Okay, we're going to get started. We're continuing on our basics of Christianity series. We've been going now. This is our 20th week actually. We've been clicking right along here and this week we're going to look at the church. Now, what if I said to you, when I start out the question, what if I said to you, you know, Lee, I love you, but I hate your wife. I wouldn't be wrong. And you'd tell me, wouldn't you? You'd tell me. You wouldn't say, oh, I guess that's okay. Well, you know, everybody has their own opinion, you know, what anybody else, what would you say? If I said, you know, I love you, but I really can't stand your wife. She's a little bit weird. Don't like her. Don't really know like spend a time with her. You know, I will from time to time, but I'm not really that into it. What would you say? We all just sit there looking at me blankly. This is an interactive class. Well, there you go. It's not a very good thing to say, is it? And yet, it's a really common thing for current former church goers to say, I love Jesus, but I hate the church. Have you ever heard someone say that? If you go down to your local bookstore, Christian bookstore or Barnes and Noble bookstore, books and millions, something like that, you're going to find a huge, huge section of Christian books. And you're not going to find a lot of books about things that we've talked about in terms of our basic Christianity series. You're not going to find a ton of books on justification or sanctification or the law of God or the Sabbath. You're really not going to find those, but what you will find are a huge number of books talking about the church. And you'll usually find those books divided into two sections. There's, I've got a great church, do everything I do, or everything about church is wrong, so stop doing it, and you know, abandon this and kind of embrace a new way. So, let's look a little bit about the church. What do we need to know about the church? Some examples of these, I included them, just in case you come across them, here's some titles. Life after church, divine nobody's, dear church, which is kind of like a letter about saying why they don't like the church anymore. Quitting church, so you don't want to go to church anymore. Pagan Christianity, which sort of says, you know, we don't really need to go to church. UnChristian, which sort of is more of a positive critique, but still a critique, and the book, they like Jesus, but not the church. This is an interesting one. George Barna wrote a book recently called Revolution, in which the noted Christian pollster, who I think you all know, promises a daring redefinition of the church as we know it. And it turns out that his definition is a lot more like playing golf than going to church, but regardless, he wants to revamp it. Revolution, change it. Everything you're doing is wrong. The church is messed up. Now, disillusionment with the church usually falls in about one of four categories. There's missiological objections. What does that mean? Basically, these are books that say that the church just doesn't work anymore. Churches aren't growing. Churches aren't reaching lost people. The church has really tried everything. Every bullet in its gun has been fired. It's just not working anymore. And we really need to just kind of chuck the whole thing and start over, do it different. That's the missiological objection, saying that we're failing on our mission. Then there's the personal objection. I'm going to read these quotes. To outsiders, the church is, quote, filled with hypocritical anti-woman, anti-gay, judgmental, closed-minded, acolytes for the Republican party. Oh, it gets better. To insiders, the church is, quote, legalistic, oppressive, and hurtful. Church leadership is controlling. The people are phony, and the ministry is programmed to death. The church is just another club protecting its own and laying down a bunch of rules that only instill a sense of self-loathing and a fruitless desire to be good enough for God. Who needs it? Now, I know if you've ever been in churches for a long period of time, you've encountered these people. These are people who have been hurt by the church. They've gone to a church with really high hopes expecting, hey, I'm in church now. I'm surrounded by Christian people. Everyone's going to be great. They're going to be loving. They're going to be supportive. They're going to be good. And then somebody sends against them. And they say, oh, forget it. I'm done. I'm not going to go to church anymore. And so they abandon the whole thing. You'll find historical objections. Usually these go something like this. All that we think of as church, sermons, buildings, pastors, liturgy, offerings, choirs, just about anything else that you want to mention. All these are a result of the church falling from its pristine state in the first century into the synchronicity over institutionalized religion that now passes for Christianity. The idea is that everything that we have been doing essentially since the first century, when Jesus was walking with the apostles, the book of Acts, that was right. And somehow we got it wrong and we sort of paganized it and we sort of mainstreamed it. And then all of a sudden there we are. Everything is wrong. But we need to go back. We need to go back to the first century church. We need to do it just like they did in the first century. And then all our problems will be solved. Problematic if you ever read the book of First Corinthians but nonetheless. Theological objections. Now these are probably the most serious. This is a quote that I want you to consider. Church is just plural for Christian. All you need is for churches two or three people who worship Christ together and to be together in the same place. The organizational, institutional, hierarchical, programmatic, weekly services view of church in this view is completely foreign to the Bible. Jesus came to put an end to religion, not start a new one. You'll hear this often times. Well, really everything that we do, these committees are in the Bible. Elders, Deacons, I just get a sense that that wasn't really part of it. Maybe they should be doing different things. We don't need all these trappings. We could just have church down at the coffee shop with you and me. And we're both Christians. So plural is the church. And that's basically it. You'll find a lot of books like that. And yet amidst all of these criticisms and all of these books that are written and there's a million of them. If you're familiar with them at all, there's just so many books like this. One cannot escape the fact that the Bible uses some of the most beautiful, rich imagery to talk about the church. The church is called, among other things, the bride of Jesus Christ in Ephesians 5. The church is called the Temple of the Living God. The church is called the New Humanity in Ephesians 2.15. It's a body with many significant parts and members. The church is called God's Field. That's an interesting one. It's called in 1 Peter a holy nation. Paul calls it in Galatians 6.16, the Israel of God. And then in Galatians 3.7 he says that the church is the children of Abraham, which was really a revolutionary thing because in the first century church there was a great division between Jews and Gentiles. And the Gentiles really felt like they were second class citizens at best. They maybe could be part of it, but they were sort of like your little brother. They could come along and tag along, but really this is a Jewish faith and a Jewish religion. And to this Paul comes and says, you church are the children of Abraham, the revolutionary, your loved. God had a plan for you, all these Old Testament books that they studied as their scriptures. They're your story too. They're part of who you are. So what is this beautiful, beloved by God, sometimes flawed, often frustrating thing that we call the church. What is it? Well, the Bible generally talks about the church in two senses. There's the visible church, and there's the invisible church. Okay? You got that? Visible? Invisible? You can laugh. That's okay. You see it? Man without a head? Come on. I'm trying. What's the invisible church? What does that mean? Well, the invisible church, this is the church in its broadest sense in that it includes all of God's people who have ever lived. Have ever lived, are living now, and will live in the future. What do I mean? In Ephesians 1, 22 and 23, we read this, and God the Father put all things under Jesus' feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. And then he continues on in Ephesians 2 by describing this church as all those who were dead in their trespasses and sins and have been made alive together with Christ. So do you see that as sort of the broad picture? He says, God's people are the church. Those who, and then he describes him and he says, you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, and now you have been made alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved. Are you familiar with it? Ephesians 2. So he describes those as all of God's people, past, present, and future, which is us, from Paul's perspective, and will be our children and grandchildren, and great, great grandchildren until Christ comes again. Now, in this sense, the invisible church, those who have been brought from death to life by God's grace, through faith in their redeemer Jesus Christ, includes Adam and Eve, who trusted in the promise that in spite of their sin, God would send a seed of a woman who would crush Satan's head and deliver them. It includes Job, who, in spite of the fact that he was still looking forward to Christ's coming, said, for I know that my redeemer lives, and at the last, he will stand upon the earth, a remarkable statement that Job, which arguably is the earliest book chronologically, going before, after the flood, he's before Abraham, one of the earliest ones. Maybe the earliest book recorded before Moses wrote the Pentateuch, he says, in that book, I know my redeemer lives, and on the end, you will stand upon your remarkable Job as part of God's people, as part of the church. The invisible church includes Abraham, who by faith desired a better country and heavenly homeland, through his offspring, who is Christ from Galatians 3.16. Ruth, love the story of Ruth, Ruth sought salvation by taking refuge under the wing of her redeemer God, a redeemer she could not yet see, and didn't fully understand. But she was embraced by Boaz, a forerunner of her redeemer, who says this remarkable thing, he's the only one in the book who acknowledges what's happened if you read it. Ruth comes and meets Boaz, and she says, well, who am I? Why would you take notice of me? A forerunner, and he says, all that you have done has been told to me, how you came with your mother-in-law to a land that was not your own. He says, may you be blessed by God under whose wing you have come to take refuge. She was looking for her redeemer, and so she was part of the invisible church. It includes Peter, the former Jewish fisherman, who confessed that Jesus is the Christ, and that confession became the foundation of the New Testament church. The invisible church also includes you, if you possessed those invisible gifts of God's salvation, union with Christ through the invisible tie of the Holy Spirit, the invisible blessings of regeneration, regeneration is being born again, literally being regenerated again, born again, genuine conversion, true faith, spiritual communion with Christ. All of these things are very real, and if you have experienced any of these things, you know that they are real, and yet we can't see them. We can't look at someone, and apart from a general sense of their life and their profession of faith, we can't see the Holy Spirit working in them in the same tangible visible way that you may see a chair or the current your driveway. These are marks of the invisible church, and so if you have faith in Christ and have been redeemed by Him, then born again, then regenerated, that you are part of the invisible church. Okay, let's continue on. Now, that's one part of it. Now we're going to begin to talk about the visible church. The visible church is a society that can be observed by the human eye. It has known members, public assemblies, and observable characteristics. This is a key distinction here. The invisible church is not separate from the visible church, but exists within the visible church. Does that make sense? So it's not like, well, you have the invisible church over here, and the visible church over here, and well, kind of pick one. It's the invisible church exists within the visible church. John the Baptist, speaking to the visible people of God, said that Jesus had come to separate the wheat from the chaff, the implication being that not all of the visible people of God are part of the invisible people of God. That's an interesting passage because I had never really seen that as clearly as I had studying it this week in context. I always thought, well, that's sort of the end of the world, and there's the wheat, and there's the chaff, there's the believers, there's the unbelievers. But John the Baptist is talking to the visible people of God. He's not talking to people out there. He's not condemning other nations. He says, Jesus Christ is coming. He's bringing a winnowing fork. And among you, visible people of God, he's going to separate the wheat from the chaff. He's going to separate the invisible church, those that truly believe, those that had faith like their father Abraham, and those who didn't believe. People in the line of Esau, and others of the ancient Israelite kings who had abandoned God and not followed after him, people like Ahab, those are part of the chaff, and so even then there's a distinction. The visible people of God is a mixed group made up of wheat and chaff, believers, and unbelievers. Now, just as not all who are descended from Israel, the visible people of God belong to Israel, the invisible people of God, Romans 9.6, so also not all who are part of the visible church are part of the invisible church. Jesus says that many people in the last day will appeal specifically to their activities within the visible church for their salvation. But God will say to them, I never knew you, apart from me, workers of lawlessness. Why? They were part of the visible church. They weren't part of the invisible church, which it comes through faith in the God that delivers us through our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Those who have been redeemed are part of the invisible church. So, what are the visible characteristics of the visible local church? How do you know that you're in a church? How do you know what a church is? We are part of a church, we go to a church every week to worship services. What is it? Is it the building? Is it the people? Is it things we do? What makes a church a church, and not just a bunch of people who like coffee, potlucks, and choral music? All of those things I do like, and so I'm going to have a cup of coffee here. Now, I'm going to give you a definition. That's a long definition, but I want you to listen to it and think about it, we're going to go through it slowly, and we're going to take a little bit of time to unpack it. There's 10 parts to it, so just be ready. That's what we're going to look at next. Consider this definition, and this is a good one, I think. The local church is a community of regenerated believers, and remember I said regenerated means born again. People were generated again, born again. The local church is a community of regenerated believers, and their children who are called by God and confess Jesus as Lord. In obedience to Scripture, they organize under qualified leadership, gather regularly for preaching and worship, observe the biblical sacraments, baptism in the Lord's supper, are unified by the Spirit, are disciplined for holiness, and scatter to fulfill the great commandment and the great commission as missionaries to the world for God's glory and their joy. Now, who can say that back to me? Anybody? That's kind of a long definition, right? Mike, go ahead. W.T. is the short version. Good job. Nice, nice. Now, I got that definition, which is modified slightly from, and I'll give you my recommended reading list here, from this book, Vintage Church, and another guy, Darren Patrick, who's a pastor in St. Louis quotes it in his book as well, the church planter about the church and the mission of the church. Anyway, really good. Good stuff. So, I modified it a little bit. He tends to be, have a little bit of a different perspective on some things, so I added to you and tweaked around, but it's largely their stuff. Okay, first thing, first aspect. What is a church? A church is called out by God. What does that mean? The word of God creates the church. Scripture paints this picture by calling the church God's new creation, and that's not an accidental description, just as creation was brought into being when God speaks, God speaks, let there be light, and there was light. So also, God's word, speaking, breath of the Holy Spirit, and creates the church. So the church is a creation of God. Both the Greek word for church, which is ecclesia, and the Hebrew word for the church, cahol, refer to the cahold out, or assembled ones. It's ecclesia is those who have been cahold out, cahol, the assembly, those who have been assembled. This pattern of God creating the church by calling it into existence is seen throughout the history of the church. If you're paying attention, this slideshow just got 13% better. God called Abraham out of the land of earth to be the father of a new people of faith. God called his people out of Egypt to become the assembly of God in the wilderness, and then the promised land. You remember they built a tabernacle there, and the Holy Spirit descended upon it, and it was a place where God met with his people in the wilderness. And then later in the promised land, once they had arrived, God descended in the cloud, led them by the Spirit, great, great stuff. But it's God calling a people out to be his people. He creates them. I didn't include the verse, but in Hosea, echoed in 1 Peter, those who were not a people have become the people of God. Again, in response to God speaking and creating a people for himself, a church for himself. Jesus called his 12 disciples, and they followed him. That's in John 1, Matthew 4, several other accounts there. God used Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit to call the New Testament church into existence through the preaching of the gospel in Acts 2, that great sermon at Pentecost. The Gentile church in Asia Minor was called into existence by Paul through Paul's preaching. And interestingly, before Paul called the church in Asia Minor into existence, God very really called Paul into new life and called him into existence bringing him from spiritual death to life on the road to Damascus. He appeared to him, and just like the prophets in the Old Testament, Isaiah 6, for example, Isaiah is called out into the presence of the throne room of God and sent out on a mission. That's a picture in miniature of what the church is. It's people called out of death out of our normal lives in this world and then sent out on a mission. We don't stay in the throne room of God. It's great when you're in there, but that's not what we're for. We're called into God's presence, we're filled with the Spirit and sent out to do his work of mission. Okay, that's the first thing. Second thing. We're called, first thing is we're called out by God. The church exists because it's called out by God. Second thing, a church has regenerated church membership. Now I said it a couple of times. What does it mean? What does regenerated mean? Born again, generated again. See, you can learn all kinds of things in church. While it is expected that unbelievers, both acknowledged unbelievers and unacknowledged unbelievers, will be present in worship services. The church membership consists of those who have stopped trying to save themselves and are trusting in Christ for salvation. In Acts 2, verse 38, that sermon at Pentecost we talked about before, we read this, and Peter said to them, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The people that were not part of the people of God who were becoming part of the people of God had to repent of their sins, had to believe in Jesus Christ, had to receive the Spirit. And so churches have regenerated church membership. Okay, here's the third point. A church includes children of regenerated believers. Just as children were part of God's Old Testament people, so also children are part of God's New Testament people. In Acts 2, 38, and moving on to 39, then, Peter has just said, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus for Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Then in verse 39 he says, for the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself. Now while children are not members of the local church in the exact same way as regenerated believing adults, children are nonetheless non-communing, which means they are not yet able to take the Lord's supper or not yet fully-communing, fully-understanding members of the visible church community. We have an expectation that God will create faith in their hearts through the preaching of the gospel and that they one day will make a profession of faith. Just in the same way as God's Old Testament people, there were children that were part of the visible covenant community in Deuteronomy 6, after giving the law. We read that we are to teach our children, go with them on the road, teach them the shamah, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. We serve him, we teach our children, they are part of the visible church, the visible people of God. Number 4, a church has qualified church leadership. The church was built originally upon the prophets in the Old Testament and the apostles in the new and the apostles of the New Testament church appointed elders and deacons. These are the two classes of officers in the church. So if you have a church in order for a church to be a church, you have qualified officers, people that are leaders in the church. Elders are godly men appointed to serve the church by leading and shepherding it and deacons are godly men appointed to lead the church by serving it. Do you see that play? How that interaction works? Elders serve the church by leading and shepherding it and deacons lead the church by serving it. They are very much complimentary officers and you can read about those in more detail in 1 Timothy 3, 1 through 13. You will see the Christian maturity and the Christian characteristics that are necessary for someone to be an elder or a deacon. Interestingly enough, they are very similar, they are almost identical lists. For a church to be a church, there needs to be godly men and women but godly men who are in office holding positions who can lead the church in these ways. If you just have two guys down at a coffee shop talking about Jesus, that's a good thing and I want to affirm that. But that's not the church, you're not part of the church in that instance, you have no elders, you have no deacons, those are part of what it means to be a church. Okay, fifth thing, a church has preaching and worship. The church began with preaching, when 3,000 people became Christians at Pentecost X chapter 2 and the New Testament church continued to gather to hear sermons, sing songs, administer the sacraments and to encourage one another. In preaching, god speaks to his church and in worship, the church responds to what god has said. This is sometimes called the dialogic two way speaking principle of worship. God speaks and we respond. I just noted that in there because if you fall along with your church bulletin on Sunday, you'll find that that's generally speaking the pattern that we follow. We begin every church service with what? What's the very first thing we do after announcements? A call to worship? Why? God speaks. We then respond, prayer, singing. God speaks in the word, we respond with singing. It's a back and forth and so if you are a church, you have the preaching of the word and also worship. You have god speaking, you have people responding, so it's a back and forth thing. If you have one without the other, you may have a fine thing, but I would argue that you maybe don't have a church. And so we're talking very specifically tonight about the church with the churches. A church administers the sacraments. Church's administer baptism in the Lord's Supper, both of which serve as a visible word. Pictures of the gospel that point us to Jesus's death and resurrection, our forgiveness, and our union with Christ through his sacrifice. And also our union with one another as a redeemed community, as the church. Now I noted this here, just as a teaching elder, which is what Tim is, which is what I am, Chris, Jerry, as a teaching elder is uniquely called to preach the word. So also a teaching elder is uniquely called to administer the sacraments. These are visible words given by Jesus to the church. And historically there's always been, and I think theologically it's correct, a really deep connection between the word and the sacraments, which is really one of the main reasons why the reformation happened. One of the great issues that they had was the Roman Catholic Church was administering the sacraments without a word being spoken. And so it very quickly devolved into superstition because no one really knew what was going on. You probably have heard this said before, the phrase, Hocus Pocus, comes from the Latin that they would say when they would perform the Mass. Hocus me corpus, Hocus Pocus. Nobody knew what was happening, the priest just raised the bread up and Hocus Pocus. And the people that didn't speak Latin, which were the majority people, they didn't know what he was saying, Hocus Pocus became the body of Christ. And so when the reformation happened, the reformers said, this is not right. We can't have a visible word that's ignorant. Otherwise it's superstition, it's magic, it's everything that is the antithesis of what the Christian faith is, which is a relationship between a God who speaks and people who respond and who love one another and are in relationship with one another because they understand what's happening. So that's a connection why, for example, why ministers teaching elders, why we administer the sacraments. It's because of that connection. Because the sacraments are given to the church for our growth and grace, the sacraments in a church are ordinarily administered within a church worship service. Now, again, there are exceptions to this. I have baptized people in hospitals. I know other people that have been baptized, that camp, or on the mission field and other things. And I'm not going to judge each and every one of those circumstances or talk about which one was right and which one was wrong. I think it's more of a general principle and a rule that since it's a churchly sacrament, it was given to the church, it's a picture of the gospel. I think that the sacraments need to be accompanied by the word of God and I think that they should rightly be take place within the context of a worship service. If at all possible, again, I'm sure you have exceptions, I can think of exceptions too, but I think it's, we talk about the general rule and then we figure out the rest of the stuff. Okay, number seven, a church practices and seeks spiritual unity. Now, while acknowledging that faithful Christians can and often do disagree about many theological issues, a true church acknowledges unity in the Holy Spirit among all Orthodox Christian believers and prays along with Jesus that we may all be one. So the world may believe that you have sent me. Chris did just a knock down drag out sermon on this on Sunday. You haven't heard it. Go to the website and listen to it. It's great. And this is what he's talking about here. For a church to be a church, you desire unity and joining with fellow Christians. One of the surest red flags, if you ever encounter a church that refuses to have any fellowship with or any acknowledgement of other Orthodox Christian churches, that is a sure red flag, that is a disaster almost inevitably, that church is either down the road or on the road down to becoming a cult. I mean, I know that's a strong statement, but that is a real red flag. Not all of them go all the way down that road. That's God's grace. That's his common grace and mercy that they don't take that to the logical extent of what they're doing. But if you say, if you come to a church that says, we first Presbyterian church of Chattanooga is the one true church and you will not have union with Christ apart from us and apart from us mediating Christ to you in this local body, that is a big time problem. And I would say that that's not a true church. And so that's not what we believe, that's not what we're about. We seek for ways to join with believers of all stripes to the deepest extent that we can. It's not always possible to join together on every level, but we look for ways that we can join with believers in Christ. And we pray for that too. Okay, number eight, a church pursues holiness and practices discipline. Because the church has been declared holy, if you remember the sanctification talk we talked about being declared holy, being set apart, being positionally sanctified. We've been taken out of ordinary use by God and then put aside for special use. We've been separated, called out, sanctified because the church has been declared holy. We seek to live holy lives by repenting of sin and striving to live lives of grateful obedience. So the church is called to be holy. Now, in order to help the church grow in holiness, the church is to practice discipline. The church disciplines its members by rebuking those who are caught in sin and seeking to restore them through an intentional biblical peacemaking process. That's outlined in Matthew 18, there are other passages that are really helpful for that. But essentially what we're saying is that in order for a church to be a church, there needs to be holiness and there needs to be discipline as a way to call people to holiness. Often times one of the real weaknesses in some of the alternative church models that are gaining in popularity now, the house church model for example, it's very rare to find a house church that practices church discipline because it's just you and like three other guys. You know what I mean? And so if you discipline one guy, well your church is dropped by 33% and the other guy is mad at you now. And then they said, well, who are you to discipline me? Well, we don't have elders, so I don't know, flip a coin. I mean, it's just, it sounds like this is, you know, well, why we're making it so complicated because it's biblical and God is wise and he's given us these things because he's wise and because he knows what's best for us. Then he knows how things work best. So only this church discipline. Number nine, churches obey the great commandment to love. Jesus teaches us that churches are not only to have a correct posture towards God and our posture towards God is one of loving worship, but also toward fellow Christians, which is loving fellowship. We read about this in Matthew 22, 37 through 39 and he said to them, Jesus said to them, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is our correct posture towards God, loving worship. This is the first, the great and first commandment and the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. This is our correct posture toward other Christians and toward the world, though it looks a little bit different. We'll kind of talk about that next in the great commission. Because Jesus loved sacrificially, the church is called to love sacrificially. There are many, many passages, many aspects of what that looks like. I'm going to highlight a couple of them. The church is to show hospitality, a church shows hospitality, churches bear with one another, churches forgive one another, submitting to one another Ephesians 5. Speaking the truth to one another, confessing sins to one another. And many other ways, if you read the book of 1 John, it's a great, great exposition of what it means really to love God and to love one another. It's an amazing little book. So, so dense with good, good stuff. Okay, number 10. Churches obey the great commission to evangelize and make disciples. The church actively tells the good news of the gospel, baptizing new believers into Christ and into his church. And disciples, believers by teaching them to obey all that Jesus commanded in response to his grace. That's the great commission, Matthew 28, 18 through 20. So, we see here a church's posture toward God is worship, a church's posture toward Christians is fellowship, and a church's posture toward the lost is mission. Sound familiar? W plus 2. See, we got all of this from the Bible, so it all kind of connects with one another. It's a good thing. Okay, some conclusions as we look at these things. The church is, I want you to know and understand as we sort of take away from this, that the church is not incidental to God's plan. God doesn't just call us out of the world in sort of a vague way. He calls this specifically into the church. Did you ever think about it that way? When we become Christians, we're not just called out of something, we're called into something. The great commission is a call into something, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Baptize them into the church, make them part of the church. And so the church is not just incidental to God's plan. In 1 Corinthians 13 verse 7, we read the love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and if we love Christ's bride as much as Christ loves his bride, we will certainly need to bear with her failings. We will need to endure her struggles and believe that she is our only hope for a lost world, not because she's perfect, but because Christ is her head. Now, I'm sure you've had struggles in the church. I have. I'm sure if we just open it up, everyone here can talk about somebody who's not treated them well or something that went wrong or some problem that they've had in church, but don't give up on the church, don't give up on Christ's bride. The New Testament knows nothing of churchless Christianity and so we press on not despising the day of small things and knowing that as imperfect as the church is, Jesus is building it and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. The church is on mission. Did you ever think about it this way? I for many years thought of the church as having gates and the devil standing on the outside of the battering ramp trying to get in there. That's not the image at all. The gates of hell will not prevail against the church. Who's knocking on the gate? The church. The church is a battering ramp blowing down the doors of hell itself and hell itself will not prevail because in spite of our imperfections, in spite of our sin, what we are now is not what we will be. And Jesus by the Spirit is taking us by the hand in the church and pulling us together forward in time toward his coming again. Believers, you're part of that. You're children. They're part of it being pulled forward into that age to come by the power of the Holy Spirit. And so that's the church. I want you to love the church and appreciate the church. Any questions? Any thoughts? Yes, Marie. I believe it is because it is a distinction between those who have come to Christ and those who haven't come to Christ. That is dead on. You're 100% right with that. But the audience that John the Baptist is addressing are people coming out to be baptized by him, including the Pharisees, the teachers of the law who sort of didn't know what to make of him and were afraid to say anything because the people were coming, tax collectors. And so he says that Jesus is going to separate the wheat from the chaff, talking to them. Any other thoughts or questions? Well, thanks Gary. I appreciate it. I should leave it on that, but I'll open up for Ron. Go ahead. See, that would be... See, if I was smarter, I'd be like, good night everybody. And then I'd just run out the door. That's a good question. The question is can you give a... Can I give a description or discuss a little bit our connection to other Presbyterian churches rather than maybe being just a purely independent local body? Well, generally our connectedness is with all believers is a spiritual connectedness. So that's sort of the broad picture. We do have an informal spiritual connectedness with all believers in Jesus Christ that are Orthodox believers. We have a connection to them. But we also have a very specific connection to other Presbyterian churches because we're a confessional church. We have a confession of faith that says essentially having studied the scriptures and that's kind of what we're going through by the way, the confession. Having studied the scriptures, we've come to the conclusion that this accurately represents what the Bible teaches. And so we have close fellowship with one another and have a closer fellowship with one another than perhaps others who would take different tax, especially those who would take different tax that are practice tax. And this is what I mean. As much spiritual union that I may have with my Baptist brothers and sisters, at the end of the day, if we're in a church together, we have to decide whether or not we're going to baptize babies. And for a Baptist, that would be an important practice and not something they could do. And as a Presbyterian, I would say, this is a wonderful gift that God has given us. I believe it's necessary and important and good, and I really want to do that. And so then we're sort of at longer heads. And so those churches, probably with which we have the most affinity, we have the closest connection with. We're sort of degrees of affinity. I think about it like concentric circles. And so I would maybe go out and pass out sandwiches to hungry people with Roman Catholics, though since we've officially excommunicated one another, we're probably going to have a difficult time worshipping in the same church together. I think we're banned from their communion. I think they're banned from our communion. So that's a little bit more rough. Is that kind of the direction you're headed? Do you want to take it a different correction? Oh, okay. He's asking sort of specifically about, well, why do we govern our church the way we do? Well, it's largely taken from sort of things that we are pulling out of the book of Acts and sort of a general sense of what they were doing in the book of Acts. It seems that in the book of Acts, there were even within cities, they would say the church at Jerusalem, which was likely not just one massive mega church that was there, but was a series of churches. And they were so closely connected with one another that they were called the church at Jerusalem. And then when a particular dispute in Acts chapter 15 arose where you had a group of Jewish converts to the Christian faith came to Christ, we're essentially saying that people needed to become Jewish before they became Christian. They had to be circumcised if they were a man, they had to sort of go through all the Jewish dietary laws and there was dispute. Paul and others rose up very strongly against that and said, no, that's not what we're going to do. And so they came together as churches with representatives from all around Asia Minor and Jerusalem and they came together in one large gathering in Jerusalem and they appeared to discuss as equals the resolution and come together and have a great discussion about it. Ironically, the person who made the final declaration at the Jerusalem Council was not Peter, but James. Apparently, James didn't realise that Peter was the Pope because the Pope always talks last. That's only half joking. But that was sort of, so there's not, we infer and we imply and we sort of draw out from and there's no, there's a great deal of disagreement about, well, should we be independent or should we be connectional and what does that connection look like? We have inferred that I think that based on the book of Acts, based on the epistles of Paul, it seems that churches were governed, governed clearly by elders and deacons and that there was a connectedness there between congregations and a mutual accountability. Paul, though he was not a member of Timothy's church, instructs him and teaches him and says that there's some accountability there, there's warnings with it, so I think that we've inferred that's what it is and as best as we can tell, that's the biblical way to do it. But we love and respect those that maybe do it a different way, we would probably just have friendly conversations over lunch about this passage or that passage. Well, we've got about five minutes, any other questions? We can go home a little bit early, yeah. Well, I'll answer the first part first and the question is, well, does God desire all these different denominations and things like this? I would say God desires very clearly unity in the church. However, we do live in a fallen world and we talked about earlier in this series about God's will of prescriptive and descriptive will essentially. God's will is that no one lies, God's will is that no one kills, God's will is the ten commandments and yet the reality of living in a fallen world is we go against that and we break those things. God desires us to be unified in perfect harmony with one another, in perfect connectional unity and yet because of sin and because of a lack of knowledge, we don't know scripture perfectly and so we disagree with one another and we have differing interpretations. It's sort of the reality of the sad reality of living in a fallen world but as far as interpretation, brother, we do that every week. When we have a preacher stand up to preach, they're interpreting God's will and no, that specifically is our calling, is to read the scriptures, study them to pray, to attempt to understand them, to discuss it with other believers and to try to say, this is what, thus says the Lord, this is what God says, more than likely, that is true. Well, we do see in part and we know in part and my admonition for all of us is to be what I call loving maximalists and this is what I mean by that. I think there's a tendency when we have sort of thorny issues or debatable issues for us to kind of want to pull back and say, well, we're just not going to think about it. I don't know if that's the best approach. I think we do need to think about it, I think we do need to know what we believe and why we believe it and we need to study God's word as the brains study God's word and examine it. But we need to do so in a loving way and a humble way, knowing that we may very well be wrong and God may reveal to us something new and our views may change and we may get to heaven and discover significant problems and potholes along the way. But we do know that we are saved not by our knowledge but by God's grace and is mercy in Jesus Christ. And so ultimately, that's a direction we're pointing. Well, it's about that time, so I'm going to close in prayer. I'll be hanging around here for a minute or two as I shut down, so if you have any questions that you just now think of or we're embarrassed to say or something, you can talk to me afterwards, I'll be hanging around for a minute. All right, let's pray. Lord Jesus, we do thank you for your church. Father, as imperfect as we are as the church, we know that you have a plan for your bride, we know you have a plan for your people. Lord, I'm so grateful for the spiritual connectedness that we do have with people who have sought you and trusted you in many, many generations. Father, we pray that the church would grow strong and stronger as you approach as you return. Father, we know that the gates of hell will not prevail against your church. And so we pray that as your people, as your new creation, that we would be on offense, that we would be bold in our witness, humble and dependent upon you but trusting that you have a plan for us and that you will work all things well for the good of those who love you and who have been called according to your purpose. Lord, hear our prayer. We pray as you are bride, the church in Jesus' name and then. See you guys next week.