What Goes on in a Local Church
Tom Shrader concludes his Christianity 101 series by examining the vital importance of the local church in the Christian life. Drawing from Hebrews 10 and Acts 11, he emphasizes that God's design for Christian growth happens primarily through local church involvement, not just parachurch organizations. He outlines what to look for in a healthy church: converted people, Spirit-filled confirmation through joy, holiness, truth, mission, unity, and love.
“If you're one of these people that are saying, I've been around here a while, and I'm not getting fed anymore, maybe it's time for you to feed others, and by feeding others, you will be fed.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Christianity 101 (2004)
Recorded: 2004
Duration: 44 min
Themes: church, community, fellowship, growth, holiness, unity, mission, love, new believer, seeking church, church shopping, pastor, church member, questioning faith, young adult, spiritual seeker
Scripture: Hebrews 10:23-25, Acts 11:19-21, 1 Corinthians 12, John 17:13, Ephesians 1:1
Theological Themes: ecclesiology, local church, spiritual formation, biblical authority, church membership, sanctification, christian maturity, body of christ
Full Transcript
We're looking at the last session, this is session 8, of the series, and I think I've mentioned this before that this is the most frequently ordered of any of the tape series that we do. I was on the website the other day looking for something, and I was just struck by how many tapes and how many series and how many things we've done. There's a ton of stuff on there. And when you take all of those, put them together, this is the series that people order most frequently.
And probably because I think it's pretty helpful and it's a great series to give to a friend, to give to somebody who's examining the Christian faith for the very first time. If you have somebody who's examining the Christian faith, this is a great series for them. And it's a great refresher series. It's something for you to go to over and over again, because it's back to the basics. It's going to the golf professional and having Him say, let me see your grip. Let me see your setup. Those are the things that we want to look at.
The Foundation: Doctrine and Scripture
So we started, and I want to spend time on it, because I want to tie this all together today. We started by saying doctrine's important. And we spent 45 minutes trying to convince you that this body of truth, these tenets of belief, these principles that are at the core of what you believe, they're really important. And that's what we did the first week.
The second week, we said, where do you go to get that doctrine? And we said, we get that doctrine from the Bible, from the scripture. We would take a hard stand, inflexible stand, and say that this Bible is the infallible word of God. That it's to believe from cover to cover. We may be wrong in our interpretation of it, but the Bible is infallible, meaning not only does it not have error, it cannot err.
And let me just give you, again, I know for some of you it's a little bit repetitive, but let me just help you in terms of thinking about things as you're thinking through and talking with others. You'll hear certain phrases. If you hear this coming at you, and a little alarm goes off. If somebody says, "Hey, you know, I use the Bible, I read the Bible, the Bible has in it some truth, it contains truth," then you need to be very, very, very concerned when you hear that.
Because the Bible doesn't just contain truth, the Bible is truth. If you say the Bible contains truth, here's what you're saying: Here are these 2,000 pages, somewhere in here is some truth. How do I know where that truth is? Years ago I lost my Ronco Bible truth detector, and I don't have the foggiest idea what's true, what isn't, except I come to it and I understand this is the infallible word of God.
Understanding God and Man
So now, having understood doctrine is important and the Bible is true, now I'm ready to tackle some big issues. And here's what we tackled. We tackled God and then man. So we looked at God and we said, who is God? And we spent three weeks looking at the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not with the idea of exhaustive study, but with the idea of saying, we're going to hopefully scratch the surface, we're going to give you some things that you can know, and this will prompt you now to go and to do your own study.
Then we turned the camera away from God and held up a mirror now and looked at ourselves and began to say, who am I? The Bible is going to give us an insight to man that we're not going to find in a sociology class at ASU or at Stanford. The Bible is going to tell us, not that man is basically good and getting better, but that man is as bad off as he can possibly be.
That when I look at man, I may see man. This is very important. If you may be here for the first time, we're relatively new to this thought process, so let me make sure we get this. We're not saying that man is as bad as he can be. Adolf Hitler did not rape and kill his mother. We're saying man is as bad off, from an eternal perspective, as he can possibly be. That man is at war with God.
You sing the Christmas carol, "God and sinner, reconciled." Well, if I'm reconciled, that means I've got two parties that were quarreling. They were at war. Now they've been reconciled. If that's all you know, if I say Jim and I are reconciled, that's all you know about is you know there was some pre-existing hostility. Well, if God and man are reconciled, what we're understanding is there's some pre-existing hostilities, and that hostility flows from Adam's sin, which we inherit, and we come into the world as sinner, separated from God.
So we may do good works by man's standards, not by God's. I may do a good work, and we may look around, and we may applaud that work. We may give you a plaque. We may put you on TV. We may call you the volunteer of the year, and look at what they did. But God doesn't look at the action. He looks at the heart of the actor. And the Bible tells us that our heart is deceitfully wicked.
The Solution: Christ's Work
That was whatever, week four or five. The next week, we said, "How do we get this thing fixed? What can I do to mend this relationship with the Holy God?" And the answer is, absolutely nothing. That Christ died on the cross.
I mean, you can feel this momentum building for this Mel Gibson movie, and whatever it's going to be. And I have just so many people asking me so many questions about it, and again, I've got books on order. They should be in, I hope, sometime this week. So I'll have them by next week for you. And I should have a copy for each one of you, with the idea that you're promising you're going to use this as you're speaking to people about this movie. There was an article in USA Today yesterday morning, talking about the pre-sales for the movie and how they're selling tickets like mad.
Movie critics were saying, "This is what you want when you release a movie. People are standing around the water coolers talking about this movie." Well, as you're standing around the water cooler talking about this movie, what are you saying? What are you going to talk about?
Here's what the movie does. The movie does an extraordinary job of helping you and me see the physical agony that Jesus went through on the cross. Here's what the movie does not do. The movie does not tell you why He went through that. That's our opportunity.
Everybody that I'm talking to who has seen this is saying, "When it's over, you can't even talk. You're just going to walk out of this and you can't even talk." But as people begin to digest this, they're going to have a tendency to say, "Boy, that Jesus was really something. He really got beat up pretty bad. That's a raw deal. He got the shaft." No. He laid down His life voluntarily so His people could have eternal life. That's a very important thing.
You need to be role-playing when you're driving in the car. People around you are going to think you're nuts, but you need to be role-playing how you're going to take this dialogue, where you're going to go in these conversations. These are the things you're going to start to hear, and we'll try to give you that tool. We're also developing a website just designed for you to direct people to it. Christianity 101 will be on that site and some other things, so people can go and get some answers.
Coming Into the Body of Christ
All that aside, now we say, do you believe that? Do you understand who Jesus is? If you do, you now come into the body of Christ. After you're in here for a while and you look around, you may be asking the question, "What in the world have I gotten myself into here? What is going on?" That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the church.
What I'm not going to do is follow that outline that you have in front of you very closely. I'll let you do a little work. You've got it. You can do a little study. You can look up the passages. I just want to talk with you.
When we talk about the body of Christ, we're talking about the body of Christ from two perspectives. We're talking about the church universal, meaning that every person who's a follower of Christ is knit together in this thing called the body of Christ, the universal church. But when we use the word church, most frequently, I think, what comes to mind for us is the local church. The local church has, at least in some people's minds, some credibility issues.
Getting Plugged In or Going Somewhere Else
At our church, when we do this class called Getting Plugged In, it's for people who are new to the church who want to know about the church. Our end in mind is to get them either one of two things: either plugged in here or going somewhere else. In fact, that's what I tell them at the end of the class. When we're all done, somebody teaches one week, somebody teaches the second week, I come in the third week, I sit down with them and I say, "Okay, here's the deal. You just found out who we are. If that does not work for you, please, please go somewhere else."
Don't come in here to try to reform this. We are what we want to be. We're not looking to change. If you come in and there's something that irritates you, you come in and you go, "I like all this, but this bugs me," I can tell you it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bug you more and more and more. That's just the way it is.
One day, I don't know how long we'd been married, not very long, and I'm in the car cracking my knuckles and Susan said, "I hate that." I said, "You know what, why wouldn't you tell me that when we were dating? Because I've got habits much more offensive than this that I'm going to spring on you in the next night or two. I've got some things I really want to show you here before long." If that cracking the knuckles bugs you when you're dating, it's going to drive you nuts when you're married.
If the fact that the guy up front doesn't have on a tie or does have on a tie or the choir's in robes or they're not in robes or there's not a choir or there is an order, if all that stuff drives you nuts, please, please, please do everybody in your church a favor: go somewhere else. That is not a problem. There's nothing wrong with that.
Non-Negotiables and Negotiables
You know why? Let me give this to you now. There are certain non-negotiables about the church. When can I compromise on the integrity of scripture, the infallibility of scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary death of Christ, physical resurrection? Those are all non-negotiables. By definition, then, everything else is what? Negotiable.
So one guy may love the music and the drums and another guy doesn't, then you just need to find a place where you like the music. That's okay. I would think nobody would be offended by that. If you don't like the building, then go somewhere else. If you've got all these things that are distracting you, go somewhere else.
Look, it's like a box of chocolates, my friend. There are lots of these churches out there with lots of different things in them. One of the things that I love about our church is, you don't have to be around very long to figure out what we're about. That's what you need to do in your church. You just need to figure it out.
Finding the Right Church
So if you're sitting here saying, "You need to go to a church," then what we would say to you is, you need to go to church, you need to find out, you need to explore it. In this Getting Plugged In class, here's what I'll hear: "I've been church hopping, and I'm going from church to church to church. I'm trying to find one that fits just for me."
Well be a little bit careful there, because that's what I'll hear. I want a place that meets my needs. I want a place that's there for me. I want a place that says, hey, I'll give you a place. Nordstrom's does a great job meeting your needs. They're there at the door. They can't wait to greet you. They'll give you a personal shopper.
It's not just about meeting your needs. It's about you now participating in meeting others' needs. If you're one of these people that are saying, I've been around here a while, and I'm not getting fed anymore, maybe it's time for you to feed others. By feeding others, you will be fed.
So I think at Scottsdale Bible, what is it? Come, grow, and go. And at our place, it's come, learn, and serve. It's got that same aspect to it. It's to come, it's to be involved, but ultimately, it's for you to meet other people's needs, be the vehicle that God uses.
What Should You Look for in a Church?
So you've got this thing called the local church. What church? What should I look for in a church? Why are there so many different churches?
The author of Hebrews writes in Hebrews chapter 10, verse 23: "Let us hold fast the confession of the hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our assembly together as some have the habit of, but encourage one another."
That's what you find in Scripture. We're beyond now salvation, and we're talking about living the Christian life. You find all these pesky little one-anothers: love one another, care for one another, pray for one another, serve one another. All these one-anothers, how do they manifest themselves? How do they flesh themselves out? God's design is that they flesh themselves out in the local church.
Priority Living Is Not a Church
Let me help you out here. This isn't a church. If you're coming here saying Priority Living is my church, I'm saying to you that you're violating what we're asking you to do. Do not come here and consider this your church. This may be something that's handy like a five iron or a nine iron, but it's not a bag of clubs.
People will periodically want to meet with me and say, I've got an idea for Priority Living. And I'll say, all right, what is it? Let's start small groups. No, go to church. We're not a church. We don't take communion together. We don't have a structure of elders. We don't praise and worship through music. There's all sorts of things we don't do that the local church does. You need to be in a church.
I cannot say this enough. People will say, you know what, I don't learn at my church. I learn here. I come here to learn and then I go to my church. You got it backwards. You need to be going to a church where you learn. You need to be in a viable place.
Don't Make Excuses
Our church is dead. I want to be there to reform it, revitalize it. Forget it. They don't want to be revitalized. Go somewhere else. Go where you can be fed. Go where you can be used. But you cannot forsake this.
When somebody says to me, I can worship God on a golf course, I'll say, well, that explains a lot to me because I certainly hear His name a lot when I'm out there, but I don't see anybody worshipping Him. I just don't see it happen. You're not going to do that.
You Can't Fulfill God's Commands Alone
Do you see what this misses? And I want to just open up your eyes to this. When you say, I can worship God on a golf course, sure you can. You can worship God at the Grand Canyon. You can worship God out there by yourself. But you can't be part of what He's prescribed for the local body by yourself.
To live the Christian life, to fulfill the Great Commission—go and make disciples—and to fulfill the Great Commandment—love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself—you must be in contact with other people. That's how God designs this thing.
The Church as a Body
The imagery that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 12 is that of a body. We're a body. We have different parts, just like the human body. We've got fingers and toes and elbows and a nose and a knee and a neck. They're all separate parts, but they come together to give us one body.
And now here's what he says: in the body of Christ, there are many parts. There's lots of various shapes and sizes. And then there's this thing called a spiritual gift. What the Bible teaches is that every Christian at the point of conversion receives a spiritual gift, a special enablement to perform with ease and effectiveness a function in the body of Christ. You've got a spiritual gift, and you should be exercising that first and foremost in the local church.
The Church Is Primary
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Young Life and Crisis Pregnancy Center and Christian Family Care and Priority Living. Nothing wrong with those. But those are all secondary. Here's the main thing: the church, the church, the church.
My experience—is it universal? No. But my experience is, when people come to Christ, when people are saved, when people find the Lord, when people become followers of Christ, and that happens through a parachurch organization, a Young Life, a Campus Crusade, a Priority Living, there's a tendency for that person to never get plugged into the local church. And I'm telling you, if that's the case of people in Priority Living, it's your fault and mine, because I cannot make this any more clear to you. The church is preeminent over this.
Does that mean you have to abandon this? No. This is a useful tool, I think, to be used in a useful way, to supplement some things, to bring things in another way, to maybe provide an atmosphere for you to say to somebody, hey, you know, I go to this thing on Thursday morning, and it's in a bar, and you want to go? That's a whole different thing than saying, do you want to go to church with me.
What do you look at when you get to the church? Two things. We're going to look at these first two points.
Converted People in the Early Church
Number one, you've got converted people. In Acts chapter 11, verses 19 through 21, Luke is writing, and he's recording the history of the church, and he's saying two things. Now, those who had been scattered by persecution, and then he's going to say, now they go out and they take the message to the Gentile and to the Jew.
I don't think we're ever going to understand how radical this was. The early Christian church was all Jewish. They were all Jews. Jesus was a Jew. So when we're talking about anti-Semitic, Jesus is a Jew. The whole early church were Jews.
The first big crisis in the church now comes about when the message goes out to the Gentiles, because that Jewish church is saying, listen, I guess it's okay for those Gentiles to become Christians, but they need to be Jews first. Remember? That was one of the arguments. If you've got an adult converted guy, what we want to see here is circumcision. Well, that's going to cut down your evangelism effectiveness a little bit. When you're talking to a guy and you say, well, yeah, I'm interested in joining. Is there any ritual I need to go to? Well, there's this thing that we do. Well, that's going to slow this process down a whole bunch.
What the message was, you don't need to become a Jew. You need to become a follower of Christ. That's radical. Not to us, but as you read through, and this happened Sunday when I was reading along on something, Jesus stays in the temple in Jerusalem, and now He comes and He says, remember His parents said, they've lost you, we're all concerned about this. And He said, didn't you know I'd be in my Father's house?
Understanding the Radical Nature of Jesus' Claims
Now for us, we've grown up with that. It's no big deal. The next verse says, and they were astounded by this. When you see those, they were astonished. They were amazed. You've got to be circling those, because what's ever around them is something really important and generally something that we'll miss.
What Jesus was saying at that moment is, I'm God. The Jews would never, ever, ever refer to God that way. And they'd never call Him their Father. They might acknowledge Him 14 times in the Old Testament, use the word father, and speak of the nation in a general way, but never like Jesus did. When you see that these guys are struggling over this church going out to the Gentiles, that's no big deal for us, but you've got to understand, they're fighting this battle.
The Role of Persecution in Church Growth
One more just sub-point. Do you see what's spreading? Persecution. There was persecution in the church. Persecution is your friend individually, suffering is your friend individually, and it's our friend corporately.
There's something, they said, when they threw all the missionaries out of China, and I'm going to probably mess this up, but I want to say there's something like 100,000 Christians or something in China. Maybe a million. I don't know. They say now there's somewhere between 50 and 100 million, without any missionaries.
See all of a sudden, in the culture, let's talk about the culture we're in. One of the things we want to make sure is that we provide in church a very comfortable environment. Easy to get to. Good parking. Parking is good. The coffee is good. The environment's good. The air conditioning is right. The music is there. It's a place you should be comfortable.
Well, when you have an environment like that, here's what you're going to attract. You're going to attract a lot of really good, honest Christians, and then you're going to attract a lot of people that aren't converted. I hope you understand that. When you walk into Scottsdale Bible Church on Sunday, or East Valley Bible Church, or Camelback Bible Church, or any of these churches, don't you for a second think everybody walking in there is a Christian. They aren't. They just aren't.
Persecution as a Purifying Force
One of the ways to find out who the real Christians would be is if we said, you know what, here's what's going to happen next Sunday. Next Sunday, I don't know if you read it, but next Sunday they've outlawed Christianity here in the state of Arizona. And next Sunday, anybody who's here worshiping, they're going to line them up and shoot them. Those fringe people may not be there that day. And man, they weed out some of those people.
Persecution, what's it do? It purges the church. It gets it pure again. Now we begin to see who are the real believers. By the way, if you're saying you want to be a missionary, I just told you a great place to start. Your church. Your Sunday school class. The people around you.
Here's what you see in the church. You should see converted people. You should see people who understand who Jesus is.
Confirmation Through the Fruit of the Spirit
Here's the second thing, and it's point two in your outline. There's this confirmation. What he's talking about here, again it's Luke's writing, he's talking about Barnabas. That last sentence, he says this, Barnabas is a good man filled with the Holy Spirit and faith.
Here's what I should see in the life of people in the church, and therefore I should see in the church, I should begin to see the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. One of the basic assumptions that I have, and it doesn't always universally work, but often times will, is that what
What we see in the individual, we should see corporately. So if we have some truth here that we teach that applies to the individual, it should apply to our corporate gathering. What do we want to see? We don't have to wonder what the church is about, because Paul tells us it's to equip and encourage the saints. It's to prepare saints for ministry.
So by definition, we should not be doing a bunch of things to attract unbelievers, because that's not church. Now, will there be unbelievers in church? Absolutely. We know that. But the church ought to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
What It Means to Be Filled with the Spirit
What does that mean? Talking in tongues, laying on the floor? Being filled with the Holy Spirit simply means being controlled by the Holy Spirit, driven by the Holy Spirit. That's what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Don't be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. What do I look like when I'm drunk with wine? Well, I'm controlled by the booze. You can say, "Hey baby, it's not me talking, it's the booze talking." When I'm filled with the Holy Spirit, it's not me talking, it's the Holy Spirit talking. It's not me, it's the Holy Spirit moving.
I should see that. In the church life, and again in your life individually, this manifests itself in three things internally and three things externally.
The First Internal Characteristic: Joy
The first thing is joy. There ought to be joy. As Jesus prays the night before He died, here's what He prays in John chapter 17, verse 13: "Now I come to thee, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have joy made full." There should be joy in your life, and consequently, because it's true individually, it should be true corporately.
Someone has written this: "There is no virtue in the Christian life which is not made radiant with joy. A joyless life is not a Christian life, for joy is one constant in the recipe of Christian living." Joy is something that's based not on circumstance, but based on relationships.
I don't get around much anymore as it is to churches. I used to probably be in 20, 25 churches a year, and now I'm in half a dozen maybe. I would go to these churches, and it was always interesting for me, not to make any judgment on the church, but to hear their assessment of their own church. They would call and they'd say, "We're really concerned, we really want to grow, we really want to be a church that's alive, we want to be a church that's attracting young people, we want to be a church that's on the cutting edge, we want to be growing, but we just don't seem to be growing."
Then you get there, and all you do is drive up on the campus, and you understand why. It's a dead, dreary place that screams, "Stay away, don't touch me, don't say hello to me."
I'm in a church one time, and I'm the speaker. They don't know me, which is always interesting. I come in, I lay my stuff down, I come back, my stuff is gone. Someone's sitting there, and they said to me, "Oh, we moved your stuff, these are our seats." Now, they didn't know me, they didn't know what was going on. There are 200 people singing, literally, "I've got joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart. Where?" Way, apparently, deep down, hidden in the recesses of my heart, there is joy. I could never detect it.
There's a gal that's been popping in, she'll pop in to something like this periodically, and the only reason she'll do it is to bring somebody new. She'll pop in and say, "I just met Barbara at the grocery store. We were just talking, then had coffee, and then I discovered she doesn't know Jesus, and we thought we'd bring her here." I'll say, "Barbara, what was it that attracted you to her?" You know what? Her smile was contagious. This joy thing is contagious. When you walk around carrying the weight of the world on you, and everybody sees it, there's nothing appealing about it.
The Second Internal Characteristic: Holiness
Internally, there should be joy, then there should be holiness. When Paul addresses his letter to the church at Ephesus, he says in Ephesians 1:1, "I'm writing to the saints." That word saints has kind of been hijacked and used to apply to people who go through a process of canonization. That's not what a saint is. A saint is not someone who has a certain level of achievement in their life. A saint is a designation given to all of us who know Jesus Christ. It's somebody who's set apart.
You've been set apart. God has a plan for you. God's desire is to use you. Consequently, you should look and act differently. There should be something distinctive and different and unique about you. You are holy.
The Third Internal Characteristic: Truth
Here's the third internal characteristic you should see in your life, and that is this idea of truth. Don't love the world or the things of the world. Don't fall prey to the lust of the flesh or the lust of the eyes or the boastful pride of life.
At the end of his life, Francis Schaeffer coined the term "true truth." What he was saying is, there's all these things out there that try to pretend that they're true or try to say that they're true or try to somehow uphold this idea that they're true, but they're not at all. What Schaeffer said is, "I want true truth."
Listen, you can go into the bookstore today and you will find books on reinventing the corporation, reinventing yourself, renewing yourself, all this stuff. You are never going to find a Bible with "extra chapters added" or "introduction redone by the author" on the front. It's not there. And if you do find one that has extra chapters added, run from it, obviously. This idea of truth—
The Moving Standard
It's a moving target, everything's moving. I didn't see the halftime show because I was in church, but I've seen it now replayed about a million times in slow motion from a thousand different directions. There's a side of me that says it isn't that big a deal—I didn't see anything. I have not done it, but I need to. What I think would be much more alarming would be for you to listen to the words they were singing as they were doing this, which would have gotten a total pass if he wouldn't have ripped that thing off of her. We're just immersed in it; we don't even think anything about it.
The standard just keeps moving and moving and moving. Here's how it works: if in 1950 this was where we were—this was our thesis—then an antithesis develops, then a compromise takes place. We just go through this process every two or three years. We started here, we're now here. It wasn't something we did consciously; it's just something that happens.
How do I find my moral compass? How do I find my direction? When I was in high school, premarital sex—and you may think I'm naive, I don't think I was—in terms of just physical intercourse, it just wasn't happening. There were a few places, perhaps, but there were basically a couple of things driving it. Number one, there was a real fear on the part of a girl that she might get pregnant. Number two, there was a stigma to this: "It's one of those girls."
What has happened is biology has solved the one problem—take this pill and you won't get pregnant—and society solved the other problem. They now look down on the girls that don't do it. I just read the article this week: average teenage boy loses his virginity at 15, average teenage girl 16. All of a sudden, we've lost our moral compass.
When Right Seems Wrong
If you're going to go into a high school and you're going to say "don't do this," I've got to tell you, to me premarital sex makes absolute, 100% solid sense. It makes sense to me. Looks like it'd be fun, looks like I'm not going to get caught, and even if I'm serious and we're in love—hey, you don't buy a car until you test drive it, right? This just seems to me like it would make sense.
Exactly the opposite is true, though. Larry and Sue Wright will tell you, in the thousands of couples they've counseled—and they've counseled couples with sexual problems—they never counseled a couple who were married as virgins who had sexual problems. There's something different. It doesn't make sense. You know why? Because the Bible tells us what's right. How do I find true north? The Bible.
External Evidence: Mission
Internally, I should see joy, and I should see holiness and truth. Externally, let me give it to you quickly—you've got about five minutes. There should be a mission in your life. You were called. Again, Jesus, the night before He dies, prays this: "As thou hast sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world." You're being sent into the world.
Your mission is not to go out and proclaim the gospel to the world. Your mission is to go out and to proclaim the gospel to your world—the guys you play golf with, the gals you drink coffee with, the people that you're hanging around with, family, friends. You are to proclaim to this world, and you're to proclaim to them the gospel. Jesus—you're an ambassador.
Joe Aldridge—any of you remember that name? Joe Aldridge had a Ph.D. in philosophy. Every year, Joe Aldridge would take a philosophy 101 class at the local community college. Not to disrupt the class—he was very respectful—but he knew that in that environment, they were going to talk about abstract ideas about life, and he wanted to make certain that in the proper perspective, he had the opportunity to say, "You know what? I just want you to understand something. I want you to understand that there's another perspective here."
It's exactly what you're seeing in this whole Passion of Christ, Mel Gibson movie. If you're not prepared for this thing, you're going to miss a golden opportunity to begin to talk to people about what it means to be a follower of Christ. You are on this mission.
External Evidence: Unity
Here's the second thing. There should be about us, externally, unity. This is a hard one. Not organizational unity. Not governmental unity. Not conformity. As I said, there are lots of churches. But there should be, at least among Christians, an agreement on the basics, the non-negotiables. That's the basis for the unity.
We don't stand around with somebody who doesn't believe in the physical resurrection of Christ and pretend that somehow we're all in the body. We don't sing around and sing kumbaya with those guys. This is not our deal. That's not the call. Paul's not saying, Paul's not writing, "Can't we get along, can't we get along, can't we all get along?" What he's saying is, those of us who are truly converted have a unity about us.
External Evidence: Love
Here's the last thing, and it kind of holds it all together. There should be love. Love is an important ingredient. I'm not talking about—when we talk about love, so often we talk about feeling. Let me read you something I found the other day. I was going through a file. This is Larry Wright's favorite Dear Abby.
"Dear Abby, you'll probably think this comes from a crazy person, but I'm quite sane, except when it comes to Rudy and Ralph. I'm 29. I've been married six times—three times to Rudy and three times to Ralph. Abby and I were married right after I graduated from high school. I was 17. Rudy was two years older. We fought from the day we were married. After a year, I divorced Rudy and fell in love with Ralph, the young slimeball attorney"—I added that—"who got me the divorce." He just kind of weaseled in there. That's not everyone who's an attorney.
Love: The Safeguard of the Church
But this guy just weaseled in there. Not many exceptions. Just kidding.
Soon I realized I was still in love with Rudy, so I divorced Ralph and remarried Rudy. That's two for Rudy, one for Ralph. Well, I discovered that I was three months pregnant with Ralph's baby, so I left Rudy and married Ralph for a second time. Meanwhile, I kept having those strong feelings for Rudy, so I called Him, asked Him if He felt the same, and He did. So we decided to try marriage again.
After three years with Rudy, Ralph showed himself to be such a terrific father to our son Ralphie, that I let Ralphie talk me into going back to his father, so that I divorced Rudy again and married Ralph again. Now I can't seem to get Rudy off my mind. I don't know what to do. I saw a marriage counselor who suggested I discreetly have an affair with Rudy, but I don't want to do that. Please tell me what to do. Signed, torn in two.
So dear Abby makes a trip to the Wisdom Bank, as you well know what comes next, only to discover she's overdrawn to write back this comment. Here's what she writes back: "Don't do anything while you're still torn. Stay with Ralph and get some psychological help until you're sure of your feelings for each other."
Well, feelings are what got her into this thing in the beginning. Feelings are going to lie to you. Haven't you ever been to Disneyland and you go in and you sit down and you get in the ride, the Star Wars ride, and you're zooming and you're moving and you get out and the box is moving forward not at all and up and down only this much and you'd swear it's falling out of the sky? That's what your feelings are. Absolutely, we're moving. We're moving 100 miles an hour. We're in the same chair. We haven't moved a foot.
The True Nature of Love
Your feelings, are feelings important? Sure. Love is not this gushy feeling, although there are feelings with it. Love primarily, at least this is the definition I'm using now, is self-sacrifice and commitment.
For God so loved the world, what did He do? Write Him a card? For God so loved the world, He took action, He sent His Son, gave His Son to die, sacrifice.
Here's what I want you to see about love. Look at all these characteristics: joy, holiness, truth, mission, unity. Love is the safeguard that we have against joy becoming hedonistic pleasure, against holiness becoming some rigid legalism, against truth becoming bitter orthodoxy. Love is the thing that will keep missions from becoming something where we just accumulate people in numbers to run thermometers and stats. Love is the thing that will allow us to deal with truth and unity with firmness but with grace.
So here's the question in this whole body of Christ. And then all these other things that you see in your list ought to be there. There ought to be education. There ought to be development. There ought to be all of these things going on in this process. But these are the things that you ought to see in a church.
The Conclusion: Your Assignment
So here we go. Here's the conclusion of all this. We race through eight weeks now in a minute.
What you believe is important. And you get that from the Scripture. Who God is is critical. We understand who He is in specific revelation, again, from the Scripture. We understand that we're lost and that He sent His Son so we could have eternal life. But that's not the beginning, or I'm sorry, that's not the end. That's the beginning.
There's a sense in which you look around and go, "What have I gotten myself into?" What you've gotten yourself into, or should get yourself into, is the local church. God's ordained the local church. Are you a part of the local church?
Here's your assignment for the next few weeks. Evaluate your relationship with your church. Are you in a bad church? Here you go. Get out. I'm going to change it. I doubt it. I don't think you can. Maybe you can.
Are you in a church that's just a great place, and the kids love it, and the teenagers are doing great, and everybody's okay, and the music's great, and it's real close to house, but the teaching's not true? In the wrong spot.
See, God's put you here not to be part of priority living, or young life, or your own little organization. God's put you here to be part of the local church. I think that's a non-negotiable. So we ask you to look at that.
Closing Prayer
Let's pray together. Father, thanks. Thanks for what You've done in our life. Thank You for who You are, the truth that You've shown us. We pray that in our lives individually, first and foremost, there will be joy. Father, that we will live a life that's holy. Father, that we will know and embrace and tell the truth. That there is a sense of mission and purpose in our life. That there is a unity with You. What's important to You, what's truth for You, is truth and importance for us.
But all of this is immersed in love. Father, the love that we can have for one another, we can't even generate on ourselves. We love You because You first loved us, and that's what we give to one another.
God, thanks for the men and women that are here today. Blows me away to see people get up and come out early in the morning. I pray that this is time that's used by them. We take these words today, they evaluate their own lives, their involvement in the church. God, now as we come to just a time of relief and retreat, use it. Use it to build us up, strengthen us so that we can be about Your work.
Father, thanks for everything You've given us, and especially Your Son, Jesus Christ. It's in His name that we pray, Amen.