What makes a church Biblical? - (pt-1)

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Well, this morning, I'm going to be addressing a topic which is unusual for us because we don't normally do topical teaching.
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Mike has, I think, just completed or will soon complete the book of...
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Is this recorded? We'll soon finish the book of Ephesians or has finished, which soon, soon finish.
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And that's normally what we do. We go through verse by verse through the
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New Testament. But this morning, we're doing something a little bit different. Mike has asked me to speak on the nine essentials of a biblical church.
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And I know what you're thinking already. You're going, nine essentials. That sounds a lot like that book by Mark Dever.
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I know all of you are thinking that, the nine marks of a healthy church. You're probably thinking that right now. And you know what?
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All I can say is I hate it when guys steal my thunder. Okay. But let me tell you a tale of two churches.
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These churches both started near our home in California when we were living there in the spring of 2001.
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Within one week of each other, one church opened one Sunday and then the following Sunday, the other church opened.
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And from all appearances, both were evangelical. One church promised to preach the word, going through the
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Bible verse by verse. And they did do that. The other promised, and I got this in the mail on a little postcard, not to waste my time.
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One church offered copies of the pastor's sermons on CD or cassette. The other church offered balloons, family portraits, and clowns on Easter Sunday.
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One church offered the pastor's own sweat and labor as he sought to understand the Bible and to translate that understanding to his people.
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The other church featured sermons paid for and downloaded off the internet, combined with skits and dramas.
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Now, after just one year, almost exactly one year, one church folded and the other was at nearly 300 people.
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Which one do you think it was that folded? Well, if it wasn't obvious,
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I wouldn't have used it as an illustration. People don't flock to hear the word of God.
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People flock to be entertained, to not have their time wasted, to have practical things that they can help, that can help their lives.
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We live in a time when sound doctrine, most people don't even know what that is. What is sound doctrine?
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They don't have a clue. And it certainly isn't fashionable. 1
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Timothy 4 .1 says this, and don't turn there because we're going to be going somewhere else, but 1 Timothy 4 .1 says, but the
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Spirit, the Holy Spirit, explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.
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We're living in those times. We're living in those later times where people don't care about doctrine.
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They don't care about biblical precision. They don't care about what the Bible says. It's, please don't waste my time.
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Otherwise, why send out flyers like that? Now, Jesus, the Lord said that he would build his church and the gates of hell literally would not have the capacity, the capability of defeating that church.
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That's Matthew 16 .18 and that seems fairly straightforward. The Lord will build his church and no power on earth, seen or unseen, will be able to stop that building.
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God will do his work. But Jesus didn't give, in that same passage, a road map, explicit instructions on how he would build his church.
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So are there several ways of doing that? Are some ways better than others? What would separate a good church from a bad church?
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Or to be a little more politically correct, what would separate a biblical church from an unbiblical church?
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My purpose this morning and in two weeks from this morning is to detail for you these essential ingredients of a biblical church so that you will know a good church from a bad one and so that you will hold the leadership of this church up to this biblical model.
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Now, this list is not exhaustive. You say nine, I could come up with 30, okay?
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I could come up with 35. It's not a contest. But these are nine that if you're moving or if you're ever in the position where you need to look for it, you need to look for these nine essential aspects, these nine essential ingredients of a biblical church.
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Now, we have had some people leave other churches to come here because of the items on this list this morning.
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But I don't believe that we've had too many leave here. In fact, I don't know of any, but I've only been here a year.
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But I don't know of any of these nine ingredients that have caused people to leave the church. I don't know that they've said, you know what, you don't do these things, therefore
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I'm leaving. But we know here at Bethlehem Bible Church that we're not perfect.
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We know that we don't do all these things the best that we possibly can. So I present these to you knowing that we lack in some of these things, knowing that we need to improve, but we're striving to do that.
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Now, why do churches fail to meet these standards? Maybe a better question is why do believers choose to attend churches that fail to meet these standards?
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Well, sometimes I think people just have the wrong priorities. They're out looking for the wrong things.
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There's a pyramid that one of my seminary professors gave us, and he said, you know, basically church boils down to four things.
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And he put them, and the reason I say they're a pyramid is because the top line he would draw bigger than the second line, better than the third line, and so on.
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So the final one was very small. And he said, here are the four priorities that people have.
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Programs. People want to know, do you have a wanna?
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What do you have for singles? I get calls about singles all the time. What kind of programs does your church provide?
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People are concerned about property, and especially people in the church are concerned about property. Always want a better building.
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And believe me, if you choose this church for the property, thank you. We're thankful for that.
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The other two points are principles and people. Now, the challenge here is if you look through the
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Gospels, if you study the words of Jesus himself, he talked a lot about those last two things, principles and people.
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He really didn't talk about singles programs. He didn't talk about a wanna. He didn't talk about, you know, child care during the week, and schools, and all those kinds.
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He didn't talk about them. Why? Because they're not the priority for the church.
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And yet, people typically, when they're looking for a church, those are the first two things they'll look at, especially the programs.
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What the church is to be focused on are those last two things, principles and people. We minister to people, and we do that through biblical principles, and it's those biblical principles that I'm going to lay out for you.
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These nine essential ingredients, and by the way, I did do some work here, and I went through and I read the pastoral epistles, and I thought
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I was just, I wanted to pull all the material out of the pastoral epistles so there would be a little bit of continuity here.
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So that's where we're going to be camping out, and the first passage I'd like you to turn to is 2 Timothy chapter 4, verses 1 through 4.
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And the first essential ingredient, and perhaps I would say the most important one, is expository preaching.
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Expository preaching. Let me read that verse, or those verses. 2
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Timothy 4, verses 1 to 4. I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word.
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Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and instruction.
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For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.
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Some of you are sitting there this morning going, what is expository preaching? Simply put, it is verse by verse teaching, in such a way that the meaning of the text, the heart of the text, is revealed.
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A preacher who is teaching expository aims to cut that text open and show you what is in it, so that you leave understanding the
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Bible better than you did before. Now, I could spend the next week, three weeks, just on this passage alone, because this is the main, the essential ingredient, and it is also the one that is under assault more than any other.
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And I'll tell you why I think that is. Preaching is under assault more than any other, and I think it's because if you have expository preaching week after week after week, you'll have these other eight things.
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You can't systematically work through the word of God and ignore the other eight ingredients. So what you'll find then is that in churches that don't have expository preaching, you're going to find that these other eight are either lacking altogether, or they're hurting in some way, they're deficient in some way.
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And I believe that there is a systematic effort these days to discredit good expository preaching.
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Why? I think it's so that the cancer of unchurches masquerading as churches can spread.
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What do I mean by an unchurch? An unchurch is where you can go, you can punch your ticket, you can hear some kind of light and fluffy message that might go,
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I mean I read one page, one webpage, and I read the preacher's sermons, word for word, it could be done in five minutes.
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That is not a sermon. But you say, you might be thinking to yourself, that's pretty strong to say that preaching is being assaulted.
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Well listen to some of this. And as you listen, I would just say that much like there's a new book out by Steve Lawson, and he says that there's a famine in the land, and he's referring to expository preaching, and I would say that's exactly right, there is a famine in the land.
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People say that preaching is broken. Some say it's irrelevant. It is a dinosaur, it is no longer a viable alternative.
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Well is preaching broken? This is what one man says, a sermon is often a violent act.
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This is a key figure among what's called the emerging church. This is the newest wave.
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We're past seeker sensitive now, now we're into the emerging church. He says a sermon is often a violent act.
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It's a violence toward the will of the people who have to sit there and take it. To treat the sermon as an oratorical performance delivered by a paid and trained professional who claims to speak for God, sets up an artificial power imbalance within the congregation.
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In an emerging church culture that values authenticity above all else, such an approach to preaching creates an artificial distance with the congregation.
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In other words, the idea is to lower the playing field to make it all seem like it's all about relationships.
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Well, relationships are important, but we come to church to worship God. We come to church to hear his word.
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Some say that expository preaching is irrelevant. One author writes, when
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I discovered that the biggest complaint of the unchurched in my area was, quote, boring and irrelevant sermons,
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I decided I better seriously re -examine my preaching. Unchurched people don't like boring and irrelevant sermons, therefore
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I better go back and recalculate what I'm doing. He said he threw out almost all of his old messages.
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Now, what is an unchurched person, by the way? Obviously, that means somebody who doesn't go to church, but is that the issue?
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The issue is, are they saved or not? And what is the purpose of church in any event?
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We don't gather here specifically with the idea of gathering in unchurched people.
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We meet here, Ephesians 4, 12 tells us, to equip the saints for ministry.
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We come here, we equip the saints, and the saints go out and do the work of ministry. That is the biblical model, not bring in the world, water things down and leave everybody befuddled as to what the
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Bible really says. That is not the concept of the church. But some people, even
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Christians, seem to be bored by the Bible. I received an email this week from a friend in L .A.
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who used to actually go to Mike's Bible study in Los Angeles, and he sent me this email telling me about a great book totally based on Scripture.
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Honestly, I thought all this stuff had died out in the 80s, but its content, it's about Nephilim, and if you know
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Nephilim, you know Genesis 6 -4, and if you don't know Nephilim, you're probably just as confused as the rest of us.
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Nephilim are one of those arguments that's like, you know, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
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It is a fine theological point. Who are the Nephilim? Well, this book is about the
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Nephilim, the pyramids, and the writing on those pyramids, and, of course, extra -dimensional beings, but it's all right out of the
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Bible. I wrote him back and I said some loving but strong things.
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Why do people do that? Why are people always out looking for the newest, latest, and greatest fad?
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Because they want their ears tickled. Somebody, we were talking in the prayer room, somebody this week said something to the effect of they wanted their ears tickled with an ice pick, and I'm going, maybe we should change our motto at the church from preaching the
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Bible verse by verse to, we'll tickle your ears with an ice pick. I don't know.
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Think about that. But people want entertainment. They want fascinating tales.
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They want supernatural crazy stuff. And, of course, they do want practical advice on how to live their lives.
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What they don't want, they don't want to hear about the holiness of God. They don't want to hear about the sinfulness of man.
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They don't want the word of God explained and focused on their lives like a laser beam exposing their sin.
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Now, some pastors, another reason I think expository preaching is on the wane, is being attacked, because some pastors, quite frankly, are lazy and they don't want to study.
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I remember when we first came out here in Massachusetts eight years ago, visiting in the summer, Mike had just been here, and there was an outreach in the park by Bethlehem Bible Church.
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And towards the end of this, the evening, this lady started talking to us, and it turned out she was a minister of some
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Unitarian Universalist whatever church. The more you use in a church title, the more problems you're in.
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But she said, you know, now this is
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Saturday night, like 8 .30, 9 o 'clock. She goes, you know, this is really great. It gives me an idea of what I might teach tomorrow.
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Nothing like waiting until the last minute. I read other stories about guys who would, this is part of this emerging church thing where they don't want to preach to anybody.
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So what they'll do is they'll study a passage and, you know, just try to keep a blank slate and just come in and share a couple things and start a discussion.
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But that's not expository preaching, and that's not what the Bible calls us for. The truth is, and was aptly stated by Robert Murray McShane, who said this,
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I am just an interpreter of Scripture in my sermons, and when the Bible runs dry, then
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I shall. Who has exhausted the Scripture? Who has taught all the truths contained inside the
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Bible? The answer is no one's done that. Walt Kaiser, professor over here at the seminary that currently escapes our mind, but he says, regardless of what new directives and emphases are periodically offered, that which is needed above everything else to make the church more viable, authentic, and effective are great stories.
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No, he doesn't say that, is a new declaration of the Scriptures with a new purpose, passion and power.
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That's what's called for today. That's why expository preaching is such a priority.
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It is what the Holy Spirit, through Paul, commanded one of the very first pastors of the very first churches on the face of this planet to do.
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And as I said, for these messages, I focused on the pastoral epistles, which are 1st and 2nd
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Timothy and Titus, for those of you who don't know, because it is in those letters that Paul gave
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Timothy and Titus instructions on how to run a local church. And it's interesting because, again, if you go through these epistles, 1st, 2nd
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Timothy and Titus, you won't find instructions on how to set up a bunch of great programs.
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You won't find that. You'll find some principles for encouraging fellowship. You'll find principles for disciplining people out of the church.
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You'll find a lot of things, but you won't find directions on how to set up programs to pack them in. When Paul writes
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Timothy in 2nd Timothy 4 .1, I solemnly charge you.
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He cannot give a higher calling. A Greek dictionary defines solemnly this way, solemn charge to exhort with authority in matters of extraordinary importance, frequently with reference to higher powers and or suggestions of peril.
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He's putting a huge burden on Timothy. He says, here's the standard. You preach the word.
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And let me tell you why you are responsible. You are accountable to God, the father,
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God, the son, who, by the way, is coming back and is going to judge you if you don't do that rightly.
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In effect, he says to him, Timothy, you do this right because the
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Lord will hold you accountable if you don't. Paul gives Timothy four qualities that must accompany biblical preaching.
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First, biblical preaching demands exclusivity. Paul tells
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Timothy that until the Lord returns, his calling is to preach that is,
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Timothy is to make public proclamation. He is to step into the pulpit and boldly proclaim the word of God.
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He has no other choice. It's an exclusive priority. Hendrickson says this.
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According to scripture then, heralding or preaching is generally the divine authorized proclamation of the message of God to men.
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It is the exercise of ambassadorship. It is the act of preaching. Preachers are, in a very unique way, ambassadors of Christ.
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They are representatives of the living God proclaiming his message. Think about the idea of an ambassador.
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We have ambassadors all around the world. Do they say whatever they want? No, because they're under authority.
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They say what the president wants or guess what? They're no longer ambassadors. In that same way, pastors are called to be ambassadors for Christ to preach his word and his word alone.
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Now, I've heard, not here, I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea, but I've heard people describe various preachers as full of themselves and unloving because they seem so confident and so bold in the pulpit.
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When I hear that, when I know that the man is a biblical preacher, I say, thank God for those men. It is their calling to proclaim, thus says the
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Lord, as long as they have breath and actually bring forth the word of God. There is no word for a timid proclaimer.
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There is no room for a timid proclaimer of the word. I think, possibly, it might be nice.
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It doesn't work. If you don't know, if you don't have a clear message from the
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Lord, from his word, then don't get up and proclaim anything. Their boldness, a preacher's boldness is not based on his opinion.
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It's not based on any outside knowledge. It's based on the source of their proclamation.
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God's people hunger, or they ought to hunger, for God's word, not the word of Mike, Dave, Steve, Louis, Mark, or Bob.
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They're all good guys, but their words are not infallible. God's word is infallible.
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And more important than anything else, even if it was just only the best source, the most important reason to preach the word is because God has commanded it.
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Timothy's not given any other option other than to preach the word, and that is what Christians should expect from their pastor.
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So biblical preaching demands exclusivity and, meaning it must be the word alone, and biblical preaching demands excitement on the part of the preacher.
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Now what do I mean? Do I mean he has to be jumping all over the stage? No. But Timothy is told to be ready.
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And it's not like, the idea isn't to get ready, doesn't mean just to prepare himself, but it's more like stand ready, stay ready, be ready at all times.
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In fact, this morning I was talking to somebody and I said, are you ready? He thought I was joking. You need to be ready to get up at any time if you are called to be a preacher of the word, you need to be ready to give a word from the
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Lord. Now that verb is literally to be ready or to be present in readiness to discharge a task, to fix one's mind on, to be attentive to.
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In other words, there's a certain anxiousness and excitement, a focus on this one task, preaching the word.
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That's what a preacher does. He zeroes in on it. Biblical preaching demands exclusivity, excitement, a readiness, and biblical preaching is not limited in its extent or time.
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That's a bit of a reach, but what I wanted to get at, I wanted to use that X thing, but be ready in season and out of season,
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Paul tells Timothy. You could translate it this way, when it's convenient and when it is untimely, that's the literal sense of it.
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You could also say when it's popular and when it's unpopular. When you think about it, that doesn't leave too many times.
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There is no substitute for the word of God regardless of what the climate is.
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And as I've said, we live in a time where preaching is considered passe, it's considered old -fashioned.
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Why? Because our culture says it is. If one idea, the culture we live in says one truth is just as good as another truth, of course the falsehood there is that there can be two competing truths.
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That's called post -modernism. And if that's true, then the preacher who claims to have the truth is definitely out of step.
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But that's not the case. There is one truth and it's right in front of us here, the word of God. And that is what the preacher must proclaim, whether it's popular or unpopular.
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Whether people will flock to the church or whether you have to fold the church in a year. Preaching has also been called irrelevant since we live in a time where there are so many unchurched people.
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And I don't know about you, but I don't really care if the Lord saves unchurched people or church people.
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I just want God to save people and he does that through his word. A biblical preacher has no option.
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He must, whether it is in demand or not, preach the word. Biblical preaching also is exactly
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God's means for solving many problems. And I don't mean that in the sense that, you know what, if you come to Christ, God promises you a better marriage.
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God promises you an easier life. A lot of these things that are taught. What I mean is the preacher cannot afford to simply let the needs of a flock drive his sermons.
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Now does that mean that he should never do a topical message? No, or I wouldn't be before you this morning. But his habit should be to preach through a text.
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Why? Because as he moves through that text, a multitude of problems are going to be resolved.
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Paul preached the entire counsel of God. Why? Wasn't he sensitive to the needs of the people? Yes. He knew they needed the entire counsel of God.
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So he gave it to them. And today's preacher can do no less. Look at the verbs in this passage here.
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To reprove is to express strong disapproval of someone's action, of what they're doing.
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Now this does not mean, by the way, that the preacher stands up here and calls out a particular person and their sin.
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Bob Smith, this message is for you and your unrepentant gambling. That's not what we do.
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As the pastor teaches through the word, the word – the message from God will condemn poor
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Bob eventually. He'll get it if he's saved. Preaching is
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God's means for bringing the individual sins of the entire congregation to their own minds, of bringing our sins before us afresh, of reminding us of where we fall short of the glory of God.
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Second verb, to rebuke, is to express strong disapproval of someone.
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Well, you can't do that. You can't express strong disapproval of somebody, some person.
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Well, yes you can because the Bible says you can. Again, you don't call Bob Smith by name. Is there anybody by the name of Bob Smith here?
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I sure hope not. But this is a warning in order to prevent an action or to bring one to an end.
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In other words, this is the word of God speaking to each of us through the preacher and saying, you know what
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Bob, what you're doing is not right and you need to stop it. Or that thing that you're thinking about, don't do it.
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It is very much a warning that wrong thinking is about to lead to a sin or may have already done so.
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Change your mind. Repent. Third verb is to exhort, which comes from the verb, and this is the only
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Greek one I'm using this morning, is parakaleo. And I use that because it should be very familiar to you.
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If I say paraclete, it's the same root. So parakaleo means to come alongside of someone.
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The Holy Spirit, as I said, is known as the helper or the paraclete. And this idea of parakaleo is to strongly urge or to encourage someone to do something.
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So the idea of this is the preacher coming alongside during a sermon and exhorting or encouraging or giving you, as it would be, a verbal hug and telling you, you know, you really need to do this through the message.
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And also know these three things must be done with great patience and forbearance. The idea is a variety of teaching methods.
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If you hear repetition sometimes in sermons, that's a good thing. If you hear the same message, you go, you know what?
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I'm tired of hearing about the sovereignty of God. Maybe it's because you haven't gotten it yet.
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You know, some days in seminary, this happened on a few occasions, and it seems kind of weird, but guys would have exactly the same messages prepared, same text.
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And, you know, they'd look like this, and the professor would say, I wouldn't worry about that.
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I think the Lord wants us to really know this passage today. So we just go for it. Can you hear the word of God too often?
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Can you hear the same points too often? Not until you've attained perfection, which will happen in heaven.
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So don't worry about that. But in any event, the point here is the preacher must not give up using the word to apply to his congregation, no matter how rebellious they might be, no matter how they don't get it, just keep preaching.
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Just keep going. This is God's appointed means to get his message to his people.
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There is no other way. Expository preaching is our first ingredient and is the key ingredient.
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Second, biblical theology. Please turn to 2 Timothy 1, verses 13 and 14.
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Biblical theology. Let me read that. Retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus.
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Guard through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us the treasure which has been entrusted to you.
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Now, what's your first reaction when you hear the word theology? Beloved, if your eyes glaze over, if your heads roll back, your mind shuts off and you start thinking about lunch, just bear with me.
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Hang on. And let me ask you a question. How did you get saved? How was it that you came to know
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Christ? How was it that you became forgiven for your sins? Did someone share the good news of the gospel with you?
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Were you reading the Bible? Were you listening to a sermon? Maybe you had a tape or cassette?
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Can I tell you a secret? That was theology. Don't tell anybody. Theology is simply the study of God as he is presented in the very scriptures that saved you.
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Why must a church have biblical theology? First of all, biblical,
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God has given us the Bible to keep us from error. If we go off and do our own thing, we are bound to wind up making mistakes.
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The Bible cannot err. So we do well, we do exceedingly well if we heed it.
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And let me, just as an aside, when somebody says God told me, I think you just have to say, well,
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I would appreciate giving me the verse that you got that from because I'm not familiar with that. And if they turn to Revelation 23, then you know you've got a problem.
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Listen, Hebrews 1 makes it very plain that God has spoken in these last days through his son.
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We have a complete revelation here. We have everything we need pertaining to life and godliness. God isn't speaking to people today because if he is, we need to continually append the scripture.
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We need to add more pages because God obviously has more to say. Biblical theology today, though, has become known as judgmental.
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How dare you judge me? Try explaining to someone, either from a liberal
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Christian background or someone who is just an outright unbeliever, from the
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Bible why abortion is wrong, why women can't be pastors, why homosexuality is sinful, etc.,
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etc., etc. And you know what you'll hear? That's very judgmental. I'm not judging anyone.
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And the pastor doesn't judge anyone. What he does is proclaim the truth, and it's the truth that judges.
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Biblical theology separates us from the world. And whenever you try to proclaim that truth, you likely will not get a positive response.
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Now, there are those who will say something to this effect. In essentials, unity, and in non -essentials, charity.
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And I think that's fine. But what are the non -essentials? But I think it's been taken to another step anyway these days.
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Today we hear more like there are no essentials except charity. The only thing that matters is charity and love.
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We have to be loving toward one another, and that means overlooking biblical theology, overlooking the truth about what
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God has said about himself and about the state of man. In verse 13,
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Paul tells Timothy to hold on to, or to retain, the standard. And that is what everything else must be compared to.
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That's the standard. It's the idea of a portrait, a picture. This is the original.
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This is the real deal, and everything else that comes along must be compared to that standard. The phrase, sound words, occurs only one other time in Scripture.
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And don't turn there. I'll read it. It's 1 Timothy 6, 3 and 4, again, in the pastoral epistles.
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If anyone advocates a different doctrine and does not agree with sound words, those of our
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Lord Jesus Christ, and with the doctrine conforming to godliness, he is conceited and understands nothing.
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Sound words, those of the Lord Jesus Christ. There, in 1
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Timothy 6, and in our passage in 2 Timothy, it clearly refers, sound words clearly refers to Scripture and the words of the
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Lord, and the theologically correct teaching of those words.
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And that is very, very unpopular today. John MacArthur notes, much of the professing church is atheological.
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Meaning what? They don't want to hold any particular theology. That is, without any significant theological convictions.
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Like the world around them, many people who go by the name of Christ believe that to hold and teach absolute doctrines is to be unloving, antagonistic, and even unchristian.
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How can that be? It's because the church has absorbed the attitude of the culture.
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We become a mirror of the culture, rather than seeking to transform that, even one life at a time.
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Brothers and sisters, this ought not be. If we are the called out ones,
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God's chosen, his elect, his adopted sons and daughters, why would we choose to think like those who hate
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God? Why would we choose to imitate them? Paul is telling
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Timothy that his teaching should be an accurate representation of what he has learned from Scripture, what he has learned from Paul, and what he has learned from godly teaching.
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When my friend Han visited us a month ago, we were driving around, and I used a term that he didn't know, a theological term he didn't know.
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I said Armenian, and I'm pretty sure from his question that he thought I meant
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Armenian. And I said, well, there is nothing worse than an Armenian Armenian, but that's another topic.
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When I explained what it meant, he said, how could anyone believe that?
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And I said, well, I did, when I first got saved. And I said, you've had the advantage of never having bad teaching, and that's a great advantage.
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But as I said earlier, every Christian is a theologian of sorts. You can't get saved without knowing some theology.
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You can't get saved without knowing who God is, knowing who man is, generally, knowing what
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Christ did, and knowing how you responded to the gospel. That's theology. And if it's good theology, it's based on sound words, because it's based on Scripture.
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Also note in verse 13 that you or I are not to hold this knowledge with a superior attitude.
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Paul writes, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. Truth is not something that we use as a hammer.
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We don't use it to beat people down, unless we need to. Well, and I say that this way, because sometimes the only way to get through, especially to a believer, is to give him a
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Bible and say, you know what, I just want you to go study this for yourself, and you tell me what you think.
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And in that sense, it is a hammer. But our objective is to be loving.
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But like our pastor says so many times, what can be more loving than to tell someone the truth? Tell them the truth about their condition.
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Tell them the truth about what they're doing. But the one caveat to that is we do need to make sure that our hearts are right.
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That we're not just throwing it out there to hurt them. That we have a genuine concern, that we are genuinely expressing our love and concern for them.
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Now the church today, just like in that day, must also, in verse 14, guard the treasure that has been entrusted.
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Hendrickson writes this, Timothy is urged once for all to guard this deposit. He must defend it against every attack and never allow it to be changed or modified in the slightest degree.
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It drives me nuts to pick up a book and say, have it say something like, I found nuances that no one's ever seen before.
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Or you know, that Nephilim thing, whatever. All these new fads that are coming along, it is so arrogant to say, you know what, for 2 ,000 years the
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Lord never blessed a single man in the church to understand this, but I've got a new higher knowledge.
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When you see that, your best bet is to run, because that's usually just way off base.
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But like Timothy, we must rely on the Holy Spirit to help us guard that trust. Why? Because our human tendency is to back down, to avoid confrontation.
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That's it, isn't it? We don't want to fight, but there are times when a fight comes our way and we cannot avoid it.
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How do we know if it's our time to guard the trust? And I would suggest this, that if we have some sense of guilt or not sticking up for God if we let things pass, then
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I think it's necessary for us to say something. But a church that does not stand for biblical theology, that is not willing to guard that trust, that doesn't treat it like the treasure it is, is not worthy of the name trust.
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And there have been so many big issues that the visible church, and I say visible church, has compromised on.
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When we talk about ecumenism, the idea of all alleged
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Christians working together on things. Think about women in ministry, homosexuality, and there are more and more and more issues every day that the church at large is being called on to swallow whole.
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There are very few positive trends in Christianity, I'm sorry to say, but this is what the scripture says.
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The world and the church will get worse and worse. The church is going to be attacked and attacked and attacked.
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And unless there are men in the pulpit and men on the elder board at churches that are willing to defend that, people in the congregation, that church is going to go under.
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And our calling is to defend, to guard that truth. We need to guard what the
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Lord has given us. Point number one, expository preaching. Number two, biblical theology.
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And number three, a biblical understanding of the gospel. Please turn to Titus 2, 11 through 14.
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I'm going to pick up the pace here. Verse 11, for the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great
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God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.
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This is the gospel, the grace of God, the unmerited favor that he bestows upon those who come to him.
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Note there is no presence of works, no mention of works as a requirement for salvation. This is through Christ alone.
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Also notice the results. Believers deny ungodliness and worldly desires, it tells us.
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For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires.
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It is God's grace, his work in us that instructs us to deny these things.
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Believers reject what had previously been enticing, what they had previously seen as desirable, they reject those things.
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Now is teaching like this, is that the trend of today's churches? I think not.
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Typically what's given is, you know what, you just received Christ and, you know, maybe at some point down the future you'll start thinking about living a holy life.
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No repentance necessary, you just name the name of Jesus and you live however you want.
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But believers live sensibly, righteously and godly and this is the flip side, the exact opposite of their hedonistic past.
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Before we only sought what? To please ourselves. And now the idea is to embrace the word of God, to live sensibly, righteously and godly.
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Believers embrace God's people, they embrace good teaching, they love whatever is praiseworthy or of good reports,
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I think as the King James says. Now is this stressed in churches?
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I've been in some of those churches, I've been in some of those Saturday night services, which by the way
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I don't even know what a Saturday night service is, except to clear the decks for Sunday morning so that you don't have to be bothered with church.
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Wrong attitude. Believers also look forward to the return of Christ in verse 13, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great
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God and Savior Christ Jesus. That's what they're living for.
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They're not living for their next paycheck, they're not concerned with the things of this world. Those things will take care of themselves.
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Jesus himself said that. They're living with eyes fixed on Him, with eyes fixed on the future.
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Believers also recognize that they were bought with a price. They are His possession, this says.
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They're zealous for good works. They love the Lord and that shows itself in how they live.
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So we have a biblical understanding of the gospel. Number four, a biblical understanding of conversion.
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Titus 3 verses 4 to 8. But when the kindness of God our
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Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness but according to His mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the
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Holy Spirit whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our
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Savior that being justified by His grace we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
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Now there's inevitably some overlap between an understanding of conversion and an understanding of the gospel.
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And I probably even muddled that all the more by talking about the results of the gospel. But let me clarify a few things.
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At Bethlehem Bible Church, first of all, we don't do altar calls. Now, why don't we do altar calls?
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First of all, there's a scriptural reason because altar calls appear nowhere in the pastoral epistles and in the rest of the
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Bible. Because secondly, for a historical slash practical reason, altar calls were actually invented or instituted by a man named
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Charles Finney, a man who is responsible for a lot of the theology in today's
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American church and by the way, you know, as a footnote, a heretic. Slight problem.
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He denied original sin. Original sin being the idea that Adam's fall impacted every single man, woman, and child.
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He said that unbelievers could please God. He taught that men must reform themselves apart from grace.
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He taught that Jesus did not die in the place of sinners, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he was the one who invented this kind of anxious bench where people would go and sit and hear his teaching and become all agitated and then come forward and receive
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Christ. But coming forward, praying a prayer, throwing a stick in the fire as they do in some camps, do not prove that anyone is a
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Christian. And we don't want somebody to think they're a Christian just because they walked forward or just because they did this or that or the other thing.
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It's not what we do. It's what's being done to us. When someone undergoes the washing of regeneration and renewing by the
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Holy Spirit, the change will be evidenced by a new life. The old man has passed away.
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Behold, new things have come. That is the mark of salvation. You know, the dropout rate for some of these crusades where people come forward, dropout rate,
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I mean people that come forward and then are never heard of again, is as many as 50%.
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I once participated in a crusade, and I'm not bragging here, but I was a counselor at one. And I had two guys afterwards that I was supposed to counsel, and they were supposedly just made a profession of faith, and I'm talking to them, and I find out,
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I mean, there were some cool elements to it, because these guys were both just recently paroled from jail and here I was a cop.
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I thought that was pretty neat. But these guys were already in church.
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These guys were already believers. They said, yeah, we just kind of, we were really moved and we wanted to come forward and just talk to somebody and pray.
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And I'm going, that's great. So these crusades are not the end all and be all.
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I remember just as an aside, I remember reading one man say that 100 million people had come to faith in his ministry.
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How many guys like that would it take to take over the whole world? Not very many. If you lower the bar enough, anybody can get into the kingdom, and that's not what we want to do.
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No, we don't have a test. There's no written test to determine whether someone has been converted, but we do have the word of God, which says what happens to the recipients of God's grace.
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Believers are changed. They're no longer the same people. And anyone who has the same desires and actions, but clings to a one -time profession of faith is likely deceived.
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After all, Paul tells us, or Paul tells Titus, that the Holy Spirit was poured out upon us richly.
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So there's no such thing as a Christian who does not have the Holy Spirit in him. And the Holy Spirit changes lives.
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Romans 8, 12 -16, and I'm not even going to go through it, but it tells us that the
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Holy Spirit works in us, changes us, and gives us that inward testimony to our spirit that we know that we belong to God.
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That passage is key because there is absolutely no way that the Holy Spirit takes up residence in us after we're saved and leaves us unchanged.
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We no longer will do the same things. So we've seen expository preaching, these essential ingredients, expository preaching, biblical theology, biblical understanding of the gospel, and the biblical understanding of conversion, and we'll have the rest in two weeks.
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If any of these issues, any of these problems, any of these elements are a concern, or if you have some more elements you'd like me to add, please feel free to come see me.
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The key is, when we're talking about a biblical conversion, a biblical gospel, what people really need to understand, and I'll just make this quick, what they need to understand is, and this is for anyone, who
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God is. If you don't understand that He's holy, that He's just, that He's all -powerful, that He cannot abide sin, and He will not abide sin, and He's going to judge every single sin ever committed, then you're not a
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Christian. If you don't understand that apart from grace, you have no standing, no claim on salvation, and you stand condemned before God because of your sinfulness, then you're not a
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Christian. If you don't understand that Jesus Christ and Him alone is the way to heaven, that it's through His perfect life,
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His perfect death, His burial and resurrection on the third day that we have the hope of heaven, then you're not a
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Christian. And if you've never repented, if there's never been a change in your life, if you've never changed your mind about God's word or God or about yourself, then you're not a
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Christian. And I would urge you even today to flee to the cross, to repent, to turn from your sins.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for these words from your scripture, for the instruction manual, as it were, that you've given us.
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Father, I pray that you would find us faithful at Bethlehem Bible Church to preach the word, to have biblical theology, to hold to a biblical understanding of the gospel and of conversion.
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Lord, that we would, by your Spirit, be enabled to guard the trust which you have given us.
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Father, and I pray for every single person here that if they've not understood those theological truths, if those truths about you, about themselves, about Christ and about repentance have not been applied to their heart,
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Father, I pray that you would do that even now. Lord, we just thank you so much for your word, for your son,
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Jesus Christ, and for the glorious hope that we have in his soon coming. Father, for the great grace which you have bestowed upon us, that we might be forgiven for every sin that we've ever committed, past, present, and future.
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No one could ever make it up, Father. Every other religion in the world is trying to work their way into righteousness, and you have granted that to us through your son.