Episode 126: Soteriology Affects Ecclesiology

Welcome to 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. Well, I've got an important question for you.

Since last episode, is your heart any better from the Razorback Blast?

You know, this has helped. Talking about church, talking about it's helped, but I'm still not over it.

It still stings. Because in real time, we're like 40 minutes from that conversation.

And even though you're listening to this a week later, we're recording on the same day. So our hearts are still crushed from the

Razorback Baseball loss. But we'll make it. By the time football rolls around, we'll be like that Michael Scott, quote, to make no, there's no doubt about it.

I'm ready to get hurt again. So that's the way it goes. Welcome to the

Rural Church Podcast. I am your host, Allen Nelson. I'm one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

You can learn more about us at ProvidenceBaptistAR. ProvidenceBaptistAR .com.

And with me today, we have a great privilege of having the other pastor of Providence Baptist Church, Pastor Jacob Robinson.

So you still doing okay then? Doing good. Glad once again to be on the Rural Church Podcast.

Man, you're just gonna become a regular co -host here. So we talked about in the last episode your journey of coming to the

Doctrine of Grace. I've shared mine before. We've talked about not long ago, we had

Joseph Allen on. We've had others that shared, Nick White. Others have shared, and it's been encouraging.

But what I want to talk about today and just kind of get into a context, even with church discipline,

Matthew 18, but there's a lot of, so there's a difference between a person who is a

Calvinist and a person who is a Reformed Baptist. So there's a difference between holding a

Calvinist soteriological position and some people call it Sovereign Grace Baptist or Doctrines of Grace Baptist or whatever the case may be.

But I know people personally who soteriologically agree with us. We can walk through the five points.

But it doesn't affect their ecclesiology. So we kind of learned about your journey into soteriology, and we got into this a little bit.

But can you give us, and there's some things I want to say too, but how did you move from being a

Calvinist in soteriology and then affected your ecclesiology where you would consider yourself a

Reformed Baptist? So maybe talk about that for a few minutes. Okay, so I remember this was, so I want to go all the way back to when

I first started thinking about church discipline, started thinking about biblical membership.

It was really while I was still at the Freel Baptist Church I was pastoring, reading Galatians, the text we're going to kind of talk about today,

Matthew 18, and I preached on this. I preached on church discipline. And I've actually went back and looked at my notes on church discipline.

And I was like, I agree with my notes. And I'm like, I really hadn't really grasped onto that.

Like, I feel like what I preached at the time was true. And I would agree with it. And if I were to preach it again, there's not a ton that I would change.

I feel like I was, but I felt like in practice, I wasn't thinking about these things.

I preached, I saw in the text, I preached it, but it didn't go much beyond that of what this really looks like in a local church.

I would say there was never a time that I thought church discipline was not biblical, that you shouldn't have biblical church membership.

I just, I really didn't spend enough time diving into scripture and putting that into practice.

And so when I was at the Freel Baptist Church, I all the time would say, we need to model ourselves over the

New Testament, you know, according to the New Testament church. I would say that, and I would believe that.

But was I really looking, was I really in scripture enough to know what that looks like?

And maybe I had this idea that, okay, there's going to be some differences now. You know, some things are outdated.

I don't know if I had that view, but maybe it kind of affected me a little bit, but really went in that reset period of,

I left the Free Will Baptist Church. I really start studying

John MacArthur. He played a big role, especially expository preaching.

I had never heard of such, came across John MacArthur, John Piper. Well, I really liked how these guys talked about expository preaching, so I started studying more of kind of how the church operates and how some of these guys operate, you know, how the church, how they believe about the church.

And I started kind of just having conversations with,

I'll say his name, Randall Chronister. You know, what is a church supposed to look like?

If our doctrine has changed on soteriology, what else should we change?

What else should we try to be more biblical on? And we really started discussing these things. And so I would say when

I was looking for a church to bring my family that ended up leading us to Perryville Second Baptist, there were some of these things that I looked at.

I looked at 9 Marks. You know, I read that, and I'm not saying I agree with everything within 9

Marks, but it really got me thinking about a plurality of elders.

It got me thinking about church discipline even more, biblical church membership.

And so coming to Perryville Second Baptist, I had these thoughts of, okay, this is what it's supposed to look like, but I really didn't have that many people to just like pour into me and be like, okay, let's take this further.

Let's go to Scripture. And so I feel like when I first came here, I probably bombarded you with all kinds of questions about this stuff because I'm reading this,

I'm going to things like 9 Marks, and I'm seeing it, and then I'm going to Scripture, and I'm like, okay, yeah, that's real.

Plurality of elders. I see it. I see church discipline should be practiced.

I see biblical church membership, and you can go on down the list. That's the way we should do it.

That's how we should do it. Every part of our worship should be affected by this.

Our singing, everything. And so I really coming here and learning from you and bombarding with questions.

Other brothers taking some or auditing some classes at Grace in Conway really kind of helped shape me to the by the time the shift kind of happened here.

I was I felt like now I feel like I'm in a better place now and I pray in a year from now and two years from now more but I feel like I was in a place of like let yes, let's do this.

Let's do this. Yeah, I want to say that the positions I've held as a

Reformed Baptist I've held, you know, I guess 15 16 years now and when

I came to the church I held these positions. In fact, I was up front with the church at the beginning and we were all kind of everybody was on board but when we really began to put these things into practice, that's when we had a bit of a kerfuffle.

Can I say that or a bit of a split for sure. So so a little historical point.

He Pastor Jacob keeps saying Perryville Second Baptist and he heard me at the beginning say Providence Baptist. We haven't changed.

We're the same same church, but we well in a lot of ways we are different but we've just changed our name. So same location and and all but I guess one thing

I want to say is I haven't thought through this well, so like the foundational principle or like one of the foundational principles of coming to a

Calvinistic soteriology is that you're going to just believe what the

Bible says your God is sovereign. You're going to trust that and even if it goes against your flesh and against your experience, you're going to trust what the

Bible says. And so where I find a disconnect is when people say that in their soteriology, but they don't let that come over into the ecclesiology and you articulated that by only thing you said that I would actually just expand on a little bit.

You said you want our church to pattern after the New Testament Church. The only thing I'd expand is like also the

Old Testament Church in the sense that in the sense that we have 39 books in the Old Testament about how

God is to be worshiped and though the positive commands of the New Covenant have are different than those of the

Old Covenant. We still we still believe and understand that God has laid a foundation in the

Old Testament for his sovereignty and for how he's to be worshiped and you know, Nadab and Abihu he did doesn't take those things lightly.

And so so all we're saying is if you are convinced of the scriptures in your soteriology that needs to bleed over.

You think it would be natural but it should bleed over into your ecclesiology where you come to an understanding of so here's some distinctives of our church regenerate church membership.

We don't just let someone come up and and and visit one Sunday and then present them before the church and say hey y 'all want to you want them to be a members.

We don't do that. We talk with them. We pray with them. We have our church interview them as it were, you know more informally organically, but but the point is we only want converted people as part of our church.

We we believe in the regular principle of worship and I know there's some others that hold that that may they may do things different than us.

But what we're saying is we just believe the word of God ought to drive our service. We have a high view.

I think was this last episode now. We have a high view of preaching. Preaching is primary in our in our our

Lord's Day gatherings. We we don't do altar calls.

Both of us grew up with a background, right? You grew up of altar calls.

And so we don't do that. Why? It's not in the Bible. It's not biblical. It's it's manipulative and we could go on and on.

Oh, you talked about plurality of elders. To me as I breaks my heart sometimes when I hear people who say that they're

Calvinist, but they but but but they don't hold to a plurality of elders, even though that's clearly in the script.

So I'm just saying that consistency demands that the same principle that drives our soteriology the sovereignty of God and the authority and sufficient the scripture ought to also drive our ecclesiology.

Yeah, I think of and I think most who hold the to the doctrines of grace would agree with this, you know, so say we have someone come to myself or to you

Pastor Quatro after service and say, you know, I think I'm saved or, you know, I want to be saved.

I think most would say, well, we're not just going to lead them through a prayer. We're going to what are we going to do?

We're going to counsel. We're going to talk to them. We're going to if it takes and you've said this after sermon if it takes all afternoon, we're going to sit here and we're going to go to scripture and we're going to look at the gospel.

We're going to add because we want to one we don't want to give false assurance to this to this person that they are a believer.

We're not going to repeat a prayer and we're going to we're not going to post it on Facebook to tell how many people got saved this morning because here's the truth.

These are souls that if they die outside of Christ they go to hell and we don't want to give them false assurance.

And so I think most have doctrines their soteriology doctrines of grace would say no you don't just lead them through a prayer you spend time talking to this person.

So you don't in understanding that they understand the gospel that there are truly a believer that I think in any church you should do that.

You should not just parade them up front without talking to them and that our soteriology is effect that we believe

God is sovereign and that we don't believe you're saved by prayer. So we want to spend the time to and we're capable of being wrong.

We're capable of getting it wrong. But to not give false assurance to someone to see if they're genuinely a believer.

Why would we not do that with our ecclesiology with somebody joining the church or somebody wanting to be baptized which that ties into being you know, all of it ties to that's the thing you try to separate it.

You can't separate it. It's just all tied together. I tried to say wait that one's tied to so to it but it's all tied together.

It's all linked. And so I agree. I don't see how you can separate these. Yeah, really it really yeah, very well put it all all goes together.

I just don't understand how sometimes people can fail to make the connection there and I want to say that having a

Calvinist soteriology is controversial and you're going to have you're going to have controversy just by being soteriologically aligned with the doctrines of grace, which we would call biblical.

So let me just say biblical soteriology is controversial enough. But then you add to that you now let that affect your ecclesiology and it's even more controversial because I know some guys that are soteriologically they have a biblical soteriology.

They hold to the doctrines of grace. They believe that God is sovereign over salvation, but it doesn't really affect their ecclesiology.

And so they still kind of they do the altar calls or they don't care about plurality of elders or they do crazy stuff on Sunday or or they don't care about regular principle of worship, you know, it's just it's it's it's an interesting position, but they can still kind of find so people are like, okay.

Well, we disagree on salvation, but we'll just keep pressing on together. But when you say no, no, wait, hold on just a second.

This is affected not just my soteriological position, not just my doctrine of salvation.

This affects the way I view the church. The church is different. Well, the way we do

Lord's Supper, you know, is different. The way we counsel with baptism is different. The way we sing and the type of songs that we will sing and even in like our church, we sing psalms and we publicly, you know, memorize scripture and we read the confession and we read from the we've read from a couple different catechism right now.

We're reading through the Baptist catechism, you know, doing all this and being serious about doctrine and theology, you're going to get labeled like our church sometimes gets a negative label, you know, one of I'll try to be very very vague here.

So it's not traced back. But one of my children's friends said to them or one of their friends, your dad's a cult leader, you know, that's like what no, we're just trying to take the

Bible seriously and furthermore, if we just come up with a bunch of positions that we say the

Bible teaches and we're the first ones ever come up with that. Well, yeah, you would have the right to say cult, but when we're finding the same truths that our

Baptist forefathers have laid the foundation for help. That's why I think it's one reason it's important that we don't hold to Quatro and Jacob's confession of faith at Providence Baptist Church.

We hold to the 1689 Second London Baptist confession of faith because we stand in a long line of godly men.

So what I want to get to which we've been promising getting to the text. We're going to get to that anything else you need to say about all that anything else come to your

Just thankful for for God's grace because all of this like you said, it's not

Quatro or Jacob's and it's not that I'm so smart or you're so smart. I mean, you're a lot smarter than I am, but it's it's by God's grace.

I'm just very thankful for his grace, you know, through all this through this whole journey that I've talked about.

I'm just thankful for his grace. Amen. And I would say again, don't go into the church with a chainsaw, you know, if you're in a situation reforming the church is not

I'm not going to say it's hard. It's impossible. It's only possible by the grace of God. And so be patient love your people know that Christ loves the church even you know, when

Paul's writing to Corinth and he they have some terrible issues, but he still he still affirms them, you know, and loves them.

And so I think I think that's important. So one of the things that is unique about a reformed

Baptist Church in a sense. I mean, I know others carry this out, but but there's others

I'm thinking more of like SBC. Like I know some people who hold to a Calvinist soteriology in the in SBC churches, but it doesn't really affect like they don't do church discipline their roles.

So one of the things you have a passage that you wanted to read from Matthew 18. So I'm going to let you read that and make some of the comments that you wanted to make about that and then we'll just kind of go from there.

Yeah, so just in Matthew 18, you know, it's very familiar scripture.

I think even most people who don't practice church discipline know this if your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.

If he listens you have gained your brother, but if he does not listen take one or two others along with you that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

If he refuses to listen to them tell it to the church and if he refuses to listen even to the church let him be to you as a

Gentile and a tax collector truly. I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth should be loosed in heaven again.

I say to you if two or three or if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask you will be done for them by my father in heaven for where two or three are gathered in my name there.

I am it among them so we could spend a lot of time dissecting everything there in that text, but what you see and you even see this

I think even with people who doctrines of grace, but you see it throughout evangelicalism is even one of the primary verses that people would use to kind of say that there's not a need for the church, not a need for the local church.

What verse would you would you think of of like I don't need the local church will be verse 20 there for where two or three are gathered in my name there

I am among them so many people you hear will say see that said, you know, my wife's a believer.

That's me plus my wife. That's two where we gather. He's in the midst of so I have church at home with my wife.

Well, the problem is is even that verse that is used so wrongly in that way that verse is affirming the church and is affirming the biblical doctrine of church discipline.

So he goes through he walks through church discipline and so we have

Christ walk through church discipline and then we see at the end.

He's saying I'm with you in this where two or three are gathered in my name there.

I am among them. He is for the church in church discipline. Christ is for you.

And so that's an encouragement that hey, when you practice these things biblically when your ecclesiology is biblical you practice things such as church discipline.

It's hard. Church discipline is hard. We've worked through things before that have been hard other churches. I know you've worked through things where church discipline is hard not saying it's not but this text right there that verse 20 that's taken so out of context

Christ is for you in this he is with you in your church being reformed to his word meaning being a church that practices biblical church membership and discipline, you know, we've said this before but I think it's important like no one is more for the health and Reformation of the church than our triune

God Christ is for the church and Christ is with the church and this episode is not a not not a long explanation of church discipline.

It's just this aspect that if you're going to be serious about your sociology, then you should be serious about your ecclesiology.

We heard from our friend Pastor Jonathan Murdoch, which by the time this comes out, he'll be coming to our church and in less than two months and he preached now.

We heard it in Spanish. He's going to come here preaching English. So we'll but he preached about formative church discipline and and formative church discipline is the aspect churches when we don't think about a lot but that is the teaching of the church.

You're disciplining in the church every Sunday because it comes from the same root word

Latin root word discipline and disciple. It's just from the same root. So it's your discipling, that's formative.

You're disciplining the church in the teaching and preaching and the ordinances and the worship.

All this is training. It's not just an event. So the local church gathering is not just this event you go to once a week.

It is the gathering of the saints and Christ is with us in a way that he is not with you when you're out on the lake with your buddy or at home with your wife.

He's with the church in a special way. That's what the text is teaching because specifically it's teaching about in corrective discipline.

So there's formative discipline, the teaching and then corrective discipline where sometimes in the church you have to put someone out.

I've been at churches before where they've said we just don't do that.

We just don't do that. Well, it doesn't matter what you think or what you do or your experience. What matters is what does the

Bible say and the Bible gives a very clear pattern here and not just pattern but also a prescription, a command for you to handle the church this way.

And so there comes a point sometimes when a brother or someone who you thought was a brother or sister persist in sin and then they don't repent, persisting in unrepentant sin, and then you have to put them out of the church.

And when you're putting them out of the church, the text there says that you're treating them like a Gentile and a tax collector, meaning that you're treating them as an unbeliever.

Might they be a believer? Yes, but they've taken all outward external observation away from you.

Like the only pronouncement you can make on them is that they're an unbeliever. And the hope is that that will bring them back to the fold and back to repentance.

And so like you said, we've had to deal with a few over the years, a few situations.

We've removed people off the roll. It's a different story, but we've also had a situation of dealing with a person and they were repentant, you know, and they wound up having to go before the church, but it was because it's a public issue, but they were repentant and like, praise

God, like the goal is not to get, the goal is restoration. The goal is not to get them out of the church.

The goal is to see them restored. And yeah, you want to say something? No, I just agree. Yeah. And so all that I'm trying to say in all this is that these two things are tied together.

If you, well, I'll put it both ways. If you hold to a healthy church, but you don't hold to a healthy soteriology, you're inconsistent.

And if you hold to a healthy soteriology, but you don't hold to a healthy ecclesiology, you're inconsistent because all of these things go together.

And I want to be clear, brother, like we're not trying to like bash people where I'm like, that's like, I'm not saying like, if you don't do everything like we do, we don't even recognize you as a church.

No, like we said before, the church at Corinth had a lot of unhealthy situations, but Paul still recognized it as a church, but what we're just trying to make a plea for consistency.

And also, I think you said this, now the episode is running together, but I think you said this last episode, you believe your opinions are right.

Well, of course, does anybody hold opinions are like, well, I hold this, but I believe it's wrong. Like no one does that, like, and we hold this and, and I would argue again,

I believe we stand in a long line of godly men that we stand up on the shoulders of giants as it were, and, and even guys like in the past, like Calvin and Luther, particularly

I'll mention those, they made some serious mistakes, but they also did some good things that we're appreciative of.

So we can appreciate people who, who disagree. We're just making a plea that your soteriology and your ecclesiology should match up.

And I would even add this, can I add one more, your eschatology. So you should be all male. But anyway, anything you want to say to all that?

Yeah, I would say the reformation of the church is, is hard.

Yes, absolutely. You will have people that leave. You, you will have, there will come hard times.

I do want to say this though, this view of the church and you, you know, if, if ecclesiology even, you know,

Pastor Cuatro talked a little bit about worship. So with, you talk about like the regulative principle of worship, whenever this is your view, we're just going to do whatever the

Bible says, like soteriology, ecclesiology, and, you know, including worship.

We're just going to do what the Bible says. It's actually very freeing. Amen. If you have a group of people that are just like, we're just going to do what the

Bible says, very thankful for what God has done here at Providence, what he has done.

There's no way Pastor Cuatro and myself could do what has been done here. It's only by the grace of God and just to have, we're not a perfect group, but when you have a group that by God's grace will come together and just say, well, what does the

Bible say? Let's do what the Bible says, because here's the thing, Pastor Cuatro and I, I don't know if you know this, but we're not clones of one another.

We're not exactly alike. There may be differences of opinion here or there, but the freeing thing is that, you know what?

It's not Pastor Jacob's church. It's not Pastor Cuatro's church. It's Christ's church, and we do what the

Bible says. So if we have, if we ever did have a disagreement, we just go to the Bible and we do what the

Bible says. If somebody comes up and says, you know, I would like us to do this, or I'd like to see this in our worship.

What do we do? We go to the Bible and we do what God says. If it's in there, we do it.

If it's not, we don't do it. I use this example in a sermon, you know, something like the local puppet ministry comes and they say, hey, we want to be a part of your evening service.

Well, we just go to the Bible and we say it ain't in there, and it's actually freeing whenever you just are resolved to say soteriology, ecclesiology, eschatology.

You know what? What does the Bible say? And then have confessions, have these things, you know,

Pastor Cuatro has used this example many times that the confessions, the confession is not scripture.

It's glasses that you use to read scripture that we believe this is what articulates what we believe about the

Bible. If there is ever a time that I hold a view in scripture that nobody else has ever held in the entirety of church history, it's probably a problem.

More than likely, there's a problem there. So rely on these. Go, go back. I'm not saying go back 30 or 40 years ago.

I'm saying go back hundreds of years ago and go back to the, you know, and read these things and just know that even though it's hard,

Christ is for you in this. And then last thing I would say, I'm going to turn it over to Pastor Cuatro, is that we all can increase our view of the church.

We all can increase our view of Christ. We all, our ecclesiology could be better, every one of us.

So my encouragement, increase your view of the church, increase your view of Christ, increase your view of his word, and know that God is for you in it.

Yeah, that's good, brother. And basically what a lot of people want to say for salvation, soli deo gloria, to God alone be the glory.

I don't want you to just say that in your soteriology, but also in your ecclesiology. Soli deo gloria, to God alone be the glory in the church.

And so you're going to, even if it runs countercultural, you know, well, we always used to do it this way.

Yeah, but it's not in the Bible. Okay, again, be patient, learn the things that you can live with, learn the things that you can be patient with, and move slowly, other things you have to move more quickly.

But the whole point is, I want to say soli deo gloria in the church. Everything that the Bible teaches me about the church,

I want to apply that for the glory of God, because Christ is worthy of a healthy church.

It's hard. You're right, but it's most work in life that is worthwhile is hard work.

And there's no more glorious work in the world today than Christ building his church among the nations.

And so you can imagine it's going to be hard, and particularly like us, the Rural Church Podcast, and here in the Bible Belt, and it can be different.

People can look at us differently. But so be it. I just found out the other day that there was another church with a mission project, another church in our town was going door -to -door passing out gospel tracts.

Now, I could be nitpicky about that. I go, well, I don't know about, you know, this, but it's like, man, that encourages me, and I would like to say,

I don't know if it's true or not, but I'd like to say that Providence Baptist Church has a bit of influence in that, because we're willing to go out and evangelize, and we're willing to be different, not for the sake of being different, but just different because if you're going to be serious about the

Bible, look, if you're going to be serious about the Bible, your church is going to be different. It's going to be different than the status quo.

You're going to look different than your community, even in the Bible Belt. But you got to be willing to say, I'm going to do that because Christ is worthy.

So, anything else you want to say about all that? So, last main question, your theological position, well, we talked about the first of last episode.

Can sports teams be cursed? Once again, theologically, and if I let that shape my worldview,

I don't believe in sports team curses, but I don't know what it is.

If it's not a curse, I just, I don't know if it's just so much, we can't handle the pressure, but it really makes it tough being a

Razorback fan. You know my position. My position is the Lord loves us so much that He keeps us humble because we would just be so arrogant,

I guess. I guess that's it. That's got to be it. If we won a national championship, we would just go crazy.

So, the Lord loves us so much that He's going to keep us humble. So, to that, we say, Soli Deo Gloria.

Thank you guys for joining us on this episode and the last two. It was really good, brother, having you on.

It's a privilege. I hope later in the summer, maybe after you get back from your trip and stuff, we can do this again.

That's great. Appreciate you a lot and our church wouldn't be what it is without the

Lord's using you here. So, thanks for being here and thank you guys for listening and we'll catch you guys next week on the

Rule Church Podcast. 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 poemos, the masterpiece of God.