In this podcast, we discuss the importance of local church life for families.

Well, welcome again to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And so Jason, here we go again. We're gonna talk about, well, it's one of our favorite subjects. It is.

It's a subject we've been working together with and on for over 30 years. Local church life has been very important to me, to my family, and so I'm glad we have an opportunity to talk about it with Kevin. Yeah, and so we have Kevin Swanson. He's a pastor at Reformation Church in E. Elizabeth, Colorado, and you can hear him on the radio every day.

He has a fantastic radio program called Generations and wow I've been I've been hearing your programs they're so good they're so helpful fact you know you're always quoting you have all these statistics I'm I have in my notes to ask you about a couple of statistics you quoted the other day, so I'll get you off the air on that, it was really... Because I might use them in my sermon on Sunday. How about that? Okay. So, okay.

So, Kevin, we wanna talk about a local church life. We want to say some simple things. We wanna say that God created two massively important institutions for the evangelization, the discipleship of His people. Those happen to be the local church and the family. Local church has tremendous importance.

The family disappears in heaven, and there's not marriage, they're being given in marriage, and everything is shifted. But not so with the church. The church endures forever. So we have this institution that is so important, and we want to encourage people to give their lives in their local churches. So why should they do that?

Kevin, why should they do that? Well, Scott, obviously Jesus made the church, He gave his life for the church. He committed himself to the church. The church is his project. The church has eternal significance.

We'll continue, as you mentioned, into all eternity. This is an eternal project. A lot of what we work with is not eternal. I'm rebuilding my deck right now. By the way, it's very costly.

Lumber prices are up 180%. But whatever the case, that deck is going to burn. It's just going to burn. So, you know, okay, we're going to build a deck, but we're hoping that we can, you know, hospitalize. We like to say hospitalize, but that's the verb form of hospitality.

We want to, you know, we want to build up the church on that deck. And so, you know, the relationships and the discipleship and the hours upon hours, hundreds, thousands of hours I spend with our young men that come through our Shepherd Center. We're going to be out there on that deck and talk about the Lord and talk about His Word and preparing young men to be evangelists and disciples themselves and their own families. So, you know, that's what's going to remain. The deck won't remain, but the work that's done on the deck will remain in eternity.

So let's get involved in that project. And we're to love the church, love the body. Jesus says, you know, you love me, you love my body. And I was just preaching on this yesterday, just that, you know, if you want to love Jesus, what can you do? You know, you're just so desirous to take $30,000 and put it into a bottle of perfume and break it over the feet of Jesus.

Well, how would you do that? Well, you would do it for your brothers and sisters in the church, because if you do it to the least of these, his brothers in the church, you'll do it to him. So I think loving his church has so much to do with loving Jesus, and of course, it's a tangible way to love Jesus. You know, I want to do something for Jesus. I don't see him.

He's on the right hand of the body. He's in heaven, but I really want to serve Jesus, love Jesus, and Jesus would just simply say to us, you do this to the least of my brothers, you do it to me. Hey, You know, we're catching Jason here. He's preaching through texts of Scripture on the church. He was in Ephesians 4.

So Jason, you're pretty fresh. Yeah. Our church is working through Ephesians, and we hit Ephesians 4, 11 through 13. I won't read the whole thing, but I'd like to read Ephesians 4, 11 and 12, where Paul writes, and he himself, and Christ, gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ. And just in thinking through that, it's really a humbling thought.

God raises up and brings to maturity certain men, and he doesn't set them in place to be served, he sets them in place to serve, and to help their brothers and sisters in a local church make progress, come to maturity, become more useful. They equip the saints for the work of the ministry. A clerical class doesn't do the ministry. They equip the saints for the work of the ministry. So, they help all of us be more useful in God's kingdom.

It's just humbling to think that God would set aside certain people just to serve His people and to help them make progress over time and make them more useful in His kingdom. And one more thing, Jason, I just add to that from Ephesians 4 just hit me that, you know, we don't grow spiritually unless we grow into the body. It's hard to imagine a thumb out there all by itself growing into this gigantic thumb. You don't grow a part. That would be sort of strange.

That'd be weird. Okay, don't do that. Don't cut off your thumb and throw it on the floor and hope it grows. But you know, we grow together as a whole body, joined in it together by what every joint supplies according to the effect of working by which every part does it share, causing growth in the body for the edifying itself of love. So, absolutely.

Ephesians 4 speaks to the necessity of being part of the body and growing together as a body. You just don't grow as a lone wolf. It just doesn't happen. And Kevin, I encountered a quote from John Calvin when I was studying to preach that text. And he essentially says that if you think you don't need that, you've made yourself wiser than Christ.

If you think you don't need your brothers and sisters in order to grow. And you could just grow without them. You can just become useful in the kingdom of God without them, and you've made yourself wiser than Christ is. Because Christ actually thinks that you do need the body. Yeah, so let's talk about the thing that really breaks our hearts and that is when we find people or families neglecting the local church.

Tell us what that looks like from your perspective. When you see someone who's neglecting, what are the marks of that? I was just chatting with some of my interns on this. The other day we're walking through the forest, driving past our forest out here on the Eastern Plains of Colorado. And I pointed out, you know, a bunch of branches laying on the ground and said, they're just not doing that good.

You know, those branches, they had just done a lot of green on those branches, you know, they're just, they're, you know, kind of independent, they cut themselves off from local church. And I think they just dry up, brothers. I think it just, you just dry up. Hey, I pull apart from our body for a couple of weeks. Say I'm on an international trip.

And my wife and I took a trip to Nepal and do a couple of family discipleship conferences throughout Nepal and came back, you know, and it's just like, we need the body. And then COVID-19 happened and you know, and then you're without the body for a couple of weeks and then we come back together in small groups. And so we did that, but we felt a dryness in not being part of the local body there for a few weeks. So I just say it's a drying up. You're not growing.

You're not receiving the edification of a body. And Hebrews 10, you know, really serious words, perhaps some of those serious words in all the scripture, that we do not forsake the assembling ourselves together as the manner of some is, but to provoke each other to love and good works. But then it follows up and says, you know, for if you reject this, then there is nothing remains but a certain fiery indignation and judgment of Almighty God. And you know, you read this and you think, wow, the assembling of yourselves together must be a pretty important priority if the other option is the fiery indignation and judgment of Almighty God, you know. So I think that's one reason why we prioritize the commands of God to assemble ourselves together despite all of the COVID-19 mandates.

Bottom line is, you know, do we quarantine the healthy or do we forsake not the assembling ourselves together? And you know, God's law, God's principle, the severity of that word, I think, pressed in upon so many of us over that year. And there were points at which I know there were godly pastors that really came down to the conclusion that this is an issue upon which we must obey God rather than men. This issue, just as Apostle Peter and John were willing to abandon the regulations of public property imposed upon the temple grounds, they said, okay, you know what, we're gonna say that the mandate to get the gospel out is much, much more important than the quarantine regulations or other regulations opposed upon them by the San Hedra. Yeah, you know, I think one of the heartbreaking things about being in the ministry is to see people who find themselves in that position.

And they are dry, they're not being taught, they're not really useful as a member of the body. In other words, they're not weeping with those who weep. They're people that weep, and you need to be there. And maybe you're the one that's weeping, and you need somebody there. We exhort one another, we encourage one another, We speak to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

And I mean, that's why I wrote this book, The Family at Church, to really encourage people to milk every ounce of good they could out of their local church life, how parents just ought to guide their families into these everlasting treasuries of truth and love that are in the Bible, and that the fellowship the church provides, that the singing in the church provides, that the evangelism, the, you know, all the things that the church provides is so critical for life, and it makes a person strong. And that's why I love your illustration about the branches or the thumb. God is just saying, look, your life isn't workable without a local church. So Scott, here's an analogy. You bump into somebody that you haven't seen for 10 years.

Last time you saw him 10 years ago, you had little kids together, and now you bump into them at the store and their kids are giant. And you're like, what, have you been feeding them fertilizer or what? Well, no, they've been growing just like your kids have been growing. Just you saw them with a big gap in between, and your kids you see every day. And I think that's one of the things people don't understand or don't appreciate about the local church, is that things are happening.

Sometimes it's almost imperceptible, It's very incremental. If you hang with it, if you can stick with it for a decade, for two decades, you actually will see there's been a lot of growth, even though each increment has been small, there's a lot to be gained there. But often people don't stick it out enough to get the increments stacking up and so they miss the growth. Let's talk about some of the practical value of being in a local church. I'm just going to throw one out and then we'll just let it roll around.

Well, you get to be with people that aren't like you, and that means you have an opportunity to love people who aren't like you and to listen to people who aren't like you. The monotone of your brain gets interrupted, And that's actually a good thing. We need that kind of stimulation. It's good for us. You're speaking of the diversity of the gifts, right?

There are just a diversity of gifts in the body and we need that. And, we have moved as a local body more towards what we call a two office view, which basically means that we don't have a distinction between, say, the pastor and the ruling elders. We just say, hey, we're all pastors. We all have gifts to share. And we find that as we're sharing our gifts, the church itself is growing much more than it ever did.

So I have a huge respect for the multiplicity of gifts that the Holy Spirit has given to the body. And my wife came away last Sunday. She's just, I mean, I think we had heard, you know, 25 exhortations or sermons or prayers, you know, just we have a morning and evening service now. We have two services. We can't get by with just one, two and a half hour service.

We'd have to add a third, a second service just because we have so many gifts to share. And my wife was just saying, man, I have never been so well fed than what is happening right now in our body. So we're seeing that. We're experiencing that, Scott. Maybe the other side of that coin you said you get to be with people who aren't like you, but the other side of the coin is you get to be around people who are more fundamentally like you than the people you grew up with, and maybe even your parents.

I mean, if you have unbelieving parents, you have more fundamentally in common with the people you go to church with than you do even your own family members. And there's just such a sweetness about being around other people who knew what they were before, like you knew what you were before, and who've just been saved by the grace of Jesus, and then you're just happy in that, so you gather on Sundays to sing and praise and hear preaching together. You know, also, not only do you get to be with people who aren't like you, sometimes you get to be with people who don't like you. Also true. And so, but that's good.

That actually is a good thing because you're in a context where you are governed by the commands of God. And when somebody doesn't like you, how do you get through that? Well, God… Well, that's one of the biggest challenges. Yeah, it really is. It's one of our biggest challenges as pastors.

Yeah, and God has given us commands for how to deal with people who don't like you, and how people in our churches who deal with one another who don't like one another. That's part of growing love. We were talking about this as a couple of pastors, and that's one of the biggest challenges when you're preaching or pastoring, there's always a handful of people that just don't like you. I don't know why, but that just don't. And I think that's true for other members in the body as well.

But our number one priority is of course that people would like Jesus, you know, that love Jesus. It's not, not that we would like each other, but that we would all love Jesus first. And then, of course, we have to grow in this love for each other, despite our differences. And Jesus did say, you know, forgive each other seven times a day and, you know, receive that and restore relationship seven times a day. And Peter's response is classic, increase our faith, Lord, increase our faith.

I'm thinking about Hebrews 13-17 where it says that the elders give an account for the souls. Imagine being planted somewhere where someone feels a responsibility to help your soul flourish. God wants to place all of his people somewhere where a person that has been brought to maturity cares about the status and the condition of your soul and wants to proactively do things to see you flourish spiritually? You know, We had a situation recently where someone had come from our church because they didn't have a church to meet. And there was some interaction with one of the elders that disappointed that person who had come.

But somebody made a comment I thought was very insightful. He said, well, that person actually never had a shepherd. They had a preacher all their life, but they never had a shepherd who would help them grow in an area that was glaring. And a lot of people would rather have a preacher than a shepherd any day of the week. Well, but when you're in a local church, Hopefully there are shepherds who care about your soul and they're willing to speak to you about your soul and the condition of your soul So that you would be stimulated to love and good deeds So it's good.

It's a good thing to be stimulated beyond where you are, you know at any given moment in your life. I think we're in this stage where we need community, we need relationship, we need the one and others. And in fact, somebody was just one of my sons without a conference and they were talking about all the problems and the isolation and you know, the economic debacle and everything else going on in the world. And the one takeaway my son took from this Christian conference was somebody stood up and said, really the thing you need to do is you need to join a local church and stay there for 50 years. And I thought that's that's pretty insightful because you know it will be the church that will emerge through all of the upheavals of empires and the casting of mountains into the midst of the sea.

God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved. God shall help her in that right early. The church will come through just fine, thank you very much, but let's be a part of it. Let's play a part of that church.

Amen. It's interesting, the empires of the world have all passed away, but not the Church of Jesus Christ. So here's Paul's exhortation to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20-28. He says, Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to shepherd the Church of God which He purchased with His own blood." So there's a number of interesting things to talk about there, but probably the most important thing is just God's disposition towards His people, the Church. He purchased them with His own blood.

You know, they're the apple of His eye. The Church is the apple of His eye. So anyway, to the extent that we don't have a self-sacrificing love for the Church, We're disconnected from the heart of God. He purchased us with his blood. He puts us in churches.

He gives us shepherds to care for us. That's a great capstone for the whole discussion, Jason. That's the importance of the Church. So, brothers and sisters, we pray you'd make your local church a tremendous priority in your life, that you would go there to exercise your gifts, to minister to the people, to receive, to be shepherded, to hear preaching, to sing songs, to engage in the fellowship, to eat together, to laugh together. My whole desire for our local church is that it is such a place of delight in the Lord Jesus Christ And when we take the Lord's Supper, we just continually can't get over how good God is to save sinners and to make them a family.

So prioritize your local church. Thank you for joining us at the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope to see you next time. Thanks. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast.

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