In this audio message, Scott Brown leads a discussion of the book 9 Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever. They discuss what the Church is to be according to Scripture. Christ is the chief cornerstone of the Church, which is to be a beacon of hope and light to the world.

Hebrews 10:24-25 (NKJV) - "And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching."

The National Center for Family Integrated Churches is pleased to present Elder Training. This message is entitled Healthy church life and is hosted by Scott Brown. Hello, good evening. This is Scott Brown here and we're getting ready to kick off another Elder Discipleship webinar. Hope you guys have had a wonderful evening so far and we pray that we'll be able to grow in wisdom and knowledge and all these things.

Let's begin in prayer, and then we'll dive into the agenda. Oh, Lord, we thank you for your glorious church, how you have planned to display your wisdom to the powers and the principalities through your people in the world, in your church, and you've chosen us in your family to do this. We're so grateful for your mercies in this and now Lord. I pray that you would use This time help us to grow in love for our brothers and our sisters in your church They would yet you would use it to help us to give our lives to do as the Apostle did to spend and be spent for the sake of your dear people. So now Lord we ask for the work of your Holy Spirit to open up our eyes that you would help us to know your will that you would show us how to love your people the ones that you shed your blood for amen okay so here we go again We're so glad that you're able to join us here tonight.

Here's the agenda. Each time we gather together, we're going to review a Scripture memory text, and then tonight we're going to discuss two books. We'll spend most of our time on Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, and then we'll continue on at the very end to discuss evangelism and the sovereignty of God by J.I. Packer and we'll talk to you about the next meeting and then we'll field any questions. So who we've got here tonight is myself and Dana Merrill and Dan Horne.

Dana Merrill is a member of Hope Baptist Church. Dana, why don't you just introduce yourself to these guys and tell them who you are. Certainly. Thank you, Scott. As you mentioned, my name is Dana.

I moved down to North Carolina due to work and didn't know anything about Hope Baptist when I was coming, but through God's very kind mercies to me, I was led there. And actually, Scott baptized me in his pond three years ago this month. Yes, in the middle of January. I was baptized in the pond here. Forty-five degree water in January.

How's that? It's ice material. It's polar bear season for baptism. Well, it's not too bad. It's about the same as where I grew up in New Hampshire in the middle of the summertime.

So, and just have been learning more and more about being a Christian and being part of a church and part of a church body, a contributing member hopefully of a church body over these past several years. So it's been truly a blessing being here. And then Dan will let you talk again so people can hear your voice. Okay, I'll just say hello because I'm sure I'll talk later. Okay, great.

Okay, so let's talk about our scripture memory. And we're in 2 Timothy 4, 1-8. And Dan, why don't you go ahead and read that for us. I charge thee therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the word.

Be instant in season, out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. But after their own lust shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables. Watch thou in all things.

Endure afflictions. Do the work of an evangelist. Make full proof of thy ministry, For I am now ready to be offered, and the time in my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day, and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearance.

Thank you. Thank you, Dan. What a marvelous help to us for showing us how to treat the Church of Jesus. So let's move on to our next slide. We're going to discuss nine marks of a healthy church.

Let me tell you why I felt this was an important book for us to read. Mark Dever helps us in a very profound way. He helps us not to create the church in our own image. And that's really important. God has made the church a very colorful and beautiful building.

It's a building with many stones. It has dozens of things that are meant to be invested in it. It's very colorful, it's very diverse, it's very beautiful. Mark Deber has isolated nine elements of biblical church life. If we consider how to treat the Church of God, we need to first understand that this is not our church.

This is the Church of Jesus. He has designed it. He has made the members of the church an intimate part of him. He said, we are of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. So we are connected with Christ.

And so it follows that the church is not our own. It's his. Deborah's nine marks are, I think, are really important because of that quality. Dan, anything you want to say about this book, just generally? Just one thought that I had coming in here this evening is that when we talk about nine marks of a healthy church, We also have to understand that every healthy church still has elements of unhealth in it.

That there is no such thing as a perfect church. We can look at these things that he addressed and he does a very good job of addressing the problems and the issues of our age. But we also shouldn't be looking for a perfect church. We should be looking to perfect each church we're in, knowing that we'll never reach that this side of heaven. Right.

And you know, Endeavor starts out with that idea in the preface. Come to think of it. I forgot that. Yeah. On page 11, as you can see on your screens he says some hopes go unfulfilled and occasionally even intrude it is in the nature of sheep to stray and of wolves to eat there you go that's a nice summary statement of church life and he says I guess if I can't deal with that, I should just get out of under-shepherding.

Churches have problems, and at the same time, God has desired for particular elements to exist in the midst of her growing pains. He says this on page 13. Unhealthy churches cause few problems for the healthiest Christians, but they are cruel taxes on the growth of the youngest and weakest Christians. They prey on those who don't understand Scripture well. They mislead spiritual children.

They even take the curious hopes of non-Christians that there might be another way to live and seem to deny it. Bad churches are terribly effective anti-missionary forces. So on the one hand, there are problems. On the other hand, those problems cause travail in people's lives, and so we should be very careful. One thing that we should also remember is James 1, that there are trials in the churches but those trials are not outside of God's sovereign will.

He talks about the healthiest Christians but trials are a blessing. We always want to say they're not a blessing but even in a church that is going through trials, it's going through trials to strengthen both the weak Christian and the strong Christians. That's how you get stronger is by going through the trials. That's how our faith is perfected. That's how the dross is removed.

These things are a blessing and it's so easy when we go through church life to look at the trials and say, oh if it was only some other way instead of saying God has us here for our good and we need to rejoice in it. Yeah, amen. And you know, it's so important to rejoice in the people that God's given you. And because these are the ones He's given you. He didn't give you other people, He gave you the ones that are there doesn't mean it's always easy though Yeah, and you know devar.

I think he quotes John Brown. I think really a brilliant Thought for all of us who think oh, I wish I wish our church was bigger if it would only be bigger would be better and everybody wants a bigger, badder church, you know? Not everybody. Well, Devo's not so sure you should and so he says, he quotes John Brown on page 13 and 14 as you can see it on the screen. This is such a fantastic statement.

I know the vanity of your heart and that you will feel mortified that your congregation is very small in comparison with those of your brethren around you. But assure yourself on the word of an old man that when you come to give account of them to the Lord Jesus Christ at his judgment seat you will think that you have had enough." Wow isn't that amazing? So yes God does hold elders accountable to those that are under their charge. We will answer for their souls. And then let's go to the introduction.

I want to just highlight his marking out of a really important question, you know, what is a true church? Before we move too far, right in the preface, right on page 15, Deborah does mention something that I was hoping that you and Dan could just touch on briefly. He mentions at the bottom of the top paragraph there, the local church is God's evangelism plan. The local church is God's evangelism program. Can you just elaborate a little bit on that even before we're getting into the evangelism, Mark?

Sure. God has placed his people in the world as a holy people, as a peculiar people. And they have the words of life. And so they hear the gospel. They are saved.

They're equipped. And then they're sent back out. In the church, they are taught the word, and Christ sends them out and says, Go teach everything that I've commanded you. Make disciples and teach everything I've commanded you. As the Saints are taught, they take what they've been instructed in, and they take it to the streets and preach the gospel.

But it's out of the teaching, it's out of the love, It's out of their community that evangelism springs. The other thing is then there's this community of love. There's this new community that's there to receive the other new believers or to show the unbelievers what it means that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. So there they are in their families, with their marriages, existing together in the love of God in order to explain how wonderful heaven is. We aren't saved in order to somehow solve our problems, but at the same time when God chooses to save us, He does change us and He does make us live differently.

The verse that came to mind when you asked the question, Dana, was John 13.35. By this all men shall know that you are my disciples if you have love one to another. And so the idea of seeing love, real love, not our society's love, not the love that you see in sitcoms, but true love, the only place that you can see that in the world is in the church. And in that church, because you can see it, this is the good news. This is the good news that you can have people that will live together through problems.

This is the good news that you have people that see that there's hope, that they're prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in them. The world's a dark place. The world's very in... You know, look at suicide rates in America. They're skyrocketing.

Why? Because we've created hopelessness in our society. The church is the bastion of hope. It is the place that is the only place with the good news. Yeah, if you guys have any thoughts about any further answers to that question, it's a great question.

So in the introduction I was trying to point out John Calvin's definition of what is a true church. Calvin said, Wherever we see the word of God purely preached and heard and the sacraments administered according to Christ's institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a Church of God exists. And Mark Dever follows up by this, The marks by which the true Church is known are these. If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein, if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ, if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin, In short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God, all things contrary thereunto rejected, and Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only head of the church." So here in the Belgic Confession, you know, Devere points out that, you know, there's the addition of church discipline, which we'll get to that later. Yeah, in Calvin and his institutes, I think it's in the introduction.

He doesn't put it in his other place where he defines what a true church is. He does put in church discipline because church discipline is just so intrinsic to the proper administration of the sacraments. So and then I like his quotation of Oskenos. He has some fantastic quotes from him in this book. The two most easily recognizable hallmarks of secularization in America are the exaltation of numbers and technique.

Of course, you know, Devere is really trying to diminish the importance of numbers and technique and emphasize the importance of sound doctrine in church. He says, Neopaganism and secularization, pragmatism, and ignorance are all serious with churches today. But I'm convinced that the problem most fundamentally lies in the way Christians conceive of their churches. And of course that's what this book is all about. I'll tell you, I really like the list.

Neo-Paganism, secularization, pragmatism, and ignorance. Those are the things that are just so difficult in the church today. They're causing so many problems. And one of the things that strikes me is that perhaps the biggest shift that's happened over the last two hundred years is a shift from the church being God-centered to being man-centered. And in the end, when you have, I mean, that's where you get neopaganism, secularization, pragmatism, and ignorance.

It all starts with, why are we there? Are we there for the love of God? Are we there to glorify God? Are we there to grow in our understanding and being conformed to His image? Are we there to prop up man?

Right. Yeah. He says in the book that we glorify numbers more easily than we glorify God. He quotes Mark Ross in a sermon. We are one of God's chief pieces of evidence.

Paul's great concern in Ephesians 4, 1 through 16 for the church is that the church manifests and display the glory of God, thus vindicating God's character against all the slander of demonic realms, the slander that God is not worth living for. God has entrusted to His church the glory of His own name. And so, you know, in the introduction, you know, Deborah is pointing out the importance of the church, the attacks against the church, and various things like that. And just the thought that God has entrusted to His church the glory of His own name. Thank God for the Holy Spirit, because without the Holy Spirit we would fall and we would fail to glorify His name, but through the Holy Spirit the church is able to glorify God's name.

Yeah, as you can see James Spangler says you can add feminism to the list. I think that's right. Yeah, isn't that neopaganism? Maybe that's a category of neopaganism. Okay, so let's let's dive into Mark 1 expositional preaching.

And so whatever you know points out here is really the critical nature. It's Mark 1 for a reason. He would say it's the most important part. I really enjoyed the way that he began this chapter. He talked about proverbial Bob going into church, how he's reacting and feeling about this and that going on in the church, and honestly how selfish we often are in the church.

And so I just snatched some of the statements either. So how's it going? Did you get enough sleep last night? Did you have trouble finding a good parking place? Were the doors clearly marked?

Getting all wrapped up into really irrelevancies. Then he turns the subject to the importance of expositional preaching. The first mark of a healthy church is expositional preaching. It is not only the first mark, it is far and away the most important of them all because if you get this one right all of the others should follow this is the crucial mark Wow I think he is dead on in that because if you are bringing the whole council of God the church will get the colors and the textures that they need and it keeps the church from just hearing one voice one man's voice but to hear the very voice of God guys do you agree with that if you get this one right all the others should follow I think this is one of the brilliant statements in the book. And I think he's partially right.

Just from my experience, I've been in churches where good sound expository preaching, if the dancing up on the stage doesn't glorify God, which it's pretty hard to have dancing glorify God, in a worship service I would hold, but if the music doesn't glorify God, If the prayer is man-centered, if all the other things are man-centered, I sat in a church for two years and watched the wrestling match. And the reality is expository preaching can lose in those circumstances. We need to understand that music is to edify the body. Music is to declare the doctrines. Prayer is to be God-ward and not man-ward.

Expository preaching is the keystone of that, but there are the other stones in the arch. If you let all the other stones in the arch go, the keystone will fall as well. I think there's a lot of churches in this area that it's been a tremendous blessing to the churches in this area that the local seminary has been pushing expository preaching. But until you get the other elements right, it can still be a very man-centered service. Expository preaching plus the other things need to go as well.

I would just add, you can have all the expository preaching. You have the best expository preaching, but if there's no shoe leather to it, if the Bible's not applied, then it's blowing into the wind. Paul uses the word a clanging of a symbol, right? That's what it becomes. Because the application of it is love.

Without love, it's just noise. It's just obnoxious. It's only once you add love to it will it really be efficacious. To quote one of our deacons, Jason would call this a top button issue. You're buttoning your shirt.

If you get the top button right, you can button the rest of them. But if you're not doing expository preaching appropriately, it's likely that other buttons are going to be off. How do I know, guys, whether I'm hearing good expository preaching or it's something else sort of in disguise. Right, so Deavor addresses that. He tries to define it.

Expositional preaching is that preaching which takes for the point of the sermon, the point of the particular passage of Scripture. That's what it is. It's preaching that is limited by, hemmed in by the text, so that the voice of God is heard in the church. The text is the voice of God. You know, somebody said, Kevin Fowler, don't you think it should be accompanied by exposition, listening, and obedience?

Well, absolutely. That's great. And, you know, Deborah points out that the church will slowly be conformed to the pastor's mind rather than God's mind if preaching is just simply topical. His big point here is that it is out of the preaching of the word of God that His people are created and God creates his people out of his word and I would probably draw expository preaching slightly larger than Mark, ever would in the sense that you can say your congregation We can be struck with an issue, you know And I've heard this done where you go and you do search the Scriptures to find what the answer is, and that's still expository. He would split that to topical.

Now I would also be in complete agreement with him that the typical pattern should be you take a passage of scripture and you let God's Word define it. But there are cases where you can do an expository sermon, which he calls that a topical sermon, and you can still expose what the Word of God says about a specific issue. The church is often harmed if you're never willing to break the pattern of expository preaching because you don't deal with the problems that are there. And you try to gloss over them and then they explode in your face if you're not dealing with them. And at the same time, I think his admonition, I mean, as men that would desire to be elders, his admonition would be even if you want to preach on a specific topic the best thing to do is to find a scripture and just preach through that scripture and exposit that scripture is the best way.

But there are topics that God's Word applies to everything. God's Word is sufficient to know all good works. But on the other hand, it is not necessarily laid out that it will answer every question that should be answered. So sometimes you do have to cross sermons or cross text. But the ideal should be wherever you can find a text, walk through it, bring in the adjacent text, the applicable text, and apply those to the situation.

But if you can let your sermon be structured by the passage, that's your best way to go. You really saw Spurgeon doing that. Nobody would call Spurgeon a classical expository preacher the way that we would define it, but he did deal with texts in their context, and that was helpful. There are different ways that men can apply this. Talking about this a lot from the perspective of the preacher, the elder who is putting together a message, as people who are not yet leading congregations, we're not elders, what if we're not hearing that?

What if we're not getting expositional preaching? What if we're getting topical month after month, week after week. What do we do? Obviously that goes into some real difficult situations about what you do. First of all, you love the church.

And that's an important thing to remember. Jesus Christ died for the church. He died for a bride, primarily died to glorify his father, but in that he receives a bride. And so one thing that you start with is loving the church even if you have disagreements with them. But moving from there, there are lots of good resources.

There's lots of commentaries that will walk you through passages. I mean, I usually look at Calvin Gill, Henry, I mean there's some great great commentaries out there that you can look at so that you can do this on your own. And go to your leadership and encourage them to shift the basis of the church from a man's opinion to the Word of God. And if it is so bad that it's man opinion week after week, you probably need to find another church. I would just say, too, there's no reason in the world we live in for any man to go unfed.

The resources out there are astonishing. You can get thousands of pages of wonderful commentaries for free online. And so, man, if they're in a situation where they feel that they're being starved. Two things. You know, don't let your feeding just rest on only the preaching of the church.

If that's your only food, you're going to starve to death anyway. There are lots of other resources that are very helpful. Including expositional preaching that you can pull from other churches. One thought that I would have is go to the church in the morning fellowship. Know the people that God has put you with.

Love the people that God has put you with. But in the afternoon, gather your family around and listen to another sermon. But also, make sure your children are fed. Just because you're not getting expository sermons on Sunday morning does not mean that in devotions day by day you can't give precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little. So when your children grow up they know the Word of God even if they didn't get a Sunday morning.

The reality is they will never get the complete counsel of God through Sunday morning. It's just not enough time. And so fathers need to be feeding their children. And then in the next generation there will be a higher standard set. That touches a little bit on jurisdiction.

Sure. Yeah, it sure does. So hey, maybe you've got some more thoughts about that. We'd love to hear those. Let's move on to the next Mark, chapter 2, Mark 2, biblical theology.

Here, Devere takes the tack of helping us understand that, you know, the Scriptures need to be understood as a whole, that there needs to be an understanding of God and what He is like. In the second quote there, what do you think God is like? Not what do you like to think God is like, but how do you put together the God of Christmas with the God of great judgment of the final day? Devereux is saying that churches need to have people who understand the Bible. This has been very poignant to us in our church right now.

We're going through the book of Galatians. And what many of Paul's arguments, particularly in chapter 3, really require an understanding of 2, 000 years of history from Abraham to Christ. And he builds many of his arguments on a proper understanding of the flow of redemptive history, from the righteousness of Abraham, and the gospel being preached to Abraham, and then the law being given by Moses, and then its fulfillment in Christ. You have to understand the flow of Scripture in order to do that, and that's part of this whole matter of biblical theology. It's easy for us to just look at a text, and I've seen this done as well, where you look at the text and you preach the text which is a good thing to do but without preaching it in the context of the rest of your understanding of scripture it's very easy to get off track.

When you prepare messages one of the things that you have to do is have a theological framework that as you read the text that modifies how you read the text because it has to fit in with every other verse in scripture. But at the same time while you study that one verse and exposit that one verse and determine the things that God is saying in there that also tweaks your complete view. So you have both the complete view that gets changed by every verse of scripture plus the verse of scripture and in your interpretation of that Has to be changed by the complete view So it's it's kind of like a telescope where where the study of each verse Gives you a fine-tuning so more and more you can see the whole picture with more clarity. So you kind of have it, but it's fuzzy and the more you study scripture, the more you're able to see the picture clearly. Yeah, and Debra talks about that in terms of having an overall framework, like for ships to navigate by, whether it's the North Star or global positioning satellites, to have that big picture.

Let's just say, I mean, it is the responsibility of elders to make sure that the people understand redemptive history and the various personalities and the various doctrines that emerge from it. And to teach them how you have to wrestle with the passages. All passages are harmonizable with each other, which means that none of them are in contradiction with each other. In the end, they can all be made sense of. But that's not an easy thing.

You need to wrestle with the word you need to meditate on the word you need to make sure that you've looked at all the cross passages so that you are as an elder you need to be teaching your people to do this to not just to say well it's got to be this and then they go and read another passage the next week and says well that has to be the opposite. No you have to work to harmonize Scripture. Actually, Dan, that leads straight into another question. As an elder, what is the burden that I bear for the body's understanding of theology? I guess there's two aspects of that that I would say.

One is that there is the aspect that you need to be covering the whole body of scripture but you can't. It's too vast. So in picking it though what scriptures you're going to preach on one of the most important things is to be making sure that you're putting the various pieces in the jigsaw puzzle and that you're not just spending all your time on one area. And one thing to do is most of the books they go through and they develop different themes in the books. And different books also have different themes.

So in picking what's going to be preached on, it's good to go historical book and then a prophetic book and then a gospel and then an epistle so that people do get the puzzle pieces fit into their jigsaw puzzle so that you are giving them the full view at the same time that you're also digging in and giving a very clear view of a specific passage. We just did that at Hope. The move from Romans back to Deuteronomy and coming back to Galatians, while we're still in the middle of Deuteronomy, was very helpful. Galatians really cleared up for me why we needed to study Deuteronomy. It helped a lot.

By the way, I agree wholehearted with James Spangler that a huge part of understanding expositional preaching is having solid mentors with whom you can discuss it after the sermon. There is the concept of iron sharpening iron. And even if you're in a church that isn't doing expository preaching, it doesn't mean that you can't find other men and discuss the scripture with them. There's this question about today people believe to be true simply what they desire to be true. You know, Devers talking about, you know, the way that Americans create what he calls designer religions and smorgasbord faiths.

You know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And elders have to be very careful that they're instructed by the Word of God alone and that they're not pulling from here and there except from Scripture alone. I think that's the hedge to continue to study Scripture. Here's the reality. We're converted and we don't know very much.

In fact, we have lots of banged up ideas rolling around in our heads. But God is faithful and over the years He continues to help us to understand His will. During those years, though, we need to be saturated with Scripture. That's how He transforms us, by the washing of the water of the Word. And so we just have to keep at it.

And that's the sweet part of life, is that God just continues to reveal Himself. And we will change. Hopefully we'll change. If we're the same people we were, had the exact same positions we had when we were saved, something is wrong. We'll get to that later, Endeavor.

They'll talk about that. But one thing that strikes me, right, is he says today the reality is there have always been people that have been heaping up teachers because they have itching ears, which is essentially what Deb was saying in that statement. In choosing passages to preach on, we have to understand that will always be the tendency of the congregation or some members of the congregation to hear the things they want to hear. And one thing as an elder and as somebody who preaches, what you also have to do is be going to those passages that are the things they need to hear, not the things they want to hear because we grow much more by the things that we need to hear than we do by the things that we want to hear. In the two, as we mature in Christ, the two become the same, right, because we want to deal with the things that we don't understand because in them we'll see the glory of God and that will change us more than dealing with the stuff that we do understand.

We talk about preaching to the choir. The reality is good preaching to the choir is to go to those passages they don't understand And maybe as a preacher you don't understand them and you have to go dig into the scripture, you have to go dig into commentary so that you can understand it, and you grow there by. Your congregation grows by. Let's not go with milk. Let's go for meat.

Let's move on from biblical theology. Oh, and also just to highlight, he marked out five areas that God is creating. He's holy, he's faithful, he's loving, and he's sovereign. As somebody said, you know, perhaps, you know, Deborah picked these because there are more, obviously, to highlight modern weaknesses. I can see many modern problems arising out of all the ones that he mentioned there.

If we could spend a lot of time on that. Cody asks, how do you fit in specific messages focusing on the issues of the day or church and yet remain expositional and fit in everything on the jigsaw puzzle? Do you wait for the specific book you're preaching through to come up or is there a time to jump around and do a series on specific issues. Yeah, well, I mean, I'll tell you, we've done that a number of times. It happened last year.

We took a pause to preach five messages on the Sabbath. We took five texts, and we did exposition on five texts. We did that because we felt like our congregation was unclear about the things that God had said about the Sabbath, so we went down deep for in these various passages of scripture to do this. So yeah, Cody, I would say it's I think it's important for time to jump. Here's another example.

We're going through Deuteronomy and we hit chapter 21 and we read that, You know, cursed is he who hangs on a tree. And we note that the Apostle Paul quotes this in Galatians. And we're also, a lot of our people, their brains seem to be mush. Their minds are spinning. They're saying, how do we interpret the law?

How do we do this? So we cut quick, if you call it waiting until chapter 21, quick. Which took us like four or five weeks to get through chapter 21. We jumped to Galatians because they're really important and very difficult passages in Galatians that we felt like it would really be helpful if our people had time to saturate themselves in those. So yeah, there are times to do that.

I think that What you have to do is look at the people that God's given you, the situations that are there, and see what seems to be right. My recommendation would be if you start a book, finish it. Somehow if you jump out to do something for a little while, come back, finish it on up. That's just my take on it. I'll throw in Spurgeon's answer to that even though my take is much closer to your take.

But Spurgeon actually thought that was very wrong and that was very poor shepherding to preach through a book. That you should never preach through a book. The reality is you should look at your congregation, understand them, know your sheep, and based on your sheep, go preach the passage that's right. And he would look at 30 passages during the week, and on Saturday he would decide which passage he was going to preach on that Sunday. Spend 45 minutes and prepare his hour sermon and then go and preach.

Which we were that skill. I'm glad you brought Spurgeon up. Spurgeon was so amazingly personal in his preaching. He was constantly going up to one brother and putting his arm around him, and then shaking the next one, and then looking into the eyes of the next and appealing just very directly. It's almost as if he was naming certain kinds of people.

Even though he had so many, He preached as if the individual was knee to knee to him in his office. And that kind of, you know, care, personal care for a church is really important. So, Cody, I think, I don't know if this is an acceptable answer. Maybe you've got some better ideas for us. One other thought on that too is when we went from Deuteronomy to Galatians, both of them are difficult, but they're difficult in very different ways.

One is understanding the difference between law and grace, which is very difficult, and understanding how law plays into grace. And we're actually even skipping to a different passage this week, and I'm going to preach on 2 Corinthians 3 for that reason to make sure that we understand the other aspect of that. But that was difficult, but Deuteronomy is difficult, but in a very different way. Deuteronomy is such a call to righteousness. It's not a call to understanding, but it's a call to righteousness.

Our congregation needed a break from that call to righteousness week after week. We look at God's face and 2 Corinthians 3 says we look in glory to glory. It transforms us. But there's also a time to take a break and say, we need something that's more about understanding rather than just that shaking up the lifestyle of the people in the church. I think to wrap this around, is Spurgeon right in personalizing his messages?

Yes. Is it right to preach through a book consistently and working hard to maintain that? Yes, it is. You see Christ doing both of those things. When we deal with the passage of Scripture, one of the other things is even in expository preaching, when you think of applications, there's one truth in every text, but there's manifold applications in every text.

So even when you are preaching expositorily through a book, your application should be dependent upon the people that are in your congregation. You should be speaking to them, challenging them, encouraging them, and where they are in their lives. And you shouldn't do it in the absence of the knowledge of the sheep. So Mike, you've got this question, do you always go back and forth between Old Testament and New Testament, and how are you picking an actual book? Well, let me start with this idea.

Yes, absolutely, I think that's a good idea. Here's the reality, though. If you're in a New Testament book, you're going to be in the Old Testament. I was in a text last week in Galatians. Every other sentence is a quotation from the Old Testament.

Romans 9-11, I think I read somewhere, when we were preaching through Romans, I think like 30 or 40 percent of the words in Romans 9-11 are Old Testament quotes or allusions or something like that. So you're not going to be able to preach expositionally without going to the Old Testament a lot. In fact, I preached a sermon on Deuteronomy, I mean, in Galatians recently, And when a man came and said, how come you're always going back to Deuteronomy? I said, well, Paul did it twice and so did I. You're going to get a lot of Old Testament history by preaching in the New Testament.

Dan's just itching to say something. So I have five more things I want to say. But we'll just let you go. No, go ahead. Just one thing that's very worthwhile understanding is the New Testament is largely commentary on the Old Testament.

I mean there are new things that are revealed but it's a revelation of fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. To think that the New Testament is somehow this huge disjointed thing from the Old Testament, in a lot of ways It's commentary on the Old Testament in a lot of ways all the Old Testament after Genesis is commentary on Genesis in a lot of ways everything after Genesis 11 is commentary on the first three and in the end what you get down to is it's all commentary is On in the beginning God and the rest of its commentary. So was that confusing enough, Mike? I don't think you have to go back and forth and back and forth. We've actually never done that.

In fact, in the last nine years of our church, I think we've preached through Genesis and Deuteronomy and the rest of it has been New Testament books. That's just the reality. And probably about half the time we were in the Old Testament. The Old Testament books are long and deep and not very well understood frequently. So it can take as long to preach through an Old Testament book as it does to preach through a few New Testament books So, you know in terms of book count, they're probably you know, very different but in terms of time, it's probably about an even split Yeah, maybe a little longer for the New Testament.

Maybe that may be so but we haven't finished it wrong yet, right? So, you know, how do you pick the book? Prayer, seeking the Lord. You know, elders should be praying for the people all the time, And through those prayers, God gives a sense of what might be appropriate. There's no magic formula, I don't think.

I've always been surprised at how unanimous Among the Elders has been that this is the right book to go to. In a lot of ways there hasn't been much discussion because everybody's usually been pretty largely in agreement and that it just feels right. It just, you know, you're led by the Spirit as to what you should do. In the end God is shepherding his church and so you don't try to make too many rules about it so that you end up getting in the way of God. Amen.

Okay, so let's go to Mark 3, the Gospel. The devour starts out the question, what is good news? Is it that I'm okay, or that God is love, or is it that Jesus is my friend or that I should straighten up and start living right I mean this is what people often think the gospel is he never says you know the often quoted book title over 30 years ago I'm okay you're okay you know some people seem to think that Christianity is fundamentally a religious therapy session where we sit around trying to help each other feel better about ourselves. Pews are couches, preachers are the preacher ask questions and the text to be expounded is your own inner self. Yuck!

That sounds like a cesspool to me. So he says, but the Christian gospel is not a matter of cultivating a relationship or following an example. You and I have a real past to be dealt with, real sins that we've committed, real guilt that we've incurred. So Devers is trying to direct us to the seriousness of sin and the fact that self-improvement and having Jesus as a friend is not the gospel, but there's something greater and far more wonderful. And then he says on page 93, Jesus is your friend, you should live right.

These messages are messages other than the good news of Christianity. They are half true at best and they are dangerously untrue when they are relied on as the Christian gospel. Gospel-centered churches are the need of the hour. You know, people are so used to wanting therapy for this or that, but the truth is, the greatest therapy is the identification of their sins and the repentance of them. You know, All of our marriage problems go back to sin.

All of our problems at work, most of them at least, go back to some sinful thing. Our relational problems go back to some sin. In the end, we want to make them environmental. We want to make them the things that are happening in our life. But we're very confused.

Look at how many celebrities get divorced over and over and over again. They have everything that this world has to offer and it leaves them in misery. We have to understand that if all we're doing is teaching them worldly things, all we're going to get them with is nothing worthwhile. Before we move past the gospel, I do want to ask one question. There are a lot of churches, a gospel message, meaning a call at the end of the sermon to walk up and accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior is part of every sermon.

As an elder, if I'm going to be getting up and preaching, hopefully going expository through passages, how big a part is that message in what I'm doing? The gospel is everywhere in Scripture. We should always appeal for the lost to be saved. We should always wrestle with them. Our churches have all kinds of unsaved people in them.

I mean, think about how many unsaved children there are in your church right now. We should be doing what Spurgeon does. Shake them, hold them, take them by the hand, and lead them to the cross. We should always be doing that. Not that we neglect the text and the context that's there.

You know, Scripture points to Christ. We should always go there at some point in our preaching. And even if, in the end, every sermon, if there isn't a call to repentance, if there isn't a call to turning and changing life. Somebody asked before, I don't remember who the name was, but somebody asked before, is intellectual preaching enough or do you have to preach with authority? If it's just intellectual teaching, all it is is something that puffs up.

The gospel is to be preached with authority. It has authority. Its intention is to change lives. And if there isn't a call to a change in life, either through saving faith or through sanctification, it's not preaching. It's just teaching something interesting.

Preaching should always find in it a mix of edification and appealing to be saved from this perverse generation. I don't think you need altar calls for that. And what we see in Scripture are personal appeals to be saved. In that sense there should be multiple altar calls. But not the altar, right?

The altar is where the sacrifice happens. The sacrifice already happened. Christian churches don't have altars. They have pulpits. That's a big difference.

And they have communion tables. And the gospel is always preached in communion One of the most wonderful opportunities to preach the gospel in your church is to the children especially is during communion That you explained the body and the blood of Christ and the sweetness of his redemption of sinners. Okay, so let's keep grinding on here. We're just three minutes away from our break and I'd like to make a little bit more distance here. So biblical understanding of conversion, he starts out with something I think we've all probably had to consider in our own lives.

People today are skeptical that anyone can really change. You know, he states it like this, the die is cast, the lot is fixed, our personality is assigned. And except for some terrible trauma, the assumption is that the leopard does not change his spots. The anxious person, his personality, or the insecure person, his psyche, that's the way it is. Maturity comes from facing up to the truth about yourself and resigning yourself to it.

So of course, you know, never doesn't agree with that, And neither should we. And he quotes, you know, John 3, 19, you know, light has come into the world. He has done it for a purpose for the transformation of people. He says this, I fear that one of the results of misunderstanding the Bible's teaching on conversion may well be that evangelical churches are full of people who've made sincere commitments at some point in their lives but who have not experienced the radical change the Bible calls conversion. We would say this is rampant.

This is a legendary problem in our churches where Perhaps it's true that we have many unconverted who walked an aisle, who did an altar call, who accepted Christ, but they never met Christ at the cross in repentance. Barna does studies and in his studies he shows that the Christian church has all the stats basically that the world has and we're surprised and we need to be. We have to understand that's because the people he's polling are not Christians. God is not inefficacious. If the Holy Spirit indwells your heart, your life changes.

That's the message we need to be preaching. Not that you come here and just say, oh yeah I'm sitting here, I'm learning new things. No. God changes people. They are born again.

They are a new life. They are a new creation. We walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh. There's all these promises and we want to minimize these and in the end right the previous chapter was on the gospel but in the end when we preach a false sense of conversion we are saying there is no gospel when we look at our churches and our churches are exactly the same as the world we have eliminated the gospel. Because the gospel is, there is hope.

There is a possibility of change. God does change people. He is active in their lives. He gives us an interesting parallel illustration. He says, your life you see is like one of those old Polaroid snapshots.

It is slowly but surely developing into a picture of the God you worship. God has called us to a life of of conversion that changes our lives. Well hey, we are ready to take our break now. We'll be back in five minutes, so we'll see you then. Thanks.

Okay, welcome back. Is everybody there? Let's get going on Mark 5, the biblical understanding of evangelism. Deber says, you know, reading through the New Testament we don't find the call for evangelism being limited to Paul or even the Apostles. At the end of his earthly ministry Jesus said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me therefore go and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you and surely I will be with you always even to the very end of the age.

So Devers making the point that evangelism is for everybody in the church. And then he gives six guidelines. Tell people with honesty that if they repent and believe they will be saved, but it will be costly. And then tell people with urgency that if they repent and be saved, they must decide now. And then tell people with joy that if they repent and believe the good news, they will be saved.

However difficult it may be, it's all worth it. Use the Bible and then realize that the lives of individual Christians in the church as a whole are a central part of evangelism and then remember to pray. So you know this chapter on evangelism, Dan what do you think? I think that yeah when we when we think of evangelism right evangelism is is declaring who God is. That's the heart of evangelism.

We get it wrong that we think evangelism is saving people, and God does use evangelism to save people. But the heart of evangelism is, the successful evangelist is one who accurately proclaims the word of God, who God is, in the way that the person needs to hear, in challenging their assumptions, challenging where they are in their life. It's not the one who causes conversion because in the end it's God who saves and not man. So all that man can do as somebody preaching the word and evangelizing, all you can do is be very careful and deliberate to make sure that you are accurately portraying who God is. Answer full according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

Speak to people when we evangelize exactly where they are, but we do it by proclaiming who God is. Let's move on to the next slide here. He speaks of CS Love. This is a guy that I bumped into when I was first converted. There were people all over my community who were doing this, trying to really manipulate people, having them bow their heads and say things, and it's...

This is not soul winning. And soul winning is not easy. It's something that God does and it's not something that we do. And so, you know, I quote some of this in here. You know, Jesus said, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.

What is your heart full of? What do you spend your words on? I thought that was a very, very helpful admonition to us, you know, because we're with people. What are we going to talk about? We really should be speaking of the greatness of the kingdom of heaven.

So let's go on to number six. Biblical understanding of church membership. I'm sorry Scott. I just wanted to mention something. As we're training elders here, in your opinion, is the responsibility in evangelism greater for an elder than it is for a member of a congregation?

Or is it one of those burdens that as a Christian we all bear? It's a burden that all of us bear. Some are more gifted in it than others. Every church I've ever been an elder in, there's always somebody in that church that's way more gifted in evangelism than I am, so yes. There are different kinds of evangelism, and we need to understand it.

There's the evangelism that you do from the pulpit, but there's also the personal evangelism that every Christian is required to do. When Paul goes and speaks on Mars Hill, that's the role that God has given Paul and that's the gifting that God has given Paul. But also when you go over to your neighbor's house for dinner, you have the same responsibility to evangelize. Not on the same scale perhaps, but you have the same responsibility to evangelize. One of the questions that Scott Parrish asked is, what is the scriptural warrant for saying they must decide now.

There's always supposed to be a sense of urgency in giving the gospel but at the other hand you know Jesus Christ said you know he who builds a tower counts the cost and so there's you know I think that Mark Deaver tries to portray the fact that you need to explain this is costly and the people need to understand what the cost will be to their life. I think sometimes with the decide now, yes we should preach it with urgency that they may die today but on the other hand You can't preach it with such urgency that you get an emotional response that isn't true salvation. It's just somebody saying, I'm afraid. I believe in God. And then they've deceived themselves to escape from hell.

There actually has to be conversion. There has to be true faith that's put in the Lord Jesus Christ. It's just not an emotional twisting or emotional manipulation. Deverer cites Hebrews 4.7 where he quotes Psalm 95, 7 through 8. Today if you hear his voice do not harden your hearts.

This is the appeal to the children of Israel to turn and turn quickly to the Lord. So urgency is important. So hearing God's voice is also important. Right. So Andrew Bradrick asks, I find it interesting meditating on 2 Timothy 4, 1-8 that parallel to the instruction preached, Paul urges Timothy to do the work of an evangelist.

How does the work of an evangelist tie into the preaching of the word and how does it differ? Well, the preaching of the word should include doing the work of an evangelist. That's not the only work. But it's part of the work. But God does give preachers and teachers as well as evangelists.

When you think of Paul and Timothy, the reality is Paul was more of an evangelist than he was an elder. He was planning churches but he was going to places where they had not heard the word before. So when Paul urges Timothy to do the work of an evangelist, chances are he's being trained to be an evangelist and he's to appoint elders and then move on from that place. And so there is a difference. The focus of the preaching of the word is not just to evangelize the congregation.

It's actually to grow them and to edify them so that they do the work of the ministry, which means they go and be evangelists. And so that doesn't mean that as a man the elder doesn't have the responsibility to be an evangelist. The focus of the meeting of the church is not to evangelize the people in there. The focus of the meeting of the church is to edify the body to do the work of the ministry. Right.

Amen. Okay, so let's move on if these guys will let me move on. Mark number six. Answer your question, Tim Scott. Oh my.

Biblical understanding of church membership. Deborah says, all the statistics seem to point to our age being an age of commitment phobia. Of course, any opportunity I can take to wage war against commitment phobia to the church, I would love to take it. Devereux goes so far as to say, can you be a commitment phobe and be a Christian too? No.

No. No. Not an answer for you. There you go. But one thing is, again, he's saying we're in an age of commitment phobia.

Remember commitment phobia started in the garden, Right? We hate authority. We don't want to submit ourselves to authority. Adam didn't want to submit himself to God. He didn't want to commit to God's ways.

And so that's the fall. And so every single human afterwards is afraid of commitment. They're afraid of submitting to authority. Because that's the nature of fallen man. We hate authority.

Right. And he calls it Lone Rangerism. To put these tendencies together, you get a culture—I laughed when I read this—that is fairly hostile to New Testament Christianity. It is very nuanced and certainly not very comfortable with church membership. I think he's absolutely right about that.

Yeah, it comes to the idea that there's a group of people, Instead of looking at it and saying here's a group of people that will hold me accountable And help me turn from my sin by holding me accountable Instead we look and say here's a group of people that they might trap me. They might attack me No We should understand that God in secondary causes is gracious enough to give us a group of people that can hold us accountable. We should delight in that if we want to turn from our sin. By the way, Dan just wrote an article coming off of a sermon that he preached on this a few years ago on church membership. We'll get it out to you.

You can have it. But the things that we believe about church membership really flow from the fact that the church is a body and we're connected to one another. It matters how connected we are to one another. That's what church membership is made of. Can you guys touch a little bit on how we define church membership?

Because that was one of the things that seemed to stand out in 9 Marks, that there seems to be a lack of specific scripture on how to do it. To answer that question and not go past 10 o'clock will be too difficult, so read the article. Because I do specifically address that in the article that I wrote. Yes, so I mean, I know this doesn't get everything that you're looking for, Dana, in this question, but Deborah gives five reasons you should join a church that preaches the gospel and models Christian living. You can read those.

He's an advocate of church covenants, as are we, because written church covenants help to center the people of the church on the categories of biblical church life. It educates them, it helps them to know how to make a biblical kind of commitment and sort of their own feel. Our view is that everybody believes in church membership. Everybody believes in church membership, even the people who say they don't. Some people, we've been in heated discussions on this matter with people who say, I just don't believe that there's anything in the Bible about church membership and so I don't believe in it.

At the end of the day, when you have a long enough conversation, they really do believe in church membership. They might define it as, well, you're a church member if you're there most of the time, or you've been part of the church for a year, then you're a member. Or, you know, everybody believes in some form of church membership, and, you know, the way that Deborah describes it is really the way that we understand it as well. And I think it has changed over time depending on at one point there were parishes and that if you were a Christian automatically you knew which church you were, had the right to do discipline on you just like a citizen. I mean with the state of the church now I would argue that a written covenant and John Richardson ask is there a specific biblical reference for a written covenant document for membership.

I would argue that Nehemiah 10 is actually a written covenant that is very similar to what our church membership covenant looks like. I mean it was a covenant among the Israelites or the Jews but it's very similar in scope, it's very similar in context. And so yeah I think that if you look at Nehemiah 10 it's giving us a pattern of what a church membership covenant should look like. We've talked about the implication in Acts as well, that there had to be some sort of written record of who was to be receiving. That's what I'm saying is when he's talking about the five whys here, he doesn't cite scripture in here and that's what I was hoping you guys could go into a little bit more deeply.

If that's addressed more specifically in the article, we as elders have a responsibility to understanding church membership so that we can explain it to the people in our congregations. And it's a thorny issue. Made a face when you said the Acts, because I actually think in Acts a lot of people go to the fact that they knew there were 3, 000 people. I actually think that that's a pretty weak argument, because you can count people without having a list of names. So that's actually an argument that I don't like very well.

But when Paul says that the majority of them put them out of the church, how did you count majority? Obviously Paul knew who the majority of the church at Corinth was. I mean there's other scripture or texts that you can go to and say, you know, this is a text that clearly shows that there were some way to count who was in and count who was out. So Deborah gives five responsibilities of church membership. Attend services regularly, attend communion particularly, attend members meetings consistently, pray regularly, give regularly.

This is for his church, you know, Capitol Hill Baptist Church. You know, I would just suggest that what Scripture says about body life requires a level of devotion, a level of presence in the church. One of the more compelling principles that we believe requires church membership is the whole matter of church discipline. How do you know who is in and who is out. How do you know who you're supposed to discipline?

Are we to discipline the global body of Christ? Who do we have to give an answer for? As an elder, I really want the answer to that question. Yeah. Do we have to give an answer to everybody in our town or just the people in our local church?

How do you define that? There has to be a way to define who is part of the membership of your church. You know, elders are held accountable for the souls of those in their midst. How do you know who you're responsible for? So we would say though there are no commands to have a written statement of faith that is signed, there are biblical commands and principles that require something to be done.

And our belief is that there needs to be clarity on who is and who is not a member. Who is disciplinable and who is not? Somebody asked the question, does there have to be an outward oath? Actually I would hold that in the New Testament church, yes, you do see there's people that are saved in part of a church, but there's no record of them taking an oath. The reality is if you look through the whole of scripture, the idea of taking an oath with a covenant is very common throughout scripture.

There's no place that says that you take an oath to marry your wife either. But yet we all accept that there should be a marriage covenant. A lot of these things, right, we want to make all of a sudden special rules for the church. The reality is covenants are throughout scripture. There are a lot of fantastic questions.

So we're not going to be able to deal with all these, but I think what we'll need to do is loop back around. Maybe we'll try to have a whole session on church membership or something like that. We also have some things in writing that we can give you that can help you understand that. We'll give you our church covenant that we use as well. One last question.

If a church member is disciplined by one church, to what extent are other churches required to recognize that discipline? We believe they're required to recognize that discipline. One comment on that, Matthew 18 says, right, when two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them. So, And this is the context of church discipline. And one thing that we have to understand is if we don't recognize the discipline of that church, what we're saying is they're not a church.

And so there are times where if Oneness Pentecostals put somebody out, I wouldn't necessarily consider a church discipline because I would have basic theology problems. But the reality is we have to understand that when we say, I'm just going to ignore the discipline of that church, what we're really testifying is we do not believe they're a church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Greg Wills gives some interesting historical information. Southern Baptists excommunicated nearly 2% of their memberships every year. And incredible as it may seem, while they were doing this, their churches grew.

And then Deborah talks about why people stop doing church discipline. You know, they desire to keep their people. They like the solvency that comes along with being nice to everybody. One thought on that is, right, we read in Proverbs, spare the rod, despise the child, and we think how harsh that is. But I would also argue that the keys have been given to the church.

If you spare the keys, you're despising your body. You're despising the body. You're not protecting it from wolves. You're not testifying that you don't believe somebody is saved when they are lying to themselves and believe they're saved. You're letting them go to hell because you do not want to offend them.

I think we have such a low view of heaven and hell in our churches today that that doesn't bother us nearly as much as it should. If somebody is in your church and they are in sin and you do not do church discipline on them, you are falsely testifying that you believe they're a Christian and you're misleading them to hell. We should be very careful to understand that God gave us the keys, God gave us church discipline as an act of love, an act of love to the people in the congregation. And when we do not use it, just like a father who doesn't use the rod, the elders in the body that will not discipline somebody is showing hatred towards that person. Right.

Right. And, Deborah points out, this doesn't mean that we're making final statements about a person's salvation, but we're, you know, in Church Discipline, saying they're not acting like Christians. And it's legitimate to say that. And to mark a brother that's not acting like a Christian. Right, and the desire is always that they repent.

That does not mean that there isn't repentance available. Absolutely, they're still not available. The blood of Jesus Christ will cover all sins. If they refuse to repent, It's not a good sign. The two wonderful effects of church discipline is one, repentance, and the other is fear.

When church discipline is administered properly, the church fears that they too would fall into sin. And there's a purifying, sanctifying effect of biblical church discipline. When men labor with one another in a biblical way and to operate in a loving manner with the one who has fallen, it's a great blessing to the church. The other thing that ties up in there, the third reason to do church discipline is Jesus Christ does say he's purifying his bride without spot and wrinkle. And one of the responsibilities that he gives the church is to purify the church in the way that he commanded.

I'm going to do it on this person, I've heard of churches that do this, I'm going to do it on this person because they don't give much, and I'm not going to do it on this person because they tithe so much. No, we do church discipline on everybody without partiality, the rich man, the poor man, you know, the well-known person, the well-liked person, the disliked person. We do church discipline out of love for God and out of love for the body and out of love for the person. There are several questions that come up around this, especially as we're looking at church leadership. What role does a pastor play in appropriate church discipline?

Who's responsible overall for the determination of discipline? Right. Our understanding of scripture is that elders don't exercise church discipline. Individuals don't exercise church discipline. Churches do.

And so there's a process, well-defined in Matthew 18, that can end in telling it to the whole church. Families often misunderstand this and they'll excommunicate a family member. There's no instance of that kind of activity in scripture, but what do you find in scripture? Churches excommunicate. Now that means that the church or the majority has to have the courage to put this person under church discipline.

A single pastor or an elder has not been given the authority by God to go around and excommunicate people. One other question that Mike Brewer asks is, would another church let a disciplined soul attend but prevent them from communion and responsibility? Hey, the church that excommunicates them, they should allow them to attend. I mean, if people that we've excommunicated decided to come back and listen to the preaching of the word, we would delight in that. We would definitely bar them from the table, and we definitely would not put them in a teaching responsibility because their testimony doesn't match their profession.

But we would definitely allow them to attend the church service and delight that they came and were hearing the preaching of the word because the preaching of the word does have power and it will bring repentance. Right, right. You know, Ron Doren, you've got this question about the keys of the kingdom and authority. The keys are given to the church. When it comes to church discipline, it's the majority that rules that has these keys.

Now, does this mean that the church will always rule right? No. No. Does anybody think that the 90% of Jonathan Edwards' congregation who voted him out were right. He had to leave, but the congregation really messed up big time.

But that was just firing him, right? They didn't excommunicate him, they just fired him, that's right. I think they made a big mistake firing him, but considered they let him preach for a year or two. A year afterward, yeah. So obviously they didn't excommunicate him, but just said that removed him from the pulpit.

Let's just close off this mark with what Greg Wills says, that a church without discipline would hardly have been counted a church. And then John Dagg's manual on church life is really good and that's where this statement appears. When discipline leaves the church Christ goes with it. I think that's absolutely true. Because I would argue when discipline leaves the church, love has left the church as well.

Right. And so Christ is gone. Right. And so Bryce Bregruth asks, you know, what requirements should be placed on church members for cutting off fellowship with excommunicates? What about members and excommunicates who are family members?

Okay, good question. What does it mean to treat someone as an unbeliever? That's one question. It doesn't mean that you hate them and treat them badly or anything like that. When you're with them, you appeal to them to repent.

That's your objective. By the way, we have a sermon on this subject on the Hope website on church discipline. It's a sermon that we preach in the context of discipline that we were doing in our own church just to help our people understand what the Bible said about that. You'll find all the answers to those questions there. But generally, you don't eat with them, but you treat them with love and kindness.

But your relationship with them has changed. And there's a sense, right, that they can't be your best friend anymore. We have to understand bad company corrupts good morals. And so if the person is in sin that's worthy of excommunication, then we have to understand that being around them too much will cause corruption. And so it doesn't mean that we don't greet them, don't talk to them, don't preach the gospel to them, don't show acts of love towards them, but we also recognize that, you know, I think Jude talks about how that brother, you snatch him as from a fire and recognize that we can get burned by being too close.

Right. So let's see, Bryce, you asked this very difficult question. What about members who are excommunicates, who are family members? So let's just say that your dad gets excommunicated and you're nine. How do you relate to your dad?

Well, he's still your dad. And you can still eat dinner with him, I would hope. Yeah, you can still eat dinner with him. Historically, what's meant is that people do look at this very jurisdictionally. In that jurisdiction, the wife of an excommunicated man, her responsibility is still to eat with him.

So the church doesn't somehow separate this from the role of the family. Those are separate jurisdictions. Yeah. So, Ken Puckett, you ask about not training children in the Word and church discipline. So you're probably familiar with Richard Baxter, who, if he discovered that fathers were not catechizing their children, he'd put them under church discipline.

You read that in his book. The Reformed pastor. Well, let's see, we haven't done that yet, but If a man is indolent and not taking care of his family, we'll certainly talk to him. We've never put a man under formal church discipline for that kind of behavior. Maybe we should.

There probably were eras in churches where that did happen. I think most eras in church history that has happened in. So I think that is the direction. But in any time frame there is an education of the church. It's the church that's putting them out.

And so it's easy to sit back as elders and say they should be put out of the church for this. But the reality is the church is the one that decides this is the standard and God is setting the standard but it's through teaching through in 20 years my expectation is that the churches will be putting people out for not raising their children in the training and admonition of the Lord. Yeah, Amen. Let's see, let's go to the next mark, Mark 8. Concern for discipleship and growth.

There's this long story of Rob. Rob who prayed to receive Christ when he was 17, lived an upstanding life, not really growing and it really didn't bother him that much. And so you know, Devere is raising the issue of discipleship and growth and the seriousness of it. And he cites Psalm 92, 12 and 13, The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a seer of Lebanon planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God. So Devereux is making the point that growth is a normal part of the Christian life.

I had a little bit of a problem with his title for this chapter. It shouldn't be a concern for discipleship and growth. It should be a church where you see discipleship and growth happening. This is what the church does. The church teaches people change.

God's word has authority. If you see year after year the church doesn't change. Even if they talk about a concern even if they do things but it doesn't actually affect the people in the pews it's not what the church does the church makes disciples not just concerned about it but actually makes disciples so mark 9 biblical Church leadership I've got a couple slides on this one. You know, he opens with the principle that there's a latent suspicion of authority in our society. In contrast, Christianity has always recognized the need for authority in society in the home and also in the church.

So there's just this acknowledgement that God has organized society with leadership involved in it. There are these leaderless house churches that are out there. There are all kinds of iterations of Christianity today that really reject any structure in leadership. Hey, Scott. This actually ties directly from discipleship into leadership.

As a leader in the church, What are some of the tools that you have to ensure that the congregation is growing, that helps people to focus on disciplining? You have to have enough time to talk to people face to face and ask them how they're doing. If there's no time in your life for other people, you won't know how they're doing. In our church we try to be proactive in asking men how they're doing. Not just men.

After our service I'm regularly talking to young boys and even some of our young girls. I'm asking them how they're doing spiritually. So I think it begins with inquiry. Of course, Richard Baxter, the king of discipleship, had 700 families in his church and he catechized all of them. They came to his office and he met with them all during the course of a year.

That's pretty rough stuff. He beats us all, I'm pretty sure. But being able to know your flock by name is really key to discipleship. One of the most beneficial things is even just having a fellowship meal every week where the people in the congregation talk to each other. Yes, sometimes there's frivolous conversation.

I'm not going to say it's always perfect but frequently those conversations are based on what the sermon was about and they're sharpening each other. They're sharpening the understanding of one another And they're calling each other to account. They're saying, well, if you believe this, doesn't that mean that now I have to do such and such? And the answer is yes. And so we just need to recognize that it's not just the leaders of the church that are supposed to be making disciples.

This is what the church does, including the church members. In times of hospitality, you look at the requirements for an elder, right? They have to be gifted in hospitality. And if they're not inviting people into their home, to both challenge them and encourage them and open up their lives to them and do all these things. Part of that is to say to the congregation, follow after me as I follow after Christ.

Right. You know another thing too, elders should be on the move. They're ready for action. They're poised. They're poised for war.

When they're among the congregation, they should be moving through the congregation prayerfully and seeing how men are doing. We're not there to hang out. We're not there to relax. We're there to shepherd, to seek souls, and to inquire about the condition of their souls. For me, on Sunday morning, it means I'm trying to cover as much ground as I can.

You know try to not move too fast or too slow that's hard sometimes but I tend to move a lot slower than you do. Yeah that's right. I tend to have the hour conversations with people and try to deal things deeper, but different styles for different people. I think you're probably right, but I still do the thing that I do. It'd probably be good to have a little bit of a...

If we could morph our styles, we might be closer to the golden mean. Or maybe God gives different type of elders to the church so that they have different gifts and exercise them in different ways. Well actually I think that folds into one of the next questions is when we're looking at the congregation, if we're looking at it during the fellowship meal, if we're looking at it during our study of the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, if we're looking at it during our Tuesday morning Bible studies, you're starting to see other members who start to rise up, but what are some of the key aspects of people that you look for when we want to start making elders, when we want to start establishing leaders in the church? To actually speak to something before that you said as part of your question, in those things. One of the things that we also do, and you mentioned that the teaching on the Second London Baptist Confession on Tuesday mornings, is to teach like Jesus Christ taught.

And the way Jesus Christ taught was typically to ask questions and not answer them. And to challenge people to think. About a hundred years ago the Church of America decided that it should just feed people and not actually teach people to think. Making disciples means that you make people who are able to think biblically by themselves. Raising people up so that they can open the scripture and exposit themselves.

It's not just to feed, feed, feed, feed, feed. It's actually training people to feed themselves. And a lot of that is done by putting in environments, even teaching environments, where when I teach on the Second London Baptist Confession, I ask questions. Now that doesn't mean that I don't ever have input to people's answers, but I ask questions, and that teaches them how to think. And then in that process, you start to see the people who are both able to ask the questions and ask other good questions of other people.

Right. Let's charge on one more slide on church leadership. The last quote in here I just want to highlight on page 242. He says the family is supposed to be our training ground in this loving authority. It is a quote ramping up place that God has given us to learn to love, respect, honor, obedience and trust in order to prepare us for relating to others and ultimately to God Himself.

This is the only time, I think, check me on this, that Dever brings up the family. I think this is the weakness of this book. He doesn't speak of the discipleship engine of the family at all. He doesn't speak of the complementary role of church and family. That's a big issue for us.

We think that's been lost. You know, as good as this book is, I think it reflects one of those blind spots. You know, Deborah gets all kinds of letters. You left out prayers. There should be ten marks.

You left out missions. There should be eleven. So, you know, I want to write him and say, you left out family discipleship, okay? You know, he tells us at the beginning why he's kept it to nine and not have, you know, every possible point necessary. Hey, family discipleship is a very significant force in the discipleship ministry that affects the church tremendously and he leaves it out.

So, okay, it's a blind spot. Mike Brewer asks, is Deborah differentiating the pastor as a distinctive type of elder? Is pastoring the call of all the elders? Our position would be that a pastor and an elder are the same. Actually this chapter is where I would have the most problems with what Devra wrote.

Devra is a very strict congregationalist. At Pentecost where 3, 000 people were joined to the church, those 3, 000 people did not decide what the doctrine is. Absolutely they decide what church discipline is. That's clear from Matthew 18, but he takes Matthew 18 and applies it wider than I think we do in our practices. The reality is the elders have the responsibility to guard the doctrine, not the church.

The elders do. They're the mature men of God. The church has the responsibility of identifying those men that will guard the doctrine well, but those laying hands on them, but once the hands are laid on them, they have the responsibility of guarding the doctrine. Same here, he makes a bigger differentiation between pastor and elder. Does that mean that there aren't elders that are set aside?

Absolutely, it's valid to set aside men to preach, but that does not make them different in authority. Every elder has a responsibility to pastor. Every elder has a responsibility to oversee. These are terms that display different aspects of the role of an elder, And these aren't different people, different positions. There's only qualifications for elders and deacons.

Right. So let's charge on to the appendix, tips for leading the church in a healthy direction. And he talks about the fact that churches today mistake selfish gain for spiritual growth. We mistake mere excitement for true worship. We treasure worldly acceptance rather than living in a way that will incur worldly opposition.

It's a pretty short section. In the very end, I really thought this was funny that he added this, the numerical 90s and beyond. He cites all these different books that have the nine marks of this, the nine principles of that, the 15 ways of this successful paradigm or whatever. So it gives you some perspective in it all. So there you have it, nine marks.

It raises lots of really important questions. You might not agree with everything in it, that's okay. And maybe there's some things that are a little bit off course in this book, but we really wanted to have you spend some time just considering these really fantastic categories to help us to keep from creating a church in our own image. The National Center for Family Integrated Churches is dedicated to proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life and to the establishment of biblically ordered churches. For more information, resources and products, please visit our website at www.ncfic.org.