64 - People of the Church, Part 1 | Church Membership | Church Discipline

Welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy.

This is a ministry of striving for eternity. It is an academy that we put out there teaching different things.

We are right now in our School of Systematic Theology. We are glad to have you with us.

We are in the last of four books. We have been basically grouping it by books for set classes.

So that way you can group these in smaller amounts but you can get book four of the syllabus which is at our website at strivingforeternity .org.

You can pick up the syllabus. With the syllabus you will get all the notes. So I encourage you to do that.

What are we going to cover in this last couple of sections of Systematic Theology?

What we are going to deal with in this, we are calling this book God's Program for the

Ages, the Doctrines of the Church, and the Last Things. So just to give you an overview, we are going to start with the

Doctrine of the Church. We looked last couple of classes on the Church as an Institution.

This week we are going to look at the people of the Church. We will probably look at next week. This week we will see membership, who makes up the

Church, and then who runs the Church, kind of, the leaders.

Then we will look at Church Government after that, and then Ordinance of the Church, Baptism and the

Lord's Supper. Then we get into those discussions of End Times, yes, the

Doctrine of End Times. We will be discussing several different things regarding the future.

This lesson, as I said, is dealing with the issue of the people of the Church. And so with that, we want to get started because we have a lot that we are going to try to go over.

Now, I am going to try to probably do this in two lessons, two classes. One class will deal with the membership of the

Church, and the other class will deal with the leadership of the Church. And the reason we are going to do that is because when we get into the membership, we are going to be discussing different things of what the members should be doing.

But there is a missing element within many churches that we are going to discuss, and we are going to spend a lot of time going through a discussion on this missing element of many churches, and it is a vital element.

In fact, it is such a vital element that it is one of three elements that in the

Puritan Age, the Puritans argued that if you did not do this one thing, you are not a church.

They had three things that were defined a church. One was the preaching of God's Word, two was following of the ordinances, and this third is something so important, they said this is the definition of a church, and if you do not have it, they argued you did not have church.

That is pretty big. And yet, it is missing in so many churches today. Now, I do not know whether it is a necessity, but we are going to get into that in just a bit.

So, I encourage you to open your syllabus if you have one. If not, I encourage you to really quick go to the website and purchase one.

They are reasonably priced, $25 each. We may be offering discounts if you buy all four.

We are working on things like that. But, with that, if you are in lesson number two in your syllabus, we start and it says, although some advocate for less organization as a more godly form of church, there is a clear indication that there was organization in the early church.

Now, the reason is you see some people that they will say that they worship in home churches.

Nothing wrong with home churches. The first century had home churches that met in homes as well as in buildings.

So, it is not the where they meet, but the issue is that some people try to argue that if you have less structure, it is more godly or more biblical.

Some argue that they are more spiritual because they worship in a church setting that has less organization to it.

The point of this is to show that there was a lot of organization in the first century church and there should be in church.

There are some who argue that when you go, say, to the streets and evangelize, that that is church.

Well, as we look through this and we look at what the New Testament teaches about church, the church had officers.

We see that in many passages that we are going to get to next week, but you will see that in Philippians 1 .1

that there were officers in the church. The reason that becomes important is if you are going to say that the church is on the street corner where people evangelize, well, who are the officers?

Who are the deacons? Who are the pastors? You see, now, if the whole church, a church body is going out, well, then you are going to have pastors associated with that.

But when it is people from different churches or just people that meet on the street, you are going to see that that does not fit the definition of church.

We kind of dealt with that in the last two classes and we have a paper that defines on the website that defines what church is.

You see a selection process that shows organization. This is Acts 6.

You see that the church realized they had an issue with the widows. They had to identify, well, who is going to take care of these widows?

Someone needs to provide the food and things like that. And so there was a selection process, some would argue, for the first deacons.

That is the word that we see in Acts 6. They were waiters of tables. That is deaconos, the word we get for deacon.

So you see that there was some organization because they had to know who to select from.

They were doing voting basically. You see that they had stated meetings in Acts 20 verse 3.

There were stated meetings. They had a meeting place, a meeting time. They would meet regularly.

They would do things at those meetings like collect an offering, like having the Lord's Supper, the proclaiming of God's word.

These are things they would do in these meetings, but they had a scheduled meeting. It shows, again, organization.

Membership role. In Acts 2, you see that they had the idea of members that were part of, they knew how many were being added to the church.

Along with that, you see a widow's registry in 1 Timothy 5 .9. So they knew who was a widow that was on the rolls of the church.

So there was church membership. I understand some don't agree with that. Some say, no, there wasn't church membership.

There are some churches that do not hold to a church membership. I don't think that we can make,

I don't think it's as big of an issue biblically to make an issue of whether there was a physical church membership.

These are people that are on the roll. They're voted into church. These are not. Or whether it was just everyone knew one another.

That's not so much the issue. Where I would argue nowadays for church membership is, one, protection of the church body.

With all the lawsuits in America, at least, you want to have to know who's part of the church.

We actually would have people sign that they agree with the doctrines of the church. So that when things happen, as with this thing we're going to talk about in just a bit, it's a sticky issue for some churches.

And because they don't have church members, it makes it hard to practice this one thing without possibly putting yourself in jeopardy.

And so I think that church membership, if you want to argue it's not a biblical thing, at least

I would argue it's a practical thing in our day and age. And then the issue that we're going to bring up that shows organization, and we're going to spend a bulk of the time, is this issue of church discipline.

You see this in 1 Corinthians 5, Matthew 18, we're going to look in detail. But you can't discipline someone out of the church unless they were a member of the church.

But that whole process shows there was organization. Now, like I said, if you're going to discipline someone out of the church and you follow the biblical process but you don't have a church membership, you open yourself up to possible lawsuits and so you have to, this is why

I say it's a practical issue. So let's look at the membership. All right? Let's start with membership.

All right. So, when we look at the membership, what is the requirement to be a member of the church?

I believe that there's only two things that we see in Scripture. Acts 2, verse 41, those who received

His word were baptized and were added to, and added that day, about 3 ,000 souls.

So you see they received the word and were baptized. So I would say that the two requirements to being a church member would be salvation and baptism.

Now, if you don't have baptism, is it a major thing? Well, I think it depends.

I want to deal with this, I'm going to deal with this probably in more detail when we get to the topic of baptism in the church ordinances but we do not have a proper view, at least in America, of what baptism really was like.

Baptism, back in the first century, was a major issue. I liken it to those who get baptized publicly in Muslim countries where when they get baptized publicly, they're basically identifying that they can be murdered, legally, because they're renouncing the faith of Islam.

And it opens them up to being able to be murdered by anyone. That means that when you did something like baptism, you counted the cost, you knew what it was going to cost.

In Judaism, you're basically dead to them. You'd be dead to your family.

They would bury an empty casket. And what would happen would be is that when you got baptized, you were basically identifying yourself as no longer

Jewish and what your family would do is they would treat you as if you were dead. Now that's a major issue when you live with your family, you work with your family, everyone in town, you work with them, you know them.

To be suddenly cut off is a major thing. You're not going to do an act of baptism lightly.

It's a major issue. It's a serious issue. And this is why we see so much throughout the

Scriptures that it almost seems as if it's saying you have to be baptized to be saved because baptism is so closely associated with salvation.

Why is that? The reason it is is because baptism was an act that you did to show the world of something that happened inwardly.

Salvation occurs first. When you're saved, you're then, because they received the word, then they were added to the church.

Sorry, then they were baptized and then added to the church. So the point

I'm trying to make there is that someone gets saved, how do they express that they're saved, that they became regenerate, that God did an inward work inside of them?

Well, they do an outward work for the world and that's why baptisms used to be very public so everybody knew.

It would be the talk of the town. Remember, this is in the time periods where you didn't have big cities like New York City or Atlanta or something like that.

You basically knew the majority of people that lived in your town and you knew them your whole life and you typically didn't travel much beyond your town.

So when someone got baptized, it spread. Everyone knew about it. So this is the point that I'm trying to make is that baptism had a significance, not because it saves a person, but it has a significance because if someone was willing to get baptized, it meant that they took their salvation, their

Christianity serious. They were willing to take a step of faith and that's what it was.

It was an act of faith to get baptized because they knew what it meant. We don't have that same understanding and that same issue for many of us.

When my parents found out that I turned from Judaism and believed in Jesus as the

Messiah and believed that Jesus was the Christ and became converted to Christianity, the question that was asked was my mother asked me, were you baptized?

When I said yes, that's when she realized it was a serious thing and they actually thought about basically making me dead to them, about cutting me off from the family as they expressed to me.

And my mother actually started hitting me because she was so angry with the fact that I got baptized because baptism had a significance to it.

For many people nowadays, it doesn't have that significance. So that's why I think we see that.

If a church holds and says they don't believe that you need to be baptized to be a member, they believe that you have to be a

Christian, in our day and age in America, that might be okay.

But what you're looking for is a way, why is it that someone that would become a member once they got baptized?

Because the baptism was a sign that they were really regenerate, they would really be a

Christian. In our day and age, in America at least, we give a lot of time.

Why? Because what baptism used to provide was an immediate way of looking at someone's life and going, this person must be a regenerate because they wouldn't do this otherwise.

Well, we don't have that anymore so we like to give time to see the fruits of someone's life to see, we can't see if someone's saved.

So what are we looking for? We're looking to see if they have the fruit of a Christian. We give time so we can evaluate and see whether their testimony of being converted actually matches with their lifestyle.

And that's why we end up giving more time. So baptism may not be as important because of that. And so we have to understand that when we look at that, we're in a different culture.

And so I'm not, I believe that you should be baptized to be a member. I think it's a first act of obedience but, or it's really an act of obedience that we should do.

But I'm not going to be hard pressed to argue that with some people in the American culture.

Okay, so I give a little bit of room there. I know others won't, but when we look at what the scripture says, they believed, they were baptized.

That's what they did. So what is the responsibility of membership? We looked at this in the last class. But the responsibility of each member is to do his part in fulfilling the objectives of the church as we discussed in the last section.

We want to serve the body. We are one body. As one body we are going to be functioning together.

And so as we serve one another, we're using the gifts that God's given each of us to serve one another.

That's the role. That's the purpose. So if you feel that your church is not feeding you, fine.

That's not what you should be in church for. The church is not for you to receive.

It's for you to give. And in that giving to others and their giving to you, you will receive.

But it's primarily for you to serve others. Now you say, Andrew, I don't know a whole lot.

What can I do to serve? There's a lot of ways in every church that people can serve.

There's things that always need to be done. Ushering, cleaning toilets, putting the bulletins together if your church does that.

Lots of different things. You can find ways you can serve. And there's some things you're just going to keep growing and learning and serve in different areas.

So that's the responsibility of membership. But then we get into this issue that sometimes, and we don't really like dealing with this, but sometimes people are not serving properly.

They're not serving the church. In fact, sometimes they have to be removed from membership because they're in sin.

And so, letter C in your syllabus, the removal of membership. And I bring this up because this is a major issue.

A couple generations ago, about a generation ago, most churches didn't practice church discipline at all, even though it's in Scripture.

And so, why? Because none of us want to do that. Look, none of us want to call someone out on their sin.

Okay, some people do. They like to call everyone else out on sin. Typically, those people that like that, it's because they want to ignore their own sin.

Alright? It's usually they're in some pretty bad sin and they want to point out everyone else's sin. Go look at what they're doing to avoid their own.

Alright? But those people aside, you know, pastors don't want to have to bring someone's sin before them.

I know that having been in the position and having to do that, I never enjoyed it.

To this day, when I have to confront someone, I don't like it. But it's something we have to do.

Why? Because it's for their best interest. It's not so we can be proud of ourselves. Look, I don't do that sin.

No. We want to bring it to their attention so that hopefully they would repent and mature in Christ.

And we're going to look at that. So a person leaves a local body of believers because the church removes them or they remove themselves.

Alright? Those are two ways. And so I mentioned, you know, if the church is not feeding me, should

I leave? Well, there are some cases where you can leave a church.

I think if the church is starting to teach things that aren't right, you know, and we're going to look at those.

I'm going to look at those at the end really because I want to focus on the stickier one first. Okay? And that's when the church has to remove an individual.

Okay? So the church removes an individual. Another name for this activity is called church discipline.

And that's your blank there. If you look in your syllabus, your blank is church discipline. Another name for removing an individual from membership when the church removes an individual is church discipline.

Now let me start with the purpose of church discipline. What's the goal of church discipline?

We see this in 1 Corinthians 5 -6 and it is for the purity of the church.

That's why we do it. So you're boasting, this is 1

Corinthians 5 -6, you're boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

Now leaven is used as an illustration here to talk about a sin or evil.

And so the idea that they're making is that when there's a little sin, it affects the whole body and it spreads.

And so the reason that we have to deal with disciplining members in the church is for the purity of the church, to keep it pure, to keep it honoring to God, to keep it to be the testimony in the community that it should be.

It's not to beat up a person. But we have to have a higher view of our church,

God's body of believers, than we do ourselves. And this is something that is hard for us as human beings.

We want people to like us. None of us want to be disliked. And yet, when we're disciplining someone, when we're having to confront someone about something they're doing wrong, there's a chance they're not going to receive it well.

And we have to do that in love. And we have to do it really for the purpose of not just the purity of the church, but for the restoration of that believer.

If you look in 2 Thessalonians 3 .6 -14, you see this, that it is for the restoration of that believer.

It says in 2 Thessalonians 3 .6, Now, we commend you, brothers, in the name of our

Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from a brother who is walking in idleness, and do not accord with the tradition that you receive...

I think I read that wrong. Let me read that again. Now, we commend you, brothers, in the name of our

Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness, and not in accordance with the tradition that you received from us.

And now the next verse. In here, you see in 2

Thessalonians 3 .14, If anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person, and of nothing to do with him that he may be ashamed.

So the idea here is, there is a shame in sin, and what we have to do is we must go to that person and help them see that they need to repent, so that they're restored to the church.

That's the goal. It is not to punish them, but to restore them.

That's a major difference that many people practice church discipline in an unbiblical way. What they're doing is they're trying to punish a person.

Church discipline is not for punishment, it's for restoration. The whole thing is, and this is important, our attitude.

When we go to someone to have to confront them in sin, and this is anywhere, look, you're going to have conflicts with other people, even

Christians, even your fellow Christians, and you have to have a proper attitude.

One attitude that you must have is you must have an attitude of love. The very next verse from what we saw, 2

Thessalonians 3 .15, Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother.

You're warning him out of love. This is the restoration that you want to focus on. There's also a humility in Galatians 6 .1.

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual, restore him in a spirit of gentleness.

That gentleness could also be humility. Gentleness, keep watch over yourselves, lest you be tempted.

We should have a humble, loving attitude when we go and confront someone.

It should not be in an attitude of self -righteousness, or we know better than you.

It should be an attitude of love and humility, being careful that we could stumble too.

You know what? You may go and confront a person and find out that you're the one that's in sin. We're going to get to that in a bit. So here's some reasons.

What are some reasons to confront a person? Well, one would be public sin. We see this in 1

Corinthians 5, verses 1 and 2. It has actually been reported that there is sexual immorality among you and of a kind that's not tolerated even among pagans.

For a man has his father's wife, and you are arrogant.

Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from you.

You see how he's saying this is a public sin. You shouldn't be. What they were doing, we think, is boasting in the fact that they're tolerating this.

You know, this is a thing. You see this today in some churches, if they can be called churches in America, where they want to boast that they are open to same -sex couples and same -sex marriage, something that's a sin in God's eyes, and they want to boast that they're open to it.

That is the same thing. This is a public sin that should be put away. And people that commit it should be removed from the church.

And what they're saying is they're saying, look at how tolerant we are. And he says even the pagans, they don't even tolerate the things that the church is trying to tolerate.

So this is nothing new with the church. But you see, when you don't practice a church discipline, you allow for sin to fester in the church.

And if it's a public sin, Paul says it should be put out of the church. That person should be removed from the church. 2

Thessalonians 3, we saw that. Another thing would be someone who is causing strife in the church.

This is Matthew 18, 15. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him.

Between you and him alone, if he listens to you, you've gained your brother. Notice the element of personal strife.

We're going to get into this passage in more detail. So I don't want to go into it in detail here. But just the point that if there's personal strife, it could lead to church discipline.

It could lead to it. The reason that I say it could lead to it is you're going to take a slower process when it's personal strife.

When someone is doing a public sin and it's known, that's a public offense to the church.

And it's ruining the testimony of the church. And therefore it has to be dealt with quicker. It has to be dealt with more publicly.

That's one of the ways that we see how fast we go through the church discipline process. It's going to really depend on how public the sin is.

You want to keep that sin known to as few people as possible. You want to keep it as quiet as possible.

But if it's something that's already known by the world, then you've got to deal with it to the world. This is why when you have well -known pastors that sin publicly, it gets dealt with publicly.

Because it's publicly recognized when you have these well -known people. Promoting disunity is another.

You see this in Ephesians 4, 1 -6. We see in this passage, it says in Ephesians 4, 1 -6,

I, therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the

Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope that belongs to your call.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

You see, the focus is on this unity. When you have someone promoting disunity, that's going against this idea of unity.

Philippians 1 -27, Paul said, Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent,

I may hear of your standing firm in one spirit, with one mind, striving side by side in the faith of the gospel.

That's how we should be doing it, side by side. But if someone isn't doing that, then we have to put them out possibly.

What we want to do is get them to be walking side by side. We don't just jump to church discipline.

I know that this is a thing I've been seeing online a lot, where people who are not members of a church, they don't like what someone says or does on Facebook.

And it's like, well, I disagree with you theologically, I want your pastor's name, you're causing division, you're slandering the brothers,

I've heard that. Where someone disagrees with a theological position, so they say you're slandering people because you're disagreeing with the theology.

That shows a problem in the person's heart who wants to talk to your pastor. They want to try to force you into accepting their view or something, but the reality is that Facebook is not the church.

The street is not the church. There are principles that we do carry forth.

We want to bring someone to a point of repentance. But not if it's not a sin issue.

It's just a disagreement. And there's people who want to jump to that publicly. Well, this person, because that person is in a public venue on Facebook, they think they have to make it public if they think there's a sin.

Sad thing is those people usually never go to the person first. That's what you should be doing.

You should go to the person first. And you don't just jump to that.

We're going to get to that on what the proper steps are. It's not going to Facebook and publicly announcing you think someone is in sin.

That's violating the steps of church discipline because you're sitting there and making a judgment and you're not going through all the steps proper.

Last one, the reason for it is when you have someone that is practicing false doctrines.

Romans 16, what we see here in Jude 4. Romans 16, 17 says, Avoiding them means you may have to put them out.

Jude 4 says, So you see there, if they're practicing false doctrine, this is how you go about this.

Now I want to spend a little bit of time in Matthew 18. Now I have here something that you can go to our website at store .strivingforeternity

.org and you can pick this up. This is our sheet. It's basically our process of reconciliation.

Notice here it's a flow chart of steps to follow when you have a conflict with another person.

You first need to go through here. Then you go to the next category. Go through all of this. Check this.

Next category. And then you're going to come over here, which is side 2. Oops, sorry, it was down here.

That's better. It covers my face. Side 2, this is where we get into church discipline.

This is Matthew 18. So you have to follow all this first before you get here.

You know what? This is what most people, especially people on Facebook and Twitter, they're not doing this. They're not going through these steps, these many steps as you can see from here.

You can pick this up from us for $2 .50, I think, and we can ship this out to you.

But this is just a good thing to have on hand when you have a conflict with someone or you need to go to someone and confront them.

Go to our website and pick up this at the store. It's the Process of Reconciliation card, and it's just a helpful thing.

It goes through the steps, the questions you should ask yourself, the questions you should ask the other. We have a section on here to ask before you go to the other person, are your motives right?

Maybe you don't have the right motives in going to that person. Is it the right time and place? Maybe you need to wait.

Is there a lack of self -control on your part? But if you get through that and you get to the point of church discipline, well, there's steps to follow.

So let's look at Matthew 18, 15 -17. And I want to look at the four different steps of church discipline here.

This is what Matthew 18, 15 -17 says. Okay, you can see that on your screen. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault.

Between you and him notice a lone important word. If he listens to you, you've gained your brother.

But if he does not listen, take one or two along with you that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be as a

Gentile or a tax collector. So with this, let's go through the steps. The speed of the process that I mentioned is determined on individual circumstances.

But ultimately this is the process we should follow. First, personal confrontation. One -on -one notice, alone.

You try to keep it as quiet as you can. If you feel like you have to tell others about it, that's called gossip.

You're violating the steps of church discipline and then you're in sin. So that's why we ask

Christians, do you lack self -control? If you can't wait to tell someone you need to... If you can't wait on the

Lord, then maybe it's a problem that you have. And so you always have to be mindful of that.

Okay, personal confrontation. The goal of personal confrontation, again, is restoration. You want to bring them to repentance.

If they refuse, they recognize it's a sin, but they're not going to repent, okay, maybe it's a thing where they don't see it as a sin.

You think it's a sin, they don't think it's a sin, and you have a disagreement. Then what's the second step?

Confrontation with witnesses. One or two people. Now, I'm going to do something, explain something, and we have that explained on this chart here as well.

The witnesses are just that. You go with one or two witnesses. Witnesses I put in our chart here.

Go with one or two witnesses, not witness to the supposed offense, but to confirm the spoken words.

They are only to confirm the sin and unrepentance. It should be unbiased witnesses.

They should not get your side first. In other words, what happens a lot of times when people say, well, let me go get two or three witnesses, you know what they do?

They first get two people, either they're good friends who are going to agree with them, or they get people that they tell them, hey, let's go confront this person.

This is what he's doing. What are they doing? They're prejudging the people that they want as witnesses.

You know what? If you have unbiased witnesses, those witnesses may say, you're in the wrong. I had that happen with someone who wanted to confront me on something, and they brought in another person to be a witness.

And in listening to the charges that this person had against me, the witnesses actually ended up saying, wait a minute, it sounds like you're the one with the problem, not

Andrew. And I've been in the reverse of that too, where I've gone with witnesses, and there's things where, you know what, it wasn't a sin, it was a misunderstanding.

I didn't understand what someone else was thinking. And so what I do when I get to, if I have to get to this stage, you know what

I do? I go to someone and say, hey, will you meet with me and another person? I don't even tell them who it is.

I say, I need you to meet with me. I want to get you or you two, you know, something like that, but you want to keep it to a few number of people.

And you say, can you meet with me? What's the issue? You'll find out when you get there.

Now, if you lack in self -control, you're not going to be able to do that. You're going to want to tell them what it's about.

So this is one of the things I find for myself, is it shows that I'm showing the self -control that I can wait upon God.

When I meet with the person, I say, look, can we just meet? And then there's witnesses there. Now, usually in a church setting, the people that follow this in church, if I come to someone and say, hey, can you meet with me?

We need to meet with somebody. They understand it's a church discipline issue. They don't know what it is yet.

And so I do it in that way to prevent gossip. I may say something to someone, and I'm in the wrong, and now it's a bigger issue.

No, you want to get, and again, what's the goal? They're there to watch. They want to listen to the dialogue. Maybe they are actually eyewitnesses to the sin itself.

That could be. Then they have more information to it. But you don't want it to be someone that just, they're going to agree with you.

You don't want your two best friends. You want someone that's going to be more spiritually minded, someone that's going to be more open to the fact that there's two sides to every argument.

And you want to let that person or persons, those witnesses, observe that there's unrepentance or that there's actually first a sin, that it actually is an issue, and then there's unrepentance.

Now, what do you do in the third step? Well, if there actually is a sin, and they're unrepentant about it, then there is confrontation with the church.

This is a missing step. What a lot of churches do is they just go right to they've been confronted, now we put them out of the church.

A lot of times what some churches do is it's like the pastors or deacons meet with a person, now it's put them out of the church.

Well, that's not the proper procedure. What you see in verse 17 of Matthew 18 is that you go to the church and you send the church to the person.

I was in a church where this happened, where someone committed a sin, they were in an adulterous relationship, and it wasn't until the church started calling this person that they realized the seriousness and repented, that they turned away.

Now, because what we did is we had to and we would do it, and there's no when you do it, it could be at any time, it could be at any church service.

Sometimes we would wait until a Lord's Supper. Why? Because when we deal with ordinances, we're going to talk about the

Lord's Supper, that it promotes unity. And so at the Lord's Supper, it's a time where you say if you have no sin, if you have a sin against a brother, you shouldn't be partaking of the

Lord's Supper. But at any point, different meetings that you might have, however it's done, however individual churches do it, but it should be that the church sends the church out.

The church goes and confronts the person, begging them to come to repentance. Again, what's the goal?

Restoration. Not trying to win an argument. Not trying to win a side. It's not trying to get people to your side of an argument.

It is restoration of a sinning brother. That's always the purpose. The last step.

If they've gone and you've given ample time for the church to go and confront the person and they've been confronted and still at that point they're still unrepentant, now it's removal of the church.

Why? At this point in Matthew it says you treat them as if they're an unbeliever. Why would you do that?

Because if it got to that point that the church came to the person in humility and love, asking that person to repent of their sin and they are refusing, you have to assume they're an unbeliever.

You have to assume they were a hypocrite who thought they were a believer but are not. And you don't know their heart.

It could be they're just being very disobedient. I've seen people who've been put out of the church. They've been disciplined and voted out of the church and later they come to repentance and they come before the church and publicly announce that they were in sin and they repented of that.

There's times where some of us are just in our pride. God has to take us through a lot to get us to repent.

And so there are those times. But the goal is always restoration.

Now, if it gets to the point where you have to vote them out of the church, the point at that point, you don't treat them as if you don't stop talking to them.

No, you give them the gospel. You treat them as an unbeliever. You treat them as someone who needs the gospel.

So what do you do? You're now going to go to them with repentance in mind. Repentance of faith.

Maybe they have faith and are disobedient. Still, you're going to then get them to want to get them to restoration, to repent of the sin and back to restored faith.

That's the goal. But those are the steps you follow. And you want to keep gossip out of it as much as possible.

You don't want people knowing. You want to keep it to as few people as possible. So, the last point.

An individual removes himself. So, some different reasons of, I think,

Biblical reasons to remove yourself from a church. One is relocation. You move.

Your job, your family, whatever it is, you move to a new location. If you move to a new location and it's far enough away, you may have to find a new church.

One, the church apostatizes in doctrine. It's not fulfilling its God -ordained purpose. It is teaching things that are major issues.

It denies the deity of Christ. It's accepting things that are anathema or cursed to what

God says. Not little things. It's not like, oh, they teach an old earth versus a young earth.

Not a big deal. There are certain things that are secondary issues. There are certain things we can live with.

We are not going to be in 100 % agreement with any church. So, we're going to have to say that there are things we agree and disagree with.

But our goal is to serve the church. So, are the doctrines of the church Biblical in the major issues?

Another one, you could leave a church by death. I mean, if you die, your membership is done.

Alright? You're done. Over. But you've been graduated to a better church.

Okay? Last is separated for service. We see this in Acts 13.

If we have that. Thanks. Acts 13, 1 -3. And this is

Paul. We see Paul and Barnabas. Now, there were in the church at Antioch prophets, teachers,

Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Malian, a lifelong friend of Herod the

Tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the

Holy Spirit said, Barnabas and Saul, for a work which I have called them.

Then, after fasting and prayer, they laid their hands on them and sent them off. So, they're doing missionary work.

They're going off to serve in another capacity. I left one church to go and pastor at another church.

So, I left my membership. Well, that was a reason for me to leave. Why? Because I was going to another church to serve as their pastor.

And so, there's times like that where you're going to serve for other services, to serve other churches.

So, those are four reasons, I think. And what you find is that most people, when they leave churches, it doesn't fit in any of them.

They're not relocated. They're not dead. And they're not going, really, to serve another body.

They're going to get from another body. And that body they left really doesn't have, hasn't apostatized.

It's not that they, you know, it's that they're disagreeing a lot of times on small things or maybe personal issues.

And instead of going through the steps of reconciling, they leave. That's the number one reason

I find that people leave, is because they're unwilling to reconcile with somebody. Leaving is so much easier.

Okay? But reconciling is so much more biblical. So, if you have a difficulty, a disagreement, a hardship with another person, don't just run away from your problems.

It doesn't do you any good and it doesn't do them any good. You know what it does for you? It makes you more likely to run away again.

It makes you less likely to make yourself vulnerable to other people. And so, you don't grow more like Christ.

You are less sanctified than you could have been. Same with that other person. You going and confronting them may bring them to repentance and they may be more sanctified.

In their walk, the most loving thing you could do is confront another person, but you do it in love and humility.

Alright? So, if you have questions about this next lesson, we're going to talk about officers in the church, pastors, deacons, their roles, their qualifications.

We're going to get into all that. Hope you stay tuned. It's going to be a packed lesson where we're going to go into a lot of different things on who should and should not be a pastor.

So, you see, this is again, when we talk about church, you don't practice discipline on the streets.

You don't practice these things. You can to an extent, but when you have your evangelism buddies, who are they that are going to be, you know, going and acting out to, oh, we're going to put you out of our church?

No, you're putting them out of your group, your friendship that goes and evangelizes together, you know?

Next week, we're going to look at pastors, deacons. That makes up a church. You have to have officers. Who are the officers? Who make up the officers?

What do they take to be qualified to be officers? We're going to look at all that because there's confusion in those areas as well. If you have questions, though, about this lesson or any lesson, please email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

Academyatstrivingforeternity .org. Again, if you want to get the syllabus, you can get our syllabus at store .strivingforeternity

.org. The syllabus is $25. While you're there at the store, you can pick up my book,

What Do They Believe? A Systematic Theology of the Major Western Religions. Also, while you're there, what you could do is you can sign up to host a

Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar. One of our seminars, we come in for a weekend. In one weekend, eight hours, six sessions, we train your people on how to interpret

God's Word. Lastly, what I'd like to do is recommend, if you're watching this live, we have the

Jersey Fire, July 8th and 9th, 2016. We have

Matt Slick from Christian Apologetics Research Ministry, Justin Peters from Justin Peters Ministries.

The topic this year will be on the Word of God. We have some great messages prepared.

You can go to jerseyfire .org to get all the details. That, again, that's July 8th and 9th of 2016 in Toms River, New Jersey.

I hope to see you there. Also, I don't have a slide on this. Maybe for next week. We have a

Reason Rally Outreach, June 3rd and 4th. The Reason Rally is an atheist gathering where they try to show their support and basically show their numbers to the politicians to try to change government laws, to try to get government to not make decisions based on people's religious beliefs, but purely upon science, which is an oxymoron because science does not produce morality and laws are moral things.

Laws are based immediately on religious belief because it's morality.

You're enforcing a morality. Science doesn't deal in the realm of morality, and so it's an oxymoron.

But what we're going to do is they're trying to gather 10 ,000, 20 ,000 atheists. We would like to see 1 ,000

Christians out there evangelizing to them. In light of that, we got a couple things going on.

We're at Striving for Eternity. We're going to have a thing on Friday night from 6 to 9 where we're going to have

Matt Slick from CARM, Christian Apologetic Research Ministry, myself, and Ray Comfort. We'll be doing a training.

We're going to have a conference there so you can participate in that Friday night. You can only get that from the

Striving for Eternity. Go to strivingforeternity .org. You can look under the events, and you can see the Reason Rally Outreach.

Also on Saturday, Living Waters is supporting an outreach. They're calling it the

DC Outreach. We're working with them on this to gather a bunch of people together. They're going to be giving away about 5 ,000 copies of Ray's new book.

It'll be your first chance to get your hands on that to give away. We're going to be having a prayer rally with them.

They're going to host a prayer rally where they're going to give out tracks, books, DVDs, things like that to give away.

That's going to be 8 o 'clock Saturday morning, June 4th. Then we're going to go over to the

Lincoln Monument where the Reason Rally will be. We are going to talk to atheists all day long.

The Reason Rally ends around 7 o 'clock. Then we're going to go home. I encourage you to sign up for that.

There is a registration at strivingforeternity .org. There's also a registration on DC Outreach at Living Waters.

You can get to both of them from the events page at strivingforeternity .org.

Until next class, I want to remind you to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.