Episode 132: Church Revitalization

To the Ruled Church Podcast.

Christ Is King Over the Church

This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas? You see that one in Pechote, Mexico?

Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king.

You can't be Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Well, I don't know where you are, but I would imagine summer, by the time this comes out, is hopefully coming to a close. I love summer, I'm grateful for the seasons, grateful for every season, but ranking the seasons, probably summer is last.

Everyone does vacations and stuff in the summer, and we have in the past, but man, sometimes summertime just seems a busier season for me. And then, you gotta deal with the heat in Arkansas. In Arkansas, if it gets too hot, and your AC goes out, well, you can just turn your oven on to like 100 degrees and cool down your house, that's what it feels like.

Then, we have to deal with fall coming, then it doesn't come, then it's really summer, then it's fall, summer, fall, summer, fall, summer. Like sometimes in early August, you can get a cool day, and then summer's back with a vengeance.

And then September, oh, is it fall? No, summer's back. And then October, and you know how it goes, 90 degree days. But anyway, all that to say, fall's coming, hopefully. That's not why you tuned in today to get a weather report.

I don't even know when, what the weather's gonna be like, because I'm recording this in August. What I wanna talk about today, though, is church revitalization. We have been through some things here at Providence Baptist Church that I think fall in line under that broader category of revitalization.

I'm gonna talk about that some, but also just gonna talk about biblical revitalization. And I'm gonna start by saying I don't love the word revitalization. I think it's maybe a bit euphemistic, but to cut to the chase, I like the idea of reformation.

I think reformation is a more biblical, stronger term. I'm not gonna fight about the term, but the idea of reformation brings to my mind a church reforming according to the word of God. And if you think about it that way, then every church should be undergoing reformation all the time.

We want to be reformed constantly according to the word of God. Whereas revitalization, you might just be like, well, this is a project. This is a revitalization project, or we've completed revitalization.

Whereas reformation, we don't complete. However, certainly there is also the reality that some churches need to be reformed better or more pointedly. There needs to be deeper reformation happening. If you have a spectrum of health on a church, just like with the human body, some people go in, we all need to be healthier, right?

Some people go to the doctor though, and you're pretty healthy and you need to maintain and just continue to do the things you're doing. Some people go in and it's like, look, if you don't change immediately, there's gonna be some serious ramifications.

Well, similarly, I think with churches, that is churches that are still true churches and God hasn't abandoned them. There are some that are pretty unhealthy and they need more radical reformation. And then there are some that you are healthy and you just need to keep maintaining.

So the point is wherever you live, wherever you are, whatever church you're in, we have this phrase we say here, and I hope it's not just a mantra, but we mean it. That is Christ is worthy of a healthy church.

So reformation, I should say, can be very difficult. I've never been probably more hurt than in the process of a reformation. Of course, we know back in reformation proper, if you will, in the 16th century, people would lose their lives.

And so reformation can be a difficult thing, maybe not in our area, but in some places a dangerous thing. But Christ is worthy of a healthy church, a little definition of a healthy church that I wrote down.

And that is a healthy church is a local congregation ordered by the word of God, empowered by the spirit of God, devoted to the glory of God, and centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ. So ordered by the word of God, empowered by the spirit of God, devoted to the glory of God, and centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ.

At our church, a number of years ago, we solidified our 10 distinctives. So we confess the 1689, the Second Lenten Baptist Confession of Faith, but then we also have these 10 distinctives. And so I think that it's just characteristics of a healthy church, I think.

I'm not saying you have to have all these 10 distinctives, but these are some things that I think would be in line for a healthy church. So just a quick overview of these. Biblical sufficiency, number one.

So God's word is our final and sufficient authority. Biblical preaching, number two. That is expositional, Christ-centered, spirit-dependent preaching. Number three, biblical holiness, pursuing godliness and doctrine in life.

Biblical leadership, qualified elders and deacons, qualified men serving in those roles. Biblical membership and discipline. So regenerate, committed, covenantal membership. Lovingly seek to watch over one another, do life with one another, restore one another if they are continuing in unrepentance, or if they have been disciplined and need to be restored.

Number six, biblical worship. That is the regulative principle, God-regulated, Christ-centered, word-saturated, gospel primacy. Rightly observing the ordinances. Number seven, biblical evangelism and missions.

Proclaiming the gospel to your town and the nations. Investing in and centering on local churches. Number eight, biblical fellowship. So the idea of meaningful body life marked by love and holiness and actual time together among the members, more than just Sundays.

Number nine, biblical homes. So households ordered under Christ's lordship. Practicing consistent, regular times of family worship. Number 10, biblical confession. So clarity, conviction, unity, and doctrine.

Again, for us, that's a 1689. I'm not saying that that's the only healthy confession, but I'm saying that healthy churches are confessional churches. And there are other things that you may add, and some things you may word differently, but I'm just trying to give a definitional foundation to what I mean when I say a healthy church.

Christ is worthy of a healthy church. So what are we going for? Well, we're reforming churches to be healthy. And I'm just trying to give you a definition of what is a healthy church. So that's some explanation.

Zechariah 4:6 and the Spirit's Work in Church Reformation

But the question is, how do we get there? Well, Zechariah 4 .6, it's an important passage. In that passage, it says, then he said to me, this is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel, not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.

Zerubbabel, he was governor of Judah, and he was charged to finish the building of the second temple. The first one, you know, had been destroyed by Babylon in 586 BC. Why do we want to talk about reforming churches with an obscure passage in the Old Testament?

Well, because I think that this text is extremely relevant. Zerubbabel, he's a type of Christ. He stands in the lineage of Christ from the line of David. But also, he points us forward to a greater building project, a greater temple, the third temple.

That is the temple that Christ is building, the church. So the emphasis I'm drawing here is that the church is built from Zechariah 4, 6, not by might, not by power, but by the Holy Spirit. John Gill has a great word here.

He said, the church is built up in all generations through the conversion of sinners, and that is done not by external force, by carnal weapons or moral suasion, but by the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, and not by the power of man's free will, but by the efficacious grace of the divine Spirit.

This is the reality and the primacy, if you will, the absolute non-negotiable necessity of church, if you want to call it revitalization, if you want to stick with that word, but reforming churches to be healthy, non-negotiable, not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.

So if this is true, and it is, it's the Holy Spirit, I'm gonna give you three imperatives in submitting ourselves to the Holy Spirit. It's not that this is a formula. It's not that like, well, you can just do this and it's blasphemous to say, Holy Spirit, activate.

I mean, come on, we're not saying that. But if it's true that the Spirit of God is our necessary worker to reform and revitalize churches, well then, here's some things that we have to do, or some ways we should respond, some imperatives, to submitting ourselves to the Holy Spirit.

Making the Spirit's Aim, Weapon, and Sovereignty Our Own

The first is to make His aim our aim. So if we want to align ourselves up with the Holy Spirit, what His aim is, we should seek that to be our aim. His goals as your goals. Set aside my desires and align myself with what the Spirit desires to accomplish.

Now, this is not secret. What does the Holy Spirit desire to accomplish? I'm gonna give you a few things. Number one, the glory of God. Everything exists for the glory of God. The Bible proclaims the awesomeness of God.

God is sovereign over everything, over stars and grass and centers and nations, ordering all things for the glory of His name. In the Holy Spirit's work in the world, one of His aims in the world is to glorify God.

So if you're in church life, if you're in revitalization, reformation, to bring glory to yourself, to boost your followers, to make money or whatever, get out. If you're trying to make a name for yourself, get out.

Because all ministry, including and especially our preaching, is about the glory of God. We must make the Holy Spirit's aim our aim, and one of His aims is the glory of God. Secondly, another aim He has is the magnification of Christ.

So in John 16, 14, Jesus says of the Holy Spirit, He will glorify me. So if your aim is the Spirit's aim, then that means your ministry, your efforts in the church, they're going to be Christ-saturated.

Your preaching is centered in and around and focused on the gospel. If our hope is the Spirit's work to revitalize the church, to convert sinners, to counsel the saints, to build a healthy church, then we must submit to His goals.

His goals, to glorify God. His goals, the magnification of Christ. You know, a place where the Holy Spirit is working is not going to magnify the Holy Spirit. It's difficult to say it this way. Yes, we do worship and magnify the third person of the Trinity, but in places where they only talk about the Holy Spirit and they don't talk about Christ, ironically, the Holy Spirit's not operating there.

Why?

Because where the Holy Spirit is operating and working in the way of reformation, He's shining the spotlight on Christ. As Jesus said, He will glorify me. Thirdly, we're talking about the aims of the Holy Spirit.

Third aim He has is the building of the church. This is encouraging because there is no one who is more for healthy churches than our triune God. Again, Zechariah 4 .6, not by might, not by power, but by the Spirit, the Spirit of God working through Zerubbabel and all those events to build the second temple.

So much more so is He working through providential means and the means of grace and all events to build Christ's church, to topple kingdoms, plunder the strong man, edify the saints. He regenerates, that is the Spirit of God regenerates through the preaching.

He sanctifies through the preaching. He builds His church through the preaching of the Word. And so you must consider that the Holy Spirit's aim, He does have an aim in building the church. Just an application here.

You can't neglect people because the Holy Spirit loves people. He cares about the souls of the church. He cares about the souls of your community. So if we're submitted to the Holy Spirit, then we're gonna care about souls.

We're gonna care about souls, right? Don't separate ministry from caring about souls. So we're talking about the Holy Spirit and submitting ourselves to Him and making His aim our aim. And if His aim is our aim, then we're gonna care about the glory of God, the magnification of Christ, the building of the church.

Thirdly, or secondly, sorry. You must make His weapon your weapon. So His aim, your aim, His weapon, your weapon. What is the weapon of the Spirit? Well, Ephesians 6 .17 says, it's the sword of the Spirit is the Word of God.

What's the Spirit's weapon, brothers and sisters? The Spirit's weapon is the Bible. The Bible must be your weapon. I'll give you two points under this heading. First, you must believe what the Bible is.

We probably on this podcast don't need to have to spend a lot of time here, but let's just reaffirm that the Bible is the Word of God. The sufficient, authoritative, necessary, clear, special revelation of God, 66 books, divinely inspired, breathed out by God through about 40 different authors, you know the line, over about 1 ,500 years in three different continents telling one great story.

It is inerrant and infallible. This is the scriptures. You must believe. So what I'm saying is if we're submitting to the Holy Spirit, then His weapon, His aim is your aim, and His weapon is your weapon, the Word of God.

You must believe what the Bible is. Secondly, though, in church revitalization and reformation, you must not only believe these truths, but you need to demonstrate them to your people. So it's not enough to just affirm in your mind what the Bible is, but show forth in your practice.

Have an unswavering faith and commitment to this book. Stand here and do not be moved. This book will accomplish the impossible by the Spirit of God. This means personally, I'll speak to pastors, you must be reading the Bible every day, every day.

If you're not reading the Bible every day, you shouldn't stop praying for reformation, right? Because your prayer life and your habits are inconsistent. Read it every day. You want to know God from His book.

It means that you try to understand how the Bible fits together. You wanna understand its grand story. You wanna memorize passages. You wanna meditate on passages. You wanna be acquainted with this book in such a way that it's like Spurgeon talking about Bunyan, that it comes out, you bleed it in your thoughts, in your conversations, even in your sermon illustrations.

You're coming up with narratives from the Bible. You just, you think Bible, you speak Bible. Again, you bleed Bible. It means practically that you order your service around the Word of God. So it regulates your worship.

It permeates your worship. You read the scriptures in your service. You recite the scriptures in your service. You sing the scriptures in your service, scriptural truth certainly. So everything you're doing is to point to and flowing out of the Word of God.

You sing Psalms. Consider adding that. It means, it will mean, be careful here, we love souls. But listen, if you do this in your service, people who don't like the Bible eventually are not gonna be able to endure the worship service because they're so Bible-saturated.

But what you're doing in that is you're demonstrating to your people that you don't just have an intellectual belief in the Bible, okay? But that you believe actually it is profitable and excellent and necessary.

And then when you preach the Bible, it means that you're not preaching from some electronic device. I mean, you can use that for your notes, but you have a physical Bible opened. You're quoting from the text.

You're telling people to look down at the words of the text. You're working through the construction of sentences. You're showing conjunctions, pronouns. You're preaching from the text. And it also means when you preach that the Holy Spirit's thoughts are what you preach, what the Bible says, the Holy Spirit says.

So you're preaching what the Scriptures say. You're opening the book and you're preaching it in its context. So we're just talking about submitting ourselves to the Holy Spirit, not by might, Zechariah 4, 6, not by power, but by Spirit declares the Lord of God.

And the hope that we have for reformation in our churches is the Spirit's work. We're gonna submit ourselves to Him. His aim is our aim. His weapon is our weapon. And third imperative is to trust His sovereignty.

Trust His sovereignty. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. He is God. He is sovereign. So a few points here. Number one, we should trust His power. Do our prayer lives reflect that we're more dependent on the Spirit's work or our own abilities?

Remember John 6, 63, it is the Spirit who gives life. So it's the Spirit's power that we're in desperate need of. Secondly, we must trust His prerogative. Now listen to this carefully. We must trust the Holy Spirit to work how and in whom He desires.

He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy. He will harden whom He will harden. It is not our job to control or harness the wind. It is our job to preach the Word and know that the Holy Spirit is gonna use it as He will, and it will not return void.

Now, the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit does not negate the responsibility of pastors. So you just don't just preach this carelessly or haphazardly, but you remember that you have a responsibility. The Spirit's gonna do what He's gonna do, I'm saying, but you have a responsibility.

So let me just give you an application here.

Pray, pray.

If you're trusting the prerogative of the Holy Spirit, you're also pleading with God. So here's an encouragement. Pray for your people by name. Pray for the members of your church. Pray for their children.

Pray for visitors and attenders in your church by name. I'm not saying how often you need to do this, but have these written out and pray for them. Carry them before the Lord. Give them into His hands.

It's your responsibility to pray for them and ask the Spirit of God to work in their lives according to His sovereign will. And think about this. If you're not praying for them, who is? What is it that you would be doing with your time that means you can't pray for your people?

Are we really trusting the Spirit's sovereignty if we're not bringing those who listen to the Word of God being preached before Him by name?

No.

So we trust His power, we trust His prerogative. And then finally, we trust His plan. And here I'm just saying, reformation, revitalization, you need to be in it for the long haul. Be resolved and then don't quit.

Keep plowing.

Keep going.

Keep running. The Spirit has a plan to present a people holy and blameless before God through the proclamation of His Word. So you see the big picture. You must see the big picture. And then trust His plan to get there.

I'll give you a quick analogy. You feed your child a wonderful meal. Your next day, has he grown any? Well, there's no measurable difference. But in 10 years and after many good meals and frankly, after many mediocre meals, your child has grown.

So it is with reformation. You preach one good sermon, you may see no change. But over 10 years, after many good sermons, maybe a couple of bad sermons, maybe a lot of mediocre sermons, you will see the Spirit's work.

And this takes us back to Zechariah 4, this time verse 10, and the King James says it this way. For who have despised the day of small things? So the providence of God is for His church. He is with her.

He is gonna accomplish great things through her for His glory and make a name for His son. But these great things are often accomplished over time in small, sometimes almost imperceptible steps. God often builds His kingdom in small steps and with small things.

Don't despise the prayer meeting. Don't despise the couple of ladies in your church that gather to pray. Don't despise the few men that get together around the word of God. Don't despise small things.

God uses small things to do great things. In Luke 12, Jesus calls His disciples a little flock. And so may we think of the true church today, the little flock. But it's the Father's good pleasure, Luke 12 says, to give us the kingdom.

Matthew Henry writes, in God's work, the day of small things is not to be despised. Though the instruments be weak and unlikely, God often chooses such by them to bring about great things. God is building His kingdom in small steps.

We're too prone to try to love the day of big things. We want to see the fireworks, the grand displays, the Billy Graham responses or whatever. And maybe we even pray for Edwards, Jonathan Edwards' type of outpouring, which I don't think it's wrong to desire that, okay?

But it is wrong to desire that at the expense of the daily small things. Again, so you're praying for a revival, but you're not reading your Bible every day. You're not praying for your people by name.

You see how we get that backwards. I'm just saying, you wake up daily, you get along with the Lord, you read the Bible, your heart is warmed by grace, you pray to God, you walk in obedience to His ways, you study the scriptures, you preach the word, you visit your people, you're praying for them, you're counseling, you're discipling, all these things.

It's no magic formula, but we're trying to submit ourselves to the Holy Spirit because we're dependent on Him to bring revitalization to our churches. It's not easy. It's not easy work. You need to be committed and in it for the long haul.

I said I was gonna share some things about our church and our process, so we really kind of, probably a good place to close and not talk about that, but I would just say keep going. If there's some way I can help you or maybe counsel I could give, I have counsel from things we've done that's gone well and I have counsel from mistakes I've made.

I can speak to both of those, but I'm just saying Christ is worthy of a healthy church, ending where we began. Christ is worthy of a healthy church and may we give our all to this endeavor for the glory of His name.

Thank you guys for joining us on this episode of the Rural Church Podcast. Hope to see you guys next week. Maybe you'll share this with someone. Maybe it'll be helpful. Soli Deo Gloria.

The Church as God's Building and Masterpiece

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?