Fundamental Priorities of a Good Church

And so, the key in looking at a church, is there manifestly there a lofty view of God?

If it's all about success and it's all about tweaking your life and feeling better about yourself and solving your problems and fixing you, etc., etc., etc., that's selling short of the priority. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. You know, at Grace to You, we get a lot of questions from listeners like you, and probably the one that comes up the most is this, can you help me pick a good local church? Of course, it is critically important for Christians to be part of a local fellowship, and the question is, how do you evaluate a church?

What do you need to look for? What are the essentials, the qualities that a church must have? And if you're currently attending a church with the wrong priorities, what should you do? Get answers today on Grace to You, as John MacArthur continues a study that he's titled simply, What to Look For in a Church.

And now here's John with the lesson. Those of you who know me know that I am addicted to the church. I'm 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. The church has never ceased to be an adventure, really an amazing 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 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 there are going to be things that I don't think will surprise you. 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. How do you pick a church? Look, you're...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. The church is going to be the 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 thousands of 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. And 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. You can...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. Where I've gone, I've been in churches and I've seen every imaginable kind of style of church. I'm not talking about that. I'm 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. 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. In the Old Testament, this, of course, is established and I think in the writings of Moses, most specifically in Leviticus 18 to 20, if you would look at that for a moment, this is just a...there are a lot of places you could go. Let's start and just to look at Leviticus 18 for a moment.

There's a principle that comes out of this very interesting text. The Lord spoke to Moses and He said in verse 2, "'Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, I am the Lord your God.'" So, you shall not do...et cetera, et cetera, what's done in Egypt and so forth. Verse 4, "'You are to perform My judgments, keep My statutes, live in accordance with them, I am the Lord your God.' You shall keep My statutes, verse 5, My judgments by which a man may live if he does them, I am the Lord. None of you shall approach any blood relative his to uncover nakedness."

That would be incest. Don't do that. I am the Lord. You should not uncover the nakedness of your father or the nakedness of your mother, et cetera. And goes on to talk about various other things. Comes to verse 30, "'Thus you are to keep My charge that you do not practice any of the abominable customs which have been practiced before you.'" This is the kind of thing that the pagan world does. "'Don't defile yourself, I am the Lord your God.'"

In chapter 19, it repeats the same scenario. The Lord says to Moses, speak to the congregation and say, "'You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.'" So reverence, mother, father, keep the Sabbath, I'm the Lord your God.

Don't turn to idols, don't make molten gods, I'm the Lord your God. Down in verse 10, "'I'm the Lord your God.' Verse 12, "'I am the Lord.' Verse 14, "'I am the Lord.' 16, "'I am the Lord.' Verse 18, "'I am the Lord.' Verse 25, "'I am the Lord your God.'

28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37." Always your conduct goes back to the fact that you have God for your God. In verse 7 of chapter 20, "'You shall consecrate yourselves before...therefore and be holy, for I am the Lord your God.'" Keep my statutes and practice them. "'I am the Lord who sanctifies you.'"

And it goes on like that. Down into verse 26, for example, "'You are to be holy to me, for I, the Lord, am holy and I have set you apart from the peoples to be mine.'" There's more of this in chapter 21, there's more of it in chapter 22, chapter 23, chapter 25, it goes on. Now what I'm saying to you is this, the foundation of all conduct is built on your understanding of who your God is.

If you understand the glory and the holiness of God, that becomes the main motivation for how you live your life. It was said by Paul, and it is a really profound insight in Romans chapter 10, it's worth remembering. It was said by the Apostle Paul of the Jews, of Israel, this amazing statement, Romans 10, 3, not knowing about God's righteousness, they were seeking to establish their own.

You know, this is really amazing...amazing. What was wrong with Israel? Why were they apostate? Why did they reject John the Baptist? Why did they reject Jesus? Why did they reject the Apostles? Why did they reject the gospel?

Why did they execute their own Messiah? Weren't they religiously astute? Didn't they know the Old Testament? Hadn't they made commitments, particularly the Pharisees and the scribes, to a fastidious study of every single detail of the Law of God?

How could they go so wrong? How could they reject their Messiah? How could they reject the gospel? How could they therefore reject the fulfillment of all that they had anticipated promised to Abraham and to David?

How could it happen? And the bottom line is, Romans 10, 3, you didn't know about God's righteousness. Bottom line, they did not understand how righteous God was. Over and over again in the Old Testament, God said, I'm holy, I'm holy, I'm holy. But they thought He was less holy than He was and they were more holy than they were, God being less than He was and they being more than they were, they thought their righteousness was enough. It is always a flawed understanding of God that leads to iniquity. Soft words produce hard hearts.

Remember that. Soft words produce hard hearts. You show me a church where soft words are preached and I will show you a church filled with hard hearts. Jeremiah said that the Word of God is a hammer that shatters. Hard preaching produces soft hearts.

And a love of soft words is a love of a hard heart. Particularly do we have to preach the hard crushing truth about the holiness of God and the righteousness of God that He is intolerant of sin, that He hates the sin and the sinner and that He will judge the sinner eternally. The Jews didn't know how righteous God was and that was the fatal flaw. 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. I can walk into church, I can be there five or ten minutes and I'll tell you...I can tell you usually how profound their understanding of God is by how they worship. You know, the preacher...the preacher's responsibility, first of all, is to take people down so that they can go up.

That's how I view my role. And what do I mean by that? I mean you have to take people down into the depths of Scripture, down into the deep things of God. If you ever expect them to go up in praise, and if you have a congregation that don't understand the deep things of God, that don't understand the height and breadth and length and depth and the glory of His majesty and His person, then what they call worship is just a form of manipulation.

And they're primarily motivated by the style and the lilt of the tune and not the content of the words. 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, spiritual, enriching worship is the byproduct of a deep understanding of truth. And so, the key in looking at a church is, is there evidently there, manifestly there, a lofty view of God if it's all about success and it's all about tweaking your life and feeling better about yourself and solving your problems and fixing you, etc., etc., etc.

That's selling short the priority. The whole Jewish religion confronted by Jesus and Paul that was apostate and on its way to eternal hell, as sophisticated as they were in their religious system, they all perished because they had too low a view of God. We face a frightening battle with a man-centered kind of theology today, selling psychological comfort to people rather than exalting God. It was said of John Calvin that no man ever had a higher view of God and does that ever come through? It was Isaiah, you know, who had a vision of God and it just crushed him to the point where he literally cursed himself. But out of the ashes of that destructive experience of seeing the glory of God came his usefulness.

And it was Isaiah who, toward the end of his book in chapter 66, the last chapter, gets this word from the Lord. Thus says the Lord, heaven is My throne, the earth is My footstool. Where then is a house You could build for Me?

And where is a place that I may rest? I'm bigger than anything You could ever build. For My hand made all these things. Thus all these things came into being, declares the Lord, but to this one I will look. God says, I'm not looking for buildings. Here's what I'm looking for. To him who is humble and contrite or broken in spirit and who trembles at My Word.

That's what I'm looking for, the one who trembles at My Word. This is of all things an irreverent age, utterly irreverent. It is the hopelessly informal age, you've noticed. I was reading an article not long ago that said essentially most people, and I forget the statistic, like 75%, most people have never been to any formal event. It's a casual world and for the most part there is a cavalier and casual attitude toward serious things. And there is a very obvious dumbing down and loss of refinement in the world. And so we take this casual cavalier approach and we adopt it toward God.

There's so much of it in the culture. I've been reading Eric Liddell's biography, pretty fascinating. The great Scottish sprinter, you know, who won the gold medal at the Olympics and wouldn't run on the Lord's Day. His mom dropped him off at a missionary school in London and he was seven years old. His brother was nine. His brother, Rob, both of them went back to China as missionaries. He is a teacher and Rob is a medical missionary later on.

But their parents lived their whole life in China. They brought the two boys home, seven and nine, stuck them in a London boarding school and the mother went away heartbroken, weeping because she wouldn't see them for eight years. And the biographer says seven-year-old Eric received his class schedule. You ready for this?

English, science, mathematics, French, German and Latin, seven years old. We are a long way from that kind of mental preparation. And so what happens is this dumbing down of a whole culture gets brought into a dumbed down church environment and there's very little ability to rise above that apparently and to think great and grand and glorious and profound and compelling and searching things about our God.

But that's where everything starts. A low view of God produces a low view of sin and a low view of everything else in the Scripture. So when you look for a church, look for a church where the preaching centers on God, on His glory, the wonder of His person, and not on you or others around you, where God is constantly being exalted, where the music is filled not just with a kind of style that's popular and enjoyable, but it's filled with a profound level of content that helps you grasp what music in the Old Testament was intended to do. And if you want to know what it was intended to do, read the Psalms, where you feel like you're coming to grips with the greatness of your God. Nobody can...nobody can make you a worshiper. You worship God at whatever level your understanding of God allows you.

If you have a superficial understanding of God, then that's how you worship because the substance of your worship is the content of your belief, right? We could sing a hymn like, O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. And there will be some Christian people that say, that's not a very cool tune.

Well, maybe they don't know much about God. But if you find somebody who knows the Bible from cover to cover, O God, our help in ages past, and all of a sudden into his mind comes the great redemptive history of God unfolded in the Old Testament, and then our...O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, and then his mind sweeps from the past to the future and he knows enough to know that in the future God is going to unfold all His glorious purposes on into eternity. In other words, you bring into the content of your worship whatever it is you know to be true.

And so this is where it has to start. So as you look for a church, you find one where God is taken very seriously, very seriously, and you know your God, and you are confronted with His glory and His majesty and His holiness. And when you know that He is the Lord your God and He is holy, that compels you then to obey His statutes and His commandments and His precepts as we read in Leviticus. That's John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and the Bible teacher here on Grace to You. What to look for in a church.

That's John's focus in his current study. And John, as important as it is to identify a healthy church, attending one that has a high view of God and Scripture, that's not the final goal for believers. Once you've found a church, there's another step that's absolutely essential. Yeah, and what you're referring to is actually joining the local church. Right, church membership. Yeah, there is a kind of attitude toward churches today that people have that they go wherever the show is, go wherever the attraction is. But the church is not a place you go to see something happen. The church that you're a part of should be a place where you minister, where you use your spiritual gifts, where you exercise to one another's, and you find that others mutually are doing the same in your life.

It really is a family. It's an event in a sense that you gather together as a people. But it's far deeper than that in the reality that you build profound spiritual relationships that stand the test of time and trial and trouble. So it's very important that you see the church as the functioning body of Christ.

That analogy is the unique New Testament analogy that defines the people of God that you don't find in the Old Testament. Shared common life, organically connected to each other and to the head who is Jesus Christ. And the church then functions in harmony, each person fulfilling the goal and the purpose that God has ordained for them.

And it's a magnificent thing. It's a family, and you might even say it's tighter than a family and maybe more spiritually intense than a family, particularly given the fact that you can have family members who are indifferent to spiritual things. So you become a part of the church when your life is given to the church fully. Be a part of a church. Be connected to the church. Join the church. Submit to the leaders, the elders, the shepherds of that church. Pour yourself into that church. Give to the church. Use your spiritual gifts. By the way, I explain all that and more in a helpful booklet called Your Local Church and Why It Matters.

Here's the good news. We'll send you a copy of the booklet free of charge. The title again, Your Local Church and Why It Matters, free to anyone who asks.

That's right. Just call us or go to our website. Even send us an email to request your copy of John's booklet titled Your Local Church and Why It Matters.

It's free for a limited time, so ask for yours today. The number here, 855 grace. You can also request your free booklet at our website, gty.org, or by email at letters at gty.org. The title again to ask for Your Local Church and Why It Matters.

And if you're growing spiritually because of Grace to You, or maybe you know someone who has experienced victory over sin through our Bible teaching radio broadcasts, we would love to hear your story. You can write to us at Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. That mailing address again, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. Or you can email us at letters at gty.org. And thanks for mentioning this station's call letters when you get in touch. And whether or not you have a testimony to pass along, be sure to request John's booklet titled Your Local Church and Why It Matters. It's free just for asking for a limited time. Request yours by email or by regular mail or at gty.org, or you can call us at 855-GRACE. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Be back tomorrow to learn how your choice of church could define the rest of your life. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.