Seasoned Members Class (part 3)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Welcome back to Seasoned Members Class, for those of you who've been here for Parts 1 and 2 and 3 and 3 and a half.

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And I don't know, I've lost count by now. I think this is Part 3. So if you've not been here before for my teaching this summer, what's happening, many of you know that I teach the

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New Members Class here at BBC. And I thought it would be fun and interesting and helpful for all of you.

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To those of you who either didn't take the class with me because you came in, you snuck in here before I started teaching it, or it's been a while and you just don't quite remember all that, kind of do like a refresher of it.

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And I've been calling it Seasoned Members Class because Old Members Class was a little bit too insulting on the nose.

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So it's Seasoned Members Class, right? And we are here and we're kind of going over that material.

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But for those of you who've just recently been in it, I think you can agree that I've been putting in so much more material and everything.

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It's almost like an Advanced Members Class. So congratulations. Consider yourselves an

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Advanced Members Class. That's maybe the better. This is like graduate level Members Class. All right.

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So for session one, we spent a lot of time talking about the familial terms that are used for church.

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And what are those familial terms? Not familiar, but familial. Anybody remember?

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What do I mean by familial? Right. Father, brother and sister.

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Yes. Right. God is our father and your fellow believers in Christ are your brothers and sisters.

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OK. And, you know, the Bible does not use those terms lightly.

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Right. It's what we talked about. We said how the what we know of that earthly relationship with our families is intended to be a glimpse of a lesson plan for how our relationships ought to be with our

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Christian brothers and sisters and with Jesus and with the father. If you can imagine how much you love and or if not even your own brother or sister, but if you could just imagine or picture the ideal brother sister relationship, earthly brother sister relationship, and you'd say what

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God is saying is that you ought it ought to be that and better with our

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Christian brothers and sisters. And in session two, we talked about how that God's instituted the church for many reasons, one of which is our spiritual protection, our spiritual protection.

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And so we spent a lot of time talking about how church is designed for how being in our church is designed for spiritual protection.

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And actually, I even made a big deal of it. Remember last time about the preposition. Right. I said we're not going to say that we are in church.

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Where because we are, in fact, what was that? A church.

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Right. We are a church. We are among the church. Right. We are to be in church sort of betrays the idea that we think of it too much as the building.

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Right. We are the church. We are among the church. And to be among the church, among the people, is one of the best things for us, for our spiritual protection.

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If you turn to Hebrews 10, chapter 10, verses 23 to 25 this morning, this was from last week.

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But let's just we're going to hit this a little bit more today. Hebrews chapter 10, verse 23 and 25, 23 through 25.

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Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering for he who promised is faithful.

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And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet one together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.

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And all the more as you see the day drawing near. So what was the purpose, as we saw in that of meeting together?

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If verse 25 says not neglecting to meet together, what was the purpose of that? Verse 24.

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Right. Right. To encourage. Right. So a little part after 25, encouraging one another, but also what's in verse 24, which was to stir up.

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To stir up one another, to love and to good works, to inspire each other, to set potentially, sometimes it's to set an example for one another.

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But certainly it's there's plenty of just, you know, of encouragement, of, of support, providing a support network for each other, so to speak, when it comes to how, what kind of good works or service that we are trying to accomplish.

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And I also mentioned quite a bit about a sheep, the sheep analogy. Right. And we talked about how the

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Bible, of course, talks, uses sheep as an analogy for us frequently.

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And sheep are herd animals. And we mentioned how, what is the benefit to being in a herd for sheep?

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It is their mutual care and defense. Right. By being part of a herd, there are some level of mutual care.

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And of course, there's also the defensive element of being part of a herd. You want to be in the herd.

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Right. You want to be in the herd. And so one of the great privileges of church membership, perhaps the greatest privilege, is that it is an inoculation against three things, temptation, spiritual defeat, and self -deception.

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Temptation, spiritual defeat, and self -deception. Now, last week, at the end of last week, we went through those three things one at a time.

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And we talked about all the different ways in which being among the church, we get protection against temptations, against spiritual defeat, which we talked about in terms of just kind of twofold in terms of either succumbing to the temptation and falling into a pattern of sin, or also just the notion of being depressed, down, being unable to, you know, sort of losing our love for God, our passion for God, our zeal for God, and just sort of falling into sort of a pit.

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And then self -deception was more, we said, there's kind of two ways of self -deception.

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One is for those who are either unsaved, but thinking that they are saved, that being in a church setting, being among the church, is going to expose them to the truth over and over and over again.

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But two, for those of us who are saved, for those who are true brothers and sisters in Christ, it is against the self -deception of error that can creep in, when you are trying to study the

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Word and learn about God from the Word, that if you're not among other believers, it's very easy for you to go off the rails, in one way, shape, or form.

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All right, now my, what I was starting to get to, just as we were closing last time, is that I have a, it's my assertion that all, that this all happens, right, how that all happens has a common root.

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It has a common root. And to me, that common root is the

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Word. It is the Bible, the Scriptures. That in all those things, it is the fact that when you are among your brothers and sisters, that the

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Word is going to come up a lot, and be talked a lot about, and debated about, and bandied about, right?

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That it is because of the Scriptures being at the forefront of all of those conversations and all of that time together, that you get all of those three protections against temptation and spiritual defeat and self -deception.

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So, let's talk about how we gather, all right? How we heard, as I said, as a sheep.

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That's what we're going to do today. How we gather. How we heard. How do we hear about the

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Word? How do we talk about the Word? Together. First, we hear about God among the church.

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We hear about God from the pulpit. From the pulpit. And so, of course, by that I mean that our regular gathering on Sunday mornings, or evening services, or other kind of special services, where we gather together to be able to hear the

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Word preached to us. And we form these groups of a local church body, partially in order to support shepherds who can invest their time, on a full -time basis, in the studying of the

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Word, in the praying for us, and in the preparing to preach that Word to us.

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Okay? So, one of the most important things we do among our church family is to gather together to hear the

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Word from the pulpit. Several weeks ago, almost a month ago now, Jerry Fish was up here, and he did a lesson for this adult

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Sunday school about the parable of the soils. Right? The parable of the soils. Turn to Luke 8.

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Do a little callback here to that parable. So just to refresh everyone, somebody read the paragraph about the parable of the soils, the parable of the soils, verse 4 through 8.

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And there you go. So there's four different types of soil here, right? As we remember

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Jerry's lesson. And the three of them, the first three, all represented a different kind of unsaved heart.

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Right? One that was not ready to receive the Word, where the Word did not take the kind of root necessary in order to lead to salvation.

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But the fourth one, the good soil, represents the hearts of those who

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God has called and has saved. Now, just as a fun aside,

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I remember one of Jerry's questions was, so if there's four soils and one out of four was true, does that mean that 25 % of the people in the world are going to be saved?

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Right? Do you remember that true or false? Remember? What's the answer? False, right. Okay, good. Just checking.

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This parable is not teaching statistics, all right, or probability. Just that there are four types.

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Now, Ken Ramey, who wrote this really helpful little book, or Ramey, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce his name,

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Expository Listening. Okay, he's from Masters. It's Ramey? Okay, thank you, Steve. He wrote this little, it's a little short book, it's called

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Expository Listening. It's a really helpful little book. It's packed full of practical wisdom about how to listen to sermons with purpose and intent.

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And when he looks at that, he talks about the fourth soil a little bit in that book, a little bit more about the good soil.

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And he points out verse 18. So down in verse 18, well, actually, right after, in verses 9 through 15,

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Jesus goes on to explain the parable to his disciples directly, right? And he lays it all out, exactly what each type of soil represents.

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And as he's wrapping up that explanation in verse 16, he says, you know, he's talking about for the folks who have the good soil, he's saying that no one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, right, so that those who enter may see the light.

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For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.

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And then listen to this, verse 18, as he sort of wraps up this discussion. He says, take care then how you hear, right?

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That whole parable was about people hearing the word and how they heard.

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And here's Jesus talking to his disciples, 11 of which, anyway, are saved.

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And he's saying, take care how you hear. So what

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Ramey was saying is that he called it, the analogy he used was harrowing, okay, harrowing our hearts to hear.

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And the word harrow is a tool, another instrument from farming, that you would take the harrow after you would plow the field, right, and you'd come on down with that plow, and that would dig up the soil, but it would sort of leave these big, giant, deep ruts, right?

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You've seen probably pictures of this, or you've seen it in action in the farming. And a harrow was then the tool that you came back and you'd run it over that field again after it had been plowed up, and that would smooth it all out again and lay it all flat and make it all nice and consistent, right, before you would then scatter the seed, okay?

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So the plowing was the action that made the soil ready, right, but the harrowing kind of made it just a little bit better, made it a little bit even more ready and receptive for the seed.

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And so in that way, there's not anything that we're going to do to turn our soil into the good soil.

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That's God and the Holy Spirit at work. But there is practical things we can do with our good soil that God has given us to harrow it.

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That's Ken's sort of his thesis, okay? And so I want to share with you a few of the things that he suggests that we can do to prepare our soil on Sundays or during the week or on Saturday night just before.

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One is kind of taking it in order of the week, that early on in the week, Monday, Tuesday -ish, read over what was preached that week.

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Read over what was preached that week. Just go back over it again. And the reason for that is actually very much based on just the science of how our memory works, that if you hear something and you take it in, and then you force your brain to think about it again a few days later, your brain sort of recognizes like, oh, this must be something important.

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It wasn't something just in the moment that I needed. It's something that I need to remember. And it takes that out of your short -term memory, and it files it in under that long -term memory section, right?

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Where it'll be sort of, it'll stick with you longer. So read over what was preached during the last week.

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And then while you're doing that, to meditate on what you read. To meditate on what you read.

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And I'm sure most of you know this, but when we say the word meditate, we do not mean to close your eyes and clear your mind and repeat and chant

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OM or something like that. It is not, in fact, biblical meditation is the exact opposite.

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It is not to empty your mind, it is to fill your mind. So really, when

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I say meditate, and when the Bible says meditate, we just mean to think really deeply about what it is you're reading, or what it was that was preached.

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Number three, and this is an interesting one, is to check your media intake.

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The kinds of media that you intake over the course of the week. And in that, he says, practice being an active hearer rather than a passive one.

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That so much of our media nowadays is designed to make you a passive hearer.

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You just receive, receive, receive, and you don't even, it almost doesn't want you to think about it.

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Right, so practice being an active hearer. And then to plan ahead for Sunday.

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This is another one that I really like. He said to plan ahead for Sunday. For some of us, that means having to set

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Saturday night apart a little bit. Where you just say, you know, he talks about avoiding things that will cause lingering distractions in your mind the next morning, which

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I thought was kind of an interesting way to put it. Try to get a good night's sleep.

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Try to get a good breakfast. And then here's, this is a really important one, and I'm sure most of the dads in this room can relate to this.

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Be prepared for something to go wrong almost every Sunday morning. Amen. How many people had something go wrong this

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Sunday morning? We did. Right, roll with the punches.

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Roll with the punches. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. And the worst thing we can do is let the chaos crisis of the

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Sunday morning derail us for the rest of the day. So there is something to be just said for if you just,

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I know it sounds like being a pessimist, but if you are prepared for something is going to go wrong, then at least you won't be frustrated or upset or just thrown off by it when it does come.

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Another one was to arrive with an expectant and teachable heart.

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An expectant and teachable heart. The prayer that I like to pray with my family on Saturday nights when we sit down for dinner and we're just saying grace, and I always just think about how the next day is

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Sunday, or not always, but when I do think of it. The prayer I like to pray is,

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Lord, please prepare our hearts for what is going to happen tomorrow. Change our lives from what we hear.

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Be ready for the possibility that what you're going to hear on any given Sunday morning is going to change your life.

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It ought to be, in fact, changing your life in small, maybe imperceptible ways to you every single time.

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But sometimes something really big might even happen. So be prepared.

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Be ready to be teachable. And then last, and maybe you are experiencing this right now, fight off the distractions while you're listening because you can listen faster than the preacher can talk.

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Now, one thing that I like to do for that is I like to take notes during a sermon.

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And the reason I like to do that is because by handwriting it out, my hand goes about the same speed as the preacher can talk.

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And so it helps me to slow down and stay on wherever he is.

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But there are other things you can do. I'm certainly not saying that everyone has to take notes. I'm just offering that as one possible suggestion.

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But do what you need to do in order to stay in gear with what's going on during the sermon.

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I've heard some people say that they even try to repeat back in their head the sentence they just heard.

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If the preacher pauses for a long pause to just try to recite in their own minds exactly what he just said with the last sentence.

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Just sort of repeat it to yourself. So that's another good possibility. Okay. All right.

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Now, speaking of distractions, let's talk for a minute about kids and kids in the congregation during the sermon.

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Okay. Now, why do we here at BBC not just invite but encourage kids in the room?

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Anybody besides Steve know? Right.

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The end goal is to be able to have them be able to sit here. Right. To have them be able to sit under the

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Word. That's great. That's great. What else? Yeah.

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Nietzsche? Yes. That is a big one.

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Church is not just for mom and dad. It's not like something where the family separates. Right.

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Okay. You go off to do your thing. You go off to do that thing. But rather it's a thing that we do together. Right. Not just as because remember all we've been talking about the familial terms thing.

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If your own family isn't doing it together, what does it make sense to talk about the church as a family doing it together?

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Savannah? The church, the

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Bible, the Gospel, they're not just for the parents. They're for you too. They're for you too.

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If there is any goal to Christian parenting, it is to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the

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Lord. Right. Well, where do you adults get your nurture and admonition? You get it from sitting here.

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Right. From hearing the word preached or from reading the word or from discussing the word with each other.

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And so in the same way, that's what we want the kids to have, the kids to experience. If we send the kids out,

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Scott Clark, he says, you know, sometimes the bulletin explains that the children are sent out of public worship in order to prepare them for worship.

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Which sounds like sending someone's child away from the dinner table in order to prepare them to eat.

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It sends the message that the church is something we do, but not something we are.

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And that's the real, that's the real crux of it. And that just brings us all full circle back to what

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I've been saying about that we're not in church, we're among church. We're among the church.

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And so when it comes to Sunday mornings or service times, just some practical advice, something that's worked well for my family,

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I know it's worked for others, is to kind of just build step by step those age appropriate sort of goals or tasks or challenges for your kids as they sit in the services.

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When they're really little, you might just be happy if they can even tell you three words that they remember that the pastor said.

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We've done little games with the smaller kids where we've written out the alphabet, A through Z, on a piece of paper, and we've said, alright, every time you hear

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Pastor Steve or Pastor Mike and they say another word that starts with a different letter, write that word on there and see if you can fill up the entire

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A through Z page on the day. So Steve, please work in xylophone a little more often, would you please?

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And Zephyr, yeah, Zephyr and xylophone, alright? Alright, so that.

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And then we have, in the bookstore, there's the books about like sermon notes for kids, right, where it just gives sort of worksheet things where it gives a little bit more structure to the kids to be able to engage a little bit more strongly with the sermon and whatnot.

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So you just sort of set up little challenges for them where you can, and then maybe you take some time afterwards as a family to talk about it a little bit more and see what they can remember, and as they're getting better about it, you stretch them a little bit more, and you give them a little bit harder challenge as they grow, right?

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So there you go. So that helps keep them engaged. Because the one thing you don't want to do, one danger, one possible negative, is if all you do is provide them with a whole bunch of distraction while they're here in church, instead of teaching them, training them to sit here and listen, we're just training them to ignore it, right, to tune it out and do something fun instead.

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So we've got to be careful about balancing that. There is nothing else in their life, really, if you think about it, that's going to train them to sit for 45 minutes to an hour and listen to one person talk without any kind of questions or interaction or fancy graphics or anything.

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So we've got to help train them. Okay, so that is hearing about God from the pulpit.

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Now I want to talk about hearing about God from each other, all right, from each other.

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Turn to Luke chapter 7. We're right here in Luke 8 still, maybe. Turn over to Luke 7. Now I confess, this is not about two people of a local church who are together in a local church, but I think there's a good principle here about how we hear about God from each other.

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Luke chapter 7, verses 18 through 23. Now before we read it, I just want to set the stage a little bit, and this is about John the

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Baptist, and John the Baptist at this point is in prison. Okay, he has served well. He has served boldly.

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He has seen Jesus with his own eyes and even seen the Holy Spirit descend upon him, right, like a dove.

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But here he is, he's in prison, and what we're going to read is that he finds himself having a lot of doubts.

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Because while things were going great for a while, now here he is in jail.

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What's happening, Lord? It's sort of a natural reaction that's coming up in his mind.

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Okay, let's look at verse 18 through 23. The disciples of John reported all these things to him.

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And John, calling two of his disciples to him, sent them to the Lord, saying, Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?

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Here's the sort of doubt thing. And when the men had come to him, that is to Jesus, they said,

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John the Baptist has sent us to you, saying, Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another? In that hour, he,

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Jesus, healed many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits. And on many who were blind, he bestowed sight.

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And so he answered them, saying, Go and tell John what you have seen and heard. Go and tell

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John what you have seen and heard. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up.

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The poor have good news preached to them, and blessed is the one who is not offended by me.

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Notice that Jesus does not condemn John for his doubts. Instead, how does he choose to encourage him?

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What does he tell these disciples to do? Go and tell.

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To witness. Go and tell John what you have seen and heard.

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That is how they're going to encourage him. Yes, it is both not just what he has said, but also tell

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John about what I have done. Tell him about what I have said and what I have done. What you have seen me do.

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What you know to be true. Jesus' prescription for John's doubts was for John to be built up by hearing about the experiences of others.

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That's the point I want to make. John was going to be built up and encouraged and have his doubts assuaged by hearing about the experiences of others.

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By hearing about what the others saw of Jesus. So that is how we too, in our day, can encourage one another and build one another up.

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When we hear about God from each other. What is God doing in our lives?

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What have we been learning about God? What has he been showing us? One preacher put it this way.

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He said, when our world is hidden in darkness and we can no longer see the goodness of God, that is when we must borrow the eyes of another.

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On any given Sunday, those of us with vision are to become the eyes of those who are struggling.

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Knowing the next week we may be in the metaphorical dungeon needing to borrow the eyes of our brother.

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So sometimes, being among the church, you are being called upon to be those eyes for someone else.

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Who needs to see Jesus this week. Or this day. Because the circumstances of life, the trials of life, have put them into just a place of sort of a darkness where they just can't see very well.

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And they need your eyes. And other times, you're going to be that person. And you're going to need to call on a brother or sister to be those eyes for you.

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And that's where sharing with one another about sharing our burdens and telling each other about what we have even maybe personally gone through can be of such a great blessing to others.

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Any thoughts on that? Other thoughts? Yeah, very often, anytime, you know, as Jonathan's saying, just some common experiences of people.

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Somebody retires and their world kind of shrinks for a little bit at first.

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And they don't interact with people as much. They don't see as many people. They don't do as much with others.

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And you kind of become a little bit more self -centered. Your world is only really about you. And that kind of thing leads to sort of a spiritual depression.

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Right? Or if you're just going through some, you know, really awful trial of life or whatnot.

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And, you know, you're just, you're feeling, you know, you're just constantly thinking about your own problems.

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Right? To be able to get together with others and see others' burdens and share their burdens with them, even if it doesn't really solve your own burden or your own problem at the time, it uplifts you to sort of get out of your own navel -gazing.

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Yeah. No, just bearing the grace. Yes. Yes.

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And you know, I just want to point out here, too, that Christine's totally right, that sometimes you're on one side of that or sometimes you're on the other.

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Also, though, don't think that you're only on one or the other side about everything on any given week.

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Right? I think we can all relate to the notion that sometimes you're going to come in and there's going to be areas in your life where you feel like things are not going great and you're struggling, and other areas where maybe things feel like they're going really well and you want to be an encouragement in.

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Right? And so you might flip -flop that role in the span of a single conversation at church.

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So, yeah, Kara. Yeah. Paul talks often, and especially in 1

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Corinthians, that oftentimes one of the – maybe it's not the purpose of a trial in our life, but when we come through that trial and we're on the other side, that God now will use that for your experience to be a blessing to others in the future who then also go through either that same trial or a similar one.

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Because, let's face it, you're going to listen more closely and believe someone who – if you get the call and you've got a cancer diagnosis, you're going to listen more closely to someone who, before you, went through a cancer battle.

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Right? They've got the real experience of what it's really like. You'll be thrilled to have other people also tell you that they're praying for you, and that'll be encouraging or whatnot.

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But the words of someone who really went through what you went through, right, can just completely turn you around and really lift you up.

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Okay? Yeah, Bob. 2 Corinthians 1. Thank you. 2 Corinthians. Yeah, 2 Corinthians 1. Thanks. I was searching for it in my brain.

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It wasn't quite coming up. All right. Last point this morning is about talking about God.

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Talking about God and to God in how we worship and pray together.

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In how we worship and pray together. I'm not going to read them, but Ephesians and Colossians, they both make it clear that we should be singing and praying every time we get together.

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Right? Every time. It talks about speaking together, singing together with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

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It's not just about Sunday morning. That's about every time we meet. But I'll ask you this question.

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What if you don't feel like singing? Sing anyway.

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Thank you, Becky. Sing anyway. Sing anyway. Sometimes, maybe you really do just need to pause and listen.

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That's okay. Sometimes there might just be some moment where something about the song or some distraction is still flying through your head.

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It'd be better for you to just pause and listen than to fake it. I will say that.

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But sometimes it's better to force yourself to sing anyway.

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Because singing expresses solidarity. On any given

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Saturday afternoon in college campuses across this country, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people fill a stadium to cheer on their football team, their

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American football team. And for most of these colleges, they have a fight song.

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The team runs out onto the field, and the whole student section and all the alumni, they all know it by heart, and they all just start singing.

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Hail to the victors, I think, is Michigan's. That's maybe the most famous one. And there's just all these fight songs that all these big colleges have, and I can't even sing

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Georgia Tech's for you because there's too many bad words in it. But the singing together expresses the solidarity.

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We are with you, team. We're going to do this together. You guys, you're going to do all the tackling and throwing and kicking and whatnot, but we're here singing with you.

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But the point is that when we sing together, it unites us.

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It unites us. And again, since we've been talking so much this morning about not doing too much navel gazing,

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I will say, practically speaking, that joining in the singing with everyone else who's also singing will help you stop looking here and start looking up.

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And really try to think about what you are singing, because again, if I can do this, and maybe some of you can too, you can think faster than you can sing.

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Sometimes you can even get ahead of yourself. Let me ask you, is it okay to get emotional while singing worship songs?

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No. Steve says no. We don't do emotions, yeah. Yes. Yes, it is okay.

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When we, well, what I think we would be, what Steve, I'm sure, is worried about is when you turn it into some kind of, no,

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Steve's not worried, I'm just kidding. But there's the notion of turning it into some kind of emotional show, right, where you do something where you become a distraction because of how you're gesturing or acting or whatnot during the singing.

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But in terms of just getting emotional, I have news for you. You are an emotional being.

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God gave you emotions. If you're not connecting with him, at least on some kind of emotional level, while you're singing, you are missing out.

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It's why we do singing, okay? And also, by the way, when we get together, praying.

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Kind of rushing through here, but just to make this point too, praying. Because the apostles were literally devoted to it.

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They created a whole new office of deacon just so they could do more of it. That's how important prayer was to them.

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1 Timothy 2, Paul calls for prayer in corporate worship. He instructs

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Timothy to make sure that he always includes prayer in their worship service times.

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And so when we are praying, also please make sure to notice that that is when we are together and having a prayer, we are together and praying together.

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Yes, there is an elder who is standing up here in the pulpit who is saying the prayer, but it ought to be all of us praying that prayer.

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And if that means, just practically speaking again, if you just repeat silently in your own mind what the speaker is praying, what the praying person is praying, then that will help you participate.

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You should feel like you are participating in the prayer. Because prayer is a service to our brothers and sisters.

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Yes, it's a uniting, yes, it's together, but also it is a service. This is going to be kind of a wild suggestion, but what if every time you got together with a brother or sister in Christ, you set aside a few minutes and each and every one of you takes a turn praying.

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Even if it's just for two minutes. What would that look like?

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What would that be like for us to take it that seriously? We talked all the time, and we're going to deal more in my future weeks about all these different verses that God gives about what we should do with our brothers and sisters.

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What would it look like if we took those more seriously? All right, let's pray.

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We're out of time. Heavenly Father, I thank you so much. Thank you so much for all that you give us in your word to equip us in how we ought to relate to one another and how we ought to relate to you.

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Father, I pray that we would, as we hear this morning the word being preached, that we would be active listeners.

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We would be teachable, ready to hear, fighting off the distractions.

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Learn and just ready and excited about the potential for your word to change our lives.

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We pray also that for the singing time, the worship time, for the prayer time, for the reading of the scripture, that all the things that we do together, that they would continue to build us up and unite us as a church towards the goal of bringing you all the glory.