Simple Church 2: Back to Basics (7) - "What Does Biblical Church Life Look Like?"

Redeemer Bible Fellowship

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November 7, 2022

00:00: Hebrews chapter 10 24 says and let us consider one another in order to provoke loving good works not neglecting to gather together as some are in the habit of doing but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day approaching.
00:22: Romans chapter 12, Romans chapter 12 and verses 9 through 16
00:39: Romans chapter 12 and verses 9 to 16 once again
00:45: God's words let love be without hypocrisy detest evil cling to what is good love one another deeply as brothers and sisters take the lead in honoring one another do not lack diligence in zeal be fervent in spirit serve the
01:09: Lord rejoice in hope be patient in affliction be persistent in prayer share with the saints in their needs pursue hospitality bless those who persecute you bless and do not curse rejoice with those who rejoice weep with those who weep live in harmony with one another do not be proud instead associate with the humble do not be wise in your own estimation we pray that God would bless that reading of his word and grant us all understanding let's pray together and ask for the spirit's help as we come to this portion of God's word gracious savior we would ask that as we come to your word once again that you would open our eyes that we would see wonderful things out of your law cause us to grow in our understanding cause us to be inclined in our will and cause us to love these things in our affections father it's our normal habit to pray for area churches but father i take a moment to pray for our own fellowship this afternoon father this is a weighty word to bring as we think about life in the church we wrestle with presuppositions and previous backgrounds we ask that you would be at work helping us even to understand these things we ask it in Jesus name and for his sake amen eddie you might want to unplug it and re -plug it to get the internet going okay please be seated we don't have our slides working yet um my title for this afternoon sermon is slightly a long one if you have the study guide in front of you and i hope you do i've called it biblical church life 101 or what does life in the church look like uh my reasoning for giving it two titles is not because i couldn't pick between the two but i'm intentionally cluing you into the fact that we're gonna do something that might be a little bit puritan today and the reason why that's the case will become apparent as we go but we're thinking about biblical church life what does life in the church look like well as we begin this afternoon i want to begin on a note of vulnerability with you if i may for a moment i'm not generally one to get vulnerable in public i save that for close friends but i think this may prove helpful as to why i'm going to say some of the things that i will say this afternoon i grew up in church i think i've alluded to that more than once um my time here at redeemer i grew up in church in fact i think i've mentioned it a few times but i'm what they call the pk preacher's kid that meant for me at least being in church a lot and being around church a lot i've seen healthy churches and i've seen incredibly unhealthy churches in my short life of course the irony is everyone thinks that the church that they're a part of is healthy at least they hope so i mean that's why they're there at least i hope so but then that begs the question how do you know if a church is actually healthy i mean like i said we all assume that the churches we are in are healthy but does that assumption actually bear up when we start to ask some questions well that was the question that i was faced with in 2019 my wife and i have been married just over two years i was serving an area church here i won't name the church because i don't really need to i was serving there as an intern and i had the privilege of mostly getting to plan and teach bible classes as well as leading a home group if you had looked at my life at that moment in 2019 from the outside looking in i was involved and i was serving and i was happy to be there and i mean i was involved and i was serving but by the winter of 2018 i knew something was off you ever had that feeling where you know something just isn't quite right one of my favorite shakespeare plays is hamlet in act one it's marcellus who says that something is rotten in the state of denmark referring to the death of the king of denmark which is kind of suspicious if you read the play i'm somebody who when something is off i can't let it go like something about what i'm hearing and what i'm seeing doesn't make sense to me and so whenever i get that sense i understand that as a human being sometimes your emotions get the better of you and you think things are true that aren't true and so i've gotten to the place where i question myself when i have that feeling and then i take it back to scripture and ask okay let's go to the bible let's see is this thing you feel accurate or is it just you and so began a in -depth study into the doctrine of the church that really hasn't let me go since so much so that despite being in a church that my wife had attended for years it was the church that married us it was the church that gave me an opportunity to serve when i got to this country when i thought might be a while as my wife and i wrestled and talked and wrestled and talked went back to the scriptures we became painfully convinced that this church that we were in that for lots of people who were there would have considered it the greatest church in the world that this church wasn't living up to what i saw in scripture now i'm someone who doesn't particularly like gossip in the life of a church and so i made a conscious effort to not tell anybody what i was feeling at that moment to just continue serving continue not to be a nuisance but i did eventually speak to the leadership of that church because that's i think the biblical thing to do if you've got a concern don't talk to everybody else talk to the people who might be able to do something about it unfortunately that went on to deaf ears and so in 2019 we left we left and we came to this church plant as it was getting started i'd like to say that the story ended happily ever after and okay yeah we didn't have a great time at that church but things have been great here well they are now but it was apparent that the lord had some more lessons about the church for me to learn this church started with the desire to be a healthy bible teaching gospel cherishing church and for the most part we've kept to that for which i'm incredibly thankful unfortunately i learned very quickly that desire only gets you so far and at the time there was little desire for much else beyond preaching and the gift of one person well that one person decided to leave in the middle of the pandemic no less and that's why our church reset that's why we're now known as redeemer bible fellowship those of you who've been here a long time will know we weren't always called that story for another time but hey that was kind of a rough start but now we could get to the business of worshiping god of making disciples and evangelizing the lost and everything i'm about to say is just my opinion and then we didn't i watched confusion and personal ambition and an inability to set aside one's desires uh unwillingness to acknowledge wrong until it was too late and infighting oh lord how much infighting at the time i wasn't in it was a weird situation wasn't in leadership it was kind of in leadership it was a mess but we i sat back and watched this church almost tear itself apart at one moment and i don't at the time i thought i was powerless to stop it probably could have done more than i did but it became very apparent that again something was very wrong at times i thought god was disciplining us and that his discipline would be so severe things were so bad i thought the only way i can see this ending is if god just said you know what i've had enough of this church i'm i'm pulling the plug i'm done after all god is just and he says in the bible that he does that to churches read revelation chapters two and three but god is equally merciful as he is just and over the last couple of years i've seen him shepherd our church through the various struggles and weaknesses of the flesh that we experience to the place where we are today where things are healthy where things are stable and like i said that's a little more vulnerability than i would have publicly talking about some of this stuff but i start there because beloved the stuff i'm going to talk to you about in this message by the way this message is going to go long i apologize i tried my best i'll cut things out cut things out and it's still going to go long so i apologize but i start with that because this isn't experimentation or theory for me beloved this isn't stuff that you know i sit up in my ivory towel with my thousands of books and just think about for the fun of it i've seen churches that lost their way and couldn't find that way back and though they're still going it's very clear in the words of first samuel ichabod the glory has departed i've seen churches that started off not so great and eventually did a better job and i unfortunately know of too many churches that missed their divine purpose and are no more today as the pastor of this church i think constantly about the survival of this church and if this church is going to survive and not just survive i don't think god's wills for churches to just survive i think god wants churches not just to survive but to thrive and if our church is going to survive and not just survive but thrive then it's going to take all of us knowing what health looks like and all of us pursuing that together the reality is though that all of us come with presuppositions none of us come as a blank slate we all come with previous experience things that we think are important we all come with our idea of what church and life in the church ought to be now that's not always a bad thing god has made us all that we are different he in his providence allows us to go through different life experiences and to view things through the lens of our own experiences that that's fine but we've got to be careful that we don't so lean in that direction that we do or that we proceed to think about life in the church purely based on what we want out of the church if i can say that lovingly we we just cannot do that our views of the church cannot be formed by us after all think back to week one we didn't invent the church the triune god in eternity past predestined that there would be a thing called the church of jesus christ it's his idea those of you who grabbed the bookmark that we make for every series you'll know that this was supposed to be the closer this was going to be the end of the series but just as i had various conversations this last week and whether it was made aware of some things i i finally called an audible i generally don't like to call audibles like that but i did this week i said you know what this message is too important to weigh another week and it was wednesday night when i finally said okay yep i'm doing this and as i as i thought about this on wednesday night i i had a flashback to one of the many many many meetings i had with the man i considered to be my mentor in the faith i will spare you the story of my friend and father in the faith pastor nathaniel who's gone home to be with the lord now though that is a story you should ask me sometime but i i had a flashback to sitting in his house in stoke newington which was a part of the borough i lived in i was a little further away but i remembered sitting in his house one day and us talking about the church and him pulling a book off his shelf and grabbing his bible that he loved so much and walking me through some teaching about life in the church and i remembered as a teenager at the time how impactful that was for me so again i'm now sitting in my bedroom in medford i'm like i wonder if i have that book so i start scratching my head i was like i think it was a john owen book so i walk into my guest room that's where my sets puritan sets all live and there it was volume 13 the it contained the book i was looking for john owen is considered one of the most precise authors of the puritan era he's generally quite hard to read sometimes if we're honest but he was a pastor as well as a scholar in fact so much was he a pastor he actually went and planted a church of his own and in planting that church he wanted that church to be on a solid foundation so he wrote a couple of books one of which is going to form the basis of the message you're going to hear today i'm not a plagiarist i have no business in being one so i'll tell you up front a lot of my thinking that wasn't driven by the text was driven by owen this week you can actually get that book in a much more modernized and readable format our friends at banner of truth publish it it's called duties of christian fellowship it's in their puritan paperback series it's a relatively new one but as i read that book it became painfully apparent that and this is my big idea for this message that biblical church life requires clear principles and determined actions very simple that's all i really want to say in this message that you can have all different kinds of versions of church life if you want but biblical church life the only kind of church life we should concern ourselves with biblical church life requires clear principles and determined action and so as i said this afternoon i'm going to do something that's very different for me and yes we are going to go to the text of scripture but dr owen is going to be our guide through a couple of texts and we're going to think biblically and historically about what life in the church should look like for the rest of our time i want to consider three crucial truths about church life that we need to consider if redeemer is going to be the healthiest church it can be three crucial truths and like i said we're going to do this with a little help from dr owen so three truths like i said i've got a long way to go so i should just jump in at this point number one healthy church life is about encouraging one another healthy church life is about encouraging one another i hope you have hebrews 10 open keep that open we'll be there for a little bit in hebrews chapter 10 we we come to a section where the author has been lifting up the high priesthood of jesus christ the fact that jesus's work as a priest is greater and more glorious than erin's work ever could have been and in chapter 10 he's starting to land the plane of that discussion with some application and beginning in chapter 10 verse 22 you've got three sets of exhortation they all revolve around faith hope and love so in chapter 10 verse 22 look at it with me for a moment 10 22 in fact in verse 21 it says and since we have a great high priest over the house of god let us draw near with the true heart in full assurance of faith with our conscience with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water that's the first exhortation he gives in light of the fact that jesus is our high priest verse 23 he gives us a second one let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering since he who promised is faithful and then we come to the text i want us to focus in on for a few moments verses 24 and 25 and let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works not neglecting to gather together as some are in the habit of doing but encouraging each other and all the more as you see the day approaching the third command relates to love and in particular we're to consider how to provoke one another to love and good works the word provoke is an interesting one it carries the idea of rousing somebody to activity um apparently we have an english word i've never heard of this word but it came up in my research this week the word paroxysm apparently comes from this word i've never used it ever in my life but apparently it means a sudden attack or a violent expression of something now rest assured this is not a call for church sanctioned violence please do not hear me say that you're meant to go put your hands on anybody do not this is not a call for church sanctioned violence but it is a call to church sanctioned encouragement that's what some of your bibles will say encourage one another to love and good works the point is that we are called to intensely encourage one another to pursue love and good works with a passion that borders on violence now i said that uh owen would help us owen actually doesn't write on this verse in the book i'm talking about but he also did write a massive commentary on hebrews and he does touch on it here here's what owen says quote this provoking one of the love and good works is the great end of the communion the fellowship that is among christians in the mutual consideration of one another considering the circumstances conditions walkings abilities for usefulness of one another they do excite one another unto love and good works which is called the provocation of them or the stirring up of the minds of men unto them in other words owen says this was the great purpose why god puts people together in churches that they can encourage one another to pursue love and good works and not just encourage that they would provoke or stir up the mind to pursue these things here's what i find interesting owen goes on and says this bear in mind he's writing in the 1600s it's 150 years there about after the reformation has taken place listen to what he says i found it he says excuse me this was the way and the practice of the christians of old but is now generally lost with most of the principles of practical obedience especially those which concern our mutual edification as if they had never been prescribed in the gospel remember he's writing that in the 1600s we tend to look back at that age and think that was a glory age of christianity and here's owen saying no actually even on even in this day christians back in the day understood this and they don't understand it now if he could say that writing in the 1600s i'll pause for a moment and just ask what would he say in 2022 allow me to get practical here for a moment how many people i don't know if he uses expression over here we use it in the uk where i'm from you get the hump with something you're unhappy with something how many of us get the hump with a church for reasons other than this how many people leave a church because the church in their mind didn't love them enough didn't make them feel wanted and insert varying themes on that idea i don't think that's necessarily wrong or inherently wrong in fact we'll look at romans chapter 12 in a few moments and we're commanded very clearly to love one another earnestly but again like i said i've grown up in church and been around church long enough to know that how often is it that the folks who complain about that that they happen to be the same folks who are thinking about serving others usually those two don't go together the folks who generally complain about that are usually the ones who aren't serving others it almost becomes as though church life is a one -sided transaction you need to do for me you need to pour into me you need to invest in me and then i'll invest in others and if i'm honest how many of us have been in churches where that's been the norm but what if we didn't start there what if we didn't start with whether we felt loved but with loving others i read the new testament and it amazes me how much the new testament focuses on the call not to be loved but to love others so Galatians 5 13 says that we are to serve one another through love
25:08: Ephesians chapter 4 verse 2 says we have to bear with one another in fact it's bearing it's active present bearing with one another in love.
25:20: Paul prays for the Thessalonians 3 12 that they would increase and overflow with love for one another beloved at the risk of sounding somewhat callous and really that's not my intent so please receive this in the spirit which is intended but church like the rest of life just isn't about us it's ultimately about God in his glory first and foremost and then how i can pour into my brother and my sister and then it's about you and even then it's not really about you it's about your growth in godliness so that you can turn around and serve your brother and your sister.
26:06: Those of the Hebrews would have us to understand from chapter 10 verse 24 that church life begins with recognizing that church life is about passionately encouraging one another to pursue