What Christ Wants Church To Be

In the interest of time, I will leave my replies and thank yous to the time together afterwards. Please turn in your Bibles to Matthew 28, verses 16 to 20. We remain seated as I read. This is the last event of our Lord's life upon the earth before he ascended into heaven. Then the eleven disciples went away from Galilee to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them. When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." And then our second reading is taken from Acts chapter 2, After the Holy Spirit has come upon them and Peter has preached his great sermon on the day of Pentecost, we see this marvellous work of the Holy Spirit in adding 3,000 people to the newly born church. Acts 2 verse 40, And with many other words he testified and exalted them, saying, be saved from this perverse or crooked generation.' Then those who gladly received his word were baptized, and that day about 3,000 souls were added to them. And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship in the breaking of bread and in prayers. Then fear came upon them from every soul, And many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. Now all who believed were together and had all things in common and sold their possessions and goods and divided them among all as anyone had need. So continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart. praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. Thanks be to God for His word. May the Holy Spirit Himself bless it to our understanding. What Christ wants every church to be should be a matter of great concern to every church member. What we think every church should be is, of course, also important, but not as important as the expectation of our Lord Himself, who is the church's head and founder and judge. And fortunately, we don't have to look in the dark to discover the marks that would characterize the kind of church that would be pleasing to Jesus Christ. For from his own words recorded in the Gospels, from Luke's description of the birth and life of that early church in the book of Acts, and from the Apostles' letters, we can glean much about what Christ wants from his people. And from this wealth of information in the New Testament, I would like to close my happy time of ministry among you by drawing out seven marks that Christ wants to see in all his churches. When Chip asked on behalf of the deacons if I would take over basically most of the preaching from the time that Dr. Goad accepted your gracious call to him. He said, I want you to be sure and keep open in October, the Sunday prior to Dr. Goad's installation and the commencement of his ministry. And I said I would be glad to do that. And what he wanted was that I should bring a message which would help to prepare the way for the beginning of Dr. Goad's ministry. And it is in that sense that I bring this message to you today. You are a wonderful church. but there is no room as big as the room for improvement. And that is true of every church of Jesus Christ throughout the world. And I hope that you will accept these exhortations in the spirit in which they are given. There may be some things with which you will not quite agree, but nevertheless they come from a heart that feels that these things are important to Christ, the head of the church. In 2004, Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church published his now well-known book, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church. My seven marks, however, are not quite the same as those that are given in Dr. Dever's book. But even in the preface to the second edition of his book, Dr. Devers says, this book leaves out a lot. Friends have said to me, what about prayer? Where is worship? John Piper asked, Mark, why isn't missions in this book? Bearing in mind then that more could be said than has been said, I'm going to give you what I have long felt are the crucial marks. And I need a little bit of extra time, and I know you will be gracious to give it to me. In order of priority, I begin with the fact that Christ wants every church to be a Bible-believing church. The apostles are Christ's appointed spokesmen under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And in 1 Timothy 3, verse 15, Paul tells us quite clearly that the church of the living God is the pillar and ground of the truth. As the ground of the truth, it holds the truth firm and secure and safe. And as the pillar of the truth, the Church holds it high for everyone to see. The question is, what is the truth? And in John 17, Jesus says, Your word, O Father, is truth. God's word, through the prophets in the Old Testament and through the apostles in the New Testament, is the truth. The truth the Church is to defend and to proclaim. That was the first mark of Christ's Church from its birth and inception at Pentecost. Luke tells us it was made up of over 3,000 members who continued steadfastly in the Apostles' doctrine. They were a Bible-believing, a Bible-teaching and preaching community. And I believe that is what Christ wants every one of his churches to be. First, its members must believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, or literally God-breathed. The words of the Bible come out, have been breathed out of the mouth of God. And therefore, the words of the Bible are without any mixture of error. And then secondly, because we believe in the inerrancy of the Word of God, we accept the responsibility to teach and practice it as the sole and final authority for faith and practice. Now, when the Baptist faith and message, our confession of faith as Southern Baptists, was revised in the year 2000, many Virginians wrote to our Baptist state paper to say that the Bible is just a book written by men and has its fair share of errors. But friends, any church built on such a foundation is doomed to failure. for all matters of faith and practice will then be subject in the final analysis to our human opinions. That is the rationale behind all those churches that form divorce for any reason, homosexuality, premarital sex, abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, and woman pastors in plain denial of the Word of God. A Christ-pleasing church, however, submits to Scripture as completely as Jesus did. It learns Scripture. It studies Scripture so that it can discover the will of God and do it. And like the Berean Christians in Acts 17, its members measure everything they hear or read by searching the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things are so. Anything that does not square with what the rest of Scripture teaches is rejected. The golden rule is that Scripture must always be interpreted by Scripture. A Bible-believing church, which is just another word for evangelical church, will therefore insist that its teachers must be faithful to the word of God and to their church's confession of faith. where there is room for legitimate differences, such as Christian liberty, or events in prophecy leading up to the return of Jesus Christ. There must be a willingness to agree to disagree. Supremely, however, the Church is to consist of members who not only hunger for the Word of God, but who adorn it. and adorn it with an obedient and a Christ-like life. Because it's all too easy to be eager hearers of the word, but not doers. And that imbalance can only result in a new generation of Pharisees and hypocrites coming into the church that will kill its spiritual life. Secondly, the New Testament tells us that Christ wants every church to be a spirit-filled church. Christ ascended to heaven to receive the promise of the Holy Spirit, because He was going to send the Spirit to indwell the church and empower the church to continue the ministry He had begun on earth. And so ten days later, on the day of Pentecost, he sent the Holy Spirit to possess the church. And the purpose of that indwelling was, and still is, to make the body of Christ that which manifests His glory, which reveals His beauty, and completes His mission or work on the earth. And the means by which the Holy Spirit achieves this goal of sanctifying Christians, of making them Christ-like, and of winning the lost, is the Word of God that Paul says is the sword of the Holy Spirit. What Christ therefore wants is not only a church that believes the Bible, but also a church where the members are filled with the Holy Spirit who inspired the Bible and uses the Bible. Church members must embrace both. It's not enough to pray that we may be protected from error, but that the truth we teach in Sunday school and proclaim from this pulpit will be empowered by the Holy Spirit whom Jesus sent to do that very work. Now, this is sadly lacking in many churches across the spectrum. And as a result, I believe, and I'm just one among many, many godly people in the church who believes that in the past 100 years the Holy Spirit has gradually become the neglected member of the Godhead. but to ignore or neglect the Holy Spirit is sheer folly. For without Him, all our church activities will come to nothing. They will achieve nothing of lasting spiritual and eternal worth. Our correct response is to constantly acknowledge our dependence upon the Holy Spirit and our obedience to His leading. And one of the things that thrilled me as I read on the internet the resume and also the philosophy of ministry of Dr. Keith Goad was that he did mention a number of times that in exercising that ministry he would have to depend upon the power of the Holy Spirit to be effective. Christians who disobey the Spirit by choice or by neglect, Paul tells us, grieve Him. They quench the fire of His power. Hence Paul's exhortation to stir up or to kindle the gift of God which is in you. Do not be unwise, he says in Ephesians 5, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father, and submitting to one another in the fear of God. All body life, you see, is due to the spirits in filling. Then again, personal holiness. is not possible unless we obey the Spirit and are filled with the Spirit. Paul says, walk in the Spirit, and the word walk is a metaphor for live. Live in the Spirit, live by the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. But above all, Christ sent the Holy Spirit to gather, to convert people and gather them into the church. So he told his disciples that they were not to feel helpless. They had an ally who was going to convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. Without His convicting and converting power, accompanying our preaching and our teaching and our witnessing, again, all our activities will not come to anything. Paul, you know, was very well aware of his need of the Holy Spirit's power. In 1 Corinthians 2 he says, My preaching was not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. And again to the Thessalonians he writes and he says, Our gospel came to you not in words only, but in power and in the Spirit. and with much conviction. So we ask ourselves, why are there so few conversions in so many of our churches today? And I think the only answer can be that by and large, We as the members and we as preachers and Sunday school teachers are not filled with the Holy Spirit. Our doctrines sound, but our words are ineffectual. And why are we not filled with the Holy Spirit? Well, as I've already said, because we have grieved and quenched Him by our disobedience and our self-reliance. Peter says, I think it's in Acts 5, God gives the Holy Spirit to those who obey Him. To be filled with the Spirit is to be mastered by the Spirit. And that's the analogy that Paul gives in Ephesians 5 verse 18. Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. Paraphrased, Paul would be saying, Don't be mastered by the intoxicating influence of wine. Rather, be mastered by the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit. The fullness of the Spirit is primarily a matter of mastery, not of quantity. And it is a condition that needs to be maintained and fostered from the day of our conversion. And so the verb in Ephesians 5 verse 18 is in the present passive imperative mood, meaning keep on letting the Holy Spirit fill or control you. If it is not maintained by daily repentance and daily submission to the Holy Spirit, we will forfeit the fullness. We will still have the Spirit indwelling us, but He will not have us. And therefore, we will not enjoy His blessings. He will never withdraw His person. But if we grieve him and quench him, he will withdraw his ministries and his blessings. Honour the Holy Spirit was Evan Roberts' cry from pulpit to pulpit in the Welsh revival of 1904. And I believe Christ wants all His churches to learn how to humbly look to the Holy Spirit and depend upon the Holy Spirit for the spiritual power which alone can make His work effective. Thirdly, Christ wants every church to be a worshipping church. When our Lord talked to the woman at Jacob's well, He said, God is Spirit. And those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth. Now, to worship God in truth, of course, means to worship Him according to the Bible. The Bible must regulate the worship that is to be acceptable to God. Under that principle, I want to stress this morning something that many churches are losing sight of, and that is the preaching of the Word of God has priority over the praises and the prayers of the people of God. I've said this before to you, especially in some of my introductory prayers before preaching, that what God has to say to you and to me through the exposition of His Word is far more important than what you and I have to say to God in our prayers and in our praises. Bearing that in mind, When it comes to the meditation and exposition of God's Word, distractions, even when unavoidable, should be kept to an absolute minimum. God says in His Word, be still and know that I am God. And again, the Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence. Now, if children are too young to understand that, their place is the nursery. That is why the church provides a nursery. Also, children need to go to the restroom before worship starts. Now, I hope you don't think I'm being personal. I really am not. I'm trying to help all of us as members of our churches honor the Word of God and allow God to speak to us without distraction. And so nothing must be allowed to hinder anybody else in the congregation from attentive listening to the preaching of His Word. Now, another trait of a worshipping church is that all its worship gives glory to God alone. To applaud a line in a sermon, to applaud The singing of a choir, or of a soloist, or the playing of musical instruments, even the singing of little children, is contrary to the biblical principle. I believe it's worldliness. That's what the world does. God's people shouldn't do it. For God has said, my glory I will not give to another, nor my praise to carved images. And again, he who glories, let him glory in the Lord. After all, have you ever heard a person clap after a minister has prayed, or anybody else has prayed? Why do we clap then? when people sing for God or when they preach as his representatives. All right, someone says, what does it mean to worship God in spirit with a small s? It means simply this, that we must worship him supremely with our spirit rather than with our body. Now of course, of course our body has to be involved, for we are integrated beings and our spirit has to express itself through the feelings and the emotions of our body. And so in scripture it is expected that in the course of the worship of God we should feel a sense of awe and humility in the presence of his majesty, that we should experience joy in the assurance of his forgiveness of our sins, comfort in the promise of his help, and grief over our continued imperfection. But while these feelings and others besides them should accompany our worship, we must never let our physical emotions carry us away. We must not be carried away by our physical emotions. They must never come between us and God, so that our enjoyment is coming before the glory of God. Now, I want to be honest. I know that most of us enjoy clapping our hands and tapping our feet and swaying our body to the rhythm of good country music. I mean, I am guilty even as a newcomer to America who never really heard country music before I came here 28 years ago. But when it comes to worship, everything we do should be controlled by our spirit. so that our worship glorifies God rather than gratifies our flesh. And you know, that is the difference between going to a concert and going to church. A concert consists of music and jokes that are designed to lift up your spirits and make you feel good, but it doesn't last. True worship, on the other hand, is taken up with God and His Word. And because it touches our human spirit through our mind, it has a transforming effect upon our life that lasts. This is the worship Paul commends in 1 Corinthians 14 when he says, Brethren, whenever you come together, let all things be done for edification, for the building up of our spiritual lives. He also says that our preaching and our praying in church must both be intelligible and convicting, so that an unbeliever, when he comes to church, says Paul, will have the secrets of his heart revealed and so falling down on his face he will worship God and report that God is truly among you. The church is to be a house of prayer and worship, not an entertainment center. Fourthly, and still in order of priority, Christ wants every church to be a praying church. You know, the church in heaven is constantly engaged in two things, in corporate praise and corporate prayer. And that's the picture the Bible gives us of the church on earth. Our Lord himself, as the God-man, felt his need to be spiritually supported by the prayers of his disciples. And as the horror of being forsaken by God on the cross drew nearer, Jesus asked three of his closest disciples to come apart with him in the garden and uphold him in prayer. How much do imperfect preachers and church members need the support of one another in prayer meetings so that we may withstand the onslaught of those demonic powers that seek to destroy us. That is why before he ascended into heaven, Jesus told the hundred and twenty to wait in corporate prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, without whom they could do nothing. And in Acts 1 verse 14 he says, they all joined together constantly, literally persistently in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers. And at the end of their 10-day prayer vigil, the Holy Spirit fell upon the 120, as well as upon the 3,000 who were converted under Peter's preaching. All of them, Luke says, received the gift of the Holy Spirit. Now, that is significant. Listen carefully. The New Testament church was born in a prayer meeting. And it's not surprising then that it has continued as it began. Following right on from Pentecost, the church is described in Acts 2 in these words, they continued steadfastly in prayers. That is, with the prayer meetings that they were already having. Did they stop? Because suddenly, with preaching and looking after the widows, there were time restraints? Not a chance. Luke says, they continued meeting for doctrine, for fellowship, for breaking of bread, and for corporate prayer. Now, a few weeks later, in Acts 4, when Peter and John were arrested for preaching in the name of Jesus, the church is found in prayer. And when the two apostles were released, they joined the rest of the church at the prayer meeting, and Luke says, raised their voice to God with one accord and said, Now, Lord, look on their threats and grant to your servants that with all boldness they may speak your word. And when they had prayed, the place was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness, and great grace was upon them all." Now, still later, Peter is now in prison on his own, and we read in Acts 12 that again the church is to be found in prayer. And Luke says that when he was miraculously freed by an angel, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where many were gathered together praying. Friends, I honestly believe God blesses His church through proper prayer meetings, and yet I notice in the six years I've been retired how in visiting churches the prayer meeting is disappearing from the list of weekly activities. As an example, in my first church in America, which I pastored for 17 years, we had two weekly prayer meetings. On Wednesday morning, a group of six ladies would meet together for two hours to pray for home missions and international missions, and then a half an hour to pray for our church. And Wednesday night, we would meet as a church, there would be about 30 of us, and we would pray for an hour. for revival, for outreach into the community, and also for healing the sick. And as a result, not through anything that we were doing, the church grew numerically, spiritually, financially. Now, ten years after I left that church, a notice appeared in our local newspaper the other day stating that Any members who wish may come before the Wednesday night Bible study to sit in the sanctuary for silent prayer. That's all the prayer that that church now has. Not surprisingly, church attendance has gone down from 120 to 40. You may not think it's a lot. You go out into the real boondookies, as some people call it. Go out into the country. and see how hard it is to build a church. A good friend of mine who was at First Baptist Church, Spartanburg, said, Ryan, you're going to a maintenance ministry. I hadn't a clue what he said, but after a few years I realized it was hard to bring new members into the church to replace the members that I was burying. It was a maintenance ministry. So God was blessing that church through its constant intercession. A very godly lady who was in charge of making out the prayer items in the IMB, I think she is now retired, but she came to our church to speak to us about praying permissions and on the side she said to me, and I quote verbatim because the word just stuck in my mind. She said, Southern Baptists spend more time praying for God to keep his saints out of heaven by healing them than they do praying for him to keep sinners out of hell by saving them. Well she didn't say it with such emphaticness but She really got the point home to me, and I realized that I needed to do some more prioritizing in our prayer agenda for the weekly prayer meetings. Our Lord has put a premium on fully-fledged prayer meetings. To neglect them, I believe, you may disagree, but I believe, is a serious sin of omission. Samuel said, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you. Read the history of Christian revivals and you will find that in every case the revival began with a small group, sometimes just of women, who met in protected prayer for an outpouring of God's Spirit upon His Word. And I pray that prayer meetings will come into their own once again, and that God will raise up intercessors in the churches who, in the words of Isaiah, will give God no rest until he makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth. Now in the fifth place, and the last three points are very brief, so you can relax. Christ wants every church to be an evangelistic church. That is to say, He wants us to witness to Him not only by our lifestyle, but by our very words. Almost immediately after Pentecost, the church was threatened with imprisonment if they continued to speak of Jesus. But Luke says in Acts 4, with great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and many of those who heard the word believed. And the number of men came to be about 5,000. Friends, we have the greatest news on earth. God has visited our planet in the person of the man Jesus of Nazareth, and he has visited our earth to save sinners from eternal damnation. To keep this news to ourselves is a greater crime against humanity than to withhold a wonder drug that would be a certain cure for cancer. or any other terminal illness. We dare not keep this good news to ourselves. Christ has commanded us in one of his parables to go into the highways and the byways and compel them to come in that my house may be full. Of course they're disinterested. They don't realize they are facing eternal damnation. They think that Christianity is just a crutch for emotional weaklings. But friends, don't be easily put off. They are vulnerable. For we have a formidable ally in the Holy Spirit who is more than able to convert them and bring them to Christ. But as I hurry on, we mustn't stop there. It's not enough to evangelize the community in which we are located and neglect evangelizing the world at large. That would be to disobey the Great Commission in Matthew 28, 18-20, where it is clearly revealed in the sixth place that Christ wants every church to be a missionary church. You know, Jesus himself was a missionary sent by God the Father from heaven to win people for himself from every nation, tribe, and tongue. for the praise of the glory of his grace. And therefore, before Jesus ascended into heaven, he commissioned his church to be a missionary church. And the word missionary means evangelizing across culture. Evangelism on its own means sharing people, the gospel, with our own culture. But missions is transcultural evangelization, if I may say so. So we are to take the gospel not only to those in our locality, but to the ends of the earth. And you know, Jesus warned us in Matthew 24 that he cannot return until this gospel of the kingdom is preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations. Now, this is something which is very dear to our Saviour's heart. No church can expect much blessing if it isn't vitally involved in missionary outreach, because millions are still unreached, un-evangelised. They have no missionary at all, and they have no portion of the Word of God in their language. And these benighted souls should surely have a greater claim upon our hearts than anyone else. After all, why should some people hear the gospel many times while others have not heard it once? Someone has said that the church is to exist for missions as fire exists for burning. And so, Friends, as you set your budgets, not just this year, but every year, always remember that a significant and increasing proportion of your budget should be allocated to that end. Why should many hear the gospel many times when others have never heard it once? And number seven, and very quickly, Christ wants every church to be an expectant church. In Luke 12 he says, Be like men who wait for their master when he will return. Be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. And again in Luke 12, Blessed are those servants whom the master, when he comes, will find watching. Now, why does Jesus place such a priority upon waiting for his return? Well, he goes on to tell us in that parable of the good and the evil student that when the cat's away, the mice will play. And Paul tells us the same thing in his letters. Whenever church members start thinking that the Lord's return is a long way off, they will begin to loaf on the job, to get drunk, and to mistreat their fellow servants. So we need to heed our Lord's warning. Let us ever keep before our eyes the imminent return of our Master who has gone to heaven. Let's be active and faithful servants in his household, servants who can never settle down to a material and affluent existence, because we know that one day we will have to give an account. of what we have done with the things He has entrusted to us. O may God give us preachers and teachers who will keep the hope of Christ's personal return, His visible, glorious, sudden return before our eyes. May every church of Christ be an expectant church whose members will not have to shrink in shame before Him. on the day of his return, but rise up joyfully to meet him in the skies. So beloved, I leave this with you. This is what our glorious head wants every church to be. A biblical church, true to his words. A spirit-filled church, empowered to do His will. A worshipping church, giving to Him the honour that is His due. A praying church, continually seeking His favour. An evangelistic church, rescuing the perishing around us. A missionary church, evangelising the world. An expectant church, looking every day. for His return. Let us pray. God of grace and God of glory, make us and every other church in our land what Christ wants us to be. For His name's sake we ask it. Amen.