The Church, The Body of Christ

The last two weeks I have spent preaching on the Church being the body of Christ. Since the Apostle Paul compares the Church with that of a physical body in 1 Corinthians 12, we say that in order for the Church to function properly all the parts must work together, just like that of the physical body.
I emphasized faithfulness both in your attendance and in the use, keeping in context with chapter 12, of your spiritual gift. God has sovereignly given each believer atleast one spiritual gift with the command to use that gift for the glory of God and the edification of the body.
Our spiritual gifts are not to be used for the glory of ourselves and they are not to be used anywhere without the sanction of the local Church. If we doubt that truth we need to reread the books of Acts, 1 Corinthians 12, and much of the New Testament. In those passages you will see that the Church is local, not universal and therefore the gifts are to be used in a local Church.
You can certainly excercise your gift outside the Church but not when the body is assembling. If you are a part of a local body, we are commanded by God to be there when the body assembles, Hebrews 10:25.
It would be a violation of Scripture, not to assemble with the body. Let's put this in Paul's terms, would you get up in the morning and leave your foot in bed? Certainly not! But that is exactly what we do when we are not faithful to the body. We can come up with all sorts of justifications for it I guess. Such as when people "minister" when they should be in their local Church. You minister on times and days when your body isn't assembled. Now, I'm not talking about going to other Churches and ministering as God leads, I'm talking about missing consistently in order to "minister", the New Testament has a probelm with that, you have neglected the local body.
We have a gentleman in our Church, Nathan Panther, who felt like God wanted him to start a Bible Study in his home for some local people that live nearby. He has one condition that he told me, "I will not have it during Church times, that would be wrong, I need to be in my Church when it assembles." Amen, Nathan.
Next post I will talk more about the gifts in the body. Just keep in mind, when Gods people neglect asssembling together as the body, the body suffers.

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What Marks a Healthy Church? #1 Biblical Teaching and Preaching

Two Sundays ago I began a new series on “Marks of a Healthy Church” and the first mark that I went over with the congregation was “Biblical Teaching and Preaching”. I gave, by the power of the Spirit, two very “frank” messages on the fact that the Church needs Biblical Preaching and Teaching.

We live in a day where, as the Apostle Paul said in 2 Timothy 4, people, literally in the Greek, “…will not put up with error free preaching, but will heap to themselves teachers who are telling them what they want to hear”.  People today do not want to hear strong Biblical Teaching and Preaching. People today seem to want sermonettes for christianettes, they want enough to ease the conscience that they went to Church, but they cannot tolerate and WILL NOT tolerate strong Biblical preaching.

I thought about some things that people do not want to hear:

1. People do not want to hear about Lordship Salvation- Yes, I am a Lordship Salvation pastor 115%. People do not want to hear about the fact that there must be a surrender of the life to the Lordship of Christ or there is no genuine salvation. This is not works salvation as some have incorrectly accused, this is the heart of the Gospel. Surrender to the Lordship of Christ is a natural outflow of the Spirit of God that lives in the heart of the new believer. Lordship salvation also does not teach that you have every conviction at the moment of your salvation. There is no doubt that people need room and time to grow in their faith, the New Testament is filled with that proof. But what it does teach is that a person recognizes the fact that Jesus is Lord (kurios in the Greek, meaning master), and there is a genuine desire to submit to that lordship. Although we do not also do it, the desire is still present. But people do not want to hear this, because, since these things are true, a lot of people would have to be reclassified whether they are saved or not. People want to make a whole lot of people saved that do not possess biblical faith, because there is no desire to submit to the Lordship of Christ.

2. People do not want to hear about the Sovereignty of God- Sovereignty means that we are out of the picture. Our salvation, our life is not ours; it belongs to Christ. He can do with it what he wants just because He wants and does not have to give us a reason for it. People do not want to hear about this because they want to feel like they have some sort of control, they want to feel like they have had some part in their salvation. But these things are foreign to Scripture. Our lives are all controlled by the Sovereign hand of Almighty God; (cf. Dan. 4:35, Eph 1:11, Psalm 115:3, Psalm 135:6, Isa. 14:24, Isa. 46:10, Acts 4:28, Proverbs 21:1, Rom. 9:18). There are many more verses that  could be given, but these will suffice. Sovereignty is a blow to human pride and ego, and many people do not want to hear it.

Thankfully, I have a Church and a group of believers that want to hear these hard things. They sit and listen and hang onto every word. This is not me, but the power of the Spirit of God working in these precious people’s hearts. I close this thread with the following text message I received from a Church member after last Sundays Evenings service:

“I just wanted to say thank you for not changing your style of preaching just because of a few people. We (he and his wife) will always be grateful and faithful to your service…Thanks again…”

That makes the ministry worthy it. To see a hand-full of people get it and love it.

Next Mark of a Healthy Church, #2 Faithful Church Members.

My fourth son

He said last night, "Daddy, I love Jesus."

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Some instruction on reply

There are several people who automatically receive an email each time that I blog on the website. Please be advised that if you want to comment on the blog post that you cannot click reply on your email, it will be returned to you. This is not a problem with our Churches website, it is just that the server from the Blogger that sends the emails out is a no reply mailbox, that is why they are coming straight back to you. We welcome and appreciate all comments, however, in order to comment you must go to the Churches website at WWW.emmanuelbaptistmineral.com, or if you are on dial up and loading the Churches web page would take to long, just send me an email at pastormichael@emmanuelbaptistmineral.com and I will make sure that your comment gets on the blog. If you go to the web site, on the home page scroll down to the lower right corner and click on pastor Michael's blog, locate the article and click on the blue comments link at the bottom of the article. Leave your comment and click submit. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Whose ministry is it, anyway?

I am very excited about a brand new series I will be starting on Sunday, June 13th. This series is going to be a Biblical look at the local church. We are going to be looking at the responsibilities of the Elders as well as the responsibility of the Church members. One of the areas that we are going to be looking is the responsibility of the members to support the ministries of their local Church.

The Apostle Paul is very clear in Hebrews 10:25, that as God’s people, we are to always be consistent in supporting the ministries of our local Church with our attendance. Many Christians believe that because they attend once on Sunday, that they are fulfilling the requirements of the Scriptures. But the Scriptures show a very different picture of faithfulness. I wonder if men were as faithful to their wives as they are to their Church (the Church being a picture of marriage in the Scripture cf. Ephesians 5), how long they would be married. Some may think that I am over-emphasizing this to prove a point, but throughout the Old Testament God accuses Israel of Spiritual adultery because they were unfaithful. Could God accuse those who are unfaithful to their local Church of the same thing. I think so!

But we not only support our Church with our faithful attendance to the services, but we also support our Church by being faithful to the ministries that may not affect us directly. Listen, even if a ministry of your local Church doesn’t affect you directly, it is still a ministry of  your Church and therefore, that is your ministry.  People incorrectly believe because they personally do not have people involved in a particular ministry in the Church, that when that ministry is on display they do not have to be there. Part of being faithful to your Church is to support the ministries of your Church. There are a number of reasons why, but one of which is to support the people that have worked hard to make that ministry successful. By you not attending because you are not involved directly, is pretty much saying that the hard work that was put into that ministry does not mean anything, because you are not involved directly. Such is incorrect thinking and contrary to the Scriptural meaning of faithfulness. I do not mean to come across hard, but I don’t think that we think about the reactions that our actions cause.

But don’t worry, I am also going to spend a great deal of time reminding myself of my responsibility as Pastor, so it will not be one sided at all.

Remember June 13th.

The Theology of Charles Finney

Many Christians over the years have given rave reviews to the eighteenth century revivalist, Charles G. Finney. Books have been written about his life, preachers quote him from the pulpit and lest we forget the great number of people that “came to the Lord” as a result of his ministry. However, as you begin to review the life and the beliefs of Charles Finney, you will find that he was very much NOT an evangelical, and not at all orthodox in his beliefs.

Charles Finney was born in 1792 in Connecticut but lived most of his life in Oneida County, New York. Raised by unsaved parents, he grew up largely ignorant of Christian doctrine. The religion that Finney remembered as a child was, he said later, “of a type not at all calculated to arrest my attention”. Finney characterized his pastor’s sermon content as “a dry discussion of Theology”.

Finney decided to study law and took an apprenticeship in Adams, New York, where for the first time he became actively involved in Church. The local Presbyterian Pastor, George W. Gale, took a special interest in Finney and made him choir director. Then over the years, Finney made a profession of faith and later felt the call of God to preach. It was, I believe, extremely unfortunate that Finney chose to pursue a preaching ministry immediately after his conversion. Devoid of any solid Christian influence in his life, he was almost completely ignorant of the Scriptures and Theology. He was a brilliant man; however, and his legal training had conditioned him to think logically, but it also saddled him with a world of wrong presumptions. Finney’s notions about justice, guilt, righteousness, transgression, forgiveness, responsibility, sovereignty, and a host of other terms were drawn from his legal studies, not the Scriptures.

Wherever Finney preached, people responded enthusiastically. Finney boldly challenged conventional doctrine and persuasively championed his own rather novel set of doctrines. He interpreted everything from a nineteenth-century American legal standard to every biblical statement. “I had read nothing on the subject of the atonement except in my Bible”, he wrote, “and what I found on the subject, I had interpreted as I would have understood the same or like passages in law books”. He concluded that God’s justice demanded that He extend grace equally to all. He reasoned that God could not righteously hold mankind guilty for Adam’s disobedience. In his opinion, a just God would never condemn people for being sinners. Finney wrote, “The Bible defines sin to be a transgression of the law. What law have we violated inheriting this sin nature? What law requires us to have a different nature from that which we possess? Does reason affirm that we are deserving of the wrath and curse of God forever, for inheriting from Adam a sinful nature”.  Thus Finney discarded the clear teaching of Romans 5:16-19 in favor of human reason. Worse yet, Finney denied that a holy God would impute people’s sin to Christ and of Christ’s righteousness to believers. Finney concluded that the doctrines clearly taught in Romans 3-5 were “theological fiction”. In essence he denied the core teachings of evangelical theology.

Unfortunately, Finney’s early success in preaching obscured his serious flaws in Theology. Finney himself admitted that when he was being examined by his Church to be licensed to preach, the presbytery, “avoided asking questions that would naturally brings my views into collision with theirs”.  When asked if he agreed with the Westminster Confession of Faith, he said, “I replied that I received it for substance of doctrine, so far as I understood it”. Then later confessed that he had never read it.

There is much more that I could say about him and if anyone is interested I will share, but for my purposes on this article what I have said will suffice, because you get the message. One of the  marks that you always hear about  Finney is the great number of people that came to “know the Lord” under his preaching. In closing I want to quote a contemporary of Finney, “During ten years, hundreds, and perhaps thousands, were annually reported to be converted on all hands, but now it is admitted that Finney’s real converts are comparatively few”. It is declared, even by himself, that “the great body of them are a disgrace to religion”; as a consequence of these defections, practical evils, great, terrible, and innumerable, are in various quarters rushing into the Church.

Finney’s logical way of thinking, instead of biblical, and heretical teaching caused the superficial “conversion” of many. He denied the most cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, and his presentation of the Gospel bore little fruit. Thank God for pastors who are strong on Biblical doctrine. 

"What is the Church doing wrong"?

The following article is adopted from Dr. Albert Mohler. Dr. Mohler is the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

"Churches in many ways have actually added to the problem. They promote the idea of the Church as a full-service entertainment and activity center, where you take children away from their parents and put them in a different peer culture. Now it's a Church peer culture. What happens when they grow out of that? What steps can the Church take to do better"

• Focus on expository preaching, and teach how to think biblically. The puplit has to take the responsibility. In far too many Churches there is just no expository preaching (teaching that expounds on a particular text of Scripture). There isn't the robust biblical preaching that sets forth the Word of God and then explains how the people of God must think differently in order to be faithful to that Word.

• Show the seriousness of Church, including personal accountability. The local Church must be a robust gospel people. It must be a warm fellowship of believers...who are really living out holiness and faithfulness to Christ, and being mutually accountable for that.

• Give answers about current issues. We're not giving kids adequate information on some very crucial issues. Look at the questions that the average teenager is facing, "Why aren't you physically intimate with your girlfriend?" "Why don't you believe in evoloution?" "Why don't you accept this worldview?" "Why don't you accept this lifestyle?" If we aren't giving them intellectual material, intellectual knowledge, substance, and confidence, we shouldn't be suprised when they go with the flow.

• Explain how the gospel in unfolding through real history. The Christian faith, the Christian claim, the gospel, is first of all a master narrative-a true story-about life, about God's purpose to bring glory to Himself. It has four major movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. The only was to understand the great story of the gospel is to begin with the fact that God is the Creator and He is the Lord of all. If we don't anchor our children in that story, if they think that Christianity is merely a bunch of stuff to believe, if they don't find their identity in that-in which they say-"Yes, that's my story. This is where I am"-then they are going to fall away.

What are parents doing wrong?

We've got to start treating young people as a mission field, not just assuming that mere nuture will lead them into Christian discipleship and into Christian faith.

Parents need to take the responsibility here. The one thing we know from the entirety of the Scripture is that parents have the non-negotiable responsibility to train, educate, to confront them with the biblical truth, to ground them in Scripture.

We also have, on the part of many Christian parents, a buy-in to a new secualar understanding of parenthood. We are letting our children make big decisions far too early. A teenager making a decision about whether he or she is going to participate in Church activities or be at Church...is making a decision that should be made for him or her".