Episode 126: Soteriology Affects Ecclesiology

The Father’s Glory in the Son and the Church

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 .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 wanna talk about today and just kinda 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 soteriological, a Calvinist soteriological position. 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 kinda 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 wanna say as 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.

Soteriology Shaping Ecclesiology Through Church Discipline and Membership

Okay, so I remember, this was, so I wanna 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 Free Old Baptist Church.

I was pastoring, reading Galatians, the text we're gonna kinda 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, like I agree with my notes.

And I'm like, I really hadn't really grasped onto that. 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 saw it 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 Free Old Baptist Church, I all the time would say, we need to model ourselves over the New Testament, 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 gonna be some differences now. 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 Old Baptist Church, 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, 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. 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 Nine Marks, I read that. And I'm not saying I agree with everything within Nine 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 Nine 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, yes, let's do this.

Let's do this.

Consistency Between Doctrines of Grace and Church Practice

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 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 gonna just believe what the Bible says. You, God is sovereign. You're gonna trust that.

And even if it goes against your flesh and against your experience, you're gonna 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. My 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 are different than those of the old covenant, 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 doesn't take those things lightly. And 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 visit one Sunday and then present them before the church and say, hey, y 'all wanna, you want them to be in 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 the point is we only want converted people as part of our church. We believe in the regular principle of worship.

And I know there's some others that hold that, that 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 Lord's Day gatherings. 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 manipulative. And we could go on and on. Oh, you talked about plurality of elders. To me, as it breaks my heart sometimes when I hear people who say that they're Calvinist, 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 sufficiency of the scripture, ought to also drive our ecclesiology.

Matthew 18 and the Church’s Authority in Discipline

Yeah.

I think of, and I think most who hold to the doctrines of grace would agree with this. So say we have someone come to myself or to you, Pastor Quatro, after service and say, I think I'm saved, or I wanna be saved.

I think most would say, well, we're not just gonna lead them through a prayer. We're gonna, what are we gonna do? We're gonna counsel, we're gonna talk to them. We're gonna, if it takes, and you've said this after a sermon, if it takes all afternoon, we're gonna sit here and we're gonna go to scripture and we're gonna look at the gospel.

We're gonna, because we want to, one, we don't wanna give false assurance to this person that they are a believer. We're not gonna repeat a prayer and we're not gonna 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 who 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 effected 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, 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 soteriology, but it's all tied together. It's all linked. And so I agree. I don't see how you can separate these.

Yeah, it really, yeah, very well put. It 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 they don't care about regular principle of worship. You know, it's just, 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 has 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 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 like our church, we sing psalms, and we publicly memorize scripture, and we read the confession, and we read from a couple different catechism.

Right now, we're reading through the Baptist catechism. Doing all this and being serious about doctrine and theology, you're going to get labeled, like our church sometimes gets a negative label. 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.

And it'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 to 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 and helped, that's why I think 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 I wanna get to, we've been promising getting to the text, we're gonna get to that. Anything else you need to say about all that, anything else come to your mind?

I'm just thankful 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 by God's grace.

I'm just very thankful for His grace 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. If you're in a situation, reforming a church is, I'm not gonna 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 when Paul's writing to Corinth, and they have some terrible issues, but he still affirms them and loves them. And so I think that's important.

Church Discipline, Corrective Discipline, and Restoration

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

So one of the things, you have a passage that you wanted to read from Matthew 18. So I'm gonna 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, 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 shall 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, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am 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 think of? Of like, I don't need the local church. Would 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, my wife's a believer.

That's me plus my wife. That's two. Where we gather, he's in the midst of it. 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. 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 long explanation of church discipline.

It's just this aspect that if you're gonna be serious about your soteriology, then you should be serious about your ecclesiology. We heard from our friend, Pastor Jonathan Murdock, which by the time this comes out, he'll be coming to our church in less than two months.

And he preached, now we heard it in Spanish, he's gonna come here preaching English, so we'll, but he preached about formative church discipline. And formative church discipline is the aspect church discipline 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 you're 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. Yeah, you wanna say something to that?

No, I just agree.

Regenerate Membership, Worship, and the Regulative Principle

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. Now, I wanna be clear, brother. Like, we're not trying to, like, bash people.

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's running together, but I think you said this last episode, you believe your opinions are right.

Well, of course, does anybody hold opinions that are like, well, I hold this, but I believe it's wrong. Like, no one does that. Like, and we hold this. 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 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 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 hard, yes, absolutely. You will have people that leave. 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 ecclesiology, even, you know, Pastor Quatro talked a little bit about worship.

So with, you talk about, like, the regulative principle of worship. Whenever this is your view of, we're just gonna do whatever the Bible says. Like, soteriology, ecclesiology, and, you know, including worship, we're just gonna 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 gonna do what the Bible says. Very thankful for what God has done here at Providence, what He has done. There's no way Pastor Quatro 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 Quatro 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 Quatro's church. It's Christ's church. And we do what the Bible says. So 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 Quatro has used this example many times that 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 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, 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 gonna turn it over to Pastor Quatro, 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.

Christ’s Church, Soli Deo Gloria, and the Cost of Faithfulness

Yeah, that's good, brother. And basically what a lot of people wanna 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 gonna, even if it runs counter-cultural, 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 wanna 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. And 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 gonna 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 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 gonna be serious about the Bible, look, if you're gonna 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 gotta be willing to say, I'm gonna do that because Christ is worthy. So anything else you wanna 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 gotta be it. If we won a national championship, we would just go crazy.

So the Lord loves us so much that he's gonna 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. Thank you guys for listening, and we'll catch you guys next week on the Rural 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.

How are you gonna respond?