The integrity of church practices has been challenged as a result of the Covid 19 lockdowns and restrictions. We have Kyle Reeder, with us, pastor of Solid Rock Baptist Church in Benton, Ky to discuss the health of the church. How does a church remain faithful in times like these? What is the state of the church as a result?

Hey, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Let me tell you a couple of things real quick before we get going. Hope you can come to our Theology of the Family Conference at Ridgecrest, North Carolina, May 20 through 23. Just Before that, a singles conference called Holiness to the Lord, May 19 and 20. Also, go to our website.

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Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life is dedicated to the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life. And so Jason, we have Kyle Reeder with us today. Hey Kyle. Greetings brothers, glad to be with you today.

Hi guys. So who is this guy? Well Kyle is a pastor at Solid Rock Baptist Church in Benton, Kentucky. Hey, it was a joy to preach there a few weeks ago. I'm glad you came.

Boy, that was such a happiness to be with your people. It was very invigorating. Amen. So Kyle, we're here to talk about the state of the church. We're here because we believe that the Church of Jesus Christ is the center of God's plan in the world, that all of history is about the rescue of a bride and the collection of believers into local churches.

Our greatest desires for the health of our local churches, Jason you're a pastor at Sovereign Redeemer Community Church and myself at Hope Church in Wake Forest. And you, Kyle, where you are, we have tremendous desires for the health and the faithfulness of our churches and churches around the country too. We obviously live in times of concern and so we want to talk on this broadcast about the faithfulness of churches and the downfalls of churches as well. So Jason, just give us some of your thumbnail thoughts beginning here. Well there are mega trends that are happening in the American church.

I think we're probably focused today on what's happening in the American church. And so there are swift currents and a lot of them we don't like, a lot of them we're trying to paddle upstream as fast as we can. So one of the things I'm hoping we can consider today is what should the average pastor do? I'm a pretty average pastor, I have a pretty average size church, we have a hundred people if everybody comes. And so in the face of Swift Current's mega trends that we're not pleased with, you don't control all of that, but what should you do with what you do control?

Right, okay. And we want to talk about the churches in the book of Revelation. I know Kyle, you've, you know, been considering particularly the church in Philadelphia, and I've been preaching through the churches in Revelation in our local church. And it's very interesting because you see flaws and you see strengths, and that's the way that we view the world as well. I mean, for a long time all of us have been concerned about the pragmatism that exists in the church.

We've all been concerned about voices, teachings that have entered into the consciousness of people, you know, all kinds of ungodly and real pagan thoughts that actually have crept their way into the church. That's exactly what happened to these churches, these seven churches of Asia that are in Revelation 2 and 3. So Kyle, you've been thinking a lot about the church in Philadelphia. Why don't you talk to us about that and how it applies to churches, you know, far and wide. Yeah, I mean, I think like with every other pastor, we're all sensing today a lot of pressure that's coming on the church just with the things that have taken place in our nation in the last little bit.

So with that pressure has come a lot of anxiety and fear and distress. I see Christian people everywhere in such a high degree of fear. And so I think as pastors, it's important for us to be sure that we're calling people out of that and to be courageous and to make sure that we're all remembering our cause. When the Lord left this earth, He gave us the great commission to go into all the world and to preach the gospel. And whether the times are good and favorable or whether they're difficult, that mandate has not changed from the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so, we don't want to be in a situation as a church to where we're in retreat. We want to continue to advance. And I think as you look at the churches in revelation, again, as you mentioned, you see certain rebukes from the Lord Jesus on these churches but you also see wonderful commendations. And one of the great commendations that he gives that to me is so encouraging is how he speaks about the Philadelphian Church and their faithfulness and their loyalty to the Lord Jesus certainly in times of distress and difficulty. And so I think that stands for us as a pattern that we can go back and look at and as well just with these all these churches together and there's so many wonderful encouragements.

And, you know, just right off the top here, and as I think about Christ addressing these churches, it encourages me to know that the Lord Jesus is always intimately involved with this church, And he knows exactly what's taking place. He knows the state of every church. And Jason had mentioned a moment ago, the little church. And I understand that. We too are a small church.

And brother, we're like you on a good Sunday. We'll have 80 or 85 people there. And, you know, Christ is very intimately involved with the little church even. And that's encouraging to me that he knows. He knows what's going on.

He communicates to us through his word by the power of the spirit. And so there's so many encouragements just as he deals with his church. But yeah, looking at the Philadelphia church, the thing that's on my heart is just stirring men and women, that are, that are in the church as well as pastors, just to be faithful to Christ and to not retreat from the mission. Yeah, and so in the Philadelphia church, the Lord says to them, hold fast on what you have. Amen.

So talk to us about that. Hold fast on what you have. What was that in Philadelphia? Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I think the main thing that the Lord was saying about this church is that they were enduring patiently.

They were holding fast to the true message of the gospel. They weren't capitulating. They weren't compromising in their message in the midst of difficulty. And of course, it breaks our hearts as pastors and shepherds of the people to see in the American church in so many regards that there has been a lack of faithfulness and boldness as it concerns holding fast to the Word and so the Lord Jesus is commending them for that. It's also interesting to note as he's giving this commendation to the church He speaks about the power that they have.

And when he says you have a little power, he's not rebuking them that they only have a little power, because you remember this is a commendation, it's not a rebuke. And I think what the Lord is communicating there is that there's a certain strength and a maturity. There's an effectual ministry that's going on through this church, and there's results, and there's influence, and all of that is a result of them holding fast to the Word. They haven't turned away from pure obedience to the Lord Jesus. And he even says that as well, that you've been obedient and you're being loyal to me and you're holding to the exclusivity of the gospel.

You have a great allegiance to me. You've not denied my name." And that's, I think, again, as pressure mounts on the people of God based upon the circumstances. I so appreciate many of the discussions that you guys have had about civil government and some of the tyranny and those kind of things that are happening in our day. And there's going to come a point where that's really going to affect the church more drastically than it has now if things continue in that way. So we're really going to be tested in those moments to see what our affections are for the Lord Jesus Christ.

Do we truly love Him? Will we truly keep His commandments? Will we obey? Will we give full loyalty to Christ and give our full allegiance to Him? And will we persevere when those difficulties come?

He's commending this church because they did just that. They have kept his word. They have been faithful, and that's what receives the great commendation. You know, in these churches in revelation, they all have, you know, different pressure points, and you mentioned this matter of holding fast. They all had to hold fast to different things because they really did have different challenges and pressures.

What would you, you brothers, say what the church needs to hold fast to in the midst of the current environment that we're living in now? So I think this might sound like a plain vanilla response, but I don't think it invalidates it at all. I think Kyle's already hit the nail on the head, which is love for Jesus. If you asked the average churchgoer, there are seven letters to seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3. Can you think of one thing Jesus said to any of those churches, probably the one thing they remember if they only remember one is Jesus saying to the Ephesian Church, you've left your first love, come back to your first love.

So I mean I don't think it takes much imagination to apply that to the modern American church. There's lots of activity, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of love for Jesus Christ that is manifest, that is demonstrating itself in just clinging to core truths as things seem to be crumbling around us. You know, and brother, I'll say to that, that, you know, the Lord Jesus, when He was on earth speaking to His disciples, He says, if you love Me, you're going to obey Me, you're going to keep My commandments. And I think, you know, the word of the hour, when we talk about holding fast, it's being bold and unafraid to say hard things to a culture that has completely lost a God-fearing worldview. I mean, we're living in a culture now where there's a whole nation we have drifted away from that God-fearing world view that was certainly at the founding of our nation to now a God-excluding world view.

Men are suppressing the truth and unrighteousness. Romans 1 tells us that. And I think when that begins to take place in a nation, we become so much in the minority that the pressure just mounts upon us to maybe curve back just a little bit on the things that we say and to not lead with such the tip of the spear of the gospel and the exclusive claims of the Lord Jesus. So as we're saying here, it really does boil down to, do I love my master? Do I love him enough that I'm not going to silence or muzzle anything that he said.

Am I going to be bold and open up the scriptures week after week, conversation after conversation, and make sure that I'm explaining the truth of God's Word accurately and pointedly, and bringing people really to see the full implications and the weight of the truth that's there for us. And I think that's the idea. Holding fast. Hold fast to what you've received. Hold fast to my commandments.

Hold fast to the word. And so that's the challenge. That's where we're at in our time. You know, in preaching through the church in Pergamum and Thyatira, I ended up telling our church that what these admonitions of these churches make perfectly clear is that the church in many ways is an intolerant institution. We are not an institution of tolerance.

You know in the Church of Pergamum, you know, the Lord is saying you have people that are holding to the teaching of Balaam, which is really the teaching of loose morality. And in Thyatira, you have people who are holding to the teaching of Jezebel, which is really very similar. But in both of those cases, the Lord is urging the church to be intolerant of that teaching. And, you know, we live in a, an era, an era where tolerance is the greatest virtue, but the church is an intolerant society. We actually discipline and re reprieve, re-reprove, rebuke and exhort, and we might excommunicate, and we're going to expose the teaching of Balaam, and we're going to expose the teaching of Jezebel in the church.

And you know, we live in a time where I think the teaching of Jezebel really is, it's the teaching of the LGBTQ proposition to, you know, just to accept and love everybody, just love everybody, And you know, I think that's one of the great dangers that we're in right now, is when you have a tolerant church, where we should be in. Yeah, I think that when we hold fast with the truth, you know scripture says if you love people, love rejoices in the truth. So you can't speak in the name of love if you don't couple that alongside with truth. It's actually the unloving thing to do to not point out the truth to people. I've said it many times, it's a simple illustration, but if you see a blind man walking towards a cliff and you know he doesn't see it and he's going to fall off the edge, it would be extremely unloving if you didn't yell to the top of your lungs to tell him the danger that was before him.

Now, he may be annoyed a little bit by the high pitch of your voice, but it very well may be the thing that saves his soul, you know, from death there, his life from death. So we have to love people by telling them the truth, and it's unloving if we don't couple our message with the full truth of God's Word. Amen. Yeah, this is making me think of, I think it's Jonah 2, 8, those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs, or depending on the translation forfeit their own mercies. With the idolatry in our hearts, in our churches, in the larger evangelical culture, the thing that we tend not to think of is what we're forfeiting with that idolatry.

Idolatry is tremendously costly. God has grace for His people, and when we cling to worthless idols, we're actually forfeiting grace. Amen. Hey brother, I think that's a great launching point for one other thing that I really wanted to mention from the Philadelphian church. After the Lord Jesus gives all of this commendation of the church, He follows that up with certain blessings and rewards to the church who is faithful and loyal.

And in verse number eight of chapter three, he mentions to them that he has given them an open door. And, you know, I got to thinking about that. And When you look in scripture, many times an open door in the New Testament is used with the idea of opportunity for effectual ministry. And what a blessing to think that the Lord Jesus rewards the faithful church with the blessing of heaven's privileges being poured out to people through that particular church. And what pastor in what church doesn't want that?

To see the gospel going forward and people being saved and added to the church. That to me is one of the greatest motivations in that passage, to be faithful and loyal to the Lord Jesus Christ, is to see the Spirit work and to see effectual results inside the church and continual ministry opportunity. And so I think we need to hold that at the forefront of our thinking during the times of pressure and to say, you know what, I want to be faithful to Christ because I want to see effect. I want to see fruit. I want to see people added to the kingdom.

I want to see people brought in and and people sanctified and built up and saints growing and all of that. And so that's a huge, a huge motivation to me from the Lord Jesus is to say, look, I'm giving you an open door because of your faithfulness. Because of your faithfulness. What do you think those open doors are for us now? And I want us to think in view of the state of evangelicalism and the things that have come upon us in recent months.

I think we all know what those are. The government has been telling the church what to do and when to do it and how many can do it and things like that. Now what we've done is that we've decided we weren't gonna listen to the government. Okay, we were gonna try as best we could to try to, you know, try to be faithful to the Lord and just continue to do things we were commanded to do, but there have been a lot of pressures on it from the outside. Just to start answering the question I asked at the beginning, I'll take the first crack at it and then maybe somebody else wants to jump in.

What can an average pastor of a little church do in the face of the megatrends? I'm going to start by saying the megatrends are made by microtrends, and so really there is a lot that we can do in our own churches. One little church being faithful is tremendously valuable and tremendously powerful, and I think we're tempted to undervalue just what our little churches can do if we just put the Bible at the center of everything and try to be, Scott, just like what you were saying, try to be faithful to what's there. Other people are watching, other churches are watching, we can collaborate with other churches who really desire to be faithful with whatever flaws that they have. And it's, I think, a focus on the microtrans that actually ends up impacting the megatrans.

I don't even know how to focus on the megatrans. All I know is there's a few things that I have a lot of sway over, and I should try to be very faithful to those things. So what are the first things that come to mind when you say that? Well, I mean preaching, obviously, faithful, you know, God-blessed preaching, and then with people who have an appetite for it in the pews, if you have that you can certainly go a long way. That's not a bad starting point.

Yeah, I would add to that too. I think that if we're talking about pastors, what can pastors do? I think the call of the hour is to be willing to be unpopular. If you're going to hold to the truth, you can't expect to be popular and for everybody to receive you. J.C.

Rowlett said about him that he was loved and hated for the same reason. It was because he preached the truth. And some people hate that, some people love that. And so we have to be willing to be unpopular and do things differently than what other people do, other churches. And what I mean by that is just going back to the truth that we have drifted from.

And specifically on that, this is another passion of my heart that I think is so important, and that is as we move forward in our churches, we need to make sure that we're keeping the church pure by not bringing unconverted persons into the membership of the church. We have a statement in our membership manual of our church, and it says, membership in this church is severely limited to those persons who can produce a convincing or credible evidence of a regenerating work of God in their life. And so for that to stand, that's gonna mean that we as pastors are gonna have to be skilled in understanding the nature of true conversion. The Bible gives us all of these amazing pictures of what a saint is and what a saint ain't. And we need to make sure that we know the difference and be very skilled in that.

And maybe it would do good for pastors for us to brush up on some of the great works, you know, men like Jonathan Edwards during the Great Awakening, you know, the religious affections and books like that that highlight what are true works of the Spirit, what are not true works of the Spirit, so that we're keeping the church pure because it takes a whole church to evangelize a sinner. When we're around sinners, they need to see the life and the godliness of the entire church, along with the faithful preaching of the message of the gospel. And brothers, that makes for a powerful punch when it comes to doing ministry with other people. And so I think holding to those things, being, being willing to, to decrease so that Christ can increase, be willing to be unpopular, all for the sake of love to Christ and being obedient to his commandments. You know, when you think about these letters to the churches, Imagine if you heard that the Lord had a letter for your church, but then you heard that there was a letter for the church, you know, down the street.

And then you heard that there was another letter that was going to be read to a church, you know, further down the street. You would you you would probably want to hear all those letters, but you would especially want to hear the letter to your church. You wouldn't want to hear what the Lord said to Sardis, that you have a name, that you're alive, but you're dead. You wouldn't want to hear the word to the church in Ephesus that you've forsaken your first love. You would definitely want to hear the message of Philadelphia and the church in Smyrna.

The Lord doesn't say anything negative, but I think that these letters are here to point out flaws in our churches and for us to bring them before our people and to recognize that, you know, all of us in the church need repentance at some level. And, but boy, the it's a blessing to be in the church in Philadelphia where the Lord doesn't have any condemnation. Amen. You know, and you know, brother, as you, as you talk about this, it's amazing to me that, and I know this can be somewhat maybe an offensive truth that comes out of this section of Revelation, but I think we learned the overarching lesson, too, that one church, when compared with another, is not as good as another. And there's different levels of faithfulness, and as we say, commendation or rebuke from the Lord.

One church is not as good as another in terms of its function and orderliness and faithfulness to the truth. So I just pray that our church is on that side of being faithful to the truth and that we're listening to the words of our Lord with these to steer away from what he rebukes and to try to engage in that which he commends. Right. Amen. Any final comments, Jason?

None for me. Okay, well, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is the center of God's plan. It's the only eternal institution. And our prayer is that God would multiply faithful local churches and I think particularly in the times that we live in it's just become more and more apparent to me how important it is to have a little family called the local church, a culture that's governed by God and by God alone, people who are being led by the word of the Spirit, not by the Spirit of the world. Amen.

And it's such a blessing to have people who who walk according to the ways of God. And you know what what I've observed in our church is that If you look at the faithful families and the faithful individuals in our church, the tumult that we've experienced recently hasn't affected them at all. Because they knew what they were supposed to do. And they just kept doing it. And they kept worshiping God, they kept seeking the Lord, they kept trusting in the ordinary means of grace, they kept singing, they kept reading, they kept hearing preaching, they kept fellowshipping, they kept eating together, you know?

And life was good. So I think the Lord has many blessings for his church and I pray that God would really Multiply faithful churches in the world. So let's keep planting churches. How about that? Amen.

It's a great plan. Maybe the Lord would give us more and more elders, you know, more than we could handle and we'd have to flip them over the wall to another location. Alrighty, well thank you for joining us on this podcast at Church and Family Life. I pray for the prosperity of the Church of Jesus Christ, for the strength, for the faithfulness. Pray for churches like Philadelphia and Smyrna of which the Lord didn't have anything negative to say.

We'll hope to see you next time. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for Church and Family Life. See you next time. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast.

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