Ephesians 4:7-16 (March 19, 2023)

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FBC Travelers Rest sermon from March 19, 2023 by Pastor Rhett Burns.

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And now if you have your Bibles, turn with me to Ephesians chapter 4. As I mentioned last week, we're taking a two -week detour from the book of Mark, trying to line up the resurrection account for Easter Sunday morning.
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So we're taking a two -week detour, and this week we're turning our attention back to the topic of the church.
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We focused on the church several weeks ago in Matthew chapter 16, and today we'll do so from Ephesians chapter 4 verses 7 through 16.
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In that Matthew chapter 16 passage, we saw that Jesus promised to build His church.
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That Jesus will build His church. That's a promise we saw that is concerning the universal church, not necessarily any particular local church, but it is our hope, it is our prayer that as Jesus builds
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His universal church, that He would be pleased to use our local congregation as part of that, and that He would continue to build our church.
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And by God's grace, and God's grace alone, we have experienced some of Jesus building our church over the last several months.
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We have experienced some growth here at First Baptist over the last several months. Last Sunday, we joyfully welcomed a new family into membership here at First Baptist.
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I have meetings coming up with several people in the next couple of weeks who are interested in membership here at First Baptist.
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We praise God for that. By the way, if you are interested in joining First Baptist, I would encourage you, let's set up a time together and let's talk membership and what that means.
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I say all that about God's kindness to us in the last several months, first to express gratitude and praise to God.
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God is the one who gives us the growth, always. And so every good and perfect gift comes down to us from the
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Father of Lights, and so we want to express gratitude. But I also say that because I want us to prepare ourselves.
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We need to prepare ourselves for growth. See, everybody wants the church to grow until it starts to grow, and then there's growing pains.
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And so I want us to get ahead of that by looking at the subject of church growth, biblically defined, but church growth from Ephesians, chapter 4, verses 7 through 16.
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I want us to ask and answer two questions this morning. The first question is, what does it look like for the church to be built up?
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Or in other words, what is biblical church growth? And then the second question is, how is the church built up?
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In other words, how does the church grow God's way? So let me read to us from Ephesians, chapter 4, verses 7 through 16, as we consider these questions this morning.
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And the word of God says this, but grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift.
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Therefore, it says, When he ascended on high, he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.
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In saying he ascended, what does it mean but that he also descended into the lower regions of the earth?
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He who descended is the one who also ascended far above the heavens, that he might fill all things.
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And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of faith, of the faith, and of the knowledge of the
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Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes.
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Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body is joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped.
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When each part is working properly, it makes the body grow, so that it builds itself up in love.
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Amen. This is the word of God to us this morning. And the first question we want to ask is, what does it look like for the church to be built up?
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What is biblical church growth? I want us to answer that question by looking at the second half of this passage first.
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So I want to get to the second half of the passage, then we'll kind of go back up to the top. But taking the second half of the passage first, we see that Paul talks about that Jesus gave gifts to the church, we'll return to those gifts in just a bit, but he gives them for a purpose, we see in the second part of verse 12, for building up the body of Christ.
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He gives these gifts with a purpose, the purpose being to build up the body of Christ. That's the goal.
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The goal is that the body, those of us who are covenant together in membership with one another, would be built up.
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And then verses 13 -16 go on to tell us what it looks like for the body to be built up.
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And so what's interesting here is that when Paul is talking about the body being built up, he doesn't say anything explicitly about numerical growth of the church.
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Now when we think church growth, we immediately think more people in the seats, right? We immediately think numbers.
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But when Paul talks about building up the body of Christ, we're going to see that he has something different in mind.
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Now saying that may raise the question, well what about numerical church growth?
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Are we against that? Well, no, we're not against that. We want that. It also doesn't mean that numerical church growth isn't in view here at all,
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I believe it is, even if indirectly. It's indirect because it's not primary.
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Now notice, when we say not primary, that doesn't mean not important, it just means not most important, not first.
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And so I believe numerical growth is indirectly in view here in this passage in Ephesians because of at least two reasons.
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One of which is in verse 12, Paul mentions evangelists, that Jesus gives evangelists to the church.
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What do evangelists do? They go proclaim Christ to unbelievers. And so if they're proclaiming
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Christ and people are believing, that's new people added to the church, and so I believe it's indirectly in view there, but also the built up body that Paul describes is a healthy body, it's a healthy congregation, and it would make sense that Christians who are not in healthy congregations for one reason or another might seek to join a healthy church, or a church where there's good opportunity to help it along towards health.
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And so these are legitimate means of numerical growth. Now if we're assessing our context, our church, our situation, if we're assessing that rightly, we're going to see that the growth that we've experienced in the last several months has been of the second kind.
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We are seeing Christians joining into our church for a wide variety of legitimate reasons.
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I think it's important to say legitimate there, because there are also bad reasons for someone leaving a church and joining another one, and there's also bad ways to do it, and so church hopping is not a good trend in our culture.
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And generally speaking, Christians need to take church membership much more seriously than we do.
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But there are good reasons for that, and I praise God for the people that he has brought here.
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Some of those reasons people have joined our church have been they've moved to the area, they're new to South Carolina or they're new to Greenville, and they needed a church home, and they found their way here.
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Some saw an opportunity to help our church regain some traction, and their previous church blessed them and sent them out to come here, to be a part, and to serve.
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Others have come from situations that were, frankly, unhealthy, and they found us heading in the right direction.
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Others have come, they've told me, because we're not afraid to tackle tough subjects and speak to cultural issues.
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And on that last point, I would add a point of clarification that, you know, by God's grace and with God's help, this pulpit will never be a hiding place from the most pressing topics going on in the world.
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And so I have no intention of standing here and fiddling while America burns, when
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America needs preaching from the Bible. Now on the other hand, we're not going to turn this pulpit into a cable news pundit's chair either, but we are committed to preaching all the
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Bible for all of life. Preaching and teaching all of the Bible for all of life, including the hot button cultural topics.
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We want to take the Bible and press it out into the corners, because it touches everything. And when we do that, and we touch some of those hot button issues,
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I want you to know, and here's the point of clarification, it's not because I love controversy, I actually don't like it at all.
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But because we have people in our church who live in the real world, and they need
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God's truth as an anchor, they need God's truth as the
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North Star that guides, they need God's truth as a lifeline in a world that is increasingly just insane.
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We need God's truth. That type of preaching that doesn't shrink back from anything going on in the world today has the added benefit, in many cases, of attracting faithful Christians.
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It's a phenomenon I've seen and heard about all over the country. And so, churches that have rolled over on cultural issues, churches that have rolled over on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory, and BLM riots, churches that have rolled over on sexuality, whether homosexuality, or transsexuality, or just good old fashioned egalitarianism, or churches that have rolled over on government intrusion and tyranny over the last few years, people are fleeing from that in search of refuge in a church with a backbone.
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We intend here at First Baptist to be a church with a backbone, but I want to be clear that even that type of numerical growth is secondary.
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We welcome it, we want it, we pray for it, but it's secondary, because primary, the primary type of church growth we want is what
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Paul talks about here in verses 13 through 16 of Ephesians 4. In these verses, what are the markers, what are the markers of the body of Christ being built up?
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He says nothing about the number of people coming. What are the markers? The first one is unity of faith.
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And so this refers to the congregation believing the same things together. It has to do with right doctrine.
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And so what we believe matters. What we believe matters.
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We want oneness when it comes to God's word. Pastor John MacArthur says it like this,
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God's truth is not fragmented and divided against itself, and when his people are fragmented and divided, it simply means that they are to that degree, apart from his truth, apart from the faith of right knowledge and understanding.
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So we don't want to be divided, but we want to be unified. And the foundation of unity is our common doctrine.
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Now does that mean we agree on every fine point of doctrine, every secondary or tertiary doctrine?
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Not necessarily. Two points on that. One of which is, you'll notice how Paul says that in verse 13, he says, until we all attain to the unity of the faith, until we attain to it.
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And so what we see is this is in process. We're works in progress.
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We're working toward unity, even if we don't have it on everything yet.
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We're working towards it because we have common doctrine of the scriptures, and we're seeking the scriptures for right belief and unity in that.
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Second point would be this, the more important the doctrine, the more unity is demanded.
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And so there are certain doctrines, such as who Jesus is and what Jesus has done, that we require unity on in order for church membership.
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And there are other doctrines, say your view of the end times, for example, where we have differing views and we're working towards unity.
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So the more important the doctrine, the more unity is required or demanded.
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But the point here is that doctrine matters. What we believe matters. And therefore the teaching ministry of this church matters.
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And so I've been given some thought to how we can enhance the teaching ministry of our church without overburdening schedules, especially as our membership is, in God's providence, geographically spread out over Greenville County.
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We have people living not just in Travel Address, but in other places of the county. And so one thing, one option, one opportunity we have is to leverage available technology to deliver sound teaching to our church.
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So I mentioned this several weeks ago, we launched a short video teaching series on our
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YouTube page called The School of Everyday Christianity. This is a teaching series aimed at applying the
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Bible and Christian teaching to the problems, situations, and questions that people face in the course of everyday life.
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And so it's doctrine applied. You can find that online and I would encourage you to watch those.
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It's one way we can work towards unity of faith and particularly applying doctrine in our life in very practical ways.
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Another avenue that we'll soon launch is a teaching podcast called Sound Words.
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And in this, I'm just going to plod through some Baptist confessions of faith. Confessions are not on par with scripture, but they're faithful summaries of what the
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Bible teaches and have been accepted by our fathers and mothers in the faith for sometimes hundreds of years.
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And so in this podcast, what I'm going to do is kind of take a section by section by section and just plod on, you know, seven or eight minutes at a time and offer commentary and application from these
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Baptist confessions of faith. Why? So that we can have common doctrine. Why?
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So we can grow in our knowledge of scripture and what scripture teaches and what we confess to be the truth of scripture.
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The goal is to supplement what we do on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights by taking rich doctrine and making it more easily accessible.
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Making it available in short, accessible, easily digestible, in an easily digestible format that doesn't require us to align all of our schedules and physically come back here at a different time of the week than we already are, but still taught by your pastor who loves you, who knows you, who you're going to see on Sunday, and not by some other pastor several states away, by somebody else's pastor several states away.
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And so look for that soon. I hope it will be helpful for our church as we pursue attaining to the unity of faith, of the faith together.
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Paul also says that the built -up body of Christ will have knowledge of the
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Son of God, knowledge of the Son of God. And so here, Paul's not necessarily talking about saving knowledge of Jesus, though it's not less than that.
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He's talking about relational knowledge that comes from walking with Jesus. He's talking about knowing
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Christ. It's the type of knowledge that Paul describes in Philippians 3 when he says,
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Indeed, I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my
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Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain
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Christ, and he goes on to say, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection.
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The knowledge of the Son of God is the lifelong process of hearing the Word of Christ and then obeying the
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Word of Christ. Hearing the Word of Christ and doing the Word of Christ. It's hearing the
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Good Shepherd's voice and following the Good Shepherd. It's the lifelong process of imitating
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Jesus, knowing Christ. The built -up church imitates
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Jesus because it knows Jesus. And then the result of that, the result of having the unity of faith and the knowledge of the
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Son of God, the result is what we see in verse 13, in the second half of that, is maturity.
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It says, until we all attain the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
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And so we don't want to be children, we want to grow up in Christ into maturity.
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That's the goal. And what it is, it's constant, it's not like we ever arrive at, well, we don't need maturity anymore.
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No, this is lifelong. God is transforming us.
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He's growing us. He's developing us, individually, but also together as a body.
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The result of unity of faith and the knowledge of Jesus is expressed, is made known in our maturity.
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And that maturity, then, is expressed in right doctrine and right living.
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Let's see right doctrine in verse 14. So that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes.
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Want maturity so that when we hear someone teaching something that's contrary to the Scriptures, but maybe they've kind of taken the
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Scriptures and twisted it just a little bit, enough to make it at least plausible, that we're not tossed around by that.
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We have right doctrine. We're not carried by the winds of what's popular.
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We have right doctrine. We're not tossed here and then back over here.
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Then we're anchored in God's truth. We have deep roots in the
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Word of God, like a strong oak tree, and the winds don't move us.
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And we also, it's also expressed, this maturity is expressed in right living. Verse 15.
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Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way unto
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Him who is the head unto Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
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Maturity leads to right living, to speaking the truth, to loving one another.
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And so to answer our first question, biblical church growth is that which leads our church members to maturity in doctrine, in what we believe, and in practice, what we do, how we live.
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And that's the type of church growth that I want for us. I want us to know Christ, and I want us to follow
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Him together. And so I hope you see that there are other types of church growth than just numbers.
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And while we want numerical growth, we pray for that, we don't necessarily aim for it as such.
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And here's what I mean there. Aiming for it, making numerical growth primary, that's the target, has so many snares, has so many dangers.
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Watering down the truth of God's word to make it palatable to sinners, but not actually helpful to them.
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Leaving the sheep of the church vulnerable to being tossed about by every wind of doctrine. Look, you have access on TV and the internet to all sorts of crazy teaching.
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You can find it, if you went looking for it, and it's probably going to find you when you're not looking for it.
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But we need to have right doctrine to protect us against that. But if we're not aiming for right doctrine, but just to get more people in the building, we leave our sheep vulnerable.
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Another danger, another snare, is doing things that displease God in order to please man.
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Doing things that displease God in order to please man. And so aiming at numerical growth as the primary target is dangerous.
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Rather, we aim at maturity. We aim to feed the sheep. We aim to have right doctrine.
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We aim to have obedient living. And we pray to God that He would give us numerical growth through that.
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Not just because we want more people, because that means more glory for God. That means more hearts that are aligned to God.
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That means more lips that are praising God. That means more bodies that are living sacrifices to God.
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That's why. Churches that aim at maturity often grow, which makes sense because healthy things grow.
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And because God blesses obedience. So that's what we want to aim for.
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So that answers our first question of what is biblical church growth? It's growth that leads to maturity and right belief and right living.
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Second question is this, how is the church built up? Or in other words, how does the church grow
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God's way? I want to read verses 7 through 12. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift.
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Therefore it says, when He ascended on high, He led a host of captives and gave gifts to men.
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Skip down to verse 11. And He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.
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Paul quotes here from Psalm 68, verse 18. And there we read that the
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Lord ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men.
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Receiving gifts among men. That's what Psalm 68 says, that the
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Lord receives tribute from men. But here when Paul quotes it, he says that He gave gifts to men.
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It's a change. And what do we see that God gives? Jesus gives apostles, prophets, evangelists and shepherd teachers or pastor teachers.
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And He gave these men, He gave these offices for a specific purpose. To equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.
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And so how is the church built up and how does it grow God's way? Well, Jesus gives gifts.
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It's because of what Christ gives to the church. He ascended into heaven and He distributed the largess as our great king.
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And He gave leadership to the church as a gift. He gave apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor teachers.
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We'll come back to those specifically in just a moment. He gives the Holy Spirit who gives gifts to individual Christians.
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And then those who lead in the church equip church members to deploy those spiritual gifts and acts of service to the church, through the church to the community.
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And when members are doing these works of service according to their gifting by the Holy Spirit, according to the equipping by their pastors, the church is built up.
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They're built up into unity of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God which leads to maturity, which leads to right doctrine and right living.
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Let's talk briefly about these gifts that Jesus gave, this leadership that Paul talks about.
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He mentions four offices, apostle, prophet, evangelist and pastor teacher. I take the first two of those, apostle and prophet, to be foundational gifts that were given to the universal church to establish it in the apostolic age, in the first century.
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And so the apostles that he's talking about were the original apostles that we read about in the pages of the
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New Testament. They were messengers who served the church broadly, who worked to establish the church.
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They received and then declared the words of God and they gave confirmation of those words by signs and wonders.
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That's what we read about in the scriptures. The prophets were those who preached in association with the apostles during the apostolic age when the church was being established.
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But their work was usually done within a specific local congregation, not always, but usually.
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They sometimes spoke revelation from God and sometimes they simply expounded on what the apostles had already taught.
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The role in the office of both apostles and prophets ceased with the end of the apostolic age and then they were subsumed into the canon of the
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New Testament scriptures. They're subsumed into the canon of scripture. And so we don't have apostles and prophets in the church today.
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We have the Bible. The church has been established and the apostles' teaching is preserved for us in the scriptures.
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We have the Bible and in it we have the apostles' teaching. But we don't have the apostles and prophets today.
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We do have evangelists and we do have pastor teachers. The evangelists are those that Jesus gives to the church for the far -reaching proclamation of the gospel to unbelievers.
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So this can refer to missionaries and church planters who go into areas that have little to no access to the gospel in order to do the work of establishing new churches.
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They are not apostles, but we can say that their work is apostolic in that they are messengers sent out to preach
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Christ and establish churches. And local churches may have evangelists too. These are those who are gifted to proclaim
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Christ and who can teach and train and mobilize and lead others in the congregation to be faithful in evangelism too.
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So these are the evangelists. And then Jesus gave to the church pastor teachers, which refers to your pastors who lead and teach in local congregations.
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These are the shepherds who feed and care for the souls of the sheep. Apostles and prophets, evangelists and pastor teachers.
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And for what purpose did God give these? What purpose did Jesus give these? To equip the saints for the work of ministry.
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So that means that ministry is a church -wide endeavor. It's something we all do.
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The ministry of the church is not a pyramid with the pastor at the top. The ministry of the church is not a bus with the pastor driving and everybody else just along for the ride.
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No, the ministry of the church is for the entire church. And my job is to equip you for that ministry.
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That is to make you ready and prepared to do the work of ministry that God has called you to do, that God has prepared, he says in Ephesians 2, the good works that God has prepared for you to do beforehand in Christ Jesus.
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And so how do I do that? Well, the first way is by the pulpit, by preaching.
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God has ordained for the church to be built up and equipped for ministry through preaching.
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And so I preach the word of God. This is one of the most important things that I do. And so it's important that I devote myself to the careful study of God's word.
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And it's important that you devote yourself to the careful hearing of God's word. So preaching is one.
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Related to that is teaching ministry. So Sunday school, midweek family fellowship, the weekly letter that I send out, the online teaching that we're putting out, all of that is designed to help equip you for the works of ministry that God has prepared for you to do.
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Pastoral care conversations and counseling is another way. Applying the Bible to your specific situation or context.
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Seeing what God is doing in your life and telling, I see this in you. That you'd be really good to do this.
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And then fourthly, prayer. Equipping the saints for ministry through praying for you.
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Through all of these things, I want to fan into flame the gift of God that he has given you.
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And to help you know how to deploy those gifts in acts of service to others in our church and then to others in our community through our church.
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And others in the community through your everyday life. Now at this point, some of you may be asking,
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I've heard of spiritual gifts, but how do I know what my spiritual gift is? You could fill out a check box thing, spiritual gift inventory that might be of some help.
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In my experience though, those things get kind of skewed real fast and real easy.
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And so I would encourage you, in order to find your, kind of identify where God may be putting you into service in and through the church,
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I would ask these four questions. What opportunities for service or what needs do we see in our church?
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When you look out, do you see a need that needs to be met? Often a need seen is a task given.
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It could be God is putting you there.
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Looking at, second question then, looking at the list of spiritual gifts in the New Testament. So 1 Corinthians 12,
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Romans 12, some other places. When you look at that list, what do you enjoy doing? What do
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I enjoy doing? When I do this, I sense God's pleasure and I enjoy it. And so the first question is about needs, the second question is about what do you enjoy when you consider the different spiritual gifts.
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Third question would be, what am I good at doing? When I do this, I do it well. And then lastly, and this may be the most important one, what do others in the church affirm that I'm good at?
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When they see me do this, they think I do it well. You might need to ask a few people.
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And I say that's more important because, or maybe the most important, one, because we live in community.
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We're doing, this is body life, and so we're connected. And so that means we're dependent and reliant upon one another.
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Often we're also hardest on ourselves, and we might not think we're really good at anything. And somebody else sees you're really good at that.
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Run there. Develop there. So what opportunities are there?
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What do I enjoy doing? What am I good at doing? What do others say that I'm good at doing? And then you kind of put it all together, and if there's some alignment between opportunity, need, enjoyment, and competence, and affirmation by others, if those things start to align in an area, then you've likely identified an excellent way that God has equipped you to serve the church.
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And that's going to be different for each one of us. But think on those questions about how you might serve.
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But the point is that Jesus builds his church through church members serving one another in the power of the
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Holy Spirit, as the Spirit has gifted them, and how they are equipped in the church.
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Now over the coming months, we're going to be talking about ways that you can serve here at First Baptist. When I meet with people for membership, one of the things that I tell them is that we kind of go through some expectations of what you can expect from us, what we can expect from you, as we live life together as a church.
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And one of those is we expect you to jump in and serve in some way. And so we're going to be talking about different ways we can serve.
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We'll vote on a nominating committee that will help kind of put people in place. We'll vote on that at our members meeting in May, I believe.
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And then they'll begin their work for the next church year. But as we go forward, as we grow, as we mature, we'll likely need to adjust some of the roles and areas of service to match our current needs and our current opportunities.
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And that's a good thing. We'll need to do that strategically. And I say that because the temptation after a sermon like this, where we're talking about putting our gifts into service, one of the temptations would be to just start doing a bunch of stuff, as if busyness equals faithfulness.
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And we don't want to just get busy doing anything. We want to do the right things. So we need to be strategic.
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Or another temptation would be to revert to everything that we've done in the past and do it all in the same way. It's kind of like a copy and paste from other seasons of ministry.
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There might be good reasons for doing that. There might be good reasons for not doing that. And so we just need to be strategic with it.
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Or another temptation would be that every person's preferred pet ministry needs to become an official, sanctioned, and funded ministry of the church, which really just isn't realistic.
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I mean, even with the number of people we have in here, we just don't have the resources to do that. More realistic is there will be some fewer ministries that we sponsor, and there will be more that we bless and we encourage.
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The point being that we ought to be measured, strategic, and wise as we do the work of ministry. And as we do, we want to emphasize the regular means of church ministry.
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Worship, teaching, prayer, hospitality, encouragement, and acts of service.
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We want to emphasize the regular means over the event -driven means of church ministry.
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Now, we'll do some events. We're going to do one Saturday night for the kids. But the regular means that God has established is what we want to focus on.
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We want to emphasize family units, households. We want to emphasize the whole household of God, the church family, as a whole over age -segregated, highly demographically -driven means of church ministry.
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Now, we'll do some of those. Our Sunday school, for example. We have a kid -specific Sunday school. And so, one opportunity for service that we have coming up is next year, we're going to need a middle school
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Sunday school teacher. From somebody in this room, or who's normally in this room, we're going to need a middle school
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Sunday school teacher. That's a good problem to have. I'm glad we have it. Another opportunity for service is,
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I would love to start an evangelism team. This is a group of people who would lead the way in our church in proclaiming
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Christ in our community. And I'm praying that we'll be able to fill this baptistry up with water soon, because people are coming to faith in Jesus.
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And so, there's a couple of opportunities right there. We'll talk about more over the coming months.
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But does either one of those, does it align with your enjoyment, your competence, your availability, with what others have affirmed about you?
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It might be a place of service for you. And the church is built up when God's people, gifted by God's Spirit, equipped by God's minister, deploy those gifts into acts of service and ministry.
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So let me end with this summary of Ephesians 4. Jesus built his church by giving leaders to the church who equipped the church for service in the power of the
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Spirit. And so, receive the word with gladness, and put it into action, in areas of service where God has gifted you.
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Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, I pray that you would build us up into maturity.
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That we may attain the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son. That we might live rightly, obeying your word and being fruitful in your world.
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I pray that you would show us where and how we might serve the church best. I pray that none of us would sit on the sidelines, but according to our station in life, and how you've equipped us, whatever we can do, let us serve.
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And that's going to be different for each one of us, I know. But Lord, I pray that you will put us into service for the building up of your church.
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And that we might be a part of taking northern Greenville County for Christ. That you might receive glory.
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ask this all in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen.