Fundamental Priorities of a Good Church

People don't live godly lives because some guy got up and gave a pep talk about the fact that they ought to live godly lives. People don't live godly lives because somebody got up and told them there are lots of negative consequences and you might not be successful if you don't behave this way. People are motivated to live godly lives primarily from their view of God. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. The worship style, the children's program, the pastor's communication skills, certainly those are important aspects of a church, but should they be the only criteria you use to determine whether a church is right for you? Bottom line, what should your priorities be when you choose a local church? John MacArthur helps you order those priorities today on Grace to You as he begins a study titled What to Look For in a Church. Well, John, a couple of questions to help launch this series. First, what motivated you to teach these lessons originally, and second, why is this such a relevant subject for Christians today who already attend a local church? Well, I think you know as well as I do, Phil, that this is one of the incessant questions that we get from listeners.

It is the most asked question we get. How do I find a good, sound, biblical church that honors Christ and has expositional preaching and all of the patterns are basically tied to Scripture? That's the big search for God's people all across our country and around the world.

So there's no mystery as to why I did this series. I want to answer the question in a general sense. As you know, the series is What to Look For in a Church, and that's foundational. You know, if you were living in Asia Minor at the time of the New Testament, you'd have one church.

There was the church at Ephesus and the church at Laodicea and so forth. But now you have all these options, and it becomes almost paralyzing to try to figure out which church you should go to. There are people who are drawn to style.

There are people who are drawn to music. But there are far more important things than the style of the church and even the style of the music. And we need to know that because we are going to be held responsible, I think, before the Lord for making the right choice in a church where we can be ministered to and where we can minister. So this series is simply called What to Look For in a Church and allows me to answer a question sort of once and for all that I have answered so many hundreds of times through the years.

Now, I originally preached these messages during chapel services at the Master's University. And obviously that's important at a university where you have young people. They're asking, of course, all the questions about what should a church be. And it's easy for them particularly to be attracted to some shallow, superficial, stylized church that looks more like a junior high camp than a real church. So I wanted to help them. So it's a series every young person needs to hear.

But not just them. Whatever stage you are in life, however long you've been in your church, it's good to be reminded of what God expects the local church to look like. And the study answers questions like, what is the purpose of the local church?

How is it supposed to function? What should it believe? You can find the series affirming of the church you're in now, or you may find that this exposes the weakness of the church you're in now and you can find a place where you can really honor the Lord. Vital teaching from the campus of the Master's University, you don't want to miss it.

That's right. And what does a healthy church look like? You'll want to keep that question in mind as John MacArthur begins his study, What to Look For in a Church.

And now here's John. Those of you who know me know that I am addicted to the church. I am a fanatic for the church. I love the church. It is my life and breath. It is the source of my highest joy and my most overwhelming anguish.

It is on my mind all the time. I sort of live in the aura of the church, all that it is and all that it calls for and requires and provides. It's a real adventure to be a pastor.

I could not be a president and I could deal with that. I could not be a radio preacher or an author, that would be all right. But if I were not a pastor, that would be the greatest loss of my entire life. The highlight of my life has been a stint at Grace Community Church. The church has never ceased to be an adventure, really an amazing adventure. The earliest years of life in the church were almost euphoric.

The church was growing very rapidly. People were loving the Word of God, dynamic conversions taking place, far more than anybody ever expected. We were learning as we went.

I didn't know a whole lot. I was discovering something during the week, preaching it on Sunday and implementing it the next week in the church. So we were all in this big adventure trying to find out what the church really was, trying to sort out theology, interpret the Bible, figure out how to apply it and it was just one incredible adventure. But always from the beginning, the goal was to develop the church in such a way as to make it what the Lord of the church wanted it to be. To look at the Word of God and try to discern there what revelation in the New Testament tells us about the church and what God's plans and purposes and expectations for the church are and then figure out how to implement that and to bring about the perfect will of God in the church through totally imperfect people. Therein lies the great challenge.

And they all know that I am equally imperfect and that even makes the challenge greater. But it has been an immense adventure and when I speak about the church, I'm not speaking about something sort of off the top of my head or off the cuff, or something I hope might be true, but when I talk about the church, I'm talking about that to which I've given most attention throughout my entire life. And I believe that one can understand what the Bible says about the church.

I don't think that that's intended to be ambiguous. I don't think the Lord said, now go out and build the church and it's all going to be a riddle and see if you can figure the riddle out. I think it's patently obvious what the church is to be. And so once you discern that in the Scripture, you can move to implementing that in the lives of people, and that's what we've been trying to do for all these many years and God has allowed us to raise up a seminary where we can train men to do the same thing and to have influence around the world with pastors and teachers and leaders who want the same thing.

And this has been the great joy of my life. And while some people might assume that the church is somewhat complex, I'm convinced that what really makes the church effective is pretty simple and that's what I want to share with you. I'm going to unfold some of them and they're going to be things that I don't think will surprise you.

In fact, there may be a certain amount of indifference as you hear me say them. And I understand that because I've learned something being around for a number of generations in the church. I was there when I was in my twenties, so I was there when the young people really were the heart and soul of the church and now it's those people who have matured and become the elders in the church who give leadership to the church.

I've seen their children, I've seen their grandchildren, I've watched the processes of generations in one single place. And I have found that with some exceptions, it's generally true that the first generation fights for the discovery and establishment of the truth. There's a real exhilaration, there's a real passion in that first generation, new Christians, people just awakening to the realities of divine truth. There's a passion to learn it, to know it and defend it and fight for it.

The second generation tends to sort of try to maintain it and maybe even extend it. The first ten, fifteen years of Grace Church, maybe even heading toward twenty years, we were really working hard to crystallize and clarify doctrine. That's why the church has such an extensive doctrinal statement, which is also the doctrinal statement of the college seminary. We worked as a staff at writing papers on all kinds of theological issues. We'd have a staff meeting and I had assigned guys to write papers on various theological things that we needed to hammer out and discuss.

We called them position papers and we still developed those kinds of things. But that first generation was primarily committed to the development of the truth, to understanding the truth, to systematizing the truth fairly consistently with Scripture, not imposing it upon Scripture, establishing the truth, discovering it, refining it and establishing it. And now we're in the second generation and what we're seeing now is this desire to maintain the truth, to guard the truth, to secondly extend the truth.

There came, I suppose, about year 20 at Grace Church, this desire to take the truth to the ends of the earth, to get books translated into every imaginable language. I was talking to one of our guys who graduated from the seminary who's just back from Croatia where they planted a training center in Croatia to take the truth to that part of the world. We've got this sort of spiritual young man mentality you find in 1 John where he talks about the young men who are valiant for the truth. They know the truth and they want to fight for the truth and they overcome the evil one who is a liar and the father of lies and tries to, of course, destroy the truth.

And so I look at that and I think that that's probably generationally speaking where our church life is. We are passionate about guarding the truth. We are passionate about extending the truth. In fact, one of the guys who was at the Shepherd's Conference, never been there before, is from down in Texas and he said to one of our elders at the end of the conference, he says, I get it, I get it. I know what this church is all about. It's all about proclaiming and protecting, is that right? And our elders say, yeah, you got it. It's all about proclaiming and protecting.

There's a passion at that and I think that's a wonderful place to be, to know the truth, to have established the truth, affirmed the truth, understood the truth and now to be passionately committed to maintaining the truth and extending the truth. But there's a third phase and historically this is...this is kind of the way it flows. The third generation is apathetic. The third generation is apathetic. They weren't a part of the process of discovery.

They weren't a part of the process of refinement. So they don't understand the pain and the endurance and the relentlessness that you went through to get there. And they really weren't...because they weren't there fighting to understand that truth, they weren't there fighting to defend that truth, they just kind of show up at some time. And obviously we have people flowing into Grace Church, we have people flowing into the college even now, people flowing into the seminary who never were in the battle to define the truth, who never were in the battle to defend the truth, who just show up when all the work is done. And the attitude that tends to be there is an attitude of apathy. And that's really sad. You see people who go to church today only if it's convenient, they're really not energized by the discovery of the truth, they're not particularly energized by refining the truth, they're not very interested in protecting the truth and proclaiming the truth and extending the truth.

They come whenever they can, they show up whenever they want. You take the preaching of the Word of God for granted, you take the truth for granted because you weren't a part of the process, therefore it has no value to you. You're like a rich kid who has all the money to buy things but doesn't understand the value of anything because no sacrifice was necessary for you to acquire it. And that's when church life gets tough. That's when people are worried about whether the air conditioner is blowing on the back of their neck or not, or whether they can find a parking place, or whether the service time interrupts the plans for the day, or whether the sermon is too long, or the pews not comfortable. And they become absorbed in all that stuff. I've read enough about church history and even contemporary and more modern church history to know there's a time in the life of the church when that becomes the dominant characteristic of the church because that third generation weren't a part of the struggle and that is a frightening thing. Maybe I'll die before I have to deal with too much of that.

But somebody in the future will have to deal with it. I get a lot of letters, I got a...I think about a 24-page letter the other day. That's a daunting thing, you know. You're so busy, you get a 24-page letter and you say, really, do I need to read this? Usually it's from some kooky person who, you know, writes with no space and then writes up the side and across the top and down the side and on the back and on the envelope, you know. But this was from a lady, absolutely, it may be the most incredible letter I've ever received. And I read all twenty-some pages of it and I was so moved by it that I had it typed up to keep as keepsake. This woman went through this incredible process of coming to understand the gospel. She was from Germany, she came to America and life was horrific. She's a writer and a journalist. She tried to find truth. She went through cults. She became a God-hater and a Christ-hater and she goes writing through all of this and she's a good writer.

And as the years go by, she's becoming more and more desperate as a little kid. Her mother was involved with the occult. Her father was into demonology. She couldn't sleep at night for fear that she was going to be killed by demons and she had all these incredible fears.

She was abused as a child and the story goes on and on. Well, to make a long story short, she turns on the radio, she listens to Grace to You and it's a series on the lordship of Christ. She hears the message, she writes for the book. First book she reads is The Lordship of Christ and she and her husband read it out loud verbatim. That's a pretty heavy introduction into Christianity. She decided she wasn't sure the New Testament documents were actually accurate, so she needed to know about that.

So she went and got F.F. Bruce's book on New Testament documents and read that. She came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be, the New Testament was what it claimed to be, and riding along in a car reading again the gospel of Jesus Christ with her husband, she was converted to Christ. And then she goes on for about five pages to describe in the most clear way this absolutely insatiable thirst to know the truth. And she says she weeps to know the truth, she falls on her face before God to know the truth, she falls on her knees before Christ and pleads that He would show her the truth.

Whatever it is that she comes to understand in the Word of God, she believes implicitly without question and she is demonstrating the real work of God in a transformed heart. You know, one could wish to have a church full of people like that who can never get enough of the truth, who just hang on every element of the truth because it is food like no other, because it is so soul satisfying and if it isn't soul satisfying for you, then somehow you've developed bad spiritual eating habits, right? How can we move ourselves away from these dangerous places of apathy that so easily creep into our lives?

And many of you fit into that sort of third generation category. You come from a Christian home, you come from parents who came from Christian parents, your grandparents maybe know the Lord, you've been raised in the church, you didn't fight for the truth, you just kind of got handed the truth. How do you...how do you fight against the tendency to be apathetic about that? How do you avoid the danger of spiritual privilege? Michael Griffiths, the British writer said, Christians collectively seem to be suffering from a strange amnesia, a high proportion of people who go to church have forgotten what it's all about. Week by week they attend services in a special building, they go through their particular time-honored routine, they give little thought to the purpose of what they're doing. The Bible talks about the bride of Christ, but the church today seems like a ragged Cinderella hideous among the ashes.

Pretty graphic. And the ragged Cinderella has lost its beauty because it's failed to understand priorities in spiritual life in the church. If we're going to recover the passion, if we're going to recover the zeal for the truth, we've got to focus ourselves on the right things. And let me say this as simply as I can say it, you have to focus yourself away from yourself.

Building a church around felt needs is utterly contrary to Scripture. Focusing on you and your problems and your dilemmas and your circumstances and your situations is counterproductive. And while it may intend to help you, the unintended consequence becomes you are the one being worshiped. This is a problem. You are the center of attention. You are the center of focus. And then the unintended consequence is when you feel like you don't have any particular needs or they're not doing a very good job of meeting those needs, you don't need a church.

If they fail to deliver what you think you need, you check out. So we need to get back to what the really important matters of the church are. As the hymn writer said, you want to go to church to get lost in wonder, love and praise. You want to go to church to forget about yourself, set yourself aside and to lose yourself in the glory and wonder of God, a God-centered preacher, a God-centered teacher, a God-centered worship is what you want in a church. When you look for a church, that's what you want. You want those who are consistently being brought before God, who are being brought into the very throne room of heaven to see His glory and His majesty and the wonder of who He is and His righteousness and His holiness. It's really sad when people don't understand the full glory of God because if you don't, if you don't understand the depth of the being of God, you can't rise to the heights of praise.

And that's what dramatically alters life. Now how do you pick a church? Look, you come from a church, I know that. You all come from some church. You go to a church. The rest of your life you're going to be involved in a church. Church is going to be a center of your life. It's going to be...some of you are even actually going to get married and have children.

You're going to raise them in a church. The church scene is frankly frightening in the letters that we get at Grace to You every...well, every week. I would say that the commonest complaint that 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. Now when I talk about this, you know you're getting down to the core of where I live because as a pastor I have a great love for the church. I've always loved the church.

Even as a kid growing up, I loved the church. Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. It's the only institution Jesus ever promised to build, the only one that He is building. And so we have to be committed to the church. But obviously not all churches are committed to what they should be. So let me give you some principles, okay?

What you want to look for in a church, not just now but certainly now and for the rest of your life. These are not unrealistic expectations. These are not methods, nothing to do with that. These are not formats.

These have nothing to do with style. I've been all over the world. I've been in church from the high mountains of the Andes in South America to church, house church in China, to churches in the Middle East, to churches in Europe, to churches in South Africa.

I've been all over the world. Everywhere I've gone, I've been in churches. And I've seen every imaginable kind of style of church, not talking about that. Talking about substance. Don't look at style. It's seductive. It's at best, style can only appeal to the flesh.

Substance is what you're after. And the first thing you look for in a church is a high view of God...a high view of God. This one could spend his entire life discussing, 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. If you do not have a lofty enough understanding of God that is rehearsed and repeated and lifted up before you all the time, and I'm not talking about in songs and choruses, I'm talking about a substantial theological, biblical grasp on God, then you do not have in place the greatest motivation to godly living. People don't live godly lives because some guy got up and gave a pep talk about the fact that they ought to live godly lives. People don't live godly lives because somebody got up and told them there are lots of negative consequences and you might not be successful if you don't behave this way. People are motivated to live godly lives primarily from their view of God. When you get people together who understand the deep things of God and they begin to sing and to praise God, they're lost in wonder, love and praise, not so much over the musical form as over the gripping profundity of the Scripture and theology set to music. Shallow worship is the byproduct of shallow theology.

Elevated, glorious, transcendent, captivating, emotional, enriching worship is the byproduct of a deep understanding of truth. That's John MacArthur speaking at the Masters University, where he serves as chancellor is addressing the students on the priorities for choosing a church. Today's message was the first in his series called What to Look For in a Church.

Now keep in mind there are a few ways to own this study. You can download the free transcripts, that's one way, and there's even a CD album available which might be a great option for you or for a friend who's looking for a good church. The title again, What to Look For in a Church, available when you contact us today.

You'll find the transcripts for What to Look For in a Church at our website, GTY.org. You can also purchase the two-CD album at GTY.org or place your order when you call 800-55-GRACE. And to listen to this study even sooner, you can download both lessons for free at GTY.org. You can also listen to any of John's 3500 sermons right from your mobile device. Just download the free Grace to You sermons app.

You can link to the version you need at GTY.org. And thanks for praying for those who hear our daily broadcasts. Every day around the world, people are listening and benefiting from Grace to You. And if you're one of them, I would encourage you to partner with us to help us get God's truth to believers worldwide by radio, TV, books, and the internet. You can mail your gift to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412, or call us at 800-55-GRACE. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for starting your week with us and be here tomorrow to learn more about what to look for in a church as John continues unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.