go with the witnesses, you go with one or two more people, and so you have two or three witnesses to the fact that there's a sin, then what do you do?

Well, then you tell it to church. This doesn't mean you put them out. Step three is the church goes to the person and confronts the person and asks the person, is this sin?

You know, this is what we're being told. Is this happening? You need to repent to this. And maybe from all the people in the church going, they'll repent.

But if they refuse the entire church, step four is when you put them out, you treat them like they're an unbeliever. It doesn't mean you don't talk to them.

It means you share the gospel with them. And then when you get to the, probably, I don't know if I hit your most favorite misinterpreted passages, but I have two here, 19 and 20, because 19 is the one that says if two agree on earth about anything,

God's going to give it to them. And I have people that I know who've said, oh, see, God's going to give it. I had Nathanael, you and I agreed we're going to pray for something and we agreed

God's got to give it to me. No, this is in light of church discipline. The very next verse people use for small church gatherings, and when

I do my Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar, that's one of our weekend seminars, we come into churches, teach people how to interpret the

Bible, I use this passage and I say, you know, this is in light of church discipline. The reason it says it is because the two or three are what?

The witnesses. They witnessed the unrepentance. It's not that they agreed, that they got together, had a vote, and because they agree,

God's got to be, is bound by this. And it doesn't mean that where you have a small church gathering,

God's there, because I usually read Matthew 28, 19 and 20, that ends and says, and lo,

I am with you always. So I ask people, how many Christians are required for God to be present?

And the answer I always hear is one. And then I look at them and say, no, He's omnipresent.

He's everywhere. He's in the midst of everyone. If there's no believers, God is there.

So it's a trick question, I know. I do it for the effect, but that's the point.

When we look at this, discipline should be done biblically. Let me just quickly wrap up with worship, and that is, worship in the church is to be dictated by God.

So I know there's different views of, should we only do what God says we could do, the regulative principle, or we can do whatever.

If God doesn't say we can't do it, then we could do it. So some are going to say you can't have drums. Some are going to say you can't have drums.

Some people say you can only sing psalms. Some say you can't have any musical instruments, which is strange because there are musical instruments that are used in the

Old Testament for worship. So there's different views with it. The point though is, we should be doing what scripture says.

Now, should we be doing smoke machines and lights and have a stage like it's a concert?

Well, I would ask, who are you worshiping then? I think that was Nathaniel's thing, right? Who's the focus of our worship?

Are you doing a light show and fog machines and getting professional musicians up there, and they're singing in such a way that the congregation can't sing?

Then it's a concert. You're not—the individual in the pew is not worshiping.

And so if we're going to do things by church, we should be looking at how God declares us to run the church, whether it comes to the leadership that we'll get to next week in more detail, the gifts, the order, the discipline, the worship.

I want to focus on some of those ones that I knew we weren't going to be able to hit specifically discipline as much, but next episode we want to do is focus in on this issue of the church leadership.

And if you want, like I said, go to strivetoturning .org, get the card that we have there on church leadership so you can see.

You'll get it in time, hopefully, to follow along with us. So let me just end this way.

Nathaniel, I want to thank you for joining us. Thank you for coming on for these three weeks here, you know, for your wisdom.

I thoroughly enjoyed Truth Be Known podcast, the one that you do, so I appreciate that you do that and you allow us to partner with you in that way because I love listening to it each week.

No, I know, we'll have Eki on here. We'll do, after Eki comes on as a co -host, we'll do a poll to see who, no, let's not do that.

He wins, hands down. I only, sometimes I just show up to hear Eki speak, so it's fine.

Yeah, he is one smart dude. I will say that. Yeah, I mean, you know, in all seriousness, if people are listening to our show or they haven't listened to our show,

Eki is an older man than I am. He genuinely is a smarter man than I am.

His love for the body of Christ, you know, his ability to articulate doctrine and the gospel and theology far exceeds my own.

It really is worth listening just to hear Eki, and I mean that sincerely.

He's the best thing that's ever happened to our show, and so I'm very grateful that he agreed to come on. He's been on now,

I think, for two years now, if I'm not mistaken, and so, yeah. Yeah, so I want to thank you for joining me, helping me out as a co -host and helping us discuss and understand better the doctrines of the

Church and encourage everyone to keep listening. If you found value in this, please share it with others, help others to know about it, and I encourage you to, if this was the first episode you heard,

I encourage you at least go back 30 -some episodes to the beginning of this series and listen to all of them.

I think it will bless you richly to dig into scripture, to dig into theology, to rightly know how to handle the

Word, to understand what it is we believe as believers, as Christians. So with that, that's a wrap.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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