Church, Part 1 of What We Believe, Part 36

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Church, Part 2 of What We Believe, Part 37

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And this is an important passage to have ready for someone, because it comes up often when you deal with this.
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And that's 1 John 2, 19, which says, they went out from us, but they were really not of us.
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For had they been of us, they would have remained with us. But they went out so that it would be shown that they are not of us.
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Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.
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This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
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Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the
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Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member.
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You can check out strivingforeternity .org or christianpodcastcommunity .org to find out more.
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And I am joined for this episode and a couple more that we're going to have as folks you know that have been listening.
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We have been rotating through guest co -hosts with me here through the other members of the
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Christian Podcast Community. And this episode, we're going to start talking about the church.
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What better than talking about the church than with pastors? So our first pastor that is going to discuss this topic with me is
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Pastor Stephen Dew. And he's from two different podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community.
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And so he's one of the few that we have that does multiple ones because he's not busy enough.
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But he has the Doctrine Matters podcast, which I encourage you to check out.
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It's a little bit shorter than his other one, which is the Christian Foundry podcast.
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A Christian Foundry podcast is, well, they got like eight guys on there, so it's hard to figure out everyone's voice.
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But Stephen will really give you a lot when it comes to the doctrine that matters when he deals with topics and a lot of different topics on his podcast that he covers and does very good, gives you a lot of material in a short amount of time, which
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I appreciate. He's very concise that way. So I encourage you to check those podcasts out. So Stephen, welcome to The Wrap Report.
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Yeah, thanks for having me. As you said, two podcasts and a pastor. So I've been kind of busy lately with those things.
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But I'm honored to be here. Thank you for the invite. And you're right, what better way to start this just talking about the church in general?
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One of God's glorious institutions. So I'm looking forward to the conversation. As a pastor, you don't really work until, what,
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Saturday night? That's true. Late Saturday night is when I start working, into Sunday, and then only on Wednesdays.
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That's kind of how it's laid out. That's what people think.
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Let folks know right off the bat, church or pastor in any way they could get ahold of you if they want to get to your church, if they're in your area.
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Yeah, I'm a lead pastor at South Carraway Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, which is in northeast
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Arkansas. Been here a little over five years now, and we are a Reformed Baptist Church. So if anybody's looking in the area for a biblical church, you can go to our website,
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SouthCarrawayBaptistChurch .com, or our Facebook site or page, I guess it's called these days. You can also find me on Facebook as well.
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All right. So let's get into discussing the church. I really don't know how far we're going to get into this episode.
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So I'm going to ask you if you could just read the first paragraph, which consists of one sentence.
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All right. All who place their faith in Christ Jesus are immediately placed by the
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Holy Spirit into one united spiritual body called the Church, the Bride of Christ, of which
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Christ is the head. All right. So this is, again, folks, as we've been going through this whole series, we've been saying we're doing this, we're going through our doctrinal statement at Striving for Eternity.
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So if you want to read along, follow along with us, go to strivingforeternity .org under the About section, and you'll see what we believe.
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Scroll down to the church and expand that. That's what we're reading. And we're doing this basically to say, what is in a doctrinal statement?
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When we see doctrinal statements, there's a lot more, as if you've been following along with our series here, there's a lot more to a doctrinal statement than a lot of people may have thought before, because a lot of what this is saying is really saying things that we're saying the
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Bible doesn't teach. And a lot of this you're going to see, especially when it comes to church, we're going to bring up some other, can we say churches?
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No, no, we can't. But Kingdom Halls, the Mormons, things like this, you're going to see, when it comes to the way we view the church and what the church is, you're going to start to see some differences again.
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We really saw a lot when we talked about who Christ is. But the running of the church is going to be different.
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I'm just going to give you one way that you can see a big difference. When you see a biblical church, there's going to be freedom.
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And when you're in a cult, there's going to be control. And that's going to be one thing you're going to be able to spot right away.
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In fact, a good way to view a cult, if you look at cults, if you get my book,
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What Do They Believe?, in the beginning, in the intro, I define a cult by five different things, whether they have an authoritarian group or a person that's the only one that can interpret the
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Bible. They have scripture twisting, because that's kind of necessary for all their control that they're going to do.
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You have isolation, where they're going to try to pull people away from other people, family, friends, that would warn them.
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And the reason or the way they do that is their exclusivity. They claim that they'll be the only ones with the truth.
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And then the last one is harm. And that could be physical, emotional, or spiritual harm.
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And so those are the five ways that the five elements that we have when defining a cult.
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But another way of looking at it is just the idea of control. And I saw someone that had the acronym
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BITE for behavioral control, informational control.
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I know the E was environmental control, but I forgot what the T stood for. I have that list somewhere here.
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Maybe I'll find it. But it's really the idea you end up seeing that they will be controlling.
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And so as we go through this, you're going to see we're going to talk about the freedom in Christ that we have within a church.
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But right off the bat, one thing that you're going to see different is that if you look at any man -made religion that has a church,
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Roman Catholicism, and yeah, that's man -made, you end up seeing that their position will be that if you're born into a family that's
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Roman Catholic or Jehovah Witness or Mormon, that puts you into the church.
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And so you're part of that church because you're born with a family that's part of the church.
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Right off the bat here, we're making a difference. We're saying that those who are the church are placed there by the
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Holy Spirit. So that's different. So Steve, we don't have people that, when we have people come to church, it's not that they've been attending your church ever since you got there or ever since they've been born that makes them a
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Christian, is it? No. But in my context, and I think it's probably like this everywhere, you talk about being born into the family, which you're automatically a part of that church.
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In the South, you hear that a lot. Well, I've always been a
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Christian. I was born a Christian or my daddy was a deacon or a Baptist pastor or you name it.
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And they think that automatically makes them part of the church. And I think that's where not having a statement of faith in what churches believe have gotten a lot of churches in kind of hot water and maybe not even churches themselves.
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Maybe not. They may not even call themselves a church. You would think that just being born into a
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Christian family makes everybody a part of the church and makes everybody a Christian around here. That is the thing that I find so often.
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Or, hey, I've been baptized, and therefore I'm part of the church. I'm a
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Christian just because I did something. Either I'm born into it or I did something like an act of baptism.
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And this is why we have the section on the church after we spent so much time on soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, to define what it is that when we say someone becomes a
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Christian, what that means. We end up seeing, though, that when we have a church, you go to any church, and when you walk in, first off, the church is not the building.
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A lot of people will talk that way, that they go to, when they speak of a church, they're referring to a building.
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Some refer to a denomination. But we're going to say, as we say even in this first sentence, it's really the body of Christ.
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It's the people that make up the church. But when we do go to a building, to where the church would meet, we have to realize, and I'm going to say this throughout this part as we talk about the church,
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I'm probably going to say this like every episode, because it's really important to understand, there are people attending even your church, even my church, that are not saved.
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Even though the doctrine could be really, really good, we have to realize that there's people who are not saved.
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So the church locally is made up of believers and unbelievers. Now, some of you may be saying,
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Andrew, why are you making such a big deal of this? And you're saying you're going to make a big deal of this, like, each week. Well, the reason is, is because if you go back to the episode we did a couple weeks ago when we talked about security, eternal salvation, eternal security, that when we're saved, we can't lose that, that all the passages that people end up using to argue for losing your salvation, it's because they're confused over who makes up the church and what the church is.
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And so they take passages to the unbelievers that sit in the pews that are pretending to be
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Christians, and they take those passages and say, oh, that is a
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Christian. Well, time and truth go hand in hand. Give enough time, you'll see the truth if someone's really a believer.
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We will look at the fruit. And so we have to realize that just because they go to church and just because they seem like they are really on fire—in fact,
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I'll say this, it's usually the people that are really on fire when they first, quote -unquote, get saved that usually get me the most nervous.
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You know, Stephen, I know you were at least watching Apologetics Live some time ago when we were recording about this guy,
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Zach's, open letter to Justin Peters, and in there I talked about the fact that his wife,
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Lindsay, who came out of Bethel, she claimed she got saved in Bethel, and she was thoroughly reformed and came out, and she was—everyone wanted to interview her because she just seemed like she was so solid, and she came out of Bethel.
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And people were asking me, like, oh, you got to get her on your podcast. And I said, no. I'm going to wait, like, a year to see where she's—I want to see if she's going to be what a
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Christian would be, which means go and get discipled and get underneath people and be trained.
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It's one thing to read books and listen to sermons, right? But it's a different thing to get into the
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Bible and be discipled by someone and trained up. And I know you're—look, you have the
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Christian Foundry podcast, a bunch of guys from your church, and whether you recognize this or not,
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Pastor Steve, I could see what your discipleship is like through that podcast, because I'm listening to these guys who didn't know
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Christ until they entered that church building, and I'm seeing how they speak of you and what you did in their life and worked with them and how each of these guys are being discipled by each other.
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That's a huge element of the church that's actually missing these days. I wanted to see if she was going to do that, and I didn't see that in her, and now she's back at Bethel, you know, supporting churches like that.
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And so, well, why did I have that knee -jerk reaction to say no? Because I've seen this plenty of times, where people are like, oh,
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I'm saved, and they're like on fire, so it seems. But they were just hypocrites that were just pretending.
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Now, I'm not saying she's not saved. I don't know that. I just know that her theology could swing 180 degrees and then 180 degrees back.
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Why? Because she had no foundation. And that's one thing
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I think we need to be able to see in the church. Absolutely. Unfortunately, you have that, and like you said, the ones that have this knee -jerk reaction, they're on fire.
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We see that a lot here of kids that come back from camp. You know, they got saved on the beach or whatever, and they're coming back, and they're on fire for Jesus, and then they get back in their school, and it's just right back to who they were, right?
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But you have a lot of adults that do that same thing, and I was listening the other night, and I haven't followed her story.
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But it blows me away how the doctrinal shift can happen so quickly.
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And that's one thing, though, that we do need to be aware of in our churches are those people that are like that, that can be all in with what you're teaching, and then all of a sudden, they're blown away by every wind of doctrine, right?
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And that doctrinal pendulum swings, and before long, that could disrupt the church.
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And I think you're right on. You've nailed it. We have to make sure that we understand that there are believers and unbelievers in the church, which is, in my opinion, the number one reason why there should be a plurality of pastors leading a church so that we can keep our thumb on the pulse of the congregation and protect the sheep, but also feed those that are unbelievers.
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And I know that I've got so many thoughts in my head about all these things, so I may be chasing rabbits here, but that's one of the things about the church is for years,
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I believe, as Charles Spurgeon has said, that we've been too busy feeding the goats or entertaining the goats and not feeding the sheep.
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And we have a lot of churches looking more like the world now, and I think those churches are going to be evidenced by the people within those churches doing the same thing you're talking about, that doctrinal swing back and forth.
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Well, see, that was under Spurgeon's time. We've passed that now. Now the churches are just goat farms.
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They're not even entertaining the goats. They're producing them. They're giving a false gospel to get people in the pews, right?
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Yeah, and unfortunately, those goat farms are producing more goat farms instead of churches producing more biblical churches.
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Correct. When you think about this, a lot of times
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I go to when Jesus spoke of the parable of the soils, because it's not actually about the seed.
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The seed's the same, right? He says the seed is the word of God. It's the soils that are different. So you have the first and last soil, right?
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The first soil, the rocky soil, nothing happens. The word of God just lands on that heart, that person, and just nothing.
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They hate God, they're rebelling, and nothing's going to happen. The last one is the good soil that produces fruit.
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That's speaking of the believer. It's interesting, most people don't think about those other two in the middle.
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Those are the hypocrites. Those are the people that go to church, and the first one, it's like they look like they sprout up, and they just suddenly have growth, and you see that plant, and it's like, wow, oh, that shot up fast, but it had no roots.
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It just, as soon as the sun came up, it just scorched it. That's what we're talking about with some of these people, right? They shoot up, and they seem like they have a good knowledge, a good handle of scripture, and they shoot up real quick, and they fade away almost as quickly.
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The other soil is the thorny soil, where, you know, they shoot up, and it looks like they're doing well, but as soon as the world kind of gets its hands on to them, and they have some trials, or some temptations, or testings, and all of a sudden, they're done, right?
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So two of the soils, half the soils, are talking about people that are in the church, but aren't believing.
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Now, how do I know they're not believing? Very simple. And this is an important passage to have ready for someone, because it comes up often when you deal with this, and that's 1
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John 2, 19, which says, They went out from us, but they were really not of us.
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For had they been of us, they would have remained with us. But they went out so that it would be shown that they are not of us.
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So what John is saying is that if they go from us, if they leave the church and start denying Christ, all they're exposing is they were never of us.
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They were hypocrites that stopped pretending, those two soils. So even though someone shows some signs of fruit, that doesn't mean they're actually believers.
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Okay, so that's a really long introduction. I feel like John MacArthur now.
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John MacArthur preaches for, like, 40 minutes and goes, Well, that was the introduction, but his introductions are way better than mine.
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All right, so let's look at this. We're saying all who place their faith in Christ, in Jesus Christ. So right there, what we're saying is, this is the limitation that we were talking about, right?
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It is not everybody who comes to church that becomes a member of the church.
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It is those who place their faith in Jesus Christ. I don't know,
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Steve, if you ever had this experience. I had a couple that came, the husband got saved and the wife did not.
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And so the husband wanted to become a member of the church, which we had no problem with. We were going to, you know, we were going to baptize him and have him come into the membership, but his wife was upset because she wanted to get baptized with him and become a member, and I said no.
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And she found that very upsetting, and I said, well, we can't because you haven't put your faith in Jesus Christ.
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So you can't get baptized because that's not going to be an outward sign of something that happened inwardly because nothing happened inwardly.
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And we can't have you as a member because you haven't been baptized, and the reason you haven't been baptized is because you're not a believer.
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And so she ended up, I think, kind of pulling the husband by the ear as they found another church that would allow her to be a member, so she just wasn't happy.
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But the reality is that as a pastor, I would have been derelict in my duty to allow someone to become a member that I know is not a believer.
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I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. No, yeah, I have some thoughts on that. And in the
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Southern Baptist world, the blue cards are at the front of every church on the first pew.
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And during the invitation, as they sing Just As I Am and wait for somebody to come down, somebody could come down and say,
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I want to join your church, and then it's got by profession of faith, by baptism, or to transfer a letter from another church, something like that.
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And for years, I've watched this play out. I've never personally been a part of a situation like you were just talking about.
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I've been a part of a lot of other ones. But for years, the church has just said, oh, you want to be a member because church has been a numbers game for a multiple amount of years.
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And oh, yeah, you know, the Monday morning conversation at the local breakfast club is how many people are in your church now, you know, between pastors.
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So church has been a numbers game for years, and people have spent more time thinking about physical numbers than the spiritual lives of those joining.
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So that in and of itself has been just a terrible thing for the church. When my church, when
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I came in, and that's kind of the way it functioned, I said, we can't do this anymore. We just can't let somebody off the street walk in and say, well,
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I like the music. I like the teaching. I want to join your church without knowing anything about them, because anybody can mark.
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Yeah, I'm going to profess Jesus Christ. This is how I'm going to become a member. And none of us know that. So I remember early on in this church, when
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I started changing this, I got a lot of pushback. It's like, you got somebody wanting to be a member of your church.
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Why are you not? What's going on? What's the deal? And I'm thinking, do you know how serious this is, is becoming a member of a church?
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So we started really pushing back. And I'll tell a quick story about this.
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When we started, we pushed back in a loving way and taught our people why membership matters and what that looks like biblically.
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So we started having, you can call it a membership class, whatever. But we wanted to get to know the people that wanted to join our church.
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And we wanted them to get to know us instead of just based off of one sermon or one visit.
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We had this guy come up. He came up to me after service. We were singing what we call our reflection song.
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He says, I want to join this church. First time I've ever seen this guy. I didn't know him from anybody. I said, okay, well, let's talk about that when we're done here.
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And I'll get you set up with next steps. He said, okay, I'll spend some time going through your statement of faith, because that's one thing we do.
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We go through our statement of faith, kind of like we're doing here. We talk about all the leaders of the church, who those are, why membership matters, all this stuff.
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One of the things is we want to hear your testimony, just because I heard a guy one time say
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I was sitting by a lake, the wind blew, and I just felt at peace, and I knew God saved me. And I said, no, but that's what he bases his salvation off of.
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So we don't want churches full of those testimonies, right? So that's part of it, hearing their testimony and all these things, getting to know them.
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Well, about the second week of meeting with the group, because there was a few people, and one of the people meeting with us happened to be a black lady.
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Well, this guy, she was running late that night, and he started just, where's that blank?
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Why is she not here? And just being very openly racist. And we had to pull him to the side and say, this is sin.
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You can't talk to somebody created in God's image or about them in this way.
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And he got mad, left, and we never saw him again. So had we accepted him on his first walk down the aisle and say,
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I want to be a part of your church, then there's no telling what would have happened. You would have had to deal with some church discipline then, which...
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Absolutely. You bring up a really good point. Not that I was planning on bringing this up, but you really do bring up an issue that when we speak of the church we have to address is the numbers game, because that has affected the church.
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Folks listening, I think about this. I'm going to ask the question. I'm going to give you time to think about it.
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What do you think is the average size of the church? Now I'm asking that question, and most people are going to be thinking of, you know, you have like a
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John MacArthur, I think he's got nine, ten thousand people at his church, and if you think of the
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Joel Osteens out there with, you know, like a hundred thousand people. So you think of all those big churches.
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Now here's the thing. The reality? The average size church in America is 75 people.
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So that tells you that if you have a church of like a Joel Osteen with a hundred thousand, that means there are a lot of churches, way more churches with far less than 75.
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A lot of them, 25. Are they any less of a church? I know Andy Stanley would say that's not a real church, because he says only big churches are churches.
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I know, he's got a couple of issues. And if folks need, go back a few episodes.
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Drew and I dealt with Andy Stanley and some of how he views who can serve in church. We addressed the fact that he has no problem with two homosexual men living together, serving in church.
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He was just upset that one of them was still married to a woman. So adultery to a woman, that's bad.
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Adultery with the guy, hey, that was fine. Right? But what we end up seeing, if you want, go back to that previous episode.
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You can listen if you haven't. So what we end up seeing is that most churches are small. I remember my first church, it was about 140, 150 people in New Jersey.
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And in New Jersey, like, when I would go to pastor conferences in Jersey or the pastor's fellowship that we had,
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I was the guy with the big church. That's a big church in Jersey. There's a couple that reach up to the hundreds and thousands, but, you know,
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I was, in my group that I was with, I was the guy with the big church at 140.
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So we look at this and realize people have started to do is focus on numbers, as Stephen mentioned, and what that ended up doing was changing behavior, because when it became more important, when this whole church growth movement started, it became important to have larger numbers, well, people started playing games with, like, well, let's not focus on doctrine.
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And Steve, does doctrine matter? Absolutely. It sounds like a good name for a podcast.
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Yeah, it does. So I'm surprised that somebody hasn't, you know, snatched that one right up. Well, actually, it's kind of funny, because you have the
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Doctrine Matters podcast, and then we also have the Matter of Theology podcast. And you guys both had applied around the same time, if I remember correctly, so I was always confusing them.
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But yeah, doctrine matters. And the thing is that people are giving up doctrine for the sake of unity.
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Steve, I'm going to ask you this question, and folks, I want you to think about this. I'm going to ask the question.
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I'm going to give you guys a little bit of a chance to think. But the question becomes, you know, if we focus on the numbers, right, we end up seeing that people have a reaction.
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There's a change. They start to focus more on unity. And so the question I'm going to have for you, Steve, is does—and don't answer right away, because I want to give people time to think about it—does doctrine divide?
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Okay, so that's the question that he's going to have to answer. Folks, I want you to think about this, because most people will say, yes, it does.
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I'm going to say, I'm going to agree and disagree, but I want to see what
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Steve's going to say about that. So, Stephen, does doctrine divide?
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Should we avoid it for the sake of unity? So we should not avoid doctrine. But I will say it does divide, although it shouldn't.
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And what I mean by that is, again, I'm going to just, from my context here in the
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South, is my church is about an hour away from, what's his name,
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Adrian Rogers Church, Bellevue, which he was there for years. This area is heavily
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Arminian, right? Grew up learning all of Adrian Rogers' teachings.
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Their pastors would teach the same things. And then when you start looking at true biblical doctrine, and you start getting into Ephesians 1 and Romans 9 and,
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I mean, Genesis 15, all over the place, right, you see people really start to put up walls and they say, you know,
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I wasn't taught this way. I've never been taught this way. This is foreign to me.
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And, you know, I've had a lot of people say, even though I see this right here that you're teaching me, I still can't believe it, whether that be soteriology, whether that be whatever the case may be when it comes to doctrine.
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But I've literally had people say, well, I can see it, but I just wouldn't. I mean, I've been in the church for 40 years.
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That's not the way I was taught. I just can't believe it. So there you have doctrine dividing and people, they're allowing it to divide.
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In reality, what I think true biblical doctrine should unite true believers.
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So I think when you get to doctrines that are difficult, and there are many doctrines that are difficult, I mean,
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I don't know about you, but I still feel the tension in God's sovereignty and salvation.
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I still I mean, although I believe God's sovereignty and salvation, I believe that there's always kind of this
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God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. There's always that kind of friction that rubs. So but even in those difficult things, believers should be willing to go to the scriptures together and reason with one another from the scriptures and not from, you know, well, my old pastor said this or my, you know, my
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Google search said this or, you know, I watched a YouTube video that said this. So I can watch a million videos that are going to confirm my thought process.
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But I need to open up the Bible and say, let's sit down and reason together from the scriptures and just let the
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Holy Spirit work in that. Because even I mean, I've already mentioned soteriology. So even if I agree in God's sovereignty and his election and somebody else doesn't, that doesn't mean we have to butt heads and divide over that.
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Right. I think because I used to be this person before I believed in God's sovereignty and salvation.
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So I think we can come together and talk through these things biblically and not from a point of anger and contention.
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And I think in that, whether, you know, somebody accepts it fully immediately or not, there's still going to be that unity to say,
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OK, hey, I'm wrestling through these things. I'm dealing with these things. But I'm with you.
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We're united and we've been called to go make disciples. So let's do that.
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Yeah, and I know that actually has happened in your church because I listen to the Christian Foundry podcast. And a couple of the guys have said they came in your church and they were very much against you in some of your doctrine.
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And then they went, oh, wait, no, he's right. That's what the Bible's teaching. So we also now know that you're not a regular listener to The Rap Report because you would have gone back to a couple of episodes ago on the doctrine of superintending.
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And that will—I put that out and I had said this is the solution to the Calvinism -Arminianism debate.
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It really is, because—and we've covered it a lot when we went through salvation, but when we think about inspiration, how we got
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Scripture, right? God works through a human author who has the choice of what words he's going to write, and yet those words he writes are actually what
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God intended to be written. Even though they chose to write them, they can't take credit for those words.
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They give the credit to God, so he gets 100 % of the credit. So this doctrine of superintending is
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God working through human agents with the choices they make, that their choices are exactly what God intended.
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We see that also in sanctification. Folks, if you remember just a few episodes ago, we dealt with sanctification, and we said it again there, right?
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Do we do good works? No. God does those good works through us. So I just apply that right to regeneration, and I think problem solved.
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Did I choose God? Yes. Did God choose me? Yes. I didn't choose him apart from him.
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He worked through me so that the choices I made were exactly as he intended them to be, but I did make a choice, but I couldn't have made it on my own, so he gets 100 % of the credit.
33:58
So that's how I resolve that tension. Yep. And I will tell you that, being a regular listener,
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I'll tell you, you preached that down at—I can't remember the pastor's name—but down in Florida, and afterwards, all the folks come up and said, man, that was really helpful.
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So there you go. Yes, I said he doesn't listen.
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He gave me a look like, oh, really? All right.
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So what we're saying, but putting a doctrinal statement out, yeah, it's divisive, but it's unifying.
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This unifies those that are genuine believers with falsehoods.
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So when we're saying all who place their faith in Jesus are immediately placed by the Holy Spirit into the
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Church, then what are we saying? We're saying you can't be born into the Church. So if you're saying you could be born in the
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Church, yes, does it divide? Yeah, it's dividing between those who claim you can just be born into the
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Church from those who believe what the Bible teaches. So yes, it does divide, but you know what else it does? As Steve said,
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Stephen and I are unified in so many different things. Why? Because we have a doctrine that unifies us.
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Are we going to be unified in everything? No. I have plenty of Presbyterian brothers and sisters who
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I can unite with. By the time we're recording this, I'm not in Israel. By the time you're listening to this,
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I'm back from Israel, but I'll be there with a friend of mine, Matt Slick. He's Presbyterian.
35:29
I'm Baptist. He goes to a Calvary Chapel Church because some of the things like the music, and he doesn't believe in membership.
35:39
I believe in membership, and I like hymns. We have a lot of differences. There's some of those differences that we're going to have more strict divides over.
35:48
He's Covenantal. I'm Baptist. He believes in infant baptism. I don't. He believes in the gifts continuing.
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I don't. You see, all those are doctrinal things, and we could choose, and this was a really important thing.
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I hope everyone heard what Pastor Stephen had said. We could choose to divide over those things, and some of those secondary issues to divide over those, or we could unite, as Matt and I do, we could unite over the gospel and the things that unite us, or the doctrines we agree on, and then we have friendly debates over the rest.
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And let's keep them friendly if you're going to do that. But what this statement of faith is trying to say is that it's not everybody who's a member of the
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Church just because they attend it. It's those who are placed there by the Holy Spirit.
36:44
Before we get into this next section, because I want to get into this, but I'm going to just take a quick break at this moment to give a word from our sponsor,
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And so we'd appreciate if you did that. Let's get back into this section now.
37:53
We're saying here that the Holy Spirit's going to place us into one united spiritual body called the
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Church. Okay. If anyone gets my book, What Do We Believe?,
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you're going to see that in the section on the Church, what I do is I walk through the term ekklesia, that's the
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Greek word where we get the word for church, and show how it morphed over the years. Okay.
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So church originally, ekklesia, what it meant was it actually started in Ephesus as basically a voting.
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It was their election. They would gather, everyone was required to vote, and they would gather to come out and vote.
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And that was the first usage that we see of that word, is to refer to a gathering for the purpose of voting.
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But in the first century after Christ, that word had a different meaning. It became the gathering for a specific purpose of worshiping
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God. But then it morphed even more, because as things continued to happen, people started to need to be more specific on the wording, and we started to use the language of the visible and invisible church, or you might have heard it as the universal and local church.
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And so right now we're saying the Holy Spirit puts us into one united spiritual body, and we have to define these terms of visible, invisible, or local and universal, because they're going to be very helpful.
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What we're talking about is the fact that the local gathering of believers, you go to on Sunday, you go to a church building, there's believers there, but we've already said there's also unbelievers there.
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So the local or visible, what you see, that gathering is made up of both believers and unbelievers, but we still refer to them as church.
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And so you see in the scriptures where it'll refer to church, but we talk about people that are these hypocrites that are in church.
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And so when we say the visible or local church, we're talking about a body of people who are made up of both believers and unbelievers for the purpose of worshiping
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God. We can't tell for sure which ones are believers or not. We've kind of covered that already.
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But we're saying that they're there. That's different than what we're mentioning here. What we're speaking of here is what we refer to as the invisible or universal church.
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Now, that's different because that is made up of only believers, but everywhere and all time.
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So Steve and I attend different churches, but we're both members of the church.
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Well, what church are we talking about? Well, we're talking about this universal church. And so every believer is put into that universal body of believers that we call the church.
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Do you have something you want to add? Oh, no, I think you're spot on with that. Yeah, and this is really important for us to understand, as I already said, because a lot of the passages that people look at in Scripture that refer to church, they assume it's only believers.
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And so during the Middle Ages, they started to update the idea of what church is to be more specific and say, are we talking the visible church or the invisible church?
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Because that becomes a distinguishing factor. Remember, at a time when everyone's forced to go to church, or if you're in the
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South like Steve, then everyone just goes to church and they think that makes them a
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Christian. So you don't have that in New Jersey, Stephen. You don't.
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In New Jersey, no one goes to church because they feel it's culturally acceptable.
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It's just, you know, because going to church in New Jersey, it's kind of like New Hampshire area or New England area.
41:59
You know, it's, you go to church there and you're going to be looked with scorn. You know, there's so many liberals.
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So we don't, I don't live in the area where everyone goes, yeah, I go to church.
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No, it doesn't happen. So the nice thing, though, is usually we have a better idea who is a believer and who isn't, because we don't have as many of the hypocrites and false converts in the church as you would down South.
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But see, now this is how, when we come to the scriptures, we have to understand this, that throughout time we had to be more specific.
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In fact, and you could read this in my book, when the Puritans came around, they had to be even more specific, because when they spoke of the local church, they've defined it and said, well, you're not really a church unless you're doing three things.
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Having the preaching of the Word of God, and that throws out, like,
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Willow Creek, Saddleback, maybe, but the preaching of the
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Word of God, the practicing of the ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper, and this third one's going to surprise some people.
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In the Puritans, they said you were not a church if you didn't have the preaching of the Word of God, the practicing of the ordinances, and the third one was the purity through church discipline.
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They believed if you are not practicing church discipline, you are not a church. That flies in the face of many churches, especially down South.
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I remember when John MacArthur tells the story, when he became a pastor there, he decided after reading
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Matthew 18 that they were going to start practicing church discipline, and all the pastors said, you're going to empty that church out.
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The very opposite happened. They lost a bunch of goats and got a ton of sheep. That's what church discipline actually does.
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That's kind of what happened at our church, too. Six weeks in, that's a story in and of itself, but I had to practice church discipline.
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Church has never heard of it, and they were all fine with, hey, the first parts of it, but when it came time to the
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Restoration, they were not having it. A lot of them weren't having it, and a lot of goats ended up leaving, but what happened is the call went forth.
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There's a church here that practices church discipline. There's one church in this area. So it started bringing a bunch of people that say, hey, this is what we're looking for.
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That's kind of the way it worked in my context as well. Yeah, and that's what happens.
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So when we're saying that you're being put into one united spiritual body, this is not denominational.
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This is Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists. I'm going to surprise some people.
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Even some Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses. Why am
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I saying it that way? They're not in a biblical church setting, but they could get saved and not know any better.
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Now, I believe that the Holy Spirit will bring them out of that and put them into a good church.
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They're not going to stay in, you know, as a Jehovah Witness or Mormon context, because I think the
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Holy Spirit will work on them and convict them. But I do think that there's people who are saved going to those, if you want to call them, churches.
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So there's people that are going to the Kingdom Halls that may actually read the Bible and get saved and not know any better.
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I was saved in a synagogue context. There's probably that too.
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People that may get saved, but still not knowing any better, still going to a synagogue. It can happen.
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So when we speak of this united body, it's united because this is everyone who believes in Christ.
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Does that mean we no longer have differences? I think I'm making it clear that we still have differences. But those differences should not be the thing we focus on.
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We focus on what unites us. Now, this is—Steve, in my background, I went to a fundamentalist seminary, and so I had to do a class on ecclesiastical separation.
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So that means, folks, that's the separation that you practice within churches. So, like, what churches can you work with?
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Can you be outside of an abortion mill and be there with a
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Lutheran or Presbyterian and be working together at preaching the gospel? There's some churches—in fact, some of the churches that would be represented in my seminary that would say, no, you can't, because they're not completely in line with you.
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They had all these degrees of separation, where you had to separate. And so I took a class.
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I had to take a class on separation. I had to write my final paper. And I still remember the professor giving me an
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A on that paper, even though I disagreed with much of the separation, and said, we unite on what unites us, and we divide, but we divide in a united way.
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In other words, we unite on the gospel that brings us together, and we recognize our differences and work within them, realizing why someone believes what they believe.
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So one of the things I'll do is when someone tells me, oh, I believe in infant baptism. Why? I don't interpret the
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Bible the way they do, but I'm going to look to see if they're consistent with their view.
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And a lot of times when they're consistent, I'll say, okay, I come to a different conclusion, but I agree that this is consistent for you.
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If they're inconsistent, I'll point that out. I could talk about where I disagree. But see, I'm focused on what unites us, and I'm not going to make an issue over what divides us.
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My professor wrote on the paper that he gave me an A. He said,
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I disagree with your conclusion, but I could not make an argument against any of your points. So I'm giving you an
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A. Hence, I had to work harder in seminary than most people. And so what we're saying here is that the
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Church is—we're giving now three different explanations of the Church that we see in Scripture.
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It's called the Church, it's called the Bride of Christ, it's called the body.
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Okay? So we're a spiritual body, right? The body of Christ. This is speaking of the believers.
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So as believers, we're a body. But guess what? Who's the head? Christ. This may surprise some pastors.
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Pastor, you're not the head of the Church. Pastor, I got news for you. It's not your
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Church. You are the steward of it.
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You're not the head of it. The head of the Church puts shepherds in a position to care for the flock, but they're not the head.
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Any church where the pastor thinks he's the head usually leads into occultic practices.
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Because they got to prove they're the head. They got to keep that control. And we've addressed on Apologize Live different groups like that, and how they get there.
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So this is why we're saying this. Why is it important to say Christ is the head of the body? Well, so that we know that He's the one that sets the rules, not us.
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Steve, you mentioned the importance of a plurality of elders. And it is important, because when we have that, we work together as one.
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It shows the unity that we should have, recognizing none of us are the head. Now, you may disagree with me.
49:45
I don't know what your position will be on this, but my position, if you ever read Alexander Strzok's book,
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Biblical Eldership, he'll talk about the one among equals. And what a lot of men will say is that one is the guy who does the preaching.
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He's kind of above all the others. And I disagree with that, and I've had the opportunity to talk to Alex about it, and I was glad that I agreed with his position, because people have tried to say that that's what he's talking about, and he's made it clear that no, what he believes it is, what
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I believe it is, is, Stephen, you're over the preaching of your church. That's your area.
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But you may not be—you may have a pastor that's over maybe the worship services, so anything dealing with the worship service, he makes the decisions.
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I can tell you how I did it when I was pastoring. I was over the—my job as the preaching pastor was
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I was over the preaching and the vision for the church. That was my responsibility.
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We had a pastor who was over worship, so he took care of anything with nursery, with songs, with anything that came about.
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Now, he didn't choose what books I would preach. I chose the books. But when it came time that someone had an issue with either the music or with—
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I remember someone having an issue with nursery, and I said, go talk to Pastor Tim. And like, well, you're—but you're the pastor.
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I said, no, not in that area. What am I doing? I'm submitting to another pastor. I'm showing preference to him or deference to him to say,
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I'm going to hand this over for him to address. That's my view of how it should work.
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Why? Because all the pastors that—when I was in my churches where I was the pastor, I wasn't the head.
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I was one of several pastors that submitted to one another, and we all submitted to Christ.
51:34
So that's what I think it pictures. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you there, because I think this— the way most people think about a first among equals, you still have that one person that's—you say equals, but that one person kind of stands out and rises above the others.
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And it's kind of a—he's seen as the ruler, the guy, so to speak.
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And you could have division in that. And, you know, he kind of dictates everything.
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And to me, that breeds a lack of trust in the other elders. And when you don't work together, but you rule from the top down, just because you're considered the, quote, unquote, first amongst equals.
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But I agree with you 100 % is, you know, elders being over certain things within the church and being able to hand those off.
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And every elder understanding that the head of the church is Christ. And I think—well,
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I don't think, I know, because I've seen it—is a lot of pastors that when they—because what we're talking about here,
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Christ being the head of the church. When pastors come in with that understanding and that conviction, they're going to more than likely preach the
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Bible in its entirety. They're not going to shrink back from preaching the whole council.
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And with that comes some of these tough doctrines and things like that. That in and of itself, because an elder or plurality of elders recognize
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Christ as the head, that too, you talk about division, will spark and drive division, not because it should, but because people aren't used to having heavy doses of the word preached, and not only preached, but lived by, right?
53:16
The elders being obedient to that. And because I'll add this, I know this from my life. One of the things it does is it shows when
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I'm showing that, hey, look, that pastor's in charge of that, that pastor's in charge of that, that I submit to them.
53:30
Yeah, I'm the guy they see preaching week in and week out, so people tend to think, oh, you're the one in charge.
53:36
You know, when you're the guy preaching, you have to work harder at making sure people aren't coming to you with things that are not your responsibility.
53:44
What that ends up doing is showing the church members not only the mutual submission we have for one another, but what it ends up showing is that we're all, as pastors, under one head.
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We're not the head. We're getting direction from Christ, and that is going to be— and I can tell you, if there's any pastors listening,
54:04
I can tell you from personal experience, the effect that has in the pew is that when you do speak to them and they know that you are making sure that you don't overstep your bounds, you counsel them, and you're going to find that there is a lot more that you can say to them, and it's going to carry more weight, because they don't look at you as the authoritarian or the one that just, oh, it's not like a military.
54:30
You're the general, and you say it. They have to listen. And when you do have a church where you have a pastor that's trying to run everything that way, what ends up happening is that they end up being in the position where they're starting to dictate, and people just listen, and then they're listening, saying, okay, he's telling me
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I must do this. And it's more of the orders rather than coming alongside of, and that's going to change your counseling.
54:58
Absolutely, and I've seen that. A lot of what we called goats earlier that left my church, that's their claim.
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He's a dictator. He just wants things his way, and no, I want things
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Christ's way. I want things the way the Bible says, and there would be people that would stay, and the exact same thing happened when they realized that I'm not a dictator, that I'm not trying to bully my way through the church or get my own way.
55:26
We sit down with an open Bible and then say, here's where I'm coming from. Yeah, they're going to make the claim anyway.
55:33
Some people. Yeah, but you're right. Once you build that trust, I mean, you can say in counseling sessions,
55:40
I mean, they just, they trust you a lot more because they know you're not trying, you want what's best for them.
55:47
That's right. I'm going to wrap up with this one.
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It says the bride of Christ. Why do we include that? Because I included that for this reason.
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It shows you the intimacy that Christ has with the church. Why Christ cares so much for the church.
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He refers to the church, this body of believers, as his bride. Think about that.
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Think about how most people, they think of bride until the honeymoon's over, right?
56:19
Then no longer a bride. Those who are regular listeners, you know, I still refer to my wife as my bride.
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That hasn't ended, right? And so the bride is that period where it's very special.
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When you have a bride, you have someone you care for, you cherish, you take care of.
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And that's what the bride is. That's what the church is to Christ. It's a bride.
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And that shows the intimacy. It shows how special it is to Christ.
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And so that tells us a bit from Christ's perspective how he's going to view the church. So next week, what we're going to do is we're going to look at the foundation, the formation of the church.
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How did it get started? And so that's going to be something that we'll look at. Now, before we wrap up, let me just, we have a new commercial, just 20 seconds long.
57:12
Let's hear from a friend of mine what he says about the Rap Report. Have you been following my friend Andrew Rapaport's Rap Report podcast?
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If not, what is wrong with you? Do you want to have a biblical understanding of the Christian life and culture? Andrew Rapaport of Striving for Eternity provides biblical interpretations and applications for the
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Go to rapreport .org. Listen and follow now. Do not wait. Do it now. Well, I got to thank the automated
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Ben Shapiro for that. That was not, that was and was not technically
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Ben Shapiro's voice. But we, so thanks Ben for that and until next week, that's a wrap.