Many states in the U.S. have passed laws which have effectively hindered a church from conducting normal, in-person church services. There are two problems here:

First, the civil government has no jurisdiction over the biblical duties and functions of the church. This is one way of saying that the authority of the state over the church is defined by scripture. While it includes the punishment of evildoers within the church, it never extends to commanding the church to obey man rather than God. In this sense, the church only has one authority - Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church. 

Second, the state is issuing laws that deprive of love. (This clip was taken from a sermon on Romans 13 on July 5 at Hope Baptist Church in Wake Forest NC) This clip is part of a sermon series that Scott Brown is doing on the relationship between the civil government, the church, and family jurisdictions. You can access it here.

Is it loving your brother to deprive them of the means of grace every week? Is it loving to make people stay home and not have fellowship with other believers? Is it loving to tell people not to take the cup of blessing and eat the bread of the body of the Lord Jesus Christ? Is it loving to tell people that they cannot sing? Is it loving to quarantine healthy people?

Is this what it looks like to do good? In our text here, we learn that our responsibility is to do what is good. We are bound by divine order of God to do what is good and to obey the commandments of God. Is it loving to avoid the sick? Is it loving to stay six feet away and keep all your brethren at arm's length?

Is it loving to leave the elderly alone? Is it loving your neighbor not to allow your family to come and visit you in the assisted living home? Is it loving your neighbor to put your father in the hospital and he goes into a coma and he dies without his wife holding onto his hand? Is not loving. Is it loving to be the people that Jesus spoke of?

I was sick and you didn't visit me. Is it loving to drive domestic violence up in a land? That's what's happening. Massive increases of domestic violence because of the lockdown. Is it loving to sequester people alone so all they have to do is look at pornography because that's skyrocketing as well.

Is it loving to sequester people alone so that the suicide rates skyrocket as they have skyrocketed? Is that loving? Is that doing good? Christians are supposed to do good. Governments are supposed to do good.

Governments are supposed to be a blessing to the people. I saw in the News and Observer a couple days ago our Raleigh paper and there's this heartbreaking picture of an older woman outside a nursing home and she was holding up a sign, I need a pen pal. I thought how heartbreaking, how heartbreaking that is. Not pen pals, how profane it is to force a person in their old age to need a pen pal. You know, no family members to come and hold their hands or read to them or sit with them.

How cold, how inhuman that is. That's not loving, that's not loving your neighbor. Don't tell me, don't tell me, don't hide behind I'm loving my neighbor. Please don't do that. Pastors are not loving their neighbors when they allow this.

Let's make this very, very clear. Our government is legislating these things, and all of them are protected and governed by the jurisdiction of the family and the jurisdiction of the state and the jurisdictional responsibilities of the individual by ordinance of Almighty God. And don't set aside the word of God for the sake of your tradition, as Lord Jesus said. Is it loving to take a man's work away from him? Is it loving to shut down a man's business?

Oh, don't you remember? The Bible says work six days. Mankind is commanded to work six days. And in the law, there's this illustration of how harmful, how ungodly, how inhuman it is when somebody falls onto hard times and they sell themselves to you as your servant to pay off their debt. And when it comes time to let them go, It's unlawful for you to take their upper millstone.

Translation, it's unlawful to take away a man's livelihood. You can't take away a man's tools of his trade. That is wicked, that is sinful. And you've watched a government shut down men's livelihoods and taken away their trade. There's a man in this church right now whose trade has been obliterated.

I don't know for how long, at least for a long time. The government did that to him. That was sinful. And now you have to wear a mask to buy or sell or work or walk or play or go to church or talk to somebody. Is this good?

Is this the government doing good? Is this a Christian doing good by complying to such things? What is love? Well, God teaches us what love is. The Bible makes it very clear.

Every law of God is a law of love, every one of them. If you want to know what love is, Don't consult your own heart and don't go to the psychiatrist, go to God. He'll tell you what love looks like. And he teaches us what love is. And When it comes to the church, it's very, very clear.

And this whole context of Romans 13 makes that very, very clear. Romans 13 comes on the heels of Romans 12, and that matters, and we're gonna walk through that because you have to understand the runway upon which the Apostle Paul deals with this matter of the civil government. And what love looks like in the church is that you give people the Lord's Supper, you give them preaching, you give them singing, you give them fellowship, and you might give them a meal that they rejoice freely together in. I'm really concerned about the churches around us, frankly, that would allow this to happen on their watch. I really am.

I did a broadcast with Stephen Lawson about two or three weeks ago on this subject about the indispensable presence of the preacher, of the physical presence of the preacher in the congregation. Steve said something really interesting. He said, these people who aren't meeting, they need to ask if they're really Christians. You can see that broadcast online. It's very interesting.

Here's my proposition. The government is enforcing the abandonment of the laws of love of God. So is it doing good? Is it a good thing? Is it a loving thing to bar you from your job for fear of for your fear of potentially getting the flu Is it a good thing to applaud lawless rioters and punish the police who are trying to stop them?

Is it a good thing that you can't shop but you can loot with impunity? Is it a good thing that your church can meet in a parking lot with the windows rolled up, but you can burn cars in the streets? And no one will do anything about it. Is it a good thing that you can tear down statues of historical figures of the past? But Don't you dare abolish the greatest racists of the last 200 years, Charles Darwin and Margaret Sanger.

Don't tear down their statues. These were the ones who fomented racism in the 19th and the 20th centuries like nobody else. They were all about favored races. You