72. The Engine Of Christendom (An Interview With Dr. Uri Brito)

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Welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 72,

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The Engine of Mere Christendom. Well, hello everyone and welcome back to the broadcast.

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We are so blessed this week to have another guest with us. If you remember last week, we were talking with Pastor Doug Wilson out in Moscow, Idaho about what is

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Christendom. Christendom is this idea that the nations are gonna be discipled by the church, that they're going to come to know

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Christ and operate in a way that is Christ -centered. And that's completely consistent with eschatology and with everything else in the

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Bible that his kingdom will extend to the ends of the earth. He will put all of his enemies under his feet and the gospel will go out into the whole world and it will cover it like the waters covers the seas.

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So we talked about that last week from a macro perspective. And this week we're so blessed to have Dr. Uri Brito here to help us zoom into that a little bit and talk about the local church and why the local church is so essential to that vision.

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Now, our guest today really does not need an introduction, but I will try my best to introduce him anyway.

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Uri Brito is the senior pastor of Providence Church in Pensacola, Florida. He's the presiding minister currently of the

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Athanasian Presbytery, which is a CREC presbytery. I met Uri at council, at a table filled with meat and cheese, and it was a wonderful encounter.

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Also, he's the author of several books, one of my favorite books, and probably the only book I know on the topic of Christian pipe smoking, which is an excellent read.

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It's about 20 pages, you should check it out. Dr. Brito, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

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Thank you very much. Delighted to be with you, Ken. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Thank you, my brother. Amen. Hey, in case anyone listening doesn't know who you are, what

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God's got on your heart, the things you love, the things he's doing, what you're working on, give us a little sketch, brother, into Uri Brito.

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Well, very good. I've been the senior pastor of Providence Church here in Pensacola, Florida, which is in the panhandle of Florida.

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I've been here for 15 years now. Began back in 2009 as ordained to the gospel ministry after spending some years in the

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PCA. I came into the CREC when we were relatively unknown with about 30 churches, and now by God's grace, we're over 100 now.

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God has really prospered our communion, and Providence has been a joy to me.

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I have poured my heart into it, and they have poured their heart into the labor of the church as well. It's been a mutual love affair for the

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Church of Jesus Christ here in Pensacola, and I enjoy doing a lot of writing on a variety of topics.

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I have a Substack account, and I have several blogs that I've worked through throughout the years, and I have, you asked about a project.

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I have one current project, which would be the publication of a book on the armor of God called the

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War of the Priesthood, which Lord willing will be out in November of this year, the War of the

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Priesthood, an exposition of the armor of God in Ephesians chapter six. That's a little bit of what's going on. I have other projects on the horizon, but I am just delighted to be serving the

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Church of Jesus Christ. You're killing me, brother. My book list is already too long, and now

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I'm like, oh, I need that book. That is so good. I've not read anything. I'm happy to send you a copy.

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Oh, that sounds like a wonderful take on that passage. So yes, yes, I will. Maybe I'll, hopefully you'll have it out by this year.

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I'd love to read it, brother. I saw this on your website, and I wanted to ask you about it because I think it's such a great transition from last week when we were talking about mere

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Christendom and what that looks like. It says, he, and that's you, affirms the centrality of the

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Lord's day worship as the supreme means to restore society to a proper

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Christendom. Now, I guess maybe where we start is what is a proper Christendom?

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Because we talked a little bit about that last week. And how is the Lord's day worship the supreme means by which we get there?

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Okay, two excellent questions. The first one, what is the proper Christendom? When we think about Christendom, there are historical realities where Christendom was manifested.

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Obviously, because they were historical, they were imperfect in nature. But nobody, anyone who denies

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Christendom, what they can't deny is that there were variations of that historically. And there was a clear example of this in the

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Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, where there was a clear political figure who desired the good of the city and who implemented policies that allowed the

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Christian faith to prosper. And those policies can vary. Among them was the significance of the

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Lord's day, the importance of Christian worship. But a proper Christendom is that which is a society that is oriented around the

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Lordship of Jesus. That's my sort of elevator pitch. A proper Christendom is a society that is surrounded by the

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Lordship of Jesus. And what that means is that Jesus Christ becomes more than a mere salvific figure, but he becomes a cosmic figure in the restoration of not only the soul, but the body, in the restoration of not only internal piety, but external piety in the church and in society as well.

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So a proper Christendom would be something comprehensive that entails every aspect of life, but that life is enculturated in the life of Jesus Christ, who is the great

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King. If that is a proper Christendom, then proper Christendom, or we should say proper

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Christendoms, or as my friend, Dr. Dustin Messer says, micro Christendoms, because it's

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Christendom in various capacities, in various places. If that is a proper

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Christendom, then that proper Christendom, for lack of a better term, needs a national holiday. And the national holiday for the proper

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Christendom doesn't come once a year, it comes once a week. And that national holiday has particular anthems, particular rituals, particular ways of being.

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For the Christian, that national holiday is the Lord's Day, which is on the eighth day, also known as the first day.

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And we have to assume particular transitions in biblical history, whereas the

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Sabbath in the Old Testament was that preeminent day. The Lord's Day, emphasized by John in the

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Book of Revelation and other places, is the proper glorification of the

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Sabbath. It's a greater Sabbath, we might say. And the Lord's Day becomes the means by which the

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Church gathers to celebrate this proper Christendom. Without these rituals, without these days, without these celebrations,

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Christendom becomes meaningless because it becomes abstract. It becomes the kind of thing that's ethereal, becomes platonic in nature, something that you only grasp in another world.

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But no, proper Christendom is an established reality that was given to us by a vindicated

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Christ when he sat at the right hand of the Father in a glorified bodily form.

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Wow. You know, I've never thought about it in the way you just described it, but every nation has its own rituals.

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We have 4th of July cookouts, we have football where the national anthem is played, we have all these

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Americana things that make us who we are. And I would assume, I think I'm right on this, that every nation has its things, that it's national identity markers, as it were.

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Maybe they have a national anthem, maybe they have a holiday. What a grace it is that God, who did not have to do this, but did this in his sovereignty, has given us culture -making, identity -making things every week, which is incredible.

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Right, that's exactly right. And so when you mentioned, when you make that reference, I'm interpreting what you're saying as there are competing rituals in societies.

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Yes. There are competing cultural structures. And there are also competing

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Christendoms. Now, they wouldn't call it a Christendom because Christendom is rooted in Christ, but they have their own messianic figures.

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So there are competing worldviews, competing Christendoms, and therefore there are competing holidays.

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And in some pagan worlds, those competing holidays entail sacrifices.

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Sometimes those competing holidays entails debauchery. Sometimes those competing holidays will entail certain rituals that are pagan by nature and orientation.

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And so therefore, the entire world is structured ever since the promise of Genesis 3 .15,

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is structured in these competing models, models that exalt Mary's child and models that exalt the seat of the serpent.

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Either way, every Christian is engaged in a competing world, which means that he has to either assume a posture of loyalty to the seat of the woman or to the seat of the serpent.

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There is no neutral ground, as Van Til would say, and therefore the

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Christian is already placed from birth in a reality that is in opposition to another.

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If he is born in a pagan society, in an un -Christian society, his reality is in opposition to King Jesus.

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If he's born in a Christian society, his reality is in opposition to paganism, as Abraham Kuyper would say.

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Either way, you're already born into a competitive universe.

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That's so good. And I don't think that most Christians, and I think you could speak more into this, brother.

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I don't think most Christians would think when I choose to sleep in on Sunday and not go to church, that I am fighting for the opposite side or that I am laying down my loyalties to Christ.

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But the way you've described that is so beautiful in that this is our day.

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This is our kingdom. It's his, but we've been brought in as citizens. And these are our festivals for our blessing to bless our

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King, right? So maybe describe a little bit about why it's so essential for just the average

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Christian to be at church every Lord's day. Why is that so important? We published a book that I edited probably 15 years ago called

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The Church -Friendly Family. And in that book, there's a quote, and I believe it was by my mentor,

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Randy Booth, that said that the decision to go to church on Sunday is a decision that is made once in a lifetime, not on Saturday nights.

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And that kind of approach to life is a fairly objective way of looking at things because if the church is, we sort of have this cliche that was birthed during COVID.

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If the church is essential, right? And the church has always viewed itself as essential because of the promises of the gospel.

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But if the church is essential, then the decision that a couple makes, I talk a lot about this in my premarital counseling sessions, the decision that a premarital couple makes before marriage and the decision they make when they get married, that's a settled decision.

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That apart from extraordinary circumstances, we will be with God's people on the Lord's day.

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And the reason we make that a priority is because to be gathered on the

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Lord's day is not only a direct command that the Bible emphasizes in Hebrews 10 and in the book of Revelation and other places as well, but it's also the way in which you manifest the team you cheer for on earth.

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It's the way in which you put on a holy clothing that is different than the kind of clothing you put on other days of the week.

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It is the way in which God has ordained communion between his people and himself.

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And so when we trivialize that day, and we trivialize it for various reasons in society, here in the

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South where I live, it's usually Sunday sports or travel teams, which

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I think it is, travel teams on Sundays, it's a form of modern day apostasy in many ways.

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And I despise it with all my heart. And everyone who comes into Providence as they pursue membership knows that here in Pensacola, but that kind of reality stands in opposition.

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And it's a subtle opposition that parents will give noble reasons for excusing themselves.

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They will say things like, well, we'll have a little devotional before the game or something like that.

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But these are all competing attitudes, the Lord's day, which is the incorporation of God's people to a heavenly reality.

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You can't do that kind of thing. Again, unless extraordinary circumstances, if you're in Iran or Iraq or China, but you can't do that kind of thing on a baseball field.

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You can't do that kind of thing because ordinarily God's people meet somewhere. And if you're meeting somewhere, it is gonna require other human beings who share the same commitment to what you're doing.

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And so the Lord's day becomes a necessity that must be a crucial rival to the trivialization of that gathering.

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And that crucial rival is the kinds of things that are getting the evangelical church off track and finding rationales to avoid the gathering of the

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Lord's day. So if we were, I can put it this way here. The Lord's day is the primary means of rivalry against the principalities and powers.

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That when God's people gather on the Lord's day, they are corporately beating up systems that stand against Christ and his anointed.

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And when we don't do that, when we build a record or a repertoire of missing that essential reality of the

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Lord's day, every time we miss it, we're going to come back weaker and weaker.

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Every time we miss it for trivial reasons, we're going to come back offering an incomplete

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Christ and the longer we stay away from that reality, ultimately what's going to happen is that that incomplete

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Christ is going to give way to a culture of prodigalness, which worship becomes non -essential.

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And then you get the kinds of things you see in Roman Catholic cultures, where you gather for Easter and you gather for other special occasions, but it becomes not only trivialized, but it becomes a religiosity, a whitewashed tomb, the kinds of things that can be externalized on specific days, but internally, it's broken like the temple.

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Right. Yeah, why do you think, well, let me just give you maybe an objection to what you're saying.

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I don't believe this, but many will say today, well, you know, I can gather with the church on my couch, my pajamas, and maybe

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I can enter a metaverse church and I can, through avatar, interact with people and I can sing songs and drink my grape juice and have my cracker right there on the couch.

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Why is that so foolish and flawed in its orientation? And these were the kinds of things we heard during the

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COVID era, the COVID hysteria. Part of the response to that is there's a pastoral way of approaching these issues.

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Not everyone who offers these rationales are quasi -apostates.

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Some of them are just genuine evangelical Christians who've kind of grown up in environments where worship was not essential.

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The Christological answer to that, there's a Christological answer and then there's a sociological answer.

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The Christological answer to that assertion is that that assertion would be a rational and logical assertion if Christ had risen from the dead merely in soul or in a spiritualized fashion.

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If he were merely a spirit now at the right hand of the Father, ruling and reigning merely as a spirit, there is a true case that wherever Christians are in spirit, that Christ could meet them there because Christ is a spirit.

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And he is a spirit, but the Bible says specifically that Jesus Christ was raised in a glorified human body, which means that Christ's vindication at his ascension, at his reign is not one relegated merely to the soul, but also it is an embodied vindication, which means that the way in which

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Christ reigns is the way he demands his people to reign also. And so if Christ intercedes and mediates for his people in bodily form, then to isolate yourself from Christ body is to isolate yourself from the reality of Christ's vindication.

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And so the Bible is very specific that where Christ is, so is his body, that Christ as the head is not divorced from his body.

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And so for the Christian to separate himself and choose a kind of isolated, soulish, spiritualized worship experience on Sunday morning is to denigrate, to despise the bodily vindication of Jesus and the body vindication of Jesus, which comes with his body as well.

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So it's essentially to divorce Jesus from his body, which cannot be in any fashion a reality.

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Christ is married to his bride and we are incorporated into his bride and that's how we come into union with Jesus.

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And so what we can't do is divorce Christ from his body because by doing so, we're doing damage to the

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Christology that sustains the church. The sociological response to it is that throughout the new covenant, throughout the old covenant as well, but specifically throughout the new covenant,

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Paul says that the way in which the church gathers is in the ministry of encouragement. And so he says this in Ephesians and he says this in Colossians, that we are to encourage one another with psalms and hymns and spirit songs, which is a promise given to the churches of Jesus Christ.

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And so I tell this to my congregation very often, Pastor, that one of the things that we do is that when we are forsaking the body of Christ, we're failing to offer a ministry of encouragement.

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That means that when you're not next to that person on Sunday morning, what you're doing is you're choosing to not encourage that person who may be desperately in need of your psalms and hymns and your spirit songs.

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So the ministry of encouragement is most clearly identified, manifested and expressed when

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God's people gather on the Lord's day. And when they're absent from that Lord's day experience, what they're doing is they are avoiding the very ministry they were called to.

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And that ministry, of course, extends to other things too, not only singing, it extends to dealing, helping through grief, helping through, or the very presence of human beings together forms a kind of sociological identity that you don't have.

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So that the sociology of the church on Sunday morning is absolutely unique from the sociology of the church gathered throughout the week for various reasons.

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But one of them, for fundamental reasons, is that when we gather in the Lord's day,

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God raptures us into a heavenly reality. So only on Sundays when

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God's people gather for worship are we truly raptured into a heavenly reality so that all the experiences we have on the

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Lord's day, from the call to the commissioning is the reality that happens in the holy exalted mountain that cannot happen throughout the week when we are in the city, in the valley.

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Christ lifts us into a heavenly place. And so therefore to follow the great sanctus of the church.

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And so when we gather, we are truly gathered with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven.

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And that's how we worship the Lord God. So the absence of that creates a sociology that is deficient.

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Yeah. The sociology that's problematic to the shaping of the human formation. There's two themes that you were just hitting on that I'd like to pull a little deeper into or dig a little deeper into.

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The first is physicality. Only the Bible has a true worldview where physicality can be honored as God intended it.

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I mean, it seems to me that what the world has offered is just rebranded Gnosticism that get on this digital platform and you have meaningful relationships.

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That's what Facebook or Meta is trying to sell to us all the time that the more you use this, the more meaningful your relationships are.

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And yet you look at the depression, the suicidal rates, the lack of intimacy, what the dehumanization of physicality that's created in that way.

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And while we're thankful for platforms like Riverside where we're on today, where you and I can meet and talk and that's a good thing, it doesn't replace physicality.

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I think that maybe one of the strains of errors that has crept into the church is this

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Gnostic tendency to sort of deny the physical need of the body and treat

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Christianity as an entirely spiritual enterprise, as a hyper two kingdoms, everything is spiritual, there's really no physical impact.

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What would you say to that? Yes, Gnosticism as my old

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Sunday school teacher used to define is a de -historicization or a de -physicalization of the

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Christian life, right? James Jordan writes about this in his book, Creation in Six Days. So when you de -physicalize the world, you get this ancient doctrine of Gnosticism, which

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I think really is quite pervasive with the evangelical scene. They just don't know it, but they are in many ways. I've written quite a bit about this.

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And so Gnosticism sort of infiltrates the church and it does its way by de -physicalizing human interaction.

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So while what we're doing right now is profoundly wonderful, right? We're thousands of miles away and here we are communicating.

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When this happens at a local level, however, it becomes heretical and it becomes heretical in the soft age, not in the hard age.

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It becomes heretical because what it does is it pushes human beings to a reality that's self -created.

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And the great heresies of history were self -created realities. Right. And so if you think about the priesthood, the description in Exodus 28 through 32, the description in Leviticus chapter eight,

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Leviticus chapter nine, the priesthood is by nature a corporate reality that is created by God with all its rituals it's given.

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The priest doesn't have the luxury or the sophistication of creating his own world. He is entering into a world that's already been created.

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And you can go back to Genesis one and two, Adam is God's first priest. He's entering into a world that's already created.

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He's not fabricating his own world. He's not, as Calvin says, an idol factory. The world's already been created.

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So at that point now, he is no longer a creator. He is a steward of the creation.

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And so human beings ought to be stewards of this creation. And creation is made in the plurality of God.

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God made man in his image. Let us make man in our image. And so when human beings choose to defysicalize their communion, what they're trying to do, theologically, what they're trying to do is to go back to a scenario that God has destroyed.

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What they want to do is they want to go back and sneak into that cherubim with a flaming sword back in Genesis chapter three that God put in Eden.

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History moves forward, Kendall. And so therefore to go back into history practically is to go back to a defysicalized world where man functions independent of other human beings.

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And while there was a temporary aloneness in creation, it was a temporary aloneness.

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It was not good. It was not good at all. That the full reality came when God created woman in this physical and tangible reality to work together, to guard the garden, to protect it, and to have dominion over the world.

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And so creation functions kind of like this. Creation begins in the garden, and then creation moves into the land, and then creation ultimately moves into the world.

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Garden, land, world. So we could put it in these three spheres. It would be church, family, and state.

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And this chronology, this kind of, these themes are precisely the way we are to apply into our human relationships.

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That man begins in the garden, begins in the church in the Lord's day. Then he moves into his family, again, another corporate reality.

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And then he moves into the world, which is his workplace, culture. And there you also can't decorporatize yourself, defysicalize yourself, otherwise you're gonna starve to death.

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So the way the world is created is always in this corporate environment. Not to say there aren't times for individual piety, but these individual pieties are not the preeminent way of pursuing piety.

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They are secondary or even tertiary ways of pursuing piety. That's good.

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Back on the physical thing or physical side of things before we move on to the spiritual, what are the blessings?

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What are the benefits? What are the, and obviously we know that it's a command in scripture to be in the

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Lord's day. We know that we are there to honor and praise God. But I think one of the things that folks don't understand is, and I loved

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John Piper's book originally back in the day, Desiring God, because of this sort of reason.

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I don't endorse everything in the book, but I liked the fact that he said that we often forget that we serve

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God for blessings because God is so rich in blessings that he has given us blessings in serving him.

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Obviously we know that it's not just ritualistic duty where we're serving

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God begrudgingly and it's just, we have to grind through this. He's so good and so kind that he's given us all these blessings by knowing him.

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So I'd say many people don't go to church because they think it's taking from them. It's taking sleep from them.

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It's taking, you know, like you said, traveling sports and all these things. What would you say is a biblical case to say that if you're going to traveling sports instead of church, you're actually robbing yourself because the blessings at church are so much greater?

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Yes, and you know, this is a way of thinking through this issue here, but we don't think very often, but church attendance is a necessity first and foremost, but it's also an art and it's a necessity, which means that in the beginning for those who are new or I think honestly of your standard evangelical who goes to college and now is in a dorm at 18 and there's very little to no pressure for him attending the

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Lord's Day service anywhere, their parents don't put any significance to it and sometimes their professors don't put a significance, their friends don't put significance to it.

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And so you get these four years of evangelical Christians kind of living in absentia where they are aware that church exists, but they formulate their own pieties outside of it.

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And we know what that does is that it provides a kind of spiritual lethargy and you become in many ways weakened, of course.

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And that reality, of course, when you do end up going back to church, have this kind of,

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I don't know, internal revival and you go back, there is an art to it.

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You need to sort of work through these things and sometimes it's not as natural, but like anything that you end up loving greatly is gonna demand some practice.

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I tell my congregation that worship is hard. Worship is difficult.

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It's an exercise that by the end, it should give you some kind of physical pain.

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And it may be because of some, in my congregation, we kneel for confession and your vocal cords should be exhausted.

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We sing a lot in our church, but also the enjoyment of life, the things we most enjoy require work.

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Anybody who has, who is in travel sports on Sundays realizes the amount of work that's necessary to get your kid from point

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A to point B. The instruments, the tools, the clothing, everything that's required, the traveling, the demand, the preparation.

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And so it's important for these folks to realize that they're trading one corporate reality for another.

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And that what they're doing in choosing travel sports over the Lord's Day is that they are choosing a different kind of church, right?

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Because church is merely, the word simply means a gathering together, right?

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It's a different polis, a different city. And so they're choosing a city of themselves.

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And to borrow Augustus' language, they're choosing the city of man. And if you apply this even more broadly, they're choosing their particular priests, their particular liturgists, right?

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There are umpires, there are referees. Right. And even if they wanna play the role of priest on Sunday morning with a little devotional, they're making themselves into priests, which in the scriptures has really severe consequences.

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This may be a bit too severe, but I think your audience can handle it. But in the

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Torah, there's an example of a man who was gathering sticks on the

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Sabbath. That man was, essentially there was a theological war as to whether he deserved death or not.

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And we think to ourselves, my goodness, he was just gathering sticks, give me a break.

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This is a little too severe. But what if what he was doing by gathering sticks was to warm up his own individual exercises and his own individual hearth, his own individual fire, his own individual fire, his own individual sacrifices.

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Now you don't have somebody who is just saying, huh, I'm gonna go out for a stroll and gather some sticks for my fire.

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What if he was gathering sticks to build his own self -created worship in competition to, as an alternative to, the worship that the priests desire of the people.

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Right. In contrast to the worship of God desire of the people corporately. If that's the case, and I think that's the right way to read that passage, then what people are doing when they assume these self -created liturgies by going to a game or going to a concert on Saturday night and just deciding to sleep in on Sundays, right?

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Or going on vacation without thinking about, where do I do one of our exercises,

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Pastor, is to think about every time we go on vacation or somewhere, which we just did recently, we love looking up what are the churches in the area that we can attend.

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And when there isn't something in my own tradition, we'll look for a little Missouri Synod Lutheran Church or a

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PCA church or something like that. Amen. When that's not a practice in the family, then that art dies.

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And when that art dies, the necessary aspect of that worship also dies, which means it becomes really common for that person to treat this.

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And here's the thing. I wrote about this in the book I wrote many years ago called The Trinitarian Father, where there was this research done in Switzerland, I believe.

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And the research essentially concluded that fathers that go infrequently to church on Sundays will produce atheistic sons.

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Wow. And that reality is fleshed out. Why? Because worship is a covenantal response to God.

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And in this way, the sins of the fathers do carry on to the children because children are imitative beings.

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Yeah. Just as we're imitative of the God who created us, children are imitative of their fathers. And so there are severe consequences.

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I would want to warn these people that what you think is good, God declared it to be evil.

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What you think is good as an exercise of rest and Sabbath, and it's hard, nevertheless,

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I understand that, but it's the kind of hard that's delightful, the kind of heart that builds memories, the kind of hard that builds cultures.

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If you substitute that hardship for another hardship, which is the liturgy of doing something outside of worship, what that other hardship will produce is weak men.

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The hardship of worship that comes with all its liturgies and rituals is the kind of hardship that will build strong men and strong wives.

35:35

Yeah. And that would be my pitch as to the necessity and the eternal longevity that worship provides in the life of a

35:43

Christian. Brother, this conversation is so good. I've got so many thoughts in my head. A couple, just based off what you just said,

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I tell people all the time, if you want your children to love church, to love the

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Lord's Day gathering, then let them see you be thrilled by it. Let them see you be so excited that your toes are curling.

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Like, I'm not even kidding. I love the church and by God's grace, that is a posture for me.

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Like, I come in excited and I've noticed my kids are imitating that. And even from the smallest ones, they're like,

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I want to go to church and praise God for that, but they have to see it. They have to see it.

36:24

The second thought I had as you were just going and saying those things is, we really have eliminated a good view of punishment and blessing.

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Because what we believe is that if I skip church, I'm not really missing that much and God doesn't really care that much.

36:45

And yet the Bible's filled with these examples. Like for instance, Nadab and Abihu, they bring funny fire, they bring strange fire and God smokes them.

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And Aaron's told you can't even cry about it. Uzzah reaches up to grab the ark and God strikes him dead because he thought that he could protect the ark from being unclean by falling in a mud puddle when touching his hand, the uncleanness of him.

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So God is severe when it comes to the punishments for neglecting worship, but he's also severe in the opposite way of the blessings that he pours out on his people.

37:24

There's no neutrality. There's nothing in the middle. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's a good way of phrasing it.

37:31

God's abundance is great to those who love him and keep his commandments, Deuteronomy 10 says. But his judgment is also great, not because what he's going to do is perhaps strike you dead.

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However, I do think there's some interesting principles there that you see in Leviticus 10 and Nadab and Abihu that is actually repeated in 1

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Corinthians 11 and 12. Right. That those who were dividing the church for a variety of reasons, some have fallen asleep,

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Paul says, which is synonymous for they have died, you know? Yeah. A different conversation, but I think what we're setting ourselves up for is for a kind of slow death when we become absent from the gathered worship.

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Now, I'm a pastor, you're a pastor, and we know that there are people out there who are hurt by the church, people who have been damaged by abuse, all sorts of ugly things that happen in church life.

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Yeah. I would want to affirm with a, I think it's a mythical quote from Augustine, but I still use it every year, that the church is a whore, but she's my mother.

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The church has done things that have been, she has prostituted herself, right?

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And I think we want to affirm that the church has done very bad things historically, but she is the enduring body of Christ.

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We love to beat up on the church, but very little do we talk about its benedictions to society.

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Yeah. And we need to do more of that. We need to bless the church by exalting her position and status in society as the bride of Christ.

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Amen. So there are cases where the church has abused its privilege, has abused its power, where pastors have abused their authority.

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All these things are legitimate, and I would want to affirm that from someone who has experienced these things.

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But I would also want to say that the church is, to quote the Puritans, a hospital for sinners. And that means that there are always people in the church who are eager to see the lost rescued.

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And the absence of church life creates this prodigal philosophy among some that what they don't perceive to be a theme in their lives or a trajectory is actually what's taking place, is that the longer you're away from church the more and more you're going to trust in mammon, you're going to trust in alternative

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YouTube priests, you're going to rely on alternative societies on TikTok, which is a reality of the transgender world today, the transgender culture.

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And so what we need to do is to advocate once more the glory of the church.

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For every three times we speak poorly of the church, the other seven should be beautiful about what the church is as God's historical and scatological reality.

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We need to exalt the good. So we need to portray the church in all its beauty and splendor as Ephesians 5 says.

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And so once we begin that, once we begin to provide a culture where enjoyment, pleasure, as the hymn writer says, none but Zion's children know.

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Only those who are in the church know the pleasures of Zion, which is God's holy church.

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And when you're in it, you have to be able to say, look, I know there's good, bad, and ugly, but I also know that the head of the church has conquered all the bad and the ugly and has made it infinitely good.

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And so when you come into the life of the church, you have to come in with that kind of gusto. You come in with that kind of gravitas saying, if this is the place

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God has for me, whether Pensacola, Boston, or wherever in New England, if the church

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God has for me, I'm gonna walk into it with the attitude that says, this is where God has placed me, this is my calling.

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And if I'm gonna be the engineer, I'm gonna be a churchman that is an engineer. So that our status, our identity is first with Christ and His church then with everything else.

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The reason I'm gonna become a good teacher is because the church of Jesus Christ has fed me in word and sacrament.

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Therefore, I can provide a good word to the world and therefore

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I can sacramentalize the world, which is I can make the world holy because I have been made holy by the bread and wine given to me on Sunday.

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So this is the kind of vision and perspective that the church needs to have, which is extremely foreign, as you know, especially in the land where you pastor, extremely foreign to the evangelical reality.

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And here in the South, we have kind of different battles. It's a kind of evangelical battle where the church attenders don't see the heavenly structure of the church and therefore they minimize it.

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Your reality, which you can speak to obviously, is probably a world in which there's none of that. They don't even have these categories to ponder.

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But in our reality here, there is a sense in which the evangelical world has forgotten their history.

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And so I often joke here that for most evangelicals in the South, they think the church began when Billy Graham was born and they have forgotten that this great experiment from heaven has been going on since the

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Garden of Eden. And that's where we need to begin formulating our idea of the church and its necessity.

43:00

Yeah, two questions before we close. I know we're maybe a little over, so you tell me if you're doing okay on time.

43:08

But I wanna get to the spiritual question, but you brought up something that I think is really important when it comes to folks who are in churches that have hurt them or in churches right now where they're like,

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I'm not sure if my church is a faithful church. I'm not sure if we're doing what the Bible says that we're supposed to be doing.

43:25

Brother, could you sketch for us just a thousands of pages have been written on this topic. So I know we can't cover it all, but can you sketch a force of a helpful vision for people to be able to grab hold of and say, this is what a faithful church is.

43:38

This is what a faithful church does. All right, that's a great question.

43:45

A faithful church is one that preserves three elements. The first one is she preserves the normative element, which is that she is eager to preserve the authenticity and the validity of the scriptures, which is the norm for all

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Christians. A faithful church is one which preserves the situational ethic and the situational is the historical context of that church.

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And so she preserves the norm, but she also preserves the historicity of the church. She doesn't believe that church began according to the pastor's dream or vision.

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She believes the church has a long enduring legacy. So the church is normative, she's situational, which means she's historical.

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And then finally, a healthy church focuses on the existential ethic. And the existential ethic is essentially the fellowship, the community, and the body.

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Without these things, the church loses who she is. She may be weak on the existential reality.

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She may be maturing on the fellowship, on the food and the festivity, but she cannot be weak on the normative reality.

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And that's why the normative is first. And so if she is weak in certain areas, you can work through them, but she can't be weak in the normative reality.

45:08

Right. So that guides the other two. And I want to say for those of you who are attending churches, listen to this podcast, attending churches where the first reality has been compromised during COVID, has been compromised due to woke philosophies, whatever it may be, that you need to have that conversation now, especially if you have children, because the fundamental sociological shaping institution of planet earth is the church.

45:35

Amen. It's not your local school. It's not your family devotional. Trust me, it's not these things.

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It's the church. And therefore, as the church goes, so goes your family. And so if you are in a congregation where you're not being fed or where the ministers are playing with the normative perspective, apologizing for it occasionally on Sunday mornings, at that point, you need to begin asking a series of questions as to what's going to shape me in the next 10 to 15 years, because that's how parents ought to think.

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What's going to shape me? And if the normative perspective is compromised, you're going to have the kinds of regrets that people have when they have, you know, those miserable tattoos they have.

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Down the road, they're going to regret it. This is going to be doubly more painful because now you're neglecting and you're damaging the very structure of your life.

46:29

Behold how good it is when brothers dwell together in unity. When there is a disunity of thought concerning the normative perspective, the result of that 15, 20 years down the road will be severe.

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And you're going to feel it. And it is better to say right now, as for me and my house, we will serve the

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Lord in His house. But that house needs to be shaped by the authority of scriptures.

46:55

Amen. Yeah, just to maybe summarize a biblical church that practices what the

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Bible says. We don't make up things in worship and offer them to the Father and expect that He will be pleased with them.

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He's already told us what pleases Him. And He's revealed that in scripture through songs and through preaching and through the sacraments.

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All those things are there. So that's the first element. That must be true. And then the second is the historical.

47:22

And I love how you said that because when we planted a couple of years ago, we said we did not pop out of nowhere.

47:29

We are connected to a 2 ,000 -year -old church that goes back even further to the Garden of Eden. So we are connected to God's people, corporate for over all time.

47:40

So I'm so glad you said that. And the relational element that where we celebrate and do festivities together and grow together as God's people.

47:48

So commend that to anyone who's listening, find a church like that because it will bless your family.

47:55

Brother, one last question. I'd love for you to take us to the heavens on this one. You said earlier that the local church is the place where God brings us up into the heavenly realms where we're transported into a different sort of space.

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Give us a biblical vision of that. Expound upon that. What is actually happening if you pull back the curtain on what's going on in our local church from call to commission?

48:23

What is that? Well, imagine or build a vision for a

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Sunday morning when you're gathered together with God's people and you have your children next to you or your grandparents. And in that moment, there is an explosion that takes place in the ceiling.

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And the ceiling is open to us. The ceiling is now revealed.

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And you felt as if you were protected, but now the ceiling is gone through this explosive reaction.

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And then at that moment, millions and millions of angels began to sing over you.

49:05

And at that moment, a voice that is even more exalted than the angels, Zephaniah 3 says that God sings over us and exalts over us with singing, more exalted than the angels interferes in that chorus and says, you are my beloved children in whom

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I am well pleased. You may think to yourself, wow, what a glorious vision.

49:30

But what if I said that's exactly what happens every time you gather? The walls of partitions are broken down.

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The veil has been torn from top to bottom. You are joining angels and archangels in singing.

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You're joined that revelation choir that John speaks about. And God is reminding you.

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We might even say he's reminding himself because he's a God who remembers of his promises made to you in baptism.

50:00

And all of these things are taking place simultaneously. And the reality that you can't particularly see, but it's a reality that is taking place in heaven.

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And the way God does that, the way God opens up the veil of redemptive history is by calling you into his presence.

50:20

He calls you into worship when you gather. And then what he does is because he sees your sins and he sees your frame, he knows your frame, as Psalm says, he demands that you confess his sins before you so that your experience in heaven is an experience that is pure, an experience that's pristine, an experience that doesn't include your filthy rags or your unclean lips.

50:49

So God takes your confession. He cleanses you. And then he offers you a word that is sharper than any two -edged sword.

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And that word cuts you asunder and it opens you up. And then that word begins to heal you from within.

51:07

And then God says, now that you have gone through this divine surgery, you have been opened up by the work of the spirit, cleansed.

51:16

Now he puts you back together and he says, now I have a table before the presence of your enemies.

51:23

And he sets this beautiful table with bread and wine. And you begin to greet one another, sing psalms and hymns and spirit songs with one another.

51:33

Your spirit begins to be heightened, elevated, illuminated, enlightened. Then after that meal,

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God says, I have done everything for you. And because I have done everything for you from the call to this point, the call to communion,

51:48

I'm going to commission you into a world that has not experienced what you just experienced in this,

51:55

I don't know, 60 to 75 minute experience. Two hours at our church. Two hours in some churches.

52:03

And now I'm going to commission you to do these things to the world, to invite the world, to call them, to cleanse them, to bring them healing, to feed them with hospitality.

52:15

So that they would say, you know, I don't know what you're drinking, but I want some of that wine too.

52:21

And so, and that's the evangelistic dimension of the church. And that's the vision that I would like to see your listeners, whoever's listening to this conversation in our context, to grasp that there's something, there's a reality far greater than they will ever grasp taking place when we gather in the

52:38

Lord's day. That makes so much sense too. And it explains going all the way back to the beginning of this conversation, why the church is the engine or the church is the power behind Christendom because we are drawn into a national identity, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation with their own rituals and our own banners and culture making things that God has provided for us and in the service, in the church, he is equipping us to now take that as his children, go back to our family analogy and to imitate them to the nations, to do unto the nations what he has just done unto us.

53:19

What a vision. And I think that's how the world will be one is just that vision that you just painted.

53:27

What a beautiful thing, brother. I thank you so much for sharing that with us. You are very welcome. Well, listen, what can we, how can we find you?

53:36

What are the websites your own? What are the projects you're working on? How can we hear more about ecclesiocentrism?

53:44

Maybe we'll call it. Yeah, fair. I have a couple of places where you can find me.

53:49

The one where I've poured a lot of affection lately has been on my sub stack. And I think it's drbrito .substack

53:56

.com. I think that's the URL, but then I have a website, that you get a chance to write at.

54:02

And you've done a couple of initial debuts, some good political work. And that's Kuyperian Commentary, which is simply

54:09

Kuyperian .com, K -U -Y -P -E -R -I -A -N .com.

54:14

And that's where I think I have 23 writers that have sort of graced the pages of Kuyperian for the last 18 years,

54:21

I think. And it's been a wonderful journey because we have a podcast. And one of the things I love the most about what we do at Kuyperian is to hear stories about people using the essays for Bible studies or book studies.

54:32

And that's what I want to do with it, is to be a blessing to the local church. Those are two really instrumental places where you can find my material.

54:40

Hey, that's awesome, brother. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you in Moscow this year for council.

54:48

And thank you so much again for joining us, brother. God bless you. God bless you, my brother. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the podcast.

54:57

Between last week and this week, we've seen a sketch of what Christendom is. We've seen how the

55:03

New Testament envisions a church that takes the gospel to the ends of the earth, discipling all the nations, knocking down satanic strongholds, pushing over hell's gates and transforming this world into a kingdom fit for her king.

55:18

And while this is certainly a future reality when all the nations bow before the Lord Jesus Christ, we can begin working on that right now where we are.

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As we learned today, Christendom begins in the local church where all the citizens of heaven assemble for our weekly holy day and are strengthened and nourished by our king.

55:39

Why? So that we can scatter to the nations, bringing them the bread of life and the wine of the new covenant, bringing them the word made flesh, which is the power of God unto salvation, bringing them the call to assemble with us next week and bringing them the need to confess our sins and to lay them down at the foot of the cross to follow

55:57

Jesus, bringing them the comfort that comes only in the forgiveness of Christ, bringing them the need to be consecrated to his word and to commune at his table so that all the new converts that we reach can come to the

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Lord's gathering and be discipled and then commissioned right alongside of us so that they will win the world to Christ and see it bow under his supremacy and lordship.

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Christendom is fueled by committed, consistent and passionate public worship. And as you consider these things, my prayer is that you would be in a good and faithful local church, a church where the word of God is rightly preached and where the sacraments are rightly administered and where church discipline is practiced in a godly and righteous way.

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If that is not where you and your family are at, pray for your local church. And if you need to leave an unfaithful church, do that in a righteous and holy way and find a church like Providence Church in Pensacola, Florida, or like Shepherd's Church in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

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They're out there. Find one and be a part of it. With that, I pray that you would make war through worship from this

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Sunday to the ends of the earth. Until next time, God bless you. And we'll see you again on the

57:09

Prodcast. If you were blessed by today's show, help us get the word out to more people by sharing this content.