Church, Part 9 of What We Believe, Part 45

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host Andrew Rapaport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity Ministries and the

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Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member. We have a lot of podcasts out there to listen to, so you go out there to ChristianPodcastCommunity .org,

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you will find something to listen to. We produce, I think it's about 40 hours of content every week, so yep, you're probably not going to be able to listen to everything unless that is your full -time job, and sorry, we don't pay you to listen.

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But, Striving for Eternity is a discipling ministry. We're here to help you in your local church.

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If we could be of assistance to you, come out and maybe do a weekend seminar on things like how to interpret the

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Bible, evangelism, apologetics, social justice, different things we can cover to help your local church to grow.

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That is our goal. Speaking of the church, that's what we're going to talk about today. What is the calling of the church?

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And I am joined again this week with my friend Harold Smith from the

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Pastor Patriots podcast, one of the other podcasts in the Christian Podcast Community, and with that, he is one of the co -hosts of that, along with Wade Lentz, who is also one of my co -hosts here, guest co -hosts in this series.

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We're doing a series called What We Believe, and we're in a section on the church, but let me welcome

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Harold in and let him share a little bit about who he is, in case you did not catch last week's episode.

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My name is Harold Smith. I pastor here locally in the western

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Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma area. I'm engaged in church revitalization. I serve as a missionary out of West Park Baptist Church in Ozark, Arkansas, and when

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I'm not engaged in revitalizing a church, then I do a lot of itinerant preaching, conferences, revivals.

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Yes, believe it or not, in Arkansas, we still have revivals. We don't guarantee that we will be revived, but we meet and hope the

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Lord does revive us, and when I'm not doing that, I have a free Christian bookstore in Van Buren, Arkansas, where I give away gospel books and sound

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Christian literature free of charge to anybody that comes in the door. I have a lot of really good gospel conversations with people that wouldn't give me the time of day outside will come in here, and because I have a building,

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I'm an expert, and so they'll ask me questions, and I get to have really good discussions, and when

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I'm not doing that, I have a couple of podcasts, Patriot Pastor podcast, as he mentioned, with Wade Lentz.

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I also have the Backwoods Baptist podcast that I do myself. Andrew, thanks for having me on today.

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Yeah, so you give away free books. That's how you make your money, right? Yeah. We mainly open on Saturdays.

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There's a passenger train that runs here. It runs through the Ozark Mountains, and it drops off up to 400 tourists at a time on a

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Saturday, and so we're primarily open on Saturdays, and on those days, it's a historic district.

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These are old buildings. The building I'm sitting in today, it's got paneling behind me, but this was built in 1899, and so this is called the

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Backwoods Book Company. It's nondescript. It just looks like a bookstore. You walk in. We say, hey, welcome.

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All of our books are free. We just limit you to one, and we started doing this in May of last year, and by the end of last year, we had given about 1 ,100 people a book, a gospel book.

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I mean, sometimes we give them Bibles and books. We give away a lot of tracts. We don't count how many tracts we give away, but it's hard to be mad at a

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Christian when he's giving you a book. I'm the only free thing on Main Street. So, I don't know.

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It's a joy. I genuinely love doing it. It's just a great way to do evangelism, and the

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Lord's provided us with the books and the financing to do it, and I thoroughly enjoy it.

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Yeah, that's an amazing thing. You're right. I tell people all the time, if you buy someone lunch, you can share the gospel with them, because when they're getting a free meal, they're—yeah,

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I've always wanted to do the old -style revival meetings. I had a pastor friend that tried starting it up, and he did one, and he said, next year,

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I'm going to invite you, and then I think that was the last one he ever did. But yeah, maybe, you know, let me know when you're doing those, and maybe we could help promote it, and maybe

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I can get down there and see one once. But let's look at what we're talking about this week.

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We're again in the topic of the Church, and this is episode—this is the 44th episode in our series,

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What We Believe. Why are we doing this? Well, a couple reasons. One, because we want you in the audience to learn theology.

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Whether you agree with our positions or not is not so much the issue that I really am concerned with, because if we disagree and it causes you to go to Scripture, amen!

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Like, if you disagree with me, but you can make a good argument from Scripture, look, we both can't be right, but guess what?

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We'll both be happy to be corrected when we sit at the feet of Christ, so I'm good with that. And so, as we look at this, we want to teach what we believe is from the

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Bible as theology. But for many people, they go to a church or they look up a ministry and they see a doctrinal statement, and they really don't know how to read the doctrinal statement.

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I mean, you could just read it, but we're 44 episodes in. Now, granted, this is—I think when

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I print it out, it's 10 or 12 pages long. I can preach in an hour, you know, about six pages, so this should take me two hours to just read through, and yet we've done 44 hours of it.

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We're not even done. We haven't even gotten to the end times yet. Because it takes—this is all the explanation behind a doctrinal statement.

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A good doctrinal statement is going to be very precise, and we're trying to help you also to learn, to train you how to read a doctrinal statement, to see all the stuff, not just what it says, but what it's not saying.

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Because a doctrinal statement is a statement of saying, this is what we believe. That's a demarcation point of between this is right and that is wrong in our belief.

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And so, therefore, as much as it says we believe this, it means we don't believe a whole lot of other things.

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And that's what we've been doing throughout this whole series, is showing, as we read through the doctrinal statement, this is what we believe, this is what we say we believe this, but there's a whole lot that goes into that that we don't believe.

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And a good doctrinal statement is going to be very precise, as you've been hearing throughout this episode. I will encourage you, if you're saying, hey, you're 44 episodes in, and this is the first one

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I'm hearing, I'm going to tell you how you can listen to every single one in order, so you could start from the beginning.

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Because we've taken breaks from the series, and we keep returning to it, and so I want you to know how to go and find them all.

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So, my guest co -host is Harold, and we've been having guest co -hosts throughout this series of different people from the

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Christian podcast community. If you want to read along with the doctrinal statement, go to strivingforeternity .org,

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strivingforeternity .org, and go to the About section. In there is a section called

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What We Believe, and if you see that, you can open up the section that's on the church.

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Now, if you scroll down a little bit more, you're going to come to another section that is going to say

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What We Believe Podcast Series, and if you click on that, you're going to have a full list of every one of the episodes that we did in order from the very first one.

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So, you can go there and listen to them in order if you want. That way, you would have them.

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That would be good to do. They all have the phrase What We Believe, and then part 1, 2, 3, 4, so if you want to just do a search in your podcast app form, that could be another way, and you could just download them in order and listen as you may like.

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So, this next paragraph is kind of short here, Harold, but if you wouldn't mind reading this so we could tackle this one.

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The Bible teaches the calling of all saints to the work of service. Wow, that was really short.

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I'm not good at writing paragraphs. I always was told in school I have to have three sentences to a paragraph.

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Oh, well, I wasn't very good in English anyway. In today's attention span, this may be a better paragraph than it seems like.

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The books you read nowadays, the paragraphs are real short, but if you read John Gill, he has one paragraph, three pages.

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He never broke his thought. Yes, Puritans had a very different style of writing than we have today.

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His titles were longer than that paragraph. That's true. That's why most of the

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Puritan works, they've cut the full title to something shorter, and then they'll maybe add it as a subtitle, but it really was the full title.

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But yeah, the thing we're saying here, and this is working off of what we said was the purpose of the Church in the last episode, here what we're saying is, what is the calling?

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The Church teaches that the calling of all the saints is to do work of service.

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Now, I say this is what we believe, this is what we're saying this is, so what is this not saying?

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Well, I'm glad you asked, because I actually wanted to answer that. So thank you very much, listener, for asking that question, probably in your head.

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What this is saying is that the purpose of the Church is not to be a social club, for one. We talked in the last episode of the importance of fellowship, but that's not the end -all be -all of the

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Church. The Church is not about a fellowship, it's about service.

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Okay? What else does that mean? It also means it's not about, oh, this one's going to hurt Harold, I know there's some people that are not going to like this.

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The Church is not about what you can get out of it, it's about what you can put into it.

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Oh, I'm sorry, it's not about you. But Harold, as you travel from church to church, and folks, if they didn't listen to last week where you described some of the ministry that you do, you go into hurting churches and act as an interim pastor and kind of fix the broken things so that they can hire a pastor and get someone in to shepherd you.

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I loved how you described yourself. You're the ER doctor that comes in in the emergency situation to fix the things so that you can get people stable for the pastor to be the regular doctor.

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I love that illustration of yourself. But as you go into a lot of churches, how often do you see that a big problem of the

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Church is that those that are there attending every week think the Church is about them, not what they put into the

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Church, but what they should get out of it? Yeah, usually what I see in unhealthy churches is one or two people, maybe one or two families, doing all of the work, and everybody else is kind of like just sitting back soaking it up, you know?

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Baptists in the South are famous for potlucks, and I'm a Baptist, and I'm in the South, and if you look at me, if you ever see a picture of me,

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I'm built for potlucks. But what you'll see sometimes in unhealthy churches is you'll see two ladies wiping all the tables down, two ladies doing all the dishes, cleaning everything, sweeping, cleaning up, and you'll see a whole bunch of people just sitting around eating, doing whatever.

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And when we talk about service, there's outward service, there's inward service, there's service to one another, there's service on your varied gifts, and it's almost kind of like a one -man show.

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The pastor may do all of these different things, and the Church just sits back, kind of, you know, and just sees what they can get out of it.

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It's so, in a healthy church, on the other hand, no one is overworked, because the people are actually kind of fighting to work.

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I mean, they're looking for opportunities to serve. They're looking for something to do. Can I mow the grass? No. Somebody else is already mowing the grass this week.

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Well, can I mop? No. Somebody else mopped yesterday. Those are healthy churches, and when

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Christians understand their job is to serve their fellow man and put others first, it's just a beautiful thing to watch.

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Yeah, so I attend a church here that's local to me called Oxford Valley Chapel in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and, you know, one of the testimonies that I loved,

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I didn't know this until we had a church business meeting, and the pastor named the number of—not by name, just gave the number of volunteers that we have serving in the

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Church in some capacity compared to the total number of people that attend the Church, and this may shock you,

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Harold, but we had 75 % of the Church, or about that, if I remember correctly.

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It might have been 73, but we had about 75 % of the Church that was serving in some capacity.

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I was shocked at that because you're probably familiar with what they'll either call the 90 -10 rule or 80 -20 rule, you know, where 10 % of the people are doing 90 % of the work, you know, and 90 % of people are doing nothing.

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That's not the calling of a church. Yeah. One of my early failures as a pastor was if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself, and it's easier to do it yourself than to teach someone else how to do it, and so I was a very—I didn't start pastoring until I was 31, and I just—I was a workaholic, just work, work, work,

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I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it, and you know what I found out? Small churches will sit back and just let you do it, and you will essentially become a one -man band doing all the work yourself.

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You'll wear yourself out, and you've not taught anybody else, you know, what their responsibility is, nor maybe they know, and you've not given them an opportunity to engage in service, and so one of the things

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I encourage pastors to learn is learn to delegate, learn to recognize who has gifts, and then learn to teach them, hey, you need to employ this gift, and when a pastor—it's not about just getting everybody else to do your job.

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I know a lot of lazy pastors who just want to preach, lock themselves in their office, have everybody else do the dirty work of ministry, and I'll just be a professional preacher.

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That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about developing people in your congregation.

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Okay, you're good at hospitality. Let's put you in charge of recognizing, you know, new visitors, engaging them.

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Oh, you're good at study? All right, let's find you a Sunday school class to teach, and getting people into the church to utilize the gifts they have makes for a, well, a body.

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When the hand works, and the foot works, and the head works, and the mouth works, it's wonderful.

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When you're short one of those items, you're handicapped, and there's a lot of handicapped churches.

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Yeah, well, let me jump off of that a little bit and expand what you're saying, because we have to understand the difference between ministry and a business.

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The church is not a business. I know that there's some who run it that way. A lot of churches, they put guys in the leadership because they run their own business, or they're the power brokers at whatever company they work for.

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They have a good business mindset. But see, what happens is they bring that business mindset into the church.

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So what am I saying is the distinction here is this. What Harold just said is about delegating.

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Well, they do that in business. But here's the difference. In business, you get fired for failure.

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In ministry, failure is expected so you could be taught. You see, that's a major difference.

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The reason so many guys say, well, it's easier for me to do it myself because I'll do it right. Well, is the goal in church to do it right or to teach someone how to do it?

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Teaching someone how to do it means it's going to be done wrong a few times. Or maybe it's not wrong, it's just different.

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You think it's wrong, but it's just done a different way, right? I mean, an example, we here at the ministry, my bride handles all the giving and things like that when people donate.

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And she's got a system that works for her on how to keep track of everyone's donations.

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Harold, I cannot make sense of that system at all. If you put me in charge of it, I got to just like, okay, let me just take this, toss it, and start over because we think differently.

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Now, if I was to say it's got to be done my way, it would be a problem. She's got a system that works really well, and it works for her, and she's doing it.

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Sometimes, guys, pastors, sometimes we just want it done our way, and our way's not always right.

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It doesn't have to be our way. You're hitting on it. This was something

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I had to learn in the ministry was I need to be not just teaching people doctrine.

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I need to be teaching them duty. As a Christian, you have a responsibility. Now, what are you good at?

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I'm obviously not going to put a carpenter in charge of keeping books, and I'm not going to put a bookkeeper in charge of changing the oil in the car or something like that.

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But distinguishing, and that's where discernment comes in. If a pastor knows and loves his people, and he's in fellowship with them, he's spending time with them, he sees their gifts.

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God's made it clear to him, and he can encourage those people and exhort them to utilize their gifts for the betterment, not just of themselves and not just for the pastor, but the betterment of the whole body of Christ.

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That's something I see a lot of young preachers faulting on. They show up at church, and it's kind of what

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I call Barney Five Syndrome. All right, new sheriff in town. Here at the Rock, we're going to do it my way.

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They want to turn the whole church upside down over policy. No, those people were there doing these jobs before you arrived.

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You don't need to change everything. You just need to teach people what to do, how to do it, and how it affects the whole church.

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Yeah, you know, in my area where I lived in New Jersey, Master's Seminary, which is a good seminary, but it got a bad reputation in our area.

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Because we get these guys that come in, and it's exactly like you said. They would come into a church, and the first thing they wanted to do is make elder rule.

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They come into congregational -led churches, and within the first—there's one guy.

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He was at the church three weeks, three weeks, before he's talking about, we need elder rule.

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All the problems with this church that you've had is you don't have elder rule. What ends up happening is people just move around churches.

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That would be a thing in Jersey. I mean, I knew a lot of people from a lot of churches because they all just would cycle through.

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Now, our church, they'd never stayed at because, well, we would actually say, well, why'd you leave the other church? And they'd give a reason, and their second weekend, we'd say, you mind if we call your pastor to let them know you're coming here?

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Why would you need to do that? Because that's what we're going to do. And you know what? We never saw them a third week. But you'd see all this, and it's like, that's not—I would tell the guys, don't make any changes for two years.

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Live with the way the church is. In fact, I always liked how my pastor made changes in the church. He wanted to go from—we were a

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King James church. Now, we weren't King James only, but we only used King James, and he wanted to go to a different translation.

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And he thought the easiest one to go to would be New King James. Okay. But do you know, he was teaching from the

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King James for two years, but what he would do is every time he'd do it, he'd point out the differences of what the

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New King James said. People would go, oh. At a business meeting, someone asked, hey, pastor, why don't we use the

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New King James instead of the King James? Could we use that translation? He goes, yeah. Is everyone in agreement?

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People were like, yeah. Okay. But as in me being in the leadership, I knew that was his plan, to teach people till they were like, can we do this?

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Well, Andrew, he made it their idea. Exactly. It was their idea to do it. Well, what

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I see a lot of times with pastors is they're frustrated that their people are not serving. They're not working.

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They're not doing this work. And so they want to get up with their Bible out, and they want to beat them over the head. And everybody's going to get to work.

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We need volunteers. You guys are not pulling your weight. You never drive sheep with a whip.

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Sheep are led. Shepherds are leaders of sheep. And so what a pastor has to do is teach people what the

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Scripture says, then show them what the needs of the church are, and then pray and trust

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God. If these people are Christians, the Holy Spirit dwells within them. And if the

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Spirit dwells within them, God is able to take the Word through the Spirit and impress them and lead them and guide them into doing what needs to be done.

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And it's not a matter of pointing out what needs to be done. As much as it's teaching, we have a responsibility.

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And that's why the paragraph's small, but it's needed. Christian, this is your reasonable service unto

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God. Yeah. You know, a very interesting episode I did in the past. If you are a regular listener, you probably heard it.

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If not, I will put a link to it in the show notes. Is that when I did this series on what is a pastor, and all of it was to lead up to the final, which is how to encourage your pastor.

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And it was really interesting, Harold, because I put out on social media and asked people to give me ways to encourage a pastor.

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And without even looking, if I just read it, I could tell you which of these people submitted things that were pastors.

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And the reason being is every pastor, almost,

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I should say almost every pastor, said this, how do you encourage your pastor? Showing up on Sunday.

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I mean, like, people were like, what? Like, yeah, that's how you encourage your pastor. That's like the number one way that all the pastors want to be encouraged is just showing up on Sunday.

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You know, if I'm not going to be at church, my pastor knows. I told my pastor I will be the church member

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I always wanted. So if I'm not going to be there on Sunday, he knows about it. He knows when

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I'm traveling. If I'm not going to be there, he knows the reason I'm not going to be there. You know, even if it's a midweek service, he knows.

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If I can't be there for the men's breakfast, he knows. It's not that hard for me to do, but people don't think about the pastor when someone's not showing up, goes, why is so -and -so not here?

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And then there's two weeks or three weeks. They don't know. They start thinking, well, why is he not here?

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Oh, because you're actually taking care of your parents, you know, and I could have been praying for that.

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Maybe could have helped you. You know, it's something as simple as that can encourage your pastor.

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But what is that? That's service. Using the gifts, and we're going to get into that soon. Using the gifts that God has given you to serve your local body.

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There's so many people, they go to look at churches, and it's like, oh, oh, there's no nursery.

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There's no kids here. There's no youth program. What are my kids going to do? Well, you know what you're doing when you do that?

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You're training your children to go to church with the expectation that they are to receive and not give, and we don't think of it that way.

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You know, it's okay for you to be the only people in a church with children. Someone has to be the first.

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I mean, it's really kind of sad. What a lot of churches do is they hire a pastor with a young family, a big young family, because that way there's some people in the church with kids so that other kids will come in.

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Someone has to be the first. But let me ask you, parent, is it okay for you to train your children the right way?

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Like, train your children that their role is to serve in church, not to receive from church. How do you do that?

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Well, you know, Mom, when we went to this other church, they had a kids program, and this church doesn't have that.

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That's okay. Why don't you find how can you serve the church? What could you do? I know I just did a

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FUPA because many churches are like, children can't serve. Yeah, they can. There's different things they could do.

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You know, I used to get the kids to help usher. Can they hand out a bulletin if your church even gives a bulletin anymore?

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Can they hand things like that out every week? Yeah, and they love doing it. Guess what? The visitors always love when there's a child handing them the bulletin and welcoming them.

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And then you could train that child, as I used to do as the head usher, to ask them, did you get one of these?

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And they hand them the bulletin. If it's someone's first time, they'd be taught to ask, is this your first time in our church?

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It is? Hey, can I give you a visitor card for you to fill out? And I'd train the kids to even ask, where did you go to church before?

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All the things I would ask. And they sit there and go, I got a 12 -year -old asking this?

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Yeah, they could be trained. And that's such a testimony to a healthy church.

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Rather than just kids running wild and jumping over pews and like, hey, we got kids. Hear them? Yeah, that's all

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I heard was your kids. Being well -trained, well -mannered, intelligent, able to speak to other adults, that is such an encouraging thing.

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Yeah, I just think overall, a healthy church shouldn't have a large nursery and no one to take care of it.

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A healthy church should have a large nursery, but it also should be well -staffed with nursery workers.

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And I'm not trying to start the should kids be in church or not. I'm just saying the debate is not like should we have a nursery or not.

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It's that if you have a lot of children, you should have a lot of adults to help nurture and lead those children.

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And it's unhealthy to have a whole bunch of takers and no givers. That's what

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I see in a lot of churches. In fact, in a church that I was in, we had a policy that mothers could not serve in the nursery.

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Does that sound strange? Yeah, the reason was because we saw the nursery as a ministry to the mothers.

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It's their only time. Exactly. They're with those kids all day long, seven days a week.

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This is the one time that they get a break from the kids so that they can worship God. And so we would not allow mothers to serve in the nursery.

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I'm not going down the family integrated church rabbit hole. I promise I will not go down.

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I'll just let you talk. No, but even those that have that mindset.

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I mean, I don't mind kids in the service. I don't either.

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Yeah. The whole point is for whatever the Lord has sent you in ministry opportunity, he should be sending you ministers to match that opportunity.

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That's a healthy church. Yeah, and it's not a thing. The frustrating thing is because there's so many churches that because 90 % of the people are just there to get, there is no one that's willing to serve.

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And we could say, well, it's the pastor's job to train them. You can't force someone to believe or to change their mindset, right?

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So, yeah, you could do all the training you want, but people have to see that their calling in their local church as a saint is to the work of service.

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So, you know, and let me say this. If you want to know, well, how can

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I learn more about the work of service? Well, that's going to come through understanding of how to study the Word of God.

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I mean, they have scholars they hire, so that everything is tagged. You go through the

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Bible, it's not just, hey, let me do a word search on something, but it's tagged on the idea, the sense of something.

30:45

And so this is a great tool that you can have. Hey, you don't have all the books like you see behind me.

30:51

Well, you can't see them because you're listening on audio. But when you watch me on my Apologetics Live, yeah,

30:57

I have a large library, but now many of those are in my Logos library as well.

31:02

And so hence the reason I'm selling a lot of my books. But the reality is you want a good tool that's going to help you in your study of the

31:10

Word of God, consider Logos Bible study tools. You can go to Logos, that's

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31:23

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Bible study tools, but I believe you'll even get five free books from us. They've made some changes, so I don't know with the subscription whether you get the five free books anymore unless you're buying the package.

31:42

So that's one of the changes with it, but you will get the discount. So go to Logos .com

31:49

slash Striving for Eternity to start your study in the Word of God so that you can learn how you could serve your local church.

31:59

And so that's a word from our sponsor that helps them to continue sponsoring us, which we appreciate. Harold, would you mind reading the next paragraph a little bit longer than that first one?

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The need of the church is to cooperate with God as He accomplishes

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His purpose in the world. To that end, He gives the church spiritual gifts.

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First, He gives men chosen for the purpose of equipping the saints for the work of ministry.

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And He also gives unique and special spiritual abilities to each member of the body of Christ.

32:39

Okay, so as we get into this, spiritual gifts, touchy subject.

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Okay, we're not going to deal with anything that is really that controversial this episode, but Harold, I think we're going to come back and do two more episodes because I think it's going to take two to cover the next paragraph, which is where all the controversy is.

33:00

So let's be non -controversial this week. So what we can all agree on, 1

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Corinthians chapter 12 is a chapter you can see that God has given different gifts to the body of Christ, so that though many members, one body.

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And therefore, you know, Harold made a comment last week, and he talked about how if the body's not serving right, it's handicapped.

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It's not functioning properly. And what that means is if God has gifted you, and think about this, if you are a believer in Christ, God has uniquely gifted you to serve your local church.

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So if you're not serving your local church, your local church is not functioning properly.

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And it's not the pastor's fault. It's our fault for not using the gifts

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God has given us to serve the body God has put us in like he wants us to do.

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And so let me say this. You brought up the body. Yeah, if somebody had lost a leg, we would,

34:16

I said this last week, label them handicapped. They only have one leg. They can't walk. If we have a church that, and 1

34:23

Corinthians 12 gives everyone as a part of a body, it talks about the eyes and the hand and the mouth.

34:31

Sometimes you, I mean, a body would be handicapped without a leg, but a body would be weird if it had two different mouths.

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Body would be weird if it had eight eyes. A body would be weird if it had four arms.

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And a lot of times what you see in churches when it comes to gifting, everybody wants to be the mouth.

34:53

Everybody wants to stand up and do the talking. Or everybody wants to be the brain and do the thinking. And not very many people want to do the hands and do the working.

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And so a healthy church should have people gifted to do all of these things.

35:08

And this is a real, this is a pet peeve of mine. I believe in the plurality of elders.

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I believe it's a good, healthy way to structure a church. But I see churches of 25 with three elders.

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And I'm like, we need three churches more than we need three elders and one church of 25.

35:30

I mean, my job is finding pastors for churches. And here's three of you sitting here taking turns preaching to basically your families.

35:38

I mean, this is not what a body should, this is not a healthy looking body to me.

35:46

That's just my opinion, Andrew. You can deny it and we'll still be friends. Well, see, the thing is,

35:51

I'll expand it and say it this way, is every single believer in a local church should be serving.

35:59

We talked about the 90 -10 rule. Well, the reality is it should be 100 % nothing. Every single member of the church should be serving the church in one capacity or another.

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It may not be on a Sunday service. Maybe you have a gift of mercy, and so therefore you're going out during the week and taking care of people in the church that are hurting.

36:23

I know the one gift no one wants is the gift of giving. Everyone comes to them asking for handouts, right?

36:31

No, but even the gift of giving is more than just giving of money, giving of your time, your resources.

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It's just having an attitude that I want to give to others. It's not just the gift of teaching.

36:47

Okay, so we mentioned that here, right? Because we're saying the need of the church is to cooperate with God.

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So first off, what we're saying is you're serving in the local church.

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It's not just you. It's you working with God. God's given you this gift, so he's working through you.

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The work that you do is being done through you, with God. It's not something you're just doing completely on your own.

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This is what we see about our sanctification. Do we do good works? Yes, but not apart from God working in us, and so we have to recognize that we're cooperating with God in that way.

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But we're saying the need of the church is to cooperate with God as he accomplishes his purpose in the world.

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Did you ever think about you serving in your local church that's God's purpose of how he's working his will out throughout the world?

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Everyone thinks that, oh, everyone should be at my church. My church should be the only true church. No. Just like I think that there's many bodies within one local body to make it one body, many members, one body,

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I think there's many churches to make one universal church. Churches are different. There's going to be different styles that, yeah, may appeal to people differently.

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I get it. Yet what we end up seeing is that that is how

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God works out his will throughout the world. Yeah.

38:19

And it starts with you and I as believers serving him through using the gifts for the purpose of the church.

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Because we put here, to that end, he gives spiritual gifts.

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Now, first we're saying he gives men gifts for the purpose of equipping the saints for the work of the ministry. This is pastors, teachers.

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Well, teaching is a gift. Yes, it's a position in office.

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Yes, pastors must be, I'm going to get myself in trouble, pastors must be able to teach.

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I say that and that shouldn't shock people, but there's a lot of churches that they bring people in as pastors, whether as paid pastors, lay pastors, pastors that are doing the preaching or guys that are organizing things.

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But they bring guys in that can't teach. Yeah. They're not gifted that way.

39:21

Well, then you're not a pastor. Yeah. Be a deacon. They can give a book report or they can regurgitate a commentary.

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They can give you a chain reference of Bible verses, but actually taking the word of God, making it applicable to the people so that they see how it affects them and the condition they're in so that they see how it still applies to them and the situation they're in today.

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That's a rare thing today. A lot of pastors come in and talk over everyone's head or they don't say anything, or they're just a

39:54

Bible commentary repeating what John MacArthur said or what John Gill said. Pastors, if you're able to teach and you've been gifted by God, you're able to give us original thought.

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I don't mean new doctrine. I mean give it to us in your own words. Tell us what

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God has gifted you to share with us. And a lot of times

40:18

I can spot a guy, that guy's trying to preach like John Piper. Well, they used to try to preach like Steve Lawson.

40:24

They don't do that anymore. But they used to try to imitate the guys they liked, and basically sermon stealing is rampant in the

40:33

Southern Baptist Convention. I mean, plagiarism, they made a big deal out of their president plagiarizing sermons.

40:40

I know dozens of Southern Baptists that haven't preached their own sermon in years. That's not your gifting.

40:48

If you're not able to preach and prepare your own sermon, God didn't call you to be a pastor. That's right. Yeah, no.

40:55

I mean, look, I had a guy, we were in a church revitalization. I came along to help out a guy, and I literally,

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I remember I talked to my wife, I'm like, he's preaching his seminary notes. Like I could tell. He's preaching through the syllabus of the class he took.

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And I mean, he like literally, he was tossed by his own father a softball question.

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Can you lose your salvation? And he turns to me and says, Andrew, what do you think about that?

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And afterwards I told him, I said, look, if you, you know, he was a young man. I said, if you want to be the pastor, you have to lead.

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You can't sit here. I mean, you can't sit there and not have an answer to such an easy question for a pastor to answer.

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But he's like, well, I don't know. Andrew, what do you think? I'm like, what are you doing? You're shifting all of the authority to me, and I'm not the pastor.

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Like you can't do that. You need to have those in. You got to be able to know how to teach other than what you've prepared that week.

41:53

And you need to prepare, not actually just read your seminary syllabus. And so this is something,

42:00

I say it starts there because look, how are we going to know what God's word is? Well, God has gifted us with people to teach us so that we can study on our own.

42:12

That should be a thing. So that's the reason I say that it starts there, but it doesn't end there.

42:18

Okay, we continue on. It says, and he also gives unique and special spiritual abilities to each member of the body of Christ.

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So what we realize there is that if you are a Christian, you at salvation were given certain gifts.

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Okay, now maybe not everyone agrees with that. The charismatics believe you can get gifts after salvation.

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But I would say that we get spiritual gifts at salvation. And those gifts are unique to us.

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We get different things. But here's an interesting thing that I've done in the study of spiritual gifts.

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Do you know that all of the spiritual gifts that are not contested as continuing, okay, we'll get into this next episode, that there's some gifts that people, cessationists like myself believe did not continue.

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Oops, I just let the cat out of the bag. Now some people don't want to listen next week. Well, listen next week so you could tell me how wrong

43:22

I am. That's fine. I don't mind. Just bring scripture. Okay, but we can have good, healthy discussion.

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But I'm talking about the gifts that no one questions, right? The gift of teaching, the gift of administrating, the gift of mercy, the gift of exhortation, the gift of service.

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These ones that no one contests, right? You've been given a certain unique ability to do them when you're saved.

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But do you know that every one of those you're commanded to do as a Christian? This is the thing

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I think people think, like, they talk about a gift of evangelism. Well, I don't have the gift of evangelism. Therefore, I don't have to do it. Actually, I don't believe there is a gift of evangelism.

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I don't see that in scripture. It may be that God has given people a better ability to do it, but I don't think it's a gifting that some people can do, and therefore,

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I don't have that gift. That was my excuse. I don't got to do it. It's not that way. And so the thing is that I look at this and say, first off, we're commanded to do all of them.

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It's just that you'll be given certain spiritual gifts where they will come easier for you or you will enjoy them more.

44:33

Let me give you, for instance, I probably was organized within the womb.

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I mean, I probably sat within my mother's womb, and I was probably trying to organize whatever was in there, okay?

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I am just an organized person. I like things orderly to the point when

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I was in school, and people get a kick out of this story, but when I was in school and we'd let out for recess, and all the kids eat their lunch and run out, and this is back in the day when your mother sent you to school with lunch, so you had a lunchbox, and all the kids would drop their lunchboxes there as they go to play.

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I could not stand the mess of all the lunchboxes. Every day I would organize all those lunchboxes in size order.

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It drove me nuts when I'd walk out and see that. So where everyone else was playing, I had to do that.

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Okay, I'm OCD. I get it. But I did not like teaching. I did not like being in front of people.

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But once I got saved, something changed. So I make a difference between what

45:34

I refer to a talent and a gift. A talent is something I was born with. I was naturally born with organizational skills, but I had a spiritual gift of teaching because I didn't have that growing up.

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It's after I got saved that suddenly I started to learn that I can communicate things well to other people, and I enjoyed doing that.

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I never enjoyed it before. That's the distinction of making, and I believe that God gives each of us gifts.

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That's clear in Scripture, but he gives us those gifts for the local body to train up the local body.

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So if you read through 1 Corinthians 12, you will see that we can't function as a body if we're all trying to do the same thing.

46:19

We can't all be teachers. We can't all be having mercy. Someone has to give the exhortation because if we're all mercy, we're not balanced.

46:28

Right. This is something that I thought of. We have gifts.

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We talked about pastors, men being gifted for equipping the flock. I think something that needs to be reminded, and you've hit all over it,

46:44

Christians ought to exhibit all of these, mercy, hospitality, exhortation.

46:50

We should have all of these to some degree. We should excel in some. Well, let's take that back and say, okay, there are certain services that need to be done, and let's just say that maybe the person that should be doing them is not.

47:05

I hear this all the time. They don't want to do something because that's not their gift. That's not their calling.

47:11

You'll see this a lot in pastors. Well, I'm just here to preach. I'm not going to clean the toilets.

47:17

And I tell young preachers, if you're not ready to clean their toilet, you're not ready to be their pastor because you may have to practice church discipline on the janitor.

47:28

And that means you need to be the janitor until you can find the next one because there's pastor, and there's also the title of overseer.

47:35

You've got to see that everything gets done. And in certain instances, you may be the guy that, like you said, runs the vacuum cleaner.

47:44

You may have to be the guy that runs the sound system sometime. Whatever it is, you should be willing to put on any hat that the

47:51

Christian needs to put on for the service of the saints and for the evangelism of the world. And some of those will come easy to you.

47:59

Some of them will be more difficult. You will excel at some. You will struggle with others.

48:05

But as a Christian, go back to what we talked about last week. It's God first.

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And if we put God first, then we have to fall into about third place because he tells us to put others in second under him.

48:19

So it's not about me. It's just about getting the job done to the glory of God. Yeah, you have that ministry,

48:25

I am second. I really don't like that because I'm not second. I get what they want to say,

48:31

God first and then I'm second. But really, I would say we're fourth at best because it should be

48:40

God, other believers, unbelievers, and me. But even within that, you're going to have priority over because it's going to be

48:49

God and then my family. They would be higher than the believers.

48:54

So really God, family, believers, unbelievers, so I'm fifth.

48:59

I am fifth. That's what that ministry should be called. But I don't want to fault them because I think it's a good concept.

49:09

They're trying to say that God should be first, and I get that, and that's good, and we've been saying that. You and I have been saying that in the last two episodes.

49:18

But the thing we want to challenge people with this and what we're trying to say with this part of the doctrinal statement is that every believer has been gifted to serve the body.

49:28

And it's not just the gifts. We've said all these gifts are commanded. So, by the way, if that means you say, hey,

49:34

I don't have to evangelize, I don't have the gift of evangelism, well, you're still commanded to do it. But think about, go back to last week's episode where Harold mentioned all the one -anothers.

49:43

There's 31 one -anothers in the Scriptures, right? Love one another. Seventy -six.

49:49

Huh? Seventy -six of them. Yeah, you said 76, and I remember there being 31 that specifically say one another.

49:56

So I'm going to go in and look. I haven't done it yet. I need to look at the other ones you're referring to because they must not just have the phrase one another in it.

50:05

I think love one another is 31 times. Oh, okay. Encourage one another, bear one another's burdens.

50:12

I think when you add them up, it's about 76. So either way, whether 31 or 76, there's a lot of one -anothering we need to be doing, and we're not doing that if we're just going to get from church.

50:29

Look, let me just reach out and speak to some. There are some listening, I'm sure.

50:35

You have been burned by church. I get it. There are people who go to church, and they sit in a pew.

50:44

They don't want to serve because they don't want to commit themselves because they have been hurt so badly.

50:51

Can I speak to you for a moment? Look, I know that it's hard. I've been burned plenty of times.

51:00

I've gone into three depressions in my life, and all of them were directly tied to having to leave a church because something was going on in the church, and I realized

51:12

I couldn't stay, and I hated leaving. Actually, when I would leave,

51:17

I would go into a depression. So I understand the feeling. I also understand that we're not commanded to just go to church, and that's what so many are doing.

51:30

It's like, I know I've got to be in church because God commands me to be in church, and so I'm going because I love God, but I don't want to be hurt.

51:38

I want you to think about it. When you have that attitude, if we have that attitude, are we saying, hey,

51:47

God, we want to serve you, but we want to be selfish? Because what we're saying is we don't want to be hurt, so we have a limit on what we think you want us to do as part of going to church,

52:00

God. No, God calls us to serve him, and if you're going to go get hurt, okay.

52:08

I walk into every church thinking, yeah, I might get hurt, but I'm still going to put myself out there.

52:14

I'm still going to serve where I can serve, and if I get mistreated, okay.

52:21

You know what? Here's something to think about. Do you realize that no matter how mistreated you are, even by people in the church, you're not mistreated any worse than the way you've mistreated

52:35

Christ, and he died on a cross for you? So just keep that in mind.

52:41

How much is Christ wronged? I mean, he knew no sin, and he died on the cross.

52:51

He paid a punishment that he never deserved. He never broke any laws, and he did that that we could be set free, and we're upset because we've been hurt at this church.

53:05

We might get hurt in this next church, so we don't want to do that. You might get hurt, but God called us to serve.

53:14

I had several people over the years that have asked me how I continue persevering in the churches.

53:21

They know some of the churches I've been in. They know the hurt that many people went through and some of it being really hard.

53:30

How do you keep persevering? How do you keep joining another church and being a member and serving in that?

53:37

Because what they're saying is, we're not doing that because I'm not going to church for me.

53:44

This goes back to what we talked about in the previous paragraph there. We're going to church for God to serve the body.

53:51

So will we get hurt? Yeah, we might, but we're not going to get hurt as much as we hurt

53:57

Christ, so do it anyway. Any last words that you have for us,

54:02

Harold? Yeah, I'll just wrap up with this. If you're a

54:07

Christian, a true Christian, you can't sit on the sidelines any more than I could tell my dad, no,

54:13

I'm not going to go clean my room. That didn't work out well for me. A few times I tried to tell him what

54:19

I was and wasn't going to do, and it didn't work out well. Our Heavenly Father has given us a command as Christians.

54:27

Real Christians can't tell their Heavenly Father, no, no, I'm not going to do it. Jeremiah tried it, and he had a fire within him that wouldn't go out.

54:36

He couldn't help it. Elijah just laid down under a juniper tree and said, I'm done, just kill me now.

54:43

I've done all I want to do. I'm not going to serve any more. Elijah still hasn't died to this day.

54:48

He was carried into heaven in a chariot of fire. The point I'm driving at is, Jonah said,

54:53

I'll go to Tarshish. I don't want to go to Nineveh. God said, no, you're going. That same God of Jonah, Elijah, and Jeremiah is the same

55:02

God that comes to me and says, Harold, this is what I've called you to do. You're going to do it. He has a way of getting me to do that.

55:11

Christian, you can do this the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is to hear it from a preacher and exhortation from scripture that this is what we're called to do.

55:20

Figure out your job and get to work. Or you can do it the hard way and God can come get your attention and put you to work.

55:27

Take it from me. Just figure out your job. Get to doing it. You'll be happy.

55:32

You'll enjoy it. You'll reap eternal benefits in heaven for your labor of love.

55:39

That's all I've got, Andrew. Well, I appreciate you coming on with me again and I thank you that you've agreed to come on for another, at least one, probably two episodes as we tackle the next paragraph there on the charismatic gifts and what we think about those.

55:54

It'll be a little bit more controversial but maybe it could be informative. Maybe listeners are going to comment and maybe teach me some things or maybe, just maybe, we might teach you some things.

56:05

It'd be worth checking out and listening. We hope that you will return and listen for that and until then, well, that's a wrap.