The True Church

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church Podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you. Today we're going to begin a very short little series on the church. We're going to take a break from the Gospel of John just for a few weeks.

Why We Are Pausing the Gospel of John to Study the Church

And the reason that we're going to do that is for a couple different factors. The first is because there's a natural breaking point in the Gospel of John and there's not very many of those in the Gospel of John.

So for instance, in John 1 verses 1 through 18, that's called the prologue. That is a specific kind of genre called elevated rhetorical prose. After that, it goes into narrative. So there's a break in the Gospel of John after verse 18 of chapter 1.

And chapter 1 after that, all the way to chapter 11, is a section. So that's what we worked through over time was that first section, the prophetic section of John. The second section of John begins in chapter 12 and it ends in chapter 12.

That's the kingly section of John and we finished that last week. So now, before we go into the priestly section of the Gospel of John, we wanted to take this natural break, as everybody's coming back from summer, to talk about a really important topic.

So that's the first reason, is that there's a natural break that's happening in the text. The second reason is that we are primarily an expository church. That means we preach verse by verse through a book of the Bible until we finish a book of the Bible.

And that is overwhelmingly primary to us. We do that all the time, even if we preach an entire book in one sermon, which has happened only once at this church. But we preach through books. We preach through chapters.

We preach through verses and we do that in an ongoing way. But we have, at times, when it was an important theological truth that we needed to consider, we have taken a break and considered a theological truth.

For instance, when we were wrestling through the concept of baptism. If you haven't been here for the entire history of the church, we began as sort of Brasbiterians, or Presby-Baptist, or however you want to call it.

We accepted infant baptism as an authoritative practice of the church, and we received that, but we didn't practice it. So we were sort of Bapto-Presbyterians, or whatever you would call it. But in the course of time, we were convinced that that actually is, infant baptism is the biblical stance from a covenantal perspective.

So we started practicing infant baptism, and we taught through that. We had a baptism seminar, we had a baptism series, and then we really taught through that because we wanted all of us to know what it is that's why we're making that decision.

So that was one example. We've also taught through mission and vision of the church. Why do we exist as a church? What's the point of the Shepherd's Church? So we've taught through that. So at times, whenever Christmas and Easter, we've deviated as well, because those are important seasons in the life of the church.

Why Ecclesiology Became Central to the Church's Birth

So why then would we break to talk about the church? Why is that such an important topic that we felt like that it rose to the level of that we would need to actually take a few weeks to talk about what the church is?

And in order to answer that question, I think I need to tell you a little bit about our story as a church. You see, more than anything, Derek and I love doctrine. We love the doctrine of the Bible. We love theology.

You'll probably find one of us or both of us reading a theology book at some point. You know, we're hiding around the corner reading Grudem or Bavinck or something. So Derek and I love theology. But there was one doctrine of theology that was the most important doctrine in the life of the Shepherd's Church.

The reason why we're here today is because of one particular doctrine. And it wasn't the doctrine of God, although the doctrine of God is the most essential doctrine that there is. Without the knowledge of God, you can't do anything.

That's what Calvin says. We agree with that. But it wasn't the doctrine of God. The Lord, by his grace, had already convinced us of the importance of the doctrine of God. It wasn't the doctrine of man.

The Lord already convinced us how bad we all are. And New England's not really especially different than most every other place. We're all sinful. We've all fallen short of the glory of God. It wasn't eschatology.

We didn't have an eschatological focus on why we planted. I love eschatology. I love the end times, but that wasn't the doctrine why we decided that this church had to be planted. That doctrine was what's called ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church.

Derek and I, about 2018, late 2017, became obsessed with the doctrine of the church. The Lord brought it to our hearts. It set our hearts on fire for it. And it changed every single thing about the direction of our life.

You see, in 2017, at the end of that year, I found myself at a church that I no longer agreed with from an ecclesiological perspective. I woke up in a church that was entertaining people every week, but it wasn't preaching the gospel.

I woke up in a church that was exhausting volunteers, burning them out, doing all kinds of programs. I woke up in a church that that every day I woke up and would go in, I felt more weight on my chest, more conviction, more brokenness.

The big production, the lights, the cameras, all of that was exhausting my heart. And to be honest with you, I had a crisis of my own pastoral ministry at that point, because I didn't feel like I could participate anymore.

We were singing songs by churches that that pronounced known heresy. Every week we were singing songs like reckless love, as if God is somehow reckless, and I would get up and I would leave church. I would get up and walk out of the sanctuary, because I was like, how can we sing these songs that defame our God?

I started asking myself, is that the way the church is supposed to be? That we just show up and we sing a few songs and we pep each other up and we bump our chest and we go home as if it doesn't matter.

I began asking myself, and I know Derek did as well, what does the Bible say? What does the Bible say about church? Because if God has given us his word, which gives us instructions on everything, and if his word is sufficient for all things, and if it's inerrant for all things, and it's infallible for all things, and maybe it has something to say about the church.

Maybe it has something to say about how we are supposed to gather as a church. And for 12 months during that season, I was reading everything I could get my hands on. I was watching documentaries like Spirit and Truth.

If you've never seen it, look it up, watch it. It is incredible. I was reading books on ecclesiology. I was learning things like the regulative principle. If you don't know what that is, I can tell you later.

It changed my life. The more I learned, though, the more I had to make a decision, and I could not stay where I was at. So in 2019, actually before I get to that, two critical truths that we learned in that season was that we cannot dress the church up.

We cannot make her look more attractive to carnal men. We cannot dress the church up like a whore so that she will be more attractive to the world. We can't do that. That's what I feel like so many churches are doing.

They're trying to dress up the church to make her more attractive to the carnal world instead of just preaching the gospel of Christ. We cannot do that. The second thing I learned is that if Jesus really is the bridegroom, and if his church really is the bride, then he has very specific opinions on how his church is treated.

Because imagine, and I've heard Paul Washer tell the story before, you have a great king, and that great king puts you in charge of his bride so that you're supposed to look after her and take care of her, and you're supposed to watch her and care for her while he's gone, and he leaves for a long journey, and then he comes back, and he finds that you're parading her through the streets with revealing clothing so that she would be attractive to the world.

What do you think he would do to you? The answer is he would probably kill you. Jesus cares about his church. That's his bride that he died for, that he loves above all else, so shouldn't we care about it as well?

What we learned in that season was that the big Eva evangelical megachurch, McChurch, whatever you want to call it, model didn't line up with what Scripture was saying. So we prayed, and we fasted, and in 2019 I quit.

It was the hardest decision I've probably ever made, and I don't want to pretend like it was easy. I don't want to pretend like that I was some hero, that I had this great conviction. I was in my bed three days out of the week, didn't want to get up.

I was weeping. I was telling Shannon, I don't know what to do, and she was like, you know what to do, and I was like, yeah, but I don't know what to do. But eventually the Lord gripped my heart so strongly that I couldn't ignore it anymore, and I had to step down, and I did to plant a church that follows Scripture, to plant a church that that our grandkids could go to.

If we're going to be in New England, and if you're going to be in New England, it's great that we have nice hospitals here. It's great that we have a good economy here. It's great that we have an attractive housing market here.

All those things are good, but it's essential that we have churches here, and how many churches are there in this part of the country that actually preach the gospel? Not very many. We wanted to see a church that would actually pray for, preach through, and maybe possibly through prayer and fasting and repentance, see revival come to this area of the country.

That New England, again, would be a place where they call upon the name of Christ, and we left in 2019 to start that work, and we started with about 20 people who had no idea what they were getting themselves into, and since then we've grown to about 80 adults that call the Shepherd's Church its home, and we plan on doing this, preaching the gospel, until we die here, unless the Lord calls us to something else.

Today, the third reason, I guess, that we would say that we're doing this series is today's our third year anniversary. Yeah, I can't believe we've been doing this for three years, and it's not exactly because September the 9th, I think, or the 7th.

September the 7th was the first service that we had, and this is the first Sunday of September, so this is the third year anniversary, but I'm blown away. But my heart is still burdened for this church.

My heart is still burdened. The same motivations that I had three years ago or four years ago, the same motivations Derek had three, four years ago, the same burdens that I have today, because I don't want to see this thing that began fade out and fade away.

I want to see us be reminded of our convictions. I want to see us embracing our convictions. I want to see us thriving in our convictions for a church that preaches the gospel, where God would be glorified.

That's the mission of the Shepherd's Church, is that God would be glorified by our gathering together through the preaching, singing, hearing, doing of God's Word. I don't ever want that motivation to fade in this place.

I don't ever want us to begin doing what all the other churches are doing, and then just offer up to Him a worship that is offensive to Him. I want this place to be a place where God is worshipped. We can't forget what it means to be the church.

You and I, individually, cannot forget what it means to be the church. We cannot grow comfortable and complacent, and we can't just keep, we can't get into the habit and the normalcy of just doing what we do, and then somehow forget how important this is, and how rare this is.

We've already said there's so many churches that do this in New England. So many churches that don't do this in New England, and this is the area where the Puritans landed. This is the area where they came and they wanted to establish America as a city on a hill, as a place that gripped and clung to the Bible, and yet now, 250 years later, this is a place that is filled with robbers, thieves, and it's one of the darkest places in the country, and I might even argue the darkest place in the country.

Some people will say Vermont, but I think Massachusetts is more aggressive about it. How'd this happen? Well, the Puritans came and they preached the gospel, and then after a few great awakenings that were overseen by men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, those religious fires died out.

Seminaries that they made, like Harvard, that was meant to train up ministers of the gospel, just in our back door or our backyard, became liberal and became epicenters of leftist thinking. Eighty years after those religious fervor, that fire was stirred in this part of the country, it faded, so that 80 years later, those embers were cold and barely smoldering.

So then what happened? I'd like to say that God brought another revival, but what happened at that point, when the fires cooled off, is that imposter religion came into New England, and it came in slowly, but it came in over time, so that in New England was infiltrated, not with biblical Christianity, but with all kinds of compromised, complacent Christianity, so that now today, we're the inheritor of a region of the country that is the darkest, most unchurched area of the country, because no one has stood up and no one has said enough.

There's four kinds of churches that proliferate New England at this point, Massachusetts especially. The first is a tradition-loving Catholicism, which is not a biblical church. The second is an experience-driven charismania, which is also not a biblical church.

Then the third is a social justice-touting, compromised church, where the rainbow flag is hung on every front door. That is not a biblical church, and then the other that's more recent, that's come in, is an entertainment-craving, complacent evangelical church, so that the landscape of New England at this point is a septic tank of dead religion, with only a few churches.

There's a few. I know of a handful for a population of about nine million, a handful of churches, and because of that, the darkness has found its home here in the state. While the church in New England has been committed to tradition, and I'm talking about Catholicism, heresies, denominational standards, this is the way my mom did it.

While we've been committed to all kinds of traditions, the darkness has crept into this region. While we've been committed to experiences, asking, does this music make me feel a certain way? Is this sermon the kind of preaching that I like?

I don't like that he yells at me all the time. Does this church have a coffee bar? Does the Spirit give me liver shivers? Is there a token skinny-jean-wearing emo on stage who pumps us all up into a frenzy?

We laugh, but how many people make their choices of church on these things? And because of that, darkness has crept into this region. While the church in New England has been committed to social virtue, bowing their knee to every idol, saying that we're gonna champion every single cause, homosexuality, transgenderism, eventually pedophilia.

I've seen churches, not in New England, but in New York, bowing down to plants so that they can make sure that they're in alignment with a green new agenda. We laugh because it's ridiculous, but outside these walls, that's the state of many churches, so-called.

And because of that, the darkness has crept in. The darkness has ran in. While the church in New England has been committed to easy believism, where they've had nothing to say, no backbone, no obedience, no commitment to the gospel of Christ, no real faith, they kind of show up and go unnoticed and go home without any life change whatsoever.

That kind of evangelicalism, because of that, darkness has flooded in. And I will tell you something right now. The enemy is not afraid of those four kinds of churches. The Catholic, charismatic, compromised, and complacent.

The enemy is not afraid of that. It has no, it's no threat to him in his kingdom. In fact, he embraces it. My hope in this series is twofold. I hope that we would not only, you know, beat our chest and say, yeah, we're the good ones.

We're not like them. That's not what I want. What I want is that we would take a humble approach to remembering why we exist so that we don't become those things. I hope that we would humbly and with open hearts look at what the church is.

And today we're just going to give a very brief and broad introduction. So that's not normal for me to give brief and broad. So that will be what we accomplish today. Well, if the sermon sounds a little different, it's because it is a little different.

But that's what we'll accomplish today, to look at what is the church in five specific areas. So let us pray and let us begin. Lord Jesus, we need churches. Not just the Shepherds Church. Not just Merrimack Valley Presbyterian Church.

Not just other faithful churches in this area who are proclaiming the gospel and who are orienting their entire life around what the scriptures say. Lord, we need churches. Lord, you have tell us in your word to pray to the Lord of the harvest and you will send the workers.

Lord, please, please send workers to this place. Lord, help us to understand what the church is. Help us to understand why the church is. Help us to understand all of the aspects of it and that it includes all of us.

The church is not a few officers. The church is all of us together, bound together by the blood of Christ. Help us to all see through this very short series what our purpose is, what our part is to play.

The Church as the Gathered People of God

And Lord, we ask these things in Christ's name. Amen. When we're talking about the church, we're not talking about a building. Because this certainly is not a church building. When we're talking about a church, we're not talking about pews and steeples and pulpits.

At the heart of the church is the people of God. That's what the church is. The people who've been ransomed by Christ, by his blood, to be God's people. But I need to make a qualification here because it's not just the people with no qualification.

It's the people that are gathered. The church is not the people who are at home in their beds. The church is not the people who prioritize kids sports over Sunday church. The church is not a place where none of us show up.

The church is the gathered people of God. It is the people who prioritize coming and being in God's presence. The church, even the word ecclesia, that's what the word church is in the New Testament, means gathering.

The most essential facet of what it means to be the church is not that my membership sits at X church, but I go whenever they have membership meetings or I go whenever they, you know, have something important or a potluck because, you know, I like food.

The church is not where I hold my membership. The church is the gathered people of God. That's what it means. For instance, in Acts 2 42, the earliest church, this is the fabric of their DNA. It says they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles teaching, and that's the preaching of the word, the teaching of the word, and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.

The fellowship that they're talking about is the weekly Lord's Day service that they were gathering in even as far back as the first century, where they were gathering in the presence of God. They were continually devoting themselves to the teaching of God's, where they were continually devoting themselves to each other.

They were coming into the church so that they could be a part of something. There's no New Testament biblical expectation for a for a haphazard or mediocrity when it comes to the gathering of the church.

We don't see that. We don't see in the New Testament men and women choosing parties over church, choosing to mow the grass over church, or more than half of the church not present every single week. We don't see that in the New Testament, and that comes out in the things that the church is named.

Our names say a lot about us, don't they? There's a story. I think I've shared this before, but it's such an impactful story to me. There was a soldier in Alexander the Great's army, and his name was Alexander, and he was caught running away from the battle.

So they grabbed him, and they brought him to Alexander's tent. They told Alexander what happened, and Alexander came into the tent, and he said, soldier, what is your name? And he said, it's Alexander, sir, and Alexander looked at him, and he said, you either change your name, or you change your behavior.

Because if you're gonna be an Alexander, you can't act like that. If you're gonna be a Christian, your name is important. The names that God has given you in the scriptures are important. They say something about you.

For instance, we're called the assembly. Isn't that an interesting term? I think about my son at home assembling a Lego kit. He's talking about wanting to buy a 10 ,000 piece Lego set for like the Roman Colosseum, which I immediately am like, good choice.

Ancient world, history, I'll help you with it. You have to assemble the broken pieces. We are the assembly because apart we're pieces. Together, we've been assembled as the people of God. It implies gathering, doesn't it?

Another term that we're given is called the gathering, which you don't have to be a language scholar to pick up on that. It means we gather. We're called the congregation because we congregate. We're called all kinds of names in scripture, which imply that we are to be together in person.

Again, there's no expectation that we would do church apart from being in church. Now we'll cover a little bit more of this next week, especially the benefits. There's a really important thing I want you to understand.

This sermon, especially this part of it where I'm talking about that we have to be the gathered church, I'm not sharing that because that's a duty that you have to be beaten over the head with. I'm sharing this because it's the greatest thing in the world that you could ever do.

Next week, we're going to talk about why it's such a privilege and why it's such a blessing and why it's so essential that we would be in church. That we would choose it above everything else on earth that we could possibly do because it's that good.

It's that sweet. It's that wonderful. It's that much of a blessing. There is a reality to the church that we'll talk about next week. That changed my life. So you have to wait for that. Today, I just want us to see that one aspect of the church is that we're regularly committed and joyfully gathering.

The Church's New Status in Christ, with God, and with One Another

So that's the first. If God has saved you by Christ, he saved you to be a part of the church and to be a part of the church is to gather. The second thing is that you and I have been given a new status.

We've been made new creations because of what Christ has done in us and that is not an individual reality. One time I had the privilege of reading through the entire New Testament in two days. I did it on purpose.

I set aside about nine hours a day and I read for 18 hours total. I got through the whole thing and I looked at just the pronouns. And I did this before the whole pronoun revolution. So that wasn't my motivation.

My motivation was I wanted to see every single you, Y-O-U, in the New Testament and what it referred to. And overwhelmingly, it's plural. It's not individual. If you were Southern, this would make sense.

We could just have y 'all. And if translators would follow that, I think it would make things a whole lot simpler. But everyone is not as enlightened as the... I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But as I read through it, I noticed that almost entirely the New Testament is a corporate book.

A document for a people, not a document for individuals. So we've been given a new status as the people of God. The first thing that we've been called as far as a new status is we've been given a new status with God.

The Bible says that in Ephesians chapter 2 verse 22, I won't read it, but we've been called the habitation of God. You know what that means? That means that no longer people have to travel to Mecca or to Jerusalem in order to know God.

We, you and I, the church, are the habitation of the living God. That God has made his dwelling place among us. What an amazing privilege that you and I, broken as we are, that we get to be the habitation of God on planet Earth.

People ever ask you, where do you go to meet the living God? You can say, go to the church because that's where he's covenanted to be. It's easy to dismiss that as a tired old phrase that we say because we come to church and we don't feel anything is different.

Well, everything that you feel isn't real and everything that you don't feel is not invalidated just because you didn't feel it. Just because you didn't have goosebumps doesn't mean God isn't here. He is here.

And when you dedicate your mind and your heart and your awareness to the fact that God really is in this place, it will change the way that you approach church. How do I know that? Because it's changed the way that I approach church.

When I come here, I don't have a right to have my pity party continue from Saturday. I don't have a right to have the depression that I had on Saturday night. I don't have a right because I'm coming into God's presence.

I'm coming in praying. I'm coming in pleading. God, help me today to celebrate you the way that you deserve. Because he's here and his presence changes things. We are the church, the habitation of God.

What an astounding thing. The Bible also calls us God's holy mountain, which, as I was reading that, I was like, well, some of us can be a little rock-headed at times, right? Is that what that means?

I'm talking about myself. No, that's not what that means. Zechariah 9 calls us the mountain of God because he's lifted us high above the nations. He's caused the nations to look to us, not to hide, not to place the truth under a bushel, as Jesus says, to hide the light of the gospel.

He's placed us above the nations with an authority so that now they look to us to understand the truth, even if they won't admit it. The government has nothing at all to say about the church. As far as how we gather, we just walked through this season.

It's true. The church has nothing that they can say about how we gather because we've been lifted high above the nations. So when they say that you can't gather because of a virus, we gather. Because the Bible says that we gather.

Because we don't follow the edicts of sinful men, we follow the Bible. We obey God rather than man. The government, we try our best to be honorable and humble and love them as much as we can. But if they tell us to violate scripture, they have as much authority here as a microbe on Mars, which is none.

We've been called the mountain of God because God has lifted us up above the nations to be an example, to shine his light to the nations. We've been called God's house in Ephesians 219. And this one is, it sounds a lot like habitation, but it's not the same thing.

The habitation of God is that God has chosen to make his presence known here, that when we've been called the household of God, we've been brought into God's family. God, by his grace, has made us sons and daughters.

That's the same title that Jesus has. Son of God, we've been made sons of God. We've been made the family of Almighty God. Listen to what Ephesians 219 says. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and are of God's household.

If you're a Christian, you've been made a family member with God. What an astounding phrase. What a beautiful reality. How many times have you looked in the mirror and thought you're not enough? How many times have you looked in the mirror and thought, I'm too overweight.

I'm too this. I'm too that. No one likes me. I'm rejected. All of those lies from the enemy that you can look right back at yourself, and you can say, go to hell with those lies because I am a child of God.

I'm a member of the family of God, and Satan, you will not win today. That truth is powerful. We've been called God's vineyard. In Jeremiah, he says that he's dug us, planted us, and made us into a vineyard.

What does that mean? When Jeremiah is looking at the future church, and he's saying that it will be a vineyard, he's saying that the church will exist for the life of the nations, that we will bear fruit, but that fruit won't just sit out and rot like it does sometimes on our counters, but that fruit will be used for the life of the nations.

The church exists to bring life to the dead parts of this earth. We've been called God's inheritance. Isaiah 19 .25, God has been stockpiling his church, adding members to his church as a part of his eternal retirement plan.

You ever thought about it in that way? That we're the inheritance of God, and that he will enjoy us, and spend eternity with us when this life is over? We're the inheritance that God has been working.

We're God's new Israel. Galatians 6 .16 tells us, As for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. This story that's been working itself out all across the Old Testament of Israel, the chosen people, we've been grafted into that.

So that now our story goes all the way back to the book of Genesis. That's why we're whole Bible Christians here, because when I read about Abraham, I'm reading about my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

When I'm reading about Moses, I'm reading about my people. When I'm reading about the Exodus, when I'm reading about David, all of these people are people I've been grafted into and adopted into because of the promises of God.

So that we did not just show up here three years ago and just invent something novel. We're connected to Christians that go back 2 ,000 years, and we're connected to Jewish believers who go back, all the way back to Moses and Abraham, and even before that to the Garden of Eden with Adam.

Our story is the oldest story on earth. Our faith is the oldest faith on earth. It originated in Genesis 1. You can't go further back than that. We've been given not only a new status with God, but we've been given a new status with Christ.

I won't go through these in detail, but he's called us the sheep that he's leading, Ezekiel 34 15. The fold that he is protecting, John 10 16. He's called us slaves because he's our master, but he's called us friends because he's our Lord.

He's called us disciples that he's teaching. He's called us beloved ones that he's leading. All of these things. In fact, the most used one probably is bride. Think about the intimate, beautiful language of a husband and a wife.

He's called that of us. That we're the bride of Christ. The one that he gives up everything in order to pour out his radiance and love. The one that he is chosen to sacrifice everything for. That's what you and I are.

The people that Jesus loves and adores. What an incredible thing. We've been given a new status with each other. Did you know that? That you and I are not just strangers sitting in a pew all listening to the same Southern person yell at you.

We're not. We're brothers and sisters now. The blood that binds you and I together is so much more powerful than mother and father. It's the blood of Jesus Christ. So that now when you look to your left and your right, you're looking at family.

You're looking at people that you've been called to love and care for and serve. People that you've now been called to give up even some freedoms for to care for them. To serve them. To love them. We've been given a new identity with God, with Christ, to each other.

So that if we approach church any lower than that, then we've got to repent. That's baseline. We're just introducing the topic right now. If we approach church as anything less than the new status God has given us, the new status Christ has given us, and the new status we have with each other, we live underneath that.

We got to repent. And repenting is not a shameful action, by the way. Repenting is a joy-filled action. Repenting is, I see the error that's in my heart. I'm going to give it over to Jesus because I know I'm not enough, and he is.

And when you do that, and you give up those things that are plaguing you, it actually brings you more freedom and more joy. For instance, if you were, if someone planted a barrel of nuclear waste in your backyard and all of your family members were getting sick, it would be inconvenient for you to dig it up.

It would be inconvenient for you to call someone to come remove it, but it would be the best thing for you. Repentance is that. Digging up the waste that's in your soul so that you can enjoy Christ more fully than you have before.