Episode 58: Zeal for the Church

Through the Ruled Church podcast.

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

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

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

You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Good morning, Edward.

Good morning, brother.

I've been sleeping a little less.

Have you been sleeping less?

Have you had anything important happen in your life since the last time we spoke?

Oh, tons of things.

Every day's important. Yeah, tons of things.

You mean like something like five pounds.

And how many ounces?

Yeah, at the last appointment, she was back up to five pounds and one ounce. So, you know how babies lose a little weight?

Yeah, they lose a little, yeah.

She'd gone down to four pounds and 13 ounces, or something like that. Anyway, she is a little thing.

Wow.

Is she the smallest of all your children?

She is. Margie Lucille is here.

Amen, amen.

And came at her own pace, or whatever. She, yeah, Stephanie, I was visiting with a pastor friend, Brother Randall Easter, and Brother Randall Chronister on Mount Magazine in Arkansas. So that's about an hour from my house.

It's an hour west of my house. And the hospital is about, you know, about 45 minutes or so, an hour, maybe, kind of southeast from my house. So essentially, I was like two hours away from the hospital.

Service wasn't great. I didn't, I mean, but the baby is like five weeks early, like, you know, but Stephanie wasn't feeling 100%. And a lady in our church went with her. And long story short, baby Margie is here.

Everybody's doing good. She's a week old yesterday. By the time this comes out, I think she'll be like two weeks old. This episode will come out next week, October 18th. So anyway, yeah, everything's good.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.

Amen, amen.

That's awesome.

How about you? Any children born?

No, no children born. No, things are going good. Busy, I'm sure everybody's busy. Excited about the fact that fall is here.

Amen, and actually not just officially calendar-wise, but weather-wise.

Yeah, it's got, it's cooled off and kind of getting into all the fall things. And we both had festivals going on in our towns this weekend. We had Junk Fest in our town this past weekend, which is kind of like, it's kind of like just a big weekend where everybody has a yard sale.

You know, there's just yard sales everywhere.

Yeah.

And so we tried to do a little bit of evangelism. We set out a yard sale really just for the purpose of passing out tracks, you know? But, and I don't know, hopefully next year we can come up with something even better, you know, because I feel like we didn't, we didn't, it wasn't as effective as I wanted it to be.

So maybe next year we'll, I'm thinking next year maybe we'll send out teams and we'll go around to all the yard sales and maybe we'll get more.

Yeah, I think that's good. And I think I would just want to encourage folks, encourage you, you know, I do think it's good to assess and say, okay, we could do better here. But to remember, you know, I'll encourage anybody listening, like sometimes you can allow your thoughts of effectiveness to not even do anything, you know?

Oh, right, yeah.

And so it's better to go out, pass out tracks and say, hey, we could do it better than to do nothing, you know? And we had Goat Fest, of course, and we did some preaching and passed out, we passed out hundreds of tracks.

And, you know, I was encouraged and I just, I think our church hopefully is getting a reputation of, look, they're going to be out, they're going to be doing evangelism. So I like that. And I think the Lord is blessing those efforts.

We actually had a visitor, so we've been doing door to door this year. And months ago we visited this house and this lady actually visited yesterday, or sorry, Sunday, today's Wednesday. So anyway, so that was encouraging.

And so anyway, I encourage churches to be doing evangelism.

That's right, that's right. We gotta reach our communities. You know, I think one of the things that's always been striking to me is as important as missions is, and it is important that we go to take the gospel around the world, but oftentimes we don't take the gospel to the people, you know, right down the street from us.

Man, I think that's such an important point. You know, and for Southern Baptist churches, they get used to just, well, we write a check and other people do missions or we go somewhere. You know, I think Saturday actually was the Acts 1 -8 mission trip, which on paper, you know, well, I don't have an issue with it, but it's like, number one, one of my issues with it is it's kind of like service evangelism kind of stuff, you know, which I think is problematic.

I was like, you've got to actually share the gospel. Like, why don't you actually just share the gospel? But another issue is just, it is kind of the idea of like, well, I'll go somewhere and do missions, but I won't right here in my neighborhood.

Right.

And the thing is, we've come to believe this kind of American kind of, well, maybe Southern sort of politeness. Like, I'll share the gospel if someone seems receptive to me sharing the gospel. Well, that's not what you should look for.

You should share the gospel. Whether people are receptive or not, that's gonna be up to the Lord. It's our job to actually share and communicate the gospel. Right. Because the whole point of the scriptures in so far as the condition of man is we're not receptive.

We're hard-hearted. We don't want to hear the gospel. We don't want to hear that we're wrong. We don't want to hear that we need to repent. We don't want to hear that Christ is the only way. But these are the things that we're to proclaim and trust that God will use them for his glory and to actually save sinners.

Well, and honestly, I think the reason why that we have that tendency to be more bold on a trip somewhere is because honestly, it's low cost. I'm never gonna see that person again.

Yeah.

If you preach to them in Perryville, well, you are gonna see them again. If you preach to them in front of harps, then you might see them inside harps when you're buying your milk.

Yeah, yeah.

And so that's the difference, isn't it?

Yeah, that's right. Well, brother, one of the things we wanna look at in this week's episode is we wanna look at zeal for the church. And the passage that I want to read is from John 2, 17. This, of course, is in the context of Jesus driving out the money changers.

He's flipping over tables. He's pouring out coins. And verse 17 of John 2 says, his disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me. Now in our church's Bible reading plan, this was something I read maybe like a week or two ago.

And it just, man, it just really, it really just struck me. You know, I've probably read it, I don't know, a hundred times, whatever. And just reading through it, I was like, man, it just stood out to me.

And so I wanna start with you, Ed. What do you think about when you hear that verse? Of course, it surrounds, there's much context we could talk about, but zeal for your house will consume me.

Right.

I think, you know, obviously we, like you mentioned there, we can get into the context of the temple and, you know, Christ cleansing the temple and all of those things. But, you know, even going back to, that is a quotation from Psalm 69.

Yeah.

Where David is talking about zeal for the Lord's house consuming him. And, you know, the temple's not even built when David writes that. It's just a desire, though, a zeal, not just for a building, but having this zealous desire to see the kingdom of God built up, the house of the Lord, which we know in the new covenant, we are the living stones being built up into a spiritual house, is what the apostle Peter tells us.

And so we want to remember that. I just hear that word zeal. It just really strikes at this idea of, it's more than just a passive kind of, oh, we'd like to see the church grow. We'd like to see some people get saved.

It really speaks to the kind of passion that we need to have for proclaiming the gospel, like we've been talking about, and for healthy churches.

Yeah.

And for seeing people, you know, more than just casually adding the church to an already busy schedule.

Yeah, yeah.

But really forming their lives around this idea of zeal for your house, zeal for the Lord's kingdom, zeal for his church consuming us.

Yeah, amen. The Lord Jesus is serious enough about worship. Now, obviously, again, we're talking about the temple here. I know some people are like, well, you know, and I think you just did a good job.

I think some people say, well, this has to do with the temple and the Jews and all that. It was like, well, hold up just a second. You know, the temple is pointing forward. Temple, of course, destroyed in AD 70.

It's pointing forward to the temple of the church. And by the way, just some eschatology here. We're not waiting on a new temple to be built.

That's right.

The church is the temple. That's what you're getting at from first Peter. You live in stones, you know, Ephesians two. Okay, first Peter two and Ephesians two. These are examples of the scripture. Like the church is the temple.

And if Jesus is concerned enough about the worship of God to physically accost people, you know, like a whip of cords and to chase them out, to turn over coins, like he's serious about this. How much more serious ought we to be today about the church?

Now we're not doing a one-to-one correlation. We're not saying the walls of the church or whatever and the walls of the temple. No, we're saying the local assembly. But because the church is manifest on earth in invisible local congregations, what we call local churches.

Right.

And how many people have no passion for the order and structure and worship. And like we talked about earlier in the episode, evangelism of the church. So this is the Rule Church podcast. And one of the things that we talk about is obviously one of the things that drives us is the church.

We love the church. We love the Rule Church. We love the church in general, but the point is we should have more of a zeal for how the church, like the church should not just be an afterthought in our life.

It should not just be secondary to our lives. It should not just be something that comes up if we have the opportunity and we'll work it into our lives. Like if you're a Christian, you should be consumed with zeal for the church.

Right.

And even thinking about this passage, you go back into Leviticus, I think maybe it's Leviticus 14, where it's dealing with the role of the priests to go in and to examine a house to see if there's leprous disease there.

And in a sense, Jesus is coming in here to the temple and he's finding it leprous, not leprosy in the walls, but it was this leprous disease in the way they were treating the worship and treating the people.

And in the same type of way, too often we allow because of a lack of zeal for health and for life in the local church. And like you kind of said earlier, when we were talking about evangelism, maybe it's a little bit our culture, Southern hospitality.

We don't wanna cause any problems, rock the boat. I once had a deacon say, well, we don't wanna rock the boat. Not here, not here at Marshall, but sometimes we'll hear those kinds of things. But here's the reality.

Like you said, Jesus was willing to go in and rock the boat. He was willing to physically accost these people. He was willing to go in and tear out the leprous disease. And too often we think, well, the church will be better off if we don't tear out the leprous disease.

But the reality is it won't. It'll just get sicker. It'll just get less healthy if we do not address the sickness. Think if you came into your church building and next, it's Wednesday. Let's say everybody gets there tonight and you guys find that you got mold growing in one of the classrooms.

Would you just shut that door and say, well, we won't use that classroom anymore?

Yeah.

Well, no,.

Because eventually you got mold growing throughout the whole building. You'd say, no, we've got to fix this. We got to treat this. We got to get that out of here. And in the same way, if you come into your church and you've got sin that's not being addressed, you've got people not being called to repent, you've got people not being loved and cared for, well, you've got disease in your church.

And if you really love the church and you're really being consumed by zeal for the true temple, which is God's people, then we're going to want to see that fixed. We're going to want to see that disease taken out.

We want to see those people restored.

Yeah.

Because we're consumed with the zeal for God's house.

You know, I think another passage that comes to my mind is in 1 Timothy 3, 15. Paul says, if I delay, well, I'll just start verse 14. I hope to come to you soon, but I'm writing these things to you so that if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.

I'm just going to give some more practical things. They're like, we should care about how the church is set up, how it's ordered. You know, like we have these controversies about, you know, well, should women preach and those things?

Like, those are the very things that Paul's addressing in 1 Timothy. I'm telling you, no, men should pray with holy hands lifted up. Women should not preach or have authority over men. This is what your deacons should look like.

This is what your elders should look like. And we push these things. Now, I know technically, you know, to one sense, I understand, you do have to order things rightly. You know, you have the Trinity and the gospel, and then, you know, you kind of, but to another sense, like, these are not secondary issues, in another sense.

Like, the church is not a secondary issue. It's a serious issue in the way that we understand and seek to structure the church. So, you know, your membership in the church. So, for example, if you're out there a pastor and you're like, you know, a church, yeah, well, we just, our members, we got a lot of people on our roll, but yeah, they don't really count us.

Ah, it's not a big deal. No, I'm saying, no, you need to have a zeal for the house of God that it would be ordered rightly. Qualified men preaching your Sunday school classes with qualified teachers. The worship, you know, our worship is not where, no, no, no, you need to have a zeal for, you know, over this very worship issue that Jesus is willing to dump people on their heads, right?

So, I'm saying, like, the scriptures, if we take the New Testament seriously, the scriptures compel us to a serious zeal for the order and structure of the local church. Our leadership, our worship, our mission, our purity, all of these things matter.

You say, well, you know, if I try to work toward that, I'm gonna make some people mad. I might lose some people. Well, first of all, let me reaffirm that.

You will. Probably true.

Yeah, you know, I hate to say 100%, I know for sure that you will make people mad and you'll lose people because maybe there's a scenario out there where that doesn't happen, but if there is, it's very rare.

So, Reformation, October, remember, Reformation month. Hey, this is a great month to recover zeal for the church. And Baptists, by the way, are like those third wave reformers that are, like, honestly, the Semper Reformanda for Baptists, and I love my Presbyterian brothers, but, like, we're still carrying the banner.

So, you got the recovery of the gospel, but Baptists come in and are like, hey, you know what? This is actually, we've gotta actually look at what the church really looks like and the ordinances of the church really look like in a regenerate church membership.

So, carry this banner of Reformation. This is worth it. Christ is worthy of a healthy church.

You know, you mentioned just a minute ago about how even our eschatology, you know, thinking in terms of the fact that we are now the temple, and I absolutely agree. However, I would even say to, man, if we had a brother that was listening to this who's dispensational even, and maybe he's got some kind of, I don't even know if it would be hyper-dispensational view that, like, that's a future thing.

Even to that brother, I would say, well, even the Lord Jesus here, His disciples are remembering that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me because of what Christ is doing here. And this is in John 2, and two chapters later, He's gonna tell the Samaritan woman that there's coming a day when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will they worship the Father.

So, Jesus, it's not like Jesus was saying, oh, it's always gotta be this temple. Jesus knows the temple's gonna be destroyed in 80, 70. He's gonna destroy it. So, He knows what's gonna happen, and still, He's zealous for the right worship of God at that time.

So, I would say, even if a brother wanted to try to parse this apart, and maybe they had a different view of eschatology, and they wanted to say, oh, we just need to be ready because things are gonna get bad or whatever, I would still say, but right now, what we ought to be doing is we ought to be seeking to have healthy local churches proclaiming the gospel and loving our brothers and sisters, bearing with one another, serving one another, caring for one another, doing all the things that the New Testament tells us to do because that honors our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen. I've gotten some messages recently with all the stuff going on with Israel, asking my thoughts and stuff like that, and some people have been like, like this one message I got, this person was like, I need to be in church, you know?

Oh, wow.

And I was like, and this was not a member, this was just a person in our community, I'm like, amen, you know? You need to be in church. That's like, whatever your eschatology, and the eschatology debates are important.

We can have those discussions. However, if your eschatology drives you away from the church, it's bad eschatology.

It's bad, right.

So whatever your eschatology is, go all in all the more on the church. I love what you said, like, what should we be doing? Are these the last days? First of all, the answer is yes, okay? For the last 2 ,000 years, right?

It's been the last days. Well, what should we be doing? Well, if you knew that, today's Wednesday, you knew that Jesus was coming back Thursday morning. Like, what would you do? Well, I hope you'd go to your midweek Bible study tonight at church and fellowship with the people of God and continue to edify them, you know what I'm saying?

Like, continue to be faithful to the church because this is what God is doing in the world today. And I'll show my hand here as far as Christian nationalism, whatever. Yes, I think it's important to preach the gospel to our magistrates and to call them to repentance.

And I want to live in a land with Christian people in government places, but God is not working in the world today primarily through nations. He's working in the world. His work in the world today is in and through the local church.

Right, and what he's doing is he's taking from among all the nations people into his holy nation, which is the church. Right, yeah.

Yeah, so what I'm saying is, brother pastor or lay person, like, have a zeal for the church. If you are a lay person, you're like, yeah, but you know, my pastor's not there. First of all, pray for him, encourage him, take him out to lunch.

Say, you know, I listened to these crazy guys in Arkansas talking about zeal for the church. Can we have that, you know, can we? And also, sometimes you can look at a situation in churches and there can be so many things that you're like, man, so much seems to be, needs to be worked on.

Well, one bite at a time, as they say, right? Like, okay, figure out priorities and start the work. As Nehemiah building the wall, you know, one section at a time and everybody had a mind to work. Like, look at the situation, assess what, I don't know if you wanna rank things or not, but just attack what needs to be done and go for it.

But don't lose, I guess the main point right there I'm trying to say is don't lose the zeal for the Lord's house because the work seems too overwhelming, you know? This is worth giving your life to and for.

Like, I don't know, like, what is it that you're aspiring for? I don't know, you know, fame, notoriety, whatever it may be, all those things are, not all those things are necessarily wrong per se in some regards.

But I can tell you this, if you're looking for those things at the expense of Christ's glory and what he's doing in the church, they're idols.

And I tell you, I would add, let's be careful that we don't end up with some kind of zeal for the universal church, zeal for the global church that takes away from us being committed and serving in the local church.

You know, this last Sunday, I had the opportunity. We actually weren't in our church. We went to another church because it was their 150th anniversary of the planting of that church. And I'd served there 20 years ago in youth ministry.

And so we went there and Brother David Miller, and you actually hear Brother David Miller on our intro, right, to the podcast?

Yeah, that's right.

And I actually think that the sermon he preached this Sunday was that same sermon that we have the clip from because he was preaching on a visible, tangible local church and I was just reminded in listening to him preach that we don't want simply to have this idea of the perfect church.

I think that sometimes even godly people, they can fall in love with the ideal idea of what they think a local church ought to be, but not fall in love with a real local church around them. You know, one of the problems in our day, and I'll use this as a bit of an example, I guess, one of the problems in our day with young men is because of pornography, because of the sexualized culture, they fall in love with this caricature, this cartoon idea of a woman that no real woman is ever gonna actually be.

Yeah.

And I think that there are a lot of Christians who have fallen in love with a cartoon idea of Jesus bride instead of a real local church that they can love and they can serve and they'll have to deal with some things in because it's not a cartoon.

Yeah, and so they get on Twitter or social media and they say, ah, it's this, this, this, this, you know?

And I can never find a local, there's not any good church within a hundred miles of me.

That's right.

Or they like to, you know, try, and I understand, you know, there are like, and there are conscience issues, like you can't go to a church, you know, in certain regards, but let me just say this. What if the only church near you was a church at Corinth where they're not doing church, they're not doing church discipline because a guy slept with his step-mom.

They're wildly charismatic.

They are

Some people are dead.

Because they're not doing Lord's supper, right?

Yeah, there's somebody apparently getting baptized on behalf of someone dead.

Right.

You know, like, you're gonna be like, I ain't going there, they're crazy, you know? Paul calls them a church. Now, I understand that's an extreme example, but you just need to think like, if that's the only church in your area, like, what are you gonna do, you know?

Are you gonna seek to go and plug and give your life there and see Christ exalted there? Or are you just gonna get on social media and talk about, you know, your ideal of the church and not actually, you know, the church has a way of humbling us, of beating us up a little bit, you know, where you're like, kind of take the arrogance out of us and having to do real life with people, like really love people, people who sometimes sin or sin against us or who think differently than us sometimes, you know?

The church life is hard in many ways, but if we understand it rightly and see the scriptures teaching on it rightly, like it's worth it, like this is the Christian life. This is the Christian life, life in and through the church.

This is what God is doing in the world today, the church. So give your life to the church and have a zeal for the church. That brings us to pretty close to landing the plane there. What do you got?

No, I think you're exactly right. And maybe the last part we wanna say is don't, when it comes to our zeal for the church, and I'll even kind of admit, I'll confess myself, I've been a little bit kind of on the worn out side here lately.

Yeah, yeah.

But I wanna say this, and I'm saying this more to myself than maybe to anybody else. We don't need to find a balance in this. You know, we always talk about finding a balance. You need to get your life balanced, right?

Work-life balance, whatever. Zeal for your church will consume me, consume me. Like it's everything in our schedule. It's everything in our family. It's everything in our life. Zeal for your house will consume me.

And we're not saying that we're worshiping the church, but we're saying that in worshiping the Lord, it centers around the life of the local church with our brothers and sisters, and everything in our life is consumed by that.

I'll leave you with this thought. How much did zeal for the Lord's house consume Jesus? To death.

Right, that's right.

That's right.

Consumed him to death. He gave his life for the church. Something to consider, brothers and sisters, and I hope that you'll weigh these things carefully. You'll be a Berean and search the scripture. See if these things be so, and then give your life to the church.

Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of the Rural Church Podcast. Say goodbye, Eddie.

See you guys next week.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's doing, this is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemas, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?