And so, what does he do? He takes action and he moves into ministry mode, even though he's flying. Solo says in verse 17, so he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with those who worship God as well as in the marketplace every day with those who happen to be there. Paul returns to his go-to, heading to the city's synagogue on what would have been the Sabbath. The rest of the week, he's heading to the city's marketplace, the famous agora of Athens.
The city's agora was its center for commerce and trade, sharing ideas and settling civil affairs with the city's rulers. When Socrates was alive, it is said that he would hang out in the agora in the marketplace, available every day to discuss ideas and philosophy with anyone willing to converse. Some scholars have suggested that Luke is intentionally framing Paul's actions in the same way by pointing out that essentially like Socrates, Paul went into the agora to begin teaching and discussing the philosophy of the Gospel with anyone willing to engage him. My prayer today is that as we are made more and more like Christ, as we are progressively sanctified by the Holy Spirit, we will have more and more of God's heart. We would feel more and more of what God feels.
We would see more and more with the eyes of Christ, hear with the ears of Christ, and I pray we would be disturbed and righteously angered and vexed by the wickedness of our culture, as Paul was in Athens and Lott was in Sodom. And I pray that, like Paul, we would feel compelled to act. Not to rant on social media, but to act, to pray with urgency for the lost and to pray for boldness, to preach the gospel to those the Lord who has placed in our lives chosen the Lord has placed in our lives who are on course to spend an eternity apart from Christ. It is not righteous anger. It is not a discontent coming from the Lord.
If by experiencing it, you can simply turn your back on those who are headed to hell, the righteous anger of God speaks with clarity and with boldness and prays and intercedes with urgency for those who do not know the Lord. If you are not someone who is regularly in the word of God as part of your daily practice of living, I must urge and exhort you to become someone who is. This is not a spiritual gift. Oh, they've got the spiritual gift of studying. There's no spiritual gift of reading.
We also live in the age that even if you literally can't read, there are apps that can play the Bible for you on your phone. There's no excuse to not be a person of the word. If you get up early and go to work, you can listen to sermons on your way to and from work. It's not hard. It just takes desire and intentionality.
Hear me on this. No genuinely mature man or Romans of God is not also a man or woman of the scriptures. There is no genuinely spiritually mature Christian who is not a student of the scriptures. I don't really know what the Bible says, but it's just always seemed to me that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's not a thing among Christians.
There's no one who's just like lucked out and most of their own thoughts just happen to line up with the Bible. Mature men and women of Christ are men and women of the Scriptures. So, it's very simple. If you want to be a mature man or woman of God, you must be a man or woman of the Scriptures. I'm going to invite the worship team to come up and I'm going to end with a few verses from Psalm 19 that speak of the word of God.
It says, The instruction of the Lord is perfect, renewing one's life. The testimony of the Lord is trustworthy, making the inexperienced wise. The precepts of the Lord are right making the heart glad. The command of the Lord is radiant, making the eyes light up. The fear of the loved one is pure, enduring forever.
So, Paul doesn't jump into his immediate pattern of ministry, which would have been to head immediately to the city's synagogue. Remember, he doesn't have any of his companions with him at this time. They served as vital assistance to him. He wasn't planning on being in Athens at this time. He'd been forced to flee from Macedonia due to persecution.
And so, Paul takes a few days to settle in, and he's just walking around the city of Athens, taking its spiritual and cultural temperature along with its academic and philosophical prestige, Athens could rightly be considered the center of religion in the empire. Petronius, a Roman writer of the day, sarcastically quipped that it was easier to find a god in Athens than a man. So proliferated was the city with shrines, altars, statues, and buildings dedicated to thousands of gods. And as Paul sees all this, as he walks the streets of Athens, his spirit is vexed within him. The phrase translated as deeply distressed in our Bibles is the Greek word "paroxysm."
It means to irritate, to provoke, to arouse, to anger. The Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, regularly uses this word to describe God's reaction to idolatry. Because Paul was a man filled with the Holy Spirit, he felt God's righteous anger within himself as he observed one of the world's leading cities filled with men and women made in the image of God to know, worship, serve, and love him. Instead, worship and debase themselves between fault before false gods and demons, giving them the glory and honor that belong to the living and true God. In Two Peter, we are told that Lot was distressed by the depraved behavior of the sexually immoral men and women of Sodom.
It says, for as that righteous man lived among them day by day, his righteous soul was tormented by the lawless deeds he saw and heard. Now, if you're not familiar with the book of Genesis, Lot is not a great dude. He was selfish. He was short-sighted. He chose to live among men and women who hated God because it was the best place to do business.
Lots was not filled with the Holy Spirit, and yet. He knew God. He was a worshipper of Yahweh, kind of. And even Lott's soul was deeply disturbed by the wickedness he observed in the culture around him every day. And I just want to ask you, are you disturbed by the wickedness that you see around you daily in our culture?
Because we are just as pagan as Athens, and we are just as sexually depraved as Sodom and Gomorrah. And if the Holy Spirit is in you, these things should disturb you. They should trouble you. And more than any other issue, the believer's first concern should be for the glory of God. There should be grief over the glory and worship that flows to false gods and demons in our culture.
There should be righteous anger over the wickedness of the culture and its commitment to training children in it. And by the way, when I talk about righteous anger, I'm talking about what Paul experienced, which is an anger that flows from the Spirit within you. And that anger is based on jealousy for the glory of God that should be directed to him. You're not righteously angry if you look at the culture and your reaction is, oh, the liberals are so stupid. The Democrats are so stupid.
That's not righteous anger. Righteous anger is concerned with the glory of God and is disturbed when it looks at a world that was created to know and love and worship and experience fellowship with God, doing the exact opposite. That's what righteous anger is. That's what Paul was experiencing. We're not supposed to feel comfortable in Babylon.
We're not supposed to feel comfortable in Sodom and Gomorrah, for we are citizens of heaven filled with the Holy Spirit. Paul was disturbed. He was righteously angry. He was provoked. He saw a city of men and women wasting their lives, slaves to sin, and doomed to an eternity apart from Christ.
They didn't know if the Jews were going to try and put someone on the boat to assassinate Paul. And they just felt we got to be with him and get him safely down to Athens. They might also have said that we want to get some more teaching from Paul. And so as we're going down on this trip to Athens by sea, we can have some more time together and get some teaching from Paul, it says. And after receiving instructions for Silas and Timothy to come to him as quickly as possible, they departed.
And as the brothers head back to Berea after dropping Paul off, he tells them, "Tell Silas and Timothy to get down here ASAP." Now, like Philippi, Athens was at this time a free city under the Roman Empire. That meant she could essentially govern herself under her own cultural and civil practices while collecting taxes for Rome, maintaining law and order and allegiance to Rome. To call the history of Athens prestigious would be an understatement. In the fifth and fourth centuries BC, she was the greatest city on earth, producing unparalleled sculptors, literature, and philosophy.
She was the hometown of Socrates and his brilliant student Plato, and the adopted home of Plato's student Aristotle, as well as Epicurus and Xeno, the founders of the Epicurean and Stoic schools of philosophy. Athens was the birthplace of the definitive dialect of classical Greek Koine and was considered the foremost city of learning in the world. By Paul's day, Corinth had surpassed Athens as the political and commercial center of Greece. But Athens remained its philosophical and academic center and was therefore still highly esteemed by the Romans. Remember, the Romans built their culture on the Greek Hellenistic culture.
They didn't try to tear it down. They tried to build upon its foundation. That's why all of the gods in Roman mythology are the Greek gods under different names. The myths are exactly the same. It's Greek mythology.
While we don't know much about Paul's upbringing, we know that he possessed Roman citizenship. And so, it's almost certain that Paul's father was a Hellenized Jew. That means a Jew who grew up in a city with Greek culture rather than Hebrew culture, which means Paul would have been familiar with Greek culture, Greek arts, and Greek philosophy. Verse 16. While Paul was waiting for them, while he's waiting for Timothy and Silas in Athens, he was deeply distressed when he saw that the city was full of idols.
So, when I meet someone who describes themselves as a spiritual seeker, I always ask, in what ways specifically are you seeking? Because the word "seek" is a verb. Most people who describe themselves as seekers are not actually doing anything. They're not studying, they're not researching, they're not reading. They're simply using the term seeker as cover for never reaching a conclusion on anything and therefore never becoming accountable for any meaningful knowledge.
When you know the Gospel, when you've seen the truth, you are now accountable for that knowledge. And most people simply do not want that. There are consequences to learning certain truths about the nature of reality. So if you're a seeker of truth and you happen to be wondering, well, what's that one book that you recommend for people? It's the story of reality by a guy named Greg Koukl.
And if you're here and you're not yet a Christian and you want to read that book, please come find me after the service. I'll gladly hook you up with a free copy. It's only about this thick. Not that thick. This thick.
You can do it. And it's worth reading to unlock the secrets of the nature of true reality. Well, among the many who believed were a number of the prominent Greek Romans as well as Men. And so, these Greek Gentiles were likely God-fearers who were attending the synagogue in Berea to explore Judaism. Verse 13.
But when the Jews from Thessalonica found out that the word of God had been proclaimed by Paul at Berea, they came to agitate and upset the crowds. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. To be honest. Just as the Jewish religious leaders from Pisidian, Antioch, and Iconium followed Paul to Lystra and stirred up trouble, so too did the Jewish leaders from Thessalonica follow Paul to Berea to stir up trouble there.
They have nothing better to do than make the 45-mile journey for the sole purpose of opposing Paul's gospel preaching. That's what jealousy will do to you. It's irrational. Verse 14. Then the brothers and sisters immediately sent Paul away to go to the coast, but Silas and Timothy stayed there.
This is another pattern we see in the Book of Acts - Paul only seems to leave a place when he's being persecuted and when brothers and sisters in the faith tell him that he needs to go, and they beg him to go. It doesn't say that Paul left. It says the brothers and sisters sent him away. We love you. We don't want to see you murdered.
As we said earlier. But Silas and Timothy stick around in Berea for a while to presumably nurture and encourage the new believers in the newly formed church. Apparently, they were not being targeted in quite the same way that Paul was, likely because Paul was the one doing the public preaching. Verse 15. Those who escorted Paul brought him as far as Athens.
Let's throw up our map again. So, the hatred of these Jewish religious leaders toward Paul was so intense that the brothers and sisters in Berea apparently felt that Paul would not be safe anywhere in Macedonia. If he just goes on to the next town, they're just going to follow him and persecute him there. So, they decided to send him all the way south down to Athens, which was about 222 miles, 357 km away. The men who escorted Paul likely did so because the threat against his life was so severe.
Consequently. In other words, because they had listened with open hearts and minds, and because they had tested what Paul had taught against the Scriptures because of those things. Here's the result many of them believed if you test the Gospels against the Old Testament Scriptures with a sincere heart, you will find it to be true. Jesus told the Jewish religious leaders, you pour over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me. He later added, if you believed Moses, you would believe me, because he wrote about me.
Speaking of his heavenly Father, Jesus' said, if anyone wants to do his will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own. In other words, if you sincerely desire to know the truth about God and you are willing to respond to that truth, God will make sure you find Him. Following his resurrection, Jesus' used the Old Testament Scriptures to help his disciples understand why he had had to suffer and die. Luke's Gospel tells us Jesus said how foolish you are and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Wasn't it necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things and enter into his glory?
Then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted them for them sorry he interpreted for them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures. If you test the Gospels and all of Scripture against logic, reason, history, and reality, you will find it to be true. If you are sincerely interested in the truth, and if you study Christianity with an open heart and mind, you will end up believing. And I say that with confidence because Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. And there is, quite simply, no other worldview that comes close to the explanatory power of Christianity.
Christianity answers every significant existential question that exists. Christianity explains where everything that exists came from, why we're here, and why there's something instead of nothing. Christianity explains what has gone wrong with the world, and why evil exists. Christianity explains the solution to the problem of evil. Christianity explains the meaning of life.
Christianity explains what the future holds for humanity how the world ends and what happens next. And Christianity's answers for each of these key existential questions are vastly superior to any other worldview. They align with reality, history, reason, logic, and science. But do not miss this vital lesson from the Bereans. If you want to find the truth.
You will need to do some studying. You will need to do some research. You will need to do some reading. That's right. It might take a little bit of effort to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
How much effort? Come on. It's tragic how often I encounter someone who claims to be interested in truth or spirituality, and yet when I say, listen, just read this one book, this will explain Christianity to you, one of the world's largest religions over a billion people, okay, they're not interested. They claim they want the truth, but they're not even willing to read one book. I think that reading one book and potentially discovering the meaning of life and the nature of true reality is a pretty reasonable trait, I think.
I'm going to get into the scriptures. And if you do that, you will be astounded by the results. You will not be the same person a year from now that you are today. But if there's no plan, no intentionality, you do not have any reason to expect that you're going to be someone different a year from now. You cannot expect growth with no plan to generate growth.
Thirdly, study the Word to obey the Word. Our brother James exhorts us with these words. Be doers of the Word and not hearers only deceiving yourselves. I've said it before, and I'll say it Again. One of the greatest dangers that a church that loves the Word of God faces is losing touch with the difference between hearing the Word and doing the Word, falling into the trap of thinking that just because we know something, we must be doing it.
We must be practicing. It is not true. Not even close to true. The ultimate goal of the Christian is not to be smarter; it's to be more like Jesus. We study the scriptures. To be changed, to be sanctified. To be made more like Christ. Remember that God gives revelation to those who respond to it. So, if you want God to continue growing your knowledge and revelation of Him, you must be committed to responding to the knowledge and revelation that he's already given you when He calls you to repent. As we said, do it. When he calls you to obey, do it. You can't just ignore God when he speaks to you clearly and continue growing in him. You'll have head knowledge, but no real wisdom.
You won't actually grow we can't say, well, let God speak to me and reveal some truths to me and then I'll decide if I want to obey or not. That's not how it works. And by the way, that is an unbelievably cavalier and dishonoring attitude to take toward the Almighty God. Speak from heaven to me, God. And I will, Jude.
Really? Really. If we want greater revelation from God, our posture must be I will obey you, Lord, if you reveal anything new to me that requires obedience. I may not know how I'm going to obey, but I want to. I am determined to.
And I believe that by your spirit you will give me the power to obey. And yes, that should be your attitude even before the Lord has revealed what it is - a predetermination to obey Christ. The Christian who desires to be mighty in the Scriptures must study the Word with a clean conscience, consistently. And to obey the Word. A great way to retain what you learn is to talk about it or share it with someone else.
Teach it to a child in our kid's ministry. Teach it to your children. Share it in your home group. Talk about it with a brother or sister in Christ or with your spouse. If home groups are on a break, like, right now, grab coffee with someone or multiple people.
Invite people over for dinner or dessert and talk about the Lord. Some people don't know you can get together without the church's permission. Like you just call up someone else in the church and have coffee with them. There's no form to fill out or anything like that. You can have people over for dinner.
You could open the Bible. I know it's like, wild, but you could just do it. It's a free market economy, baby. That's Right. The Old Testament priest and scribe Ezra is a wonderful example for us.
This is why I have a kid named Ezra. By the way, it's this verse Ezra, 7:10, tells us Ezra had determined in his heart to study the law of the Lord, obey it, and teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel. He had determined in his heart to study and to obey anything he learned; he would obey. Now, note what it says next in verse twelve. It says consequently underline that word.
Here are three building blocks for that. Number one, study the Word with a clean conscience. With a clean conscience, severely neglected and underrated point Hebrew. If there is sin in our lives that we are aware of but we are refusing to deal with, our study of Scripture is going to be limited. It's not going to be anywhere near as profitable as it could be.
Why? Because we're trying to pretend that we can just ignore our sin and just move on down the road with our relationship with Jesus and becoming more like Jesus. But Jesus doesn't play that game. Jesus says, we're not going anywhere until you deal with this. And so what you'll find is you can just keep taking in facts and information, adding head knowledge, but nothing's actually going to change in here.
You're not actually going to grow. You're not going to become any more like Christ, because God is not into playing games when he says, you need to change this, Jeff. You need to repent of this. You need to go make this thing right. If I just say, I'm not going to do that, let's just move on, god says, no, we're not just going to move on.
Next time you come here, I'm going to be saying the same thing. You can pretend I'm not, but I'm going to be saying it. You can keep reading and adding head knowledge and lie to yourself and pretend that you've just moved on. But nothing is moving on. Paul told believers, rid yourselves of all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all slander like newborn infants desire the pure milk of the Word, so that by it you may grow up into your salvation.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught this if you are offering your gift on the altar and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar first. Go and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Does it sound like God is okay with us just ignoring an issue and saying, well, we'll just move on? In the meantime, he says, "I don't care if you're at church. Go make it right and come back."
If we know there's something we need to do, something we need to repent of, something we need to make right, we should not think we can set it aside, ignore it, and have God bless our devotional time with Him. We're not fooling God, even though we may be fooling ourselves. Secondly, and write this down, study the Word consistently. Study the word consistently. If you want to become good at anything of importance, you're going to have to work at it consistently.
For the Christian, that means having a plan for how and when you're going to study the Word. Each day, imagine trying to get in shape and saying, I'm going to work out. When are you going to do it? When it happens, it happens. It doesn't just happen.
You're never like, oh, man, I don't know how it happened. I'm just here working out. I just stumbled into this gym and now I'm sweating and giving 110%. Never going to happen. Never, ever going to happen.
Doesn't happen. If you look across the room and just see the dumbbells over there on the side and you're like, thinking about you, you got to actually walk over and put in some work. And the same is true with the Word of God. You have to have a plan so that you can develop a consistent pattern of study in your life. Now, if you can't seem to find the time to get into the Word, but you sincerely want to, and you're serious, I want to challenge you with the words of Job, who said of the scriptures, I have treasured the words from his mouth more than my daily food.
And so here's the challenge. If you can't seem to find time to get into the Word, take a year and make this commitment. When I wake up, I'm not going to eat. I'm not going to go online, I'm not going to look at my phone till I've taken in the Word of God, till I fed my soul, you'll remember to do it. Your stomach will remind you and just say, no matter what, I'm going to wake up.
And then I also see the folks who have their Bible. They have their outline; they have their pen. Some even have an extra notebook, and they're just dialed in. They are expecting God to speak through his word. They are receiving the Word with eagerness.
Lord, I'm hungry for the truth. Speak it to me in Matthew chapter nine, two blind men chase down Jesus and ask him to heal them. And Jesus says to them, do you believe that I can do this? They said to him, yes, Lord. Then he touched their eyes, saying, let it be done for you according to your faith.
And their eyes were opened. My observation in my life and in the lives of others is that the measure we are blessed by the teaching of God's Word works in a similar way. What we receive from God's Word is generally proportionate to the faith we exercise by receiving the Word with eagerness, or not. And here's what I can promise you those who come to the Word of God in faith with eagerness will not be disappointed. So, if you need to change your attitude toward the teaching of God's Word, do so repent, and you will begin to experience the rich blessings of God's Word like never before.
Make a note of this those who receive the Word with eagerness will always be ministered to by it. Those who receive the Word with eagerness will always be ministered to by it. I promise. Even if me or BJ don't do a great job one day, if you show up in faith with that attitude, you'll hear from God. You'll be blessed.
That's just the power of the Word. And I want you to know how blessed I consider myself to teach in a church where there are men and women who receive the Word with eagerness. I am deeply grateful for those of you who pray faithfully and consistently for God's presence and power to be upon the preaching ministry of Gospel City. I'm deeply thankful for that. I experienced the blessings of that.
And so, if that's you, thank you so much for doing that. Truly. As Spurgeon said, great preachers are produced by congregations that receive the Word with eagerness. Now, I suggest there are three building blocks for anyone who wants to become a person mighty in the Scriptures, and these are basic, foundational, elemental things. But you might not have had anybody ever tell you this if you say, I want to become a student of the Scriptures, I want to become mighty in the Word, know my way around the Bible, and know the Lord's Word.
The best protection a church can have against false teaching is a congregation that are students of the Scriptures. False teaching is easy to get away with in a church where people don't study the Word for themselves.
It's easy to get away with in a church where the pastor's word is treated as gospel. And that's why you generally find false teaching and false Gospels flourishing in churches that do not have a culture of studying the Scriptures. Gospel City is a church that loves the Word of God, and we're doing all that we can to help each other grow in the knowledge of the Word and know how to study it more deeply, collectively and individually. So, make a note of this. All believers are called to be students of the Scriptures and test what they hear against the Scriptures.
That's God's design for the church. The pastor starts teaching heresy, he gets called out by the people of the church. He won't repent, and the church leaves. And I want to point this out. I know there are so many people who lament the number of false teachers that are in the church around the world today.
But equally, we need to lament the number of people who line up to hear what they have to say. Those churches would not exist if there were not thousands and thousands of people who wanted to hear that false teaching, because they prefer that message to the truth. And so the solution is for pastors to be students of the Scriptures, and for men and women who are part of the church to be students of the Scriptures, too, protects the church. All genuine Christians are under the authority of the Scriptures. This is important.
I really want us to notice that Paul, the super apostle, the greatest pastor who ever lived, was not offended, that people didn't blindly believe what he taught. Paul didn't say, "What do you mean you need to investigate further? No, you don't. Do you have any idea who I am? I'm Paul. I'm kind of a big deal. These letters I'm writing to you, they're going to be in the Bible, okay? Do not disrespect me. You don't need to test what I'm teaching. I'm Paul." He doesn't do that. He doesn't do that. On the contrary, Paul rejoiced that they took his teaching seriously enough to search the Scriptures and test it. And I've seen too many churches where a question on a sermon, a question based on Scripture, is received by the pastor with an attitude of how dare you?
How dare you question me? Just notice that is not how Paul responded. Note that it says they received the Word with eagerness. With eagerness. What posture do you take before the Word of God, corporately and privately, do you show up to hear the teaching of the Word with a heart that is prepared and eager?
I've said it many times. I could usually look out and I can pick out the people who are going to be ministered to by the Word, and I can pick out some of the people who aren't. I can see the folks who don't have a Bible, don't have an outline, don't have a pen, and they're just chillin' and they're not expecting to hear from God. They're not expecting that God is going to reveal anything worth writing down to remember and reflect on later.
And then I also see the folks who have their Bible. They have their outline; they have their pen. Some even have an extra notebook, and they're just dialed in. They are expecting God to speak through his word. They are receiving the Word with eagerness.
The Berean Benchmark....Date:6/25/23...Series: Acts
Passage: Acts 17:10-17........Speaker: Jeff Thompson
After being forced to flee Thessalonica due to persecution, Paul moves on to Berea, where he encounters a synagogue of “noble” men and women who receive the Gospel “with eagerness”.
As we rejoin the Apostle Paul's second missionary journey. He is in the present-day Greek city of Thessaloniki, then known as Thessalonica. Some of the leading Jews in the city became jealous of Paul and the power of his ministry hired some thugs and stirred up a mob that demanded the city's leaders force Paul and Silas to leave. If they stayed, they would likely be murdered. And that's why we read in Acts chapter 17, verse ten.
As soon as it was night, the brothers and sisters sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. This is something that happens multiple times in Paul's ministry. He would never look to leave. He would never be afraid. But brothers and sisters who cared about him would sometimes have to say, Paul, you're loving to be murdered tomorrow if you don't leave tonight, we love you.
We'll catch up later. And there are other people who need to hear the Gospel, so you need to go. And that's the idea here. The church in Thessalonica would go on to take root and grow strong in the Lord. When we reach Acts chapter 20, we'll learn that two men from the Thessalonian church joined Paul to minister for a season.
And when Paul later writes to the Thessalonians, he commends them with these words it's on your outlines. The word of the Lord rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia but in every place that your faith in God has gone out. They took advantage of their location on the Ignatian way to preach the Gospel, evangelize their region, and grow into a mighty church. Let's go ahead and put our map up on the screen so you can see that what they did is they sent Paul west around the top left corner there from Thessalonica to Berea, which was about 45 miles or 72 km away. It was a much less important town than Thessalonica and was described by Cicero as being off the beaten track.
Then it says, upon arrival, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. As was Paul's custom when arriving in a new city or town. The people here in Berea were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica since they received the Word with eagerness and examined or asked about the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. We know the message that Paul was preaching in synagogues. Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah.
He has fulfilled the law, suffered and died for our sins, risen in victory over death, and through faith in Him our sins are forgiven and we can be brought into the kingdom of God regardless of our ethnicity. The response that Paul received from the Jews in Berea differed greatly from that of Thessalonica or most places he had preached. Instead of encountering closed-minded men and women who cared more about their traditions and prejudices than the truth, Paul found a synagogue full of open minds who were hungry for truth and seriously devoted to the Scriptures. Accordingly, their legacy, forever in the Word of God, is that they were of noble character. Do not mistake their open-mindedness for naivety or simple-mindedness.
On the contrary, they put Paul's teachings to the test, cross-examining them so to sea against the testimony of the Scriptures. And obviously, when they did, they determined that Paul was indeed preaching the truth. This is a model for how all believers should respond to all preaching and teaching. It should always be put to the test against the Word of God. This is why you will sometimes hear me say something along the lines of "Don't believe anything you hear me say simply because you hear me say it. Get into the Word of God for yourself. Test what I teach against the word of God. Make sure that it's true."
With that said, I'm going to call Jeff and Maureen to come up. I'm going to get ready to lead us in worship and I'm going to close this message and this whole series with our definition for church membership one last time. Church membership is a covenant of union between a particular church and a Christian that consists of the church's affirmation of the Christian's gospel profession. The church's promise to give oversight to the Christian and the Christian's promise to gather with the church and submit to its oversight. May the Lord Jesus Christ give us the grace that we need to be the kind of church that he died for us to experience.
Amen. Amen. Let's pray. Jesus, I just thank you. I thank you every week. I thank you every day that you are the Lord of your church. You promise to build your church. You tell us what your church is. It is people sinners saved radically by our grace that you made available when you went to the cross, died on the cross, went into the ground, and rose three days later. The gospel message, the good news of what you did to purchase a people to yourself is the only reason that your church exists.
I thank you for the church that exists in his room. Believers, brothers, and sisters who have received your grace and applied it to their lives and have been brought into your people filled with your spirit. And now we live for you. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus, that we don't have to guess about the purpose of our church and what we're supposed to do as your distinct people.
You give us your word? And I pray, Lord, that you'd increase our zeal to know Your word and even increase our zeal even more to not just know it, but to do it in every area of our life, and not just individually. As Christians, Lord, we want to be a collective, a church, a people that is sold out to know you, to love you, and to do Your will in our lives and in this city. Teach us that and empower us to do that. Jesus, build your church around the world.
Build it in India as we prayed earlier. Build it here. Port Coquitlam. We pray and use Gospel City to that end. I ask all those things, Jesus, in your sweet and your powerful name.
Or you can check off the circle on your connect card that says, I want to become a member of Gospel City Church, and one of us will connect with you sometime during this week. This first step is just that.
It's a first step. You're not making any final decision at this point. You're simply letting us know that you're interested in learning some more and pursuing the potential of becoming a member. And this lets us begin a conversation with you. Second, join our online membership path.
We've created content online formatted in a step-by-step process that takes you through everything you need to know about becoming a member of Gospel City Church. There's no deadline to have this online content completed, so you can go at your own pace. If you're not very familiar with using the Internet, please let us know and we can convert the online content into a hard copy for you. We'd be happy to do that. Now, this online path exists to help you understand and answer some of the following questions:
What is the church? What is the gospel? What is a Christian? What is Baptism? What do the elders of Gospel City commit to do for the members of the church? What do the members of the church commit to do for one another? What do we believe as a church? What is our statement of faith? What are our distinctiveness as a church? What do we believe in Gospel City? That may not be what every other local church believes.
We have people go through this online content because it addresses some of the things that we need to know about a person who wants to join our church. These questions will help us discern if someone has already become a follower of Christ or if they are still on a journey toward becoming one. They'll let us know if a person has been baptized, which is something a person needs to go through if they're going to be a member of Jesus' Church. Remember, Jesus calls believers to get baptized. If a person is already baptized, great.
If they haven't been yet, we can walk that process out with them. The online content also helps us describe to the potential new member how we're going to provide oversight to their discipleship if they end up wanting that. We don't want anyone to be surprised about what they're signing up to be a part of when they become a member of the church. We don't want anybody coming to the realization six weeks after they've become a member of the church and they say, Whoa, wait a second. You guys mean to tell me that you tried to obey Jesus in literally everything?
If I had known that I don't think I would have become a member here. See, we want those who are becoming members to join the church with eyes wide open, knowing ahead of time what they can expect once they've become members. We don't want anyone to have any surprises later on. You may get to this point in the process of going through the online content and you realize you might not want to experience the kind of life that you're reading about. Your initial zeal for becoming a member of the church may have subsided after going through the stuff online, but maybe you finish this online portion, and you realize that there's nothing more you'd rather have than to be a part of a people who live for Jesus together the way that you've just read about.
And if that's you, then you move on to the third step, which is to meet with the elders and we'll walk with you through the answers that you've submitted online. We'll take you at your word when you share your answers to the questions that we ask and barring any obvious reason that would keep us from moving forward, we will affirm you as a new member of Gospel City Church. And that's it. That's it. There's an unofficial step.
And because this is an ongoing step, for as long as you are a part of Gospel City church, you will get to enjoy all the blessings and benefits that God has for you that are found in formally belonging to his church.
Church membership remedies this because it makes a way for us to obey commands like the one found in Ephesians chapter five, verse 21. It creates opportunities for us to live in a local community of God's people, where we can submit to one another with a clear conscience. And so, to recap, we've just looked at three examples where church membership needs to be in place so that obedience to Jesus can be possible. Church membership needs to be practiced so that the elders can identify who they're called to pastor. It needs to be in place so that Christians can identify who their elders are so that they can obey them and submit to their teaching in real and tangible ways.
And it needs to be in place so that we can obey commands in the Bible like the one found in Ephesians 5:21. We need to know who the other members in the church are before we can fully give ourselves to doing the one another commands with them and towards them. Add these to all the other things that we've observed about church membership in this series that God has always made a distinction between his people and not his people, and that distinction is seen today when a local church practices church membership. Formal membership has always been practiced by God's people. We can see the pattern of it play out in how Israel practiced membership in the Old Testament and how church practices formal membership in those new, Jesus prescribed the practice of church membership when he told us the Great Commission.
He gave us the Great Commission to do when we looked at that last week, how that is a call to practice church membership at the local church level. And again, church membership is a prerequisite to obeying some commands in the Bible. I hope all these arguments have landed for you. I hope they've led you to appreciate what church membership is more than you did before the series started. If you agree with the arguments that you've heard in this series and you're not a member of a local church yet, the next logical step is to become one.
And I'll show you how you can do that here in Gospel City if that's where the Lord is calling you, to be. We'll look at that in just a minute. But what if you're here and you're still on the fence about it? What if you're still posting against the concept of church membership even after hearing a four-part series arguing for it? If that's you, here's what I invite you to do wrestle with the arguments that I've made in this series.
Engage with them, think through them, and develop a counterargument to them. If you don't agree, write it down and show me. Show me from the Bible how the practice of church membership isn't biblical. This will take you intellectual time and energy to complete, but it will be profitable for you to engage with the Bible like this on your own. Don't just say, Nah, I've heard what he said about it, but I still don't like the idea of membership.
I still don't think it's biblical. And someone says to you, oh, that's interesting. Why don't you think it's biblical? Don't respond with, I don't really have an argument against it. I just don't like the way it sounds.
I don't like the way it makes me feel. Now, you're free to respond that way if you want to. You're free to respond however you like. I would call you to more, that's all. And I would be happy to have conversations with you about the wrestles that you're having with it.
Now, for those of you who want to lean into church membership, now that you've heard the arguments for it and you feel compelled to become a member here at Gospel City, let me walk you through how we go about affirming new members in the church. 'First thing you need to do, if that's you, let Jeff or me know that you are interested in becoming a member of the church, you can come up to either of us after the service and just tell us. You can email, text, or call us during the week.
Now, you don't need to be a member of a church to do these commands. You can love other Christians humbly, gently, and patiently, regardless of what church you or they belong to. You can speak truthfully to them. You can be kind and compassionate to them and forgive them. You can even speak to them in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
If the opportunity to do that ever presents itself, you can obey the commands found in these four verses in Ephesians without the prerequisite of church membership in place. Let me read this next one for you. It's also on your outline. Ephesians, chapter five, verse 21 says, submitting to one another in the fear of Christ. You could technically do this command even if both of you, you and the other believer are not members of the same church.
You could submit to another Christian you don't know. But are you ever going to honestly think about this command with me? And let's put aside for the moment that the Apostle Paul is writing to a specific church in the city of Ephesus. Although the truths found in this letter to the Ephesians can and should be applied to believers everywhere, he's not writing to the global church. He is writing to members of those churches in Ephesus, and he's giving them specific commands to do towards -get this - literally one another in their church.
When they received this letter from the Apostle Paul, they were likely all together with one another when it was read, and they would have had a good idea of how this letter was to be applied among them. They do the things in the letter to one another. But let's forget about that for a second. Let's come back to this one verse. Elders aren't the only ones who can call another believer to obey one of the commands that Christ has given us in His Word.
Other saints can call you to obey what Christ plainly commands, but are you going to submit to another person calling you to obey Christ if that person isn't a Christian? Are you going to submit to someone who hasn't submitted themselves first to Jesus and then to his church? Are you required to submit to them if you don't know their life, their character, their love for Jesus, or even if they are saved, how are you going to be able to take anything they call you to do in the name of Jesus seriously? If we're being honest, you're not going to submit to anything that they call you to do. And I wouldn't blame you because I probably wouldn't submit to that kind of person either if I knew nothing of a person other than that they claim to be a follower of Jesus, but they haven't submitted to the will of Jesus by becoming a member of his church where their submission to him can actually be fleshed out.
I'd have a hard time taking what they say about the Bible seriously. But on the other hand, if I know the one who is speaking God's Word into my life and I see their life, I know that they've been incorporated into the same body of Christ as I've been. They are submitting to the same Jesus that I am. They are submitting to the same elders I am. They are submitting to the same church I am.
Then I will be much more comfortable listening to them share the Word of God with me and even call me to obey the Word of God in my life. There's nothing more beautiful to me than a community of God's people who know, love, and minister to each other like that. And that's what we should be growing up into as a church. So, you can technically submit to another professing Christian if they exercise the authority of the Word of God in your life.
You can technically do that. But are you likely to? If you know nothing about their faithfulness in submitting to a local church themselves? You probably won't. And that would be a problem because the Word of God commands us to submit to one another.
The elders at church number two also announce that they too are feeling compelled by the loved to lead their church to pursue an equally good but different biblical initiative. Each church's vision requires the members to get on board, and that will require their time energy resources, and effort. And it quickly becomes clear that it would be impossible to give yourself to both initiatives at the same time and in the same way. Now, what would you do in this scenario? Do you give yourself halfway to each one because you can't be in two places at the same time?
Do you say yes to one church and no to another? How would either of these kinds of responses reflect the command in Hebrews 13 to obey your leaders and submit to them if you need to disobey one set of elders from one church so that you can partially obey the others or vice versa? In this scenario, you cannot obey either team of elders fully. So that means you are disobeying both of them and therefore you are not obeying the command in Scripture found in Hebrews 1317. Now, what's the only way that you can avoid this hypothetical scenario from even having the possibility of happening?
Well, the answer is you're a member of one particular local church where you can give yourself to following the lead of the elders there, so long as they are leading you to accomplish the Lord's will in the life of the church. I would argue that the only way you can make sure you have a chance to obey Hebrews chapter 13, verse 17 in your life in any kind of regular and meaningful way is to be a member of a local church where you are counted among the flock. This way the elders know that they have the responsibility to shepherd you and that you know you have the responsibility to give yourself to being led by them. And you do that by obeying and submitting to them as they call you to obey Christ. Local church membership is the only way to ensure everyone is on the same page concerning this special sheep-shepherd relationship.
This brings us to number three, and this is going to be the next fill-in on your outline. Church membership needs to be in place so that Christians can submit to one another. Biblically, it needs to be in place so that Christians can submit to each other. Biblically formal church membership not only defines the relationship that Christians have with their elders and the elders with them, but it also defines the relationship they are meant to experience with their fellow members. The New Testament is filled with commands that we call one another commands.
They're called that because the command has us fulfill a particular task toward other Christians. Not all the commands in the Bible require a person to be a member of a local church before they can obey them. Many could be done in the absence of church membership being in place, but I would argue that some of the one another commands can't be obeyed in any kind of meaningful way apart from both parties belonging formally to the same church. I'll show you what I mean by taking a look at the other commands found in Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Those first four don't necessarily require church membership, and I've put them down on your outline.
Ephesians, chapter four, verse two. Paul says with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. Ephesians 4/25 says, therefore putting away loving, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor because we are members of one another. Ephesians 4:32 says and be kind and compassionate to one another forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ. Ephesians 5:19 says, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music with your heart to the Lord.
Do you think Jeff and I would be honoring people's boundaries? Well, if we tried to impose our pastoral care upon people, if they don't want to be pastored by us, if they've never indicated to us that they want that kind of relationship from us? More importantly, do you think God will hold Jeff and me accountable for not pastoring a person who doesn't want to be pastored? One Peter five says shepherd the flock of God among you. And that implies that there is a way to identify who is a part of the flock that is among us and who isn't.
And when we can identify those who are in the flock, those who want to receive pastoral care from us, we can then move on to do the hard work of actually shepherding them. But not before that. As we've seen so far in this series, the practice of church membership draws a line of distinction around a certain group of people that formally makes up the local church, aka the Flock of God among us. And the people inside the line have raised their hands, so to speak, indicating to the elders of the church and to everyone else that they want to be pastored in the kind of way that you've heard described in this message. They welcome it, they want it, and they expect it as they should.
And that is exactly who Jeff and I and any future elders of Gospel City Church will pastor. We will pastor them like we're going to have to give an account to God for them, but we have to know who the sheep are before we shepherd them. That is what the biblical prerequisite of church membership allows us to do identify the sheep. Number two, church membership needs to be in place so that Christians can relate to their elders biblically. This is just the other side of the same coin.
Elders can't shepherd the flock among them biblically unless they know who is part of their flock. And the flock can't relate to their elders in a biblical way unless they have elders over them in the Lord. Take a look at Hebrew 1317 one more time. The author writes to his audience obey your leaders and submit to them, since they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account, so that they can do this with joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you. The command is simple and straightforward, obey your leaders and submit to them.
But how is it possible to obey your leaders and submit to them if you don't have any leaders to obey or submit to? How are you going to obey the command in Hebrews 13 if you are not formally recognized and identified as a member of a local church that has elders over you? In the Lord, there is no shortage of leaders. Biblically qualified elders exist all over the world. You can find elders in local churches in almost every country.
How are you going to decide which ones you're going to submit to and obey as your elders? Forget that there are elders all over the world. There are a bunch of different pastors who shepherd local churches right here in the city of Port Coquitlam. How are you going to decide which ones you're going to submit to and obey as your elders from among all of them? Well, what if someone says that they don't need to become a member of a local church because they are a member of the universal body of Christ?
And because of that, they can loosely attend multiple different local churches without ever formally joining any of them. And that means, in their eyes, they can have pastors from various local churches. I'll answer that using a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you attend two different churches, each with its own team of elders that pastor the church. The elders at church number one announce that they are calling the church to pursue a particular biblical initiative, that they feel the Lord is calling their church to.
But our pipeline discipleship course is for members who want to be disciplined by the elders of the church. Pipeline, which is optional and never mandatory, is a three-year curriculum designed to train disciples and how they are to go make disciples. Right now, I'm in the middle of taking a group of us through level three of this program for the very first time. It's really exciting.
I view Pipeline the same way I view Jesus modeling discipleship for us. When he trained up his disciples, he had twelve of them, and he disciplined all of them perfectly, but there were three that he spent more time with on a regular basis. You could read about them in the Gospels. Peter, James, and John. The elders of Gospel City give themselves to disciplining all of the members of the church.
But Pipeline affords us the opportunity to spend individual time with a smaller group of our members who want to be personally discipled even more. So, what does church membership have to do with all of this? Why does church membership need to be in place first as a prerequisite for the elders to pastor the church like this? Well, because of what it takes for elders to actually do these things. We pour our lives out to do these things, and we cannot do this special kind of posting for everyone who simply attends a Gospel City service.
It would be literally impossible to do. I'm not exaggerating. There are not enough hours in the week to pastor everyone who simply attends here on a Sunday night. And impossibility aside, we can't do these things for people who don't want it or expect it. What I'm about to say next might be news to some of you, but not everyone who comes to a Sunday service wants to be shepherded the way that the Bible calls them to be.
No matter how big or small the Sunday church gathering might be, everyone who attends will fall into one of six categories. And if you like using pictures, you can imagine this diagrammed on a pie chart in your mind in a Sunday worship service like the one we're all in right now, there can be one - Christians who are members of the church. Two - Christians who are members of another local church and they're just visiting. Three - Christians who are not members of any church. Four - unbelievers who are genuinely seeking Jesus and are here because they want to learn more about him. Five - unbelievers who are not genuinely seeking the Lord but are here for maybe other okay reasons. And then six - unbelievers who are not genuinely seeking the Lord and are here for bad reasons. Can you imagine Jeff and I giving ourselves to pastoring someone who attends on a Sunday and they're like... and the person that we're trying to pastor... and they're like, what are you doing? Why are you calling me all the time? Why are you trying to invite me out to lunch and talk about my life?
Why are you asking me those questions? I don't want or need this kind of stuff from you. All I want to do is show up on the Sundays that I feel like maybe sing a song or two if I happen to like the song. Never serve, never give, and take things from the message that I like and leave the stuff that I don't. The only email I ever want from you is the one letting me know when the next potluck is happening.
The Apostle John quotes Jesus saying these words about the relationship that Jesus had with his sheep. John, chapter ten. Starting in verse eleven, Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, the hired hand, since he's not the shepherd and doesn't own the sheep, leaves them and runs away when he sees a wolf coming. The wolf then snatches and scatters them.
This happens because he is a hired hand and doesn't care about the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. I lay down my life for the sheep. With Jesus serving as the model shepherd, elders are to lay down their lives for the sheep.
That's the way of Jesus. So, if we put all of this together when it comes to pastoring Jesus' Church, elders need to give themselves to identifying who the sheep are that we are accountable to God to pastor. We need to spend time energy and effort knowing them, praying for them, reaching out to them, responding to them, disciplining them, teaching them, calling them, exhorting them, rebuking them, protecting them, laying down our lives for them, loving them. Here are a few of the ways that Jeff and I try to give ourselves to accomplish this kind of pastoral care here in Gospel City, we schedule times throughout the year to meet with our members. And right now, that amounts to meeting with each member about once every couple of months, we call them on the phone or we meet up for coffee. We do this to check in to see how they're doing, to know them, to counsel them, to rejoice with them over the things that they're rejoicing over, and to pray with them. We also plan regular meetings throughout the year where we get all the members together and worship Jesus. We take communion, and we share with them, as elders, issues that are going on in the life of the church that they need to be aware of. We share any other updates, we pray, we eat, we laugh.
These happen about once a quarter right now. And these are some of the sweetest times in my life. We give the members of Gospel City priority access to us. I don't screen my calls and messages the same way for everyone. Next to my wife and daughter, church members get top priority in my life.
I'll still answer other calls because that's always the polite thing to do. But when my schedule is overwhelmed, as it often is, certain things have to be put aside till later and other things get the priority. Members in Gospel City are the elders' priority. We make deeper discipleship opportunities available to our members. Home Group, as amazing as it is, is open to absolutely everyone, member or not, Christian or not.
But our pipeline discipleship course is for members who want to be disciplined by the elders of the church. Pipeline, which is optional and never mandatory, is a three-year curriculum designed to train disciples and how they are to go make disciples. Right now, I'm in the middle of taking a group of us through level three of this program for the very first time. It's really exciting.
I view Pipeline the same way I view Jesus modeling discipleship for us. When he trained up his disciples, he had twelve of them, and he disciplined all of them perfectly, but there were three that he spent more time with on a regular basis. You could read about them in the Gospels. Peter, James, and John. The elders of Gospel City give themselves to disciplining all of the members of the church.
It is deeply purposeful work. It's rewarding work. There's no higher calling. But easy is never a word a person should use when talking about the work of shepherding the flock of God's people. Just this week I came across a letter that John Piper's dad wrote to him when John was considering if he would enter pastoral ministry full time.
Here's what Bill Piper wrote to his son many years ago. Now, I want you to remember a few things about the pastorate. Being a pastor today involves more than merely teaching and preaching. You'll be the comforter of the fatherless and the widow. You'll counsel constantly with those whose homes and hearts are broken.
You'll have to handle divorce problems and a thousand marital situations. You'll have to exhort and advise young people involved in sordid and illicit sex with drugs and violence. You'll have to visit the hospitals, the shut-ins, the elderly. A mountain of problems will be laid on your shoulders and at your doorstep. And then there's the heartache of ministering to a weak and carnal and worldly apathetic group of professing Christians, very few of whom will be found trustworthy and dependable.
Then there are a hundred administrative responsibilities as a pastor. You're the generator and sometimes the janitor. The church will look to you for guidance in building programs church growth, youth activities, outreach, extra services, et cetera. You'll be called upon to arbitrate all kinds of problems. At times, you will feel the weight of the world on your shoulders.
Many pastors have broken under the strain. If the Lord has called you, these things will not deter nor dismay you. But I wanted you to know the whole picture, as in all of our Lord's work, there will be a thousand compensations. You'll see that people trust Christ as Savior and Lord. You'll see these grow in the knowledge of Christ and His Word.
You'll witness saints enabled by your preaching to face all manner of tests. You'll see God at work in human lives, and there is no joy comparable to this. Just ask yourself, son, if you are prepared not only to preach and teach, but to also weep over men's souls, to care for the sick and dying, and to bear the burdens carried today by the saints of God. End quote. It's heavy and glorious stuff.
If you know what goes into pastoring people, you know how hard it is. But there's more. There's the highest level of accountability attached to this task. The author of the Book of Hebrew writes to his audience in Hebrew, chapter 13, verse 17, saying that they - your elders - keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account.
Give an account to who? To God. Take a second to let that thought settle in your mind. The Bible says that elders are going to have to give an account to God for how they pastored the people that he put under their care. What kind of care and concern does God expect elders to have for his people?
To answer that question, it'll be helpful to know what kind of care and concern God has for his people. The apostle Paul, speaking to the Ephesian elders in Acts chapter 20, verse 28, says to them be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has appointed you as overseers to shepherd the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. Every member who belongs to God's church. His one. Only because God paid our entrance fee to get in.
If God paid for people to get into his church with the price of his own life, how much do you think he cares about the people in his church? If Jesus was tortured and killed on the cross so that he could bring us into his church, how much more is He going to love us now that we're in it? We cannot come close to fully comprehending how much God loves his people and cares for them. And elders must recognize the weight of that. And that means we must give ourselves to loving the sheep in our flock, like Jesus, the chief shepherd, loves them.
Then when you get paid from that job, you can go and buy food second. That's an example of a regular prerequisite. Now, a Biblical prerequisite is something that's required as a prior condition for a Christian to be able to obey Jesus. I'm going to show you that church membership fits this definition because it needs to be in place first in order for Christians to obey some of Jesus' commands. Second, not all of Jesus' commands require church membership to be in place before they can be obeyed, but some of them do.
And even if it's only some commands in the Bible that require church membership to be in place, then that should be enough for a follower of Christ to want to become a member of a local church, if they aren't one already. This is important for all of us to understand. If there is anything missing in a Christian's life that makes it impossible for them to obey Jesus in a real and tangible way, then the Christian needs to make whatever changes they have to so that they can begin obeying God in those areas. If the way your life is structured makes obeying some of Jesus' commands impossible for you, then you need to restructure your life so that you can obey Jesus. Remember what we said last week - that Christians are one-trick ponies.
All we want to do is obey Jesus in our life. That's it. That's why we exist. And that's what the title of this message is. Getting a church membership is a Biblical prerequisite to obeying Christ.
Now, let me go ahead and show you why this is true. I'm going to give you three examples where church membership needs to be in place so that obedience to Jesus can be possible. Here's the first one, and it's going to be the first fill-in on your outline. Church membership needs to be in place so that elders can pastor the church. Biblically church membership needs to be in place so that elders can pastor the church.
Biblically this point will make zero sense to you if you think that the main reason pastors exist is to run a public worship service once a week, usually on Sundays. Some people think that. Some people are genuinely curious about what a pastor does all week long and all the spare time that we have between the weekly church services that they run from Sunday to Sunday. Now, if that was all we did facilitate a church service once a week, then the discussion we've been having about church membership these last few weeks has been a complete waste of time. Because I hope it's obvious to everyone that you don't need to be a member of the church to come to a public worship service like this.
Now, our Sunday night service is a big deal in the life of Gospel City Church. It's one of the cornerstones of what we do as a church here. I don't want you to think that I'm suggesting for a second that it isn't, but I need everyone to see what the Word of God actually calls Elders to do; and expects them to do when it comes to pastoring Jesus's church. In one Peter, chapter five, one of the official spokesmen of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Apostle Peter calls elders to shepherd God's flock that is among them. Shepherd them, not entertain them, not tell them what they want to hear, not create a two-hour window once a week where they can participate in a religious experience.
Shepherd them. Now, shepherding people is a lot like shepherding sheep. That's why God uses that specific imagery in the Bible to describe it. Shepherding, God's people includes, but is not limited to feeding them the word of God, leading them to the pasture where they can experience the fullness of Christ in their life, protecting them against the wolves of false teachers and the schemes of the devil, caring for them their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs, loving them like the good shepherd loves us. This shepherding of people is full-time, round-the-clock work that is often uncelebrated and underappreciated.
The Biblical Prerequisite of Church Membership....Date:10/1/23 Series: Distinct...Speaker: BJ Chursinoff
In this final message, we'll hear one more biblical argument for the practice of church membership. And what does a person do if they want to become a member of the church after hearing all the arguments laid out in this series? We'll explain that process briefly in this message too.
You. All right, we are wrapping up our series about church membership tonight. We've covered a lot of ground getting up to this point. We've seen that God has always made a distinction between those who are a part of his special people and those who aren't. And that distinction is meant to be seen today.
When a local church practices church membership, we've seen that there's a pattern of God's people practicing formal membership all throughout the Bible. Israel practiced it under the Old Covenant, and the church practiced it under the New. Last week, we saw that Jesus prescribed the practice of church membership at the local church level, and he did this when he delivered his great commission to his first disciples. And that brings us to tonight. This final message in our series is going to have two parts to it.
In the first part, I'm going to give you one more biblical argument for the practice of church membership at the local level. And in the second part, we're going to look at some of the practical ways we walk out church membership here in Gospel City. If this is your first time ever joining us for one of our Sunday night services, and you haven't had a chance to watch any of this message series online and you have no idea what church membership is, don't worry. I got you. Right now, I'm going to give you the definition that we've been using throughout this series.
I put it on your outline. Church membership is a covenant of union between a particular church and a Christian that consists of the church's affirmation of the Christian's gospel profession, the church's promise to give oversight to the Christian, and the Christian's promise to gather with the church and submit to its oversight. When a local church practices church membership, it draws an invisible line around a group of people. And it says, as a church, we can affirm the professions of faith of those who are inside this line, and we give ourselves to helping these specific people grow in their faith in Jesus in real and tangible ways. We will teach these ones to obey Christ because they have indicated to us that they want us to do that.
We can't speak of those who are outside of the line, but we can speak of those who are a part of this church. And as far as we can tell, these ones are genuine followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what church membership says. I've been making arguments in this series in an attempt to show everyone that when a church practices church membership, they are doing something that is in line with what the Scriptures teach us about who the church is and what it's supposed to be doing. So, here's the last argument I'm going to make in this series for the biblical nature of church membership. There are some commands in the Bible that cannot be obeyed apart from the practice of local church membership. In other words, church membership being in place is a prerequisite to obeying certain commands we have in the Bible. A prerequisite is something that is required as a prior condition for something else to happen or exist. Meaning that if you don't have the prerequisite in place first, you cannot do certain actions second. For example, the normal prerequisite to eating food as an adult is that you have to have a job where you make an income first.
Then we ask God if he wants us to send disciples from our local church over there so that they can preach the Gospel, baptize new believers, and teach them to obey Jesus. We send disciples to plant local churches there and to practice church membership, just like Jesus commanded us to, just like he prescribed it for us. And with that, I'm going to invite the worship team to come and get ready. I'm going to wrap this message up with a question and an invitation. If Jesus has authorized the church to affirm a Christian's profession of faith and to oversee their discipleship by way of teaching them to obey the commands of Jesus, shouldn't every Christian choose to submit to that authority that Jesus delegates to his church?
Shouldn't every Christian want the church to affirm their faith and teach them how to follow Jews? If you're a Christian and you're not a member of a local church yet, I hope you're thinking through the things that you're hearing in this series. And if you're wrestling with any of the things you hear me share, or if you have questions that I haven't addressed, please, please reach out to me or Jeff so that we can talk with you about them. We want to hear from you. We really do.
We want to hear from you about these things, and we want to have this conversation with you. So please reach out to us. So, with that said, I'm going to pray. Jesus, I thank You we could never run out of things to thank you for, but I'm going to be really specific here. Lord.
I thank you that we're not trying to be a church and build a church and live on purpose and on mission. We're not trying to do this scrambling in the dark without a blueprint. You care about the building of Your church infinitely more than we care because the building of Your church means that people are getting eternally saved and being brought into Your family where they experience heavenly, supernatural love and power on this side of heaven. You want people saved. You want people to become more and more like your son Jesus, Father.
You want that. And so, you tell us what to do so that we can see that accomplished in and through our lives. Thank you. Thank you for not just telling us what to do and showing us how to do it. Thank you for giving us the power that we need to actually do it.
Thank you for Your spirit that's in us collectively as Your church. We're not bringing a knife to a gunfight here, Lord Jesus, and we praise you for that. We are equipped with everything that we need to do, everything that you're calling us to do. So, I pray for us as a church here at Gospel City, Lord. Expand our vision, grow our vision for how you'd want to use a little band of disciples like us here at Gospel City, members of Gospel City, and how you'd want us to leverage everything in our lives to live.
Sold out to you, sold out to do Your will, no matter what it costs, no matter where it takes us, no matter what it looks like. Because if we do Your will, that means you're going to be glorified and people are going to be added to your church. So, give us that compassion, that conviction, to see that done here. Do it, Lord, we pray. Do it for the reason we pray, all the things we pray.
Do it because that's the way that you're glorified maximally. And that's the way that we're going to experience the deepest, richest, most profound life in you. If we're a part of a life that does that, have your way in Gospel City Church. Have your way in all of your local churches that you spread across the globe. Be Lord Jesus, not just with our words, but in real, tangible ways.
Be our Lord, in your name, we pray these things. Amen. Amen.
They can only be applied in full at the local church level. Making disciples according to Jesus requires that we baptize them and teach them. Both are required. It's not either or. We're not called to baptize new Christians and then source out the teaching part to other churches who are to disciple them or vice versa.
In Matthew 419, Jews told the first disciples that he was going to make them fishers of people. And he didn't have a catch-and-release idea in mind when he said that. He wasn't thinking, "Haha! My disciples will get people saved, and then they're going to turn these freshly saved believers loose to go and figure out how to be a Christ follower all on their own. And hopefully maybe one day they stumble into it." No, being a fisher of men requires that we keep the ones we catch, so to speak.
Making disciples requires sharing the gospel, baptizing new believers, and teaching them to obey Jesus. It requires all of these things because of technology. I can preach the gospel to someone who lives in Switzerland. And because of that same technology, I can also hear the profession of someone's faith who lives in Thailand. And I can affirm what I hear.
But even with all the advancements of technology, I cannot baptize either of them unless I jump in a plane and go to them. And I cannot teach them to obey Jesus, at least not the way that Jesus modeled teaching for us. That's because teaching is more than simply relaying information to someone. It's not less than that, it's just so much more. Consider how Jesus taught his disciples.
He called them to follow him. They left everything to do it. They spent their lives together with Jesus. They heard him teach the crowds, they heard him talk with them privately. But they also saw his life.
They saw how he talked, how he loved, how he humbled himself, how he served, how he died, how he lived. And he was able to see them and hear them and be with them. He could see how they were struggling at some times and how they were getting it right at other times. He saw when they needed encouragement and when they needed correction. Jesus didn't say to them, here's a list of everything I want you to do now go and do these things and report back in ten years.
He said, "Walk with me and watch me do these things, and then you go and do what you've seen in me." And what did Jesus say at the end of the Great Commission? The sweetest words a believer will ever hear and remember I am with you always. To the end of the age, Jesus was with those he discipled. When the disciples heard Jesus speak the Great Commission to them for the very first time, I bet they knew immediately what he meant when he said go and teach the new disciples to obey everything I've commanded you.
That's because they had just been taught personally by Jesus for three years, they knew what was involved with teaching the way Jesus wants us to teach. They experienced it firsthand for themselves. We have to love the ones we're discipling. And to lovingly disciple someone, we have to be with them. That's the way of Jesus.
So, therefore, the only way we can actually obey all of Jesus's Great Commission is to do it at the local church level. It's the only way it's possible to do the things he's telling the church to do in it. Well, what if the Great Commission is to be well, if the Great Commission is to be done only in the context of the local church, then how is the church built around the world? How is it built in Switzerland, in Thailand? How are disciples being made there?
How are they being baptized? How are they being taught to obey the commands of Jesus? How are they practicing church membership the way Jesus lays it out for us in the Great Commission? Answer through the local churches that are in those areas, of course. And what if there are no local churches in those areas?
But second, this scenario is necessary only if you understand what the church actually is. The Church is a bunch of jacked-up sinners who have been radically saved by the grace of God, and now we exist. Our whole existence is built upon this. We exist to love Jesus, trust Jesus, and obey Jesus. That's it.
That's all we do. We're one trick ponies. That's what we live for. That's what marks us. That's our identity.
So, it's an oxymoron to call someone a Christian who refuses to obey Jesus. Refuses. I'm not talking about wrestling against sin, fighting it, trying to put it to death, and making mistakes along the way. There is all the grace and patience in the world for a saint going to war against their sin like that. A person who calls themselves a Christian who refuses to agree with Jesus and who refuses to even try to obey Jesus might not actually be a Christian.
And if they might not be, the most unloving thing a church can do is to pretend that they are one for sure. The removal of a member from the church is supposed to produce repentance in them. It's supposed to open their eyes to the seriousness of the situation that they're in. The church says, in effect, you claim to be a Christian, but we can't see into your heart to know for sure if you are one or not. But we can see your life.
And over this season of your life, we cannot see the evidence that you are a Christian. For that reason, we can no longer affirm your profession of faith in Christ in this local church. Now, in the best-case scenario, the person who is removed from the church receives the grace from God that leads them to genuine confession and genuine repentance. And if that happens, the church walks with them gladly down the path to being reinstated in the Church, which is what everybody wants. It's what the whole church celebrates when it happens. We rejoice. We party like it's 1999 when the one lost sheep comes back to join the 99.
I have this sneaking suspicion that nobody likes talking about church discipline, but we need to include it in this discussion because it falls under the banner of teaching disciples to obey Jesus. The church has been authorized by Jesus to teach his disciples to obey him. It's the teaching of obedience to Christ that is the distinguishing mark that identifies us as Christians. The local church draws a line around the membership of the church and says, these ones inside this line, these ones belong to Jesus. We can't speak about anyone outside of this line, but we can and do affirm the ones inside this line because they love and obey Jesus.
That's what Jesus has authorized his church to do. And this is what genuine Christians want to do and want to be a part of. Share the gospel, baptize those who believe, and teach those who have been baptized. The church doesn't do these things because we came up with those ideas. We do these things because Jesus told us to do them and because he gave us the authority to do them.
This is what is meant when we say that Jesus authorizes his church to build his church. Now, at the beginning of our time, I said that in the Great Commission, we are given a prescription by Jesus to practice church membership at the local church level. And now I'm going to tell you why I can say that this is going to be the next fill-in on your outline. These words of Jesus found in the Great Commission cannot be applied in full at the universal church level. The Great Commission cannot be applied in full at the universal church level.
The new disciple seems to be growing in their faith. They are building deep and meaningful relationships in the church. It's awesome. Everything's hunky dory for about nine months. Then it comes out that this new disciple has been gossiping and spreading false rumors about a bunch of people in the church.
Nobody knows why this is happening, but the fact remains that this new disciple is straight-up lying to people. And those lies are creating a lot of division and leaving a lot of relational carnage in their wake. This kind of activity is firmly addressed in the New Testament. Paul writes about it in his letter to Titus and I put the reference down on your outline for you. So, brothers and sisters go to this person to try to help them see the error in their ways.
People go individually first and have one-to-one conversations with them. And when the person doesn't respond, then one or two others are brought along with them to try and reason with this person. But even these attempts to change the person's mind are futile because they remain unresponsive to the pleas from their brothers and sisters to change. The final stage comes when every single member of the church comes together in a sort of intervention, and the entire church tries to get this person to change. And after all of that, the person still refuses.
What is a church supposed to do in this hypothetical situation? There's only one option at this point. The church has to stop treating that person like they are a Christian, and they have to start treating them like they aren't one. They can no longer publicly affirm this person's profession of faith in Jesus. I've just paraphrased for you what Jesus instructs the church to do in Matthew, chapter 18 when a situation just like this arises, Christians in a local church have an obligation to look out for one another.
And it is so great, it's such a sweet feeling to have people who know you and who love you and have your back and want the very best for you. If or when a member of the church sees another member practicing sin practicing sin? I'm not talking about making mistakes. I'm talking about something devastating, like in our hypothetical scenario. Then they will try and shine a light on the issue to help their brother or sister see where they're going astray and call them to make the necessary changes that will allow them to bring that area of their life back in alignment with how Jesus wants them to live.
Christians should want people who will point these things out in us in loving and gracious ways. And if they do, our response should be to repent and to thank them for loving us enough to say something that would keep us from spiritually walking off a cliff. Sometimes churches will come across a disciple who will refuse to acknowledge their problem, and therefore they will refuse to change their destructive pattern. Sometimes a person will dig their heels in even more. If, after following all the steps that Jesus lays out for us in Matthew 18, the person still refuses to repent, and there's no desire to obey Jesus in that specific area that he's calling them to address, the Church may have no choice but to remove that person from being a member of the church.
I don't have to tell you this, but this is so painfully sad when it happens. It's so painful for everyone involved. But it's necessary at times. And why is it necessary to do this? First, Jesus tells us to handle the situation this way, so we obey Jesus.
Thank you Bob I will try to get that book, as I never heard of this before. I did read lots of other books, some of them I wished I never did read...........jenny
God's people live according to the word of God. The Bible functions as a parameter around our lives, governing and influencing the way we live within its boundaries. New Christians don't know how to live this new life instinctively. We have to learn how to follow Jesus. We have to be taught how to obey Jesus. This requires that a new disciple submits themselves to the teaching that the church provides them.
Now, if you get a little nervous around the words authority and submission, then please hear me say this when it comes to placing ourselves under the authority of the church, nobody is going to make you do anything that you don't want to do. It's a big reason why we check to see if you've actually become a Christian before we formally bring you into the church. Because Christians are the only people on the planet who want to obey Jesus. We are relying on the fact that the Holy Spirit is in a person when we teach them to obey Jesus because that is what the Holy Spirit will do in us. He will produce in us a desire to obey Christ.
The authority that Jesus gives the church to teach disciples is confined to what the Word of God says. Now, some church leaders abuse the position of authority that's been entrusted to them by stepping out of bounds when it comes to instructing church members to do things that the Bible is silent on. For example, a church should never tell you who to marry. It can tell you who not to marry because the Bible tells Christians they can only marry another Christian. But a church cannot say, Susie, we want you to marry Bob.
Marry whoever you want as long as they belong to Christ. And ladies, if Bob longs to know, give him a chance. But you don't have to. You don't have to marry him. A church can't tell you who to marry, where to live, what kind of house to rent or buy, what kind of car to drive, what kind of job to work at.
This may sound ridiculous to you, but there are churches where this kind of stuff actually happens, and it shouldn't. And if anyone has experienced this, they will be extremely wary and tentative of anything to do with church membership. I get it. But the scope of the church's authority is bound up and limited to the plain commands of Jesus. That's it.
That's what we've been authorized by the King to teach. And so, the church teaches new disciples how to obey Jesus because this is exactly what Jesus has commanded the church to do. Jews were the ones who kickstarted this process for us. Jesus taught his disciples how they were to obey him. The disciples, in turn, taught the church that was birthed in the Book of Acts how to obey Jesus.
Those new disciples taught the new disciples that came after them, and they taught the ones that came after them all the way up to today. Now, let me ask you this what if a Christian refuses to obey Jesus? Here's a hypothetical scenario for you to consider. A person hears the gospel and believes it. The church baptizes them and brings them into the church where they begin teaching them how to follow Jesus.
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What Makes Jesus Unique? No one else made the claims that He did, He is alive...............
And so, what does he do? He takes action and he moves into ministry mode, even though he's flying. Solo says in verse 17, so he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with those who worship God as well as in the marketplace every day with those who happen to be there. Paul returns to his go-to, heading to the city's synagogue on what would have been the Sabbath. The rest of the week, he's heading to the city's marketplace, the famous agora of Athens.The city's agora was its center for commerce and trade, sharing ideas and settling civil affairs with the city's rulers. When Socrates was alive, it is said that he would hang out in the agora in the marketplace, available every day to discuss ideas and philosophy with anyone willing to converse. Some scholars have suggested that Luke is intentionally framing Paul's actions in the same way by pointing out that essentially like Socrates, Paul went into the agora to begin teaching and discussing the philosophy of the Gospel with anyone willing to engage him. My prayer today is that as we are made more and more like Christ, as we are progressively sanctified by the Holy Spirit, we will have more and more of God's heart. We would feel more and more of what God feels.
We would see more and more with the eyes of Christ, hear with the ears of Christ, and I pray we would be disturbed and righteously angered and vexed by the wickedness of our culture, as Paul was in Athens and Lott was in Sodom. And I pray that, like Paul, we would feel compelled to act. Not to rant on social media, but to act, to pray with urgency for the lost and to pray for boldness, to preach the gospel to those the Lord who has placed in our lives chosen the Lord has placed in our lives who are on course to spend an eternity apart from Christ. It is not righteous anger. It is not a discontent coming from the Lord.
If by experiencing it, you can simply turn your back on those who are headed to hell, the righteous anger of God speaks with clarity and with boldness and prays and intercedes with urgency for those who do not know the Lord. If you are not someone who is regularly in the word of God as part of your daily practice of living, I must urge and exhort you to become someone who is. This is not a spiritual gift. Oh, they've got the spiritual gift of studying. There's no spiritual gift of reading.
We also live in the age that even if you literally can't read, there are apps that can play the Bible for you on your phone. There's no excuse to not be a person of the word. If you get up early and go to work, you can listen to sermons on your way to and from work. It's not hard. It just takes desire and intentionality.
Hear me on this. No genuinely mature man or Romans of God is not also a man or woman of the scriptures. There is no genuinely spiritually mature Christian who is not a student of the scriptures. I don't really know what the Bible says, but it's just always seemed to me that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's not a thing among Christians.
There's no one who's just like lucked out and most of their own thoughts just happen to line up with the Bible. Mature men and women of Christ are men and women of the Scriptures. So, it's very simple. If you want to be a mature man or woman of God, you must be a man or woman of the Scriptures. I'm going to invite the worship team to come up and I'm going to end with a few verses from Psalm 19 that speak of the word of God.
It says, The instruction of the Lord is perfect, renewing one's life. The testimony of the Lord is trustworthy, making the inexperienced wise. The precepts of the Lord are right making the heart glad. The command of the Lord is radiant, making the eyes light up. The fear of the loved one is pure, enduring forever.