Church, Part 3 of What We Believe, Part 38

There's nothing else in the world like the church, if the church is, we understand it right.

And we're speaking of the universal church, those that are born again believers. Because that's the next part, it's made up of all born again believers in this present age.

Welcome to the Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to another edition of the Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the executive director of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian podcast community of which this podcast is a proud member. We are gonna be talking again about the topic of the church continuing in our series on what we believe.

You wanna follow along, I encourage you to go to strivingforeternity .org. Check out the about section under there, you're gonna see what we believe.

You're gonna scroll down to where it says church, expand that, and we're gonna be dealing with just another snippet.

This is, I think, third episode on the doctrine of the church. We'll be in this one for a bit, kind of like we were with the doctrine of salvation, but we're not in a rush.

We're wanting to discuss these things because there is an importance to discussing doctrinal statements, what's there, what's not there.

There's a lot more that goes into these things, and we're just saying where we at Striving for Eternity are that may not be where my co -host is.

My co -host today is none other than the, can we really say he's the

Alaskan? Well, he's a missionary up there planting a church, but Nathaniel Jolly, I wanna welcome you as a guest co -host and as for folks who are regular, you know that we've been going through with different co -hosts that are from the

Christian podcast community, and you are, you and Eki have a podcast. I'm gonna let you introduce yourself and your podcast so that our folks can know, well, all the brilliance that you guys teach over there.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me on, brother. If you wanna talk about the brilliance, we'd have to talk about Eki. As for me, you know, like you said,

I'm in Alaska. My wife and I moved here. We were planting a church at the very bottom of the peninsula here in Alaska.

It's been good and it's been church planting and so God's been gracious. And then like you said, yeah, we're a member of the podcast community here.

Ours is called the Truth Be Known Podcast and two pastors, Eki's pastoring out in California.

And yeah, so it was really good to be on with you, Andrew. Alaska is a really easy place to plant a church and do ministry, right?

Oh, absolutely. We have things like Amazon two week shipping and our closest

Walmart is an hour and a half away and our winter lasts for most of the year, so.

Yeah, a lot of people don't understand you're in an area where people are very spread out. So, you know,

I encourage folks to be praying for Nathaniel and the church plant there, because when most people in the lower 48, as we'd be called, talk about church, we often don't think about the fact that there could be many, many, hundreds of miles even between people.

There's areas pretty sparse and it's not what most people think of. And so I think ministry up there by you is a lot harder planting a church than what we think of elsewhere, especially a biblical church.

I mean, I'm sure that the false churches do better as they do everywhere else, but having a biblical church is gonna preach the truth as you do.

And if folks, if you doubt that, just go listen to his podcast. They don't hold punches. They say it like it is, very biblical, very appreciative.

I learn a lot from their podcast, even from Nathaniel, not just Eckie, don't believe what he's saying.

It's a very rural area up there, right? Oh yeah, yeah. You know, most of Alaska you can only get to by snowmobile, sled dog, boat, or plane.

That's the majority of the state. And contrary to what Texans like to think, you can fit about three of Texas in Alaska.

So it's a big state, largely rural. Yeah, that actually amazed me when I knew someone that was up in Alaska and they had said, yeah, everyone has planes instead of cars.

And I was like, what? They said, yeah, they all have these little like two or four seater planes because that's how you get around.

Like he was really out in nowhere. And he said, he fly into town to go grocery shopping.

And I was like, what? That just seemed bizarre to me. It's a lot of places are like that.

We're a little more fortunate. We are at least on the road system. And I say the, cause there's only one, but we're at the very bottom of the peninsula, pretty far away from everybody else, but at least we're on the road.

So most places aren't like that at all. You know, there are still communities in Alaska where if you look like me or you, if you're white, you can't even get into unless you're medical or you're bringing stuff.

So there are unreached communities in Alaska that I think most people aren't aware of the situation here, so.

Yeah, so folks be praying for Nathaniel and you can get ahold of Nathaniel if you wanna be helping him out or maybe your church wants to,

I don't know, go up there, do a missions trip and do some evangelism with him up there. And he might be able to help you do some.

I'm sure he won't decline help from folks in the lower 48. That'd be good.

But today's topic is gonna be the church. And you and I, you're a pastor. I wanted to get pastors as we went through talking about the church.

And yet not every pastor is going to agree with me. So I don't know if you fully agree with our doctrinal statement.

And as you know, I'm not opposed to disagreement. That's fine as well. If we could, on our doctrinal statement, if you could read for us the third paragraph there that we'll start with, we may end up doing both paragraphs, but we'll start with the first one.

If you could read that for the audience. Yeah, it says, the church is thus a unique spiritual organism designed by Christ, made up of all born again believers in this present age.

The church is distinct from Israel, a mystery not revealed until this age. And of course you've got scripture references in there.

Yes. And so now this is building on the previous episode. I know we've had some other episodes that have been since we've continued this series.

So if you go back to the earlier ones, we talked about the church being the body of Christ that was formed at Pentecost.

Now in this episode, we're going to get into a little bit more of some of the differing views that people have.

At Striving Fraternity, I would take a more of what's called a dispensational view over a covenantal view.

We've talked about that in the past. So I'm going to rely on you to go back to previous episodes to understand those.

If you don't, it's always good to have that. But one of the things we're saying that I think both

Nathaniel and I would definitely agree with is the church is a spiritual organization.

And we would say that because it's God's organization.

He's the one that creates this. So when we think of a church, and we mentioned this in the past episodes, but it's important for us to re -emphasize this here.

We talk about the church and we see that throughout time, we've had people being more and more precise in that word.

If you get my book, What Do We Believe? I actually go through on the doctrine of church. I give the history of how that word changed through time.

And one of the things that occurred more in the middle ages was the fact that it was more described as a local or visible church and a universal or invisible church.

And that's an important distinction. That distinction we're gonna make here. Because when we speak of a local church, that local church has members, but we don't know if they're all saved and born again.

But when we talk about the universal church, Nathaniel and I don't attend the same local church, we're thousands of miles between us, but we're part of the universal church.

And this paragraph is dealing with the universal church. So that's a spiritual organism.

It is something that God has done with only born again believers.

So we're saying that the church is a unique spiritual organism designed by Christ.

So one thing this is not saying, as we've said throughout this series, why are we going through a doctrinal statement? Because there's a lot in a doctrinal statement it says, and there's a lot it doesn't say.

One of the things this doesn't say is that the church is not a corporation. That's really, really important because I know being in church, being in church leadership, having counseled so many pastors, that there are so many churches where they get guys that think the church is like their business.

You get guys that are really good, they're natural leaders, they run their own business or they're executives in some big company, and they try to run the church like a business.

The church is not a business. The church is a ministry. They're very different. They run it very differently.

Let me give you one for instance in how this works out. In a business, failure is not acceptable.

You have someone that fails a lot and you fire them, right? Because it costs you money, it costs time.

That's a business. And sometimes you have people think that's how the church should run. That's not how churches run.

Church is a spiritual organization, so it's based on discipleship, which means failure is acceptable because that's...

Okay, Nathaniel doesn't do this. I have to learn from mistakes. Nathaniel doesn't. We'll understand that.

But most of us learn from our mistakes, okay? And because of that, when we're in a church, a spiritual organization, we're discipling.

We're allowing people to fail. We're allowing people to make mistakes. And they're doing that as part of discipleship.

That's one way that we see that when we're saying that this is a spiritual organism designed by Christ, one thing we're saying, or at least

I'm saying in the statement I wrote, is it's not a business. It's not to be run like a business. Yeah, I think that's a good point,

Andrew. And obviously I'm very passionate about the church or I wouldn't be a pastor. But I think when the value of looking at statements like these is, especially when we so easily get caught up in kind of the modern day view of what church is and what church isn't.

And I actually wanna go to the reference that you have here in Ephesians. So you have Ephesians 2 .11

and then 3 .6 referenced. But let me just go to 2 .11. It says, therefore, remember that you formerly

Gentiles in the flesh who were called uncircumcision by the so -called circumcision, which is performed in the flesh by human hands.

Remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

But now in Christ Jesus, you who were formerly far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

Now, you go to the very first part of Ephesians and he talks about the spiritual reality of every human before they come to Christ, that you're dead in your trespasses and sin.

And then in verse four, after telling us of our deadness, he says, but God being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions made us alive together with Christ.

I think it's so important when we're thinking about the fact that the church is a spiritual organism because in our current society, what we see all kinds of temptations in how to view the church wrongly, the most prominent thing is just pragmatism, right?

And pragmatism fundamentally comes from the view that the church is not built by God, but built by men.

And so if you give into pragmatism, you have to fundamentally deny the truth that the church is a spiritual organization.

And if you deny that, then it's perfectly okay to do ridiculous things like we've just seen this

Easter, right, you can have pop stars come and sing and I can't even quote some of the things that I heard that were just so utterly blasphemous.

But if you don't believe God is the one who builds the church, then you can do stupid things like that.

And so it is really vital that not only we have statements like this, but that we more importantly understand these statements.

God's the only one who builds his church. And so if a church that's biblical has 50 people and they're all white, praise

God because God's the one that's building that church. If a church has 200 people and it's a biblical church and there are all sorts of ethnicities because of where they are, praise

God because God is the one building the church. And if a church has 10 people and they're biblical and they're faithful, praise

God because God is the one who builds his church and it's a spiritual church.

And so, yeah, I think it doesn't just affect us in terms of kind of theologically, intellectually, intellectually, but it really, if we don't get this right, we'll see that we treat the church in ways that the church should never be treated.

And let's give a good example of that. We're not afraid of naming names here, but, you know, Bill Hybels went out when he started the

Willow Creek Church, which a lot of people know of that church and a lot of people tried to model after that church. And what they did was they went out and did a survey of the area.

What do you like about church? What don't you like about church? And they realized a lot of people thought that church was boring.

So what they decided to do was on Sundays, they would do dramas and they would make it more evangelical.

It was more to get the gospel communicated. And on Wednesdays, they had their time where they would do sermons and do the training for the believers.

Now, after many years of doing that, Bill Hybels, I think, started to realize that the problem is that the church was now filled with unbelievers and the real believers weren't being fed.

And there were many who said that early on, he could have listened, but for many, they had to experience that, see that and then go, oh, this doesn't work.

What was he doing? He was practicing, let's appeal to the culture to see what would bring them in.

I knew one pastor that said, I could get the church filled every Sunday just to have an open bar.

You'd fill the church, but it wouldn't be a church. And that's the thing that we're saying here is that when we talk about church, it's a spiritual organism.

So it should be doing spiritual things. It should be doing ministry things. It shouldn't be trying to fill pews or chairs.

It shouldn't be about making money. It shouldn't be about platforms. It's not about the size. Andy Stanley will eventually learn this, because he believes that small churches are,

I don't think he said sinful. I forget his word, but he based it on biblical. He believes you should have a big church.

Well, Andy Stanley is not gonna go to Alaska to have a big church. It doesn't work there.

It's just not going to. And see, this is a problem that you have when you think of the church not as a spiritual organization, but as something else.

So we're trying to be really specific. This is a unique spiritual organization. There's nothing else in the world like the church, if the church is, we understand it right.

And we're speaking of the universal church, those that are born again believers, because that's the next part.

It's made up of all born again believers in this present age. Oh, I mentioned that present age thing again.

Okay, last episode when we dealt with this with Pastor Steven, we talked about this. There is some distinctions that we have within Christendom.

And let me start off by saying that if you have a different view than my view,

I would still call you a Christian if you understand the gospel and received Christ. If you're in Christ, you're part of this church, whether you think the church started with the

Old Testament and the New and being just two different administrations of one organization, that would be a more covenant theology view.

I'm gonna get into that a bit more. Or if you want to believe as I do that there was the nation of Israel and now the church,

I see them having distinction. Not everybody does, and that's okay. It doesn't mean that we're not part of the church.

We're all part of the same universal church because we're born again. So I wanna emphasize that.

That becomes an important emphasis. I mean, would you agree or not? Yeah, it is.

And I think as I was kind of thinking through this particular statement here,

I think this is probably really a good place to have what you have here.

And our views, mine and yours are slightly different, but I think this is such a good place for that to be right here.

Because again, if you fail to understand what we mean by spiritual church, and again, what we really mean are those who have been,

I mean, if you just go, the book of Ephesians, the first chapter, those who have been predestined, they've been called by God, God's work or regenerative work in their heart, they've repented of their sin, they've trusted in Christ and they are saved, right?

Those are the people that make up the church. And if you believe in Christ, you've repented of your sin, then you're part of the body of Christ.

You're not rejecting the fundamental doctrines necessary to be a Christian.

There are peripheral doctrines, right? Things that we would put in the second or third tier.

When we talk about tiers, and your audience probably knows, we're talking about things that don't affect the person and work of Christ, right?

So once you get outside of that, and this, I think we both agree, would fall in that category. Then we're just talking about differences of how we teach in times, how we understand the distinctions of where the church happened and when, and things like that.

But if we miss the first part, and this was really my point, we could be tempted to demonize people on these other issues, and assume that they're not in the spiritual church because they disagree on some of these issues.

So I think that really understanding what it means that someone's in the spiritual church is actually extremely vital.

Because if you get that wrong, and you believe that it's, unless I agree with every single doctrine, you're not a brother because you don't agree with X, Y, Z.

And we're seeing splits all in the church today. Some of them are valid.

I mean, I think we just have to realize that if you touch the person and work of Christ, a line has to be drawn, it has to be drawn quickly.

But on these side issues, we're in the same body of Christ. I think of R .C.

Sproul, John MacArthur, right? One day, I have no doubt they're gonna embrace each other as brothers in heaven.

And you wanna talk about difference in doctrines, they had more than just a couple, right? I think it's vital that we understand, really understand what the spiritual nature of the church is.

Then when we get to these other issues, we don't demonize each other. And it's good when you have that iron sharpening iron.

I mean, John MacArthur and R .C. Sproul, their friendship helped to sharpen each of them.

This is why so many people, I mean, Matt Slick and I, good friends, we debate many topics.

We're very different. Presbyterian versus Baptist. We have differing views on baptism.

We have infant baptism. We've debated that. We've debated, he's a continuationist, I'm a cessationist. So we've debated gifts.

We've debated the church, covenant, theology, dispensation. We've debated all these things. And we've actually been invited to conferences to debate them because we both have such respect for one another and learn from one another.

And therefore we don't try to denigrate one another. We try to emphasize what we believe and we don't misrepresent what the other believes.

And I think it's healthy for people to see that. But this is not new with the church because you read the

Ephesians passage, but the Ephesians 3 .6, it's that the Gentiles, now I just want to stop there and go, we're like, wait a minute, think about what was going on in the first century church.

You're mostly Jewish people from a very Jewish legalistic mindset. And all of a sudden these

Gentiles are coming in from what Jewish people would think is a very worldly mindset, having a very different way of thinking that church should be run.

They had the same type of conflicts, though maybe on a different topic.

We don't debate whether you can eat bacon or not, right? Pork and things like that.

But the strife and the struggles and the debates were still there. They still had to work through these things as born again believers.

So the one thing I really want to make clear with it, because we're going to get into a more specific area where I disagree with many, even in the audience.

And I'm not saying, you know, stop listening because you don't agree. No, keep listening. If you feel like correcting me, go ahead.

Info at strivingforeturning .org. You know, it comes to me and I'll be happy to try to answer the questions.

And if it takes a really long answer, all I encourage you to come on to Apologetics Live so we can have a longer discussion. And that's one of my other podcasts.

It's a live show on Thursday nights. But the thing is that we all would agree that whether you believe that there's more continuity between Israel and the church, in other words, you're more of a covenant theologian, you would still believe that in this present age, the time we're living in, the universal church is made up of only and all believers.

I think everybody would agree with that. So that's where there's agreement.

The next part is where there's disagreement. And so before we get into that, because we'll get into that, before we do,

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And if you're still awake with us, let's get into some discussion now, where some people do disagree, and Nathaniel may disagree with me a bit, but that's okay.

What I say here in the next sentence is, the church is distinct from Israel, dispensational.

So I'm gonna see more of a distinction there between Israel and the church.

That doesn't mean, like I said, that if you hold to a view different, that you're not a believer.

But I put in there 1 Corinthians 10, 32. I'll start at verse 31.

It says, whether then you eat or drink or whatever you do, all to the glory of God, give no offense either to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I also pleased all men in all things, not seeking my own profit, but the profit of many so that they may be saved.

And so there's a distinction, I think, that he's making between the church of God with the

Jews versus the Greeks. And I just see a distinction. And for me, when it comes to interpreting scripture,

I just see that there's this distinction between the nation of Israel and the church.

And that's why I say, following in the rest of this sentence, it's a mystery not revealed until this age.

So I don't think we can go to the Old Testament and find the church. Now, when

I say that, is there continuity between these two organizations? Oh yeah, a lot of it.

And that's why you have so much discussion on the continuity and discontinuity between Israel and the church, because there is a lot of similarity.

I'm against people who would say that beyond the extremes where there's complete discontinuity, no continuity at all, or those that say there's such continuity, there's no distinction at all.

So I wouldn't be on the one extreme would be the hyper -dispensationalists, and some of them really get,

I mean, there's some that will say, oh, you only should be reading the letters from Paul or just the epistles, because the gospels and all that, that's

Israel. Well, no, no, that's not right. All 66 books are for the church.

And then if you can get the other extreme, theonomy would be kind of where that would go. You don't see people that would hold to that, because if you're gonna say

Israel and the church are the same, well, then the laws for Israel would be for the church.

And now when we get into that, there's a whole lot in that, because there's things that we would see that have been fulfilled in Christ.

And I think dispensationalists or covenant theologians would see that, such as some of the holiness laws or the separation laws.

Okay, now I'm using more Jewish terminology. I'm not using more Westminster confession theology, right, terminology.

So Westminster confession of faith would use terminology like civil, ceremonial, moral law.

Now, we don't see that in the Bible. We don't see Trinity in the Bible. It doesn't mean it's not true, right?

We see things that are taught in the Bible, and human beings build on this in our prayer.

Before we got started in this podcast, Nathaniel, we prayed and we were thankful that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Great men have gone before us and helped us. We gleaned from their struggles in theology, and much of our theology is really based in errors and heresy that came before, right?

You had heresy saying, well, Jesus wasn't God. Well, then someone had to formalize the doctrine of the

Trinity to explain what Scripture teaches. So let's deal with straw man arguments.

If you're going to argue that, well, the Bible doesn't explain this ceremonial, civil, and moral law, therefore it doesn't exist.

Okay, but do some of the ideas that are taught there exist?

Well, yes, and that's where we end up seeing there needs to be an understanding of each other's positions in this.

So if you're more of a covenant theologian, please don't take me to the woodshed just because I'm saying that there's a distinction here.

Hear me out in what I believe, right? But I believe that there was a mystery.

There is the church age, it's not replacement. I don't believe that covenant theology is teaching that the church replaces

Israel. There are some who make that, but most covenant theologians don't hold to that.

So it's wrong to say that's what covenant theology teaches. I know if you listened to John MacArthur and some of his

Shepherds Conference talks, he has said that, and I've gleamed probably more from John MacArthur than anybody else, but I've disagreed in the past with him on that.

I've had Emilio Ramos on here. We talked about that, and I actually agreed with Emilio against John MacArthur, even though I disagree with Emilio's views, right?

Because we got to be fair with what scripture says. And so what I see is, I do see that there are things that in Jewish terminology, we would refer to holiness or separation laws.

They were to keep Israel separate until Messiah comes or came, and therefore there's not a need for them anymore.

But you know what I don't see covenant theologians and specifically theonomists practicing? Is Passover.

And you go, Andrew, why are you bringing that up? Well, because it was commanded for Israel to practice and observe

Passover forever. Well, if the church and Israel are one organism, then the church should practice

Passover, because Passover isn't something that was a,

I don't think a would fit under ceremonial or civil. Now, some might say, well, it's ceremonial.

They could. I mean, I've never actually seen a list of all 614 laws that are in the first five books and had them placed in each of these categories.

It may exist out there. And if it's out there, hey, send it to me, info at strivingforjourney .org, because I would like to see it.

But I haven't seen that, and I have looked. But what I think is when we look at these things, there are laws that we would see commanded for Israel that we don't see carried over into the church.

And I'm not, clearly not saying we should get into Hebrew Roots movement and we should be back under the law.

If you know anyone that's involved in Hebrew Roots, if you don't know what it is, praise

God that you haven't had to deal with it. But if you have had people that, the best book

I know on that is a book called Torahism by R .L. Sahlberg. I've had him on this podcast in the past, and he's actually done our intro music, by the way.

So the thing though is that there are people that go that far. They start saying the church should be practicing these laws.

You see, this is where if you see a distinction, it becomes separate, that you can make that separation.

Now, most covenant theologians I know do hold to some separation here. They do have a distinction.

Why? Because they don't keep Passover. They don't keep kosher. They wear mixed cloths.

All these are laws that Israel had to keep. They don't keep the Sabbath where they don't carry a bundle or carry anything to church.

I mean, everyone carries their Bible, right? And so these are things that we would say, well, they're, even in covenant theology, they see some distinction.

Most of them. I don't know too many that would, I mean, really the Hebrew roots are the ones that are kind of going under where they try to go under the law.

But most of those actually come from dispensational groups and not covenantal groups.

So I will say, I'll be fair with this as well. When we talk about this,

I'm speaking of a universal church, not local church and not denominations, by the way.

Next paragraph, we're going to get into local church versus denominations. We'll talk about that a bit, just as a primer for that for probably next episode.

The thing is that denominations are good, even though I'm not denominational. I don't believe in denominations.

I don't, I haven't been really part of a denomination, but I will say that if you look at the broad spectrum of Christianity, and I'll be interested in Nathaniel's view on this, but if you look at a broad spectrum of Christianity, you look at the

Presbyterian denominations, the churches typically don't go wacky.

It's usually the denominations that start going liberal and the good churches leave them and start another, but let's put this, you don't have as much wackiness as you do within the dispensational, independent

Baptist churches, right? I mean, that's where you see a lot of what

Eckie and Nathaniel talk about in their podcast with some of the people they'll mention and call out in the word of faith, new apostolic reformation.

That's coming out of dispensationalism folks. And so the covenant theologians have a fair argument there.

I'll agree, but I'll also agree with Luther when he was making the same case with the Roman Catholic church, when they were saying, you can't have private interpretation, otherwise everyone's gonna be able to say whatever they want.

You're gonna have all this heresy because everyone's gonna go crazy with it. And Luther said, I'd rather have that and the truth.

And I would say the same, like, yeah, I'll call out the craziness, but I'd rather be able to say

I have the truth, I think. But what are your thoughts there? Those are really good thoughts. And I think your explanation of what would be my view,

I mean, we're a 1689 confessional church. And I think that's true.

And I mean, I think this conversation actually is gonna be really important in the future because I think there's plumbing, a battle in this area where historically for a long time, at least here in kind of the modern day, we've not really been bothered by each other so much outside of the extremes.

I think there'll probably be a temptation to be some more infighting, probably not too far down the road.

We're already seeing that, brother. We're seeing that already. Yeah, I think it's heating up. And so, yeah,

I would look at these verses and I probably wouldn't pick these verses. I would view them a little bit differently.

When I think of like the Ephesians three passage where it talks about, when Paul's talking about the mystery,

I would understand that to be the mystery that now the Gentiles, whom the Jews never had any thought of being included are gonna be included into the church rather than it being a verse to kind of separate the two necessarily.

But all that being said, I think when we look at these things, the point is that what we have to do, both of us, whether you're dispensational or more covenantal, what we would all agree on is who makes up the true church, right?

The spiritual church, the true church. And so whether you carry some distinction or not, I'm not saying it doesn't matter.

Obviously we have differences because we believe it matters and truth does matter. But that's the area that we can't get that wrong, right?

And so if you believe Israel is so different, this would just kind of be in your very hyper crazy areas that Israel is so different, they're gonna be somehow saved outside of professing faith in Christ.

And then we have issues. And you're right about the laws. I would divide, use the three -part division of the laws just based on observation.

I'm glad you pointed out. Yeah, there are lots of words we use today, like infra and superlapsarianism.

You're not gonna find that in the Bible either. And most people can't spell it anyway. People can

Google that later. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Duck, duck, go, use something other than Google. Okay, okay.

Duck, duck, go, there you go. My wife uses duck, duck, go. I still get spot on by Google, I guess.

Anyway, so I think these are important and we kind of talked to this before the show. I think it's good at times that we go back and review the doctrines we believe now.

So just for instance, to be a little bit vulnerable to the audience. So I'm in one of the programs at Master's Seminary and I don't hold to their eschatological views.

Obviously, they don't see me as an enemy. They never would have accepted me into the program. Obviously, I don't see them as an enemy.

I don't think there's a better seminary in the country to be honest, but I differ in that area.

But while I'm there, and there are people who more recently have given a lot of time to understanding their view,

I decided, well, I'm gonna take the three years that I'm there, Lord willing, I'll review these doctrines again, try to understand a little more deeply the dispensational point of view.

And I may come out even stronger of a nettle. I actually know guys personally who went into the program who were dispensational and came out covenantal because while digging in, they no longer could see what they thought they saw.

But I think the maturity of the person I'm thinking of now allowed them to say, you know what, but we do believe that the church is a spiritual church and it's only made up of one kind of people.

And that's the repentant people who have put their faith and trust in Christ. And so this is an area where you do need to come to a conclusion.

You need to come to a conviction, but whatever conviction you come to, you need to know that you have brothers and sisters who are genuine brothers and sisters who will be in a different area.

And so, yeah, I think those are all really good points that you made there. Yeah, I know I graduated from a independent fundamentalist

Baptist seminary. And so there were things they held to that when

I went in, I thought I held to. But as I dug in, and one of the things I appreciated in my seminary was they encouraged you to read both sides of an issue.

And I still remember, I took a class on ecclesiastical separation. So the separation of churches, like who you can work with and fellowship with in ministry.

And I still remember I wrote a paper basically disagreeing with the seminary's position on separation.

And back then, at least the seminary, they would say you and I couldn't do a podcast together. I'd have to separate from you.

Well, I wrote my paper and I still remember the professor gave me an A and he wrote,

I disagree with your conclusion, but I cannot disagree with any of your points. Well, what did it do?

It actually made me have to work harder to present my arguments because I knew

I was against the common thought at that seminary. And there were a lot of other things when it came to doctrines of salvation, my view changed.

And so it's good to do that. People may not know this, but Augustine had done that.

He went back later in life and actually edited all of his works that he had done.

This is one of the things people don't know why the Roman Catholic church and the Protestant church both can go back to Augustine is because he made arguments for both.

And it depends if you go with his earlier documents or his later edited copies because he rewrote a lot of this stuff because he realized, you know what,

I taught my younger years, it was wrong. It's healthy to do that, I think, but we need to know why we don't believe it just...

And one of the things I find a lot is people go, well, I knew X, whatever it is, covenant theology, dispensationalism,

Calvinism, Arminian, whatever the topic. People go, I know it because I was raised in a church that way.

Stop. Like, you know that when you were 16, 17, 18 years old, you were not digging into scripture like you are now in your 30s and 40s, okay?

You were not. So do the same digging on the other side. I remember talking with folks that they went from a more dispensational view to a covenant view,

Baptist view to Presbyterian view. I've had many friends that made that shift. And the thing was,

I'm thinking of two people, one that was willing to read Baptist works. The other, nope,

I'm done. Like literally giving away books from people that were held to a

Baptist view, even ones that held to a covenant view, like Votivopacum, giving those books away.

Cause, nope. Now that's the thing where I say, hey, study both sides. That's the one thing

I always want to encourage folks to do. Could I be wrong in what I'm saying in this doctoral statement?

Yeah, could be. And in heaven, we'll know. I could tell you one thing for sure. In heaven,

I will agree 100 % with what R .C. Sproul believes today because he beat me to heaven, okay?

You'll be a good Baptist when you get there. Yeah. I mean, we're going to all agree then. But what

I see is I just see that there's this mystery that Israel talks about.

And when you look at my end time view, I think that God's going to do something more with Israel in the future.

And so I don't think that this church age, if you want to call it that, is some preemphasis.

It's some, just, it was a plan. No, it wasn't any of that. God always had this as his plan. He was always going to have a lot of continuity between Israel and the church.

But for this time period, I think he has some discontinuity. And I've said this before, but I think we had someone that emailed us and told us that they found this really helpful.

So I'll repeat it to see if it helps folks. But the way I view the laws is, and again, you can look at it ceremonial, civil, moral.

I just choose to break it up as universal laws for Israel, laws for church.

And it helps me because there are certain things that are universal to all people in all times, whether they're

Jewish, Gentile, believer, unbeliever. You should never lie.

You should never steal. You should never murder. Those things are universal, but it's not just the 10 commandments that are universal.

And so there are things I think that are universal for all people, whether they believe or not.

When I talk about a universal church being of all believers, I use the same language for the nation of Israel.

And this has been very helpful for folks to see that when we speak of Israel, it's not different than we speak of the church.

We speak of a local church that meets, that has believers and unbelievers meeting. But we speak of a universal church that is only believers.

Well, Israel had the same thing. There was believing Israel and unbelieving Israel. If you want to call it universal

Israel and local Israel, or you want to call it visible and invisible, however you want to do it. But it's a similar concept.

You had people that were believers of Israel, and they were believing in what

Christ would do for them. And they are the believing Israel.

That's the Israel that Paul refers to as not all Israel is Israel. They're the believers.

And then they're universal Israel, but then there's local Israel or visible Israel that's made up of believers and unbelievers that are part of that same nation.

For the Jewish people in Old Testament times, I don't think they ever really saw the church that we have today.

Now you could argue they should have, because one of the things when we talk about this being a mystery, I will say that I think some covenantals make a pretty good argument when you look at through the

Old Testament and you can see that, look, God said all the nations are going to be blessed through Abraham.

Now, was that speaking just at what Jesus did on the cross? Well, no, I actually believe that Israel was supposed to go to the

Gentiles and preach the truth. Jonah did. It wasn't something that was, this is only for the

Jewish people. But I think the Jewish people, let me preface this in case we have new people listening, I'm going to say something against Israel, about Jewish people.

I'm saying this as someone who is Jewish, okay? I am from a Jewish background. I converted to Christianity from a

Jewish background. There is a pride in Judaism. We're God's chosen people.

And I think the Jewish people in the Old Testament with these separation laws to keep them separate from the nations felt like we're the only ones with the truth and we're going to keep the truth to ourselves.

I would argue that was wrong on their part. Okay? I think they should have been missionaries.

I think the reason for their separation was because they kept wanting to be like the world. By the way, that's no different than the church.

You can see plenty of churches that want to be like the world. Andy Stanley, Joel Osteen, we could go on.

They're trying to look like the world. And so these things are new, right?

But I do think that the church that we have today where you have Jewish people and Gentiles intermixed, okay, maybe that's more first century.

We don't see it so much today. Most of what we see today is what we would think of as mostly Gentiles. Some were probably

Jewish way back when, but it's mostly Gentiles that are meeting and worshiping the one true

God, knowing that Christ was the Jewish Messiah, but they're not coming from it from a

Jewish perspective and background. And so to the Jewish people,

I think Paul could say, hey, yeah, this is a mystery. I think it was to some extent.

Now, to what extent? That's where we have debate and discussion. I don't know that I'm gonna be as firm as I used to be 20 years ago.

I'll just be honest. 20, 30 years ago, when I got into seminary, it was like, how can anyone believe covenant theology?

Because I wasn't reading covenant theologians. And then I started reading covenant theologians. And most of my friends, by the way, most of the people

I engage with and talk with are covenantal. But yet, it's like, okay,

I learned from them. I'm not a, you would hold to the 1689. I don't hold to all of it.

There's things I agree with, things I don't. But you brought up a really good point is that we're seeing a lot of division.

I'm seeing a lot of division over 1689. There was a church where someone wanted to ask his pastor to have me come and speak.

And the question the pastor asked is, does he hold to the 1689? And when the answer was no, he can't speak here.

Well, that's practicing the separation that the fundamentalists practice, right? So we have this on all the sides.

So this one, I'm trying to, kind of going a little bit longer with this just to say that we don't want to have that division. Yeah, and I think it's a good point.

And let me just say this as someone who, you'll find us on the Founders website as well as Master Church Church as a 1689 church on Founders, right?

We're a G3 church. You have to adhere to the 1689, I think, or one of the, I think they give several options.

You can disagree, you have to submit where you disagree with 1689, yes.

That's right, and that's really where I'm going with this. As a 1689 church here, two things, and I think 1689 guys, if they're listening to you, they need to listen very carefully to this.

The 1689 is essentially no different than the individual writing a statement of faith document.

It is not scripture. It is a helpful tool that points us to scripture the way

I think what scripture means. And so like, for instance, we read it in our services.

We take one paragraph and we read every morning in our services, and I tell people to use them during the week to make

Bible studies, go look up all the references and see if you can understand why we're coming to this statement, if you agree with it or not.

If you don't, let's sit down and talk together. But the 1689 is not itself scripture.

And I think too many confessional guys, almost put the 1689 or whatever confession they're using on the level of scripture.

And it's sort of this false argument of, well, but it's scripture. No, it's an exposition of scripture.

But an exposition can be mistaken, right? An exposition is an interpretation.

It's, you know, my sermons on Sunday morning, I'm an expository preacher. To the degree that my exposition is correct, right?

My sermons are biblical, they're authoritative. That's the goal of exposition, right?

Is to preach the point of the text. But that's not to say that my exposition couldn't be wrong in some places.

In those places, it's no longer authoritative. And the 1689 is that way.

And I'm probably not a great 1689 -er. I know I might lose some people here. I don't typically say that publicly, but there are some things in the 1689 that I'm like, mm, that's a little bit too far for me.

It's not far enough for me to say I'm not 1689. And most people take some exceptions to, if you hold to the

Westminster, if you hold to, you know, the various other confessions out there. That just can't ever be something that I think we break ties over.

And maybe as we kind of wind down this thing, because they were wanting to go to an hour, something that I like to talk about is we have these doctrines and we're talking about them, but now why does it matter?

What's the application? Like practically, experientially, how does understanding the church in this way make any difference in anyone's life?

And I mean, we've really been talking about it the whole time, but one way it makes a difference in your life is you don't start breaking fellowship over confessions.

Right? Unless there's some wacky one out there that I'm not familiar with that is just totally jacked up and unbiblical.

I'm sure there must be. You don't have to agree with the 1689 to preach in my church. Now there are some things you have to be, but that's not one of them

I would prefer, but I would listen. I would let John MacArthur preach in my church any day, anytime he wanted, and he could preach anything he wanted except eschatology.

But that's because I think the practical application that we started with is what makes up the true church.

Now I'm saying true church, we use the terms here spiritual, right? Spiritual organism, the spiritual church.

We can't make divisions amongst true brothers and sisters in naming this cross denominationally.

Now I can't be in a Presbyterian church because the differences are too great for that level, but to do conferences together, to do evangelism together, to read together, to have on podcasts, there's all those things that we shouldn't see divisions over,

I think, in those things. So the practical application, I think that's one, is if we understand the church is a spiritual organism and who makes up the church, then we don't create divisions that are really godless divisions.

And I think the second thing, we talked about pragmatism, you go to the end of Ephesians chapter six,

I think it's verse 10 or 11 or 12, somewhere around there, and Paul ends

Ephesians talking about spiritual warfare, right? He says, finally, brethren stand firm and goes on to talk about putting on the armor of God.

I don't have it pulled up in front of me, but, and then he goes through all of that. One of the applications of understanding that the church is a spiritual organism is then you understand that if you're going to do anything in with the church, it's going to be a spiritual battle.

The answer is going to be a spiritual answer. So there are strife and issues in the church, you need to pray, you need to put on the armor of God because now you're understanding it's not that you need a new

CEO to attract more people, there's a spiritual war going on because it's a spiritual church.

And that's very practical. Yeah, and that's where we started, right? I mean, that's right where we started.

And I mean, look, folks, what are we going through? We're going through a doctrinal statement. The doctrinal statement of the Shriven Treaty could be wrong, just like the

Westminster, or we don't say this is equal to scripture. I had a guy, and I'll end with this, is I had a guy that actually contacted us many, many, many years ago, that he believed the 1689 was equal in authority to scripture.

And I disagreed with him. He was trying to out me as this heretic for not holding to 1689 as equal in authority to scripture.

Now, the good news is many years later, he actually contacted me and asked my forgiveness over that.

He said, I know I wronged you and I wanna ask your forgiveness. Well, that's a spiritual thing.

See, that's how we deal with things. Why don't we take other Christians to court? Because it's a spiritual organization.

You don't take the people in your own church to court because that's a business way of handling it.

We're saying this is a spiritual organization. We do things spiritually. That's the distinction. And that's the emphasis that we're trying to make here with this paragraph is say, this is a spiritual organization.

We do things through discipleship. We do things on a spiritual level. We don't do things the way the world does them.

So why would we be against the whole church growth marketing type stuff? Because that's not how

God laid out how to do church. And we have to see it as a spiritual organization and because it does change the way you're going to approach how you do church.

And that becomes an important distinction. Now, next week, we'll get into looking at some of the more issues with the local church.

And Nathaniel is gonna join me next week as well. So I wanna end by just encouraging you to check out Truth Be Known podcast with Nathaniel and Eki.

It's a great podcast. It's one of the reasons I'm having these different guest hosts on so you could hear them, learn more about them and start checking out their podcasts so that you can see what they're teaching.

It's not a competition. You could subscribe to both. If you wanna subscribe to him, I mean, look, sometimes

I think he has better content than me. I listen to them every week, but we do wanna say that when we look at the church, there are differences that we have in this.

We don't need to fight over it, but we do need to realize that the way we handle this is not like the world.

We handle this dealing in it as spiritual because it's a spiritual organization.

And with that, that's a wrap. This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.