SA Ep90 - Articles of Faith #13 The Church

SA Ep90 - Articles of Faith #13 The Church

In this episode, we examine the doctrine of the church. The Bible teaches that the church is a local assembly of baptized believers, gathered for worship, fellowship, discipleship, and service, under the headship of Christ. We will look at what the church is, why it exists, and why it matters to every believer. This episode also addresses the importance of faithfulness, unity, and biblical function within the church. The church is not a side issue in the Christian life. It is central to God’s work in the world.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Seeking Approval Podcast. I'm Dr. Chris Smelser from Iliad Baptist Church. You know life moves fast and faith is not meant to be rushed. I want to take some time and slow down with you and have some honest conversations from the Word of God about daily living. So join me here today on Seeking Approval. In the time we live when things seem to be so unstable, where argument could break out at any point. Disagreements. And not just minor things, major things, life-altering disagreements that lead to many different outcomes. Don't you wish there was a place you could go to escape it all? A place where you could leave all those cares behind and enter into a sanctuary or haven of rest? Well, there ought to be. That's what we call the local church. But today we treat the church as something that's optional, casual, even unnecessary at times. It's something we do in our convenience. Well, I'll I'll go to the eight o'clock service so I can have the rest of my day to do this thing. We can run to the 11 o'clock service so we could have the morning to sleep in. Now I'm not harping on anyone who has multiple services. There are churches out there who just simply can't house the number of people that they have. But then there are those that have the different service options because maybe we want church to fit our need. We want the casual service, we want the formal service, we want the contemporary service, we want the old-fashioned service. What about just worshiping God in spirit and truth the way that we ought to? What about coming into a place where we do not allow the things of the world to come in? I don't know why we've entered into a time where it seems like that when anything happens in the social world or political world, that the church must take a stand against it, that we must make some sort of comment or uh that we disagree or disavow anything that is happening. Let me tell you, and I've said it in my church many times. Our church does not stand with anything social or political that goes against the Bible. Period. I don't need to get up in our sanctuary, in haven of rest, where our focus should be on the preeminent one of all creation, Jesus Christ, and worshiping him in spirit and in truth, and have to come in and talk about the things that's going on in the world, the things that we want to leave outside those walls. Why invite those things in? But yet we do. And we carry those things in a lot of times in our own uh our own hearts. We we carry it in as our baggage, you know, no more than uh we have our wallet or our purse or our diaper bag, you know, or our our children in tow. We just we we throw all the luggage of the world as well, and we just carry it right in and set it right down on the pew next to us. And it's such a sad thing that church has become such a thing. When we come to the doctrine of the church and our articles of faith, we're dealing at faith, we're dealing with something that is both very practical and spiritual and needed. People need, no matter what you might think, we need a place to escape this world. And that's exactly what the church should be. It should not be an afterthought, a place of convenience. I was talking to a gentleman, it's been some two years ago, maybe three, uh, in my I run a construction business, and I was talking to him about doing some uh some work for me, uh, that uh concrete work. I don't like finishing concrete, I don't mind finishing concrete. I'm not good, let me say that. I don't mind finishing concrete, I'm not good at finishing concrete. And I was wanting to do some uh some really nice uh concrete, uh do a project that was gonna you know take about five years to do a section at a time, large section at a time. And um, so I was talking to him about it. Well, as we're you know talking about the project, and I'm talking, you know, we were gonna do about uh fifteen thousand dollars a year over a five to six year span. I mean, we're talking you know, sixty, seventy, maybe a hundred thousand dollars worth of work that I was wanting to give to this gentleman. And as we're hanging up, he says, let me ask you something anyway. Uh okay. He said, Why why you why are you Baptist anyway? Why you why do you go to church? Don't you know that that church is uh uh sending people to hell? And I took offense to that. Uh I that that that bothered me, I should say, uh terribly. And he went on a little rant about churches and and things of that nature, and uh when he had finished, uh I began to uh unload upon him the burden of the church and to let him know exactly what the church is and why the church is important. And he had gone on to tell me during that uh monologue of his that he reads his Bible every Sunday morning. He reads his Bible every morning, but he reads his Bible every Sunday morning, and he has his own church at his kitchen table. Now I can understand if you're in a place where you can't meet and gather together. That you don't have that option. And there are people around the world, and you may be listening to this. We have people all over the world who are listening to these podcasts and our sermon audio page and buying our books. Thank our book sales this month have been tremendous. Thank you all. If you're one of them, thank you. They're on they're on Amazon. I I mean, uh it was it was it blew my mind when I got uh the um the printout, the summary this month. Uh thank you all. So maybe you don't have the option of meeting together as a as a church, a community of believers. But if you have that option and you're choosing not to, then you're contradicting, going against what the Bible tells us that we are to assemble ourselves together, that we are to edify, to we're we're to lead, we're to hold each other accountable, we're to pray for one another, bear one another's burdens. You can't do that when you're sitting at home. And so he he was wanting to condemn me, the pastor of a church, by the way. He was wanting to condemn me for uh sending people to hell through religion is what he was trying to say, but he did it in a very poor way. And so I began to expound him the first couple of chapters of the book of Acts about where the church started, why it started, the great mystery of the church that Paul talked about that was unveiled whenever Christ uh completed the work of salvation on the cross, and and shortly thereafter the church was instituted. And it became a place where the persecuted believers of Christ in the first century could come and gather together. Did they have problems? Yes. Did they have issues inside the church? Absolutely. That is not anything new to us. Paul wrote uh a couple of letters to churches that were struggling. He wrote a couple letters to churches that were, you know, doing fantastic. Churches that were persecuted. And then John wrote seven letters to churches. I wonder why so much of the New Testament is given to epistles or letters or mention or discussion about the local church. I wonder why God took so much precious real estate in a book that uh a a canon of scriptures that only has 66 books, that that only has uh uh 1,189 chapters, that has 31,102 verses, and that's that's to span over you know 4,000 years of writing. I wonder why he would take so much real estate in the smallest portion, the New Testament, of this uh kind of bifurcated book, two halves, and spend so much time on the church. Why would he say that we are the body and that he is the head of the church? Well, I wonder why he would spend so much time because church is important. We're not dealing with an afterthought in this. Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Listen to the pronouns in that. I will build my church. And yet people today won't tell me that church is not that important. It's casual. Just come as you are, leave as you were. You know, we got a man in the pulpit. It's gonna hopefully give us a you know 15-minute uh thought about you know you know finances in in today's world. What we should think politically, who we should vote for. Oh man, it's great. We get in by 11 o'clock, we're out by noon, I mean, we can sleep in and we can still get to lunch. I mean, it's it's fantastic. We can have our afternoon nap. Don't have to worry about it. We don't have to go back on Sunday night. I mean, who does that anymore anyway? Wednesday night? You kidding me? No, we don't have no Wednesday night. We do a small group. We meet at somebody's house and have dessert and talk about the the week and you know, all those good things, you know. What have we what have we become what are we making this? I mean, the the the I fear that we've gotten so far away from what God intended. I mean, is our church perfect? Absolutely not. Is our church exactly what uh the Lord had envisioned for his church to be? I'd say we fall well short. I mean, if if if Romans 3.23, all have sinned to come short of the glory of God, I'm sure that all churches have sinned. I'm sure that all churches have come short of what God wants their church to be. But I would hate to knowingly make decisions for our church to say, you know what, we're just we're gonna ease up a little bit. You know, if you want to come, you can be here if you want to be here. No, I I it is my job to make sure that the people that attend our church understand that this place, it's not only a good idea, it's a command of God that we assemble ourselves together. Now, he does not say that we need to assemble ourselves together on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night at, you know, 7 o'clock. But we are to assemble ourselves together as a matter of which some is. That's when we meet. And then I love it when people say, well, you know, they didn't meet on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night in the Bible. No, they met daily. They gather together daily. So you want to do like the the New Testament church did? All right, I'll see you here Monday night. Oh, you can't even give me people together now for a three-night revival. Week-long revivals have become three-night revivals. And and preachers are just, you know, holding on that somebody might show up for it. And I'm not talking about visions, I'm talking about the church members. That's a sad day whenever a pastor's got to be praying. Boy, I hope my people show up. Lord, just please let my people show up this week for revival. I'm so glad that I've never had to worry about that or never felt the need to worry about that. We have, well, we had one revival at our church from the time I got there. It was our summer revival. We have it in the second week of July. And uh this past year we had one in the winter with Dr. Mike Bagwell. I mean, I've I've wanted to have him in a revival for years, and uh a time came available. He had someone cancel out, church he'd been with for years, and um, man, I took it. He called and said, I've got a date open. I said, I'll take it. He said, Preacher, you don't know the date. I said, I don't care, I'll take it. As long as it ain't the second week of July, and if it is, we'll figure something out. But uh anyway, we had to win revival. I don't if if people show up, that's all that's up to them. But I don't sit around and fret, boy, I hope people show up. I hope people show up because I know what I'm going for. I know what I'm praying about for the church. And the people that show up, that's who shows up. And if they don't want to show up whenever their church is assembled together and their church is trying to do something good for the hearts and their lives, that's between them and God. I can't do anything about that. Now, I wouldn't say so much as uh heard a pastor out of uh North Carolina say he used to come to our church and hold revival. I heard him say one time he said, I'm nothing more than the bus driver. I just open the door, let them on, open the door, let them off. I I don't go that far. I'm more I gotta do more than that. I worry when people aren't there. I worry when I see people that are that are slipping off that you know, those those people who are uh constant and faithful, you know, well, Wednesday night they don't come anymore, and then everywhere so often Sunday nights, you know, like I'll be there if I can on a Sunday night. I worry about that because you you can watch the the heart of the believers you know gradually, you know, getting weaker and weaker. So yeah, I do worry when people aren't there. I mean, I worry about them, I worry about their spiritual walk. Uh it it it bothers me as a pastor, but I mean, there is only so much I can do. I can pray about it, I can plead to God to burden their heart about it, but ultimately it's a decision that comes between you and your relationship with Jesus Christ. I've I've often said that now I'm talking about people who have the local church to attend. We have folks uh in certain parts of the country that I can see on our analytics, people who are on our sermon audio page, and people who are on our uh different uh podcast um platforms or across all platforms, so I have to, you know, I look at different ones. But um we got people around the world that I'm sure you don't have a local church. You probably don't have a you know an independent Baptist church on every corner driving down the road. And so for some people, this may be your gathering together. And if it is, I I I I appreciate it. I pray for you. Uh and and uh and I thank you for using this time to try to get along with the other Christians and believers to encourage you. But for those folks that that do have a church where you can gather together, those who do have a Bible that you can faithfully grab and read. I often say that a person's relationship with their Bible and a person's relationship with their church is indicative of their relationship with God. If they don't open their Bible but maybe once a week, whenever the preacher says, you know, this is our Sunday morning reading. And for a lot of people, that's not even they don't even open their Bible then. If the only time they go to church is maybe on a Sunday morning if they can fit it in their schedule, I'd say that's pretty indicative of our relationship with God. So the church, I there's so many other verses uh that I wanted to get to this morning, and and I'm not, I'm I'm I'm up against 15 minutes here, and I try to keep these as short as I can. I mean, we I've got verses after verses here. I guess mainly today, in our Christian walk, it's the importance of our of our of our love for the church. Acts 2, uh, 41, 42, let me just say this. Then they that gladly received his word were baptized, and the same day they were added unto him unto them about three thousand souls, and they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship and breaking of bread and in prayers. That's what the church should be. It should be the preached word and the receiving of the word. Seeing souls come to some come to Christ, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. And then once that happens, keeping the doctrine of fellowship, of breaking of bread, that's literal and figurative, spiritual, and then fellowship, edifying, building each other up, helping someone who's had a loss in their life, or a tragedy, or a trial, celebrating with those who've had great victories. That's what that's what we're doing as a church. And then most importantly, it's the word, it's the worship, it's the teaching. It's it's allowing the heart of the believer to leave the things of the world outside, come together, and focus on what should be preeminent. The church should not just be a building, it's not just a meeting, it's the body of Christ in a sinful world that can come and worship the one who gave his life for us. Thank you for joining us today on Seeking Approval. You know our faith oftentimes grows in quiet places. I hope today's conversation gave you something worth carrying throughout the rest of this day. And join me, Dr. Chris Smelser, again next time as we continue thinking, learning, and walking together. Until then, grace and peace to you from Seeking Approval at Gilead Baptist Church.