Fundamental Priorities of a Good Church C

When you find a place that teaches the Word, you'll find a place where doctrine is clear. You'll find a place where holiness is pursued. You'll find a place of spiritual authority, all very, very essential in your spiritual development and to the glory of God. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. If your work relocated you to a different state, you obviously would try to find a new home, a school for your kids, and places to shop. And of course, if you're a Christian, you would also need to find a good church.

But how do you do that? What do you look for? What are the marks of a church that truly honors God and serves His people?

John MacArthur helps you sort out those critical questions today as he continues a study recorded at the Master's University. It's helping you see what to look for in a church. And with that, here's the lesson. The church scene is frankly frightening in the thousands of letters that we get at Grace to You every...well, every week. I would say that the commonest complaint we receive is from people who cannot find a church where they feel the truth of God is honored and ministry is done in a biblical way.

This is no small frustration. It's not that there aren't many churches, there are lots of churches. It's trying to discern what is a good church, what is a right church.

And I want to help you with that. I want to talk about what a church should be. The first thing you look for in a church is a high view of God...a high view of God...a high view of God. Proverbs 9, 10 says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Everything starts with fearing God.

That's the beginning of everything. And that's crystal clear in Scripture. The holiness of God is the first and central element in the church. The glory of God, the exaltation of God. There's a second and I think equally critical focus if you are looking for a church, if you want a church to be what it should be and if you want to bring to your own church experience what is necessary, not just a high view of God, but a high view of Christ...a high view of Christ.

And I don't know that I need to beg that issue or to say too much about it, it should be pretty apparent to all of us. Look for a church where Jesus Christ is exalted, not where somehow they sort of sneak Him in here and there. I remember seeing a program at a large seeker-friendly church and during this program there was...that was strange, there was music and there was even some cursing and very kind of non-Christian event and the idea...this was done in the church, people were brought to this thing and it was...there was really nothing Christian about it and at the end, a statement was made and this is a quote, "'In some way, shape or form, Jesus has touched all our lives.'"

Good night. Well I don't even know what that means, in some way, shape or form, Jesus has touched all our lives. It doesn't mean anything.

But I suppose that was some effort to, I don't know, sanctify the event. One thing you're going to find in the New Testament church is the centrality of Jesus Christ. He is not an addendum. He is not a P.S.

He is not a postscript at the end of the program. He is not sort of stuck in at the end after you have been the focus of the preacher's attention. That's why if I had my choice, I would rather preach the gospels than any other part of the New Testament because...and I think that's why the bulk of the New Testament is the gospels. And the gospels are the life of Jesus Christ, the life and work of Christ. And the Old Testament, Jesus said, are those that speak about Me. Jesus Christ is the center of all our worship.

There wouldn't be any worship without Him. And I just...I'm saddened, I listen to TV preachers who talk about all kinds of things, about people's problems and needs and I just don't sense the centrality of Christ. If you preach the gospels, it's Christ in every verse. If you preach the book of Acts, it's the work of Christ through the Holy Spirit in the church. If you go to the book of Romans, it's the great treatise on the meaning of the sacrifice of Christ. If you go to the book of Hebrews, it's the glory of the great High Priest. If you go to the book of Revelation, you're going to see the glory of the returning and exalted Christ and He is the theme of Scripture. There must be a high view of Christ.

And I don't mean that in some esoteric sense or some sense of respect. I mean that in terms of a passion on the part of the worshiper. I love to sing hymns about Christ. I love to sing songs about Christ. I love to preach about Christ. There's no greater subject than Christ to preach on.

I find it almost impossible to give myself to speaking about issues that aren't related either to the greatness of God or the person of Christ, or the work, of course, of the Holy Spirit. But I'm saddened by the fact that the glory of Christ has been diminished in churches that are so focused on the people. Turn in your Bible for a minute to Philippians chapter 3 and I can comment on this briefly. And this is a familiar portion of Scripture, Philippians chapter 3, so familiar I go back and read it all the time. It's basically fallen out of my Bible here. Philippians chapter 3, well we can pick it up, you know, you know verses 3 through 6 where Paul talks about all of his accomplishments as a religious Jew. He, verse 4, talks about his confidence in the flesh, circumcised of the nation Israel, tribe of Benjamin, Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee as regards the Law, persecutor of the church which defines his zeal as to the righteousness which is in the Law, at least outwardly, certainly not inwardly, he was blameless and all of that he had spent all his life accumulating up until his true conversion. But I just...I think it's such a powerful thing in verse 7, whatever things were gained to me, those things I have counted as a loss for the sake of Christ.

Spends his whole life accumulating all this, all this self-righteousness, all this religiosity. And then he says, I met Christ and it was nothing but loss. I had put it in my gain column, you know, like a count would do on the prophet's side.

I had put it in the gain column as if it was advantageous to me. And I met Christ and I realized it was all loss because all efforts at self-righteousness are damning efforts and they don't accumulate anything helpful. So he says it was all loss. And then in verse 8 he says, more than that I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Now there is a statement that at some point in your Christian life you have to come to grips with. I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but excrement is the Greek word, in order that I may gain Christ. Everything in this world is, in the King James, dung, manure compared to Christ. I mean, that is an incredible statement.

I don't care what it is. Your worldly accomplishments, your achievements, your material possessions, your career, whatever it is you own, all of that and even your own sense of well-being, your own confidence, your own self-esteem. Paul says, all the best about me, all that I spent all my life accumulating, a reputation. And he had a noble reputation. He was a funded persecutor, funded by Jewish money to persecute and kill Christians. He was considered a noble defender of Judaism.

When it came to his religious achievements, nobody could give a more impressive list. And he said, it's all manure compared to knowing Christ. And the question that rises out of that is how important to you is it to know Christ? He says here, I count all things to be lost in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. And yet in another place, you remember he said this, that I may know Him, that I may know Him. Go down to verse 10, that I may know Him. What are you talking about, Paul? You just said you know Him, now you say you want to know Him. What is he talking about here?

He's saying I know Him but the knowing is not sufficient. I want to know the power of His resurrection. I want to know the fellowship of His sufferings. I want to be conformed to His death.

What do you mean? I want to really know Him. I want to know Him better than I could ever know Him, knowing what I now know.

You ought to go to church and say, The goal of going to this place is I want to know Christ better than I know Him. I want to know Him far better than I know Him. I want to know everything about Him. I want to know everything about His character, everything about His mind, the mind of Christ. I want to know everything about His attitudes.

I want to know every word He said. I want to understand it. I want to grasp it. I want to understand the depth of His compassion, the greatness of His affection, His love. I want to understand the zeal that He had for the truth, and I want to understand the heart of anger that went out against sinners when He made a whip and cleaned the temple. I want to understand every nuance that the Apostle Paul unfolds in the Scriptures concerning the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ.

I want to understand that. I want to know the same power that raised Him from the dead. I want to understand that power and know it as He lives in me. I want to know the fellowship of His sufferings. What does He mean by that? He said, I want to suffer the way that He suffered.

I want to have a partner in my pain. I want to have Him understand that I am suffering for the same truths and the same realities for which He suffered, not atoning for sin, but suffering the hatred of those who resented the truth. Paul said, I want...I want to be conformed even to His death. I want to die the way He died, faithful to God for the truth.

I want to know Him. I question whether in contemporary evangelicalism there's very much of this desire in the hearts of people to know Christ like this. Can you actually look at all the stuff in your life and say it's just newer to me? What really drives me is to know Christ...to know Christ. As I said a moment ago, I particularly love to preach the gospels. It takes me a long time to go through the gospels, but I have to tell you this, slower is better than faster, folks, because I don't want to miss anything. And one of the deep regrets of my life, and it is a serious regret that I live with and I don't often talk about it, but it is one of the really deep aches in my heart and it's been there for many, many years is that I know things about Christ from my study of Scripture that I don't have the time or the opportunity to tell other people. And that's one of the...you talk about preparing a message for me, I never prepare...I never studied the Bible to make a sermon, I studied the Bible to understand it. And having understood it, I can usually think of something to say. But what comes out of that sermon might be a tenth of what I have come to understand. Sometimes it just sort of leaks out in conversations and occasionally places like this when I share those things.

But it's one of the frustrations. Somebody asked me about the book I wrote, The Battle for the Beginning. And somebody was, you know, saying they appreciated the book and they asked me how I felt about the book and I said, I'm not happy about it.

I really am very unhappy about that book, it bothers me a lot. And they said, why? And I said, because when I went through Genesis 1 to 3, the book should have been this big and it was this big and there's all that that nobody's going to know.

That's very frustrating to me. So as I said, you're fortunate that I don't even go slower and longer. Somebody said, my preaching is like my golf, long and to the right and always near a hazard. But I'm not running out of material, I'm running out of time...I'm running out of time.

I'll be dead before I can get to it all. And I will have...and this is interesting for a preacher, I will have so many things that I will die knowing but never having told you. Well, let me give you a third thing to think about when you're thinking about a church and where its focus should be. And by the way, a church that's consumed with the glory of God and the majesty of Christ is really going to be a wholesome, healthy, holy place. But there's another thing that is obvious and I mean, I hardly need to say it and I'll just say it in passing, you need to be in a place where the Scripture is exalted...where the Scripture is exalted, not where somebody's ideas are punctuated with Bible verses. Psalm 138 2 says, God has exalted His Word above His name. Jesus said, we live by every word that comes out of the mouth of God, quoting from Deuteronomy. You need to be in a place where the Word of God is proclaimed and explained. I have been saying the meaning of the Scripture is the Scripture and nothing is as powerful. When you understand the meaning of Scripture, you have just tapped into the most powerful truth in the universe. It doesn't make any sense to be in any place where the Word of God is not proclaimed. You know, 1 Timothy, over and over again, Timothy is instructed about the Word and about how important it is to be faithful to the Word.

And in chapter 3, there's a reason, sort of summing it up, he says, verse 15, the church of the living God which is the pillar and support of the truth. We live in a whole universe of lies. Satan is the father of lies.

He fathered them in the Garden, as we all know. The world is full of lies. There has to be some place where you can go and hear the truth.

Not man's ideas, not man's impressions, not man's insights, but the truth...the truth, the truth. It was some years ago when the publisher of the L.A. Times and five or six other national newspapers and the owner of a dozen network-affiliate television stations took me to lunch and asked me a question. He said, I've just come to listen to you a few times and I just want to ask you a question. You have this audience, you have this influence, why don't you ever give your opinion on things? And we were sitting at lunch and I said, you really want another opinion?

You don't have enough? Could you really benefit by another opinion? You've got a whole opinion section in your paper every day.

You want more? Well, he said, come to think of it, it's a good point. I said, however, I would be very happy to write a column for you that's not my opinion. Well whose opinion would it be? It wouldn't be anybody's opinion, it would be the truth of God. I'd be happy to do that. Never heard back about that.

I'm not about opinions. It's all about giving voice to God. I was sitting in one of those...they used to have these, what they called serendipity sessions. It was group therapy.

I'm not real big into group therapy. People were sitting around saying all kinds of things they shouldn't say. And so they said, you know, we want you to get in touch with your deepest inner self. And so they passed out little paper cups to everybody and they said, due to that cup, what will be a representation of how you view yourself? So I have this little cup in my hand and I'm sitting next to a guy, he's a pretty complex guy. And he's making an origami thing, you know, like the Japanese deal out of it, like the bird they make out of paper. He's...I'm sitting there thinking, what do I do with this cup?

And they give us like 45 minutes. So I just sat there and watched all these guys with the nuances, you know, trying to reflect all the complexity of their personality. Finally it struck me. I just punched the bottom out. I was done. And then they came around and they decided to ask certain people to explain themselves with their cup. This is kind of an epiphany for me at the moment.

And they picked me. So I said, well, pretty simple, I just see myself as a channel through which the truth of God can flow. Oh, brother, how boring.

How one-dimensional. And that's how I see myself. Every opportunity for me, whether it's at the college, or the seminary, or Grace to You, or Grace Church, is the same. It's about the truth. It's about the truth. And it's about divine truth. And divine truth is what energizes me. Divine truth is what's been deposited to me. It's a treasure that I have to guard and it's a message I have to proclaim and I'm accountable to God for doing it. But it's not something I do reluctantly, it's something I do passionately. And when you choose a church, you find a church where the people who are shepherding, people who are preaching and teaching have this passion to proclaim divine truth accurately, faithfully.

Anything else is a misrepresentation of their responsibility. I remember reading about a Puritan who...this was an American Puritan back in the east coast in the 1800s who took a church and told the people he was going to preach through the Bible and the leaders of the church were so mad, they locked the pews. Have you ever been in an old church in New England where they had a swinging door and a lock and people bought their section like box seats at the Dodger Stadium? And the rich people bought the boxes up front and the poor people got the little ones in the back and a guy stood above with a little long fishing rod with a ball on the end to whack kids in the head who talked?

That's how it was. Well, these guys were so mad that this preacher was going to preach through the Scriptures that they locked the pews so that the people who wanted to hear him had to stand around the perimeter. So he preached to people standing around the perimeter through the Scriptures for nine years before they unlocked the pews. That's commitment. That's commitment.

He knew what he was supposed to do and he did it. Now I admit you can get carried away, there was another Puritan who came to a church in New England and said he was going to preach through Isaiah. He preached there over 25 years and died in chapter 8.

That's too slow. Well, you understand. When you find a place that teaches the Word, you'll find a place where doctrine is clear. You'll find a place where holiness is pursued.

You'll find a place of spiritual authority, all very, very essential in your spiritual development and to the glory of God. Father, we thank You for our time and reminding us of what is Your desire for Your church. We want to exalt You and Your Son and Your Word.

And we need to do a little inventory in our lives to find out if that's really important to us. We want to know You, O God, and Christ and the Word. For in that knowledge comes our soul satisfaction, comes our power, comes our joy. Put us in places like that all through our lives and even use us as leaders to assure that the church is what it should be.

We thank You in our Savior's name, amen. That's John MacArthur speaking at the Master's University where he serves as Chancellor. His goal was to show students what to look for in a church. That is the title of his series here on Grace to You. Now you could say that this series is about identifying churches with the right stuff. The traits that churches will have if they're truly honoring the Lord and serving God's people. And so with that in mind, there are important lessons we can learn by examining churches that have the wrong stuff. And John, I'm thinking in particular about some of the very earliest churches and how they managed to get off track so quickly. The church didn't even get through the first century before the churches started to go astray. And we shouldn't be surprised by that because the apostles warned us about that. Peter warned us that false teachers would be everywhere.

And Jude picked up on it in almost the same exact language. And John wrote about the fact that there would be false teachers and that you had to test the spirits to see who was really of God. So it went off track rapidly, and we should also go back to Matthew 13 and understand that Jesus said, �Wherever he plants his church, sows the wheat.

The devil will sow the tares.� So it's not a surprise. And we can actually look at those early churches, and that's a treasure for us, by the way, that the Lord has included personal letters that Jesus wrote to those churches. That is a very, very unusual biblical feature where Jesus actually writes a letter to a local church, and he did it seven times, and they're recorded in Revelation 2 and 3. And we get a direct evaluation, assessment, and plan for those churches right from the Lord of the church himself. All of this is included in a book titled Christ's Call to Reform the Church.

And as I said yesterday, this is free to anyone who has never been in touch with us before. Imagine if your church received a letter from the Lord Jesus Christ. What would it say? Would the Lord praise your church for its faithfulness, its clear doctrine, its love for him? Or would he give a dire warning and call your church to repent? The Bible records that Christ gave such an evaluation to seven churches, and they're pertinent for us today as well.

Well, are you intrigued? If so, and if you have never contacted us before, we want to send you Christ's Call to Reform the Church with our compliments. Call or write today and ask for a copy, Christ's Call to Reform the Church. It's free if you're getting in touch with us for the first time. Yes, friend, Christ's Call to Reform the Church can show any congregation, including yours, how to please the Lord and honor his word, and again, it's free if you've never contacted us before.

Get in touch today. Call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, GTY.org. Christ's Call to Reform the Church will show you and your congregation practical biblical strategies for putting off worldliness and for making sure your love for Christ does not become cold. Don't forget, Christ's Call to Reform the Church is our gift to you if you've never contacted us before. Just call us at 800-55-GRACE, or visit our website, GTY.org. And while you're at the website, GTY.org, make sure to take advantage of the thousands of free resources we have available there. You can read daily devotionals, you can watch episodes of Grace To You television, and you can download more than 3500 of John's sermons, including the lessons from John's current study, What to Look For in a Church. To tap into those free Bible study aids, go to GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and the staff, I'm Phil Johnson reminding you to watch Grace To You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, or check your local listings for Channel and Times. And be here tomorrow when John explains why he loves the church and why you should too. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace To You.